THOMAS LARSON

(Quadrant December 28, 2025)

1 / I’ve been listening to Terry’s Riley’s In C, the minimalist wonder of variable creation first performed at the San Francisco Tape Center in 1964, all my adult life. I began with the 1968 Columbia multi-tracked recording (remastered here), which, in my solipsistic years, failed to stir me, though the dexterity it takes to play it in ensemble, the original, a sprightly clip of 42 minutes, I found impressive. I also found In C static, void of emotion, a bit soulless, and not fully improvisatory since its repeating patterns were set and you, the musician, decided when and when not and how much to play, though you had to remain linked to the group’s progression, never getting too far ahead or behind. Cleverly ordained by Riley to be free and restrained, like an indoor cat in a three-bedroom apartment.

(Written October 2, 2025)

The tornadic hullabaloo over Charlie Kirk’s “assassination” and the fight over his legacy has earned a spot in the annals of selective listening. Kirk was a free-speech firebrand who promulgated rightwing anti-diversity values, Christian Nationalism, and women’s traditional roles; he was also a popular lecturer and podcaster, that is, until he was murdered while speaking before thousands on a college campus. We know that free speech and hate speech, the biased and the vile, are protected by law, which citizens largely agree on.

The rush to burnish Kirk’s legacy came, expectantly, from those who were devoted to him. Most beloved was his provocation, “Prove me wrong”—a carnivalesque come-on to incite engagement with ideas and ideologies he opposed; he believed his arguments were so well informed and deftly numerable, no one could match him. He had the true believer’s quality—heroic, overbearing, dangerously convinced, a Biblical view of how men and their families should comport themselves today.

Action/Spectacle September 15, 2025

It may be that the greatest gift humans have given one another comes from the Greeks and their invention of the Muses. About them, Hesiod writes, “They are all of one mind—their hearts are set upon song and their spirit is free from care. He is happy whom the Muses love. For though a man has sorrow and grief in his soul, yet when the servant of the Muses sings, at once he forgets his dark thoughts and remembers not his troubles.” Echoing Hesiod, Edith Hamilton says, “their voices were lovely beyond compare.” Among the nine women was Erato, Muse of lyric poetry, who plays the lyre; Terpsichore, Muse of choral song, who plays the lyre while she dances; Euterpe, Muse of music, who plays the flute. Extending their reach, the Muse Calliope, the goddess of epic poetry, and the god Apollo, a musician who played the lyre and sang, gave birth to Orpheus, the god of song, the Robert Burns of their time. Apollo’s brother, Hermes—the god of boundaries and those who cross them—made the lyre, yoke and crossbar with four strings to pluck and bow and presented it to his nephew.

(San Diego Reader August 21, 2025)

Our Lady of Guadalupe has been known, for decades, as San Diego’s immigrant church. These days if you walk to the bustling neighborhood chapel—its walls of sun-addled white stucco, its doorways outlined in florid blue vines, its unmissable dignity beside the I-5—you pass vendors with pots of tamales and cobbed corn alongside Guadalupe-imaged candles, parishioners milling about just out of Mass or waiting for the next one, a few older men alert by the front entrance, closed but not locked. Through that door you are welcomed: alabanzas, or Mexican folk songs, lather the air; people beam with Sunday forgiveness; the weathered pews sag with accumulated warmth. When the priest trails in for Mass, decked with alb and green-sashed chasuble, he brings solemnity to his conclave of migrants, sheltered by their faith-based anonymity—about your status, no one cares, not even if you speak just a bit of English, your skin is brown, and your hands are callused from agricultural toil.

Except Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who may have its parishioners in its sights.

(Quillette July 9, 2025)

In 1963, eleven years after his 4’ 33”—a piece requesting a musician not play for a spell of precise time—John Cage staged a work, not of his own, but that of a past fellow traveler, called “Vexations.” The short work for piano, a kind of atonal sound-screen, was written in 1893. Its asymmetrical shape, like a craggy mountain ledge, runs out and comes back on itself and loses interest after a couple minutes. Its directionlessness seems to fulfill some yearning in its composer, as much hardship as joke: His accompanying note asks the performer(s) to play the piece 840 times in succession.

(Times of San Diego, May 26, 2025)

Earlier this month in Glasgow, Scotland, I heard the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra performing Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, whose initial falling motive in G minor, known the world over, is termed the “fate theme,” its urgency suffusing the entire work. The program writers billed the Fifth as “a pulse-pounding struggle between hope and despair.” For me, the evening was much closer to “pulse-pounding” because I had a pulse and it pounded a lot during the music and, as such, had scant recourse to hope or despair. It’s well known that adding abstract linguistic descriptions to the abstract nature of music, albeit musically meaningless, sells tickets. And yet symphonic complexity cannot ticket our subjective responses to what any particular musical pattern is “emoting”—because, as the Swedish composer Allan Pettersson notes, music has “a lot to say but it’s not about anything.”

(San Diego Reader April 15, 2025)

On March 5, 2001, using a stolen 22-caliber revolver and reloading the gun twice, Charles Andrew "Andy" Williams wounded 13 classmates and killed two fellow students at Santana High School in Santee. Local outrage, within easy memory of Columbine, fed on a national desire for vengeance as well as assembled a cruel paradox—an adolescent who lacks reason and restraint as a boy is, because of the random atrocity, also adult enough to be tried as one. In other words, Williams, at 15, was a natural-born killer. Such was the law, and the prosecutorial charge. Consequently, he pled guilty to first-degree murder twice and received two consecutive 25-years-to-life sentences.