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Our musicological friends at Dial M for Musicology are mentally preparing for the big one, the national meeting of the American Musicological Society, this year in Los Angeles the first weekend of November. In particular, they are obsessing about that deadly AMS ritual, the cattle call job interviews. I have my own cringe experience, calling the phone number of an interviewer, who had requested my full dossier, and discovering that he had not set up an interview with me because I was not on the short list. Ouch. Link

I basically wanted to avoid the morass of misperception that characterized the reportage on Benedict XVI's lecture at the University of Regensburg. I thought that Jon Stewart on The Daily Show had the best bit on the flap, that Muslims, outraged by the Pope's association of historical Islam with violence, promptly reacted by threatening and actually carrying out explosions and murders. For a more reasoned reaction, I recommend David Nishimura's intellectual analysis at Cronaca. If I had wanted to wade into this dustup, I would have done something like what David did so well, that is, look at "what [the Pope] actually said" (he provided links to German transcript and an English translation). As David observed, "From initial reportage, it seemed as if this might be somewhat akin to the Lawrence Summers affair, where certain opinions had been deemed so unacceptable that even mention of their existence was grounds for execration." Link

Today, Scott Spiegelberg posted a concise and helpful introduction to how to realize a figured bass at Musical Perceptions. This was in response to the search terms that brought one reader to his site. Link

Professor Heebie McJeebie has been pontificating on things classical for three months, and he gets mentioned in the Times of London? Where is the justice in that? There's no real rancor: the Professor has a fine blog. Link

IN BRIEF:
We miss our Vilaine Fille's pithy and acid commentary, but we wish her all the best on her Italian sabbatical. Congratulations to Alex Ross on deleting 140,000 words from his forthcoming book, an achievement that rivals the labors of Hercules. This reminds me of my experience editing my dissertation. At one meeting with my director, she ordered me to remove one-third of the commas. La Cieca dixit, et erat lux: the Metropolitan Opera will broadcast live and archived performances via Sirus Radio. Can I get it set up for myself before the September 25th broadcast of the opening night Madama Butterfly?