The Art-Music, Literature and Linguistics Forum
March 28, 2024, 03:53:48 pm
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
News: Here you may discover hundreds of little-known composers, hear thousands of long-forgotten compositions, contribute your own rare recordings, and discuss the Arts, Literature and Linguistics in an erudite and decorous atmosphere full of freedom and delight.
 
  Home Help Search Gallery Staff List Login Register  

David Wright's article on Rob Barnett

Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 5   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: David Wright's article on Rob Barnett  (Read 32803 times)
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
ahinton
Level 6
******

Times thanked: 30
Offline Offline

Posts: 837


View Profile WWW
« on: January 20, 2014, 02:44:00 pm »

If ever there were irrefutable evidence that two (or more) wrongs don't make a Wright, his posturing and his Wrightings constitute it.

His haranguing of Rob Barnett is as gratuitous as it is unnecessary as it is vile.

http://www.wrightmusic.net/ provides as defensive, self-aggrandising and messily inaccurate (i.e. shoddily, if at all, edited) an introduction to its perpetrator as one could hope for (or rather against).

His article Elgar Unmasked (surely to all intents and purposelessnesses a typo for Wright Unmasked) includes the sentence
"There is that wonderful story that he [Stanford] wrote to Elgar one day and said that he was sitting in the smallest room in his house with a copy of the Elgar Cello Concerto before him but that, thankfully, it would soon be behind him"
when most of us know that this story concerns not Elgar but Reger, not a score but a review of a Reger première and not a third party letter but one directly from Reger to the errant critic - but that's just one of countless hundreds of gaffes, borrowings, fantasisings and the rest of which almost every line of this article is infested - for evidence, see http://www.wrightmusic.net/pdfs/elgar.pdf. Elsewhere, he credits this story and its telling to William Walton.

I expect to be sued for drawing the above and below attention to extracts from his writ(h)ings, given that his articles are all followed by text that is or amounts to a variation on

"WARNING

Copyright David C F Wright renewed 2004 [or whenever]. This article or any part of it, however small, must
not be used, copied, published even in part, downloaded, stored in any mechanical or retrievable
system. Failure to comply is illegal, being theft and contrary to International Copyright Law and
will render offenders liable to action at law. However, the author may grant permsission upon
written application."

He seems to be unaware of and/or unconcerned about "fair use" policy, notwithstanding his evident concern about copyright and its infringement as set out in http://www.wrightmusic.net/pdfs/copyright-law.pdf.

Anyway, I'll take that risk.

He has his likes and dislikes, as do the rest of us, of course, but it's well-nigh impossible to read some of his stuff for more than a few paragraphs before finding oneself at risk of being drowned in a sea of salacious quotations, stories and psuedo-opinions most if not all of which are uncorroborated elsewhere and none of which are referenced. There's useful material about Sessions, Gerhard and quite a few other composers, but much of even this reads to me too much like anecdotally-infused coffee-table stuff. He never loses an opportunity to puff up Humphrey Searle, who certainly does deserve far more attention that he gets even today (Wright was apparently a student of his - so was I, as it happens) though, given the manner and matter of some of Wright's other literary expressions, one might well be forgiven for questioning whether this could come across to certain readers as something of a poisoned chalice.

For anyone with any regard for Elgar, Chopin, Scriabin, Schubert or Britten, his articles (and not just the ones on those three composers) are best avoided at all costs.

As to conductors, he's lucky that Daniel Barenboim (his least offensive statement about whom - "I regret to say that he was not a nice man" - might be read and an implied desire to assume that Barenboim is no longer with us) hasn't reached for his lawyer. Simon Rattle might well have done the same, having been described as "someone who abuses music... the butcher of Beethoven, the murderer of Mahler, the assassin of Szymanowski..... and the rest", were it not for Wright's lame attempt on this occasion to conceal himself behind a mask of "various contributors" (unnamed, of course, but presumably chosen for their remarkable similarity of "style" and "content" to his own) rather than admit to being the writer of what most certainly does not read like a multi-author piece (and why in any case would it be expected to do so?). John Barbirolli and Herbert von Karajan fare no better and Georg Solti is likewise snapped at and pilloried. For Gustavo Dudamel he prefers to pepper reluctant praise with his own uniquely unpleasant brand of patronising commentary.

All of this is heavily seasoned with defensive excuse-making in the guise of his alleged courage in "telling the truth".

All is also either badly proof-read or not proof-read at all, "Andreas Bocelli" and "avante garde" on the performers' list, "Alina Ibragomova" in his piece on Roslavets, "Alice Sarah Ott", "a faculty memer", "Jamie Laredo", "Ceceile Licad" and "Nancy Gilbraiths’" (for "Nancy Galbraith's") in a single article on female pianists being sadly typical of the often hastily assembled, ill-punctuated stuff of which some was published quite a few years ago but has nevertheless yet to be corrected - not that I imagine that anyone would wish to "correct" Dr Wright.

He appears to be a 67-year-old moralist anti-homosexual Christian with interests in spiritualism. His professed academic qualifications (PhD, DMus, DD) have apparently been called into question and it seems that no one has been able to identify from which universities they came; were he genuinely to be in possession of these three degrees, I somehow suspect that it would be possible to look up evidence of them but, in the meantime and in the absence copies of any of his theses for them, it would seem especially remarkable that his writings, considerable as they are in quantity if not in quality, include none of the referential footnotes expected of the seasoned academic, were it not for his evidently obsessive desire to present scores of unsupported and largely unsupportable allegations as though they were facts.

I have no idea as to whether he holds, or has ever held, any kind of academic or teaching position but I can only hope that he's never held the latter.

He seems to like the sound of his own voice almost as much as I imagine that the majority of his readers dislike it.

The best policy, it seems to me, is to read a few bits of his outpourings (if you must), take note of their truculent and noisily expressed barbs and their general spuriousness and speciousness and then pass swiftly onto something else.
Report Spam   Logged

Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 5   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum


Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy