Soho the Dog

Been around the world

2012-01-30T14:38:00.002-05:00

Not really. But I have been mostly elsewhere than this space. Catching up:

Fuzzy Math. Many words on the history and appeal of the hot toddy, with recipes both true and speculative. A guest post for Molly Sheridan's Wonderland Kitchen, January 30, 2012.

Reviewing Helios Early Opera.
Boston Globe, January 30, 2012.

Reviewing Lise de la Salle.
Boston Globe, January 30, 2012.

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Orchestra Chamber Players.
Boston Globe, January 24, 2012.

New England's Prospect: The Haunted Mansion. The BSO plays Harbison's Sixth and Turnage's From the Wreckage.
NewMusicBox, January 20, 2012.

Curtains

2012-01-15T07:30:00.001-05:00

Why Boston is "not an opera town." The Boston Opera Company (1908-1915) and its upshots.
Boston Globe, January 15, 2012.

Additional tangents:

If I had to guess who first said that Boston wasn't an opera town, I'd say Heinrich Conried, the onetime manager of the Metropolitan Opera; after disappointing Boston box office during the company’s 1905 tour, Conried bypassed the city altogether the following season. (Read between the lines of this article, for instance.) Was the founding of the Boston Opera Company and the building of the Opera House, in some small part, a riposte to Conried? The author Henry C. Lahee thought so, writing that Conried's snub served to "fix a determination in the hearts of Bostonians to have an opera company of their own, and no longer be dependent for their annual homoeopathic dose of opera on the Metropolitan or any other visiting company."

One of the more interesting plans surrounding the Boston Opera Company before its bankruptcy was the possibility of an “opera trust,” which would have combined the major American opera companies—Boston, the Metropolitan in New York, the Chicago Opera Theatre—into a syndicate. Instead of hiring singers on a per-appearance basis, the syndicate would have contracted singers for a full (half-year) season, during which they would appear with multiple companies. The idea was masterminded by Otto Kahn, the head of the Metropolitan, and would have been engineered through interlocking board memberships, which is why Kahn ended up on the Boston Opera Company's board, and the BOC's Henry Russell and the Met's Giulio Gatti-Casazza served as “advisory associates” for each others' companies. As was the case with the Boston Opera Company itself, World War I was the official death knell for the opera trust, though it's easy to imagine the trust unraveling on its own as competition and the convenience of transatlantic travel increased.

Boston's political sea-change from Brahmin to Irish neatly coincided with the Opera Company's lifespan. Mayor Hibbard was a no-show at the groundbreaking for the Opera House; “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald was in office for the Opera Company's early seasons; Both Honey Fitz and his successor, James Curley, saw the company off for their swan song, a 1914 European tour. (The expense of that tour, incidentally, is sometimes cited as a cause of the company's bankruptcy, but contemporary news reports emphasize that the tour was independently financed.) One can sense, in Fitzgerald's and Curley's relations with the opera, the gradual widening of the gap between the ascendent Irish and venerable Yankee society. Fitzgerald might have been an Opera Company stockholder, but Curley wasn't; and Curley seems to have gotten at least as much political capital out of the company's demise as its survival, to judge from this report, in the November 11, 1914 Boston Evening Transcript:

MAYOR STILL THE “ANGEL”
-----
Provides Three More Members of the Boston Theatre Opera Company with Fare to New York
-----
Today three more members of the Boston Theatre Opera Company, making thirty in all, appeared at the office of Mayor Curley seeking car fare to New York. The mayor gave then $10 each, and, turning his empty pockets inside out, exclaimed that he had done his share for the relief of the distressed company, though inquiring if there were any more who had failed to get out of town.

Both the gesture and the presence of a reporter are pure Curley. (Though there was, from time to time, a distinct Boston Theatre Opera Company, the timing and circumstances would seem to indicate the soon-to-declare-bankruptcy Boston Opera Company.)

The notion I explore in the article, that the wedge between Brahmin society and the Italian immigrant population, in particular, tripped up any possible revival of a Boston Opera Company is, to be sure, speculation. Even more speculative, though equally interesting, is whether Bostonian anti-Semitism played a part as well. There doesn't seem to be indication of it in the collapse of the original Opera Company—the fact that both Russell and Kahn were Jewish, for instance, rates hardly a mention in contemporary news coverage. By the 1920s and 30s, though, fueled by the Red Scare and an increasingly vocal Catholic hierarchy, anti-Semitism was rampant. In his book The Crimson Letter, historian Douglas Shand-Tucci has traced how anti-Semitism, in combination with traditional Boston prudishness, shifted the locus of modern art in America from Boston to New York—with two of his case histories being those of the Massachusetts-raised, Harvard-educated Leonard Bernstein and Lincoln Kirstein. The opera doesn't exactly fall under the modernist umbrella, but one could make the argument that the flight of such talent only made it harder to establish a new company in Boston. Consider that the groundbreaking for Lincoln Center came only a year after the demolition of the Boston Opera House, then consider that two-thirds of Lincoln Center's tenants were Kirstein's New York Ballet and Bernstein's Philharmonic, and one can get a sense of the missed opportunities.

If, indeed, anti-Semitism also indirectly contributed to the less-than-amenable operatic atmosphere in Boston, then it would be a small irony to find one of the city's most notorious anti-Semitic demagogues, Father Leonard Feeney, lamenting (in a 1956 issue of his magazine The Point) that “Boston is a 'symphony' rather than an 'opera' town,” because of a preponderance of Jewish conductors—“with about three notable exceptions, the men who gesticulate before the chief orchestras of the nation are all Jews.” The article goes on:

Shall we start a crusade to rescue the holy precincts of Symphony Hall from the sacrilegious hands of the Jews? Shall we picket the box-office? Shall we assault the place? Storm it in mid-season? Shall we sweat and bleed and die for the right to hear Beethoven conducted by a Mayflower descendant?

After proper consideration, we think not. We think that perhaps this time we will restrain our wrath, run the risk of being labeled “above it all,” and just contemplate with medieval, Romish satisfaction, the prospect of a stuffy hall-full of heretics being serenaded by a pit-full of infidels—for all eternity.

Also: make sure to read Geoff Edgers' autopsy of Opera Boston.

Und ihre Rosen in purpurner Glut, Bächlein, erquicke mit kühlender Flut

2012-01-02T20:07:00.004-05:00

Raise a glass! You made it to 2012!

Lucy's Purple Aura

juice of 1 lime
juice of ½ lemon
1 tablespoon grape jelly
1 teaspoon grenadine
1½ oz. gin
a decent handful of mint leaves

Shake it all with big chunks of ice until the jelly is liquefied and the mint is in confetti-like bits. Strain (keeping the mint, leaving the ice).

According to the same psychic who filled in the corners of my CV, my wife's aura is, in fact, purple. For those not inclined towards gin (like, say, my wife), this makes for a good mocktail; just replace the gin with still or (better) sparkling water.

Are met in thee

2011-12-19T13:15:00.000-05:00

It's less than a week until Christmas, which means it's probably time for me to get my act together and get ready for this deluge of services. It also means it's time for that Christmas prerogative of organists everywhere, the willfully perverse reharmonization of familiar carols! This year, the changes really are changes (click to enlarge):

Happy Holidays! See you in 2012—when we'll run out this thirteenth b'ak'tun in style.

Think of it as maybe the soil of some great past civilization

2011-12-19T12:42:00.001-05:00

Reviewing Cappella Clausura.
Boston Globe, December 19, 2011.

Ride pattern

2011-12-13T12:06:00.002-05:00

New England's Prospect: Stolen Moments. The 2011 Boston Conservatory New Music Festival and BMOP cross paths with jazz.
NewMusicBox, December 13, 2011.

With care, in hopes

2011-12-12T09:23:00.002-05:00

Reviewing Boston Baroque's Messiah.
Boston Globe, December 12, 2011.

To judge by the portion of the audience that stood for the "Hallelujah" chorus, Boston Baroque's audiences are far more contrarian than the Handel and Haydn Society's: whereas nearly everybody stood at H&H's performance, only about a third of the audience stood at Boston Baroque's.

Let nothing you dismay

2011-12-07T11:58:00.002-05:00

Reviewing the Firebird Ensemble.
Boston Globe, December 7, 2011.

Also, this:

With Every Christmas Card I Write. Culture, copyright, and quantum measurement.
NewMusicBox, December 5, 2011.

Splash screens

2011-11-26T20:20:00.001-05:00

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Boston Globe, November 25, 2011.

The Big Broadcast

2011-11-23T14:47:00.001-05:00

Reviewing the Boston Classical Orchestra.
Boston Globe, November 21, 2011.

New England's Prospect: Don't Mention the War. Sound Icon and the Sound in SPACE festival.
NewMusicBox, November 22, 2011.

There's, like, the Galleria

2011-11-19T16:30:00.001-05:00

Guerrieri: Overchoice Rag (2011) (PDF, 4 pages, 153 Kb)

Ethan was giving me a deserved hard time for letting the rag-a-month project from a couple years ago drift off into a senescent fog after a mere four installments. The lesson: be careful what you wish for! This one is reasonably classically-proportioned, it just can't decide what key it wants to be in. Equal temperament, you disorientingly large-inventoried emporium, you.

No MIDI, since my usual computer is in the shop, and I've been magically transported back in time to a golden age of slower, far less powerful operating systems. Instead, here's me playing, wrong notes and all. Be careful what you wish for, &c., &c.

And if you're good, I'll search for wood

2011-11-14T12:55:00.002-05:00

Reviewing the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Trio Mediaeval, and Mantra Percussion.
Boston Globe, November 14, 2011.

The headline is a little misleading—if I did my job, the main takeaway should be as much about how much BoaC veers from hardcore minimalism while still acknowledging it. But "Timber" really does hit the same happy place that, say, Music in Contrary Motion did when I first heard it. (And, especially in the Hub, when you see that many people walking out, a comparison to Four Organs has been duly earned.)

Hey, I've been really lax on linking to stuff, haven't I?

Reviewing the Cantata Singers.
Boston Globe, November 7, 2011.

Reviewing the Discovery Ensemble.
Boston Globe, November 8, 2011.

Reviewing Mykola Suk.
Boston Globe, November 11, 2011.

My busy mind is burning to use what learning I've got

2011-11-01T20:08:00.003-05:00

In honor of a minor milestone, a riff on the martini that I've come to rely on:

Manuscript Submission

2 oz. dry gin
¾ oz. apricot eau-de-vie (I like Blume Marillen)
½ oz. rosé vermouth (like Martini Rosato)
A couple good dashes of grapefruit bitters

Stir all ingredients with ice until really quite cold (I swirl it in a metal shaker until my fingers stick) and strain into something appropriately graceful.

I'll sail upon the dog star

2011-11-01T08:20:00.000-05:00

Reviewing Lang Lang.
Boston Globe, November 1, 2011.

Don't Look Now

2011-10-30T08:18:00.001-05:00

Sound is the messenger. Previewing Wesleyan University's Alvin Lucier celebration.
Boston Globe, October 30, 2011.

Cathedrals, castles, making up rules

2011-10-27T20:35:00.002-05:00

New England's Prospect: When the Working Day Is Done. Poe Night, Amanda Palmer, and Laurie Anderson.
NewMusicBox, October 27, 2011.

Cabinet of wonders

2011-10-25T09:27:00.003-05:00

Reviewing The English Concert and Andreas Scholl.
Boston Globe, October 25, 2011.

I also forgot this one, from Sunday:

Galleries and the Art of Music. On concerts in museums.
Boston Globe, October 23, 2011.

The triumph song of Heav'n

2011-10-23T11:18:00.006-05:00

Last week, the church that has provided me with much of my gainful employment for the past decade, The Presbyterian Church in Sudbury, celebrated its 50th anniversary, so I wrote an anthem for the occasion. Score below, where also, behind some ambient Presbyterian noise, you can hear the premiere (thanks to Doug Nicholls for the recording).

We Love the Place (2011), SATB chorus and organ (PDF, 170Kb)

The words are by William Bullock, Anglican missionary to Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Numerous versions of Bullock's poem were already floating around by the end of the 19th century; I mixed and matched stanzas I liked. Supposedly, when asked why there wasn't a stanza of "We Love the Place" devoted to the church's pulpit, Bullock replied that he would have been compelled to write:

We love thy pulpit Lord,
For there the word of man
Lulls the worshiper to sleep
As only sermons can.

The winter of our discontent

2011-10-22T15:58:00.001-05:00

I considered making an actual bumper sticker of this, until I decided that the people I'd most often end up explaining it to would be the people I'd least often want to talk to.

Eastern Promises

2011-10-17T15:55:00.001-05:00

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Orchestra Chamber Players.
Boston Globe, October 17, 2011.

Incidentally, by the measurements of Sabrina! this was an ill-behaved audience. The season's started, Boston—brush up on your etiquette.

Don't be that ickeroo, get rep and follow through

2011-10-17T14:49:00.000-05:00

Hire Learning.
NewMusicBox, October 17, 2011.

In which Critic-at-Large Moe and I regard the Boston Symphony's new-music mug as half empty.

Acts of respiration

2011-10-04T09:16:00.001-05:00

Reviewing Audra McDonald.
Boston Globe, October 4, 2011.

Reboot

2011-09-28T13:41:00.001-05:00

New England's Prospect: Looking Backward. Juventas, Guerilla Opera, and Longy's Septemberfest.
NewMusicBox, September 28, 2011.

Porous dancing

2011-09-28T09:04:00.001-05:00

Reviewing Dinosaur Annex.
Boston Globe, September 28, 2011.

Let George do it

2011-09-27T09:51:00.001-05:00

Reviewing Emmanuel Music in Bach's B minor Mass.
Boston Globe, September 27, 2011.

Homiletic for the People

2011-09-19T10:38:00.003-05:00

Reviewing Newton Baroque and Exsultemus in Telemann's Harmonisher Gottesdienst.
Boston Globe, September 19, 2011.

Miles to go before

2011-09-15T15:41:00.002-05:00

Seven League Boots. The Boston new-music trail.
NewMusicBox, September 15, 2011.

Ad nos vix tenuis famae perlabitur aura

2011-09-10T16:45:00.005-05:00

It was this year, ten years on, that I noticed that my vague skepticism regarding commemorations of the 9/11 attacks had become unusually acute. I am habitually skeptical, which is both virtue and fault; and I've always had a little bit of skepticism about all kinds of such public memorials. In America especially, large public commemorations like the annual remembrance of 9/11 are, to use a metaphor appropriate to the country's history, land grabs of a sort, a staking out of mental/emotional/political territory. For a long time, the almost instantly customary observance of 9/11 has made me think of two quotations. One (which I already had quoted on 9/11 a couple years ago) is from Willa Cather's My Ántonia:

Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red grass had been ploughed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr. Shimerda's grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross. As grandfather had predicted, Mrs. Shimerda never saw the roads going over his head. The road from the north curved a little to the east just there, and the road from the west swung out a little to the south; so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft gray rivers flowing past it. I never came upon the place without emotion, and in all that country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence — the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.

Mr. Shimerda, a presumed suicide, had been buried—as superstition dictated—at a crossroads, but instead of the grave being lost to traffic, it is almost as if the world itself shifts its grid to allow the spot to remain claimed. I like to think that Cather, who grew up as the country was taking stock of its post-Civil-War self, was both acknowledging and gently rebuking the frenzy of memorials to the war, especially the proliferation of Civil War cemeteries. In her study This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust summed up the cemeteries this way:

The establishment of national and Confederate cemeteries created the Civil War Dead as a category, as a collective that represented something more and something different from the many thousands of individual deaths that it comprised. It also separated the Dead from the memories of living individuals mourning their own very particular losses. The Civil War Dead became both powerful and immortal, no longer individual men but instead a force that would shape American public life for at least a century to come.

Mr. Shimerda's grave both insists on its own very individual circumstance and rights, but also wryly comments on the 19th-century American colonization of real estate, both figurative and literal, by the dead.

The other quote is pithier, a Garry Wills description of Richard Nixon on the campaign trail in 1968:

[T]he entire American topography is either graveyard, for him, or minefield—ground he must walk delicately, revenant amid the tombstones, whistling in histrionic unconcern.

Nixon grew up in an era when the country was becoming increasingly obsessed with its heritage, the topography becoming more and more crowded with its own past. The anniversary of 9/11 is, too, graveyard and minefield—the only difference being that the whistling must be uncontroversially solemn.

So that's my usual vague skepticism. But this year, I found myself skeptical specifically about the musical content of the plethora of 9/11 ceremonies to the point where I really started to wonder about the purpose of such music. There is an interesting disconnect that happens between music and commemoration; it comes, I think, between such events’ tendency towards ignorationes elenchi and certain merelogical assumptions about musical qualities. Aristotle included ignoratio elenchi among the rhetorical fallacies he classified in his guide De sophisticis elenchis; it has come to mean any sort of red-herring irrelevant argument, but Aristotle's use of the term was a little more precise; he used it to mean an argument which, "though it is valid, only appears to be appropriate to the thing in question." Mereology is the logical study of parts vs. wholes; the particular problem that I think applies here is whether a given quality of music—"musical integrity," say—is part of the music itself, or whether it is the music that is part of a larger idea of musical integrity.

The conflict was made patently clear in the recent kerfuffle over the originally-proposed cover to the Nonesuch release of Steve Reich's WTC 9/11. The original image—a news photograph showing United Flight 175 about to strike the south tower of the World Trade Center, the colors manipulated to a sepia-toned grime—caused fairly widespread reaction: it was in poor taste; it was unduly sensationalistic; it was, at best, irritatingly obvious. The subsequent defense of the first cover by Nonesuch president Robert Hurwitz brought Aristotle's category into play by (mostly) insisting that the music itself was an honest response, that Reich was a great artist, and that to object to the choice of cover was to put Reich's integrity into question. Again: Hurwitz was defending the cover by, instead, defending the music. (It only appears to be appropriate to the thing in question.) That’s a classic ignoratio elenchi—and, moreover, one based on the assumption that musical integrity is a larger quality than the piece of music itself, one that also encompasses its physical packaging and marketing.

9/11 is hardly unique among periodic memorial commemorations for being fertile ground for this sort of sophistry, essentially a good-intentions defense with the volume turned significantly up. Good intentions are nobler than the truly cynical would have us believe; but, in such cases, the mereology of good intentions can get pretty murky, leading to conclusions that are equal parts depressing and alarming. Here is where Hurwitz's ignoratio elenchi led him:

Whether or not a work offends people is a question that artists have had to contend with from time immemorial, and I hope that, in our quick-to-respond, politically correct world, artists will not let fear of a Twitter campaign prevent them from standing up for what they believe in. Artists with whom we have worked through the years... have made extremely strong political statements through their compositions, songs, and recordings, or for the causes to which they have dedicated themselves. Many have taken a lot of heat for doing just that. What message does this send out to younger artists who might have something to say that makes people uncomfortable? That they’d better be careful not to offend anyone?

As best I can tell, this is that paragraph's logical essence: in order to preserve artists' right to offend people, it is necessary that no one ever get offended. Such is the logical conclusion of commemoration-based ignorationes elenchi. The landscape of 9/11 remembrance is strewn with eggshells; what's amazing is how many of them have been deliberately strewn.

One might ask what, exactly, music can contribute to a commemoration, what part it contributes to the whole of an actual memorial event itself. The best I can come up with is its potency as a blank slate, as a screen onto which each listener can project their own emotional narrative. The New York Philharmonic is marking this year’s 9/11 anniversary with Mahler’s Second Symphony, which is not an uninteresting choice (for one thing, it confirms the success of Leonard Bernstein’s campaign to make Mahler the unofficial composer of American neurosis), but one surmises that Mahler got the call mainly (and oddly) because something like John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls (which the Philharmonic commissioned, after all) is too specific in its programmatic qualities, too likely to interfere with commemoration’s role as a benign, neutral canvas. (Likewise, one of the reasons that Music After seems like such an exception to most 9/11 musical commemorations is that, unusually, it curates strong individual voices in such quantity that it kind of erases the gap between specificity and assembly, the quiet insistence of Mr. Shimerda's grave refracted onto a variety of tiny plots.)

Besides, the very nature of music, in a way, conflicts with this kind of commemoration. Monuments are supposed to be permanent reminders; music, though, is about remembering and forgetting, permanence and impermanence, palpability and insubstantiality. Half of it fits the occasion; but the other half is constantly, gently cancelling out the first half. To mark an occasion permanently appended with the phrase “never forget” with an art form that is essentially temporal, essentially fleeting, only works if one doesn’t listen too closely.

One of the rather minor occasions that 9/11 has crowded out of its memorial territory is the birthday (well, the baptism day, the closest thing we have) of William Boyce. This Sunday also happens to be Boyce's tercentenary—he was baptized on September 11, 1711. Boyce was one of the most accomplished English composers of the 18th century, Master of the King’s Musick to Georges II and III, organist at the Chapel Royal; but he is mostly forgotten now, except for a few church anthems and some occasionally-revived symphonies. But I like to think Boyce had at least a little sense of the uneasy fit between music and monumental commemoration. He composed what was at the time a fairly well-known setting of the Rev. Dr. Thomas Lisle’s poem “The Power of Music,” which turns the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice on its Offenbach-like head: the denizens of the Underworld are astonished not only that Orpheus should brave the journey, but that he should do so in search of his wife, of all people. Deciding that hell lacks “torments sufficient” for Orpheus’s temerity, Pluto decides that the only proper punishment is to give him back his wife—that is, until Orpheus’s lyre works its spell, and Pluto changes his mind:

But pity succeeding soon vanquish’d his heart,
And pleas’d with his playing so well,
He took her again, in reward of his art;
Such power had music in hell.

Boyce does the jest the honor of an elegant melancholy—

—a wistful acknowledgement, maybe, that music is forever slipping away, dodging the well-defined roles we would have it play.

It's in that spirit that one could categorize one of the only really appropriate musical memorials I’ve ever found. It’s Frederic Rzewski’s ”A Life,” a short piano sketch written the day after John Cage died. It’s gnomic and quirky in a recognizably Cagean way, but there’s also a tribute hidden in the playing, one that only emerges at the right tempo:

It’s a conspiratorial joke—in conventional performance practice, one shared only between the composer, the performer and, somewhere (if you happen to believe in that sort of thing) the dedicatee. But it’s also built into the most essential feature of music, it’s fleeting temporality. It risks the wit of mixing the idea of a memorial with music's constant but constantly evanescent immediacy. Perhaps in contrast to a lot of commemorative music, it knows exactly what it is, what all music is: a tenuous breath, an inscription carved on the surface of a running stream.

(Boyce score via.)

Hoodle ah da wa da scatty wah

2011-09-03T13:01:00.004-05:00

Reviewing the American Repertory Theater's Porgy and Bess.
The Faster Times, September 3, 2011.

Dégustation

2011-08-29T17:50:00.003-05:00

Reviewing the Boston Chamber Music Society.
Boston Globe, August 29, 2011.

Crazy for trying and crazy for crying

2011-08-18T08:10:00.003-05:00

Reviewing the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Handel's Orlando.
Boston Globe, August 18, 2011.

Waiting for summer, his pastures to change

2011-08-08T20:25:00.003-05:00

Discursive:

The 2011 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, part 1.
NewMusicBox, August 8, 2011.

Concise:

The 2011 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, part 2.
Boston Globe, August 9, 2011.

Writing these round-up reviews for the Globe is always a dance between enthusiasm—it's a great platform for saying things about works that deserve to have things said about them—and frustration: given the space limitations, there's simply no way you can mention every piece. For a variety of reasons, these pieces were left on the cutting room floor:

Eve Belgarian's Robin Redbreast, which sets a Stanley Kunitz poem in an almost distractingly mannered recitative (here sung by tenor Martin Bakari), but backs it up with a combination of hollow, chirping piccolo (Henrik Heide) and electronically-altered birdsong that was very, very cool;
Richard Festinger's Peripeteia, a running-note divertimento for clarinet (Danny Goldman, who was quite good), violin (Wang Fang Wong), and cello (Marybeth-Brown Plambeck), music that, despite some mid-piece longueurs, was remarkably successful at pinning improvisatory fluidity to the notated page;
Jonathan Keren's Multiscala, combining a mandolin part of familiar-yet-unfamiliar extended strumming techniques (played by Avi Avital) with a string trio (Johanna Gosshans, Daniel Getz, and Jeremy Lamb), running quick-fire variations, like turning some exotic artifact over and over in one's hands; and
Bernard Rands' Tre Espressioni, the festival's oldest piece (1960), played by Ursula Oppens on her Sunday recital, and, indeed, expressionistic, aphoristic slabs of demonstrative old-school modernism.

Further reading: Jeremy Eichler, Allan Kozinn (1, 2), Andrew Pincus (1, 2).

Stop making sense

2011-07-29T08:49:00.002-05:00

Reviewing Boston Midsummer Opera's L'Italiana in Algeri.
Boston Globe, July 29, 2011.

The atomic number of zirconium

2011-07-26T07:55:00.000-05:00

Today is my birthday. This year's honored co-celebrant is Serge Koussevitzky, who would have turned 137 today, if only he had actually put his arms into the sleeves of his overcoat more often. Get past the credits of this late-1940s bit of USIS propaganda, and you can see the man in action, conducting Beethoven's Egmont Overture:

There's a story behind this film: it was a single-camera shoot, so Koussevitzky and the BSO pre-recorded the overture, then played along with the recording for several takes; Koussevitzky apparently grew increasingly angry that he couldn't deviate from his own interpretation.

My lovely wife threw a party last weekend to mark my implacable aging. You are sad that you weren't there! You can, however, simulate the occasion via drink. Here's what I concocted for unsuspecting guests:

Second Score

1 oz (30 ml) rye whiskey
⅔ oz (20 ml) pineapple juice
⅔ oz (20 ml) lime juice
⅓ oz (10 ml) apricot brandy
⅓ oz (10 ml) rosé vermouth

Shake well with ice and strain into a cocktail glass; top with

2 oz (60 ml) cold champagne

Cutting down on alcohol? Good heavens, why? Have you seen what this world is coming to? Nevertheless, here's one for kids of all ages; name courtesy of Jack Miller, who also baked the birthday cake pictured above, a cake that will be spoken of for years to come in hushed, awestruck tones.

Four For Tea

1 oz (30 ml) double-strength green tea
1 oz (30 ml) pineapple juice
⅔ oz (20 ml) lime juice
2 tsp (10 ml) pomegranate molasses

Shake with ice, strain into a glass, and top with

2 oz (60 ml) sparkling apple juice or seltzer

Pomegranate molasses can be found in the Middle Eastern aisle of your local supermarket, or at least where all the couscous and falafel mix gets shelved, I would think. I also used it as part of the brine for twelve pounds of pulled pork, and it worked really rather well. Shahia tayba!

When your dreamboat turns out to be a footnote

2011-07-25T21:50:00.002-05:00

I was out of town and otherwise occupied last week, which meant that I missed Ethen Iverson's reading list. His list of jazz books is now added to my own to-do list, seeing as how I've only managed about half of those. His classical list is also superb—I would also, off the top of my head (and avoiding biographies, as Ethan did), add Peter Conrad's A Song of Love and Death (probably my favorite book on opera); Schoenberg's Style and Idea collection (what can I say, I find Arnold good company); Pierre Bernac's The Interpretation of French Song (dazzlingly deep, even if you disagree with it it, it's the one book you have to specifically disagree with); and Nicolas Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective (it seems like it should get old, yet it never, never does). Irwin Bazelon's film music book (which Ethan mentions) is excellent and in-depth, but I find it kind of curiously bitchy regarding genre films; Christopher Palmer's more fanboy-ish but, in its own way, equally thorough The Composer in Hollywood is, I find, a nice balance. And I was mildly surprised that the original Pitchfork list that inspired this exercise neglected Nik Cohn's Awopbopaloobop Awopbamboom, still my favorite book on rock and roll, though to list it is to, admittedly, be forced to acknowledge that rock had pretty much run its course by the late 60s.

But I'm coming pretty late to this game, so I thought I'd mix it up a little. So, instead of music books, here's a list (again, off the top of my head) of five books that aren't about music but still, nonetheless, changed my musical thinking, directly or obliquely.

Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. History that not only gives proper due to the minutiae of great historical endeavors, but knows and illustrates that such details are utterly inseparable from the prevailing historical context, even when the people involved are tunnel-vision unaware of that context—a notion permanently embedded in my view of music. Also: a demonstration of the poetic capacity of explaining even the most arcane technical niceties.
Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes. I enjoyed this book long before I actually understood what Wills was doing with it. It's not only about Nixon, but about the entire period of American history leading up to his presidency; Wills spends lots of time deconstructing and dismantling one book or study of that history after another. After enough time, I've realized that any book will yield contradictions if you make enough incisions in it, but that's Wills' point, I think: American history is best understood by laying its contradictions bare. It's an idea that has served me well in getting my head around a piece of music on too many occasions to count.
Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française. Really, anything by Michelet—any of the volumes of his Histoire de France, any of his quirky studies on various aspects of human nature and behavior. If you have the time, struggling (as I do) with a French dictionary handy is advisable—English translations of Michelet tend to be old, somewhat clunky, and incomplete. But even such second-hand Michelet is worth it—there's nobody quite like him for breadth, for structure, for pacing. The most symphonic historian of all time.
Henry Adams, History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison. Adams had issues, to be sure—he was self-pitying, he was almost comically pessimistic, he was irrationally anti-Semitic (though more in real life than in his books). But he was, I think, the greatest American prose stylist of the 19th century. All of Adams is worth reading, but the History is Adams at his best—casually magisterial, intricately witty. To read Adams is to understand the relationship between complexity and freedom—the full Victorian profusion of his sentence structure, and his mastery of it, allows him to place the key point of each idea wherever he wants. He can lead with it; he can end with it; he can use it as a fulcrum between phrases, between clauses, between qualifications and demurrals. And, as a result, when Adams does drop in an utterance of Hemingway-esque pithiness, it jabs harder than Hemingway ever did. If you've ever wondered why my own sentences tend towards the convoluted, or why I harbor what might seem to be an inexplicable fondness for music others might consider dense and difficult, a big part of it is that my education included Adams' Education.
Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum. At first, I was going to go with The Role of the Reader, my favorite collection of Eco's semiotic texts, but I think his novel has more deeply embedded itself into my musical thinking, particularly because I'm so obsessed with Romanticism and its continuing hangover. Eco makes black comedy out of the tendency of the myth to take on a life of its own, a mechanism that has not only become prevalent in music (not just classical) since the 1800s, but has pretty much driven it. The first step of coming to terms with post-Beethoven music history is to be able to simultaneously acknowledge both myth's fictional status and its palpable, almost indelible persistence.

P.S. Yes, this is the second time I have gone to that particular Elvis Costello well for a post title. It's not just books that take up permanent residence in what might otherwise be useful parts of my brain.

Blue Light Special

2011-07-21T09:15:00.002-05:00

Reviewing Jean-Yves Thibaudet.
Boston Globe, July 21, 2011.

Update (7/22): I reviewed the second of Thibaudet's Ravel recitals here.

Freedom of expression

2011-07-19T11:41:00.000-05:00

One of my summer resolutions was to actually practice, which, given my seemingly hard-wired summer-vacation mental entrainment, is not an insignificant task. So Rhapsody in Blue has been sitting on the piano for a few weeks now—apt summer fare, I think. What I've been finding most interesting about the music this time around is how tricky it is, and the unusual way in which it's tricky: Not so much technically—there's certainly some finger-tangling passages, but on the whole, it's hardly as forbidding as, say, Islamey—but temporally. Rhapsody in Blue is a piece in which it can be fiercely difficult to find the right tempo.

This is not for lack of indication; Gershwin has tempo markings all over the place, amply garnished with ritardandi and accelerandi and rubati both explicit and implicit. Here's what you get on the first four pages alone:

Molto moderato (♩=80)
poco rit.
Moderato assai
tranquillo
poco scherzando
pochissimo rall.
a tempo
poco rall.
tranquillo
deciso
scherzando
Poco agitato

... and so forth. Out of 30 pages (this is in my very old, beat-up edition of the solo piano version) I count 23 that carry at least one indicated alteration of tempo. But the only metronome marking you get is that very first one. (And that seems to have been a late addition—the original manuscript of Ferde Grofé's orchestration simply marks the beginning as "Slowly.") Rhapsody in Blue is a piece that asks for near-constant tempo fluctuations, but puts the parameters of those fluctuations almost entirely in the hands of the performer.

It's also a piece for which, thanks to recording technology, the acquiring of an extra-notational performance tradition has been more or less completely documented. Probably the most obvious alteration has been in the big Andantino melody, this one:

Gershwin's 1924 recording with the Paul Whiteman orchestra takes all of this at the same tempo (as does, a little more loosely, Gershwin's piano-roll rendition), which is what's indicated, and which sounds weird to our ears, because the more common practice now is to double-time the last six bars of that phrase. That's how Oscar Levant and Eugene Ormandy do it on their 1945 recording. It's how Bernstein did it. It's how just about everybody does it these days.

The thing is, in order to do that passage, and that section, without the double-time distortion, you have to hit a pretty precise mark, tempo-wise: it has to be fast enough that the last six bars don't bog down (the Gershwin/Whiteman recording does plod a bit) but not so fast that the first two bars are trivialized. If you can hit that mark (about ♩=120, I've come to think, maybe a shade faster, though 126 seems a little too fast), it's kind of a structural boon: you can take the next eight pages or so, all the way up through the following Agitato section, at essentially the same tempo. But then you're more locked in than if you slide into the Andantino with Romantic languor, and then rubato the heck out of those six-bar consequent phrases. The performance practice that's evolved, in other words, gives the performer more room to maneuver—and more room for error.

The question that I've been thinking about is: does such room to maneuver also make the performance more expressive? At about the same time I started wrestling with the varying speeds of Rhapsody in Blue, I read this review of a concert from this summer's Sick Puppy festivities, and was struck by this description of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Kontakte:

I tend toward agreement with one of my seatmates, who described the experience as highly engaging intellectually, but emotionally remote.

I don't wish to take the reviewer to task—I adore Stockhausen's music, but I fully understand that it's not everyone's cup of tea. Still, I was intrigued by the phrase "emotionally remote," since, to me, anyway, Kontakte is, if anything, emotionally in your face pretty much all the way through. (Here's a recording to sample.) The emotions, though, are not those usually associated with musical expressiveness.

It might be useful to reference Robert Plutchik's classification of emotions, in particular the way he divides emotions into opposite pairs. Musical expression tends to be those pairs on Plutchik's N-S-E-W axes: joy and sadness, anger and fear—perusing this summation of recent research into emotional communication in musical performance, the bulk of empirical research has surrounded those types of emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and love. My emotional experience of Kontakte, though, falls mostly onto one of Plutchik's in-between axes: the tension between anticipation and surprise.

Here's a typical section of the score to Kontakte:

There's a bit of leeway in the performers' staves, but it's always in the context of those implacable numbers at the top of the score, the music's running time, broken down to tenth-of-a-second accuracy. It's both the source of Kontakte's emotional effect and the subversion of our accustomed perception of it. To do a Rhapsody-like indulgently-slow-then-double-time move is completely foreign to this context. Any momentary freedom on the part of the performers is immediately yanked back into Kontakte's grid by the necessity of synchronization with the electronic component. And that seems to conflict with what we've come to accept as communicating musical expressivity. The notion was concisely stated back in 1925 by psychologists Carl Seashore and Milton Metfessel:

This deviation from the exact is, on the whole, the medium for the creation of the beautiful—for the conveying of emotion. That is the secret of the plasticity of art. The exact is cold, restricted, and unemotional; and, however beautiful, in itself soon palls upon us.

Obviously—given my enthusiasm for the exacting emotional world of Kontakte—I don't buy that. But for all the modernist effort to demonstrate they are, in fact, two different things, the conflation of expressivity and emotionality persists. The more expressive emotions are not false; but mere expressivity is not the end-all of emotional experience. And a sidelong glance into the worlds of politics or nationalism or fundamentalisms of various kinds offers no end of warning signs for exclusively associating emotion with expressiveness.

It's interesting that, after Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin came around to the greater precision of metronome markings. The only one of his subsequent concert works that doesn't include them is An American in Paris, and the experience of hearing Walter Damrosch conduct it too slowly apparently converted Gershwin. The Second Rhapsody is diligent with metronome indications, as is the Cuban Overture, as is the Variations on "I Got Rhythm." And it's equally interesting that none of those works has ever attained the place in the repertoire of Rhapsody in Blue. It might just be a coincidence—or it might be a measure of the general equating of performer freedom with communicative effectiveness. My own heresy: as much as I love Rhapsody in Blue, I kind of think that the Second Rhapsody is a better piece of music. But, then again, I know that I'm at the margins of the mainstream of perceived musical emotion. I don't mind—I may not get swept off my feet quite as easily, but the payoff is a view of the world made just a little more lucid.

Cross-posted at The Faster Times.

Full-court press

2011-07-18T13:32:00.000-05:00

Reviewing Dean, Schubert, Hétu et al. at Yellow Barn.
Boston Globe, July 18, 2011.

Summer sun, something's begun

2011-07-15T17:08:00.002-05:00

Reviewing the Boston Landmarks Orchestra.
Boston Globe, July 16, 2011.

Operas as summarized by the lyrics of "Ashes to Ashes"

2011-07-11T09:00:00.001-05:00

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Do you remember a guy that's been in such an early song?

Licht: I heard a rumor from Ground Control.

Moses und Aron: They got a message from the action man.

Der Freischütz:

Aennchen: I'm happy; hope you're happy, too.

Don Giovanni: I've loved all I needed to love; sordid details following.

Elektra: The shrieking of nothing is killing.

Madama Butterfly: Just pictures of Jap girls in synthesis.

La Bohème: I ain't got no money.

Samson et Dalila: I ain't got no hair.

Götterdämmerung: I'm hoping to kick, but the planet—it's glowing.

Thaïs:

Thaïs: Strung out in heaven's high!
Athanaël: Hitting an all-time low.

Tannhäuser: Time and again I tell myself, "I'll stay clean tonight."

The Merry Widow: I'm stuck with a valuable friend.

The Midsummer Marriage: One flash of light, but no smoking pistol.

Mefistofele: I never done good things.

Albert Herring: I never done bad things.

Der fliegende Holländer: I never did anything out of the blue.

The Ice Break: Want an axe to break the ice.

Tosca: Want to come down right now.

Wozzeck: My mother said, to get things done, you better not mess with Major Tom.

10-Hour Party People

2011-06-26T21:00:00.001-05:00

Reviewing the SICPP Sick Puppy Iditarod.
Boston Globe, June 27, 2011.

Salient solution

2011-06-20T12:25:00.000-05:00

Smoked meat (full-fat) at Schwartz's.

This summer's annual fall-off-the-blogging-bicycle was brought to you by Soho the Dog's brief all-staff jaunt to Montreal and Québec. And also this week's Boston Early Music Festival gauntlet. But mostly the trip north, during which we spoke French extremely badly but still ate extremely well. Très bien! The best restaurant music we heard was in Québec City, where, after hiking all day through St.-Roch, we wandered into the Cafe Abraham-Martin in the Complexe Méduse just as the owner put on David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust—the whole album. *pompe le poing* (The worst was also in Québec City, when an otherwise lovely lunch at Laurie Raphaël was accompanied by this—in a remix that Went. On. Forever.)

Anyway, one of the happenings I missed was the announcement that the board of directors of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra had re-signed president Anne Parsons for another three years. Parsons was the face of management during the orchestra's six-month strike—in fact, the deal was agreed to back in March, before the strike had even ended.

This sort of thing, it turns out, is something of a minor DSO tradition. Back in 1919, the pianist and conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch gave the DSO an ultimatum: he would only sign on as music director if he got a new concert hall.

The directors of the Orchestral Association decided that they had no choice but to build a new hall. A hastily assembled building committee selected C. Howard Crane as the architect. Within two weeks the committee had purchased the site of old Wesminster Presbyterian Church and raised half a million dollars in building funds. Crane's general contractor—prepared to work day and night to rush the building to completion—promised that it would be finished on schedule.... The contractor further showed his zeal by starting demolition of the church at a corner of the roof while a final wedding ceremony was still going on inside.

(Source.) Orchestra Hall—now part of the Max M. Fisher Music Center—is today one of the orchestra's biggest financial headaches, the collateral on a $54 million balloon loan taken out in the face of what was revealed to be the financial bubble of the last decade. Decisions like that have not exactly reflected well on the prowess of the DSO board, and while the Music Center debacle predates Parsons, when that board expresses its confidence in her ("proven expertise in navigating challenging economic climates," according to the board chair, who also runs a commercial real-estate company—hmmmm), it does create a bit of a with-friends-like-these situation. Hence the head of the orchestral committee calling Parsons' contract extension "disappointing and puzzling." (Definitely puzzling timing—was a change in management on the negotiating table? Outside supporters were calling for it, at least.)

A change of leadership would seem to be a common-sense move in Detroit, if only to clear the air of lingering bad feelings. But, then again, there are plenty of organizations—orchestras included—that are rife with bad feelings yet still hold up just fine. It might be a little more trenchant to say that a change of leadership is necessary based on a political-scientific analysis of European fiscal policy in reaction to the OPEC oil shocks of the 1970s. No, really! Well, maybe only kind of, but still fun to think about. Consider the work of Fritz W. Scharpf, emeritus director of the Max Planck Insititute for the Study of Societies. For a long time, Scharpf's main research topic has been European integration and the difficulties and contradictions therein, but along the way, he's come up with a nicely trenchant way of thinking about the relationship between varying approaches to economic policy and political legitimacy.

Back in the 1970s, the decision by OPEC to pump up oil prices put a severe strain on the then-prevalent Keynesian model of macroeconomic management—government spending and tax cuts to stimulate demand, spending cuts and tax increases to keep demand (and inflation) from overheating. As Scharpf explains:

Under these conditions, governments committed to Keynesian demand management were confronted with a dilemma: If they chose to fight unemployment with monetary and fiscal demand reflation, they would generate escalating rates of inflation; but if they would instead fight inflation with restrictive fiscal and monetary policies, the result would be mass unemployment.

What's more—

In Germany and Switzerland, by contrast, governments were unable to reflate the economy because monetary policy was determined by an independent central bank that was unconditionally committed to the defense of price stability—in which case the bank's tight-money policy would neutralize expansionary fiscal impulses.... Under these conditions, major job losses were unavoidable. They could only be softened if real wages were quickly adjusted downwards, which was true in Germany and Switzerland but not in the other hard-currency countries practicing an imported (and perhaps less clearly understood) version of the Bundesbank's monetarism.

The Bundesbank—Germany's central bank—was long marked (pun—ha) by its devotion to monetarist policies: basically, focusing on maintaining price stability via control of the money supply rather than aiming for full employment by stimulating demand. It's supply-side, rather than demand-side policy, the kind of thing that can lead to massive deficits (e.g., Reagan-era US) or massive unemployment (e.g., Thatcher-era UK). In Germany, though, it worked pretty well for a lot of the 1970s and 80s. How come? In a talk he gave at the London School of Economics last month, Scharpf sums up:

[The Bundesbank] took great pains to explain, to the government, the unions and the public, how coordination by monetary policy would not only ensure price stability but also produce economically superior and politically justifiable macroeconomic outcomes. Once rampant inflation was brought under control, it would precisely monitor the state of the German economy and pre-announce annual monetary targets by reference to the current “output gap”. Maximum non-inflationary growth would then be achieved if fiscal policy would merely allow the “automatic stabilizers” to rise and fall over the business cycle, and if wages would rise with labor productivity.... In other words, responsibility for the management of the economy would be assumed by the “non-political” monetary policy of the independent Bank, whereas non-inflationary fiscal and wage policies could be conducted with a low political profile.

In Scharpf's analysis, Keynesian policies have high political salience—because they directly involve taxes and government services, they tend to produce strong and immediate political reactions. Monetarist policies have low political salience—they're pretty technical and behind-the-scenes, so there's some insulation from the churn of the political surface. But monetarist policies require that such low salience be maintained—which is why the Bundesbank did so much legwork getting everybody on board, ensuring low salience down the line. (Compare with the period of German reunification, when the Bundesbank was pulled into more highly politically salient waters against Chancellor Helmut Kohl, with resulting damage to the Bundesbank's reputation.)

And now for the question that explicitly or implicitly comes along in at least 75% of posts in this space: So where exactly is this going? Well, it's hardly an exact analogue, but orchestras respond to fiscal crises with policies that are more or less monetarist. While it might be fun to see what would happen if an orchestra tried to spend its way out of a crisis in the Keynesian manner, it can't really happen because orchestras can't issue debt. Instead, they cut—they cut costs, they cut wages, they cut performances, &c. But, as in Germany, that only works in an atmosphere of low political salience—the exact opposite of what the DSO has managed to achieve. Even if you happen to think that managerial brinkmanship was the DSO's best plan, if we borrow Scharpf's ideas, it fairly guarantees that there's no way to get back to a low-salience situation without either a change of management or a change of orchestra—severely curtailing the possibility of any further monetarist solutions to any subsequent crises. (Again, perhaps not an exact analytical fit, but pointing in an interesting direction.)

High political salience really brings out a lot of the more curious organizational aspects of orchestras—for instance, the way the players are not just employees, but also the product, and a crucial political constituency. It also points up that boards and, by extension, management, are not always terribly accountable—high political salience demands such accountability in governmental situations, but boards are largely self-governing. This is not to say that all boards are untenable; some boards, at least, appreciate the value of low salience. This is, again, a pretty fancy justification for what would seem to be common sense. But it does hint at how, if this kind of non-profit doesn't happen to have either an institutional history or a managerial interest in maintaining deep, representative, competent governance, it can be pretty hard to get that to change, even when the need is obvious.

Detroit's Orchestra Hall and the bit of land it sits on—the corner of Woodward Avenue and Parsons Street—has some interesting accountability karma. Woodward Avenue runs along the original Saginaw Trail. The plot was originally one of the so-called Park Lots, created in 1806 when the U.S. Congress authorized the "Governor and Judges' Plan," an appropriation of land that was previously a common. The lots were supposed to be distributed to settlers who had been displaced by the massive fire of 1805, with the remainder to be sold to raise money for a courthouse and jail. Instead, officials repeatedly dragged the process out, in order to squeeze out the original inhabitants, buy up lots for themselves, and fuel a speculative real-estate boom. Silas Farmer, Detroit's 19th-century city historiographer, was rather elegantly sarcastic about it in his History of Detroit and Wayne County:

The Governor and Judges, first in charge, undoubtedly assumed unlawful power in giving away lots to various churches and societies, and exceeded their authority in many particulars. None of these powers were included in the Act creating the Land Board. The ease with which their sessions changed from land-board to legislative, and from legislative to judicial, as the exigencies of the case seemed to them to demand, was something marvellous even for that time of transition.

Only twenty years after its 1919 construction, the DSO vacated Orchestra Hall, the financial pressures of the Depression being too much to handle. The city seized the hall in 1941 for non-payment of taxes, then sold it to Ben and Lou Cohen, who already owned a chain of theatres; the Cohen brothers re-opened the Hall as the Paradise, which played host to some of the biggest jazz acts of the time. When, in 1970, the structure faced demolition at the hands of the fast-food hamburger chain Gino's, a concerned-citizens committee was able to buy it and begin restorations.

The Orchestra moved back in 1989—which means that Orchestra Hall has only housed an orchestra for well less than half of its existence. On the one hand, the Hall is a tribute to the DSO's perseverance; on the other hand, it is a fount of cautionary tales. But the board seems disinterested in learning from the past, once again throwing a wedding while knocking down the church.

Equal opportunity

2011-06-20T09:26:00.001-05:00

Reviewing Kristian Bezuidenhout.
Boston Globe, June 20, 2011.

Additive synthesis

2011-06-20T09:25:00.002-05:00

Reviewing Marc-André Hamelin.
Boston Globe, June 20, 2011.

Steppin' Out

2011-06-18T11:30:00.000-05:00

Reviewing the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra.
Boston Globe, June 18, 2011.

Soul to soul, brother to brother, a cappella

2011-06-16T23:42:00.001-05:00

Reviewing The King's SIngers.
Boston Globe, June 17, 2011.

Old School

2011-06-15T10:00:00.000-05:00

Reviewing Early Music America's Young Performers Festival.
Boston Globe, June 17, 2011.

Transformers

2011-06-14T09:05:00.000-05:00

Reviewing A Far Cry.
Boston Globe, June 14, 2011.

Shir Heart, Attack

2011-06-07T10:15:00.001-05:00

Reviewing Chorus pro Musica.
Boston Globe, June 7, 2011.

Musicians wrestle everywhere

2011-05-24T11:33:00.002-05:00

Reviewing Ashmont Hill Chamber Music.
Boston Globe, May 24, 2011.

The final paragraph was whittled for length—the original:

But the rest of the program engagingly wrestled with dualities. Snow’s energetic rendition of two “Figments” by Elliott Carter seemed to collect the the concert’s threads of pugnacious, eloquent self-assertion. The second, “Remembering Mr. Ives,” paid shadowboxing tribute with a series of punchy double-stops, answered by slippery, icy harmonics: the American eagerness to get in the ring with ghosts.

Strauss and Mahler Re-Enact Your Favorite Movie Moments (6)

2011-05-18T07:35:00.000-05:00

Click to enlarge.

For the 100th anniversary of the death of Gustav Mahler.

Previously:

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Midnight Cowboy.
The Ten Commandments.
It's a Wonderful Life.

Carnival cruise

2011-05-18T07:29:00.003-05:00

Reviewing the Boston Pops.
Boston Globe, May 18, 2011.

I love to tell the story

2011-05-17T08:27:00.002-05:00

Reviewing Coro Allegro and the United Parish Chancel Choir in Kareem Roustom's The Son of Man.
Boston Globe, May 17, 2011.

Side note: having read The Prophet at an age when one is presumably most susceptible to it and not been seduced, I confess that I've never been much of a Kahlil Gibran fan, but Jesus the Son of Man, which I had never read, is quite good.

Diplomatic recognition

2011-05-16T09:21:00.003-05:00

My original copy went missing in a move sometime during the Clinton administration, but I am happy to report that the single greatest photograph of the Cold War is once again in the library at Soho the Dog HQ:

In honor of such an auspicious reacquisition, some random, politically-angled links.

Curtis Hughes' Say It Ain't So, Joe, an opera starring Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, is looking for Kickstarter money for a planned recording. Selling point for disillusioned cynics: none of the money will actually go to any candidates!

After 22 years on the 4th floor of City Hall (just longer than his father), Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley spent his last day in office taking in a concert.

A primer on Russia's emerging political pop underground.

Ah, Jersey.

The 2nd District Court of Appeals ruled that week that a Florida state law making it illegal to play your car stereo too loud was unconstitutional. (In possibly related news: Luther Campbell, mayoral candidate.)

A Newt Gingrich scholarship for music students? A Newt Gingrich scholarship for music students.

He went through wild ecstatics when I showed him my lymphatics

2011-05-10T11:20:00.006-05:00

I was so busy last week that I missed the cost-disease Internetically rearing its head yet again. Greg Sandow brought it up as Exhibit no. 74-D (or so) in the ongoing hand-wringing over orchestral finances (see Louisville, Honolulu, Detroit, Syracuse, Philadelphia). Alex over at Wellsung took exception, on the eminently reasonable grounds that reports of the impending death of orchestras have been around for an awfully long time, and have invariably proved to be exaggerated.

I love the cost-disease—I love thinking about it, I love doing thought-experiments to test it, I love reading the academic respiration of confirmation and refutation it has inspired for the past 50 years. It's catnip for ruminators: a simple idea that gets less and less simple the more you poke at it. The idea is this: you can divide industries into those in which technology enables a lowering of labor costs over time, and those in which it doesn't. The performing arts tend to fall into the latter category, the standard illustration being that you can't use technology to get the required performers for a string quartet below four. Over time, the argument goes, industries afflicted with the cost-disease are increasingly disadvantaged in comparison with those that aren't.

I wrote a thing about the cost-disease back in 2007—good Lord, that's four years ago now. There are probably orchestras who have formed, had their Golden Age, and run aground on the shoals of a dithering board in that time! I was kind of afraid to read it again, but I think it holds up reasonably well; for all my customary dystopian glee, I did approach both the severity of the cost-disease and its rebuttals with some degree of skepticism.

For example, I still think I was right to draw a line between the performance industry and the recording industry—as much as people like to point to recordings as a technological innovation that increases per-worker productivity for musicians, it struck me then as a fundamentally different business, as it strikes me now. Which is not to say that an organization can't aid its own bottom line by selling recordings on the side, which has been an increasing trend—Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, London, BMOP: all those orchestras have started their own labels. Having spent two days at that Rethink Music conference hearing everybody say that recordings are the promotional giveaways of the future, I'll be curious to see how long it lasts, but, like ticket prices, if you can get people to pay, good on ya. But it's a parallel business, a complementary business, not the performance business itself. Now, streaming concerts, that's more interesting—although, so far, most organizations who are streaming concerts online are doing so for free; whether that can be successfully monetized, to use everyone's favorite vulgar term, is still something of an open question. I, for one, am skeptical that the success of the Met Opera high-def simulcasts is something that can be widely imitated, for instance. But if there's a market there, I think, in a way, that does change the calculus of the cost-disease. (It doesn't cure it, but it resets its progression to a more manageable level.)

But there's some things I wish I had highlighted more—I just didn't see them clearly enough at the time. And they all revolve around how easily the idea can slip into a pejorative, market-centric mindset. I mean, we're calling it a disease, for gosh sakes. We could just as accurately say: there are prominent labor efficiencies in the performing arts that are non-scalable. That it makes it sound like what it is: a value-neutral structural trait of such organizations. The cost-disease is not a crisis—not "the killer part of the long-term rise in expenses," as Sandow puts it—but a given feature of running an orchestra or similar institution. The fact that some orchestras have done a notably poor job at managing that feature should not disguise the fact that many other orchestras have managed it fairly well.

I think that pro-market bent is revealed in the persistent insinuation that the cost-disease has only really been an issue since orchestras went to full-year schedules in the 1960s—a time period apparently chosen to conveniently provide a union scapegoat. Here's Tony Woodcock, the president of NEC, hmm-hmming that one on his blog:

Subsequent contract negotiations transformed the musicians’ jobs into positions governed by Collective Bargaining Agreements that converted compensation packages from a variable to a fixed cost. (The financial model of any orchestra in the country today will show the musicians as the biggest single cost.)

I am having a hard time imagining any orchestra anywhere at any time in history where the musicians weren't the single biggest cost. (Then again, Woodcock was relying on the pro-management bias of the Flanagan report.) Sandow, too, got into this, relating that he "first heard about structural deficits years ago, at a private meeting, from people who ran major orchestras that weren't Philadelphia." Really? Because I could have first heard about structural deficits in, say, 1881, when the Boston Symphony Orchestra ran a structural deficit in its first season of existence, ran a deficit every season after that, and nevertheless still is around. Here's Henry Lee Higginson's original prospectus for the orchestra:

Such was the idea, and the cost presented itself thus: Sixty men at $1500 = $90,000 + $3,000 for conductor and + $7,000 for other men (solo players of orchestra, concert-master, i.e., first violin, etc., etc.) = $100,000. Of this sum, it seemed possible that one half should be earned, leaving a deficit of $50,000, for which $1,000,000 is needed as principal. (M. A. DeWolfe Howe, The Boston Symphony Orchestra 1881-1931, p. 16)

That's still the model: pay the musicians, take in what you can from ticket sales, build up an endowment to cover the deficit. The BSO was lucky enough to have Higginson to make up those deficits himself, but just because the BSO, in its early days, had a development pool that made up for in robustness what it lacked in diversification should not take away from the realization that, even in that good old Gilded Age, the orchestra was relying on a development pool. This has been part of management's job from the get-go: shake the trees to make up the difference. That's not a challenge to the business model, it is the business model.

It's the intuitive resistance to viewing that model as "viable" that's at the heart of what I've learned about the cost-disease since that 2007 primer. Alex rightly notes that "the cost disease idea and its predictions of inescapable economic annihilation for the performing arts seem just a bit too convenient for those who indulge in classical music pessimism." I would also add that, in my experience and reading, an eagerness to rebut and dismiss the cost-disease is awfully prevalent among those who indulge in a libertarian or free-market-based worldview. I have a fondness for any idea that bothers triumphalists and pessimists alike, which gets at what I now think about the cost-disease: that it is, in a way, the boundary at which the postulates of capitalist society—all those free-market assumptions that, no matter how reasonable or widely held, are still assumptions—derail. The cost-disease is hardly fatal, not necessarily a source of crisis, but just a fact of life for certain types of endeavors; that we view it as something to be diagnosed and possibly cured just shows how big the disconnect is between the value of performance and the price the market puts on it. The two other industries cited as textbook examples of the cost-disease—education and health care—show the same disconnect, in terms of both underpricing and overpricing. Behind the cost-disease is a set of assumptions about efficiency and progress; but the cost-disease shows up right where those assumptions begin to fray.

Lady of Spain, I adore you

2011-05-07T14:23:00.001-05:00

Reviewing Opera Boston's Maria Padilla.
Boston Globe, May 7, 2011.

Concentratin'

2011-05-06T10:00:00.005-05:00

The Boston Symphony Orchestra announced their 2011-12 season today. My colleague Jeremy Eichler gives the rundown over at the Boston Globe, along with some reading of the tea leaves as well as more leaves to read. If, like me, your default category is composers, here's a handy list:

9 works: Beethoven

7 works: Mozart (this includes all five violin concerti, performed by Anne-Sophie Mutter over two concerts to start the season)

4 works: Ravel, Strauss (Richard), Stravinsky

3 works: Berlioz, Brahms, Debussy, Haydn, Harbison (finishing a two-season survey of his symphonies, including the Sixth, the BSO's only world premiere this season), Mendelssohn (including Lobgesang, which the symphony is letting Riccardo Chailly take a crack at)

2 works: Bartók, Dvořák, Prokofiev, Weber (Weber? Weber)

1 work: Bach (J. S.), Barber, Britten, Carter (the Flute Concerto, also headed to San Francisco for a December tour), Dutilleux, Kodály, Lutosławski, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Salonen (the Violin Concerto, with the composer conducting), Schumann, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Turnage (From the Wreckage, a US premiere), Wagner

So, yeah, Beethoven is taking up nearly 13 percent of the schedule. And those first four groups: 35 percent of the composers control 66 percent of the programming wealth! Just for fun, I ran the BSO's seasonal composer distribution through a calculator to come up with its Gini coefficient, the standard shorthand for income inequality—the higher the number, the more concentrated the wealth. The BSO's coefficient—37.9—isn't quite as bad as the United States' (45, as of 2007), but nowhere near Sweden's coefficient of 23. One can, with questionable statistical validity, find the closest match on this list and thus declare the BSO the East Timor of orchestras.

Ah, you might say, but not all of those works occupy equal space on each program—Lobgesang, for instance, takes up the whole evening. Well, I ran those numbers, too—if a piece was one of three on a program that received four performances, for instance, it was credited with four-thirds of a performance. By that measure, Beethoven is now taking up over 16 percent of the schedule—and the Gini coefficient balloons to 43.4, on par with, say, Guyana.

The BSO's press release, incidentally, included this spin:

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4, arguably the least-known and least-performed of the composer’s nine symphonies

That's kind of like calling Ringo the least-known Beatle, but I give the BSO marketing department props for putting forth the effort.

Update (5/6): I ran one more set: the Cleveland Orchestra's 2011-12 season. Coefficient for works-by-composer alone: 38.2. Weighted by number of performances: 41.8.

Update (5/6): OK, one more, to compare with a new-music-focused group. The Boston Modern Orchestra Project's 2010-11 orchestral season shows a by-composer coefficient of 9.7, and a weighted-by-performance coefficient of 11.2. Much lower, not surprisingly; all but two composers are represented by a single piece of music. Expand the data to include their chamber concerts, and the by-composer coefficient becomes 11.4—but the weighted-by-performance coefficient jumps all the way to 37.9. Why? BMOP does multiple performances of a small number of programs, but the majority of the programs only get one performance, so the weighting becomes seriously skewed. (Eliminate those repetitions of programs, and the coefficient falls back to 18.4.)

It's like 1993, and it's weird as hell to me

2011-05-02T13:25:00.003-05:00

I spent a good portion of last week at the Rethink Music conference in Boston, and my oft-oblique impressions are now up at NewMusicBox:
Courts and Conquerors: Thinking and Rethinking the Rethink Music Conference.

One important presentation that didn't make it into the article was Jean Cook and Kristin Thomson's overview of the Future of Music Coalition's Artist Revenue Streams research project, an ambitious survey- and interview-based test of all those hypotheses about the positive effects of the Internet on musicians' careers that everybody assumes but, it turns out, no one has ever actually looked into. They're on the prowl for data; if you're a musician of any genre interested in telling them something about your household income, they'd be very interested in you.

It gets bigger, baby, and heaven knows

2011-05-02T13:23:00.002-05:00

Reviewing Christian Tetzlaff and Antje Weithaas.
Boston Globe, May 2, 2011.

I am the DJ, I am what I play

2011-05-02T13:20:00.002-05:00

Reviewing Dawn Upshaw and Stephen Prutsman.
Boston Globe, May 2, 2011.

"... the magician and the prophet on the one hand, and in the elected war lord, the gang leader and condotierre on the other hand"

2011-04-25T11:48:00.006-05:00

The Boston Symphony Orchestra is into the last two weeks of its season, under a pair of guest conductors who might also be reminders of the group's post-James Levine conducting predicament: Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, often touted as a candidate for a caretaker BSO music director, and Charles Dutoit, currently filling a similar role at the crying-poor Philadelphia Orchestra. I am hardly an expert in classical-music criticism—as Globe readers rarely hesitate to remind me—but I do have a good trick for gauging the relationship between a professional orchestra and a guest conductor, a ridiculously simple one, but one that usually tells a great deal about the concert at hand: is the orchestra looking at the conductor? It's not necessary, after all; I could probably get up in front of the Boston Symphony, give the downbeat for Brahms 2, and then walk away, and the orchestra would probably come up with a pretty decent Brahms 2 all on their own. There have been BSO concerts I've seen where the players spent more time stealing glances at the concertmaster than at the conductor. There have been a few that started out that way, but where, over the course of the concert, the conductor won them over, so that by the end, the players were hanging on every wave of the stick. And then there's the ones where the podium is the natural focus of attention from beginning to end. It's not foolproof, but, for the most part, that's a corresponding progression in the quality of the concerts as well.

It's a criterion that measures, among other things, a conductor's charisma, which is something I was thinking about in the context of both the Boston and Philadelphia situations. Not so much charisma in the sort of vague, strong-personality everyday use of it, but in the somewhat more specific way that the great German sociologist Max Weber used it. Weber's ideas about charisma come in a long lecture, Politik als Beruf ("Politics as a Vocation"), that he delivered late in his life, in the wake of World War I. (You can read "Politics as a Vocation" here; the translation, uncredited, is by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills.) Weber characterized three different kinds of political leadership:

To begin with, in principle, there are three inner justifications, hence basic legitimations of domination.

First, the authority of the 'eternal yesterday,' i.e. of the mores sanctified through the unimaginably ancient recognition and habitual orientation to conform. This is 'traditional' domination exercised by the patriarch and the patrimonial prince of yore.

There is the authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace (charisma), the absolutely personal devotion and personal confidence in revelation, heroism, or other qualities of individual leadership. This is 'charismatic' domination, as exercised by the prophet or—in the field of politics—by the elected war lord, the plebiscitarian ruler, the great demagogue, or the political party leader.

Finally, there is domination by virtue of 'legality,' by virtue of the belief in the validity of legal statute and functional 'competence' based on rationally created rules. In this case, obedience is expected in discharging statutory obligations. This is domination as exercised by the modern 'servant of the state' and by all those bearers of power who in this respect resemble him.

Weber's definition of domination is specifically in the context of the state, the power of which Weber analyzes as derived from its claim on a monopoly on the use of violent force: "The state is considered the sole source of the 'right' to use violence". The power wielded by a symphony orchestra is awfully garden-party by comparison. But one can, I think, find hints of Weber's three legitimations in every orchestra. Certainly the orchestra's artistic power is based, in large part, on the authority of an "eternal yesterday"; and some of the organizational power struggles could be traced to a conflict between that traditional authority and the rules-based legal authority of unions and corporate regulation.

But it's Weber's gift-of-grace (the literal translation of χαρισμα) that sets orchestras apart—they're some of the very few organizations whose leaders are, necessarily, even by definition, charismatic leaders. We might think of such charisma as a de facto requirement in the political sphere as well; Weber, in 1919, was already at least hinting at its predominance:

To be sure, the pure types are rarely found in reality. But today we cannot deal with the highly complex variant, transitions, and combinations of these pure types, which problems belong to 'political science.' Here we are interested above all in the second of these types: domination by virtue of the devotion of those who obey the purely personal 'charisma' of the 'leader.' For this is the root of the idea of a calling in its highest expression.

But charisma is a democratic choice, not a requirement. Garry Wills' polemic-disguised-as-a-meditation The Kennedy Imprisonment draws heavily on Weber's categories to make that point, contrasting the low-key, legalistic, trust-the-hierarchy administration of Eisenhower with JFK's explicitly charismatic brandishing—and appropriation—of presidential power. Since Kennedy, political success has, more often than not, been judged in charismatic terms. But political office is not inherently dependent on charisma—and such offices actually can resist charismatic leveraging. (As does the electorate—witness the pleasing-nobody limbo of Barack Obama, a charismatic figure but a temperamental legalist, trying to pivot from a Kennedy-esque campaign to a very Eisenhower-like style of governing.)

Orchestras, though, are predicated on charismatic leadership—you need somebody the players are going to look at. Wills' analysis, interestingly, suggests that such leadership is actually a chronic source of organizational instability. In the political sphere, charismatic leadership best flourishes in crisis situations—Wills points to the Kennedy administrations penchant for marathon, high-stakes convocations of decision-makers centered in the White House: "Since the charismatic leader's special powers grow from special dangers, the two feed on each other," Wills notes. "For some crises to be overcome, they must first be created." For orchestras, such crises tend to be centered around changes in leadership—music directors rarely depart except under circumstances of crisis, which, cyclically, gives the succeeding music director the fuel to exert a new round of charismatic authority. But such lacunae are perilous, especially now that the peripatetic, scheduled-years-in-advance conductor is the norm. The charismatic basis of music directorships means that the organizations are comparatively impoverished in the vacuum left by their departures. Wills again: "Charisma, the uniquely personal power, delegitimates institutions. Rule by dazzlement cannot be succeeded by mere constitutional procedure." He quotes Weber's biographer, Reinhard Bendix:

Such a transformation from charismatic leadership to traditional domination occurs most frequently when the problem of succession must be solved. In a strict sense that problem is insoluble, for charisma is an inimitable quality that some higher power is believed to have bestowed upon one person. Consequently a successor cannot be chosen at all. Instead, the followers wait in hope that another leader will appear who will manifest his own charismatic qualification. [emphasis added]

In that sense, the timing of the Philadelphia Orchestra board's decision to file for Chapter 11 is hardly coincidental, the weakness of the institution expressing itself in the absence of a permanent charismatic head. (Interim conductor Charles Dutoit, indeed, seemed surprised by the move.) As far as I know, the BSO is not in comparable financial distress (although, if Philadelphia gets away with their petition, I cynically would not be surprised to see every orchestra in the country try a similar maneuver the next time a contract re-negotiation is on the horizon). But they're most likely looking at a couple seasons, at least, without an official music director. Given Levine's history, one might chide them for not being more proactive in arranging for a successor, for letting the situation reach such a crisis point. Under Weber's analysis, though, the crisis is the point, the crisis is necessary before the institution can make a move, because the crisis is what lends authority to the next leader.

It's hard to imagine what a conductor who relied on Weber's "legality" would look like—even those who philosophically defer to "the authority of the score" tend to make such deference part of their charismatic aura (and can be among the most charismatic of all—Riccardo Muti, for example). Maybe such statute-based power can only be found in those ensembles that abstemiously avoid permanent conductorial authority—St. Luke's, Orpheus, A Far Cry, &c. For most traditionally-structured orchestras, though, charismatic leadership is par for the course—which means that, structurally speaking, so are regular doses of drama.

Update (4/25): Joshua Kosman thoughtfully looks on the bright side.

The Rachmaninoff Covenant

2011-04-21T12:40:00.004-05:00

As of this morning, the International Music Score Library Project, the online repository of public domain music, is offline, due to a rather iffy (to say the least) DMCA takedown demand from the UK-based Music Publishers Association. The full tale is on the IMSLP forum; Tim Rutherford-Johnson has commentary and links.

The trigger for this latest skirmish is the IMSLP's posting of the score to Rachmaninoff's The Bells, a work that is not under copyright in the US, no matter what the MPA might claim. But is the use of that particular piece and that particular composer coincidental? Hmmmm.

To wit: off the top of my head, I can think of three rationales for the MPA's attempted shutdown:

The MPA is a somewhat clueless organization, hoping to protect some royalties via corporate bullying.
The sheer questionability of the takedown notice is aimed at sparking a legal challenge that can then be appealed, a UK version of Golan v. Holder.
The copyright maneuverings behind the Rachmaninoff legacy are more cloak-and-dagger than I thought.

History inclines my opinion towards the first option; the devil-making-work-for-idle-hands aspect of certain corners of the legal profession might incline me towards the second. But my inner conspiracy theorist loves the fact that Rachmaninoff is at the center of this, because Rachmaninoff plus copyright equals fertile ground for at least mild conspiracy.

The majority of Rachmaninoff's works are public domain in the US for the simple fact that the nascent Soviet Union couldn't get their act together on copyright. Tsarist Russia had never signed on to the Berne Convention; Soviet attempts throughout the 1920s to create bilateral copyright treaties with various other countries were abortive. From 1917 until 1967 (when the USSR finally signed its first bilateral copyright treaty, with Hungary), the Soviets were not part of the international copyright system; works copyrighted in Europe or America, say, had no protection in the USSR, while works copyrighted in the USSR had no protection anywhere else. As soon as Rachmaninoff's music was published in Soviet Russia—The Bells, for instance, came off the press in 1920—it was PD everywhere else.

Stravinsky was in the same boat, which is why there are multiple versions of many of his pre-Soviet-era greatest hits—The Rite of Spring, The Firebird, &c.: Stravinsky revised the scores in order to copyright at least some version of them in the US and Europe. It's also a contributing factor, probably, to Stravinsky's demonic productivity. Rachmaninoff, though, neither revised his earlier works nor composed all that much after leaving Russia (though the selection was choice: the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and the Third Symphony both post-date his emigration and, thus, remain snugly under copyright).

That hasn't stopped Rachmaninoff's descendents from trying to reassert some copyright control over the PD works. Some efforts have been relatively above board—the Rachmaninoff Critical Edition, for instance, done with the full cooperation and input of Alexander Rachmaninoff, the composer's grandson, and duly copyrighted 2005—and some more curious: you might recall Alexander Rachmaninoff Wanamaker, Serge's great-great-grandson, who wanted to do new arrangements of the Rachmaninoff catalog, just different enough to warrant fresh copyright. Wanamaker died in a fire in 2009, and the status of his efforts isn't clear, although this refashioning of the Third Symphony into a "Fifth" Piano Concerto might be some indication of the trend.

Now, do I really think that shady Rachmaninoff-connected minions are somehow blackmailing MPA executives into pursuing this legal action? That'd be a great story, but, no, of course not. But the Rachmaninoff situation is exactly the sort of thing that's being contested in the above-mentioned Golan v. Holder. A little background: the Berne Convention, which originally dates from 1886, has been the general international framework for intellectual property ever since. Which doesn't mean that it's been hewed to ever since: the US and Russia only got around to joining the Convention in 1988 and 1995, respectively, and when they did, they did so while specifically exempting themselves from the Convention's stipulations for retroactivity—in other words, neither country wanted to try and sort out royalties on works that, in each country, had been public domain for the better part of the 20th century. However, subsequent treaties have muddied the water, both WIPO, from 1996 (and the basis for the DMCA law that provided cover for MPA's cease-and-desist), and the so-called Uruguay Round, the 1994 trade agreements that also brought you the World Trade Organization. It's the latter that is the basis for Golan v. Holder—the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, under which Congress ratified the agreement, amended the US Copyright Code, providing for "the automatic restoration of copyright in certain foreign works that are in the public domain in the United States but protected by copyright or neighboring rights in an eligible source country." (According to the US Copyright Office.) That would be one heck of a precedent right there. But note that, even if the URAA were to stand up under judicial scrutiny, The Bells should have remained unaffected—its theoretical 75-year copyright term expired the day the URAA took effect, and, according to the Berne Convention, such natural-causes temporal expiration of copyright is immune to retroactivity.

Hence the prima facie ridiculousness of the MPA's claim. But, given the US Supreme Court's conservative majority's combination of pro-corporate cheerleading and (except for Anthony Kennedy) anti-international skepticism, I, for one, am not quite sure what to expect from Golan v. Holder; as a legal stalking horse for a similar case in the EU (not to mention a mixed metaphor), The Bells might adequately toll. Or, again, maybe the MPA is just yet another hidebound entity, deciding to run down the Internet, but tying their legal shoelaces together. Either one is plausible, really. Far less plausible, but far more satisfying to my dark, mischievous soul, would be a cabal of Rachmaninoff intimates, making a solemn vow in 1943, fanning out across the Western world, insinuating themselves into the corridors of copyright power, biding their time until the trap was ready to be sprung. The Bells would actually be a pretty good soundtrack for that movie.

Update (4/21): The MPA backpedals, kind of.

Further update (4/21): IMSLP is back up.

I don't know when that road turned onto the road I'm on

2011-04-20T12:30:00.003-05:00

Over at The Faster Times, some thoughts on the Philadelphia Orchestra's bankruptcy filing.

I wish I were happy

2011-04-18T08:59:00.001-05:00

Reviewing Emmanuel Music's production of The Rake's Progress.
Boston Globe, April 18, 2011.

Nun hab' ich ewig Leid und Grämen!

2011-04-15T13:40:00.005-05:00

There hasn't been much in this space lately—that's what an impending 11-service Holy Week gauntlet will do to one's productivity, I guess. But, in the interests of catching up: a couple weeks ago, the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra had an in-house "Composer Madness" competition, in which players got to vote on matchups in an NCAA-style bracket of the League of American Orchestra's list of most-performed composers. The final round pitted Beethoven against Mahler, at which point Kathryn Bacasmot flattered Soho the Dog HQ with a request for a commemorative cartoon, to run on the group's Facebook page.

No big upset here; Beethoven took the crown, so this is what ran (click to enlarge):

Had Mahler won, this is what would have run:

I love how, in that last panel, Ludwig came out looking like a pre-1960 Peanuts character.

Greased lightning

2011-04-12T10:30:00.001-05:00

Reviewing the St. Petersburg Philharmonic and Alisa Weilerstein.
Boston Globe, April 12, 2011.

To the Victor belongs the spoils

2011-04-11T09:31:00.002-05:00

Reviewing the Orchestra Sinfonica dell'Europa Unita's "Notte Tricolore."
Boston Globe, April 11, 2011.

Copyright claims mean Gramsci's writings tend to be search-only on the Web, but the writings of Benedetto Croce remain readily available.

Weekend Insomnia Playlist

2011-04-09T00:43:00.004-05:00

Alex Ross posted a playlist last week that made me feel lazy for not blogging more; I mean, come on, just write down what you're listening to, how hard is that? Now, I think I've said it here before, but I am a pretty obsessive listener; items are listened to constantly and repetitively for a few days/weeks, only to then drop completely off my radar. So it might be fun to see what's in heavy rotation right now:

"All Cried Out" (Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam) (see above). You know how some pop songs have isolated moments that you listen to the song over and over again just to sample? (For example, I once spent a month playing Blur's "Country House" to death solely for the transition into the second chorus.) "All Cried Out" is like two dozen of those moments strung together—and yet feels weirdly ephemeral when considered as an actual song. As if you can only measure it in parallax or something.
Strauss/Godowsky: Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes from "Die Fledermaus" (Katherine Chi, piano). An excellent live performance I downloaded from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's website. Is there any composer who ever brought more technique, polish, and sheer elbow grease to self-indulgence than Godowsky? The wildly-overpriced-yet-insanely-good gourmet burger of Romantic pianism.
Andy Williams' Greatest Hits (Andy Williams). Andy Williams: a man whose cool is predicated on how much he simply doesn't care whether you think he's cool or not. An inspiration for us all. (Seriously, I had totally forgotten just how smooth Andy Williams is; if there's even a dull edge on this record, I haven't found it.)
George Antheil: Sonatas for Violin and Piano (Mark Fewer, violin; John Novacek, piano). This has been the go-to driving music for about five weeks now. Antheil's Second Sonata might be the most sardonically literate cartoon music ever; the First manages to both cheerfully plunder Stravinsky and Bartók while sassing them at the same time. The performance is some of the most committedly stylish 1920s provocation you're likely to hear. High-minded snotty punk music. I love it.
9 (Public Image Ltd). Speaking of high-minded snotty punk music—or post-punk, anyway.... I was cleaning the den a couple months ago when I found a cassette of this that poet and cultured, sophisticated man about town Jack Miller had dubbed off for me back in high school. Upon said finding, played it straight through and then played it straight through again, and have been going back to that well every couple of days ever since. 9 has the reputation of being too clean and polished for a PiL album, but something about John Lydon sneering over all those shiny, happy grooves at least partially redeems the late 80s for me.
Charles Wuorinen: The Haroun Songbook. Here's what happened: I was throwing together a CD mix for a longish car ride, wanted a nice blast of atonal cheer to shift gears after Billy Joel's "Summer, Highland Falls," and somewhat impulsively settled on "It's a Princess Rescue Story," and then started to remember just how oddly catchy a lot of these songs are, and now they're all stuck in my craw. Especially "It's a Princess Rescue Story."
"Summer, Highland Falls" (Billy Joel). Haters gonna hate, but, deep down, they wish they could come up with a melody this good.
Bach: BWV 911, 826, 807 (Martha Argerich, piano). This one has been drifting in and out of the obsessive playlist for a few months. It's a great clear-out-the-muck aural reset album: it's like one of those really good understated 1970s thrillers where everything's in sharp focus and it's smart enough to assume you'll think for yourself and it's tricky enough to keep you on your toes, and when it's over, everything around you seems to have just a touch more clarity. I actually bought this album for a dollar at a library sale; I would have shed a tear for the declining cultural standards of civic institutions, but, on the other hand, that's a dollar well-spent.

Oxygen, oxygen right to the brain

2011-04-04T09:13:00.002-05:00

Reviewing Harvard's Fromm Concert: Ensemble SurPlus and the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble.
Boston Globe, April 4, 2011.

Kinemacolor

2011-04-01T09:23:00.002-05:00

Reviewing Sound Icon.
Boston Globe, April 3, 2011.

Concert last weekend, online now, in print on Sunday. Better late than never.

It's taking longer than we thought

2011-03-25T09:09:00.003-05:00

From Dwight's Journal of Music, vol. III, no. 10 (June 11, 1853), pp. 75-76:

Music as a branch of Commerce.
The N.Y. Musical World and Times is informed that the music trade of this country, for 1852, amounted to twenty-seven millions of dollars.

The same journal says:

"The Piano-forte trade of this country amounted last year to upwards of twelve millions of dollars: and should it increase in as great a ratio for twenty years to come as it has for twenty years past, the Piano-forte crop of the North will exceed the Cotton crop of the South. Then, political economists will have a less discordant subject upon which to expend their learning and eloquence, and perhaps our national counsels will present the pleasing spectacle of "honorable gentlemen," from all parts of the country, engaged in acoustical, melodic, and harmonious discussions and experiments. When these tuneful days shall arrive, it is to be hoped that many of, if not all the discords which now rack the public tympanum, will be so "prepared" and "resolved" that they will no longer mar the harmony of our Federal organization, and sectional strifes be superseded by national concord—results which could probably be achieved by a proper distribution of the "flats" and "sharps" of the nation, or better, perhaps, by dispensing with them altogether."

If that's movin' up then I'm movin' out

2011-03-22T09:02:00.006-05:00

Justin Davidson has an article in the latest New York taking a look at what he calls "the new New York School," those Gotham-based twenty- and (barely) thirty-something composers of fairly entrepreneurial bent dedicated to digital life, stylistic liberty, and the pursuit of a kind of grand, thoughtful eclecticism. (It's a little bit indicative of the atmosphere Davidson is sampling that most of the composers he mentions have first-name recognition: Judd, Nico, Missy, Timo, Tyondai.) Anyway, here's the money quote:

We idolize the radical who shreds the previous generation’s conventions, but every aesthetic revolution begets an ardent rigor of its own. The new New York School has a healthy distaste for tired conflicts and old campaigns. Despite their gifts and alertness to the moment, its composers seem muffled, bereft of zeal. What they badly need is a machine to rage against and a set of bracing creative constraints.

Chalk up another datum of proof of the ubiquity of the materialist conception of history! When I first read that, my left-Hegelian happy place lit up like a Christmas tree. I tend to regard music history as pretty Hegelian, not in the constant-historical-progress way, but in that it tends to shift about dialectically; and I certainly have more sympathy towards left-Hegelian interpretation—as troublesome as his philosophy can be, I tend to think that Marx got closer to the Way Things Are than Hegel ever did. But I confess that I found this article to be a little cognitively dissonant. That benchmark of a revolutionary shredding of previous conventions, of a necessity for conflict and constraint, is, itself, a leftover convention, and one that the new eclecticists haven't needed to shred. They've just moved beyond it.

When we think dialectic, we tend to think of the old thesis-antithesis-synthesis model (which was Fichte's, not Hegel's). Marx equated the historical dialectic with struggle, and, politically and economically, anyways, history bears him out. But the dialectic is not necessarily a conflict. Hegel's conception was that the dialectic expands understanding in such a way that what once seemed like conflicting information is revealed as just too limited a perspective. A few years back, I tried applying this idea to big-picture music history—one of my better meanderings, I think. Apply it to the new New York School, and what's the conflict they're rendering moot? I think you could make a plausible case that it's the very idea that aesthetic conflict is a necessary flag for generations to rally around.

This is not to say that constraint and/or rage can't produce great music. An awful lot of the music I love seems to be coming from that place—a sort of punk-ish, in-your-face energy—and it can sometimes buzz the mind to the extent that calmer music fades. (Here's an example of that happening to my critical self—to my ears, you put "Kontakte" on a program, most everything else is going to sound a little bit wan.) But, then again, I've heard plenty of music in which having something to prove was a curse, not a charge—all kinds of barely-warmed-over fake Copland that seemed to regard the mere act of having a tonal center as some sort of artistic triumph. Rage and constraint are aesthetic choices, not aesthetic necessities, and, like any aesthetic choice, it's what you make of the choice, not the choice alone. Anger is not the only kind of zeal there is—and it seems to me that the music Davidson is talking about has plenty of zeal, be it blinding cheer (Tyondai Braxton's Carl-Stalling-on-a-Skittles-bender Central Market) or quiet certainty (the scratched-negative vistas of Missy Mazzoli's Death Valley Junction). It's generous, not defiant. Maybe that seems a little weird nowadays.

Why am I going on and on about this? Well, it touched a nerve. Thinking about that article got me thinking about my own fairly unglorious career as a composer. It was about five years ago that I gave up trying to be a professional composer. I mean, I still compose—there's always something I'm tinkering with—and I still tend to engage music with a composer's brain. But I was pretty lousy at making a living at it, for two reasons. The first: you might not know it from my online persona, but I am very shy. If you ever see me having an extended conversation with anyone up to the level of casual acquaintance—listening, eye contact, the whole megilla—I am either a) enjoying at least my second drink, or b) working very, very hard. At the time I was trying to get some career traction, I was my own worst enemy. I remember going to new-music concerts and spending the entire first half in stomach-knot dread of intermission, when I would either screw up my courage and go network with all the other new-music types in the audience and then feel miserable because I was so graceless and awful at it, or I would stay safely in my seat and then feel miserable for not doing my job.

But the second reason is a little more interesting. I'm starting to think that I was, inadvertently, part of a kind of compositional lost generation. I didn't notice this until I was out at Tanglewood last summer, reviewing the Festival of Contemporary Music. This one was intended as a complete survey of Tanglewood's 70-year history. There was not a single composer born—like I was—in the 1970s. And I realized—of course there wouldn't be. We were all trained to be the next generation of academics and gatekeepers, but the previous generation of academics and gatekeepers were still around, holding ever tighter to those positions. That sense of aesthetic conflict—always dubious to begin with—was now, even worse, just going-through-the-motions office politics. And I found myself casting about for scraps. I was constantly second-guessing my own eclecticism (every call for scores I responded to, I always felt like Paul Newman trying to bribe his way into the poker game in The Sting: "That will get you first alternate, sir"). I began to resent when contemporaries had success (a truly squalid experience). I began to see opportunities as more important than the actual music. Finally, an opportunity came along, a last-minute concert for an ensemble I didn't have a piece for, so I threw something together. It was far too difficult, and a pretty terrible piece to boot, and it was cancelled on the eve of the concert. I was pissed and depressed—I mean even more so—for several weeks, until I finally wondered just why I was doing this to myself. So I quit. I was immediately a happier person. I have never regretted it.

Maybe I could have figured it all out, but I didn't, and I found other things to figure out that were better suited to me anyway. But I guess that's why, when I look at this new New York School, whether I like the musical output or not (though most of it I do), I don't see a group of composers who are lost, or tentative, or in need of a good old-school chip on their shoulder. I see a bunch of composers writing exactly what they want to write, building their own community of support, and making a go of it. In other words, in at least some partial way, they figured something out that I never did. I'm old enough that I can be happy about that. Because, both dialectically and practically, that's progress.

Nice 'n' Easy

2011-03-21T09:46:00.002-05:00

Reviewing the Cantata Singers and Ensemble.
Boston Globe, March 21, 2011.

Hector of the flashing (green) helmet

2011-03-17T11:48:00.003-05:00

I lost track of days this week, so it wasn't until I saw the third passer-by done up in neon green that I remembered that, yes, it's today that's St. Patrick's Day. I'm one-quarter Irish, which is probably just the right amount to enjoy an American St. Patrick's Day with some equanimity—not inclined to full-blown plastic leprechaun hat embarrassment, but not so Irish that I can't get behind the idea. Kind of like Christmas, I tend to embrace the sheer unmoored weirdness of St. Patrick's Day: a religious observance gone brazenly secular, a national celebration that thrives an ocean away from the nation it celebrates. (I remember once, a long time ago, spending St. Patrick's Day in a bar that marked the occasion by hiring a Highland bagpiper, kilt and all—even the Irish-Americans seemed to take it in the sort of "eh, why not" spirit in which it was intended.)

Driving around this morning, I got to thinking about who would qualify as the most "Irish" composer there is. Now, there are plenty of composers who are actually Irish (my go-to is always Charles Villiers Stanford, on the grounds that Elgar hated him; if you're annoying the English, then, as an Irishman, you're doing something right), but I'm talking about a composer whose personality and/or music fits the crazy American stereotype of Irishness that gets a lot of play every March. You know the image: a charming rogue, a garrulous spinner of tall tales, blasphemous yet sentimental, irresponsible yet lovable, &c., &c. There's not many. Wagner, maybe—nobody spins a tall tale like Wagner—but, then again, his irresponsibility isn't so much "lovable" as "obnoxiously self-centered and anti-Semitic." For a while, I toyed with the idea of Poulenc—the puckishness fits—but his Catholicism is more St. Teresa than Father Ted.

So I'm going to throw my one-quarter-Irish weight behind Hector Berlioz. Tall tales? In spades. More charming the more delusional his grandeur? Absolutely. And really, throwing a brass band into a Requiem mass is a pretty Irish move. Plus, he was Irish by marriage, at least for a little while. So there you go: Hector Berlioz, stereotypical Irishman. Strange? Sure, but not really any stranger than the holiday itself. Slainté!

If you want the job done right, you gotta use the proper tools

2011-03-15T10:35:00.005-05:00

Reviewing the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin.
Boston Globe, March 15, 2011.

We're still singing that same song

2011-03-14T20:52:00.004-05:00

Reviewing Paavali Jumppanen.
Boston Globe, March 15, 2011.

Until the world we roam, how can we be sure?

2011-03-14T11:58:00.005-05:00

Reviewing the Emerson String Quartet and Sir James Galway.
Boston Globe, March 14, 2011.

Steve Smith's review of the players' Saturday performance in New York, including the Adès premiere, can, and indeed, should be read here.

Angry, wrinkled Old Majesty

2011-03-13T00:52:00.003-05:00

Geoff Edgers, in today's Globe, reporting on the Boston Symphony Orchestra's search for a replacement for James Levine, interviews Jonathan Menkis, head of the BSO's players' committee:

Whom would he prefer? Menkis mentioned Bernard Haitink, the BSO’s principal guest conductor from 1995 to 2004, and “Lenny."

As in Leonard Bernstein. When life imitates comedy, that's a little scary, but when life imitates my attempts at comedy, a fallout shelter is probably your best bet.

One look and I had found a world completely new

2011-03-09T16:29:00.002-05:00

Because it was a good day to play it: Percy Grainger's arrangement of "Love Walked In":

Sit right down and you'll hear a tale

2011-03-08T10:03:00.002-05:00

Reviewing the Radius Ensemble.
Boston Globe, March 8, 2011.

Obéissant aux dieux, / Je pars et je vous aime!

2011-03-03T12:38:00.004-05:00

In Li Hao-ku's 13th-century, Yuan Dynasty drama Chang Boils the Sea, Chang, a wandering scholar, benefits from divine assistance in his wooing of Ch'iung-Lien, the daughter of the Divine Dragon King of the Eastern Sea. As the title promises, Chang eventually triumphs by magically boiling away the sea, eliminating the watery barrier that protects the Dragon King's palace. A happy ending—except that, as the audience has known all along, neither Chang nor Ch'iung-Lien are who they seem, but rather, former immortals, exiled from heaven for the crime of falling in love. Just as wedding bells seem about to ring, the pair instead abruptly cast off their temporal identities and leave the mortal world.

I thought of Chang and his travails after the announcement yesterday that James Levine was, indeed, resigning as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Interestingly, no one is quite sure just what this means yet: there was already much talk of Levine reducing his role, so a continued presence as some sort of principal-guest-conductor-type doesn't seem out of the question—and the September 1st resignation date at least hints at the possibility that Levine will have another summer to put a stamp on Tanglewood. (Or, maybe, it was just the most administratively convenient date.) But irregardless, some sort of end is here, and the odd, long-anticipated precipitousness with which it happened would have resonated with those Yuan Dynasty audiences. Levine and the BSO were both made for each other and, somehow, ill-starred. They could repeatedly summon divine magic—a fierce Moses und Aron, stunningly impeccable Wagner, a Les Troyens for the ages—but, just as repeatedly, their romance ran into near-melodramatic complications, of both health and schedule.

Levine's leave-taking thus seems a little anxious and inconclusive, reflecting the uncertainty that the possibilities opened up by his departure can outbalance the possibilities lost. Or maybe it's just the way the story fits all too well in what increasingly feels like the advent of a protracted mean season. In that regard, Chang Boils the Sea really did have the happier ending; as the again-immortal Ch'iung-Lien puts it:

Idly we shall watch the Peaches of Immortality redden on the trees,
For we have cast off this World of Dust and its Boundless Bitter Sea.

Cross-posted at The Faster Times.

But when u got it baby, nothing come 2 hard

2011-03-01T09:30:00.002-05:00

Reviewing Dmitri Hvorostovsky.
Boston Globe, March 1, 2011.

That was the curious incident

2011-02-28T10:50:00.002-05:00

Reviewing the Boston Philharmonic.
Boston Globe, February 28, 2011.

CSI: Atonality

2011-02-23T11:44:00.003-05:00

In 1914 young Frances Glessner fabricated a model of the famed Swiss quartette, the Flonzaley Quartette. Her handiwork was presented to the musicians at dinner one evening, an event remembered by her son: "It was covered with a large floral piece in the center of the table, which gave no hint as to what was underneath.... After dinner, the floral piece was removed with a flourish, and there, two feet from their noses, was this model of themselves playing!... For a moment nobody spoke, and then all four members of the quartette burst out in voluble language.... Each one of them pointed with delight to the eccentricities of the other three. I still remember Mr. Betti, with a magnifying glass peering over the shoulder of his own miniature, trying to read the music on the music rack. It had been specially written by Frederick Stock, the conductor of the Chicago Symphony, in the style of Schoenberg, but was impossible to play—a fact which Mr. Betti soon appreciated."
—Carol Callahan, Prairie Avenue Cookbook:
Recipes and Recollections from Prominent
19th-Century Chicago Families, p. 54

Prairie Avenue, on Chicago's South Side, was the address of choice for the city's Gilded Age industrial barons; the Glessner family—John Jacob Glessner was a vice-president of International Harvester—fit the profile in style, living in a mansion designed by H. H. Richardson and dispensing largesse as major supporters of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Due to family pressure, however, Frances Glessner Lee would have to wait until her 50s before she was able to pursue her true calling: forensic pathology. With George Magrath, the chief medical examiner in Boston, she founded Harvard's department of legal medicine. One can surmise that her model of the Flonzaley Quartet was impressive indeed; she later produced her famous "Nutshell Series of Unexplained Death" (example pictured above, via), intricately detailed one-inch-to-one-foot dioramas of crime scenes, designed as case studies for prospective investigators. Now located at the Maryland Medical Examiner's Office, the Nutshell Studies still serve their purpose, training the forensic eye to notice their crucial, grisly eccentricities.

What's there is cherce

2011-02-21T10:00:00.000-05:00

Reviewing the Takács Quartet.
Boston Globe, February 21, 2011.

Di piu' risorgere speranza e' muta!

2011-02-18T14:15:00.000-05:00

To be honest, there aren't as many perks as you might think to being a freelance classical-music critic, but one of them came in the mail yesterday: this new transfer of one of the great performances of Verdi's La Traviata: live, from Covent Garden in 1958, with Maria Callas as Violetta. Now, while, if forced to name my favorite soprano, I would probably pick Callas, I am hardly a Callas expert, but even I have long been aware of the run of Violettas she sang in the late 1950s—the La Scala performance in 1956, the famous Lisbon Traviata from 1958, and this Covent Garden version. (Callas also sang Violetta at the Met around the same time, before she was "fired" by Rudolf Bing; after Covent Garden, she took on the role one more time, in Dallas.) Callas in La Traviata is kind of like Citizen Kane—not everyone will agree that she was the best Violetta of all time, but the suggestion is more universally plausible than any other. And I'm not sure anyone has ever single-handedly raised the bar on a role the way Callas did; Violetta is, today, a much more challenging role, much more of a career benchmark, because Maria Callas sang it the way she did.

I am probably in a minority in that I prefer the Covent Garden Traviata to the Lisbon Traviata, but my rationale is pretty simple: for me, the heart of the opera is "Ah! Dite alla giovine," the duet that Violetta sings with Germont in Act II, and Callas's Covent Garden "Dite alla giovine" surpasses all others. With this new release, I thought I would try and figure out just why that is. It's tricky: by this point, Callas's general conception was pretty consistent. Compare the 1958 Lisbon with the 1958 Covent Garden, and they're pretty similar: the pared-down sound, the implacable rhythm. But there are differences—and, in the Covent Garden version, by design or accident, they pivot the duet from operatic drama to a traumatic critique of operatic drama.

"Dite alla giovine" is one of opera's great frozen moments. Germont has convinced Violetta to leave Alfredo, Germont's son, on the grounds that it will remove the scandal that would impair the marriage prospects of Germont's daughter. "Say to your daughter, so pure and fair," she sings, "that there is a victim of misfortune whose one ray of happiness before she dies is a sacrifice made for her." Germont expresses, rather effusively, his sadness at this turn of events. In the Lisbon Traviata, Germont was sung by Mario Sereni in booming fashion (to be fair, he's only following directions—Verdi writes the part up to a double-forte). This actually made for a neat dramatic moment: when Violetta returns to her opening phrases in duet with Germont, Callas's insistent quietness actually brings Sereni down from his heroic ring, and the effect is rather of the older man being jolted from public sympathy into a truer, private commiseration. But, perhaps anticipating the gap to be bridged, Callas has already opted for a stronger, bigger dynamic arch than she would use in London. By contrast, Mario Zanasi, the Covent Garden Germont, sings with a much leaner tone—almost tenor-like—and, as a result, the duet maintains a cooler, less roiled profile.

I think that coolness, that emptiness, is the key. You can hear it in the very start of the duet, the fermata "Ah!":

As always in 19th-century opera, the fermata is an implicit invitation to ornamentation. In the Lisbon Traviata, Callas does an elegant little portamento from the B-flat to the G. At Covent Garden, though, she did a stripped-down ornament: just the B-flat, then an A-flat, then a break before the next downbeat. And that's why I prefer the Covent Garden Traviata, because it's where Callas's conception of the character comes through with the most clarity. Her Violetta is not just a woman who has been forced by society into a corner. She is a woman who has, almost in a loophole way, leveraged the artifice of a projected personal image into a kind of defiant prominence. And, in punishment, she has that very artifice taken from her.

We sometimes compliment a performance or a work of art by calling it "artless"; it's an illusion, usually the result of an art so finely honed that it disappears from the artistic surface. Callas's "Dite alla giovine" is something more complex: it's the illusion of a loss of art. It's all the more shattering since her Act I singing, in both versions, is so vibrantly artful, a performance shot through with a confidence in its own performing flair. But Traviata is an opera all about pretense, and image, and how societal standing becomes more precarious as society gets more shallow. Like I've said before, the heartbreak is that Violetta is trapped in a world where Germont's argument actually makes sense to her. But then the ultimate emptiness of her own carefully-constructed artifice is laid bare.

Opera is, of course, one of the most artificial art forms there is, in a glorious way. It revels in its artifice; it posits it as more real than real, and sweeps you up in its amplification. Callas's Violetta plays off that, in a way that, perhaps, she knew would only work within the oppressive artificiality of La Traviata's world. For those few minutes of "Dite alla giovine," Callas rips down the curtain—the artifice is gone, the trappings are gone, the opera-ness of the opera is gone, and we're left with a palpably empty void. It is as if—to reference another opera—Salome were nothing but veils, her dance a dance of disintegration. Not many singers would dare to open up a glimpse of the abyss like that. Callas would, and it was, at least for me, quite possibly the most beautiful thing she ever did.

Unlikely music critic of the day

2011-02-18T10:12:00.006-05:00

We are right off the park, and I get a lot of nature taking Harriet to the amusements. The other day, Anton Webern's music was on the radio. She heard it and said, "It's like wild animals thru the woods walking," and then, "It's like spiders crying together, but without tears."
—Robert Lowell to Randall Jarrell, November 7, 1961

At the time, Harriet Lowell was four years old. Her Webernian impressions would turn up in her father's poem "Fall 1961," an anxious meditation juxtaposing "the tock, tock, tock / of the orange, bland, ambassadorial / face of the moon / on the grandfather clock" with "the chafe and jar / of nuclear war; / we have talked our extinction to death":

A father's no shield
for his child,
We are like a lot of wild
spiders crying together,
but without tears.

Nature holds up a mirror.
One swallow makes a summer.
It's easy to tick
off the minutes,
but the clockhands stick.

In his biography of Robert Lowell, Lost Puritan, Paul Mariani points out that "Fall 1961" was Lowell's first poem after a difficult, fallow year following his wildly successful "For the Union Dead."

Just asking

2011-02-15T13:59:00.005-05:00

Okay, I'll get to the fate of arts funding in the US federal budget in a minute. But first, let us pay proper regard to the parade of arts administrators falling all over themselves to preemptively pass the buck. First up: NEA head Rocco Landesman, who's been making all sorts of noise lately about how there are too many institutions and too many arts jobs, &c. Example:

“There are 5.7 million arts workers in this country and two million artists.... Do we need three administrators for every artist?”

I am somewhat surprised that Landesman has not been lambasted for the sheer disingenuousness of that statement, considering he in all likelihood pulled the 5.7 million figure from Amercians for the Arts and the 2 million figure from his own agency without bother to consider that a) the NEA's 2 million artists are included in AFTA's 5.7 million workers, and b) that 5.7 million is a tally of total full-time equivalent jobs, not just administrators. But, anyway: then there was Michael Kaiser, dodging blame: "The arts are in trouble because there is simply not enough excellent art being created." (Don't sell yourself short, Michael—you stuff your foot that far down your throat, it starts to look vaguely Philip-Guston-esque.) And then there was this blog post by New England Conservatory president Tony Woodcock that the Internet kept trying to direct my attention to the other day. On the surface, it's your standard classical-music-needs-to-reinvent-itself hand-wringing, full of concern over Relevance and Legitimacy and Its Place In Culture (i.e., in the thrall of irrelevant network effects). But this article was interesting: I scratched that surface, and was kind of amazed how little there was actually there, as it were. I mean, anybody who tries to take both sides in the Detroit Symphony strike is not really putting their foot down very hard. I took it as a sign that our public discourse on the arts may have finally reached the point where all sides have abandoned specificity for rhetorical wheel-spinning. Woodcock's peroration:

We need to reassert the power of music and the power of musicians to be extraordinary in their music making and in their ability to re-invent themselves for all our futures.

It sounds good, I'll give him that.

And give those administrators credit for sensing the shift in the wind: in terms of arts funding, the White House's new budget proposal starts the negotiation at a 13% decrease in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, from $168 million in FY2011 to $146 million in 2012. Keep in mind that the opposition started their negotiation at zero, and it's looking pretty grim. Here's the real fun: scroll to page 439 of this bit of high-performance eye-glazing, and you can see that the long-term assumption is a steady erosion of federal arts funding—that estimated $163 million in 2021 is, in real dollars (based on standard CPI inflation estimates), not even as much as the reduced proposal for 2012. If you think that this is a planned devolution and that states will pick up the slack, I will answer you as soon as I catch my breath from laughing.

But, as cynically satisfying as regarding the collapse of civilization can be, it's still, again, rhetorical wheel-spinning. So here's my line in the sand: I want to see that proposed $146 million tripled in a decade. I want a commitment to annual 11.5% increases—and, Race-to-the-Top style, I want state access to those increases tied to the ensured health of state arts agencies. And by 2021, the NEA budget should be $438 million. You want to spur private-sector activity? According to this research (which I've cited before), such an increase could potentially boost private donations to arts organizations by somewhere between $40 and $340 million annually. You want to create jobs? Compare this analysis and the AFTA analysis: the alternative energy industry—which the proposed budget supports to the tune of some $8 billion in research grants and breaks—generates 1.67 jobs per $100,000 spent, while the arts generates 2.94 jobs per $100,000 spent. You want some political cover? Tripling its budget would merely be returning NEA funding levels, in real terms, to their high-water mark under the Reagan administration (1984, which wasn't even the high-water mark for NEA funding overall).

Truth be told, I didn't do a lot of research and then come up with a tripled NEA budget as a result. I pulled that tripling out of thin air, and then went looking for justification. And, truth be told, it wasn't hard to find it. Does this indicate, perhaps, that I am less than serious about deficit reduction and/or economic growth? Well, as far as I can tell, that puts me in good company. Nobody in government, for all their shouting and posturing, seems really serious about it, either. Nobody seems serious about actually raising taxes or shoring up entitlements. Nobody, for instance, seems serious about scaling back military spending to 1990s levels, even though that's killing jobs in the long run. It's just political point-scoring—rhetorical wheel-spinning. Might as well spin that wheel towards the arts. At least they do some good.

The Golden Horn

2011-02-13T22:34:00.004-05:00

So I arrived back home from an evening out, having missed the Grammys, and discovered that, apparently, I am some sort of inadvertent, telepathic kiss of death: nobody I was rooting for won. Darcy didn't win. Steve Mackey and BMOP didn't win. Harry Christophers didn't win. Janelle Monáe didn't win. The late, great Solomon Burke didn't win. Apologies all around for the magical jinx of my advocacy. (I am a Cubs fan, after all.) At least, in categories that had flown under my scattershot radar, Pete Seeger and Kaija Saariaho came away with awards.

Scrolling through the list of winners, my eye did alight on the category of Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance. The nominees: Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Robert Plant, and John Mayer. Average age: 57.6. Baby boomers: please step away from the levers of cultural power and keep your hands where we can see them.

Another one rides the bus

2011-02-11T14:22:00.002-05:00

I don't normally stoop to highlighting contemporary-music-hurts-my-ears ridiculousness, but this lazy, ill-informed screed from one Michael Fedo (Contemporary music sounds like bus crashes! Supporting evidence: three vague anecdotes and a Terry Gross interview with Paul McCartney) commits the compounding sin of attempting a joke at the expense of tripe, which, as anyone with a modicum of culture knows, is at the pinnacle of the culinary pantheon. Begone, Michael Fedo! We're just fine with our bus crashes.

One of these days, I am actually going to write an article about how right now is a golden age for tripe eating in Boston. (Exhibit A: Jacky Robert's Tripes à la Provençale. Exhibits B, C, D....) Of course, the classic statement of Bostonian tripe was the eponymous staple of the old Parker House hotel; you can still recreate it at home.

Noblesse oblige

2011-02-09T13:46:00.004-05:00

Apropos of nothing, or maybe something—you never know with the way my brainstorms play out—I got side-tracked yesterday digging up dirt on Boston Symphony Orchestra trustees from the 1950s. That's a lot of Ivy League WASP rectitude right there! But I did find a good story about N. Penrose Hallowell. Hallowell was a brahmin banker (his BSO trusteeship was an outgrowth of his partnership at Lee, Higginson & Co., BSO founder Henry Lee Higginson's firm), whose propriety was such that he wouldn't support his mistress until, after many years, they were properly married. But maybe the experience contributed to this instance of magnificent equanimity:

When Mr. and Mrs. N. Penrose Hallowell were selling their home to Mr. Howard Johnson of eatery fame, Mrs. Hallowell expressed the hope that Mr. and Mrs. Johnson would have a happy future in the house. There was a perceptible silence. Then Master Johnson, age nine, piped up, "There isn't any Mrs. Johnson. One's dead and one's divorced," adding hopefully, "but Daddy's got a girl friend." As the silence turned glacial, Mr. Hallowell rose from his fireside, smote the roadside restaurateur smartly on the back, and speaking for the first time said, "Bully for you, Johnson."

Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

2011-02-09T12:12:00.002-05:00

Kansas is the latest state to take financial aim at the arts, with their governor, Sam Brownback (yes, he's a Republican—how'd you guess?), issuing an executive order abolishing the Kansas Arts Commission, though the abolishing is via some sort of gradual-privatization-through-the-auspices-of-the-Historical-Society smokescreen convoluted enough to make Freudian analysts rub their hands with glee. At least there's some nominal outcry. But this is par for the course—political point-scoring over economic impact. It is, in other words, the result of playing nice. And I was musing this morning: maybe part of that playing nice is something that arts advocates normally tout as an advantage, namely, institutions' deep ties to their communities.

You know why states never pull this kind of crap on corporations? Because corporations don't care about their communities beyond PR necessity, and governments know it. Go on, Kansas—rescind all the tax breaks on Koch Industries and see how long they stick around. Companies, factories, sports teams—they all know how to work this sort of blackmail. Arts organizations? Not so much. Now, I'm not saying that theaters and opera companies should go to war with their communities. But I, at least, would be curious to see what a little mercenary action could accomplish. Say this Kansas thing holds up—what if the Topeka Symphony could broker a little sweetheart deal with Nebraska to move it and its 100 jobs north of the border? How would that play in Wichita?

Realistic? Probably not. But arts advocates are now forced to deal with an entire generation of free-market fundamentalists that would never risk having their fragile faith tested by something as dangerous as the carrot of an economic impact statement—so why not consider the stick?

Das erinnert an vergangene Zeiten

2011-02-08T18:53:00.006-05:00

Hey, tomorrow is Alban Berg's birthday! So here's an honorary cocktail for the party: rather lush, a little exotically perfumed, a little hell-fire in the background.

Lulu's Fix

3 parts gin
3 parts lemon juice
2 parts peppercorn syrup*
1 part strawberry purée
A decent bunch of mint leaves

Throw it all in a shaker with ice, and shake well—until the mint breaks up. Strain into a glass (with a coarse enough strainer that bits of mint are floating in the thing) and garnish with an expressionistically long peel of lemon rind.

*Peppercorn syrup: put ½ cup sugar, ½ cup water, and a handful of crushed peppercorns (black, green, whatever you've got) in a small pot and simmer until the sugar is dissolved and the peppercorns have imparted a nice burn.

Here's a little bit of Anja Silja (Lulu), Richard Holm (Alwa), and Carlos Alexander (dead on the floor), ca. 1968, in a typically awkward tryst:

Second time around

2011-02-07T12:47:00.002-05:00

Reviewing Yehudi Wyner's Fragments from Antiquity with the Lexington Symphony and Dominique Labelle.
Boston Globe, February 7, 2011.

It's either sadness or euphoria

2011-02-07T12:43:00.001-05:00

Reviewing Joshua Bell and Sam Haywood.
Boston Globe, February 7, 2011.

The way you hold your knife

2011-02-05T17:16:00.002-05:00

Previewing Opera Boston's production of Hindemith's Cardillac.
Boston Globe, February 6, 2011.

Only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness

2011-02-04T13:38:00.004-05:00

Everyone's starting to have fun with the New York Philharmonic's new digital archive, so in honor of the other big event in New York this week, here's a real rarity: Leonard Bernstein and Richard Nixon being civil to one another.

This was less than a decade after Bernstein had been called a fellow traveler by Life magazine, and just over a decade before Nixon recorded himself calling Bernstein a "son of a bitch." (Ironically, Life's accusation came on the heels of the infamous Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, which probably indirectly led to the above encounter. The Conference, organized by the Soviet Union, prodded the CIA to focus attention and money on pro-American cultural diplomacy; the Institute of International Education award to Bernstein was largely based on such diplomacy, in the form of Bernstein's international tours with the Philharmonic.)

These kinds of archives tend to be fertile ground for reading between the lines, but one figure whose personality comes through largely unfiltered is my old teacher, Lukas Foss. A folder of documents surrounding Foss's guest conducting stints in the mid-1960s is chock-full of Foss's scattered, exuberant graciousness and Carlos Moseley's good-natured exasperation in trying to pin him down. There's also this glimpse of Foss's typically cheerful pragmatism, in this case regarding Bach's St. John Passion:

Regarding St. John Passion text, I feel very strongly that we should have no translation. Main reason: leaf rustling, but also important that we don't get all that dated anti-Semitism into print. Whenever it is done..., it produces a flurry of letters. Why not have a little harmless synopsis for each number, and on a single page or an adjoining page so there is no turn.

Hourly Comic Day 2011

2011-02-02T11:34:00.008-05:00

(Click to enlarge.)

(More hourly comics here.)

Multiplicity

2011-02-01T08:32:00.002-05:00

Reviewing NEC's "Salute to Franz Liszt."
Boston Globe, February 1, 2010.

Sergey Schepkin sent a nice e-mail clarifying that the four-hand arrangement of the "Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2" was not Liszt's own, as was listed in the program, but that of Liszt's student Franz Bendel—to which Schepkin added additional ornaments and Hungarian-style scintillation. (Bendel, incidentally, performed at the famous 1872 "World's Peace Jubilee" in Boston; two years later, while on another tour, he died in Boston after being stricken with typhoid fever.)

Vogel als Prophet

2011-01-31T13:06:00.005-05:00

A while back, I decided (and I quote):

I don't have a Twitter account, and I probably never will

As you can see on the right side of the page, I changed my mind on that one. What happened? Well, Emerson, after all. And flattery will get you everywhere. And I've been doing so much following on Twitter that my own account became a matter of efficiency.

But mostly, I became curious as to what a Twitter version of me would look like. I have a blog persona, a critic persona, a composer persona, a book-author persona—sure, they're all kind of like me, but they're also not really me (or they're only distilled portions of me) in a way that I find kind of fascinating. So I wondered what part of my personality would come to the fore when forced into a 140-character suit.

(Though I still think that tweeting during concerts is a bad, bad idea.)