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In Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas, one of the most noted performers of our time, Russell Sherman, finds music that cannot be mastered, only addressed.

He says: it is like wrestling in the great sandbox of childhood and heaven with the ultimate Sumo soldier of humanity-an irresistible opportunity, Russell Sherman says, no matter how many times “I get flattened.”

On subjects like the meaning of that mountain of Beethoven piano music, words always fail. But Sherman, undaunted, is as inventive talking about Beethoven as he is playing him: Opus 10, Sherman says, should have some of the humorous chemistry of Charlie Chaplin between elegance and blunder, grace and pratfall.

We are confronting a grumpy, ribald, kindly composer who can seem to the performer like an implacable God, with Russell Sherman, in this hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Russell Sherman

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People call John Perry Barlow a cyber cowboy, but that isn’t the half of it.

He is, or has been, a hard-drinking, motorcycle riding, jack mormon, an environmentalist, a draft dodging hippy, and a registered Republican. He wrote songs for the Grateful Dead, spent a year in India, and ran his family’s Wyoming cattle ranch for 17-years.

What the world knows Barlow best for, though, is the laissez faire Electronic Frontier Foundation he cofounded and his 1996 “Declaration of Independence (from the Realm of Cyberspace)” – a libertarian manifesto that’s made him the digital Thomas Paine.

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel,” he begins, “I come to you from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

Netizens Unite! John Perry Barlow is on this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

John Perry Barlow