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.
We love thy pulpit Lord,
For there the word of man
Lulls the worshiper to sleep
As only sermons can.
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.
[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.
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.
But pity succeeding soon vanquish’d his heart,Boyce does the jest the honor of an elegant melancholy—
And pleas’d with his playing so well,
He took her again, in reward of his art;
Such power had music in hell.
Second ScoreCutting 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.
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
Four For TeaPomegranate 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!
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
Molto moderato (♩=80)... 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.
poco rit.
Moderato assai
tranquillo
poco scherzando
pochissimo rall.
a tempo
poco rall.
tranquillo
deciso
scherzando
Poco agitato
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.
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.
Aennchen: I'm happy; hope you're happy, too.Don Giovanni: I've loved all I needed to love; sordid details following.
Thaïs: Strung out in heaven's high!Tannhäuser: Time and again I tell myself, "I'll stay clean tonight."
Athanaël: Hitting an all-time low.
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.)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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
9 works: BeethovenSo, 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.
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
Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4, arguably the least-known and least-performed of the composer’s nine symphoniesThat's kind of like calling Ringo the least-known Beatle, but I give the BSO marketing department props for putting forth the effort.
To begin with, in principle, there are three inner justifications, hence basic legitimations of domination.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.
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.
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.)
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.
