The denouement?

[pbrower2a]

The Crisis Era comes to an end with a sharp change in the political culture. For example, extremist behavior is no longer tolerated or trivialized. Of late I have heard of incidents in which Trump supporters have done violence in response to the FBI snooping at Mar-a-Lago for classified information. Surely, someone must have ratted him out, whether out of conscience or of fear of legal consequences for failing to do so. 

Although a dead body to which has been done obvious violence is itself troublesome, one might have exculpatory circumstances. If one did not do the deed one might have some explaining but without self-incrimination. So "Mr. Boddy" committed suicide by self-inflicted gunshot wounds for many possible reasons from impending arrest and long-term incarceration to a terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.  Or "Mr. Boddy" fell down a flight of stairs while drunk or on drugs. Having classified documents in the wrong place has paradoxically fewer exculpations than a dead body and is itself prima facie evidence of guilt as is having a stash of heroin or cocaine. 

Not so long ago Republicans owned almost all issues of national security. So Obama caused no problems with it? That shows perhaps how well Democrats knew to avoid trouble even if the rewards for handling it properly were politically slight but consequences for failure at that were catastrophic. Donald Trump threw that away by aligning himself with brutal autocrats overseas and (worst) attempting to blackmail the President of Ukraine.

My bad prediction: when Trump was impeached, I expected Republicans to go along because they had long been fussy about national security. Most let him get away with that. Ironically they would be far better off now had they impeached and removed him. Mike Pence could play his Goody Two-Shoes routine perhaps to an election in which he wins. He might be more effective in getting a flat tax or replacing the income tax with a national sales tax, achieving a nationwide Right to Work (for starvation pay) law, a complete nationwide ban on abortion, massive privatization to monopolistic profiteers, abolishing welfare, and perhaps making religious devotion mandatory even in public colleges.  That would drastically transform America into a pure plutocracy in which the (fundamentalist Protestant) Lord reigneth... in a drastic shift from a secular society that still pretended to care about people who did not have the assets. Great wealth would itself become a tool of great oppression and a cause of great suffering. 

That is not what happened, and it will not be what happens.  

All Tunings are transitions from the ways of the previous Turning to the next Turning. and nobody can deny that the American world of 1948 was very different from that of 1928, and not only in technology. America abandoned the boom-and-bust economy of the quasi-Gilded Age. The celebrity circus of the 1920's was gone. The dangerous Second Klan of 1915 that was a nationwide force as a fascist movement had folded. The high-school diploma that was only for the middle class and above was now the norm for the working class. Suburbia had started to bloom (or infect, depending on your attitude) the rural areas on the outskirts of town where there had been hobo encampments and "Hoovervilles". Banking, a once wild-and-wooly casino of often shady activity, had taken the role of saying no to speculation. Non-WASP Americans who had been poor because they were not WASPs started to enter the Middle Class. Defense plants and the Armed Services had become integrated.

Obviously it helped that America had defeated the most demonic powers ever in existence; had America not done so America might be a land of peonage or slavery under Japanese or German overlords with large parts of the population vanishing into fake showers into which would be administered Zyklon-B gas. Much of the impetus of the Civil Rights struggle arises from the exposure of at least Nazi racism, with many Americans asking questions of whether Jim Crow practice was compatible with our claims to liberty and legal equality. It is telling that Nazi "philosopher" (and eventually, convicted major war criminal) Alfred Rosenberg translated the word subhuman from the writing of the Klan "philosopher" Lothrop Stoddard into the even more horrific Untermensch.  I'm tempted to believe that the Axis lost the war due not to some superiority of the American way of life but instead because a fascist order cannot win the peace. Thus I see such a work as The Man in the High Castle, the best of a certain genre of science-fiction, as absurd if in some respects grimly amusing. 

Two roads diverge at some point in a 4T. One leads to disgrace and ruin, personal or national. Another leads to a wholesome result. Maybe it isn't perfect; the generational theory suggests that even what people see as the optimum changes predictably in a cyclical way.

[David Horn]

(08-15-2022, 07:37 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Two roads diverge at some point in a 4T. One leads to disgrace and ruin, personal or national. Another leads to a wholesome result. Maybe it isn't perfect; the generational theory suggests that even what people see as the optimum changes predictably in a cyclical way.

Note: the 1950s (better known as the Ideal World) had plenty of racial issues, including lynchings, plenty of demagogues, including Robert Welch and Joe McCarthy and plenty of lesser but still effective social inhibitors -- ask anyone who belonged to the "wrong" church.  The last 4T stated from REALLY BAD, and ended with still bad but kinda, sorta better.  I doubt we get more this time either -- assuming that the 4T resolves on a high note. of course.

Assuming you agree that this 4T is a shadow of the ACW, which wasn't really resolved positively either, the best we get, apparently, is "some improvement".  After all, history is a process, and we're just sitting out our little piece of it.  "Success" is probably permanently illusive.

[Eric the Green]

(08-16-2022, 10:18 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(08-15-2022, 07:37 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Two roads diverge at some point in a 4T. One leads to disgrace and ruin, personal or national. Another leads to a wholesome result. Maybe it isn't perfect; the generational theory suggests that even what people see as the optimum changes predictably in a cyclical way.

Note: the 1950s (better known as the Ideal World) had plenty of racial issues, including lynchings, plenty of demagogues, including Robert Welch and Joe McCarthy and plenty of lesser but still effective social inhibitors -- ask anyone who belonged to the "wrong" church.  The last 4T stated from REALLY BAD, and ended with still bad but kinda, sorta better.  I doubt we get more this time either -- assuming that the 4T resolves on a high note. of course.

Assuming you agree that this 4T is a shadow of the ACW, which wasn't really resolved positively either, the best we get, apparently, is "some improvement".  After all, history is a process, and we're just sitting out our little piece of it.  "Success" is probably permanently illusive.

So far, that "some improvement" is all we've gotten; although this is supposed to be a decade of reform, according to where Saturn is and the 30-year cycle delineated by some historians like Schlesinger. And it's easy to see this in every recent such reform decade, except perhaps the previous one which had to buck the neoliberal era and the 3T. This time, a reform era coincides with a late 4T, and both last through the 2020s, and are not about to end before the decade does. Often with reform eras, it takes a couple of years or more to see the biggest progress start to come through, as for example the biggest New Deal reforms or the civil rights bill and Great Society and the height of the progressive era's reforms, and the crisis climax, which can see some drastic institutional change as well as a climax and resolution of conflict, is also often not due to come until the last years of the 4T.

In spite of everything, including a gray champion president that's seen as TOO gray, my prediction seems to be coming true now. In 2022 I expected according to my latest book for some reforms to pass, but I knew that the Democratic rulership that was due to start after the 2020 election was going to be tenuous at first. Now we'll see if the Democrats can pull an upset and keep the House (and they now have a slight lead in the generic poll at 538.org), and come through with their current poll numbers that indicate a pick-up of 3 seats in the Senate, and the willingness among the 48 real Democrats, given the urgency of the times, to bypass the filibuster if they get 51, we could see further reforms to pass in the next few years. And the resistance is ramping up too as the reich-wing gets ever angrier at losing power, (again as I predicted decades ago), and the risk of civil violence usually grows as we enter the last years of a 4T and a reform era in the late 2020s, much like what happened in the late 1960s and late 1930s. Sometimes the later years of the reform era verge on or enter revolution, so we'll see if our nation even holds together, or if we can achieve a victory over the reactionary autocratic and aggressive foreign forces of our times.

But none of us, even older Boomers, should be "sitting out". The civil war actually WAS resolved positively-- just not in the longer run. Too much reversal happened as the 1T deepened. So we'll see how far a retrenchment goes in the next 1T. But I also see a ramping up of the green revolution and the sixties movements again in the late 2040s, as the Awakening comes on quickly again (like last time) and the 3rd cycle of modern revolution fulfills itself. We older folks may just be sitting out then, or perhaps watching from above. The reversals this time may not last. We certainly can't afford to go back to the fossil fuel era, for example.

[pbrower2a]

(08-16-2022, 10:18 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(08-15-2022, 07:37 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Two roads diverge at some point in a 4T. One leads to disgrace and ruin, personal or national. Another leads to a wholesome result. Maybe it isn't perfect; the generational theory suggests that even what people see as the optimum changes predictably in a cyclical way.

Note: the 1950s (better known as the Ideal World) had plenty of racial issues, including lynchings, plenty of demagogues, including Robert Welch and Joe McCarthy and plenty of lesser but still effective social inhibitors -- ask anyone who belonged to the "wrong" church.  The last 4T stated from REALLY BAD, and ended with still bad but kinda, sorta better.  I doubt we get more this time either -- assuming that the 4T resolves on a high note. of course.

All Crises leave behind some unanswered questions, many of those from before the Crisis because the victors themselves have their own vices that they need not contemplate. Early capitalism was extremely exploitative, and the American Civil War in no way resolved that. If you wish to discuss race relations in the failure of Reconstruction -- that failure may have led to the rise of the concept of Aryan superiority with all the ensuing evil that culminated in the Holocaust. If Southern blacks had gotten a reasonable chance to thrive as capitalists as they tried to do, then white racism would have been shattered as a foundation of any ideology. Instead that white racism festered as antisemitism, and we all know where that went. Nazi Jew-hating was above all else racist in theory. 

The aftermath of the Second World War left much of Europe with shattered institutions that local "pupils of Stalin" could overthrow with the aid of Soviet military and political influence. Mao's Communists overthrew what had been a government consistently allied with the US but with a weak hold on the country. Howe and Strauss did not complete even Generations until 1989;  a work similar to theirs might have suggested that the Crisis of 2020 could easily be the Cold War in what might have been billed on the opposing sides as the Final Struggle between Communism and Capitalism, most likely ending in some Gotterdammerung in which ends with the obliteration of a huge fraction of the human population and the destruction of every achievement since the Stone Age. All in all, it is a good thing that things did not so turn out. 

This can be said of the stolid time following the Second World War: it had its faults, but there was clear progress on race relations, even if those include some horrible incidents such as the murder of Emmitt Till and the unconscionable bombing of the Eighth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Yes, that "fine Christian organization" according to its self description showed its support for Christianity by bombing a church. Truman desegregated the Armed Forces. Brown v. Board of Education negated the oxymoronic concept of "separate but equal". 

The 1T allowed the children of the time to grow up able to make their own decisions on Right and Wrong. Kids heard their grandparents talk about wintering in Florida, but while Florida is boring, the trip along 1 to and from New York City (or Philadelphia or Boston) , 21 to and from Cleveland, 23 to and from Greater Detroit, or 41 to and from Chicago or Milwaukee led the grandparents through the ugly underbelly of American life... Jim Crow. What was the point of separate water fountains, and why were there signs that read "No Negroes Served here"? Such tales likely fed the Freedom Summer. The 1T created that foundation. The struggle for civil rights for Southern blacks led to other struggles -- even to anti-Communist dissent in central and Balkan Europe... and LGBT rights.
     

Quote:Assuming you agree that this 4T is a shadow of the ACW, which wasn't really resolved positively either, the best we get, apparently, is "some improvement".  After all, history is a process, and we're just sitting out our little piece of it.  "Success" is probably permanently illusive.

Americans (and others) solved lots of problems over the seventy-five years since Hitler offed himself in a fetid bunker as the Soviet Army approached.  Maybe this time we have few advances in human rights beyond what we achieved with Obama as President. (Trump is a pure reverse, and he is being reversed). We do have AGW staring us in our faces, and if you thought that either World War II was factually horrific or  that a heated explosion of the Cold War would have been nasty, then contemplate what Anthropogenic Global Warming can do. I start with agriculture, not the most glamorous of economic activities but the one that underpins everything else. People can do wondrous things with software engineering, but software engineers must be fed if they are to do what they do well. So must everyone else. Cut the food supply while the world population expands and you have the basis of thermonuclear warfare or mass starvation.  

I get ahead of myself. We really need two things to stave off a horrific next 4T. First is Zero Population Growth; second is putting an end to the pointless exercise of conspicuous consumption that devours energy and other resources and generates waste heat. Status symbols, we must recognize, are not wealth but instead its waste, especially when they are cheap to manufacture and distribute.  We will have wondrous technology to simulate a visual paradise in certifiably-crappy areas.  We will not need to commute as much.

We had the equivalent of a shooting war in COVID-19 (regrettably it is not over) with over one million deaths in America alone. I cannot yet say that the Russo-Ukrainian war will not spill over.

This Crisis has proved almost entirely political and cultural. If I am to judge the political quality, then I see an analogy between Obama and the first two terms of FDR as leadership. Maybe we would have been far better off with a third term of Barack Obama than the dreadful four years of the Trump nightmare. We are yet to fully escape the shadow of Donald Trump. This said, the law is winning against Trump criminality. We are a nation of laws, and under a President who recognizes such, things can go rather smoothly. When we have a President who tries to be a dictator we have huge problems. 

Weird things happen at the end of a Crisis, and the weirdness sticks.

[JasonBlack]

(08-16-2022, 10:18 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(08-15-2022, 07:37 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Two roads diverge at some point in a 4T. One leads to disgrace and ruin, personal or national. Another leads to a wholesome result. Maybe it isn't perfect; the generational theory suggests that even what people see as the optimum changes predictably in a cyclical way.

Note: the 1950s (better known as the Ideal World) had plenty of racial issues, including lynchings, plenty of demagogues, including Robert Welch and Joe McCarthy and plenty of lesser but still effective social inhibitors -- ask anyone who belonged to the "wrong" church.  The last 4T stated from REALLY BAD, and ended with still bad but kinda, sorta better.  I doubt we get more this time either -- assuming that the 4T resolves on a high note. of course.

Assuming you agree that this 4T is a shadow of the ACW, which wasn't really resolved positively either, the best we get, apparently, is "some improvement".  After all, history is a process, and we're just sitting out our little piece of it.  "Success" is probably permanently illusive.

Something most boomers will agree with me on is...1st Turnings are overrated. Granted, having been born on the other side of the curve, I understand the appeal. The 3rd and 4th Turnings are typically stressful periods to live through. A 1st Turning offers a necessary period of respite and gives time for society to rebuild, but this comes with the price tag of conformity, often to the point of infringements on privacy and, especially in the first half, straight up witch hunts weeding out the last supporters of the old regime.

[pbrower2a]

For child Idealists, 1T's might seem creepy. Adults seem uptight about things that one might think silly. Uncritical conformity is not a way for young Idealists whose childhoods afford perhaps more privacy and room for intellectual (as intellectual as is possible for a child). Children are not compelled to conform to the extreme except in very repressive societies.

[Anthony '58]

Zero Population Growth is the one tenet of the "ecology" movement that I have always considered sensible.

[pbrower2a]

(08-20-2022, 12:14 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: For child Idealists, 1T's might seem creepy. Adults seem uptight about things that one might think silly. Uncritical conformity is not a way for young Idealists  whose childhoods afford perhaps more privacy and room for intellectual life (as intellectual as is possible for a child). Children are not compelled to conform to the extreme except in very repressive societies.

Added material:

Or those in which many are exploited for raw labor (or even-more sordid activities)

[JasonBlack]

(08-20-2022, 12:14 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: For child Idealists, 1T's might seem creepy. Adults seem uptight about things that one might think silly. Uncritical conformity is not a way for young Idealists whose childhoods afford perhaps more privacy and room for intellectual (as intellectual as is possible for a child). Children are not compelled to conform to the extreme except in very repressive societies.

They sound creepy to me as an adult. Even 3T/early 4T suburbia kind of creeped me out a bit and reminded me of robots. Given 1Ts tend to be both more uniform and more collectivistic, I can only imagine they would be ill-received by the young. Fortunately, I will likely be in a position where I can more readily afford to separate from reality and find peace and quiet. The young never have this option.

In my opinion, one of the main differences in how each generation deals with any given turning is shaped by the degree to which one is forced to deal with society directly.
- Children have no escape from needing to interact with the world constantly (even if primarily via observation and play for the first half. you just don't have the kind of boundaries or autonomy to decide too much at that age),
- Rising adults need to be adaptable and receptive to carve out their niche in the world around them
- Midlifers generally have the experience and walkaway power to curate their immediate environment, as well as living quarters further from the hustle and bustle and increasingly taking on a mindset of "I'm 45. I'm sick of dealing with your shit".
- Elders (to the extent that they are free of the most severe physical or psychological ailments) have the most ability to interact with the world on their own terms. They don't generally have the most independence so much as they are the most free from the constraints of authority figures and career responsibilities. Most do not choose to opt out entirely, as this is an age where people tend to care greatly about the future prosperity of their children, grandchildren and greater community, but many retain this option.

On balance: children and rising adults feel more of the pressures of a given turning, midlifers and elders a bit less.

[Eric the Green]

(09-24-2022, 04:09 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

(08-20-2022, 12:14 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: For child Idealists, 1T's might seem creepy. Adults seem uptight about things that one might think silly. Uncritical conformity is not a way for young Idealists  whose childhoods afford perhaps more privacy and room for intellectual (as intellectual as is possible for a child). Children are not compelled to conform to the extreme except in very repressive societies.

They sound creepy to me as an adult. Even 3T/early 4T suburbia kind of creeped me out a bit and reminded me of robots. Given 1Ts tend to be both more uniform and more collectivistic, I can only imagine they would be ill-received by the young. Fortunately, I will likely be in a position where I can more readily afford to separate from reality and find peace and quiet. The young never have this option.

In my opinion, one of the main differences in how each generation deals with any given turning is shaped by the degree to which one is forced to deal with society directly.
- Children have no escape from needing to interact with the world constantly (even if primarily via observation and play for the first half. you just don't have the kind of boundaries or autonomy to decide too much at that age),
- Rising adults need to be adaptable and receptive to carve out their niche in the world around them
- Midlifers generally have the experience and walkaway power to curate their immediate environment, as well as living quarters further from the hustle and bustle and increasingly taking on a mindset of "I'm 45. I'm sick of dealing with your shit".
- Elders (to the extent that they are free of the most severe physical or psychological ailments) have the most ability to interact with the world on their own terms. They don't generally have the most independence so much as they are the most free from the constraints of authority figures and career responsibilities. Most do not choose to opt out entirely, as this is an age where people tend to care greatly about the future prosperity of their children, grandchildren and greater community, but many retain this option.

On balance: children and rising adults feel more of the pressures of a given turning, midlifers and elders a bit less.

Good summary-- and I don't want you to think I disagree with all your posts

[JasonBlack]

(09-24-2022, 04:49 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Good summary-- and I don't want you to think I disagree with all your posts

I know. It's all good man lol

[pbrower2a]

(09-24-2022, 04:09 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

(08-20-2022, 12:14 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: For child Idealists, 1T's might seem creepy. Adults seem uptight about things that one might think silly. Uncritical conformity is not a way for young Idealists  whose childhoods afford perhaps more privacy and room for intellectual (as intellectual as is possible for a child). Children are not compelled to conform to the extreme except in very repressive societies.

They sound creepy to me as an adult. Even 3T/early 4T suburbia kind of creeped me out a bit and reminded me of robots. Given 1Ts tend to be both more uniform and more collectivistic, I can only imagine they would be ill-received by the young. Fortunately, I will likely be in a position where I can more readily afford to separate from reality and find peace and quiet. The young never have this option.

I thought that it was Boomers who thought much about the last 1T as 'creepy'. Maybe it was usually children who were most critical of a time in which they were children, whether Reactives during an Awakening, Civics during a mindless and chaotic Unraveling, or Adaptives who were stifled during a scary Crisis. 

It's telling that the GI culture of the last High is readily available at Goodwill as their kids clear out the vinyl LPs and primitive electronics of GI's who died over the last thirty or so years. Bing Crosby, Guy Lombardo, Lawrence Welk, Perry Como, Patti Page, etc. in music? It all seems corny now for its insipid sentimentality. Figure that the only people who could cherish this were people who missed out on the Voyage to the Interior of an Idealist, the brash hedonism of a Reactive, or even the whimsy of an Adaptive. The Big Band material does get revival, if only because it was some of the best pop culture ever (think of Strauss waltzes, ragtime, and the original model for the Big Band pattern -- Josef Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Considering that Mozart and Haydn wrote music that succeeded at multiple levels of aesthetic satisfaction, the question may be why people don't see the "classical" era of music as pop music at its best. It was so received at its time. 

Maybe American pop culture would be different had Glenn Miller lived to a ripe old age. Boomers would have reacted to the blandness of the GI culture even without the Vietnam War; there would have been an Awakening, and it would have been more strictly cultural.  

Quote:In my opinion, one of the main differences in how each generation deals with any given turning is shaped by the degree to which one is forced to deal with society directly.

Messrs. Howe and Strauss would likely agree with that. 

Quote:- Children have no escape from needing to interact with the world constantly (even if primarily via observation and play for the first half. you just don't have the kind of boundaries or autonomy to decide too much at that age),

Children are helpless, and if they try to do something to improve their lot it is usually futile.  Adults like the Brothers Grimm, Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, Walt Disney, and J. K. Rowling create the fantasies made available to children -- or someone like Mark Twain or  the creators behind The Little Rascals tells them what reality is even if in the latter it is a parody.   

The old saying "curiosity killed the cat" applies more to children than to cats. Feline curiosity brings cats into contact with prey; child curiosity has them wandering recklessly into traffic or falling off a bridge into a raging torrent of frigid water

Quote:She was born in 1936. She slipped off an icy bridge over in Union City, Michigan, and fell into the St. Joseph River and either drowned, died of internal injuries, or died of hypothermia. Her body was discovered several miles west in St. Joseph County, Michigan on April 3, 1942. The death record is in St. Joseph County, Michigan, where her body was found; it is highly likely that she died in Branch County.

This is one of my relatives, and names have been hidden to protect innocent people. Six-year-old children lack the survival skills of six-month-old kittens who grow up with instincts that say "trust nobody", including cars, bigger cats, and strange dogs. The wiser one gets the better one is in assessing danger such as an icy bridge over a raging torrent of recent snow over a rocky channel.  

OK, her parents are deceased, no criminal charges were filed, and I can give you a source largely of my compilation:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Knauss-207

I do genealogy as a hobby. I find myself finding plenty of history from it. I can tell you something about the "Wicked Witch of the West" of the Wizard of Oz.  I've seen the story many times. The fourth daughter of an aristocratic English family has few advantages in life, but she does get to marry some promising prole in England. She leaves England with her "common" husband whose work ethic is better suited to America (where he does well) than to England taking a little finery with her. Like most aristocrats she is accustomed to treating people badly but cherishing the fine stuff that her grandchildren come to loathe because that stuff that she defends so militantly, When she dies, her grandchildren who could never bond to her get the finery that she defended so militantly and destroy it in a bonfire, often whooping it up "like Indians", and that often leads to the story that her grandchildren were part-Indian. No --her grandchildren treated her as a witch whose death was something to be celebrated, much like the Munchkins celebrate the death of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. Now, to spoof Paul Harvey, you know the r-r-r-r-r-Rest of the Story!

Quote:- Rising adults need to be adaptable and receptive to carve out their niche in the world around them

Rising adults enter the adult world only to find it economically and administratively unwelcoming. The jobs offered are mostly dreadful. They pay badly, demand that one bow and scrape or expose oneself to great danger (because people less 'expendable' would avoid them). They find themselves in a dog-eat-dog world of inhuman competition for abysmal wages, and if they can't live with their parents they end up competing for slum housing both dreadful and overpriced. Management, often by people little less craven than they because those two are still wet behind the ears, is dehumanizing. But if one lacks marketable skills, then such is what one can expect. At the worst they become cannon fodder in wars for profit or for the dubious glory of "their country" -- like World War I, the Russian front in World War II, or the Iran-Iraq war. 

So one develops skills and finds something better fitting one's personality. One eventually learns to work smart as a way to avoid exhausting toil. Or one starts a business or finds one's way into some semblance of a trade or profession -- or leads a miserable life. 

Quote:- Midlifers generally have the experience and walkaway power to curate their immediate environment, as well as living quarters further from the hustle and bustle and increasingly taking on a mindset of "I'm 45. I'm sick of dealing with your shit".

Some people simply burn out by the time that they are in their 40's. Some find early-adult life so distressing that they commit quick suicide by means that I need not mention or kill themselves more slowly with drugs or alcohol. The more lucky ones find themselves in midlife patterns of life by age 30, and those may be the happiest people. Those are the people who can do much the same things at 45 (if perhaps with more refinement and economic success) and are well positioned to enjoy life into their 70's and 80's, whether as creative people, academics, professionals, business owners,  or even skilled workers.  

Quote:- Elders (to the extent that they are free of the most severe physical or psychological ailments) have the most ability to interact with the world on their own terms. They don't generally have the most independence so much as they are the most free from the constraints of authority figures and career responsibilities. Most do not choose to opt out entirely, as this is an age where people tend to care greatly about the future prosperity of their children, grandchildren and greater community, but many retain this option.

See above. The happiest of them are living much as they did in a generally-happy midlife. Their work might be physically light, but it is satisfying in itself.  The sustainable midlife is a good way to age.  

Quote:On balance: children and rising adults feel more of the pressures of a given turning, midlifers and elders a bit less.

The well-prepared people in midlife who carry no monstrous grudges against the Establishment (like Barack Obama) fare better than those seething with rage (Adolf Hitler) and take on powers that nobody should ever have.

[JasonBlack]

Quote:I thought that it was Boomers who thought much about the last 1T as 'creepy'.

Thinking 1Ts are creepy is most common among idealists, but people of more individualistic temperament don't tend to be the biggest fans of them regardless of generational archetype. Likewise, more collectivist temperaments tend to dislike 3Ts regardless of archetype, more security oriented temperaments are more likely to dislike 2Ts, etc (I think we can all agree most people in general dislike 4th Turnings)

Quote:Maybe it was usually children who were most critical of a time in which they were children, whether Reactives during an Awakening, Civics during a mindless and chaotic Unraveling, or Adaptives who were stifled during a scary Crisis.

These are my thoughts as well. My impression of the 3rd turning was less "this is chaotic" and more "What the hell, man? Everyone is so irresponsible. I'm all for having a good time, but all anyone wants to do is spend more money they don't have and kick the can down the road until everyone else has to suffer the consequences".

Quote:It's telling that the GI culture of the last High is readily available at Goodwill as their kids clear out the vinyl LPs and primitive electronics of GI's who died over the last thirty or so years. Bing Crosby, Guy Lombardo, Lawrence Welk, Perry Como, Patti Page, etc. in music? It all seems corny now for its insipid sentimentality.

Tbh, I've always been a fan of many GI singers. From the popular music of BFrank Sinatra, Edit Piaf, Burl Ives and Mahalia Jackson, to opera singers like Franco Corelli, Eleanor Steber, Rise Stevens or Cornell MacNeil

Quote:Band material does get revival, if only because it was some of the best pop culture ever (think of Strauss waltzes, ragtime, and the original model for the Big Band pattern -- Josef Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Considering that Mozart and Haydn wrote music that succeeded at multiple levels of aesthetic satisfaction, the question may be why people don't see the "classical" era of music as pop music at its best. It was so received at its time. Maybe American pop culture would be different had Glenn Miller lived to a ripe old age. Boomers would have reacted to the blandness of the GI culture even without the Vietnam War; there would have been an Awakening, and it would have been more strictly cultural. 

The majority of GI music was more dry, but on the plus side 
- more suitable for adult audience, not radio stations full of people who think the ideal is to sound 16 years old
- less quite as self-absorbed. it was less about the singer personally and more about the music itself. 
- similarly, the point itself seemed less like "let's make the best music" and more "let's focus on our craft and produce beautiful singing.

[pbrower2a]

(09-26-2022, 01:30 AM)JasonBlack Wrote:

Quote:I thought that it was Boomers who thought much about the last 1T as 'creepy'.

Thinking 1Ts are creepy is most common among idealists, but people of more individualistic temperament don't tend to be the biggest fans of them regardless of generational archetype. Likewise, more collectivist temperaments tend to dislike 3Ts regardless of archetype, more security oriented temperaments are more likely to dislike 2Ts, etc (I think we can all agree most people in general dislike 4th Turnings)

Apocalypse arises when those in power (Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini are extremes) seek to change the world at all costs and fail to recognize what those costs are. Those leaders who greatly devalue human life are the most dangerous at the time. When Satan Hussein gassed the Kurds, he went to the top of the list of leaders likely to start a war with the USA. This was when the Cold War was going on.  

Quote:

Quote:Maybe it was usually children who were most critical of a time in which they were children, whether Reactives during an Awakening, Civics during a mindless and chaotic Unraveling, or Adaptives who were stifled during a scary Crisis.

These are my thoughts as well. My impression of the 3rd turning was less "this is chaotic" and more "What the hell, man? Everyone is so irresponsible. I'm all for having a good time, but all anyone wants to do is spend more money they don't have and kick the can down the road until everyone else has to suffer the consequences".

That is exactly what I would expect. A 3T is nearly pure rot. Sure, some fun is part of it, but personal responsibility and collective purpose are not. 3T rot leads to the 4T. Federal deficits became surpluses in the 1990's and energy consumption shrank due to the fall of Communism (a libertarian trend). Then Dubya became President and the Right found pretexts for Big Government. Yuck! 

Quote:

Quote:It's telling that the GI culture of the last High is readily available at Goodwill as their kids clear out the vinyl LPs and primitive electronics of GI's who died over the last thirty or so years. Bing Crosby, Guy Lombardo, Lawrence Welk, Perry Como, Patti Page, etc. in music? It all seems corny now for its insipid sentimentality.

Tbh, I've always been a fan of many GI singers. From the popular music of Frank Sinatra, Edith Piaf, Burl Ives and Mahalia Jackson, to opera singers like Franco Corelli, Eleanor Steber, Rise Stevens or Cornell MacNeil

OK, Sarah Vaughan. 

Talented musicians are to be found in all generations, as are some great voices. Of course classical music (including opera) has a tradition that largely transcends generational trends. So we have Jascha Heifetz, David Oistrakh ,Arthur Grumiaux, Henryk Szeryng, Erica Morini, Isaac Stern, and Mischa Elman on violin; Rudolf Serkin, Vladimir Horowitz, Sviatoslav Richter, and Emil Gilels on piano. Can you really separate Lost Ernest Ansermet, Charles Munch, Karl Boehm and George Szell from GI's Herbert von Karajan, Georg Solti, Rafael Kubelik, Jean Martinon, and Leonard Bernstein as conductors? Performance of classical music is timeless, with at most subtle trends that might take decades to cause subtle changes. Listeners' tastes might change, but that is a different matter.  This is more likely to appear in the repertory played, with such composers as Gretry and Raff almost completely disappearing from the repertory as 'new' composers appear.  
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Quote:[quote pid='82716' dateline='1664173837']

Quote:Band material does get revival, if only because it was some of the best pop culture ever (think of Strauss waltzes, ragtime, and the original model for the Big Band pattern -- Josef Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Considering that Mozart and Haydn wrote music that succeeded at multiple levels of aesthetic satisfaction, the question may be why people don't see the "classical" era of music as pop music at its best. It was so received at its time. Maybe American pop culture would be different had Glenn Miller lived to a ripe old age. Boomers would have reacted to the blandness of the GI culture even without the Vietnam War; there would have been an Awakening, and it would have been more strictly cultural. 

The majority of GI music was more dry, but on the plus side 
- more suitable for adult audience, not radio stations full of people who think the ideal is to sound 16 years old
- less quite as self-absorbed. it was less about the singer personally and more about the music itself. 
- similarly, the point itself seemed less like "let's make the best music" and more "let's focus on our craft and produce beautiful singing.

[/quote]

1. The adult audience no longer includes GI's in significant numbers. It's telling that Millennial adults, who are much of the market for popular music today, have not been part of any "easy listening" revival. They are not reviving GI popular music, either. 

2. When I think of truly immature people I think of people who have never had to face the harsh realities of an economic order that puts elite power, indulgence, and gain above all else. Narcissistic personalities are terribly immature, and the cure for narcissism is to be in the position in which must spend a couple years doing mind-numbing, soul-crushing work that destroys any excess of self esteem. Work for a company that reminds people at every turn that someone else wants your job and that assumes that everyone who works there is a potential thief, and you will be humbled fast. At some point one may fully believe that nothing is so wonderful as to suffer for shareholders, executives, bosses, and customers from whom all blessings (survival and what else? Not much!) flow and one believes that liberals do nothing for one but raise taxes that make life tougher. Narcissists at the top of corporations, governments, and non-profits get away with sadism and often create an environment perfectly suited to masochists at the bottom. (The connection between narcissism and sadism, including economic sadism, should be obvious).

3. Narcissism is common among creative people of most kinds (writers, artists, musicians, and stage or screen actors). If they reach a certain level of competence they can easily dictate the terms of their work because they are who they are. There was only one Igor Stravinsky or Pablo Picasso at the time, and there is none now. Narcissism is the norm among politicians. Creative people need some individuality unless they are making predictable art such as that for some 'creative' corporation (let us say Disney, Warner) or something suited to ad copy.  

4. Teenagers are the ones being sold on mass low culture. Figure that the people who buy movie tickets and music singles (whether 45-rpm records in the old days or downloads today) or 'young adult' novels are heavily teenagers spending what little money they have (some of the rest will be on fast food) from allowances or chores. Relatively few GI's got to do this while still children, but they often got to turn the radio dial to Big Band music as children. Their parents may have preferred that the dial be turned to religious devotionals instead, but at least Big Band music was fun and squeaky-clean. Remember: by current standards most GI kids led hardscrabble lives which expressed themselves in Our Gang and Little Rascals shorts.  Kids not northern and western WASPs were largely poor. World War II changed that just in time for many Silent children getting to know the Good Life as their GI parents moved from the tenements to the suburbs.  It would take another Great Depression or the calamitous post-apocalyptic world of a horrific war to break that pattern. Boomers may have thought that GI's were doing well, but they saw GI's only in adulthood.

If adults are the only ones with the means to buy books and recorded movies, then they dictate what is available on the gramophone or in the library of entirely hard-cover books (cheap paper-back books were available starting in the 1930's, and the military offered a veritable library of cheap paper backs to soldiers and sailors during WWII), and no teen culture really appears. With television such programs as American Bandstand started to appear with the ability to market stuff to teens in the advertising... that changed everything. 

Say what you want, but there has been a boom in expensive boarding schools for kids -- largely in which the school administration can keep kids from having access to the mass low culture that their 'mere' middle-class contemporaries face. That is now one of the biggest class distinctions in America. 

5. If you want music for its own sake, then listen to the preludes and fugues of Bach and especially Reger (Reger is not entertaining), the late string quartets of Beethoven and the string quartets of Bartok and Shostakovich which really are pure music. Then there is twelve-tone music that relatively few people (I am not one of them) 'get'. Medieval polyphony was typically intended to strengthen and confirm religious faith. Vivaldi, Handel, Haydn  Mozart, Chopin, and Dvorak wrote most of their works as entertainment or for some occasional use. Operas since Monteverdi have always been large-scale entertainment in conception if not now in practice. Some music is a mindless exercise in using a hook and a conventional feeling ("I'm En-or-ee the Eighth I am!" , "They're coming to take me away, ha! ha!, or "Like a Virgin"), but even something so sublime as Bach's Goldberg Variations or Puccini's Turandot that requires a huge investment in personal time for tuneful and clever music. In those two cases the music is clever and tuneful and satisfying. Maybe it takes some effort to appreciate music not from our time that is not so obvious such as Monteverdi madrigals or folk music from some other culture, but it is worth the effort. The perfect basis of long music such as Mozart's Divertimento for String Trio K 563 or the elegiac theme of the adagio of Bruckner's seventh symphony might not be as suited for an advertising jingle (on which Barry Manilow gets rich) -- but it certainly is coherent.  

OK, for musical coherence the folk-tune is still the model, and at that I can see great faults with some popular music, as in the examples I displayed above. For truly beautiful singing, listen to some medieval polyphony. Little could be more magnificent than Thomas Tallis' Spem in alium.

[Eric the Green]

(09-26-2022, 01:30 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: The majority of GI music was more dry, but on the plus side 
- more suitable for adult audience, not radio stations full of people who think the ideal is to sound 16 years old
- less quite as self-absorbed. it was less about the singer personally and more about the music itself. 
- similarly, the point itself seemed less like "let's make the best music" and more "let's focus on our craft and produce beautiful singing.

"let's make the best music" sounds best to me.

[pbrower2a]

(09-27-2022, 12:45 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(09-26-2022, 01:30 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: The majority of GI music was more dry, but on the plus side 
- more suitable for adult audience, not radio stations full of people who think the ideal is to sound 16 years old
- less quite as self-absorbed. it was less about the singer personally and more about the music itself. 
- similarly, the point itself seemed less like "let's make the best music" and more "let's focus on our craft and produce beautiful singing.

"let's make the best music" sounds best to me.

I concur. It is possible to create great music with glorious counterpoint and structure, and perhaps the display of wondrous virtuosity as an extended entertainment. Even so, music can be reduced to melodic lines and rhythm. Melodies can be complex; a composer is excused for the banality of a tune if able to put it into some glorious purpose. It's hard to imagine anyone singing the initial melody of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, but we can excuse such due to the greatness of the completed work. 

It is telling that Irving Berlin practically stole his tune for "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" from Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #5, turning the single notes into one, shortening the tune, and slowing the melody enough for Judy Garland. One genius meets another.

I mentioned the string quartets of Bartok and Shostakovich. Both composers, neither of which went full-bore atonal, adopted or imitated folk song for melodic coherence. It worked well. 

For musical coherence, folk music (song or dance) is the appropriate ideal for melodic virtue. Other genius, as in counterpoint, harmonization, extension, variation, addition of a rhythmic line (no -- not a disco beat, something far more suitable to derision than the much-maligned Alberti bass of an earlier time), and orchestration can make a work to satisfy musical sophisticates.

[JasonBlack]

Quote:Talented musicians are to be found in all generations, as are some great voices. Of course classical music (including opera) has a tradition that largely transcends generational trends. So we have Jascha Heifetz, David Oistrakh ,Arthur Grumiaux, Henryk Szeryng, Erica Morini, Isaac Stern, and Mischa Elman on violin; Rudolf Serkin, Vladimir Horowitz, Sviatoslav Richter, and Emil Gilels on piano. Can you really separate Lost Ernest Ansermet, Charles Munch, Karl Boehm and George Szell from GI's Herbert von Karajan, Georg Solti, Rafael Kubelik, Jean Martinon, and Leonard Bernstein as conductors? Performance of classical music is timeless, with at most subtle trends that might take decades to cause subtle changes. Listeners' tastes might change, but that is a different matter.  This is more likely to appear in the repertory played, with such composers as Gretry and Raff almost completely disappearing from the repertory as 'new' composers appear.  

Sure, but this doesn't mean the technique of classical singing has stayed as consistent as many would have liked. For example, let's compare two singers singing the same aria:

Christine Goerke (Gen X, born 1969)





Helen Traubel (Lost Generation, born 1899)






To me at least....the difference in quality is obvious.

[pbrower2a]

There are differences of quality in singing between singers. At one time the go-to singer was Enrico Caruso; more recently it was Luciano Pavarotti. Choosing between them is a matter of taste. Critical evaluations were similar during their lifetimes. The sound of a violin may change some over time, but it is safe to suggest that the sound quality of Itzhak Perlman's current violin will be much like that of Yehudi Menuhin for the simple reason that Perlman plays the violin that Yehudi Menuhin played. One great master of the violin can inherit or buy the violin of a predecessor. Nobody can buy or use the vocal cords of Enrico Caruso or Luciano Pavarotti.

Some of it is a matter of taste. Richard Wagner used to be for Germans and people informed by German culture. Wagner was not popular outside of the realm of Germanophile culture (by the way -- that includes plenty of German-speaking Jews who thought themselves Germans or little different from the highly-influential German Jews upon Jewish populations of central and eastern Europe. Nazism co-opted Wagner and sullied his reputation, but over 75 years classical music has become part of the lives of peoples far beyond the two or three main centers of classical music (Germany, Italy [largely opera] and Russia). The audience for classical music expanded into Britain for performance, with Handel, Haydn, and Mendelssohn overawing British audiences until Britons started to compose some of their own remarkable music. Sophisticated people worldwide are not slaves to the culture in which they are born, so the audience for classical music (including opera) includes the USA (since about 1900), Latin America, and the Far East.

OK... Israel... but the musical tastes in Israel are very conservative and for its educated people... very German.

India, the Muslim world, and sub-Saharan Africa are next. After that you are discussing extra-terrestrials as potential fans of classical music. Cats and dogs in musical houses do not count.

...Still, the training of opera singers and string or wind players remains much the same. Tastes change over time, and one can expect different musical tastes, however subtle, between audiences in Beijing and Boston. So?

Wagner is obvious for cultural problems. He was a Nazi favorite, and nobody wants to become a Nazi so that he can better appreciate Wagner. Take away the theatrical grandeur of Wagner or sanitize it so that it no longer suggests Nazism and it no longer has the majesty that it once had. The Nazis hijacked Wagner as they could not hijack Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, or Brahms -- and for obvious reasons they could not hijack Mendelssohn or Mahler. Wagner was old enough to have acceptance but not new enough to offend Nazi tastes.

A current craze in classical music is the attempt to rediscover "period performance" in which musicians attempt to rediscover old musical practices including intonation, tempos, instrumental vibrato, interpretations of note lengths, and the use of old-fashioned reeds and strings. One irony is that period performance often sounds less attractive than more modern practice. Imitating the lesser standards of performance is incompetent, as shown by the fact that conductors who conducted as early as the 1930's and into the 1950's (and often well beyond) never spoke of any "golden age" of orchestral play. Musical training is better and more rigorous than it used to be. Instruments often have richer sound, and they are designed to fully 'get' composers from Mozart onward. I cannot imagine a satisfying pianoforte performance of Schubert's piano sonatas; I can better imagine a fine performance of them on a Moog synthesizer (which is as un-genuine as is possible) than on some pianoforte from Schubert's time.

We could never in full conscience restore the audience to what it was. We may have some idea of what Monteverdi's Orfeo or J S Bach's cantatas sounded like, but we are far from the same audience. We would not want to return to his time complete with an economic order that practically everyone modern would find abominable. To experience Wagner in the Nazi style and most fully appreciate it one now would practically have to be a Nazi, which would be even more abominable. I once told a neo-Nazi on the web that if I had to choose as a German-American between becoming a Nazi or converting to Judaism that I would convert to Judaism because Judaism would require far fewer changes in my cultural and moral values. (My genealogical studies since then established that I am nearly half from what is basically the UK, for what that is worth). Like most Germans and German-Americans I hate Nazis for the disgrace that they attempted to impose upon our culture.

[JasonBlack]

(09-28-2022, 07:36 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: A current craze in classical music is the attempt to rediscover "period performance" in which musicians attempt to rediscover old musical practices including intonation, tempos, instrumental vibrato, interpretations of note lengths, and the use of old-fashioned reeds and strings. One irony is that period performance often sounds less attractive than more modern practice. Imitating the lesser standards of performance is incompetent, as shown by the fact that conductors who conducted as early as the 1930's and into the 1950's (and often well beyond) never spoke of any "golden age" of orchestral play. Musical training is better and more rigorous than it used to be. Instruments often have richer sound, and they are designed to fully 'get' composers from Mozart onward. I cannot imagine a satisfying pianoforte performance of Schubert's piano sonatas; I can better imagine a fine performance of them on a Moog synthesizer (which is as un-genuine as is possible) than on some pianoforte from Schubert's time.

The problem isn't that they're trying to imitate sub-par standards. It's that they're not imitating them correctly in the first place. It turns out....we actually have recordings of some of the original performers for works Verdi, Puccini and others.

For example: Franceso Tamagno, the first Otello






compare that to a modern example. It's not the worst (I didn't want to be too biased and just pull up the worst example I could find), but you can tell pretty quickly his technique is off. It sounds strangled, pushed, almost constipated). 




Rosa Raisa: The first Turandot (note: this aria is not from Turandot, but it is from another verismo composer). Pay close attention to that note at around 3:30. "io piAAAAAAAAAANgo!" That's called chest voice or "voce di peto" in Italian. 





modern example: hollow, artificially dark from too much falsetto singing. Remember that monster chest voice note at the end of the previous video....nope. Completely gone here, and with it, the bulk of raw emotion the piece is supposed to convey. As with my previous comparison, I did not scrape for the bottom of the barrel here. This is very good singing by modern standards, but when you compare it to real bel canto/verismo technique....no, she doesn't hold a candle.

[pbrower2a]

(10-01-2022, 12:43 AM)JasonBlack Wrote:

(09-28-2022, 07:36 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: A current craze in classical music is the attempt to rediscover "period performance" in which musicians attempt to rediscover old musical practices including intonation, tempos, instrumental vibrato, interpretations of note lengths, and the use of old-fashioned reeds and strings. One irony is that period performance often sounds less attractive than more modern practice. Imitating the lesser standards of performance is incompetent, as shown by the fact that conductors who conducted as early as the 1930's and into the 1950's (and often well beyond) never spoke of any "golden age" of orchestral play. Musical training is better and more rigorous than it used to be. Instruments often have richer sound, and they are designed to fully 'get' composers from Mozart onward. I cannot imagine a satisfying pianoforte performance of Schubert's piano sonatas; I can better imagine a fine performance of them on a Moog synthesizer (which is as un-genuine as is possible) than on some pianoforte from Schubert's time.

The problem isn't that they're trying to imitate sub-par standards. It's that they're not imitating them correctly in the first place. It turns out....we actually have recordings of some of the original performers for works Verdi, Puccini and others.

For example: Franceso Tamagno, the first Otello





Excellent! Modern singers need learn of singing from the chest. Even I know enough to do that, and I am not from a family of opera fans. (Many were hick German-Americans, and in case you think that they listen to classical music including opera ... they don't. The older ones are mostly devotees of country music, and the younger ones are mostly into pop music of various origins). I'm guessing that classical music, including opera, unites people along some other cultural trait.   

Verdi lived into the era of the gramophone and surely heard it. Opera arias were among the obvious music to be recorded, as recorded music was a luxury until the age of the LP record, at least for classical music. 

Quote:compare that to a modern example. It's not the worst (I didn't want to be too biased and just pull up the worst example I could find), but you can tell pretty quickly his technique is off. It sounds strangled, pushed, almost constipated).
 




The name Vladimir Galouzine should give away part of the problem. In Soviet times, Italy was not part of the Soviet sphere of  politics, and any opera singer who did Italian opera was a likely defector. Needless to say, Soviet students of classical music as singers or orchestral players rarely got permission to go to the West. Soviet pianists and string players were none the worse for wear from that. Opera singers were compromised musically if they tried to perform Italian opera on a Russian stage. (The DDR was open to Soviet students of great music, and it had its great tradition of German music. The DDR claimed (legitimately) J S Bach as undeniably one of its own. This said, there are differences between German and Italian... and Russian opera is much more Russian than Italian after more than seventy years of Soviet rule that tended to isolate Soviet creative people from the West. 

Don't get me wrong. Russia has a great operatic heritage. But that is more related to Boris Godunov and Yevgeny Onyegin than to Trovatore or Turandot.  That gap has been shrinking. 

Quote:Rosa Raisa: The first Turandot (note: this aria is not from Turandot, but it is from another verismo composer). Pay close attention to that note at around 3:30. "io piAAAAAAAAAANgo!" That's called chest voice or "voce di peto" in Italian. 






modern example: hollow, artificially dark from too much falsetto singing. Remember that monster chest voice note at the end of the previous video....nope. Completely gone here, and with it, the bulk of raw emotion the piece is supposed to convey. As with my previous comparison, I did not scrape for the bottom of the barrel here. This is very good singing by modern standards, but when you compare it to real bel canto/verismo technique....no, she doesn't hold a candle.

The great conductors such as Arturo Toscanini (earliest-born) and Szell (latest-born) born in the later half of the 19th century  who conducted into at least the 1950's (Toscanini. 1868-1957) and 1960's (Szell, 1897-1970) never spoke of any Golden Era of orchestral play. It is telling that orchestral musicians despised composer-conductor Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) for his disparagement of the orchestras of his time for inadequacy for playing his demanding works... and the works of others as he wanted them played. Mahler, it seems, was right! The reputation of Franz Liszt as a pianist regrettably does not appear in recordings, but we have Rachmaninov playing his own piano part in his concertos... and it was extremely good. Fritz Kreisler, who recorded into the 1920's, was also excellent. 

There were few truly professional orchestras around 1900. The New York Philharmonic may have been adequate for Mahler when the Vienna Philharmonic was unavailable due to antisemitism and his reputation as an @$$hole, which helped things not at all. Mahler was only seven years older than Toscanini. 

In contrast to orchestral play (more highly-trained musicians are out there, and that means that small American cities such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis can have fine symphony orchestras, and the real constraint on quality of orchestras is the quality of instruments available) due to the more rigorous training of symphonic musicians. Singing is a different matter. Itzhak Perlman could buy the violin of Yehudi Menuhin, but Luciano Pavarotti could not buy and use the vocal cords of Enrico Caruso.