< World Premiere > ERNST KRENEK : The Santa Fe Timetable, Op. 102 (for unaccompanied SSAATB choir) Monday 20 February, 1961 - Los Angeles, CA The Gregg Smith Singers, cond. Gregg Smith Text: The Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe Railway System Timetables (circa. April, 1945)

< World Premiere > FREDRICH CERHA : Vier Hölderlin-Fragmente (for unaccompanied SATB div. choir) Tuesday 18 February, 1997 – Berlin, Germany RIAS-Kammerchor, cond. Erwin Ortner Text: Johann Christian Fredrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) Universal Edition, Vienna, 1996 (UE 30407)

Autocracy & Poverty Dr. Timothy Snyder Sunday 6 October, 2022 When I am on media, television hosts ask how democracy is relevant to people who are voting on kitchen-table issues. That’s easy. When Trump destroys our democracy, he will also destroy our economy. Autocracy will bring poverty. Think about the politicians Trump idolizes, Vladimir Putin in Russia and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The first undid a democracy through fake emergencies, the second through persistent constitutional abuse. It is not hard to see why Trump likes them. Now consider the Russian and Hungarian economies. Russia sits on hugely valuable natural resources, and yet is a poor country. The profits from its oil and gas are in the hands of a few oligarchs. Hungary sits in the middle of the European Union, the most successful trade project of all time. And yet Hungarians are poorer than their neighbors, in part because the Orbán regime corruptly channels EU resources to friendly oligarchs. The lesson is clear. Democracy is a method of checking corrupt rulers. When there is no functioning democracy, corruption is unchecked. And democracy is an element of a more fundamental guarantor of prosperity, the rule of law. In Hungary and Russia, the rule of law has been bent and broken, to the benefit of the few, and to the detriment of the many. Ending the rule of law is the Trump-Vance platform. Trump is running as a candidate who has attempted a coup against constitutional rule. Vance has already said, multiple times, that law does not govern who leads the country, and that he would have supported Trump’s coup attempt. The rule of law begins from the principle that we are all equally subject to to it. Trump promises to weaponize the law to immunize himself and his supporters and to pursue his political opponents. Those who worked with him in the White House believe him. Laws are executed by trained civil servants. Trump and Vance back a plan to fire the forty thousand federal employees who now execute the law and replace them with forty thousand loyalist hacks. That is Project 2025. It doesn't take much imagination to see where this leads. Here are five quick examples. 1.  The very rich will not be taxed, but you will be taxed more. The hardest thing the IRS does is to tax the wealthy. In an atmosphere of lawlessness and favoritism, this will become impossible. Insofar as the federal government runs at all, it will be by taxing the middle class. 2.  The banks can collapse. As we saw in 2008, our financial system is held together by a very thin tissue of regulation. Unless laws are enforced, as they won't be under a Trump-Vance administration, the overadventurous will very likely draw us all into another financial disaster. The bailout will be paid for by the average taxpayer because the rich won’t be taxed (see number 1). 3.  Americans will be at risk of losing their benefits. Social Security and all the rest depend upon a functioning federal bureaucracy, which is exactly what Project 2025 guarantees that we will not have. Americans take for granted federal institutions, from VA Hospitals to the insurance of bank accounts (see number 2). 4.  The stock market can crash. It depends upon the laws that prevent insider trading and other abuses. If these laws are applied selectively, and if the people who used to enforce them have been fired, then corrupt investors will win while others lose out. After a time, the stock market loses its prestige, investors go elsewhere, and everyone loses. (And those who were treating their investments as cushioning to their retirement benefits are now poor: see number 3). 5.  Businesses will get stuck. Doing business depends upon all sorts of interactions with the federal government. When the federal government loses its civil servants, much of this will stop happening. Or, worse, companies with personal connections will be able to continue functioning without following any rules, while others will grind to a halt. This means millions of people losing their jobs. (And it is now hard for businesses to raise money: see number 4). This list could go on. The collapse of the economy is not a bug of autocracy, but a feature. There is an autocratic logic to economic failure. When nothing works, when law does not matter, when elections are irrelevant, the only way Americans will be able to get anything done is by appealing to those who have power. We will have to give bribes to the corrupt and hope for favors from the top. Once we behave like this, we get used to the idea that only the leader can fix things, which is of course what Trump likes to say. And so the circle closes and the new regime is installed. The new autocracy is confirmed by our new poverty. That is, in any event, the Trump-Vance plan. They are talented politicians, and they have an alternative to democracy and prosperity, which is autocracy and poverty. Whether they bring America this new regime is up to us.

On Consequences: What About "Fuck Around And Find Out" Don’t You Get? Forsetti's Justice Monday 17 February, 2025 As anyone with two functioning brain cells could have predicted, people who voted for Trump and those who sat out the last election because “both sides are equally bad,” are experiencing the “Find Out” portion of “Fuck Around, Find Out.” From MAGA farmers in the Heartland whining about losing their livelihoods, to “Latinos For Trump” voters crying about their abuela being deported, to people who voted for Trump who are finding out they are losing their government jobs due to DOGE, the Find Out Portion of Trump’s second administration is just getting started. Am I surprised? Fuck no! What would happen if he won again was blatantly obvious to anyone with a brain, moral compass, and basic understanding of … well … just about anything. Do I care? Fuck no! It isn’t the fault of those of us who threw up warning flags, shot off flares, and screamed until we were hoarse that the things we said were going to happen if he got reelected, happened. That burden of responsibility is not on us, no matter how hard some try to make it so. Should I care? According to those “Finding Out,” the media, and the moral scolds on the left, I’m supposed to care. Their arguments for caring come in three different forms: Compassion, Sympathy, and Non-Alienation. I’m supposed to be compassionate towards those who are suffering, regardless of the reasons for their pain. Really? The people who have spent the past twenty years bitching about participation trophies want one now because they are on the losing end of their play and want me to comfort them with orange slices, a big trophy that has “We Are Not Losers,” engraved on it, and a hug? Hell, even if I believed in a participation trophy culture, I wouldn’t extend it to those who voted for Trump or didn’t vote in 2024. A soccer team of kids who get beat 20-0 at least tried their best. They put in the work at practices, played the best game they could, and lost. MAGA voters didn’t’ do jack. They didn’t put forth any effort to understand any issues. They walked onto the field of play, handed in their lineup, and didn’t do another damn thing. The people who sat out the election did even less. What do I mean by, “they didn’t do another damn thing”? All the information about the Democratic Party’s agenda, Kamala Harris’ record, and policies were readily available for anyone to see. So too, were Trump’s. All the things Trump is doing were things he, or those close to him, said they were going to do. EVERY SINGLE FUCKING Thing! Why in the fuck would I be compassionate to anyone who willfully denied and / or ignored this? Fuck them! My compassion goes to the people who are going to suffer from Trump’s policies who did the right things, made the right choices, and actually put forth an effort. That’s who deserves my compassion. Not some farmer in Iowa who put a fifty-foot billboard of “Trump 2024” on his land who is now scrambling to save the farm that has been in his family for generations. Actions, choices, and elections have consequences. Hence the “Find Out” part of FOFA. Along the same lines, I don’t have sympathy for these people for what they are going through. Do I wish these terrible things to happen to people who made bad choices? Not really. But, that is the only way they might (very heavy emphasis on “might,”) learn. Until the consequences of their actions are severe enough, and maybe not even then, people are not going to learn. If they keep getting bailed out, financially, emotionally, culturally … there is no incentive for them to learn. How many times do Republican policies have to fuck over rural America before they learn a lesson? It’s been almost all of my sixty-four years and they not only haven’t learned a lesson, they’ve doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on their loyalty to the GOP. How many times do Democratic policies have to bail out these same people before they get any credit for it? Obama and Biden not only saved the US auto and energy sectors but helped make them better. Their reward for this? Having areas dominated by these industries vote Republican. This is just one of hundreds of examples like this I could give. Am I supposed to have compassion and sympathy for these people? Fuck that! I’m pretty sure the people pushing the “compassion and sympathy” arguments know they are pushing garbage which is why many of them have shifted to the more nuanced, though equally garbage, “let’s not alienate the Find Out crowd because that won’t get them on your side.” This argument might sound reasonable except those touting it never can give examples of it working. Obama bent over backward to accommodate Republicans. The Affordable Care Act was more Republican-based than Democratic. What was his reward for this? Being called a Marxist socialist who was creating death panels that would end Pappy’s and Memaw’s lives, to provide on-demand abortion to drug-using moochers from San Francisco. I have yet to see anyone provide a real example of a Democratic statement, position, or policy that actually changed a MAGA’s mind. The argument being made is basically: 1. Bad things are happening to Republicans because of their choices. 2. Dems should not point this out because it will alienate Republicans. 3. If Democrats don’t point this out, then Republicans will learn the error of their ways. The faulty logic is in believing what Dems do or not do has any influence over Republicans. There is no causation here. It is understandable, on some level, why people might believe this argument. Hundreds, if not thousands, of articles and even more media hot takes have been put forth pushing the causation between what Dems say / do and Republicans’ choices. It’s not the Republicans’ fault they support a racist, misogynist, criminal. The Dems made them by (fill in the blank.) The paradigm of this causation argument is whenever a Republican comes out and says something blatantly racist the justification they give for doing so and the excuse given for them by the media is, “If Dems hadn’t called them “racist,” they wouldn’t have said / done something racist.” No ownership of their actions. No personal responsibility from The Party Of Personal Responsibility. They flip the causation completely around to justify their actions. It wasn’t what they said or did that led to someone calling them a “racist,” it was someone calling them a “racist,” that did it. It is Bizarro World Logic. Today’s Republicans don’t want compromise. That concept has been beaten out of them through years of Newt Gingrich tactics, Rush Limbaugh talking points, and FOX News. As long as this is the mindset of conservatives, there is NOTHING Democrats can do or say that will not alienate them. Everything the Democratic Party stands for would have to be abandoned, to partially satisfy MAGA. As the Democratic Party, whose rights are we willing to sacrifice to win the vote of the farmer in Iowa who is upset Trump’s policies are going to cost him his farm? I don’t fucking negotiate with terrorists. I especially don’t negotiate with White supremacist domestic terrorists. Once you do this, they will ALWAYS demand more. Roe v Wade WAS the compromise when it comes to abortion. How did that turn out? Were the right satisfied? Did they accept it and move the fuck on? Nope. Now that SCOTUS has said that abortion is up to the states, do you think the right is happy? Nope. Until they get 100% of what they want, they will never satiated. If you understand the nature of modern-day American conservatism and its ties to Evangelical Christianity, then you know, without a doubt, they cannot be reasoned with, no amount of evidence, compassion, or sympathy, is going to get them to change their minds, at least not on any meaningful level. This is why there are no fucks left in my basket to hand out to anyone, no matter how much they are suffering, for the choices they made on November 5th, 2024. All my fucks are reserved for those who made the right choices but are going to suffer anyway. The pragmatist, realist, and ethicist in me are fine with this. As my mom used to tell me, “You can’t change people who don’t want to change and until they hit bottom, they will never change.” Applying this to anyone, especially people who you care about, isn’t easy. Applying it to a good chunk of your fellow citizens is perhaps more difficult, but more important.

< World Premiere > HANS SCHANDERL : Meerwunder (for four unaccompanied SATB choirs) Saturday, 14 February, 2004 – Konzerthaus, Berlin RIAS Kammerchor & Rundfunkchor Berlin Text : Gertrud Kolmar Carus Verlag, 2003 (CV 07.356)

Carl Sagan's 'Pale Blue Dot' is one of the most important and reflective speeches about the human condition and our place in the universe ... “From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar', every 'supreme leader', every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

The 'Pale Blue Dot' photograph of Earth was taken on Wednesday 14 February, 1990 by the Voyager 1 probe from a record distance of about 6.4 billion kilometers and 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane. The striking photograph almost never happened. Early on in Voyager's mission, Carl Sagan had tried to get the look back at Earth, but others on the team worried that the Sun would end up frying the camera. But eventually, with the mission winding down, Sagan finally got his wish — a last minute Valentine's Day gift in 1990. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.

< World Premiere > GRANVILLE BANTOCK : Vanity of Vanities (Symphony for Unaccompanied 12 part choir) Saturday 14 February, 1914 Liverpool Welsh Choral Union, cond. Harry Evans J. Curwen & Sons, 1913 Text: Book of Ecclesiastes, Old Testament

The Weak Strongman Timothy Snyder Thursday 13 February, 2025 Americans have a certain idea of freedom. We are fine just the way we are and the only problem are the barriers in the outside world. In this mental world, Musk’s hollowing out of the government can seem justified. Trump’s betrayal of friends and destruction of alliances can seem convenient. We will be great again by being all alone, with no one to trouble us. This fantasy leads right to tragedy. It sets the stage for the weak strongman. Trump is a strongman in the sense that he makes others weak. He is strong in a relative sense; as Musk destroys institutions, what remains is Trump’s presence. But other sorts of power meaning vanish, as Musk takes apart the departments of the American government that deal with money, weapons, and intelligence. And then the United States has no actual tools to deal with the rest of the world. The strongman is weak because no one beyond the United States has anything to want (or fear) from the self-immolation. And weak because Trump submits to foreign aggression, putting waning American power behind Russia. The weak strongman undermines the rules, but cannot replace them with anything else. He creates the image of power by his rhetorical imperialism: America will control Greenland, Panama, Mexico, Canada, Gaza, etc. From there, it is hard to say that others are wrong when they invade other countries. The weak strongman is left endorsing other people’s invasions, as with Russia and Ukraine. He lacks the power to resist them. And he lacks the power to coerce them. And, ironically, he lacks the power to carry out wars himself. He lacks the patience, and he lacks the instruments. Many Americans fear Trump, and so imagine that others must. No one beyond America fears Trump as such. He can generate fear only in his capacity as neighborhood arsonist, as someone who destroys what others have created. America’s friends are afraid not of him but of what we all have to lose. America’s enemies are not frightened when Trump kicks over the lantern and sets things on fire. Quite the contrary: he is doing exactly what they want. Trump plays a strongman on television, and he is a talented performer. But the strength consists solely of the submissiveness of his audience. His performance arouses a dream of passivity: Trump will fix it, Trump will get rid of our problems, and then we will be free. And of course that kind of Nosferatu charisma is a kind of strength, but not one that can be brought to bear to solve any problems, and not one that matters in the world at large. Or rather: it matters only negatively. As soon as Trump meets someone with a better dictator act, like Putin, he submits. But he can only enable Putin. He can’t really even imitate him. Trump’s supporters might think that we don’t need friendships because the United States can, if necessary, intimidate its enemies without help. This has already been proven wrong. Trump can make things worse for Canada and Mexico, in the sense that a sobbing boy taking his ball home makes things worse. But he cannot make them back down. Trump has not intimidated Russia. He has been intimidated by Russia. The cruelty that makes Trump a strongman at home arose from the destruction of norms of civil behavior and democratic practice. Unlike any other American politician before him, Trump has scorned the law and used hate speech to deter political opponents here. For years he has used his tweets to inspire stochastic violence. This intimidates some Americans. It has, for example, led to a kind of self-purge of the Republican Party, opening the way for Trump, or in fact for Musk, to rule with the help of tamed and therefore predictable cadres. The effect of this is that people who have submitted to Trump see him as a strongman. But what they are experiencing is in fact their own weakness. And their own weakness cannot magically become strength in the wider world. Quite the contrary. Stochastic violence cannot be applied to foreign leaders. Trump has said that he can stop the war in Ukraine. He wrote a tweet directed at Vladimir Putin; but the capital letters and exclamation points did not change the emotional state of the Russian leader, let alone Russian policy. And no one in Irkutsk is going to threaten or hurt Putin because Donald Trump wrote something on the internet. Something that works in the United States is not relevant abroad. In fact, the tweet was a sign of weakness, since it was not followed by any policy. Putin quite rightly saw it as such. Trump and his cabinet now repeat Putin’s talking points about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. One could generously interpret Trump’s tweet to Putin threatening sanctions and such as an act of policy. I saw conservatives do that, and I would have been delighted had they been right. But I fear that this was just the characteristic American mistake of imagining that, because Americans react submissively to Trump’s words, others must as well. For words to matter, there has to be policy, or at least the possibility that one might be formulated. And for there to be policy, there have to be institutions staffed with competent people. And Trump’s main action so far, or really Musk’s action so far, has been to fire exactly the people who would be competent to design and implement policy. Many of the people who knew anything about Ukraine and Russia are gone from the federal government. And now Trump is trying to make concessions to Russia regarding issues directly related to Ukrainian sovereignty on his own, without Ukraine, and indeed without any allies. He is showing weakness on a level unprecedented in modern US history. His position is so weak that it is unlikely to convince anyone. Trump is a sheep in wolf’s clothing. The wolves can tell the difference. Russians will naturally think that they can get still more. Ukrainians, for that matter, have little incentive to give up their country. Trump can threaten them with cutting US arms, because stopping things is the only power he has. But Ukrainians must now expect that he would do that anyway, given his general subservience to Putin. If the US does stop support for Ukraine, it no longer has influence in how Ukraine conducts the war. I have the feeling that no one in the Trump administration has thought of that. It is quite clear how American power could be used to bring the war to an end: make Russia weaker, and Ukraine stronger. Putin will end the war when it seems that the future is threatening rather than welcoming. And Ukraine has no choice but to fight so long as Russia invades. This is all incredibly simple. But it looks like Trump is acting precisely as is necessary to prolong the war and make it worse. Thus far he and Hegseth have simply gone public with their agreement with elements of Russia’s position. Since this is their opening gambit, Russia has every incentive to keep fighting and to see if they can get more. The way things are going, Trump will be responsible for the continuing and escalation of the bloodshed, quite possibly into a European or open global conflict. He won’t get any prizes for creating the conditions for a third world war. It’s an obvious point, but it has to be made clearly: no one in Moscow thinks that Trump is strong. He is doing exactly what Russia would want: he is repeating Russian talking points, he is acting essentially as a Russian diplomat, and he is destroying the instruments of American power, from institutions through reputation. No American president can shift an international power position without policy instruments. And these depend on functioning institutions and competent civil servants. In theory, the United States could indeed change the power position by decisively helping Ukraine and decisively weakening Russia. But that theory only becomes practice through policy. And it is not hard to see that Musk-Trump cannot make policy. Even should he wish to, Trump can not credibly threaten Russia and other rivals while Musk disassembles the federal government. Intimidation in foreign affairs depends upon the realistic prospect of a policy, and policy depends, precisely, on a functioning state. Let us take one policy instrument that Trump mentioned in his tweet about Putin: sanctions. Under Biden, we had too few people in the Department of the Treasury working on sanctions. That is one reason they have not worked as well against Russia as one might have hoped. To make sanctions work, we would need more people on the job, not fewer. And of course we would also need foreign powers to believe that Treasury was not just an American billionaire’s plaything. And that will be hard, because their intelligence agencies read the newspapers. The United States cannot deal with adversaries without qualified civil servants in the departments of government that deal with money, weapons, and intelligence. All of these are being gutted and/or run by people who lack anything vaguely resembling competence. Americans can choose to ignore this, or to interpret it only in our own domestic political terms. But it is obvious to anyone with any distance on the situation that the destruction of the institutions of power means weakness. And it creates a very simple incentive structure. The Russians were hoping that Trump would return to power precisely because they believe that he weakens the United States. Now, as they watch him (or Musk) disassemble the CIA and FBI, and appoint Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel, they can only think that time is on their side. The Russians might or might not, as it pleases them, entertain Trump’s idea of ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia. Even if they accept the ceasefire it will be to prepare for the next invasion, in the full confidence that a United States neutered by Musk-Trump will not be able to react, that the Europeans will be distracted, and that the Ukrainians will find it harder to mobilize a second time. Trump is not only destroying things, he is being used as an instrument to destroy things: in this case, used by Russia to destroy a successful wartime coalition that contained the Russian invasion and prevented a larger war. What is true for Russia also holds for China. The weak strongman helps Beijing. Time was not really on China’s side, not before Trump. There was no reason to think that China would surpass the United States economically, and therefore politically and militarily. That had been the great fear for decades, but by the time of the Biden administration the trend lines were no longer so clear, or indeed had reversed. But now that Trump (or rather Musk) has set a course for the self-destruction of American state power, Beijing can simply take what it would once have had to struggle to gain, or would have had to resign from taking. A weak strongman brings only losses without gains. And so the descent begins. Destroying norms and institutions at home only makes Trump (or rather Musk) strong in the sense of making everyone else weak. In our growing weakness, we might be all tempted by the idea that our strong man at least makes us a titan among nations. But the opposite is true. The world cannot be dismissed by the weak strongman. As a strongman, he destroys the norms, laws, and alliances that held back war. As a weakling, he invites it.

< USA Concert Premiere > ELLIOT CARTER : Musicians Wrestle Everywhere (for unaccompanied SSATB choir) Tuesday 12 February, 1946 New York Times Hall, New York Randolph Singers, cond. David Randolph Text: Emily Dickinson Theodore Presser Company (35200119)

The New Authoritarianism Steven Levitsky The Atlantic Monday 10 February, 2025 With the leader of a failed coup back in the White House and pursuing an unprecedented assault on the constitutional order, many Americans are starting to wrap their mind around what authoritarianism could look like in America. If they have a hard time imagining something like the single-party or military regimes of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, or more modern regimes like those in China or Russia, that is with good reason. A full-scale dictatorship in which elections are meaningless and regime opponents are locked up, exiled, or killed remains highly unlikely in America. But that doesn’t mean the country won’t experience authoritarianism in some form. Rather than fascism or single-party dictatorship, the United States is sliding toward a more 21st-century model of autocracy: competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbent abuse of power systematically tilts the playing field against the opposition. In his first weeks back in office, Donald Trump has already moved strongly in this direction. He is attempting to purge the civil service and directing politicized investigations against rivals. He has pardoned violent paramilitary supporters and is seeking to unilaterally seize control over spending from Congress. This is a coordinated effort to dig in, cement power, and weaken rivals. Unlike in a full-scale dictatorship, in competitive-authoritarian regimes, opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they often seriously vie for power. Elections may be fiercely contested. But incumbents deploy the machinery of government to punish, harass, co-opt, or sideline their opponents—disadvantaging them in every contest, and, in so doing, entrenching themselves in power. This is what happened in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and in contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey. Crucially, this abuse of the state’s power does not require upending the Constitution. Competitive autocracies usually begin by capturing the referees: replacing professional civil servants and policy specialists with loyalists in key public agencies, particularly those that investigate or prosecute wrongdoing, adjudicate disputes, or regulate economic life. Elected autocrats such as Chávez, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, and Nayib Bukele all purged public prosecutors’ offices, intelligence agencies, tax authorities, electoral authorities, media regulatory bodies, courts, and other state institutions and packed them with loyalists. Trump is not hiding his efforts to do the same. He has thus far fired (or declared his intention to fire, leading to their resignation) the FBI director, the IRS commissioner, EEOC commissioners, the National Labor Relations Board chair, and other nominally independent officials; reissued a renamed Schedule F, which strips firing protections from huge swaths of the civil service; expanded hiring authorities that make it easier to fill public positions with allies; purged more than a dozen inspectors general in apparent violation of the law; and even ordered civil servants to inform on one another. Once state agencies are packed with loyalists, they may be deployed to investigate and prosecute rivals and critics, including politicians, media companies, editors, journalists, influential CEOs, and administrators of elite universities. In the United States, this may be done via the Justice Department and the FBI, the IRS, congressional investigations, and other public agencies responsible for regulatory oversight and compliance. It may also be done via defamation or other private lawsuits. The administration doesn’t have to jail its opponents to bully, harm, and ultimately intimidate them into submission. Indeed, because U.S. courts remain independent, few targets of selective prosecution are likely to be convicted and imprisoned. But mere investigations are a form of harassment. Targets of selective investigation or prosecution will be forced to devote considerable time, energy, and resources to defending themselves; they will spend their savings on lawyers; their lives will be disrupted; their professional careers will be sidetracked and their reputations damaged. At minimum, they and their families will suffer months and perhaps years of anxiety and sleepless nights. Plus, the administration need not target all critics. A few high-profile attacks, such as a case against Liz Cheney, a prominent media outlet, or selective regulatory retaliation against a major company, may serve as an effective deterrent against future opposition. Competitive-authoritarian governments further subvert democracy by shielding those who engage in criminal or antidemocratic behavior through captured referees and other impunity mechanisms. Trump’s decision to pardon violent January 6 insurrectionists and purge prosecutors who were involved in those cases, for example, sends a strong signal that violent or antidemocratic actors will be protected under the new administration (indeed, that’s how many pardon recipients are interpreting the pardons). Likewise, a loyalist Justice Department and FBI could disregard acts of political violence such as attacks on (or threats against) campaign workers, election officials, journalists, politicians, activists, protesters, or voters. They could also decline to investigate or prosecute officials who work to manipulate or even steal elections. This may appear far-fetched, but it is precisely what enabled the consolidation of authoritarian rule in the Jim Crow South. Protected by local (and often federal) authorities in the aftermath of Reconstruction, white-supremacist groups used violent terror and election fraud to consolidate power and disenfranchise African Americans across the region. Finally, state institutions may be used to co-opt business, media, and other influential societal actors. When regulatory bodies and other public agencies are politicized, government officials can use decisions regarding things such as mergers and acquisitions, licenses, waivers, government contracts, and tax-exempt status to reward or punish parties depending on their political alignment. Business leaders, media companies, universities, foundations, and other organizations have a lot at stake when government officials make decisions on tariff waivers, regulatory enforcement, tax-exempt status, and government contracts and concessions. If they believe that those decisions are made on political, rather than technical, grounds, many of them will modify their behavior accordingly. Thus, if business leaders come to the conclusion that funding opposition candidates or independent media is financially risky, or that remaining silent rather than criticizing the administration is more profitable, they will change their behavior. Several of the country’s wealthiest individuals and companies, including Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Disney, already appear to be adjusting in that way. Democracy requires robust opposition. Opposition parties and civil-society groups cannot function without money and without a large and replenishable pool of talented politicians, lawyers, journalists, and entrepreneurs. But using the state’s power against critics will likely deter many of them, depleting that pool. Talented politicians may decide to retire early rather than face an unfounded investigation. Donors may decide that the risk of contributing to Democratic candidates or funding “controversial” civil-rights or pro-democracy organizations is not worth it. Media outlets may downsize their investigatory teams, let go of their most aggressive editors and reporters, and decline to renew their most outspoken columnists. Up-and-coming journalists may steer clear of politics, opting instead to write about sports or culture. And university leaders may crack down on campus protest, remove or isolate activist professors, and decline to speak out on issues of national importance. Civil society therefore faces a crucial collective-action problem. Individual politicians, CEOs, media owners, and university presidents act rationally and do what seems best for their organizations. They work to protect their shareholders’ interests and stave off debilitating investigations or lawsuits. But such isolated acts of self-preservation have collective costs; as individual players retreat to the sidelines, the opposition weakens. Some of these costs will be invisible. The public can observe when players sideline themselves: congressional retirements, university presidents’ resignations, the ceasing of campaign contributions, the softening of editorial lines. But we can’t see the opposition that never materializes—the potential critics, activists, and leaders who are deterred from getting in the game. How many young lawyers will decide to remain at a law firm instead of running for office? How many talented young writers will steer clear of journalism? How many potential whistleblowers will decide not to speak out? How many citizens will decide not to sign that public letter, join that protest, or make that campaign contribution? Democracy is not yet lost. The Trump administration will be politically vulnerable. Unlike successful elected authoritarians such as Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and Vladimir Putin in Russia, Trump lacks broad popular support. His approval rating has almost never surpassed 50 percent, and incompetence, overreach, and unpopular policies will almost certainly dampen public support for the new administration. An autocratic president with an approval rating below 50 percent is still dangerous, but far less so than one with 80 percent support. The new administration’s political weakness will open up opportunities for opposition in the courtroom, on the streets, and at the ballot box. Still, the opposition can win only if it stays in the game. Worn down by defeat, and fearing harassment and lost opportunities, many civic leaders and activists will be tempted to pull back into their private lives. It’s already happening. But a retreat to the sidelines could be fatal for democracy. When fear, exhaustion, or resignation eclipses our commitment to democracy, competitive authoritarianism succeeds.

< World Premiere > KALEVI AHO : Symphony No. 10 Thursday 6 February, 1997 – Lahti, Finland Lahti Symphony Orchestra, cond. Osmo Vänskä

< World Premiere > ELLIOTT CARTER : Concerto for Orchestra Thursday 5 February, 1970 Philharmonic Hall, New York, NY New York Philharmonic, cond. Leonard Bernstein Associated Music Publishers, 1972 (HL50225800) “I had been thinking about writing a work which treated most of the players in the orchestra as soloists, when the commission from the New York Philharmonic started me off. In casting about for a plan, a dramatic and musical structure for such a multiple concerto, I came across St. John Perse’s 'Vents'  (Winds), a long poem about America which suggested a way of ordering a piece. I realized at once, of course, that the broad, Whitmanesque rhetoric of the poem could only partially be reflected in the music whose main aim was to give individual, human expression to a great variety of players; yet the poem’s fluidity and its changes of character offered a useful model.” — Elliott Carter

“If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. And every now and then I wonder what I want them to say. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize—that isn’t important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards—that’s not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school. I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others. I'd like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison. I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity. Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that's all I want to say. If I can help somebody as I pass along, If I can cheer somebody with a word or song, If I can show somebody he's traveling wrong, Then my living will not be in vain. If I can do my duty as a Christian ought, If I can bring salvation to a world once wrought, If I can spread the message as the master taught, Then my living will not be in vain. Yes, Jesus, I want to be on your right or your left side, not for any selfish reason. I want to be on your right or your left side, not in terms of some political kingdom or ambition. But I just want to be there in love and in justice and in truth and in commitment to others, so that we can make of this old world a new world.” — Dr. Martin Luther King : "The Drum Major Instinct" Sunday 4 February, 1968

< World Premiere > MICHAEL TORKE : Ash Friday 3 February, 1989 – Ordway Center, St. Paul, Minnesota St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, cond. by John Adams Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. (HPS1138) “In trying to find a clear and recognizable language to write this piece, I have chosen some of the most basic, functionally tonal means: tonics and dominants in F minor, a modulation to the relative major (A-flat), and a three-part form which, through a retransition, recapitulates back to F minor. What I offer is not invention of new "words" or a new language but a new way to make sentences and paragraphs in a common, much-used existing language. I can create a more compelling musical argument with these means because, to my ears, potential rhetoric seems to fall out from such highly functional chords as tonics and dominants more than certain fixed sonorities and pop chords that I have used before. My musical argument is dependent on a feeling of cause and effect, both on a local level where one chord releases the tension from a previous chord and on the larger structural level where a section is forced to follow a previous section by a coercive modulation. The orchestration does not seek color for its own sake, as decoration is not a high priority, but the instruments combine and double each other to create an insistent ensemble from beginning to end. Only occasionally, as in the middle A-flat section, do three woodwind instruments play alone for a short while to break the inertia of the ensemble forging its course together.” — Michael Torke

The Logic of Destruction Timothy Snyder Sunday 2 February, 2025 What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together. The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government deny all of this, and are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation. For them, only a few people, the very wealthy with a certain worldview, have rights, and the first among these is to dominate. For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions. The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide them with services are conspirators within a “deep state.” We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes. All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now. The federal government has immense capacity and control over trillions of dollars. That power was a cocreation of the American people. It belongs to them. The oligarchs around Trump are working now to take it for themselves. Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow. Think of the federal government as a car. You might have thought that the election was like getting the car serviced. Instead, when you come into the shop, the mechanics, who somehow don’t look like mechanics, tell you that they have taken the parts of your car that work and sold them and kept the money. And that this was the most efficient thing to do. And that you should thank them. The gap between the oligarchs’ wealth and everyone else’s will grow. Knowing what they themselves will do and when, they will have bet against the stock market in advance of Trump’s deliberately destructive tariffs, and will be ready to tell everyone to buy the crypto they already own. But that is just tomorrow and the day after. In general, the economic collapse they plan is more like a reverse flood from the Book of Genesis, in which the righteous will all be submerged while the very worst ride Satan’s ark. The self-chosen few will ride out the forty days and forty night. When the waters subside, they will be alone to dominate. Trump’s tariffs (which are also likely illegal) are there to make us poor. Trump’s attacks on America’s closest friends, countries such as Canada and Denmark, are there to make enemies of countries where constitutionalism works and people are prosperous. As their country is destroyed, Americans must be denied the idea that anything else is possible. Deportations are a spectacle to turn Americans against one another, to make us afraid, and to get us to see pain and camps as normal. They also create busy-work for law enforcement, locating the “criminals” in workplaces across the country, as the crime of the century takes place at the very center of power. The best people in American federal law enforcement, national security, and national intelligence are being fired. The reasons given for this are DEI and trumpwashing the past. Of course, if you fire everyone who was concerned in some way with the investigations of January 6th or of Russia, that will be much or even most of the FBI. Those are bad reasons, but the reality is worse: the aim is lawlessness: to get the police and the patriots out of the way. In the logic of destruction, there is no need to rebuild afterwards. In this chaos, the oligarchs will tell us that there is no choice but to have a strong man in charge. It can be a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras, or a conniving Vance who, unlike Trump, has always known the plot. Or someone else. After we are all poor and isolated, the logic goes, we will be consoled by the thought that there is at least a human being to whom we can appeal. We will settle for a kind of anthropological minimum, wishful contact with the strong man. As in Russia, pathetic video selfies sent to the Leader will be the extent of politics. For the men currently pillaging the federal government, the data from those video selfies is more important than the people who will make them. The new world they imagine is not just anti-American but anti-human. The people are just data, means to the end of accumulating wealth. They see themselves as the servants of the freedom of the chosen few, but in fact they are possessed, like millennia of tyrants before them, of fantastic dreams: they will live forever, they will go to Mars. None of that will happen; they will die here on Earth, with the rest of us, their only legacy, if we let it happen, one of ruins. They are god-level brainrotted. The attempt by the oligarchs to destroy our government is illegal, unconstitutional, and more than a little mad. The people in charge, though, are very intelligent politically, and have a plan. I describe it not because it must succeed but because it must be described so that we can make it fail. This will require clarity, and speed, and coalitions. I try to capture the mood in my little book On Tyranny. Here are a few ideas. If you voted Republican, and you care about your country, please act rather than rationalize. Unless you cast your ballot so that South African oligarchs could steal your data, your money, your country, and your future, make it known to your elected officials that you wanted something else. And get ready to protest with people with whom you otherwise disagree. Almost everything that has happened during this attempted takeover is illegal. Lawsuits can be filed and courts can order that executive orders be halted. This is crucial work. Much of what is happening, though, involves private individuals whose names are not even known, and who have no legal authority, wandering through government offices and issuing orders beyond even the questionable authority of executive orders. Their idea is that they will be immunized by their boldness. This must be proven wrong. Some of this will reach the Supreme Court quickly. I am under no illusion that the majority of justices care about the rule of law. They know, however, that our belief in it makes their office something other than the undignified handmaiden of oligarchy. If they legalize the coup, they are irrelevant forever. Individual Democrats in the Senate and House have legal and institutional tools to slow down the attempted oligarchical takeover. There should also be legislation. It might take a moment, but even Republican leaders might recognize that the Senate and House will no longer matter in a post-American oligarchy without citizens. Trump should obviously be impeached. Either he has lost control, or he is using his power to do obviously illegal things. If Republicans have a sense of where this is going, there could be the votes for an impeachment and prosecution. Those considering impeachment should also include Vance. He is closer to the relevant oligarchs than Trump, and more likely to be aware of the logic of destruction than he. The oligarchs have likely factored in, or perhaps even want, the impeachment and prosecution of Trump. Unlike Vance, Trump has charisma and followers, and could theoretically resist them. He won’t; but he poses a hypothetical risk to the oligarchs that Vance does not. Democrats who serve in state office as governors have a chance to profile themselves, or more importantly to profile an America that still works. Attorneys general in states have a chance to enforce state laws, which will no doubt have been broken. The Democratic Party has a talented new chair. Democrats will need instruments of active opposition, such as a People’s Cabinet, in which prominent Democrats take responsibility for following government departments. It would be really helpful to have someone who can report to the press and the people what is happening inside Justice, Defense, Transportation, and the Treasury, and all the others, starting this week. Federal workers should stay in office, if they can, for as long as they can. This is not political, but existential, for them and for all of us. They will have a better chance of getting jobs afterwards if they are fired. And the logic of their firing is to make the whole government fail. The more this can be slowed down, the longer the rest of us have to get traction. And companies? As every CEO knows, the workings of markets depend upon the government creating a fair playing field. The ongoing takeover will make life impossible for all but a few companies. Can American companies responsibly pay taxes to a US Treasury controlled by their private competitors? Tesla paid no federal tax at all in 2024. Should other companies pay taxes that, for all they know, will just enrich Tesla’s owner? Commentators should please stop using words such as “digital” and “progress” and “efficiency” and “vision” when describing this coup attempt. The plotting oligarchs have legacy money from an earlier era of software, which they are now seeking to leverage, using destructive political techniques, to destroy human institutions. That’s it. They are offering no future beyond acting out their midlife crises on the rest of us. It is demeaning to pretend that they represent something besides a logic of destruction. As for the rest of us: Make sure you are talking to people and doing something. The logic of “move fast and break things,” like the logic of all coups, is to gain quick dramatic successes that deter and demoralize and create the impression of inevitability. Nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them. What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. Sometimes self-government just means elections. And sometimes it means recognizing the deeper dignity and meaning of what it means to be a people. That means speaking up, standing out, and protesting. We can only be free together.

Mayday at the DOJ Harry Litman Thursday 30 January, 2025 The Department of Justice is in the gravest crisis of its storied 150+ year history, and whether it will emerge with anything like its previous institutional strength and integrity is far from clear. Twice before, the Department has faced a crisis from within. Both times, presidents sought to corrupt its mission for self-serving ends. Both times, political appointees of the Department—as it happened, Republicans—stepped up, putting the DOJ’s institutional interests ahead of the personal welfare of the president. The first episode was the famed 'Saturday Night Massacre' of 1974 during the Watergate investigation, when President Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Both Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused the president’s order and resigned. (It was Robert Bork, the then Solicitor General, who ultimately carried out the order, with the acquiescence of the other two.) The refusals led more or less directly to Nixon’s resignation. It was a defining moment for the Department, still invoked today as one of its finest hours. The second episode occurred in 2021, at the end of Donald Trump’s first administration. Trump sought to strongarm the Department into writing a false letter to Georgia election officials to further the plot to steal the election. In a dramatic Oval Office showdown, the entire Department leadership, led by acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen, told Trump that they would all resign if he installed Jeff Clark as a puppet AG and went ahead with his plans. Trump relented, and again the Department reaffirmed its institutional strength. Both of those crises were events of high drama when the continued institutional integrity of the Department of Justice was on the line. The current crisis has not yet reached a white-hot moment of showdown, and that may never happen. That is because, stung by his failed shakedown the last time around, Trump already has stacked the deck by installing lackeys to issue the orders. For that reason and others, including the servile see-no-evil Republicans in Congress, the institutional attack he has initiated is considerably more menacing, and the outcome considerably more in doubt. Most importantly, there is no DOJ appointee in place to play the role of Richardson or Rosen by standing up for the Constitution above the president. It was the Trump hand-picked acting Attorney General, James McHenry, who temporarily led a Justice Department unit dealing with immigration during Trump’s first term, who carried out Trump’s order to fire the 12 career prosecutors who had worked for Jack Smith. An even more breathtaking example here is Ed Martin, the just-appointed acting United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, who has ordered up an ill-defined “investigation” into some of the conduct of the January 6 prosecutions, demanding a “comprehensive and assertive” interim report by Friday—a laughably short turnaround that precludes any sort of thorough analysis. And he ordered the top officials in the office to oversee the investigation of their colleagues, adding a graceless insult to the injury of the project itself. This rub-their-noses-in-it move is a repeating trope of the hostile takeover of the DOJ we are seeing unfold. Ed Martin is a charter Stop-the-Steal election denier, who represented Proud Boys and other rioters and served on the board of the “Patriot Freedom Project,” a group dedicated to raising money to support the marauders. He attended the January 6 rally and tweeted that there was “nothing out of hand” about what happened at the Capitol that day. He has no business being involved in any DOJ investigation involving the offenders. Trump is no great strategic thinker. But he has a deft instinct for sowing chaos, which he does by bundling together a plethora of outrageous acts at once. That has been his general MO for his first 10 days in office, and his specific approach to DOJ. It’s all part of the blueprint of Project 2025, which Trump disavowed during the campaign but has clearly become his Administration’s operator’s manual. With so many bombs exploding at once, it’s very hard for institutionalists to effectively make the case or even explain to the American people why Trump’s conduct threatens constitutional rule. Moreover, there is the additional challenge that much of the country has been conditioned to see Trump’s reprisals as tit for tat for the Department’s prosecutions of him. Readers of this Substack know that my organizing approach to Trump’s treacheries is to start with the lie. It’s a sort of iron law of Trump knavery that the last 10 days have repeatedly illustrated: there’s always a lie at the core. Here, the core lie is the claim that the prosecutions of Trump and his gang of constitutional hoodlums were politically motivated and not meritorious. It’s clear that embracing the falsehood is a required article of faith for anyone in the administration, including AG nominee Pam Bondi, who advanced it, repeatedly and casually, in her testimony, along with general diatribes against the Department for “weaponizing” prosecutions. But the claim is a vicious slander, and one that goes to the heart of the department’s identity. Its proponents’ sole basis for making it is that Trump was the defendant. The fact—the plain fact that we must insist on again and again—is that career DOJ lawyers are highly professional, scrupulous, and dedicated to the public good; and they were all those things while working under Jack Smith. And in the very rare exceptions when they are not, there is a supervisory and disciplinary structure to come down hard on them. The Department does not tolerate much less countenance politicized prosecutions, which directly contradict its operating credo of doing justice without fear or favor. The image of a systematically corrupt Department of Justice from line prosecutors to the attorney general always has been a dark Trump delusion. For all DOJ alums who know how the Department actually operates, it’s galling to have to make this essential point over the raucous shouts of the Trump chorus. There is a way to prove that in Trump’s cases. It’s just that, as with rebuttals of so many of Trump’s irresponsible diatribes, it requires meticulous explanation and a fair hearing, both of which have become very scarce commodities under Trump’s malign influence, along with that of the right-wing media ecosystem that parrots every lie. Prosecutors habitually invoke “the facts and the law” as the sole guides to their conduct. It’s such a bland, widespread mantra that it tends to go in one ear and out the other. But in fact, it’s the north star of prosecution without fear or favor. The simple, indispensable point is that the charges against Donald Trump and his co-conspirators were grounded securely in the facts and the serious violations of federal law that they established. And of course, Trump and company have cited no facts or law in support of their claim. The sole point of “proof” is that Trump was the defendant, and the implicit argument is that a Democratic administration that prosecutes a prominent Republican must be in the tank. Jack Smith rebutted these charges while he still could at the end of his Volume One report to Merrick Garland. He did so with the simple avowal that the dismissal of the charges in no way turns on “the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution – all of which the Office stands fully behind.” A final contrasting feature of this current crisis is that, in contrast to the others that necessarily played out in a matter of days or hours, this one has no clear showdown point. Indeed, while the firings were meant to settle scores with career staff for doing their jobs, their intended effect is no less to chill the rest of the Department to frozen nitrogen levels. Department attorneys know today that their jobs are threatened if they pursue investigations that possibly undermine Trump’s personal interests. The goal is pernicious: to rot the Department culture from the inside and convert it to an instrument of personal service to the President. The crisis will be unfolding for the next several months, as Trump, Martin, and company (presumably to include Bondi) pursue their relentless campaigns of reprisal. I will have much more to write, but it’s critical to keep foremost in mind that this is a Manichean battle between forces of good and forces of evil. One side is correct and righteous; the other is lying and wicked. If history, or political culture, or congressional courage, or all of the above, can’t suffice to deliver an eventual repudiation of Trump’s scurrilous claims, the Department will have been permanently crippled. It is on all of us to keep up the volume on this issue. Today’s debacle with the withdrawal of the over-aggressive OMB order is a useful reminder that Trump will blunder, and he has only the thinnest of margins in Congress to work. An important counterblow, one that all of us can strike, is to insist on the lie at the heart of the DOJ takeover and never to give ground. The day will come when the episode, like the January 6 insurrection itself, will be broadly understood to have been driven by the self-serving lies of a petty would-be autocrat. But for the moment, the horizon is stormy, and the endpoint is difficult to discern.

< World Premiere > ELLIOT CARTER : String Quartet No. 3 Tuesday 23 January, 1973 – Julliard School, New York The Julliard String Quartet Associated Music Publishers, 1973, 1998 (AMP 7303) Awarded the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Music “My String Quartet No. 3, commissioned by The Julliard School for the Julliard String Quartet, divides the instruments into pairs: a duo for Violin & Cello that plays in rubato style and a duo for Violin & Viola in more regular rhythm. The Violin–Cello duo presents four different musical characters – an angry, intense 'Furioso' ; a fanciful 'Leggerissimo'; a 'Pizzicato giocoso'; and a lyrical 'Andante expressivo' – in short sections one after the other in various orders, sometimes with pauses between. The Violin–Viola duo, meanwhile, presents the six contrasting characters: 'Maestoso'; 'Grazioso'; 'Pizzicato, giusto mechanico'; 'Scorrevole'; 'Largo tranquillo'; and 'Appassionato'. During the Quartet each character of each duo is presented alone and also in combination with each character of the other duo to give a sense of ever-varying perspectives of feelings, expression, rivalry and cooperation.” — Elliott Carter

< World Premiere > ROBIN HOLLOWAY : The Consolation of Music, Op. 38, No. 1 (for unaccompanied SSAATTBB choir) Monday 22 January, 1979 – Queen Elizabeth Hall, London The BBC Singers, cond. John Poole Boosey & Hawkes Ltd., 1979 Words : Robert Herrick (1591-1674) & William Stroud (1589-1671)

< World Premiere > BÉLA BARTÓK : Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta Thursday 21 January, 1937 – Basel, Switzerland Basler Kammerorchester, cond. Paul Sacher Universal Edition, 1937 "In the summer of 1936, the 55-year-old Béla Bartók, having by then achieved considerable international fame as a performer, composer, and ethnomusicologist, tackled a formidable array of compositional challenges in his 'Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta', a work of astonishing synthesis, organicism, and technical brilliance." — Christopher Gibbs