James O. Tate

Latest by James O. Tate in Chronicles

• Columns

  April 2016

  There’s More Where That Came From

  When I first heard chamber music, it seemed an acquired taste, and subsequently a taste I acquired. So I will recite some personal history without any illusion that it matters because it was my experience.

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• Columns

  March 2016

  Music and the Tooth Dentist

  As my many devoted readers have already noticed and let me know, though I do love good music, it’s hard to convey the intensity of that devotion. So it occurred to me to write about abject rather than exalted musical experiences.

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• Columns

  February 2016

  First Hearings

  Some years ago a fellow told me that I should put my money in CDs, and I did, to my regret in one sense. I thought he meant Compact Discs. Silly me!

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• Columns

  January 2016

  Come Into the Garden, Maud

  A year after the American debut of Jascha Heifetz in 1917, James Huneker wrote an interesting sentence in the New York Times: “Much has been said of Heifetz and his musical gifts compared with great violinists of the time—Ysayë, Kreisler, Elman, Zimbalist, Kubelik, and Maud Powell.”

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• Columns

  December 2015

  Her Master’s Voice

  Recent publicity to the effect that not one but even two films about Florence Foster Jenkins are in the pipeline sends us what I think is a very ambiguous alert.

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• Columns

  November 2015

  Henry Radetsky and Fritz Kreisler

  Tossing around a word like music is problematical—and culture is even harder to deploy meaningfully. Nevertheless, I am going to give both a try.

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• Columns

  October 2015

  How Long Has This Been Going On?

  We live in revolutionary times of rapid technological change, and yes, it is a little disconcerting when the rules morph and the practices mutate. But I did predict years ago that vinyl would be back, and so it is.

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• Columns

  September 2015

  Doing Music Wrong

  National Public Radio is a bad idea, as you can tell from the name. But the specific reality is even worse, though I suppose it comes in different forms.

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• Columns

  August 2015

  Quiet, Please

  Silence can be a bad thing if there is too much of it, but today that is not often the case, for we live in a noisy world.

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• Columns

  July 2015

  To Begin With

  For music is a way of knowing history and perceiving culture, and often the most memorable way. Music is necessary, unavoidable, and vulnerable, as well as transparent.

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• Reviews

  May 2015

  The Great American Disintegration

  When a former colleague sent me a snippet from The New Yorker of September 22, 2014—a piece called “As Big As the Ritz,” by Adam Gopnik—the attention therein given to two recent books on F. Scott Fitzgerald caught my eye, not only because I had already acquired one of them, but because I was repelled by the treatment of those books.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  April 2015

  Star, Dusted

  Sometimes I wonder why I spend the lonely night dreaming of a song, but mostly I don’t. Mostly I don’t, because the nightingale doesn’t tell his fairy tale unless he hopped a ride on the Cunard or the White Star Line.

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• Reviews

  March 2015

  Good Grief

  Poetry has to me never been what I have so often heard called a problem, and that was so for the simplest of reasons: It was never presented to me as a promblem until I was advanced in school, after which it was reformulated as a target of incomprehending odium by students whose insensibility had been reinforced by their “education.”

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• View

  February 2015

  The Future of Minority Culture(s)

  Two challenging words of the title of this essay stand somehow between us and ourselves, so that we will have to get around the distortions unnecessarily presented by minority and culture in order to see the freedom and even the substance that is closer than we are ordinarily able to perceive.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  January 2015

  A Racial Revolution

  “My tradition is not to remark on cases where there still may be an investigation,” declared President Obama as he upstaged New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio on December 3, speaking from the White House Tribal Nations Conference.

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• Reviews

  December 2014

  Waitin’ for The Robert E. Lee

  The life of Lee having been “done,” redone, and perhaps even undone by revisionist treatment, the present weighty phenomenon requires some contextual examination. We might first and simply ask the question, What is the purpose of this book?

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• View

  November 2014

  Watching Is Out—So Watch Out!

  I have been receiving so many requests lately for lifestyle advice, tips on public relations and media etiquette (not to mention recommendations about health and beauty maintenance), that I just haven’t been able to keep up with them all.

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• Vital Signs

  November 2014

  The New Political Science

  I once presumptuously thought I knew what “political science” was (Aristotle told me), and I even remembered Eric Voegelin’s New Science of Politics, but I was wrong—again. Is there is p-p-pattern developing here?

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• Reviews

  August 2014

  Something With Pages

  Some thoughtful soul, not I, would perhaps have some positive words about the present volume, and not without some justification.

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• Vital Signs

  January 2014

  Deadly" "Kiss Me

  My title is not the title the film is known by, but it is, with familiar strangeness, the title that we see, as the credits crawl “the wrong way” (in this film, the right way), imitating the unwinding of the road as seen from a speeding vehicle.

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