In January, the Tim Rutherford-Johnson of the Rambler took to task some guy called Daniel Asia for writing a completely idiotic article on John Cage for the Huffington Post (well, the Rambler referred to it “frankly embarrassing”, but let’s call a spade a spade).

Asia is back, and this time he’s written an article called “Carter is Dead”, in which he breaks down exactly why he thinks Elliott Carter is an objectively bad composer. 

It’s not worth taking this apart line-by-line, because it’s basically all wrong. It seems to me, at least, patently absurd that Asia’s primary criticism of Carter’s work boils down to the accusation that it is “chaotic”. To my ears, at least, (most of) Carter’s music is (in a sonorous sense, not just a “precompositional” sense) immaculately planned. In fact, the amount of sense that Carter’s music makes is the main reason that I, personally, can’t quite love this music in general (as important as a handful of individual pieces may be to me).

In fact, I actually wanted to use this article as an excuse for a brief meditation on ‘relative listening’ in Carter, which Asia brings up as a way of criticising the final movement of the Cello Sonata, but seems to have forgotten about completely by, like, two paragraphs later when he wants to criticise, like, the exact same thing in other pieces, but from the polar opposite direction. But Asia’s point is too self-contradictory, too riddled with false analogy, even to use it as a springboard to write about something else.

The article has, however, spawned #DanAsiaArticleIdeas on Twitter, so it’s not a total loss.