Saturday, July 08, 2006
Is Jay Greenberg the 21st Century Mozart?
 Terry Teachout has a piece in the Wall Street Journal (preview only, subscription required) this morning about Jay Greenberg, the 14-year-old wunderkind composer who has, so far, written five symphonies and more than a dozen piano sonatas, and has been signed by Sony BMG Masterworks and the giant talent agency, IMG Artists.
Amazing story with the inevitable comparisons to Saint-Saens, Mozart and Mendelssohn and the usual fretting about whether all the attention is too much too soon. My personal feeling is that the kid should grab his 15 minutes while it's dangling in front of him and see if he can stretch it into a meaningful, productive career. For reasons I'm not sure anyone really understands, musical intelligence asserts itself earlier than other intelligences. Who cares if he becomes a morose, depressed teenager? Most of them are nowadays anyway.
The indispensible Kyle Gann inquires over at PostClassic: "Can anyone recommend a really good 20th-century music history text, one including (or even limited to) European music, and extending past the 1970s? The ones I've seen are either terribly out of date or crap. I've already got a decent 20th-century American text." If you have a recommendation, go over and leave him a note.
Yesterday's little outburst aside, I've decided that political blogs are really not that great an idea.
posted by Jerry Bowles
7/08/2006
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