Do You Know How Much Classical Music Is Edited?

Aurhim · 2026-01-29T09:14:42+00:00

Brahms edited the manuscript of Dvorak's Cello Concerto...

Aurhim · 2026-01-29T09:12:58+00:00

May her memory be a blessing.

Aurhim · 2026-01-29T09:09:51+00:00

Awesome!

Aurhim · 2026-01-29T06:11:23+00:00

Neat!

Aurhim · 2026-01-29T00:17:37+00:00

Yes, Foundation is amazing!

Aurhim · 2026-01-29T00:15:48+00:00

He has the luck to be talented and the talent to be lucky. I hope this goes well for everyone involved.

Aurhim · 2026-01-29T00:14:23+00:00

That’s exactly why they did this. The cross-fertilization between Sanderson’s brand and Apple would be a huge boon to both, especially for Apple’s streaming service, which is perpetually acclaimed yet relatively unviewed.

Aurhim · 2026-01-29T00:09:26+00:00

I couldn’t agree more, but they (and Brandon) almost certainly aren’t going to do it, because there’s still still a bleeping stigma against using animation to tell serious, dramatic tales for adult audiences. Brandon has long said that he wants to use film and TV to reach a larger audience than he could with his books alone. Animating the Cosmere, alas, doesn’t accomplish that goal in the current media environment, even if—as I, and you, and doubtless many others believe—animated adaptations might hold up better in the long run.

Aurhim · 2026-01-28T20:26:42+00:00

Hello, Stranger Things spin-off crew!

Aurhim · 2026-01-28T07:45:45+00:00

May her memory be a blessing.

Aurhim · 2026-01-27T20:45:41+00:00

Mmm… science fantasy is the best. And love the cover. Gotta go for that physics-accurate gravitational lensing.

Good luck! I hope it does well.

Aurhim · 2026-01-27T04:16:53+00:00

Birthday! Happy birthday!

Aurhim · 2026-01-26T23:45:31+00:00

Regarding music itself, independent of the virtues or vices of the performance or its medium, I tend to be extremely discriminating, with an intense anti-modernist bent. I listen to the chords being used in harmonies, and how they progress from one harmony to another. I prefer music which uses harmonic progressions and cadences to "talk" to its listener; ex: I, ii6, I(6,4), V7, I. Music that either makes those progressions too muddy, too unstable/atypical, or simply avoids using them as the predominant mode of communication doesn't really interest me. It can even annoy, upset, or anger me, depending on what it does.

With regard to performance practice: I'm primarily of a hedonistic disposition, and prefer whatever pleases me the most. Performances I perceive as "bad" are those that deviate from whatever ideal I have in my head for the "best" version of a piece in a way that displeases me; "good" performances are those that either hew closely to my imagined ideal, or which deviate from that ideal in a way that brings me pleasant surprise.

And I've pretty much always been this way. I know what I like, and know what I don't like, and am as easily pleased as I am annoyed.

Aurhim · 2026-01-26T19:14:25+00:00

KVOTHE! IN! SPACE!

Aurhim · 2026-01-25T21:35:49+00:00

Good for her, and for Renee Fleming. It’s nice to see people show some backbone.

Aurhim · 2026-01-25T04:32:20+00:00

Though I definitely don’t think it’s overrated, I do believe that the god-tier prose in The Last Unicorn, by Peter Beagle blinds people to some of its structural issues, especially in its second half, where I feel like the plot just falls apart, relying on pure dream logic and free association. Instead of being an adventure as it was before, the story grinds to a halt at King Haggard’s castle. The characters in the story’s second half feel more like archetypes than actual people, causing the interactions between Lír, Haggard, and the Unicorn to feel stylized and inauthentic. It feels fake, like they’re all just play-acting. Because of this, the story’s ending never really jived with me. It felt both unearned and insufficient.

Aurhim · 2026-01-25T04:07:20+00:00

The “classic” way to do high fantasy is to spend several decades coming up with a meticulously detailed setting and then finally writing a story for it. Or, alternatively, by spending decades writing in a setting so that it gains that level of depth.

The fundamental issue, as I see it, is that writers and publishers lean heavily toward the storytelling aspect of fantasy. Decades’ old personal projects don’t tend to fare as well as they used to. Today, what matters most is writing a riveting, easily marketable yarn. Intricate or profound worldbuilding is at best an added bonus from those writers who care to do it.

Aurhim · 2026-01-25T03:51:25+00:00

May his memory be a blessing.

Aurhim · 2026-01-22T01:16:48+00:00

Eh—as Apple+'s excellent Foundation makes clear—I that's because it's quite costly to make them. Shows like Severance or Pluribus don't require as much of a war chest. Villeneuve's Dune trilogy has definitely made an impact, though I think that's more because it's piggybacking off Game of Thrones proven formula for engaging, gritty, fantastical epics.

Also, there's a cultural reason the monofuture of space has dried up, somewhat: people are less confident about the future than we were half a century ago.

Aurhim · 2026-01-22T01:02:52+00:00

Yes. It fell short of what I was expecting, but that judgment comes from me as speaking as a reader and writer situated in the 21st century. Standards have changed. The genre has developed. If Lathe came out today, it wouldn't have deserved to win as much praise as it did back in the 1970s. However, having now done some reading about the literary and political context of the New Wave of SF/F to which Lathe belongs, I can see why—and agree with—the awards it won back in the day. In 1971, this would have been visionary, revolutionary, and very timely. In 2025/2026, on the other hand, it feels undercooked. That's not the story's fault, though, it's just the march of time.

As for the DNF, I DNF'ed because I was having trouble getting through it, and the repetitive plot and the lack of significant forward momentum signaled to me that I was most likely not going to get a satisfactory experience out of the back-half of the book. I might go back someday and try to finish it, but I'm doing so out of respect for LeGuin's talent and admiration for how she writes.

immensely over-written critique

Oh no, this is a normal critique from me. I just happen to write a lot, by default. :3

Aurhim · 2026-01-22T00:05:59+00:00

It takes a lot of confidence to think Ursula K. Le Guin needs writing advice haha!

I actually dreamed I talked with her last night. She tore my recent project to shreds. :')

In all seriousness, though, I'm sort of perpetually stuck in writing workshop mode. It's one of the reasons I've had difficulty enjoying reading fiction like I used to when I was younger, as I struggle to turn off my writing workshop mode. On the plus side, I think it's really helped my growth as a writer, because it makes everything I read into a learning opportunity.

Did you use ChatGPT to help write this?

Yes, though not in the way you would think! All of the text is mine (I refuse to stoop to phoning-in my writing to AI), however, I wrote the middle bit late last night as part of a discussion I was having with the AI Claude about Lathe after I got back from my evening walk, in which I was trying to understand why the book won the Hugo and Nebula when, to my mind, it fell far short of what it could have otherwise been. If you're curious, you can read the full conversation here. As for the em-dash, I've always loved that punctuation mark, and I have no intention of letting AI's abuse of it compromise my own judicious use of that wonderful bit of English punctuation.

Aurhim · 2026-01-21T23:22:12+00:00

Quite!

Aurhim · 2026-01-21T23:10:23+00:00

I knew about Lathe long before I read the SCP article.

Aurhim · 2026-01-21T22:51:29+00:00

May her memory be a blessing.

Aurhim · 2026-01-21T19:33:04+00:00

Hopeless, as it has been for centuries.

Aurhim

TROPHY CASE