Timothy Goeglein, director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, resigned yesterday after he was found to be committing plagiarism in the pages of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel. Those who relish encounters between contemporary music and politics — encounters inevitably as weird as they are rare — will want to know that living composers play a peripheral role in the story. One of Goeglein's columns, lyrically titled "Life Can Be Beautiful If the Music Is," sang the praises of Gian Carlo Menotti. It turns out that the author borrowed liberally from a Robert Reilly article in Crisis magazine. The really striking passage in Goeglein's piece — seemingly of his own invention — is this: "In the world of contemporary classical music, no names rate higher than John Corigliano, John Adams and Richard Danielpour. They are names that classical music lovers know and respect. But how about creative individuals who strive for excellence in all the arts and whose achievements often go unreported and unfunded because they are seen as less avant garde? How do they comprise this renaissance in music, for instance, that gets beyond an endless succession of bar rests and back to inspired notation?" A good question! I am sure that listeners everywhere have had their fill of Danielpour's astringently experimental, evening-length silent pieces.
