Special Thursday edition: Here's some music so beautiful that it almost doesn't matter whether it matters at all

Including a note from Kurt Vonnegut expounding
his "canary-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts"


"I was perplexed as to what the usefulness of any of the arts might be, with the possible exception of interior decoration. The most positive notion I could come up with was what I call the canary-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts."

-- K.V. (who else?), a full half-century ago -- see below, just a bit

ALL RIGHT, TIME TO GET TO WORK



Music Sample No. 1

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center: Wu Han, piano; Ani Kavafian and Arnaud Sussmann, violins; Paul Neubauer, viola; Fred Sherry, cello. CMS Studio Recordings, recorded in New York City, April 2007


NOW, EXCERPTED FROM MR. VONNEGUT'S "Address to
the American Physical Society, New York City, February 5, 1969":

Many of you are physics teachers. I have been a teacher, too. I have taught creative writing. I often wondered what I thought I was doing, teaching creative writing, since the demand for creative writers is very small in this vale of tears. I was perplexed as to what the usefulness of any of the arts might be, with the possible exception of interior decoration. The most positive notion I could come up with was what I call the canary-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts. This theory argues that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.

The most useful thing I could do before this meeting today is to keel over. On the other hand, artists are keeling over by the thousands every day and nobody seems to pay the least attention.

(appended in Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963-1973, Vol. 2 of Library of America's four-volume Kurt Vonnegut Edition)

by Ken

Okay, so I've missed yet another Sunday, in case it matters, which of course it doesn't -- and, oh yes, a Monday, Tuesday, and I guess Wednesday too, if you insist on counting every last gosh-darned day. But since I more or less had the components of this, er, post ready to go, or at least readyish, I've somehow summoned the determination to proceed, on the slim (slimmest?) chance that it might somehow matter, or come to matter. Somehow.

I'm pretty sure you don't want to go there, though. How 'bout instead we listen to more music? Perhaps a somewhat larger and sort-of-semi-self-contained chunk.