The Fredösphere

I'm posting from an internet cafe in beautiful Siesta Key just off Sarasota, Florida.  This cafe appears to be run by a nine-year-old girl, assisted by her eight-year-old brother, but I have no complaints as we're having a great time.  I'll resume regular posting when I return to the frozen north.

Merry Christmas, everyone.  We'll be jumping in the van at 4:00 tomorrow morning (yes, morning) for the big drive down to Sarasota, Florida.  We've stockpiled snacks and electronic stimulation in the hope the two kids survive the journey without pulling a gingham dog / calico cat-style act of mutual metaphysical nullification on us.  I'll look for chances to blog while I'm down there, but I cannot promise anything until I get back around January 5.  Cheers.

Yesterday I mentioned fedoras.  I should have also linked to this hatted crusader.  (Not to be confused with this hatted crusader.)

A Voyage to Arcturus is a blog outside of my usual interests, but I visit it occasionally.  It covers astronomy news and the intersection of science and public policy, all in a refreshingly sane way.  (Which is not to say it's always right; infallibility is reserved strictly for Our Spherehood.)  It gets the hat tip today for something definitely within my interests, but which I have neglected lately:  bad religious art.  As a bonus, we have a seasonal theme:  it's the Cavalcade of Bad Nativities.  Have at it.

I spent last night in the venerable Michigan Theater attending a free showing of one of those tiresome, clichéd horror movies about some creepy, psychotic old man who dons a Santa Claus suit and goes on a rampage, plunging an entire city into chaos and terror.  This one was called ... Nightmare on ... no, wait ... Miracle on 34th Street.  Yes, that was it.  The most regrettable part is, I took my kids.  What a mistake.

In the last few days, I've sampled a lot (for me) of popular culture, and it has put me in a foul mood.  Monday night we watched Nanny 911, which has its own special lameness, but the commercials were what especially appalled.  All that hype devoted to the stupidest, most worthless things!  How do people stand watching TV?  Meanwhile, Miracle was hardly reassuring (it was my first time to see it).  A more innocent time ... gotta have faith ... blah, blah, blah.  Face this fact, if you can:  they made a Christmas classic out of a courtroom drama.  A courtroom drama!  If only they could have found a plot contrivance that would have sent Natalie Wood to the electric chair, the movie would have been redeemed.

On the way home from the movie, my friend Jed expressed an interest in owning a fedora, after I commented on the hats.  Can a man of this day pull of such a statement?  Dare I try wearing one?  Did poofy hair kill the hat in western culture?  These are sincere questions.

I'll wrap this up with a few random links.  Here's more on the current bad Santa epidemic.  Via A&L Daily I found this important warning to musicians:  Mozart makes you sick.  Meanwhile, my friend John sent me a Wikipedia entry packed with information about heavy metal umlauts.  It's the diacritical mark of the beast! 

The novel Zodiac (1988) by Neal Stephenson features a fictional band called Pöyzen Böyzen, which one character describes as "not bad for a two-umlaut band".

My umlaut is not intended to effect the pronunciation of the Fredösphere, but I assure you it is not purely gratuitous.  As I believe I have mentioned before, it is a reference to Teilhard de Chardin's term noösphere, from which the term blogosphere was cooked up.  Tom Wolfe's essay in Hooking Up on de Chardin is the most entertaining source of information on this topic, but not available online, so instead I'll direct you here, where they (sadly) use the convention of spelling noösphere without the umlaut.  Weenies!  The link clears up one bit of confusion:

[A] fundamental characteristic of layer 9 [i.e., the noösphere] in comparison with the former ones, is that the building element -man- doesn't lose his individuality. Socialisation is not a superindividual being as suggested by the Gaian hypothesis of e.g. Lovelock, although ultimately there is a convergence in the minds of men into a superconsciousness that Teilhard called the Omega Point.

That's a relief.  Furthermore, at the end of his life, de Chardin developed the less-well-known concept of the Christosphere, the final stage of development beyond the noösphere.  (Don't you even think of using that word for the name of your next blog!)  Nevertheless, de Chardin has a gnostic vibe going that gives me the same slippery feeling I get from reading Phillip K. Dick.  But that's a (long) topic for another day.

You can't excommunicate him!  He's Pope John Paul II!

Via Alex Ross, you got yer Bach-themed Advent calendar, and via the Corner, it's yer Narnia-themed hip hop from Saturday Night Live.  I forgot to review the Narnia movie, probably because I was so relieved simply to have survived the experience.  I would give it an A-; it failed to do the impossible of living up to the book, but it avoided any eye-rolling embellishments, which is more than you can say for the LOTR movies.  In fact, the most significant addition (a whole new talking fox character) was actually sort of almost in line with Lewis' creations.

Congratulations are due to Renewable Music on its first bloggiversary, and thanks to Daniel Wolf for squandering part of his celebratory post on some very kind words for the Fredösphere.  And yes, if he and I were ever so reckless as to enter the same room, we would turn into pillars of salt, the mountains would melt like wax, the moon would turn to blood, and a flock of geese would fly by in the shape of a swastika.

Via Artsjournal.com we find a description of a glass artist's attempts to sue other artists whom he says are copying him.  This relates to my post on Ex Nihilo by Frederick Hart, and Michael Blowhard's comment, all which you can see here.

I also wanted to comment on that swirly leaf lettuce pattern in Hart's sculpture.  To me, it looks like the kind of wave produced by a helicopter when it flies low over water -- which in turn brings to mind -- and puts an odd, slightly irreverent spin (sorry) on -- the strange description in Genesis 1:2 of the Holy Ghost, who, as some translations say, "hovered" over the face of the waters.

[And at this point, the post veers off into the very deep and troubled waters of religious belief about creation.  Those of you who are allergic should bail now, or at least have your medication handy.]

Those who take Genesis seriously on at least some level may share with me an awe at the spooky imagery of Genesis' opening passage.  It's oddness, and somewhat confusing descriptions, only increase its authority for me; I admit my approach may be not shared by many, but I feel our origins must be beyond our understanding, else they would lack the complexity necessary to produce us.

Those interested in a very learned description of the perils of Old Testament translation are urged to read the New Criterion's review of Robert Alter's new translation of the Hebrew Bible.  (Registration required.)  Especially fascinating is the description of the phrase tohu wa-bohu, traditionally rendered "without form and void" but which may be a neologism (if that can describe a phrase that is thousands of years old) never used anywhere else, which Eric Ormsby, the reviewer, suggests could be rendered "helter-skelter."  Try again, Eric.

Finally, I offer this odd link which comes from a strongly literalist approach to the Bible, yet manages to arrive at some novel conclusions (and is perfectly consistent with an earth that is billions of years old).  I link neither to mock, nor to endorse, but merely to expand your understanding of what is possible in the big, wide world of devout religious belief.  In fact, the theory that Genesis 1:3ff was meant to describe a re-creation is one I have heard before. 

I'm listening to Aaron Copland:  A Centenary Tribute.  Hearing the Fanfare for the Common Man reminded me of choir tour during spring break one year back in my undergraduate days, when the brass ensemble with us would play that piece while the choir processed into the sanctuary du jour.  (It was a religious college choir giving concerts of sacred music in churches.)  We basses would take our natural, superior place on the topmost step of the risers as the trumpet soared and the gong roared and some terrified baby inevitably screamed its head off.  It was during one of those moments I concluded the piece would have been better titled Fanfare for the Common God.

I'm also enjoying a recording of Brahms' Liebeslieder-Walzer sung by an all-star quartet.  "Brahms needs the most mature voices."  You hear that said if you hang around choirs long enough.  There's a kind of old-school choral sound -- dark, rich tone with unbuttoned vibrato -- that is particularly suited to Brahms and which is produced naturally by older voices.  My undergraduate choral experience was dominated by a director who loved that sound and made it his single-minded mission to beat all that was youthful, thin, and shrill out of our voices.  (He would occasionally turn to the sopranos and say, "you are all 50 years old, you weigh 300 pounds, and you're Russian:  now sing!")  This was in the time before it was widely appreciated what can be achieved by smalls voices with straight tone in the right repertoire.  Thus, although he achieved much in the pursuit of the sound he wanted, the result suffered from one-dimensionality, and the whole enterprise had a quixotic air about it.

I suppose the ideal performance of these waltzes by Brahms would be by a mid sized choir of obese, 50 year old Russians, but this quartet is great nevertheless.  Of the four, I particularly admired Olaf Bär, who possesses one of the most exquisitely perfect bass names I've ever heard (and he sings real good too).

Fun stuff at ChoralTalk, an email list I subscribe to.  (It's archived on a public website.)  Gary Wayne started it off with this request:

The community chorus for whom I work is interested in creating an "artistic committee" to help guide the director in planning of programs and selection of musical literature. This is to be an advisory committee with the final decisions left to the director.

Please reply with your opinion on a committee of this nature. If your community chorus has a written description of such an committee, our chorus would love to have a copy.

Many directors responded with deep suspicion, if not outright hostility, to such a committee.  I served on one once, but it was a task force for generating suggestions, nothing more, and everyone stayed calm about it, so it ended without disaster.  (The director even programmed one of my suggestions, the gorgeous Corpus Christi Carol by Trond Kverno.)  Nevertheless, one board member with tons of music experience insisted the very existence of the committee was an insult to the director.

Scroll down from the link and you'll see other opinions, especially from those involved in arts marketing.  I can imagine a group helping enormously by brainstorming about concert themes, as long as the chain of command was well understood. 

More entertaining are the horror stories of micro-management.  My very favorite is from Dr. Alan Mason:

I have been the Director of Music at Temple Israel in Miami, Florida since 1991. This year we established an "artistic committee" consisting of several prominent congregants: a gynecologist, a lawyer, the owner of a large corporation, a dentist, a psychiatrist, and an accountant. After Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the "artistic committee" recommended that next year's High Holiday Choir should not include "the five girls up front" (the sopranos), because they sing so high. At that point I told the Rabbi, "there is no more artistic committee. There is only me." Thank goodness I have 14 successful years under my belt. My word carried more weight than their idiotic suggestion.

Thanks to reader Jon who, properly recognizing the Fredösphere's status as the 17th greatest expert of all time on the subject of choral arrangements of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, has sent me a link to Freddie Feldman's production of an a cappella version.  You will be gratified to learn great atttention was given to the album's timings so that "Wizard of Oz Compatibility" is preserved. Clearly, the album art steals the show; I enjoyed the sound clips, but found the leads a bit less compelling than the Pink Floyd's.  I guess that's why the original is the 17th greatest-selling album of all time.  Way to go, PF -- you're almost as good as Hootie and the Blowfish!

Did anyone else spot this? The Firefox logo may have drawn inspiration from Frederick Hart's Ex Nihilo, the sculpture above the western door of the Washington Cathedral.

Labels: Creativity, Design

This post by Rick Brookhiser is hilarious, or as hilarious as anything can be about Terry Teachout in the hospital.  Get well soon, Terry!

I'm feeling self-indulgent today and may not blog at all.  I'm exhausted, having spent the entire night at the emergency room with my poor darling Maharincess, who decided to stumble while climbing the stairs and jam a wooden dowel into the back of her mouth.  Because critical nerves and an artery are in that neighborhood, the docs decided to give her an MRI, one requiring five minutes of lying perfectly still.  Anyone familiar with four-year-olds knows five minutes of stillness ain't gonna happen without sedation; sadly, the Maharincess turns out to be the type of person for whom sedatives wear off quickly.  The first MRI attempt was abandoned after a half hour of trying to calm the panicked preschooler.  That was around 2:00 a.m.  They waited to allow the first batch of drugs to wear off, then brought out the more powerful stuff and pumped it into her like a gas station attendant filling up a dual tank International Harvester Travelall.  By 4:00 a.m., we were done; the Maharincess slept in Elysium and I waited two more hours for the results, which I never doubted would be the All Clear.  The only book I had grabbed for a diversion was a textbook on poetry:  I need mind candy; this was mind spinach.  By 6:30 we were home, the Maharincess was snug in her own bed, and I was ... snowblowing our driveway, which found a way to bury itself in six inches of snow while I was goofing off.  (Der Drübermensch shares a birthday with a good friend, so they decided to have a joint party, and we'll be having lots of visitors trying to get into our house without falling into a drift.  Thus, this evening I'll be viewing the Narnia movie in the company of 10 -- or is it 13? -- seven-year-olds just as I use up my last drop of nervous energy.  I should really get a dual tank for that nervous energy stuff.)

I'll get to the recipe blogging in a minute, but first I'll touch on some perennial, yet neglected topics.  First of all, two words:  airship yacht.  Secondly, it turns out there's a guy based in Rome, calling himself Benedict, who claims to be the Pope.  This is a total scam.  Maybe.

Now, onto recipes, with a seasonal emphasis.  I'm a partisan of bread pudding, living in a world seemingly filled with bread pudding skeptics.  I've found the perfect recipe to appease everyone.  We're talking here about the apotheosis of bread pudding.  The secret?  Use croissants and avoid raisins.

The wifeösphere bought a cookbook hyped by Instapundit.  We can report it is everything it's cracked up to be.  Quick entrées for busy, yet picky, families.

Is the making of Christmas plum pudding a dying art?  I've had decent success with this variation on the traditional favorite.  Again, they replaced raisins with other, less skin-intensive, options, namely chopped dried Calimyrna figs.  Raisins are just evil, people.  The are the antipopes of dried fruit.

Can anyone recommend a good Boston Brown Bread recipe?  I had some at a restaurant once that was soft, sweet, and almost chocolaty rich.  (Maybe that was the secret ingredient.)  All attempts to duplicate this unforgettable experience have disappointed.

As you can see, steamed desserts are the theme here.  I love them for their rich warm goodness, but especially because they take so long to make, and are therefore unusual.  Yes, I'm one who is perversely drawn to the difficult.  I'm organizing a militant branch of the slow food movement, which I call Balsamic Jihad.  Let me know if you want to join.  (On the other hand, there is such a thing as too slow.)

We've got more Narnia blogging for you today, prompted by Adam Gopnik's New Yorker article.

Any robust assertion of a religious viewpoint is bound to be polarizing, so I'm not terribly surprised to find out C.S. Lewis has his critics.  Nevertheless, I was disappointed by the degree of hostility Gopnik displays.  Beyond that, he seems to miss the point at several turns.  He has the patronizing opinion that the only good Christianity is meek, lamblike Christianity, and he can't understand how a lion could become a Christian symbol.  He also claims Lewis was too parochial in his Anglicanism, which is patent nonsense -- Lewis is the supreme Mere Christian.  Heck, even pentecostals can raid his writings for ammunition.  And that an Archbishop of Canterbury disliked the strong beer of Lewis' religiosity tells you much of what you need to know about both -- none of it complimentary of Archbishops or derogatory of Lewis if you ask me.

A recurring embarrassment is Gopnik's referring to Narnia as allegory.  That Narnia does not fit the definition of allegory has been discussed a thousand times in Narniological writings; I bet the author knows this, so why didn't he explain himself?

An allegory is an elaborate scenario populated by symbols.  One understands the allegory when one matches each symbol to what is symbolized.  Narnia is not an allegory because Aslan is not a symbol for Jesus; he is Jesus, placed in a new, completely fictional environment, for the purpose of performing a thought experiment regarding What Would Jesus Do in that environment.  Asking oneself, "what was Lewis trying to tell us by including a centaur in this chapter?  What does the half-man, half-horse symbolize?" is a fool's game.  There is no answer to that question.  The centaur symbolizes nothing.  It answers the question "what would Jesus do if he were talking to a centaur?"  You may find that question interesting, or you may find it supremely vacuous, but in any case that is what Narnia is about.

Let's recap what Lewis is doing:  he considers a beloved character from literature, and craving more information than the canon supplies, lets his imagination run free, creating scenarios and plot lines that expand our understanding of the character.  These stories exist with a odd, not-really-official status relative to the canonical work.  Considering this last night, I was suddenly hit by a thunderbolt of comprehension:  Narnia is nothing more or less than fanfic.  Gospel fanfic!

Is this insight semi-original?  That's a tough question.  Googling narnia fanfic won't help you find discussions of Narnia qua fanfic, but will get you lots of sites devoted to Narnia-based fanfic.  Lots and lots and lots of sites.  And this is the moment I rediscover that opening a Pandora's box is a bad idea:  it turns out Narnia fanfic contains all the horrifying variations that make fanfic of any kind so ... charming.  I'm not even going to describe it.  Just one word will say it all -- slash -- and if you don't know what that means, consider yourself very lucky.  Jumpin' Jezebel -- is nothing sacred to these people?

We should be very glad Lewis was enough of an artist to avoid inserting a Mary Sue into the story (although some have dared to claim Aslan is a Mary Sue).  Otherwise we'd have a character named Lewis dying in some centaur's arms or ... well, once again, the decorum for which this blog is justifiably famous prevents me from spelling it out for you.  You figure it out.

One final question:  are there other examples of fanfic based on Biblical characters?  Stupid question!  Meanwhile, someone at Wikipedia thinks Jewish midrashim are premodern examples.  The same link documents a type of fanfic in which a Mary Sue converts all the author's favorite characters to the author's religion.  I suppose it was only a matter of time.

And at this point, even I am sated with this topic.  I'll leave you with a final link to a list of sci-fi authors by religious affiliation.  If you're looking for Quaker sci-fi, now you know where to go.

Yesterday I mentioned (because Virgil Thomson did) Angels by Carl Ruggles.  Today I want to draw attention to another track from a CD called Modern Times with the London Brass.  The final track is a set of variations on a theme by Paganini (a composer who apparently wrote only one theme) by Witold Lutoslawski, arranged for brass by R. Harvey.  It's a show piece, and is perhaps less than perfectly satisfying on a formal level, but what playing!  The tuba occasionally produces a wonderfully controlled, ultra-low splaat that sounds like someone sitting on a 16-foot diameter crushed velour whoopee cushion.

And, to answer your next question:  yes, engineers continue to, shall we say, push the envelope in whoopee cushion technology.

My, my, my:  the things I learn while researching material for the Fredösphere!  Apparently, the state of Florida is a roiling cesspool of human folly and malevolence:  mobs beating drunk drivers ... Whole families of degenerates wearing nothing but Bibles ... 35 thousand pairs of shoes thrown out because they sound like "whoopee cushions for the feet" ... Parents who torture their children ... a man who "found" a bullet embedded in his tongue ... and a veritable epidemic of female school teachers who can't keep their hands off the schoolboys.  Yow.  I've done the dirty work for you, so there's really no need for you to degrade yourself by following this link.

(Perhaps Steve Hicken, who linked to the same Teachout post I did yesterday, would like to defend the state of Florida by providing some counter-examples.  If he can think of any.)

Terry Teachout says Virgil Thomson's music criticism is violently prejudiced.  I'm reading Thomson's Twentieth-Century Composers:  American Music Since 1910 and I don't see any significant misjudgments.  Now, we all know I'm not biased, so if I agree with Thomson, then the only possible alternative is that Teachout is all wet--or is thinking of some other critical writings by Thomson.

It's refreshing to read Thomson's appropriately unworshipful evaluation of Charles Ives:

In remaining somewhat unimpressed by the Ives output in general--though there are certainly delicious moments and even perfect whole pieces, usually small, like the orchestral Housatonic at Stockbridge and The Unanswered Question, possibly also the third of the "Harvest Home" chorales--the present writer has no wish to underesteem the aspiration, the constancy, and the sacrifice that Ives's musical life bears witness to.  Nor to undervalue a create achievement that posterity may prize.  Actually, the man presents in music, as he did in life, two faces; on one side a man of noble thoughts, a brave and original genius, on the other a homespun Yankee tinkerer.  For both are there; of that one can be sure.  How they got to be there need not worry us, for every artist begins in a dichotomy.  But how this could remain unresolved to the very end of his creative life might be of interest to speculate about.

Really, is this opinion controversial?  I wonder if part of Ives's appeal is in the mythology of the lone artist, toiling away for years privately, needing none of the encouragement that comes from performance and applause.  Others may find this heroic; to me he looks like just another introverted composing geek who took a long time to learn how to play the self-promotion game.

Thomson also strives to deflate American music's greatest hot air balloon:

A lack of urgency has been characteristic of Cage's music from the beginning.  The instrumental sounds, whether altered or normal, are charming at the outset and agreeably varied from one piece to another, even in such delicate gradings of variety baas from one piano preparation to another.  But whenever I have played his recorded works for students I have found that no matter what their length they exhaust themselves in about two minutes, say four at most.  By that time we have all got the sound of it and made some guess at the "permanent" emotion expressed.  And there is no need for going on with it, since we know that it will not be going any deeper into an emotion already depicted as static.  Nor will it be following nature's way by developing an organic structure.  For if the mind that create it, though powerful and sometimes original, is nevertheless a narrow one, the music itself, for all its jollity, liveliness, and good humor, is emotionally shallow.

As I was proofreading this paragraph, I notices I typed "poserful" in the last sentence instead of "powerful."  A simple mistake--or my mind, channeling the Voice of Truth?  You make the call!  Cage's music belongs with other conceptual art, which has been wonderfully described by Hugh Kenner as that which, once described, need not be experienced.  I hope no one wants to argue with these manifest verities.

Thomson's criticism doesn't age perfectly; from our vantage point his praise of Copland sees a bit timid, and his admiration for Angels, a tasteful, but not terribly memorable, piece for brass choir by Carl Ruggles, seems out of proportion.  Still, I'd say he usually nails it, especially regarding Ives and Cage.

Mark McPherson is a local actor who portrays C.S. Lewis in a one-man show called "From Narnia, With Love:  The Spiritual Voyage of C.S. Lewis."  He'll be performing the show today at my church at 4p.m.  The last time he came to St. Luke to do the show, he got to meet our own Larry Krieg, who as a child became semi-famous as the "Lawrence" who corresponded with Lewis from 1955-58.

Larry has posted his correspondence at a website.  He was the one who expressed the neurotic fear that, by loving Aslan more than Jesus, he was guilty of idolatry.  There's much more; I suggest you haul your fat carcass over there and have a look yourself.  I was dismayed to learn one of Larry's letters prompted the most deeply misguided of all suggestions from Lewis:  that one read the Narnia stories chronologically.  Pernicious nonsense!  All must read the books in the order I read them:  as they were written, and as they were ordered in the box sets of my youth.  I see the modern sets have been reordered.  It's those dam' liberals, changing things again!

Via Renewable Music, I found composer and radio manager Cary Boyce at Sequenza21 giving some marketing advice to composers.  I think it will be interesting to anyone.  A key point:  packing your bio with long lists of academic achievements will help win you your next teaching position, but makes you look dorky in other contexts.  Also see David Rakowski, who skewers composer's dorkified web pages deliciously:

I am endeavoring not to use that breathless press-release style prose -- especially the stuff written in third person -- that so many composers use on their sites, as we prefer first person plural.

To all this advice I would add:  find a way to get an audience to fall in love with your music.  Do that and everything else will be taken care of.  Oh, thanks, Mr. Fredösphere!  You've made it all so easy!  You've given away your secret!!!

Oh, and yet one more piece of advice: try not to vomit into your own lap on live television.

(Although, maybe this filmmaker guy is playing some kind of very deep, counterintuitive game.  When I heard that very contrite "I'm sorry," just before that anchor chick announced the commercial break, I suddenly felt overwhelmed by a wave of sympathy for the guy.  It's like what Oscar Wilde said:  the only thing worse than people talking about how you went on live television and vomited into your own lap is people talking about how you went on live television and didn't vomit into your own lap.  He was quite the genius, that Oscar Wilde.)

A visitor who likes to compose "geometrically precise perpetual motion things" asked if I am a natural songwriter.  I certainly don't think of myself that way.  I've always been a harmony and form kind of guy, coming very late to any serious attention to melody and rhythm.  I was well into adulthood before I noticed the importance of note selection to some listeners.  To the extent I have any ability in writing singable melodies, it stems from my years absorbing positive -- and especially negative -- examples as a choral singer and conductor.

There are singable melodies, and then there are melodies that are actually sung, complete with words.  I'm no expert in left brain-right brain analysis, but I have read enough to have formed some ideas I will share with you now.  (It's a first in bløgösphère history:  the blogging of half-baked ideas!)  Tapping into the power of your right brain is the focus of a lot of brain hemisphere discussions, because the right brain is mute.  Your speech center is on the left side, so the right brain's activity is not accompanied by words -- it is much harder to describe and seems very mysterious.  Lots of creative activities occur when the right brain takes over, putting one in a trance-like state where time's passing is not noticed and the yammering of the internal voice halts.  This trance is considered mystical somehow, and is highly prized by many.  I suspect the capacity for entering into the right brain trance varies widely among people.

Here's my point:  if you are composing instrumental music, you are operating in a pure right brain environment.  If your right brain's got what it takes, you are all set.  Writing music to a text requires another level:  the text's meaning can only be comprehended by the left brain.  Thus, skillful setting of texts requires rapid switching between brain hemispheres -- not typically an easy thing to do.  I suspect this explains why "one great song is worth five merely adroit symphonies" (as Ned Rorem once said, if I am not mistaken).

Again, this is half-baked.  I hope those with contrary opinions or enlightening examples will jump in.  See also Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (the review says that although its theory is "somewhat outmoded, it is still a useful model") and also this webpage with more caveats.