On the Pulitzers

Let's get this disclaimer out of the way: I think it's cool that Ornette Coleman won the Pulitzer prize. I'm a big fan—the disappearance of my Free Jazz LP in a move was a sad, sad day. (Yes, there's a CD. But I had it on vinyl, man.) And if the jury wanted a controversy-free non-classical pick, they couldn't really have done better. Coleman's earned respect across genres in way that almost no one else can. Maybe that's why the announcement has seemed rather anti-climactic. Then again, maybe it's because the non-classical nature of this year's prize was almost certainly a foregone conclusion.

What do this year's Pulitzer music jury and the Supreme Court have in common? That one's easy: they're both stacked decks. And, coincidentally, they both delivered this week exactly what their selection was intended to deliver. The A.K.s who give the O.K.s started to chip away at Roe v. Wade, a reversal which should come as a surprise to exactly no one: when the last two justices were put on the court, this was what their supporters were aiming for. And a look at the Pulitzer jury makes it pretty clear that this was going to be a non-classical year, come hell or high water. Coleman, in fact, hadn't even been nominated. Justin Davidson reports:

As jurors huddled for a weekend in March to go through the hundred-plus scores and recordings, someone noticed that despite the official desire for submissions in jazz, film music and other genres, Coleman's latest CD, "Sound Grammar," wasn't in the pile. Another juror, ex-Timesman John Rockwell, sent someone out to scare up a copy.

(That's got to rankle all those other composers who forked over fifty bucks with their nominating applications.) Jazz belongs in the mix, but do you get the feeling that prizes are going to start being passed around from genre to genre every year? It's like instead of a de facto lifetime achievement award, it's a de facto stylistic affirmation award. The politics around the Pulitzers will be the equivalent of the 19th-century Parisian Prix de Rome. (In as much as they aren't already.) Here's something else: for the drama prize, the board rejected all three of the jury's recommendations and gave the hardware to David Lindsay-Abaire's non-finalist Rabbit Hole. I'll bet that within a decade, they'll pull the same thing with the music prize, ignoring the jury and opting for a board member's no-doubt-persuasive argument for some pop-jazz equivalent of Profiles In Courage, one handily available for purchase or download. (Historically, this has been bad news for composers: in 1965, the jury recommended Duke Ellington for the prize—it was the board that decided to give no award that year. Same in 1992: any committee that can screw over both the Duke and Ralph Shapey in the exact same way is something special.)

I don't think awards are all that important, but the mechanisms behind them are interesting for what they say about the field. And it seems pretty clear that, at the moment, the outside perception of art music has become as much an exercise in stylistic categorization as it is in popular music. Staking out a genre is as important, maybe more important, that the moment-to-moment, note-to-note discourse, or the structure and rhetoric of an individual piece. For over a decade, I've been hearing new music that gleefully jumps the lines between various schools and styles, and I've never been of the opinion that there are musical goals that are limited to one genre or vocabulary only—I'm a confirmed eclecticist. But for now, we may be in for some historical housecleaning, celebrating more stylistically extreme composers and performers as critics and observers make an effort to fix points on the cultural landscape. I guess it's a certain kind of entertainment to watch awards committees try and bend their heads around issues that the practitioners worked out for themselves years ago.

Career objectives

Sometimes, Moussorgsky is whole civilizations discarded by life. Sometimes, he is whole cultures from under which the earth has rolled, whole groups of human beings who stood silently and despairingly for an instant in a world that carelessly flung them aside, and then turned and went away. Sometimes he is the brutal, ignorant, helpless throng that kneels in the falling snow while the conquerors, the great ones of this world, false and true alike, pass by in the torchlight amid fanfares and hymns and acclamations and speak the fair, high words and make the kingly gestures that fortune has assigned to them. Sometimes he is even life before man. He is the dumb beast devoured by another, larger; the plants that are crowded from the sunlight. He knows the ache and pain of inanimate things. And then, at other moments, he is a certain forgotten individual, some obscure, nameless being, some creature, some sentient world like the monk Pimen or the Innocent in "Boris Godounow," and out of the dust of ages an halting, inarticulate voice calls to us. He is the poor, the aging, the half-witted; the drunken sot mumbling in his stupor; the captives of life to whom death sings his insistent, luring songs; the half-idiotic peasant boy who tries to stammer out his declaration of love to the superb village belle; the wretched fool who weeps in the falling snowy night. He is those who have never before spoken in musical art, and now arise, and are about us and make us one with them.

—Paul Rosenfeld, Musical Portraits
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920)

Animal pragmatism

Reviewing the Florestan Recital Project.
Boston Globe, April 17, 2007.

If you build it, they will hum

The irrepressible Elaine Fine discovers Internet treasure in the form of old "Popular Science" and "Mechanics" magazines. One great photo after another. (By the way, you can put me on the waiting list for a brand-new Heifetz.)

Strauss and Mahler Re-Enact Your Favorite Movie Moments

(Click to enlarge.)

Medium Well

Ever wonder what Chopin's speaking voice sounded like? A lot like Jacques Cousteau, as it turns out. And heaven looks like Versailles. That's at least on the evidence of this 1955 recording (auto-loading flash file) of the composer communicating through the late British medium Leslie Flint. Chopin describes his sensations of death, and his transport to an afterworld community of artists and musicians. He doesn't like much modern music, although he respects some unnamed practitioners who are "sincere," but then again, he's been spoiled by music of the higher plane, which doesn't even require instruments. (Wonder what he thinks of the video game.)

(A more reliable resource: the Chopin Early Editions collection from the university of Chicago.)

Wunderhorns

How did I miss this? On Tuesday, students and faculty at the University of Maine in Farmington premiered Philip Carlsen's "Car Life: A Traffic Jam Session for Automobile Orchestra." (Enthusiastic article here; skeptical article here.) The ensemble? Forty-five cars spread across three parking lots, conducted with a big red flag by Carlsen's fellow professor Steven Pane.

Carlsen's automotive orchestra used subtle and not-so-subtle harmonies, cascading and alternating a cacophony of horns, radios, warning beepers, revving engines, slamming car doors and human voices. It was all part of an eight-page, detailed musical score that had drivers keeping one hand on the wheel and the other on the radio dial, ignition key or door handle, anxious to honk their horn at the requisite times and blast WKTJ or WUMF at just the right moment.

Carlsen himself missed the spectacle, laid up with a bad back, which just means that there'll have to be a repeat performance. I can't wait.

(Appropriately tangential tribute: the late, great Kurt Vonnegut, car salesman.)

Berkshire beak-wetting

Let's say you're a good-hearted animal lover without a whole lot of money. You go down to the local shelter and offer to volunteer to do some work for them, and they say, sorry, in order for you to volunteer, you'll have to make a cash gift.

Sound dumb? Well, replace "animal" with "music" and "shelter" with "Tanglewood," and you'll get the gist of this story from the Berkshire Eagle, which reports the Boston Symphony Orchestra telling its summer volunteers that they'll have to pony up at least seventy-five bucks for the BSO's Annual Fund before they'll be allowed to work. Huh? Let me read that again. Nope, my bafflement still stands. Huh?

The BSO administration is crying poor, saying that Tanglewood loses money every year. So, of course, the people you take that out on are the ones already working for free. Oh, they're also cracking down on the free passes that volunteers are entitled to in return for their efforts. Used to be, you'd agree to work eight hours, and you'd get a pass (that's for a lawn seat, by the way). Now, no pass until you've already worked the eight hours, which kind of stinks if you're only out there for a weekend or two. They're also restricting the transferability of said passes.

At the informational meeting, which was held Monday at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, a BSO executive referred to the "egregious abuses" of the companion passes in past seasons, and told of one former volunteer who was surreptitiously leading friends through the gate "nine times an hour."

I realize that most of the Tanglewood volunteers aren't starving students—they're retirees and vacationers looking for a good deal. And it is a pretty good deal: put on a name tag, point a few patrons in a few directions, hand out programs, and get to hear the concert for free. But, come on, they're volunteers. The BSO may need new revenue streams, but the people who have spent years giving you free labor is probably not the best place to go looking for one, not from a morale standpoint, not from a staffing standpoint, certainly not from a PR standpoint. BSO development operations director Mia Shultz called the changes "a new definition of commitment." It's also an old definition of foolish.

Update (4/13): Geoff Edgers has lots more information, including a BSO assertion that Tanglewood loses $3 million every summer.

Variations (4): half empty, half full

—G. F. Handel, Messiah
(Coopersmith edition)

—Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen,
"Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive"

Barnstorming

The Red Sox finally open at home today, inspiring this tangential, wow-that's-ridiculous-but-this-is-a-blog-so-why-not question:

What if orchestras were run more like baseball teams?

Collectively, that is—what if baseball’s system for identifying, signing, and grooming talent were adapted for symphony orchestras? In baseball, there’s two paths to the major leagues. If a scout thinks you’re unusually talented, you’re drafted by a major league team out of school (usually college, but sometimes high school), after which you hone your craft on a series of minor league farm teams owned by the major league organization, hopefully getting to the point where you’re called up to the big show. If you’re not drafted, you can audition your way onto an unaffiliated minor league team, and try and work your way up the ladder from there.

Notice how similar this is to the current breakdown of orchestras in the United States, at least structurally. There’s conservatory and college ensembles, there’s smaller, regional orchestras, and then there’s the big city “major league” groups. And, for the most part, that’s the career path, with one crucial difference: for an orchestral player, there’s a blind audition at every step of the way. In actuality, most players in major orchestras have regional experience, and all of them, I would guess, have college degrees and/or stints in advanced training programs on their résumés—the experience, on paper, looks a lot like the college-minors-majors setup. But what if that progression were more formalized?

Just last week, I was getting some comedic mileage out of the Virginia Beach Symphony’s attempt to generate more marketing impact by changing their name to “Symphonicity”—I still think the name’s a mistake, but that shouldn’t distract from the fact that regional orchestras like Virginia Beach have a constant financial wolf at the door. An MLB farm-team model would make explicit what big orchestras take for granted: that the talent pool they’re able to draw from is largely dependent on the existence of mid-level, local, what would be in effect double-A and triple-A orchestras. It’s in a major’s interest to ensure that such smaller-scale ensembles stay in business—first of all, the current résumé-screened blind-audition process would otherwise be even more of a crapshoot than it already is: without enough "minor league" positions out there to give applicants an imprimatur of orchestral experience, the chances of landing someone who sails through excerpts like a dream but has no idea how to play in a large ensemble goes up. More important are the long-range consequences: if smaller groups go belly-up, then the talent needed to keep the tradition alive and viable is more economically likely to abandon music before it even gets a chance to be heard.

A large-market orchestra financing a small-market one seems rather goofy on the face of it, but keep in mind that a couple of them are already spending money in similar ways, in the form of advanced training programs. To name a couple, the Boston Symphony has the Tanglewood Music Center, which fields a full orchestra; Ravinia, the Chicago Symphony's summer home, has the Steans Institute—which doesn't. (Other organizations, like San Francisco and Chicago, sponsor orchestras at the pre-college and pre-professional levels.) There's even programs that seem like distant echoes of an athletic draft, finding individual young musical talent and using the organization's resources and reputation to offer encouragement and practical experience—see, for example, Chicago's Diversity Fellowship Program, an interesting try at increasing minority representation and visibility in the orchestra world without sacrificing the integrity of blind auditions.

Is making the step from those sorts of programs to full-scale farm-team orchestras highly unlikely? You bet. But as smaller groups face increasing danger of folding up shop, it's possible that, a couple generations down the line, industry groups like the American Symphony Orchestra League will turn to collective fundraising to keep the base of the pyramid healthy. (Again, not unlike Major League Baseball—I mean, if Steinbrenner's willing to go along with revenue sharing, anything's possible.)

Just so long as we don't have to sing the National Anthem before every concert. I'm all for reasonable patriotism, but remember Karl Muck.

Signal to noise

The Joshua Bell as subway musician story has made its way around most of the musical blogs already, but I'll join the fun and link to it as a service to those readers who don't always frequent other sites (like, say, my mom).

Personal analogue: my college roommate Mark used to have a gig playing lounge piano in the lobby of a fancy-schmancy apartment building in Chicago, and I would sub for him every now and again. How little attention was being paid? I could leaven my directionless Dukelsky-esque noodlings with entire pieces by Schoenberg and Feldman with nary a raised eyebrow from the residents. Ignoration has its perks.

(Actually, there was one guy living there who did pay attention. Whenever Michael Morgan walked through the lobby, Mark would segue into the most incongruous bit of operatic repertoire he could think of. There's a certain unique fun in pitching your act to the farthest corner of the room.)

The merry-go-round, broke down

Stephen Thaler is a computer scientist whose St. Louis-based Imagination Engines, Inc. builds electronic neural networks that are designed to generate new ideas based on pre-existing parameters. He's been training his Creativity Machine network to write music. Thaler feeds a bunch of music into the network, then perturbs the electronic neurons so they start reassembling the material into new combinations.

Basically one neural network, called the imagitron, is bathed in simulated heat. It generates new ideas. The other, called the perceptron, monitors the first. It has opinions and governs the amount of heat stimulating the imagitron.... I would smile or frown as the machine generated sound and the perceptron could see my reactions. If I liked something, it would remember that and map a pattern of how I would rate a song, freezing in memories of likable tunes.

Thaler plans to release an album of machine-created music on iTunes in the near future.

This isn't Thaler's first foray into composition. In 1994, he claimed U.S. Copyright no. PAu-1-920-845 on 11,000 "musical hooks" generated by the Creativity Machine. From the company's history:

October, 1995 [sic], Most Prolific Musician of All Time. A Creativity Machine, trained on top-ten melodies over the preceding 30 years proceeds to invent 11,000 new musical hooks that are promptly copyrighted. Interestingly enough human musical artists disdain the copyright, protesting that "only human minds can conceive music!" Thaler holds back on a million song database generated via Creativity Machine in view of the spirited response from human artists. ...On the flip side, computational musicians don't get it either, feeling that they can do the same thing, spending months or years concocting new works of art via computer. What they don't realize was that only a few hours had been spent by Thaler in translating sheet music to a representation more conducive to neural nets. Beyond that, Creativity Machine function was spontaneous and voluminous.

Just in case you weren't sure that Thaler was prone to confuse quality with quantity, he's also copyrighted (no. TX-5-725-954) a million new machine-generated English words.

Let's leave aside the absolute inanity of the Copyright office on this. (Every time I write a new phrase, I'm supposed to check and make sure I'm not infringing on 11,000 randomly-generated variations? Please.) If you get the sense that Thaler has a tendency to indiscriminately anthropomorphize the output of these neural networks, you're right. From the article:

Q. And music from your computers is different?

A. It's filled with feeling. It's generated much the same as music from the mind of a human composer. It is spontaneously and autonomously generated by machines, using only raw emotional response from a human being. There are no explicit rules, no databases of prior music and no templates of any kind.

No database of prior music—that is, except the examples that Thaler's fed into the machine as raw materials. It's not filled with feeling, it's filled with processes gradually filtered out by a feedback loop. The filtering itself, in its speed and efficiency, may be impressive, but all it's doing is throwing sonic spaghetti against the refrigerator door of Thaler's ear and noting which strands stick.

No doubt Thaler would claim that's all human composers do, and we're just arrogantly attributing it inspiration or whatever because we don't consider the process. The machine, though, doesn't imagine the intended emotional state and then try to realize that state in sound. It's doing what Thaler has programmed it to do, methodically trying permutations until the desired feedback goal—Thaler smiling—is consistently attained. It's the ultimate pop music dispenser: it gives you what you like, and only what you like, all the time. Does Thaler really think this is what composers try to do? (In his patent for the machine, Thaler theorizes that ideas are noting more than "degraded memories," which makes me wonder just what it was, say, Harry Partch was trying to recall.) And note that the computer is beholden to whatever styles are used as examples. As Thaler says: "We put in a wide spectrum—classical, rock, hip-hop." The prospect of an experimental aesthetic only arises if the listener providing feedback has formulated that aesthetic already.

Don't get me wrong—the technology certainly sounds cool. It's just that Thaler's reading into it something that's just not there. In between programming machines to design warheads or toothbrushes, Thaler has started In Its Image, Inc., a non-profit dedicated to "Raising awareness, through public seminars, of the artificial intelligence technology that promises to be the computational vehicle for immortality." The idea is that we'll all upload our meat-based, decrepit neural networks onto robust Creativity Machines and thus maintain our own unique consciousness indefinitely.

This sounds suspiciously like a humble cousin to a scenario laid out by physicist Frank Tipler in his book The Physics of Immortality, which proposes the universe evolving into an all-powerful quantum computer that will simultaneously recreate every possible state of consciousness in a perpetual virtual reality. If that sounds fishy to you, well, you're not alone. Thaler doesn't go nearly that far, but reducing human experience to mere neural interaction implicitly devalues the powerful artistic spur of human fallibility, decay, imperfection—the magical, cascadingly fruitful effort of pushing up against the boundaries of time, understanding, and physical ability. I admit, this might just be my own post-Romantic bias against crude 17th-century body vs. soul dualism—an analysis of this blog's archive would no doubt reveal a standing prejudice against the immutably unbreakable. The cultural expressions I treasure are the products of imaginations inseperably bound up with the frustration, desperation, and exhilaration of corporeal existence.

Besides, the proof is in the pudding, right? Well, if this brief, Mannheim-Steamroller-worthy MP3 sample of Thaler's handiwork is really the music of an immortal future, I have to admit, a mortal opt-out is looking better and better.

Object lesson

Two of my greatest music score bargain finds have been Richard Strauss. Back in my Tanglewood days, a field trip to a used book store in northern Connecticut yielded a four-dollar Boosey vocal score of Salome. And a few years back, I rescued this two-dollar treasure from a discard sale at the Boston Conservatory library.


That's an original Fürstner piano-vocal score of Die Frau ohne Schatten. I can see why the library was getting rid of it, as it's rather beat up: the spine is falling apart, the pages are brittle, most of the corners are cracked and disintegrating. For cheap score study, though, it's perfectly serviceable.

Actually, I'm not sure this particular copy ever any shelf time at all. Imagine my surprise when I opened it up at home and this came tumbling out:


The Staatsoper Berlin performed Die Frau on June 22, 1940, and the previous owner of the score, a man named Gustav Grossmann, saw fit to hang on to the program. I'm not sure why—he doesn't appear among the personnel:


(Click on the image to enlarge. The only names I knew are Torsten Kalf and Walter Grossmann; no doubt opera buffs will recognize many more.) Grossmann did work for the Staatsoper, however. He stamped the score with his address:


Based on the markings in the score I'd guess he was either an assistant conductor or a répétiteur. The only thing I've been able to learn about him is that he conducted the German premiere of Zemlinsky's opera Der Kreidekreis in 1934, shortly before Zemlinsky left Germany forever. (The performance was repeatedly disrupted by a claque of brownshirts.) No reference books, English or German, mention him. He must have survived the war—the score has pencilled notes regarding either a performance or a broadcast of the opera in 1959, conducted by Karl Böhm. (The singers mentioned seem to be the same as those on Böhm's 1955 Decca recording.)

I could probably find out more about him if I really tried; maybe someday I will. Right now, though, I don't want to know more about him. For me, the power of this particular artifact lies in its mystery. I don't know what Grossmann's personal or professional connection with this particular piece was. I don't know what he did or didn't do during the war. I don't know why he kept the program—an innocent souvenir? A rueful reminder? Secret pride?

Most importantly, I don't know by what path this score, with its potent accessory, ended up in Boston, Massachusetts. And because I don't know, I'm forced to imagine, which inevitably leads to a consideration of what I would have done had I been in Grossmann's place, in any of the numerous scenarios, charged or benign, that could have transpired. It brings up the very real possibility that, in certain situations, I may not have been as heroic or courageous as I would like to imagine.

I've been revisiting the life and music of Anton Webern over the past few months. Webern's relationship to the Nazis was, to put it mildly, an unfortunate combination of naïveté, patriotism, and opportunism. He deplored the anti-Semitism, but was entranced by the strong German nationalism, the prospect of German culture once again taking the lead after the disaster of World War I. As his Jewish friends were forced into leave, Webern never could bring himself to denounce the Nazis. Maybe he thought that Kristallnacht and the like was just a phase, that cooler heads would prevail, and everyone would come back. They never did, and the break with his former colleagues (particularly Schoenberg, who had been like a father) must have been distressing. One of the sadder episodes in Webern's life involves the solo piano Variations, written in 1936: Webern dedicated the piece to the Jewish pianist Edward Steuermann as a token of friendship. Steuermann, shortly to flee Europe, never acknowledged the gift, disgusted by Webern's refusal to speak out.

Of course, Webern's pain is trivial compared with those who were exiled or who perished in the camps. But still, I get the sense that I would have rather liked Webern as a person, and I want to go back in time, shake him by the shoulders, and tell him, convince him, that these people aren't who he thinks they are, that they're not going to change, and that he has to take a stand, that even remaining silent is a stain that he'll never be able to wash away. And then I wonder what someone from fifty years in the future would be shaking my shoulders about. One of the most amazing things about that 1940 program is that it contains absolutely no hint that there's a war on. In the face of even that epochal conflagration, the urge to maintain the façade of a normal, everyday life must have kept many people from refusing to recognize what was going on until it was too late. That's why I hang on to the program, to remind myself that the right thing to do isn't usually the convenient thing, that a path through life that avoids unpleasant obstacles is liable to lead one down dark, dead-end streets. Sunlight can burn, but the alternative is living in perpetual shadow.

Ensemblonious

The Virginia Beach Symphony Orchestra has announced that they're changing their name . (Article via ArtsJournal.) The new name, created in consultation with HCD Advertising and Public Relations, is "Symphonicity." Yes, that's the whole thing. Symphonicity.

"It's a $50 word, that's for sure," said Dan Downing, executive vice president at HCD. "But it's something that you see it, you don't forget it."

Kind of like a car crash, I suppose. Fifty bucks, eh? One wonders what the going rate is for "Orchestrexcellent" or "Philharmarvelous."

Now, I really shouldn't make fun of efforts by smaller, regional orchestras to expand their name recognition or media presence—they're feeling the economic squeeze far more than their big-city counterparts. I'm going to make fun of this, though, because that might just be the stupidest name I've ever heard.

HCD's relationship with the English language does seem to be more that of a distant cousin than a beloved sibling. From their website:

If marketing is not relevant, it has no purpose. If it is not original, it will attract no attention. If it is not impactful, it will make no lasting impression.

If it is not a double negative, it will be no harder to read. And there's a circle of hell reserved for non-facetious users of words like "impactful."

The orchestra announced the change on April 1st. I hope they take the implied out, and say the whole thing was a joke.

Rewards that will be great somewhere

It's Holy Week, the most important hebdomad in the Christian calendar. Since I'm a church musician, this means that my week has essentially been vacuumed up and pulverized into a fine, delicate powder. Music ministers may vary in piety and theological aptitude, but I'll tell you this much: we all have an appreciation of Ordinary Time that far surpasses those in the pews. (Another church musician I know once referred to the day after Easter as "Good Monday.")

I chalk this up as another occupational hazard—the fact that performing musicians don't get to enjoy the experience the way audiences do. For example: if we wallow in the sadness of a sad piece, or the exultation of an exultant piece, it's liable to distract us from the things we have to concentrate on in order to communicate that sadness or exultation to the listener. On the other hand, we get the intellectual and kinesthetic satisfaction of building the edifice, rather than just apprehending it. It's more than a fair trade; but it means that we can't share certain, crucial parts of the audience's experience.

So like Christmas, I'll have my Easter holiday sometime after everyone else's is over. (I wonder if my synagogal counterparts have the same feelings about Passover or High Holy Days. "Why is this night different from every other night?" Because there's no extra rehearsal.) Anyhow, to expiate my sin of blasphemous complaining, you can now download the rest of the Easter introit up there for free—for free—at the Choral Public Domain Library. It's on its third go-round with my choir, and it's unusual in that they actually like it. Wonders never cease.

Update: The CPDL link has gone dead, so here's the score:

Guerrieri: Easter-Day (2005) (PDF, 2 pages, 115 Kb)

Back catalog

A man named George Hargreaves has, once again, decided to run for the Scottish Parliament. Hargreaves is an ordained Pentecostal minister and the founder of the Scottish Christian Party. Hargreaves is going after the Green Party MP Patrick Harvie, mainly on the grounds that Harvie is gay and campaigns for gay rights. As Hargreaves says, "Homosexuality is a sin. I am against Patrick Harvie because he campaigns against Christian teachings on the subject. We have to stop the moral slide turning into a moral avalanche."

The punch line: Hargreaves has been able to fund his party out of the multiple millions of pounds he made co-writing (with American Idol's Simon Cowell) the 1980s Sinitta flip sides "So Macho" (video here) and "Cruising" (dance mix here), two of the biggest British gay pop anthems of the past quarter-century. Kind of like if Pete Seeger had taken all the royalties from "Waist Deep In the Big Muddy" and donated the money to, say, George W. Bush's re-election campaign. I've said it before: I can't make this stuff up.

Putting It Together

Reviewing the Boston Cecilia.
Boston Globe, April 3, 2007.

Electric mixer

Reviewing Daniel Bernard Roumain and The Mission.
Boston Globe, April 3, 2007.

That Old-Time Religion

Reviewing Trio Mediæval.
Boston Globe, April 3, 2007.

Lieder mit Worte

I had a chance on Friday to go to a free lunch/press conference with James Levine at Symphony Hall, to coincide with the announcement of the Boston Symphony's 2007-08 season. (Jeremy Eichler explains it all for you here.) Levine must be the easiest interviewee in the world: ask him a question, no matter how innocuous, and he'll talk for fifteen minutes. (He spent five minutes explaining why he wouldn't answer one question.) The big highlight: Berlioz's Les Troyens, presented in two parts for two weekends in the spring—and both parts performed back-to-back on May 4, 2008. If you want to find my Berliozophile self on May 4th, you know where to look.

But here's something interesting that I noticed later: two out of the four commissions being premiered are symphonies that involve voice, John Harbison's Fifth (with mezzo-soprano and baritone), and William Bolcom's Eighth (with chorus). Obviously the Harbison owes a debt to Das Lied von der Erde (which it's being performed with), and the Bolcom puts one in mind of both Beethoven and Mahler. "Symphonies" that involve voices tend to come at transitional points in music history, but also have a tendency to take on political overtones, even if only by association: Beethoven's Ninth, for example, right on the line between the Classical and Romantic eras, but also, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unofficial national anthem of anti-totalitarianism. Or think of Mahler's huge vocal symphonies, humanistic paeans to God and nature in the midst of a decaying imperialist world—and the dissolution of Romanticism. Or Shostakovich's Thirteenth and Fourteenth. Or Bernstein's Third (the ultimate 60s happening). It's as if history reaches a point where abstract music just isn't enough, and composers feel the need to tell rather than imply.

So for fun, let's take the position that the appearance of these two new entries at the same time isn't a coincidence, that it's indicative of some confluence of the zeitgeist that's bubbled up to the surface. What's the significance? Is it political—American artists finally absorbing a) the end of Western hegemony, b) rapidly fraying American imperialism, c) the latest upturn in the historical cycle of violence, d) a pivotal clash of incompatible cultures, or e) the current hell-in-a-handbasket of your choice? Or is it one of those final, grand pronouncements on a fading style? Which begs the question: which style? American academic composition? Eclecticism? The idea of a symphony itself?

I don't know—maybe no significance at all. But I like to think this way every once in a while. What's the big shift going on in the world right now that, looking back, will sum up the era a hundred years from now? Even better: what if it's something that we don't even notice? (Cue quietly dramatic music from basses and bassoons.)

Incidentally, if you've ever wondered what they actually feed the press at a press lunch: sandwiches. Dressed with inordinate quantities of mayonnaise. Outstanding cookies, though.

Care-Charmer Sleep

What would you do about playing the piano [if you spent a winter north of the Arctic Circle]?

I don't need to play it. But I'm sure the local bar has got a piano I could noodle on if necessary. Well, to be truthful, once a month or so I've literally got to touch the piano or I stop sleeping properly. That really is true. I was in Newfoundland last summer, just as a tourist, and after about a month I found that I was getting by on three and four hours a night, which seemed ridiculous, because I was doing reasonably energetic things like wandering up and down cliffs and beaches and cuing the surf for all sorts of imaginary documentaries... and this was insane, because I was getting more and more tired every day. And finally I realized that what was missing was the fact that I did need contact with the piano for an hour or so. And literally, that will do me for a month; that's all that's necessary. As it happened I knew of a delightful old German Steinway located at the CBC studios in St. John's, which I discovered when I was down there doing The Latecomers four years before; I asked if I could have an hour with it, which they granted, and the next night, you know—sound as a baby.

—Jonathan Cott, Conversations With Glenn Gould

Boy, it was tough getting up this morning.

Physical modeling synthesis

I freely admit that I'm so far behind the curve on electronic music that the road looks straight to me. Logic? Max/MSP? I don't know what you people are talking about.

My experience with the wires and dials was forever tainted by my first experience, in a closet at my high school that happened to have an old ARP 2600. That thing was fun—hands on, unpredictable, and everything that came out was worthy of Forbidden Planet. Once I got to college, though, everything had gone digital; I found that I missed the patch cords and the touchy sliders, and I lost interest.

These days, of course, analog synthesizers are retro cool, or whatever the current term for "retro cool" is. (In honor of Phil, maybe it should be "cop pension show.") I once looked into configuring my computer to run emulators of all the old machines, but it involved a lot more software than I was interested in buying, and again—no patch cords. And I certainly don't have the money to pick up the real thing (EBay has an ARP 2600 for auction at the moment that's already way out of my price range, and the reserve hasn't even been met).

So until those commissions start rolling in faster than I can turn them down, I'll just have to resign myself to building my dream studio on paper. Literally.


Astro Boy there has himself a fine "Moog Modular V" (no such beast actually ever existed, but it looks pretty cool) courtesy of this PDF download. (He's joined by special guest DJ Monkey on turntables.) In the meantime, I'm debating whether to plunk down a few euros for some more elaborate paper synth kits from this place. I may have to: one of the models is, you guessed it, a cardboard ARP 2600.

(Luddite? Build yourself an ocarina.)

Sky and Sea

Some Thurday afternoon fun: the great Brazilian accordionist Sivuca performing "Céu e Mar" on Swedish television in 1969.



Sivuca, who passed away last December, actually lived in New York for a dozen years or so (mainly working with Miriam Makeba), which makes his comparative anonymity in the States even more baffling. He had quite a following in Scandanavia, though. Great stuff.

Cattle Call

Time to limber up your rhymes for "Alamagordo": the New Mexico House of Representatives passed a nonbinding memorial a couple of weeks ago asking the New Mexico Music Commission to sponsor a competition to compose a "State Cowboy Song."

Now, New Mexico already has one of the better state songs, "O Fair New Mexico," written by Elizabeth Garrett, the blind daughter of the guy who killed Billy the Kid. They also have a Spanish state song, Amadeo Lucero's "Así a Nuevo Méjico" (which was adopted after the then-Lieutenant Governor sang it to the legislature in 1971). Then there's the bilingual state song, "Mi Lindo Nuevo Mexico," by Pablo Mores. Oh yeah, there's also the state ballad, "Land of Enchantment,", co-written by Michael Martin Murphey. But apparently, there's a need for a cowboy song as well.

The language of the bill, introduced by Gloria Vaughn, is actually quite pragmatic:

WHEREAS, the members may be able to agree on declaring an official state cowboy song so long as the process for selecting such a song is less arbitrary than by a vote of a majority of the members of the legislature, whose tastes and musical abilities may vary....

Entries, though, will be limited to composers who either were born in the state or have lived there consecutively for twenty years. I'd consider that a prohibitively high entrance fee. Plus, it means I can't nominate Doctor Atomic, about New Mexico's wildest cowboy ever.

(Peruse the rest of "The Cowboy Rag.")

Final frontiers

Reviewing Collage New Music.
Boston Globe, March 27, 2007.

Really Idiotic And Asinine

The Copyright Royalty Board, promulgators of the recent we're-just-the-lapdogs-of-the-RIAA decision to drastically up licensing fees for Internet radio, have agreed to reconsider. Well, kind of. They're accepting additional written comments on the decision until April 2, but whether they'll actually hold additional hearings or change their minds on the rates they already set is still in a bureaucratic haze. (See this story from the useful clearinghouse blog Save Our Internet Radio.) There's a petition online, and a call or e-mail to the most muckraking of your local congresspeople might be in order.

If you're wondering what this is all about, Kyle Gann and Doc Searls can get you up to speed on the whole eye-rolling fiasco. (And get in your listening to PostClassic and Counterstream while you can.) Message from an actual working musician to the industry organizations allegedly working on my behalf: cut it out, will ya? I'm trying to make a living here.

Inconspicuous consumption

My lovely wife and I had occasion to drop in to our local Barnes and Noble printed matter monstro-mart over the weekend, and, out of habit, I checked the Classical Music book section, which seemed to be, how shall I put it, somewhat less buxom than I remembered. Out of curiosity, I counted, and found that this particular store was offering eighty-three different titles related to classical music—and I'm charitably including books concerning Il Divo, Andrea Bocelli, and Joe Volpe in that total.

Eighty-three is not a lot of books. To put it in perspective, I could have, two shelves over, picked from twenty-nine different tomes on the Beatles alone. (This too is wrong, especially considering that there were only six books about Elvis. But I digress.) Ten years ago, this would have been a cue for much hand-wringing over the red-headed-stepchild status of classical music in American culture. Now, though, I think it says more about the Internet's inexorable pressure on bricks-and-mortar corporate balance sheets than anything. It's a fair guess that a large portion of classical music practitioners and aficionados have shifted their discretionary spending to the Web; it only follows that big chains will be less inclined to devote valuable real estate to books and CDs that the target audience is probably browsing via computer.

The online world is still not terribly friendly to browsing, but I imagine that will change, and soon. What's more, an encyclopedic selection won't be a loss-leader, like it was in the pre-Internet dark ages. I can remember spending lunch hours at the Barnes and Noble in Evanston, Illinois, while I temped at Northwestern for a summer. I liked to hang out in the Literary Theory aisle. Once, a saleslady asked if I needed help, and I said no, I was just browsing. Her disbelief was indignant. "Nobody just browses in Literary Theory," she said. I was polite enough not to scold her for mistrusting a customer that was on the verge of buying a book that had probably sat on the shelf since the store was built. But that was the attraction of those stores when they opened: they were liable to have everything, a tempting thought even if it meant pockets of product that were rarely, if ever, picked over. With the Web, though, every niche and category is equally served, and maintaining such a large retail selection is a fool's errand.

So I wasn't particularly put out at the paltry classical offerings. One way to read Alex Ross's summing up of the current state of classical recording—nobody knows anything, basically—is that small but viable revenue streams have sprung up too fast and too numerous to be tracked with traditional metrics. Marketers won't be able to try and shoehorn all music into one particular distribution model—a recipe for classical disaster in the 90s—because no one model will be demonstrably more successful than any other. Ignorance is bliss.

Still, though: c'mon, guys. Eighty-three? I've come out of yard sales with more books than that.

Hope, blood, Turandot

Quiz time! This idea is a total rip-off from the excellent movie blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? Then Handel was quite the narcissicist.

Anyway, here's ten questions to kill your Friday afternoon. You can leave your answers in the comments, or else leave a link to wherever you're posting. Do please include the questions when submitting your answers.

1. Name an opera you love for the libretto, even though you don't particularly like the music.

2. Name a piece you wish Glenn Gould had played.

3. If you had to choose: Charles Ives or Carl Ruggles?

4. Name a piece you're glad Glenn Gould never played.

5. What's your favorite unlikely solo passage in the repertoire?

6. What's a Euro-trash high-concept opera production you'd love to see? (No Mortier-haters get to duck this one, either—be creative.)

7. Name an instance of non-standard concert dress you wish you hadn't seen.

8. What aging rock-and-roll star do you wish had tried composing large-scale chorus and orchestra works instead of Paul McCartney?

9. If you had to choose: Carl Nielsen or Jean Sibelius?

10. If it was scientifically proven that Beethoven's 9th Symphony caused irreversible brain damage, would you still listen to it?

The trouble is he's growing; the trouble is he's grown

West Side Story turns 50 this year, which, when you think about it, is pretty old for a juvenile delinquent. If you're in Boston, you can celebrate by taking in a production of the show by On Broadway, the student musical theatre group at Boston University. Shows are tonight and tomorrow; tonight, there's also a pre-concert talk by Jamie Bernstein, the composer's daughter.

Music director is our good friend Brett Abigaña, who somehow managed to get his snazzy website up before I did (warning: auto-loading percussion music).

Guile of the Dead

Alexander Temple Wolkonsky Rachmaninoff Wanamaker is the great-great-grandson of Sergei Rachmaninoff. And the 21-year-old University of Arizona student is about to take over Rachmaninoff's legacy—and that includes rearranging Sergei's works so they can be re-copyrighted.

"It's as little rearrangement as possible, preferably," he explained.

Wanamaker said the family already has approached a few composers about doing the rearrangement. "We're in the process now of having the music rearranged so that we can re-establish the rights and generations can enjoy it for futures to come," he said.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would think that generations would be able to enjoy the music for futures to come regardless of whether anybody's making any money off of it. Sergei died in 1943—that means his post-1923 works (including the Symphonic Dances, the Paganini Rhapsody, and the Fourth Piano Concerto) already won't start going into the public domain in the U.S. until 2019. And now, four generations removed, they're trying to make sure that the royalties on those—and everything else—keep coming for another 95 years? (Actually, based on the fact that any "rearrangements" would probably be "works for hire," they might fall under the 120-year corporate copyright term.) That's pushing copyright's "temporary monopoly" to possibly over two centuries, in some cases. From the article:

Wanamaker is quick to dispel concerns that the family will increase the fees for orchestras to rent and play Rachmaninoff. Actually, he says, the cost will be less because there will be fewer hands in the pot.

"What we would like to do is actually lower the prices," he said, noting that over the past 30 years, royalties have generated at least $50 million in income that's divided between the family and the publishing firms. Without the publishing firms, the family would get a bigger cut and could afford to drop the price, he reasoned.

Even a two-percent cut of that is more money then I'll ever have, ever. Can't he just invest what he's got, and use the interest to pay for scotch and Jay-Z albums? The ridiculousness of the copyright regime in this country never ceases to amaze me.

There's a hole in the bucket

I have an article over at NewMusicBox today on Baumol's cost-disease and what it means for the economics of live performance and recording. My lovely wife pointed out something to ponder while you read: if you're one of those who thinks that the steady wane of school arts programs is big trouble for the future of jazz and classical music, keep in mind that the education sector is also unusually affected by the cost-disease.

(How to play with your money.)

And the world exhales

Things are continually Yeatsianally falling apart, which is why I grab good news where I can find it.

La fenice

If you're not already aware, a fire gutted the offices of the Oregon East Symphony in Pendleton, Oregon on Thursday. They're in a bad way, and if you have a few bucks or other stuff that might be useful, they've set up a fire recovery fund. They do a lot of educational outreach in areas that don't always get that kind of attention—they're the good guys, in other words.

Most links are to the blog of Kenneth Woods, Oregon East's conductor, who, in the midst of crisis, still manages to read minds. I was thinking about a post on Hans Rott for this week, but Woods got there first, and I was going to defend Elgar from his own countrymen, but Woods is already on it, quick and funny. Just like a good conductor: a beat ahead of you, ready with a cue.

Update (3/21): Donations can now be made via PayPal.

March Madness

Reviewing the Boston Camerata and Ensemble Aziman.
Boston Globe, March 20, 2007.

(Yes, I know Adam de la Halle's name is misspelled. That's what comes from talking to the copy desk on a cell phone. Thanks, Verizon!)

Update (12:30 PM): It's been fixed. As good a time as any to gratefully acknowledge the people at the Globe copy desk, who save me from at least one howler a week.

Call it what you want

Reviewing Boston Secession.
Boston Globe, March 20, 2007.

The final paragraph seems to be missing online:

Ring Frank does like to talk—a lot—and most of what she says could more effectively be conveyed in program notes. Closing the distance between performer and audience is not an unworthy aim, but if it could have meant a few more of Duckworth’s marvels, at least one listener would have opted for a little less conversation.

Droit de seigneur

Lisa Hirsch points out a Bernard Holland review of Nico Muhly that makes me green with envy: I'm just a freelancer now, but my dream is to get to that level in the criticism hierarchy where I can be lazy enough to express my bafflement in print at a question that had been answered in my own paper not a week before. Lexis-Nexis is for the rabble.

(Full disclosure: as a TA at the BU Tanglewood Institute, I gamely tried to teach sight-singing to a crowd that included, among others, Nico, Judd Greenstein, and Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum. That took a lot of coffee.)

They got a message for the action man

I had a hard time getting up this morning—maybe I could get some help from English schoolkids. As part of Manchester Metropolitan University's celebration of National Science and Engineering Week, students from three Manchester-area schools, St. Paul's (Walkden), St. Barnabas (Clayton), and Wyche Primary (Nantwich), composed wake-up music for the residents of the International Space Station, with some help from the members of the Manchester Camerata: "The musicians... worked with the children composing new music for the wake-up calls based on astrophysical data, such as the radio waves emitted by celestial bodies, and visual images of space." (They also had an Internet improv session with astrophysicist/rock musician Fiorella Terenzi.)

The three entries were judged by Russian rocket scientist Alexander Martynov and legendary cosmonaut Alexander Volkov, with the Camerata recording the winner for future early-morning duty (though this news report was coy as to who that winner actually was.) In the words of MMU Science Week organizer Conway Mothbi, "The call will be heard 250 miles above the earth by Expedition 14 cosmonauts under conditions of weightlessness. This is a great honour as it is a UK first."

Update (3/21): Wyche Primary took the prize (see comments). I'll make sure to provide a link as soon as the recordings are posted.

Croí follain agus gob fliuch

St. Patrick's Day is tomorrow. (So is Evacuation Day—basically a Bostonian work-around to make the occasion an actual legal holiday.) There's been a radio commercial here in Boston for the past few weeks that uses some variant on the phrase "Everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day." My lovely wife and I thought this would be a good marketing tack for the Boston Symphony to promote this weekend's performances of Mahler 3.

ANNOUNCER: On St. Patrick's Day, everyone is Irish—even a nervous Austrian Jew!

MAHLER (in the voice of the Lucky Charms leprechaun): I'm Gustav Mahler! Come and be hearin' me Third Symphony! The trees, the flowers—they've all been talkin' to me! We'll even have a chorus of wee little ones!

My last name notwithstanding, I'm one-quarter Irish, although, to put things in perspective, that makes me only half as much a man of the auld sod as, say, Richard Nixon. On the other hand, a childhood's worth of sunburned freckles has to count for something, right? Besides, on St. Patrick's Day, everyone is Irish—even Toru Takemitsu! Here's his arrangement of "Londonderry Air," AKA "Danny Boy," as performed by Kosei Kubota.

Gaining One's Definition

Definitions of music are by no means rare.

The most usual, the official one, is this: "Music is the art of combining sounds in a manner agreeable to the ear."

According to Hugo Reimann, music is "the manifestation of Beauty through the medium of sound."

Another German has it that "Die Musik ist eine klingende Arithmetik" (Music is a sonorous arithmetic).

Spencer, on the other hand, considered music as a natural development of the accent imparted to the human voice by passion.

To Mazzini music was "the faith of a world whose poetry is but high philosophy."

To the average listener, music is melody, that is to say, a mere "pretext to sing."

And lastly, we have the famous definition of Théophile Gautier, that "music is the most expensive of all noises."

* * * * *
Feeling constrained to give a definition myself, I should say that, in my opinion, music is the art of combining sounds both in time and space (successively and simultaneously) according to the composer's creative egoism and his complete indifference to every law that opposes his sincerity.

From L'Evoluzione della Musica, A traverso la storia della Cadenza perfetta ("The Evolution of Music, Throughout the History of the Perfect Cadence"), by Alfredo Casella, 1919. (Emphasis in the original.) A fun party game: try and match each definition with a subsequent 20th-century musical style, vocabulary, or school. Even Gautier's.

Appellation spring

Composers are aiming for the wrong star. Commissions? Pulitzers? Joan Peyser tell-all biographies? Pffft. Everybody knows the real fame is in taxonomic designations. You'll know you've made it when there's a sludgy, possibly extinct organism that's named for you.

To the left there is the microsporidian parasite Buxtehudea scaniae, surrounded by a mitochondrion of the cell it's mooching off of. Both the genus and the family, Buxtehudidae, were named for the guy Bach hiked across Germany to hear by Swedish biologist Ronny Larsson of Lund University, who's also honored his countrymen Hugo Alfven and Franz Berwald with microscopic fungi of their own.

The Australian chalcidologist A. A. Girault killed two birds with one stone in 1926 with the wasp Mozartella beethoveni. As he described the species:

Mozartella (Ectromini).
As Mesorhopella but golden, antenna short, capitate, club equal funicle, funicles transverse. Ovipositor ¼ abdomen, latter depressed=cordate[.] Veins subequal. Minute.

M. beethoveni. Wings clear, veins pale. Funicles 1-2 twice wider than long, longest, rest wider. Pedicel bit longer than wide. Discal cilia well toward base, of hind wing, 15 lines. Pinkenba, Q. ex galls, May 10, 1916. H. Jarvis.

Chopin has a moth, Fernandocrambus chopinellus. And Rossini has a seashell, Cymbiola rossiniana, described by M. Bernardi in 1859, making him possibly the first musician so honored. (That's the shell, commonly called Rossini's volute, at right.)

Most recent speciations have pertained to pop musicians. The Beatles have quite a few beasties named after them, the most pertinent being Greeffiella beatlei, a nematode worm identified by S. Lorenzen in 1969—the worm's shagginess perhaps resembling a Beatle haircut. The Godfather of Soul lives on as the mite Funkotriplogynium iagobadius, named by Seeman and Walter in 1997 ("iago"="James" and "badius"="Brown"); Mark Knopfler got a dinosaur. But Australian paleontologist Greg Edgecombe leads the field here, naming scores of trilobites after the Rolling Stones, the Ramones, Simon & Garfunkel, and, my personal favorite, the Sex Pistols: Arcticalymene viciousi, A. rotteni, A. jonesi, A. cooki, and A. matlocki.

The best story, though, has to be the jellyfish Phialella zappai. Marine biologist Ferdinando Boero got himself transferred to a lab in California so he could meet Frank Zappa, his musical hero, by naming a jellyfish after him. The plan worked—in spades: take a listen to You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore, vol. 6, and you can hear "Lonesome Cowboy Burt" rewritten as "Lonesome Cowboy Nando."

When I get off, I get plastered.
I swim till I fall on the jellyfish.
Then I find me some academic kind of illustrator,
I describe the little dangling utensils on this thing,
And tell him to draw it up
So it looks just like a brand new jellyfish.

(You can read more about Boero's friendship with Zappa here. Here's more stuff named for Zappa. Scroll down here and you can find more musicians.)

Smooth operator

Reviewing Jonathan Biss.
Boston Globe, March 13, 2007.

Every little cloud always sings aloud

Some people out there know that I'm a confirmed Winnie-the-Pooh freak, so imagine my delight to find Fyodor Khitruk's 1969 Russian version, Vinni-Pukh, had turned up online:



(Courtesy of Cartoon Brew.) If you're used to the E.H. Sheperd illustrations, or their crude Disneyfication, the visuals may be a surprise (albeit a vibrantly pleasant one), but once that bear launches into his unbelievably catchy song, Khitruk's version leaves all others behind.

The music is by the Polish-Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg, who remains largely unknown in the West, although that seems to be changing. Born in 1919, Weinberg hardly had an easy life—the rest of his family perished in the Holocaust, and his father-in-law, the great Soviet Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels (famous for his Yiddish King Lear) was killed on orders from Stalin. But Shostakovich noticed Weinberg's talents and befriended him, and when, a few years later, Weinberg himself was arrested on charges of "Jewish bourgeois nationalism," Shostakovich sent a letter to the head of the NKVD, Lavrenta Beria, on Weinberg's behalf. (He was released upon Stalin's death.) In turn, Weinberg was most likely the driving force behind Shostakovich's turn towards Jewish subject matters in the 1960s and 70s. Before his death in 1996, Weinberg wrote over 20 symphonies, several operas (the work he himself thought his best, the Holocaust-themed opera Passazhirka ["The Passenger"] was posthumously premiered in 2006), and quite a bit of film music, including two more Pooh shorts for Khitruk. Here's another one:



That's Vinni-Pukh idet v gosti ("Winnie-the-Pooh Goes on a Visit"), from 1971. Khitruk was one of the first Soviet animation directors to break out of the rut of Socialist realism, and you can see the Russian folk influences in his Pooh films. Weinberg's music is a perfect fit, vaguely folk-like but also sophisticated and scintillating, setting the mood with a stylish economy of means.

The Soul of Wit

Phil at Dial "M" posted an unbelievable video of Glenn Gould playing a Beethoven bagatelle this week; go there and watch it, and then you can come back here for more miniature fun.

Paul Crossley performing Luciano Berio's "Leaf":


Simon Keenlyside sings "Fin ch'han dal vino" from Don Giovanni (Abbado conducting):


John Zorn and Naked City do "Snagglepuss" live:


And the late, great Dave McKelvy covers Chopin's "Minute Waltz":

The Wrong Trousers

This week, Greg Sandow posted an essay by one of his Eastman students about what's wrong with classical concert formats. It's the usual suspects:

At times even I feel uncomfortable in the stuffy atmosphere of the concert hall and sometimes I wish I could just go to a concert in jeans and a sweatshirt instead of feeling like I need to dress up for the event.... Less formal attire for musicians would not only make us more comfortable when we’re playing, but I think it would also let the audience feel more relaxed.

(For the record, I've gone to probably several hundred classical concerts in jeans and tennis shoes and never once was refused admission. Is Rochester more hardcore about that sort of thing?) The student goes on:

Throw in some pop/rock lighting experiments and I think we might be talking about real entertainment.... What if the composer also specified that the woodwinds should stand and the lighting should be blue during the second movement? Spotlighting on soloists is also a direction that might be interesting in concerts....

In other words, it's the veneer, not the actual musical content. Now, the outward trappings of a concert experience are important, but here's where the trouble comes in: this student (and some of the commenters) think outward trappings to be of primary importance, and they want the trappings to be, well, those of a rock concert.

One of the commenters proposes this program:

How does commissioning a ballet for Ades' Living Toys and a film for Reich's Eight Lines with Ligeti's piano concerto sandwiched between sound to you?

Frankly, to me, it sounds like way too much distraction. But that would be about the level of visual stimulation you'd expect from a rock band. For them, there's a lot more to compete with: audience members come and go, they feel free to talk, they feel free to sing along. They applaud themselves for recognizing a song, and they spend as much time socializing as listening. A rock act needs a stronger signal to cut through that level of noise. That's the milieu, and it's fine—rock music is engineered around it such that it's still musically worthwhile. But that much simultaneous activity would hardly be conducive to really getting into the sonic world of an Adés or a Ligeti (let alone a Feldman, Lucier, or Webern).

What seems to be missing here is the realization that one of the indispensible and vital pleasures of art music (classical and jazz, I should add, even though the focus of this post is classical) is the immersion in the sound on its own terms—not just rhythm and harmony, but the actual sound of the music. And a lot of the logistics of traditional classical performance—the uniform attire, the comparative silence of the audience, the lack of patter and superfluous stage business—have the salutary effect of not diverting your attention from that sound. I emphasize that I don't hold any particular brief for current practices, but these types of proposals introduce elements that would interfere with the musical potential of concerts far more than they would promote it. For example, I'm hardly a stickler on applause: if you feel the urge to put your hands together, you should. I wonder, though, if the constant focus on the issue isn't evidence of a stifling tradition, but, rather, an inability to appreciate the beauty of sound fading into silence—as a collective experience, an entire audience cheering can't compare with an entire audience holding its breath. Has the predominance of rock and pop aesthetics somehow made that sort of suspended moment an uneasy terra incognita for those such as Greg's student? Even her plea for new music is misguided:

When was the last time a new ballet caused a riot as in the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring?

Not recently, thankfully—a riot is not the best atmosphere for perceiving a new work of art. But note that she's not highlighting the engagement with something new, the intellectual excitement of coming to terms with an unfamiliar piece, but the crowd's verdict; the ideal is an instant sensation, a ready-made flow for the listener to go with. Which means that the clothes and the etiquette and the distance of the performers aren't what's intimidating, it's that none of those things give any clear instruction as to what you're supposed to think of the experience. It ends up being just you and the music. And if you've spent your life having marketers and mass media telling you what to think, that freedom can be disquieting indeed.

The student describes a faculty recital with approval:

During the recital they interacted with the audience, allowed themselves to show their strange but hilarious personalities and got the audience involved in their performance. Suddenly their ‘serious’ classical music was not so serious anymore. We laughed, we were entertained and most importantly, we talked about it to our friends the next day.

All concerts can be experienced on the level of personality and stage presentation, but for this student and her friends, that's the most important aspect. These are all (presumably) music students, and every concert they go to (presumably) has music on it. Why aren't they talking about all the other concerts? Because then, they'd have to talk about the actual music, which is not easy to do; they're used to the standard level of discourse surrounding pop music, which is based around celebrity. It's a fine line between making the audience comfortable and allowing them to never leave their comfort zone. A concert that lets you view and discuss the world the way that you're used to is hardly an unpleasant experience, but that's pretty much the opposite of what I've always believed good art is supposed to do.

That's a pretty curmudgeonly thing to say, isn't it? I'm a curmudgeon about a lot of things. And those people calling for a more rock-like classical experience aren't wrong to want what they want. We all do. But they're in danger of closing themselves off from an awful lot. Greg's student describes a performance:

I turned toward the audience and played one extremely loud note and not surprisingly, a woman in the front of the hall jumped about two feet out of her chair. How often can typical classical music concerts affect an audience member so directly?

Surprisingly often, in my case. But that's because I finally figured out that it's not about being knocked out of my chair, it's about being able to aurally go up to the music and engage it actively, openly, maybe even foolishly. The more that classical music borrows from popular music, the more the artistic content is skewed in a pop direction: towards sensation and away from contemplation, and more crucially, towards expectation and away from exploration. The most important music is the music we don't yet know that we want. Structuring the presentation along popular lines makes it that much more unlikely that we'll ever find it.

Not long for this world

I'm the first to admit that my skill at prognosticating competitions is non-existent, so I wasn't surprised that none of the composers I considered in the running for the Grawemeyer Award won (see comments here). I was pleasantly surprised that my other prediction failed to pan out—that the honored piece would be an opera or concerto (the winner, Sebastian Currier's Static, is for five players). That call, in fact, was based on solid evidence: 12 of the previous 20 winners had been either stage works or solo-and-orchestra affairs. The inherent flash and drama of virtuosity or figurative action, after all, is always going to make a bigger impact than a well-wrought but understated meditation for a few players that don't seem to be working very hard.

I've been thinking about such things this week as I've been revisiting the Webern op. 27 Variations for solo piano. In Moldenhauer's biography, he quotes Webern writing a colleague about his progress: "The completed part is a movement of variations; what is evolving will be a kind of 'suite.' In the variations I hope I have realized something I have envisioned for years now." To another correspondent, a couple of weeks later: "During the last few weeks I was uninterruptedly at my work and now see that the variations go on further, even if they turn into movements of most diverse types." (Emphasis in the original.)

Webern first started working on the Variations in October of 1935, went at it full-steam starting the next June, and finally finished it in September. That's a long genesis for a not-very-long piece of music, but the quotes reveal that Webern had to live with the notes for a long time before he could see where they were going, generating a type of fully organic form that he had clearly been trying to imagine for the better part of his compositional life. The pianist who premiered op. 27, Peter Stadler, remembered coaching the music with Webern: "For weeks on end he had spent countless hours trying to convey to me every nuance of performance down to the finest detail. As he sang and shouted, waved his arms and stamped his feet in an attempt to bring out what he called the meaning of the music I was amazed to see him treat those few scrappy notes as if they were cascades of sound." For Webern, they were: highly charged phrases packed with a year's worth of thought and emotion.

I doubt the Variations would win any major music award today. The Grawemeyer specifies a "large musical genre"; the Pulitzer is for a work "of significant dimension." Webern's few pages wouldn't get much of a look from such juries. Yet op. 27 is a piece of significant dimensions, even if those dimensions are curled into themselves like something out of string theory. Big awards, thankfully, don't always go to big ensembles, but there's a long way to go before a couple of perfect minutes of lapidary precision and ineffable depth can hope to compete on equal terms with a Wagnerian stem-winder.

Hats Off

It's Thursday, so it must be time for Paul Hindemith and Darius Milhaud to star in a Weimar-era avant-garde German version of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" video! That's Vormittagspuk ("Morning Ghosts"), directed by Dada luminary Hans Richter in 1928 (with music by Hindemith). The Nazis deemed it "Degenerate Art" and destroyed the negative, but a print survived, and, of course, is now available on YouTube. Richter later spent some time in America, where, among other things, he collaborated with Jean Cocteau on the late surrealist romp 8x8: A Chess Sonata (portions of which are also online—check out this sequence featuring Paul Bowles awakening to compose from a slowly draining swimming pool.)

Boy, boy, crazy boy

From the wires:

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are about to buy Leonard Bernstein's old apartment. (That's a Scientological E-Meter to the right there, like the one that will soon sit in the place formerly occupied by Lenny's ashtray. Build your own!)

Peter Frampton (link warning: auto-loading guitar music) just narrated Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf in Kentucky.

Go to Syracuse and you might just end up as an official Lou Reed scholar. (Reed's also picking up the George Arents Pioneer Medal for Excellence in the Arts.) English majors only, which may confirm your opinion of Metal Machine Music. Not mine, though—I love the noise. (Thanks to awesome sister Jeana Stewart for the tip.)

Oboist H. David Meyers has been sentenced to a year and a day in prison for running an illegal sports gambling operation. (Speaking of gambling, just one more day to get in on your office Grawemeyer pool. My money's on Steve Reich—but I came up empty in MegaMillions, so maybe you should ask someone else.)

Update (3/8): The Grawemeyer? We were all wrong—me especially. Congratulations, Sebastian!

In a Persian Market

Remember Nader Mashayehki? He's the conductor of the Tehran Symphony Orchestra, who last year, toured Europe with a program that included Frank Zappa's Dog Breath Variations. He's at it again: tomorrow night, he'll lead a perfomance of John Cage's Four⁶ at the Tehran Conservatory of Music. “It will be interesting to find out whether there is any penchant for Cage’s works among Iranians or not, and if so, to what degree,” Mashayekhi says. As far as anyone knows, this is the first Cage performance in Iran since the Islamic Revolution. The Tehran Symphony faces chronic funding shortages, but Masayekhi isn't inclined to shift to a more conservative programming philosophy. “[Cage's] works create a hope and a philosophical view toward life," Mashayehki says. "This view is very helpful and we really need that hope in Iran… his music creates joie de vivre.” Indeed.

(Article via New Music ReBlog, which I'm shocked and mortified to find is not on the blogroll. I really need to update that thing.)

Update (3/6): Alex Ross, who's more productive on his lunch hour than I am, tracks down a poster for the concert that I can't wait to print out and hang on the wall.

"Oh, she didn't hit it"

Our former DePaul roommate Mark Meyer sends along news that one of our favorite professors, Tom Brown, passed away last week. The "scholar and gentleman" epithet doesn't begin to descibe Dr. Brown, who had the irrepressible enthusiasm of the true nerd and enough endearing quirks for at least a dozen other musicologists. Two facts that probably won't make it into his obituary: he met and romanced his former wife, so the story goes, while she was still in a convent, the discovery of which gave us a whole new level of respect for the man; and every ten years or so, he'd put aside all other books and spend the year re-reading Proust. He was living proof that the field of music is so rich that one could happily spend an entire life thinking deep, idiosyncratic thoughts about it. (Post title is a direct petulantly indignant quote from Dr. Brown's "Shakespeare and Music" seminar, when, after talking for weeks about the high D-flat at the end of the mad scene in Verdi's Macbeth, the soprano on the video he showed the class chickened out and sang an A-flat instead.)

If they asked me, I could write a book

Reviewing the Cantata Singers Chamber Series.
Boston Globe, March 6, 2007.