Everyone seems to agree that this presidential election is unpleasant, depressing, stressful, etc. So if you’re sick of listening to all the political bullshit, allow me to give you some very different bullshit for your listening pleasure!

If you’ve taken a music appreciation class, you’ve probably had some John Cage forced on you. I should point out that I like the guy, and I like musing over and talking about his ideas. At the same time, I don’t actually enjoy listening to his music; I think it’s main value is not aesthetic but philosophical.

Among the many cool ideas he had (I say “cool” because I don’t think it’s necessarily “good”) was to remove the human composer from the act of composing as much as possible. From here he began exploring other ways to challenge our ideas about music composition and creation (and, about ourselves and our social interactions). His piece Indeterminacy is a recording of Cage reading random sentences from selected stories, while his friend David Tudor makes random musical sounds with various instruments.

If the music were more typical, and the spoken words made sense, this recording would be same-old-stuff, perhaps something akin to a children’s story accompanied by music. But since both music and words are nonsensical, our initial response is “what the hell is this?” But, to a non-human, both same-old-stuff and the nonsensical-stuff might sound exactly the same. Who gets to define what is music and what isn’t, anyway?

All Souls’ Day marks the end of Allhallowtide, the second of two Christian celebrations related to Halloween (the first being yesterday, All Saints’ Day.)

All Souls’ is a celebration that commemorates the dead. Not surprisingly, there are loads of great pieces linked with death – our own or that of a loved one. One of my favorites is “Bring Us, O Lord God”, a setting of a prayer for a peaceful death by the poet and priest John Donne, composed by the English cathedral musician William H. Harris.

There’s a lie we like to tell ourselves: bullies are mean because they are actually insecure, depressed, unloved, and lonely. That might make us feel better when someone is picking on us, but the truth of the matter is, bullies are jerks who are living the good life at the top of the social ladder.

And that’s why there are stories like Don Juan: seducer, rapist, murderer, liar, and just about the most horrible person you can dream up. Mozart‘s operatic version of the story, Don Giovanni, begins with the main character seducing the daughter of a knight, before then killing her father – with no regrets for any of his actions. The opera concludes with a triumphant moment of justice, when the murdered knight appears as a ghost who offers Giovanni one last chance to repent – Giovanni, however, would never stoop so low. The knight grabs him by the hand and pulls him down to hell. Everybody else then casually sits around and agrees that Giovanni had what was coming to him.