Nickel in the Slot

I was out of town last week, so I'm a little late to Steve Hicken's quiz.

1) What five operas would you most like to see performed?

1. Schoenberg: Von Heute auf Morgen. Believe it or not, Schoenberg was actually offered an awful lot of money by a publisher for this piece, but his wife Gertrude thought the publisher was being annoyingly pushy, so Schoenberg turned it down. He credited the refusal with saving his life—had he taken the money, he said, he might have ended up too comfortable to flee the Nazis in time. So how come no publishers are offering to save my life in this way?
2. Britten: Owen Wingrave. His second-to-last opera, a brilliant anti-war ghost story, originally written for television. Just don't let premium cable near it, or Owen will face his family's demons buck-naked. And the demons will be played by B-list starlets. I spoke too soon: that's a travesty I'd actually watch.
3. Tippett: The Ice Break. Some people are vaguely embarrassed by Tippett's self-written libretti, but is there anybody else, in any genre, who goes where he goes? I mean, besides Pink Floyd?
4. Babbitt: Fabulous Voyage. Uncle Milton's 1946 Broadway musical, based on Homer's Odyssey. If Babbitt had gone on to have Jerry-Herman-esque success on the Great White Way, would the alleged serialist hegemony in 1950s and 60s America still have come about? If not, would all those people continually complaining about said alleged hegemony find something else to complain about? Yeah, probably.
5. Stockhausen: Licht: Die sieben Tage der Woche. Bonus points if the production is financed via a series of high-tech international jewel heists.

2) What five pieces would you most like to hear performed?

1. Busoni: Piano Concerto. Anybody who looks at a draft of a massive, late-Romantic concerto and thinks, "You know what this thing needs? A men's chorus!" is my kind of guy.
2. Barraque: Piano Sonata. I've never heard it live.
3. Ives: Symphony no. 4. See above. Might as well throw in Gruppen while we're at it. Think of how many freelancers you could feed with a program like that.
4. R. Murray Schafer: No Longer Than Ten (10) Minutes. For reasons previously noted.
5. Nam June Paik: Danger Music #5. You're going into that whale's vagina a nobody, but you're coming back a star!

3) What five living performers would you most like to meet?

1. Riccardo Muti. I'll invite him over, put on a Pavarotti record, and hide behind the furniture.
2. Jean-Yves Thibaudet. I could use a makeover.
3. Placido Domingo. Mr. Domingo, I have this album you recorded with John Denver that I'd love for you to sign... Mr. Domingo? Where are you going?
4. Jessye Norman. I'd just keep giving her money until she agreed to record the outgoing message on my voicemail.
5. Oscar Peterson.
OP: Hi, I'm Oscar Peterson.
Me: OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG

4) What five living composers would you most like to meet?

After ten minutes of thinking, "Oh, yeah, I'd like to meet him/her; oh, wait a minute, I already did," I gave up. Hanging around Tanglewood for the better part of seven summers will do that. Not that any of them would remember me, anyway. (Five that are fun to meet, if you haven't already: Steven Mackey, Marjorie Merryman, Tan Dun, Andre Previn, Osvaldo Golijov.)

5) What five living musicians (composers, performers, writers, scholars, etc) would you most like to play three-on-three basketball with/against?

My team:
Me
Michael Daugherty
Tommy Tune
Other team:
Alicia de Larrocha
Jimmy Scott
Prince

I like those odds.

Unlikely music critic of the day (literally)

Bernstein has taught me, too, what Hegelianism is. I knew I was a Hegelian, but never knew what it was. Now I see that a Hegelian is one who agrees that everybody is right, and who acts as if everybody but himself were wrong. What a delightful idea—so German—that Karl Marx thought himself a Hegelian! It is equal to Wagner's philosophy...

—Henry Adams to Brooks Adams,
Paris, November 5, 1899

Bonus quote!

The nieces took me to Philadelphia to hear Ternina as Ysolde [sic], and Looly taught me what to say about it. To you, the formula doesn't matter. To me, the singular part of it was that the music of Ysolde should be interpreted to me by two young and perfectly pure girls. Another Americanism! I could not even hint to them what it meant, and they couldn't have hinted it to me if they had known. The twelfth century had the audacity of its passions, and Wagner at times talks almost plain twelfth century language.

—Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron,
March 12, 1900

Previously: 1, 2.

DJs communicate to the masses

Bryant Manning reports that things are still pretty much as I remember at my alma mater. (A major scholarly highlight of junior year was the co-discovery, with this guy, that the opening of Brahms op. 120, no. 2 could be played over the accompaniment pattern of "New York, New York.")

Via Alex.

File under miscellaneous

Classical Notes.
Boston Globe, November 2, 2007.

The Lexington Symphony, the national anthem, a French Baron, and fried chicken.

Off-Topic Thursday: Eat Your Words

Obscure twenty-five-cent words, wasting valuable work time, and feeding the hungry? Free Rice is three of our favorite things, in one convenient website! Idly test your vocabulary, and for every one you get right, ten grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Program. Waste a couple hours on the job, and you can help someone else's economy while undermining your own! Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to work larboard and clapperclaw into my everyday conversation.

(Thanks to Lisa at Exploding Aardvark for finding this one.)

Many Happy Returns of the Day

MASSENET'S 'GHOST'
SEEN AT REHEARSALS
—————
Singers and Stage Hands of the
Paris Gaiete-Lyrique Swear
They Behold an Apparition.
—————
ACTS AS IF LEADING OPERA
—————
Outsiders Unable to See Anything
on Stage Where Composer's Last
Work Is Being Made Ready.
—————
Special Cable to The New York Times.

PARIS, April 20.—What is regarded by the Paris artistic world as the chief musical event of the season, the premiere of "Panurge," the last work of Massenet, scheduled to be given Tuesday at the municipal Opera House, the Gaieté-Lyrique, has taken on additional interest because of the assertions of singers and stage hands that the stage is haunted at every rehearsal by the ghost of the composer.

The extraordinary affair has been kept secret for a fortnight, but just leaked out, with the result that the Gaieté has been beseiged by musicians, opera lovers, and friends of Massenet, eager for details of his alleged appearance.

"I first noticed the apparition at the second rehearsal," said the baritone, M. Marcoux, to The New York Times correspondent. "It appeared at the end of the second act at the right-hand corner of the stage. At first I thought it was a hallucination on my part, but, try as I might, I could not keep my eyes from the figure, which I could see distinctly, clad in the familiar gray frock coat, beat time with its hands and shake its head in approval or disapproval. I said nothing, for fear of being ridiculed, and as the ghost, or whatever it might be, did not appear again that day, I took a dose of bromide to steady my nerves.

"Next day Mlle. Lucy Arbell, who has the principal rôle, clutched my arm suddenly during the duet in the second act and whispered, in a terrified voice, 'Look! Look!' There, in the same place, stood the strange figure, going through the motions of conducting an orchestra. I must confess our voices sounded shaky as we continued singing."
...
Marcel Simond, General Secretary of the theatre, was another witness of the strange manifestations. He said that at first the women members of the company were tremendously impressed and hysterical and the tenors and basses were nervous as schoolgirls, while the stage hands refused to go near the haunted corner, but in the course of a few days they appeared to accustom themselves to the strange apparition and the work is now going on as usual.
...
The correspondent of the New York Times spent this afternoon on the stage of the theatre, but, although M. Marcoux and others pointed to an alleged spectre, the correspondent was unable to see the slightest trace of it.

—New York Times, April 20, 1913

Save situation

Reviewing Itzhak Perlman.
Boston Globe, October 30, 2007.

Concert and review preceded Game 4, but with the way the World Series was going, I figured I better get in a baseball reference while I could before the long winter. My lovely rabid-Red-Sox-fan wife and I then watched the game at a bar, surrounded by loud drunk people, which is, really, the only way to see a team clinch. (Good thing, too—had the Red Sox lost, I have a feeling those guys would have gone out and keyed every car in the lot.)

The Smart Set

A management consulting firm called Synectics came out this week with a publicity-stunt "survey" of the top 100 living "geniuses." If you're keeping score, Philip Glass tops the musical world, coming in at #9. The rock contingent shows a decided baby-boomer bias. Jazz? No geniuses left, apparently. Dolly Parton squeaks in at #94, though.

Lists like this tend to be pretty silly, and this one is worse than most, with a methodology so flimsy that I question this firm's proficiency at consulting anybody on anything. But the survey does point up something interesting. The first criterion on Synectics' list of five defining traits of genius is that old favorite, paradigm shifting. And I realized that paradigm shifting might just be the one thing that unites the past century or two of music history.

The term "paradigm shift" became famous from Thomas Kuhn's 1970 study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Notice the word choice, though: not scientific process, or discovery, but revolution. That's a post-Romantic bias revealed right in the title, but the effects of Romantic thinking (heck, let's gild the lily and call it the Romantic Revolution) are so deeply ingrained in modern society that we don't even see it. That might be why 20th and 21st-century music history seems so fragmented and variegated: we take for granted the one universal feature, the way every turn of the musical wheel—jazz, atonality, minimalism, rock, historically-informed performance, neo-Romanticism, &c.—claims (or is claimed) to have shifted some paradigm or another.

I don't think this is by definition good or bad, it's just an observation: the societies we live in are, at their core, products of the Romantic era, and I don't see that influence ebbing anytime soon. (In a lot of ways, it's bound up with the spread and solemnization of democratic processes.) But it is a big change from, say, the 1600s, when a composer like Sweelinck was widely recognized as a genius, not because he was an innovator, not because he was a revolutionary, but because he did what everyone else was doing so much better than everyone else did. That's a contrast with the current touchstone for musical genius, Beethoven. It's an open question whether Beethoven's innovations were popular, or whether Beethoven was popular because his penchant for innovation so well embodied fashionable Romantic ideas. I suspect the latter—the really inventive late stuff didn't gain very much traction at the time. But his is the kind of impact that musicians of all stripes are still, consciously or subconsciously, being judged against.

The censures of the carping world

When O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder charges in 1995, the only people I talked to who weren’t surprised were friends in law school. O.J.’s lawyers worked a textbook defense: destroy the credibility of the arresting officer, and reasonable doubt descends on the entire case. I thought of O.J. fairly early on in this week’s must-read, Richard Taruskin’s Monty-Python-16-ton-weight of a book review in The New Republic. Taruskin is reviewing recent literature on the allegedly precarious state of classical music in current culture. His favorite?

…Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music by Blair Tindall, a journalist and recovering oboist, which despite a pandering title actually contains the smartest and most constructive take on the situation.

Come on. Blair Tindall? I could see if he wanted to cite the book as symptomatic of certain attitudes that he saw in the modern music world and wanted to use in his argument. But “the smartest and most constructive take on the situation”? That book was trash—entertaining trash, yes, but about as constructive as jello shots. The jury would like to see those gloves again, your honor.

This review encapsulates everything that drives me nuts about Taruskin’s writing: at first I'm amused by by the insult comedy, then the rhythm starts to bog down, and finally I'm just exhausted—and, temporarily, reflexively sympathetic to whatever poor idea he continues to bludgeon out of apparent inertia. Taking up a trio of books that could be easily—and deservedly—dispatched on the back of a couple of napkins, Taruskin instead unleashes 12,000 words (12,000 words—let us never speak of this man as “pithy” again), so focused on his invective and his provocations that he ties his shoelaces together, stumbling over his own arguments, lurching past more interesting, subtler points. Even more frustrating, those points are eminently worth making—but they're drowned out by the irresistable lure of the lapidary put-down.

Here’s a favorite bit. In the midst of Taruskin carpet-bombing Julian Johnson’s Who Needs Classical Music?, anti-Semitism rears its ugly head (I know, I know—Taruskin playing the anti-Semitic card? Shocking) in the Halloween-mask guise of Richard Wagner. Taruskin traces Johnson’s classical-music-as-moral-uplift back to E.T.A. Hoffmann, then condemns it because Wagner took it up:

Between Hoffmann and Wagner, however, the metaphor of depth had been claimed by German writers as a national trait; and just as nationalism underwent its general transformation from a modernizing and liberalizing discourse into a belligerent and regressive one in the later nineteenth century, so the notion of spiritual depth had been turned into a weapon of national and racial aggrandizement in Wagner's hands.

So what? Ideas don’t automatically lose their validity just because unscrupulous people try and assimilate them into their own distasteful worldviews—and it's an awfully tenuous assumption that, by listening to a composer's music, we automatically perceive and accept that composer's philosophy. (I've listened to Wagner for years without succumbing to the temptations of rabid nationalism, racial superiority, or wife-stealing.) Now, Taruskin is bringing up Wagner’s anti-Semitism in the context of taking down Johnson’s advocacy of classical music as a moral tonic. Taruskin rightly points out that art should bring pleasure, first and foremost, and that pleasure takes many forms:

But pleasure does not have to be defined sensuously, and there are all kinds of pleasures: guilty pleasures, altruistic pleasures, animal pleasures, spiritual pleasures, perverse pleasures, the pleasure of a good meal, of a good cry, of worthy accomplishment, of self-improvement, of self-possession, of exclusion, of ascendancy, of dominion, of revenge.

Taruskin coruscates Johnson: “To cast aesthetic preferences as moral choices at the dawn of the twenty-first century is an obscenity.” But Taruskin, of course, is doing just that, saying that if you derive pleasure via a Hoffmann-esque aesthetic philosophy, you’re headed down the same road to perdition that Wagner took. "Belief in [classical music's] indispensability, or in its cultural superiority, is by now unrecoverable," Taruskin states, "and those who mount such arguments on its behalf morally indict themselves." First of all, a belief is not an argument, and second of all, doesn't that belief constitute an aesthetic preference? Certainly some pleasures are morally reprehensible, but that means that other pleasures (even if just the pleasure of avoiding the morally reprehensible) are, by comparison, morally advantageous. Taruskin wants it both ways.

Both the book itself and its reception (as recorded on Amazon.com) expose the sort of pleasure it promotes: that of solidarity in sanctimony. To all who have read it with enjoyment I urgently prescribe a reading of Father Sergius, Tolstoy's parable of moral exhibitionism and its comeuppance. I will pray for the salvation of their souls.

God’s eyes would probably glaze over around the 8,000-word mark.

The thing is, all three of these books (or at least the two that I read) deserve a certain amount of opprobrium, but the interesting review that might have come out of that—promulgating a theory as to why, market forces to the contrary, so many of us do still listen to classical music—is buried under spluttering, Dickensian rage and that seemingly deathless nostalgic 1970s hit, poking Adorno with a stick. (ANABlog has already pointed out a couple more of Taruskin's less watertight arguments.)

On the other hand, why make a big deal? I don't particularly care for the eat-your-vegetables rationalization of classical music in these books, either. Here's why: on the header of his blog, the film scholar Jim Emerson quotes the philosopher Daniel Dennett: "There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear." In my book, scattershot bullying counts as a bad argument; by the end of the article, I had to consciously remind myself that I actually agreed with a lot of his positions. Taruskin closes by quoting Tony Soprano—see, kids? Your professor is down with pop culture, too. (In the meantime, the kids have moved on to "The Office" and Arcade Fire songs.) "Do not expect nuance from a mob boss," he warns. I won't, Don Taruskin.

Work song

Reviewing the Arthur Berger Memorial Concert at NEC.
Boston Globe, October 25, 2007.

Über Sternen muß er wohnen

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is easily impressed, if this interview is any indication:

If you could sit down with one person from history, who would it be?

I would like to sit down and talk to Beethoven, my favorite composer. That would be amazing. I suspect what would be most fascinating is the discovery that these people are human too.

Really? That would be more fascinating than the discovery that Beethoven was a lizard-like creature from another solar system who needed twice-daily injections of growth hormones in order to survive Earth's crushing atmospheric pressure? (That would go a long way towards explaining the whole middle period.)

Warhorses

Daniel Barenboim was at it again last week, announcing a plan for the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Israeli-Palestinian youth ensemble he co-founded in 1999, to perform the first act of Wagner's Die Walküre at the Waldbühne, an open-air arena in Berlin built by the Nazis for the 1936 Olympics.

"Can you imagine that?" Barenboim was quoted as saying in the interview, released Wednesday. "The Waldbühne was built by Hitler. The music is Wagner. Played by us! Hitler and Wagner would turn in their graves."

This is Barenboim the world-class provocateur; anyone who criticizes him as naïve is badly misjudging him—the man knows exactly what he's doing. (For a sample of the consternation Barenboim tends to cause, see the comments at the end of this Ha'aretz report, or go here for a particularly heavy-handed approach.) For the record, I find Barenboim's music-making and his provocations to be sincere and thought-provoking—even when I'm not convinced, I'd rather be disagreeing with Barenboim that agreeing with a lot of other musicians, if that makes any sense. Still, I would imagine that most Germans don't immediately associate the Waldbühne with Hitler anymore—the Rolling Stones were already playing the arena in the 1960s, after all, and the Berlin Philharmonic traditionally closes its season there every June with a festive summer night. But Barenboim's reminder is entirely in keeping with a way he has of approaching the repertoire, which is fascinating.

Barenboim's use of repertoire and venue is, in a way, a complete reverse of how classical music has come to be promoted in modern culture. Usually, the fact that the classical canon was composed a) a long time ago and b) in a not-particularly egalitarian atmosphere goes politely unmentioned—the rationale (which I've often used myself) being that it doesn't matter where the music came from, it speaks to something universal in all of us, loosing itself from its socio-politico-historical moorings and floating free as the common property of humanity. Barenboim flips this on its head: Wagner's music is vital to us today not in spite of the politics of the composer and the music's subsequent historical associations, but because of it. For Barenboim, the way music can embody the universal human condition is a choice we make, a choice that reflects an essentially optimistic view of the contest between good and evil within the human soul. We can look Wagner in the eye, as it were, and reject his anti-Semitism by embracing his music, the nobler aspect of his human existence. When Barenboim programs Wagner in Jerusalem, or takes the podium at a Nazi venue as a Jewish artist, he's asserting that evil isn't something that needs to be quarantined, it's something that needs to be confronted and defeated by mankind's capacity for good. Rather than passively ignore the potent historical baggage, he actively puts it front and center, then invites us to consciously choose the positive experience of the music over the negative aspects of its past misuse, or even its origins. It's almost as if Barenboim is exercising the listeners' minds in the method of engaging the world that he thinks is necessary for ever improving it.

Wagner is the most obvious vehicle for this sort of thing, but here's another example that works in subtler ways. When Barenboim took the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra to Ramallah in 2005, on the program was a tribute to the late Edward Said, the Palestinian-American scholar who co-founded the ensemble with Barenboim: the "Nimrod" movement from Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations. Last summer, I participated in a discussion panel when a documentary of the concert was screened at the Boston Jewish Film Festival; at the time, I joked that Elgar was a canny choice, since the last time that Jews and Arabs in the region had been united was in their opposition to the post-WWI British Mandate. But scratch the surface, and there's multiple levels of the sort of intellectual aikido that accompanies Barenboim's Wagner: a piece that often memorializes heads of state being played for someone who spent his career trying to articulate the position of the disposessed, a composer indelibly associated with one of history's greatest colonial empires put into service celebrating an originator of post-colonial theory. The great thing is that it reflects back on the music, too—hearing Wagner's powerful beauty in Israel makes you realize the contrast between the large, deep humanity of Wagner the composer and the small, petty transience of Wagner the racial theorist; hearing Elgar in Ramallah highlights the ambivalence and poignancy forever present beneath the nobilmente Edwardian façade.

I'm more or less a moderate on the Israeli-Palestinian question: I think anyone who denies Israel's right to exist is a fool, but equally foolish is anyone who thinks that its existence can long persist in any worthwhile fashion without finding a peaceful co-existence with the Palestinians. And I have to admit that often, my view of human nature isn't sanguine enough to believe that the conflict between good and evil within the human soul is anything like a fair fight. At times like that, Barenboim's idealism can seem like naiveté or simplistic grandstanding. But Barenboim's whole point is that your reaction is a choice—even if you don't choose to believe that most people will do the right thing, at the very least, you yourself can choose to do the right thing. You can look at the awful ways in which even the most beautiful of human endeavors have been put to use, and decide that, even if it was that way in the past, it doesn't have to be that way in the future.

They Can't Take Thaat Away From Me

Reviewing the Boston Philharmonic.
Boston Globe, October 22, 2007.

The Boston Philharmonic's printed programs include this bit of wishful thinking:

Cell phones, pagers, watch alarms and similar noise-making devices wreck concerts and embarrass their owners. Please switch them off.

Wreck concerts? Yes. Embarrass their owners? Not in this country, my friend.

Multitasking

One of [Virgil Thomson's] peccadilloes was dozing during concerts. When I was reviewing for the Sun we quite often were at the same concert, and I could observe him in this condition and occasionally hear a snore or two. What amazed everyone was the fact that when he came out in the intermission his remarks indicated that he hadn't missed a thing. When I moved over to the Tribune Thomson and I would go out to dinner together from time to time before covering our respective assignments. Once Thomson cautioned me against having coffee (the decaf vogue had not started yet) and to be sure to have enough wine so that I would be able to sleep at the concert. There were times when I wished I could sleep but I lacked the talent—though I recall falling asleep at the Metropolitan during one ear-shattering passage in a Wagner opera, drowned in the sound and luxuriating in the red plush interior of the old opera house.

—Arthur Berger,
Reflections of an American Composer

Berger also quotes the funniest sentence I read all day, a Bernard Holland description of George Rochberg's neo-Romanticism: "Mr. Rochberg's quintet does remind us of the frontiersman who, having fought his way arduously through badlands and hostile Indians to the promised West, abruptly decides to resettle in Philadelphia."

Our Prayer

Sasha Frere-Jones has an article in the latest New Yorker that's been getting a fair amount of attention, in which he complains that indie rock has pretty much abandoned a long-standing rock tradition of more-or-less stealing from African-American musical styles. I don't know nearly enough about current indie rock to critique that, but he did say a couple of things that set my gears turning. First off, he seems to regard the African-American influence as an almost purely rhythmic one.

If there is a trace of soul, blues, reggae, or funk in Arcade Fire, it must be philosophical; it certainly isn’t audible. And what I really wanted to hear, after a stretch of raucous sing-alongs, was a bit of swing, some empty space, and palpable bass frequencies—in other words, attributes of African-American popular music.

But African-American music has its own distinct harmonic features as well. And I hear a fair amount of African-American harmonic influence, particularly from gospel, across the pop landscape. But, more interestingly, I hear even more of it in a lot of music by a guy Frere-Jones correctly points up as an inspiration to a lot of the indie crowd:

Several groups that experienced commercial success, such as the Flaming Lips and Wilco, drew on the whiter genres of the sixties—respectively, psychedelic music and country rock—and gradually Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys, a tremendously gifted musician who had at best a tenuous link to American black music, became indie rock’s muse.

Now, I would say that the link is more than tenuous—the initial Beach Boys sound was heavily indebted to Chuck Berry. "Surfin' U.S.A.," after all, is just "Sweet Little Sixteen" with different lyrics. But the sound was soon transformed into a new genre: "Fun, Fun, Fun" lifts its opening guitar riff from "Johnny B. Goode," but after that, it's essentially a Chuck Berry song that Chuck Berry would never be able to sing. And some atypical later Beach Boys albums (such as Wild Honey or Carl and the Passions) make explicit a debt to R&B and soul that was percolating under the surface of all those bright surf anthems.

But the harmonic influence is a far trickier matter, and points up the difficulty of tracing musical influence in general. The sound I'm thinking of is gospel's subdominant-dominant mash-up. The subdominant, which we all know and love from plagal "Amen" cadences, colors much of gospel harmony. It's a common ornament to the tonic chord:


At some point, that neighborly rocking was combined with a stronger V-I bass movement:


That subdominant-over-dominant IV-over-V sound (in chord symbols, either G11(add9) or F/G) is one of the touchstones of gospel. The presence of the first and fourth scale degrees push it past the basic V-I found in hymns, but its resolute diatonicism keeps it from sounding like straight-up jazz. Here's the conundrum: I hear a lot of that sound in Brian Wilson's later, more critically-revered output, but did he really get it from gospel? Or did he come up with it on his own, as a natural evolution of his musical voice? Part of the problem is that he uses such sounds in a fairly idiosyncratic way.

The quasi-gospel harmonies stay pretty much in the background in those early Beach Boys songs; everything is arranged for the standard rock instruments of guitar and bass, which doesn't highlight the vertical thinking as much, and while something like that first progression forms the basis of much of the rhythm guitar, it sounds more like rockabilly than gospel. The gospel sounds only come to the fore around the time of Pet Sounds, when Brian's focus turns from the bass to the piano (and, by extension, other keyboard instruments) as he eschews live performance for the studio. The textural model is the repeated right-hand quarter-note chord, something Brian probably picked up from listening to Phil Spector records. You can hear it clearly in the organ part that opens "Good Vibrations":


This is still very much in the Phil Spector mode, solidly triadic. But by the time of "Surf's Up," written for the ill-fated Smile album, things have gotten a little more complicated:

The third and fourth bars are close to the typical IV-over-V gospel dominant. But the first two bars are something else entirely. In essence, he's flipped the V-I movement in the bass, making the second chord of the pair the dominant. And he obscures the movement towards resolution by harmonizing the first bass note as a chord in second inversion, a particularly unstable sonority. The unexpected inversions are something Brian turns to again and again in this period, layering on a question where the bass line would seem to give an answer.

Are the fact that these sorts of chords are also found in gospel a sign of influence or coincidence? On the one hand, Brian has said in interviews that it was actually Burt Bacharach songs that opened up his ears to extra-triadic harmonies, major and minor seventh chords and the like. On the other hand, in the America of the 1950s and 60s, it would have been hard for Brian not to be influenced by gospel—I've written before about how the Civil Rights movement infused American vernacular music with a healthy dose of the African-American church.

But the most fascinating possibility is that Brian's gospel chords evolved separately, but from a common source. If you consider the music he grew up with—Protestant hymns, Four Freshman pop, early blues-based rock-and-roll—it's not that different from the stew out of which Thomas Dorsey first synthesized gospel in the 20s and 30s. Maybe it's a musical version of the Miller-Urey experiment: if the right elements are present, the necessary combinations form no matter what. It's like trying to trace the cross-pollination between the Beach Boys and the Beatles: "Surf's Up," for example, wasn't commercially released until 1971, but had been famously featured in the 1967 Leonard Bernstein-hosted CBS documentary Inside Pop. And put side by side, the Beatles' "Let It Be" and "The Long and Winding Road" sure do seem to be in debt to it. But maybe they were just all drawing on the same zeitgeist.

For comparison, here's one more Brian Wilson similarity, one that most certainly represents a parallel development, and not a direct influence. "God Only Knows" is, on one level, a celebration of the subdominant. It starts on IV (A major); the tonic E-major harmony never appears in root position. Here's the main progression of the song:


The tonic-related harmonies, in the center of the phrase, are second- and third-inversion instabilities that need to be resolved. That point of tension is surrounded by chords all related to either subdominant IV (including the F-sharp minor triads, which are, after all, the relative minor of IV) or the subdominant substitution ii. The tinta of the song is perennially stuck in the middle of an "Amen" cadence.

You know who else used to stack his harmonies heavily towards the plagal, the flat side of the circle of fifths? Edward Elgar. And for precisely the same reason that Brian Wilson does—to give the music a sense of melancholy grandeur, a sense that bright, sturdy perfect cadences would flood with too much sonic light. Now I know that Brian Wilson wasn't consciously trying to imitate Sir Edward. But they both heard the bittersweet longing within the plagal cadence, and chose their vocabularies accordingly. Tracing influences is fascinating, but for me, just as fulfilling is the realization that even total musical strangers are sometimes, in the same way, chasing the same star.

Going In Style

Reviewing Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.
Boston Globe, October 17, 2007.

Buying The Rest Is Noise

(Click to enlarge.)


Update (10/22): Robert F. Jones casts the movie in the comments.

America Drinks and Goes Home

More composer beer: Frank Zappa ale, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the release of Absolutely Free.


(The same brewery has also released an ale in honor of Freak Out!) I keep waiting for this to be a trend. Composer/beer puns abound: Quincy Porter, Alan Stout, C.P.E. Bock—but for my money, nothing would beat a Virgil Thomson Unfiltered Wheat.

Good? Bad? Ugly?

So did legendary Italian film composer Ennio Morricone get dissed in Korea or not? Morricone was in the country last week to be honored at the Pusan International Film Festival this week, but left early—depending on who you read, this was either all according to plan, due to an unprecedented mid-festival typhoon, or because of an unforgivable breach of etiquette. From the Seoul Times:

As part of opening night, Ennio Morricone was supposed have been honored with a ceremonial hand printing, but the inclement weather kept the legendary composer indoors and the presenting ceremony private.

But the Korea Times first reported this:

Afterward, the private opening party at the garden of Paradise Hotel greeted the stars and celebrities. Morricone, who was planning on topping the late-night event with the festival's first hand-printing ceremony, was unable to do so due to fatigue.

(The "hand-printing" ceremony is a festival honoree tradition, kind of like the way stars have left their imprint in the sidewalk outside Grauman's Chinese Theater.) The same paper later expanded on that report:

Ennio Morricone, the 79-year-old legendary Italian composer and conductor, was one of the important guests at Thursday's opening ceremony. But the maestro of film music and his wife were left unattended and unescorted at Thursday's opening ceremony.

Rumors went even further:

The most contested talk of the town was the alleged mistreatment and early departure of Ennio Morricone, the world-renowned maker of timeless scores from "Cinema Paradiso.'' With the sudden arrival of three contending presidential candidates, Morricone's red carpet entrance was pushed back during the opening ceremony. The 79-year-old composer had to remain standing for a very long time, and local media reports suggest that the festival staff did not treat him with respect.

Morricone did not show up for the hand-printing ceremony later on that evening. PIFF organizers, on the other hand, maintain that he left the country according to plan.

But the Hollywood Reporter says it's tabloid exaggeration:

However, the Korean press, especially the mercurial online variety, turned on PIFF this year, showering the festival with a barrage of complaints: Guest Ennio Morricone left the festival in an angry huff (false), a press conference for Lee Myung-se's "M" was far too crowded (true), a beachfront pavilion leaked (true, but there was a typhoon at the time).

The Reporter's reporter, Mark Russell, went into more detail on his blog:

Okay, the truth about Morricone, as far as I know. Morricone led a concert in Seoul on Wednesday (Oct. 3) night. He flew down to Busan on Thursday and, despite feeling ill (the dude is 80), he agreed to show up to the opening ceremonies, at least briefly. Morricone was picked up at the airport by one of PIFF's programmers (sadly, without a translator) and driven to his hotel.

Then he was taken to the opening ceremonies. There was a little disorganization backstage for a few minutes because of the politicians who wanted to attend (particularly Lee Myung-bak, who was quite late). PIFF organizers said it was about 5 minutes, while another person I talked to estimated it was longer. Morricone and his wife were then introduced and led to their seats.

After a few minutes, because he was feeling ill, Morricone went back to his hotel and skipped the opening party. He left early the next day, as scheduled.

No idea where the rumor started that he felt mistreated by PIFF. After all, he did the hand printing. If he was so angry, why would he have done that? There is absolutely no proof that anything bad happened (besides the delay at the opening ceremonies). Just a lot of silly gossip.

My guess is that Morricone would be too classy a guy to confirm whether he was disrespected or not. PIFF is one of the biggest film festivals in Asia, by the way, and swarming with journalists. Backlash? Spin? Or did the organizers really abandon their guest of honor?

80 Blocks From Symphonies

Gustav Mahler, who we all thought died in 1911, is apparently alive and well and a graffiti artist, leaving tags all over Toronto. Ah, this stuff is really frisch!

Key indicators

Today's starting point is this Bloomberg News report on the efforts of the French piano manufacturer Pleyel to reposition themselves as a maker of high-end concert instruments in response to Japanese and Chinese competition. The article doesn't really get into the most interesting aspect of that move, namely, keeping the traditional Pleyel sound (which, based on the last paragraph, it seems they're trying to do). The ubiquitously standard piano action and timbre of the modern world, what everything gets compared to, is that of a Steinway—a fluid, precise touch combined with a bright, penetrating sound. Pleyels historically have had a lighter touch and a much more limpid, transparent sound. The frequent combination of thick, busy textures with seemingly impossibly low dynamic levels in some pieces of Chopin or Debussy, for example, make much more sense when you know that both composers favored Pleyels.

Keeping that traditional sound is a bold move because it's the reason Pleyels have become comparatively scarce. Steinways are standard because they're engineered specifically for a consistent sound that can both fill up a big hall and cut through an orchestra. Pleyels were made primarily for smaller halls and, especially, salons, where its intimate shading could be best appreciated. The company is apparently betting that by highlighting their instruments' idiosyncratically individual timbre, they can generate enough interest to support only their highest-quality models—the article reports that they're discontinuing manufacture of uprights, presumably a higher-volume but also less marked-up product. That's a direct response to competition—the cheapest Pleyel upright has been retailing for around 7,500 Euros; a Chinese-made piano costs only one-fifth as much. But whether there's a long-tail-type niche for 100,000-Euro grand pianos is, putting it mildly, a bit of a risk.

A scaled-up Pleyel would probably put out enough sound to fill up a large space—after all, even the mighty Bösendorfer 290 Imperial, which does fine in multiple-thousand-seat houses, actually has a somewhat more delicate sound than a Steinway "D": all that bulk and those extra strings make for a deeper, more sustained tone, not a louder one. But given the premium put on rehearsal time, especially in the United States, there's the danger that getting used to a non-Steinway sound might be considered one too many adjustments for soloists and orchestras.

I hope Pleyel can make a go of it—I love the sound, myself. If I ever have piles of money, my instrument of choice will be an antique Pleyel. (Although getting such instruments into the US can be a problem: in the past, the ivory keys have run afoul of anti-poaching import restrictions. New Pleyels get around this by using, no kidding, fossilized woolly mammoth tusks.) But you can look at pianos as an object lesson in how globalization, for all its benefits, homogenizes manufacturing. The cheap instruments coming out of China and Japan tend to emulate the Steinway sound; other styles are endangered. Bechsteins, for example, are still made in Germany, for the time being, but the company is now owned by the Korean conglomerate Samick, which makes most of its instruments in Asia (they've also taken over the Knabe and Sohmer names, among others); the Bloomberg article mentions in passing that Bösendorfer is for sale, which I wasn't aware of, but would mark the third change of hands for that company in the past decade.

The question is whether it's homogenizing music as well. Has the reduction of the idea of what a piano sounds like to, for the most part, one particular timbre similarly impoverished the way composers write for the instrument? Would Chopin and Debussy have come up with the textures and harmonies they did if they were working with a modern Steinway? I can't think of another instrument that's become as one-size-fits-all as the modern concert grand.

The history of an instrument is usually presented as an evolutionary chain: viol consorts turning into the modern string section, recorders becoming transverse wooden flutes becoming their contemporary metal counterparts, and so on. It's like that classic illustration from grade-school biology textbooks showing the step-by-step genealogy of the horse. But that particular pattern—a chain of improvements leading up to a single, modern epitome—is actually something of an evolutionary failure. Truly successful biological lineages are the ones that branch out into endless variety. There's an argument to be made that the real descendant of the piano is the keyboard synthesizer, with its limitless timbral possibilities, and that the mechanical piano is just an atavism anyways. Still, I'd feel better about the family dynamic if all the siblings but one weren't hanging on by a thread.

Let's play our wedding march

From the dusty files of the Soho the Dog music library: Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" from A Midsummer Night's Dream. With added lyrics. And arranged for Hawaiian guitar. (Click to enlarge.)


Posted in honor of my lovely wife, in celebration of another year, and with the happy expectation of many more.

Prussian roulette

Reviewing Boston Musica Viva.
Bostton Globe, October 8, 2007.

Remakes

By now, everyone in the opera world has absorbed the news that Charles Wuorinen is working on an opera based on Brokeback Mountain. I was less skeptical about this idea than some—I thought some of the best, most startling parts of the last Wuorinen piece I heard, his 8th Symphony ("Theologoumena"), were the most delicate moments—and I just make it a rule to try and reserve judgment on any piece until I actually hear it. (I've been surprised, pleasantly and unpleasantly, far too many times.)

But then I read that David Carlson (whose Anna Karenina was premiered in St. Louis last season) was working on an adaptation of On the Waterfront (scroll down to the bottom) and I started to think about Wuorninen's efforts as part of a mini-trend of film-based operas: William Bolcom already saw the premiere of A Wedding, based on the Robert Altman film; Poul Ruders is composing a version of Lars von Trier's Dancer In the Dark; Howard Shore is mutating David Cronenberg's The Fly.

On the face of it, this might not seem like news: opera has always plundered other art forms for subjects and plots, far more often, in fact, that it's generated them itself. But cribbing from film changes the dynamic in a fundamental way. The previous motherlodes of operatic adaptation—theater and literature—are both re-creative media. Plays require live interpretation by actors and directors, with the varying personnel producing equally varied versions of the source material, while literature is dependent on the creative complicity of the reader—everyone who cracks the cover is his or her own producer/director, on the stage of imagination. But film, with its complete Gesamkunstwerk of word, image, sound, and editing, crowds out the possibility of dramatic (though not necessarily semiotic) re-interpretation.

More crucially, I think, duplication and distribution of film universalizes the public image of a particular movie in a way that doesn't happen with plays or novels, no matter how popular. Take On the Waterfront, a movie that's burned its way into our collective artistic memory in a remarkably specific way: even people who haven't seen the movie already have Brando in their head ruminating how he coulda been a contender. Same with Brokeback Mountain: the notoriety (and countless parodies) have created a particular mental image and memory of that story for almost everybody.

It's not that operagoers will be coming into the show with a pre-existing, personal interpretation of the story they're about to see—that happens with any adaptation—but that the pre-existing interpretation will be the same one across the board. Everyone will be comparing it to the same experience: a formidable challenge for anyone wanting to translate the material. I could see how Bolcom sould get away with it: The Wedding is something of a cult film—how many people have actually seen it? Or even had heard of it before the opera came out? Far fewer than Brokeback Mountain or The Fly, I'd bet. But with a popular movie, something that immediately latches onto the zeitgeist, I would think that the universality of the filmgoing experience puts the opera at a disadvantage. My sense is that the bar will either be set too high—anything less than an utterly convincing and completely contrasting illumination of the story will be a failure—or too low—simply not alienating the audience's existent relationship to the material will be sufficient success (you're terrific if you're even good, in other words). Either way, there's a danger of shrinking the artistic space for opera to work its own, idiosyncratic magic.

Shadow play

A trope we've cantillated more than once in this space is the notion that a piece of music takes on a life of its own and makes its own way in the world as soon as the composer puts the finishing touches on it. Here's a rather extreme instance of that.

The song in question is called "Genjer-Genjer," and it was widely popular in Indonesia in the 1950s and 60s. It was written in 1943 by Muhammad Arif, supposedly inspired by, and describing, his wife's soup-making; genjer is a leafy green vegetable, regarded by many cultures as a weed, but cultivated for animal and human consumption in Java. The song became something of a standard in Indonesia—go here to listen to one of the best-known versions, by the Indonesian pop star Bing Slamet (1927-1974).

To understand what happened to this song requires descending into one of the murkiest swamps of 20th-century history, the failed Indonesian coup of 1965. In Indonesia, "1965" and, more specifically, "30 September" carry much the same kind of resonance and overtones that "9/11" does in the United States, but even after forty years, historians are still trying to untangle the various stories, accusations, and justifications surrounding the event. On September 30, 1965, a number of Indonesian army officers kidnapped and assassinated six army generals. Calling themselves the "Group of September 30" (usually abbreviated to G-30-S, or Gestapu, in its Indonesian acronym), the officers claimed that they had taken their action pre-emptively, against a right-wing "Council of Generals" that were themselves plotting to overthrow Sukarno, Indonesia's first president.

Sukarno had been in power since the country won its independence from the Netherlands in 1945. In the late 50s and early 60s, he had effectively used his widespread popularity and his fiery, frequently anti-American rhetoric to position himself as a triangulation between the formidable, deeply right-wing army leadership and the increasingly powerful PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party.

One of the enduring arguments about the G-30-S coup is whether the PKI had any hand in it, and if so, how much. By 1965, the PKI claimed some 27 million members—the largest such party in any non-communist nation—but had been effectively stifled from increasing their legislative power by parliamentary maneuvers, including Sukarno's appointment as president-for-life. On the other hand, Sukarno, attentive to the political winds, had been increasingly adopting a populist, anti-imperialist stance in tune with the PKI. While evidence does point to knowledge and abetment of the coup by certain high-ranking PKI leaders, there's little to support the idea of a conscious party instigation.

The coup collapsed within a day or so, partially due to poor planning on the part of the plotters, and partially because another general, Suharto, moved swiftly to crush the rebellion. Suharto's role in the coup has been the subject of much debate. Almost certainly he knew of it beforehand, and he was not on the list of of generals to be captured, leading many to suggest that he feigned sympathy with the G-30-S, only to ruthlessly turn on them, and the PKI, as an opportunity to seize power himself. It worked—Suharto had pushed aside Sukarno completely by 1967, and remained in authoritarian power until he was forced to step down in 1998.

The theories behind the 1965 coup fall roughly into four groups:

1. The G-30-S were the driving force. These theories take the plotters at their word: the coup was an attempt to prevent a right-wing overthrow of Sukarno. The PKI's involvement was either non-existent or, at best, limited to the tacit support of a few PKI officials, without explicit party approval—given the growth of the PKI, the argument goes, the party would have had little reason to disturb the status quo. This analysis was earliest and most famously proposed by scholars Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey in their informal 1966 paper.

2. Suharto was the driving force, as part of a conspiracy to discredit the PKI. In this scenario, Suharto is an Iago-like figure, slyly goading the plotters into carrying out a coup that he knows will fail, leaving him well-placed to take power himself and blame the coup on the PKI. Proponents of this theory point to how comparatively well-organized Suharto's supposedly spontaneous response was, and how conveniently the events fomented later anti-PKI propaganda (see below). More conspiratorial-minded variants include CIA support and involvement. A good summary of this version of the theory can be found in Peter Dale Scott's 1985 paper.

3. Certain elements of the PKI recruited and supported the G-30-S, only to be caught off-guard by Suharto's ruthless response. This theory has arisen from attempts to sort through much of the testimony of alleged G-30-S and PKI plotters, with their varying states of reliability. It argues that the "Council of Generals" was, at the very least, actively positioning themselves to crush the PKI upon the death of Sukarno, who had in 1965 been in ill-health for some time. Rather than take their chances on the defensive in such a situation, a few PKI higher-ups formulated the plan to kidnap the generals, and actively recruited army officers to carry out the operation. John Roosa explains this theory best in his book Pretext for Mass Murder.

4. The PKI, as a party, was behind the coup, in an effort to seize power against the democratic will of the Indonesian people. This has been more or less the official government line since Suharto took power.

It's important to have a sense of the complex uncertainty surrounding the actual events of 1965 in order to appreciate the brazen nature of Suharto's subsequent exploitation of them. It would appear that the intent was to kidnap the generals and then present them to Sukarno for prosecution, but the plotters botched the job—three of them were killed in their homes, and when the rest were brought to Jakarta's Halim Air Force base, it was decided to abandon the kidnap plan, and the other three generals were executed. (A seventh general escaped when his aide was mistakenly captured and killed in his place.) All seven corpses were thrown down a well.

The retrieval of the bodies and their subsequent reburial was a public relations triumph for Suharto, who personally supervised the recovery at the well under the eyes of photographers and television cameras. But government-fomented rumors sprung up almost immediately that put a far more grisly spin on the generals' fate—and, in the process, "Genjer-Genjer."

The rumors concerned the Gerakan Wanita Indonesia (Indonesian Women's Movement), better-known by its acronym Gerwani. The organization, under the umbrella of the PKI, advocated for female rights and empowerment, aiming for women to have a full share in Indonesia's revolution. According to reports that began to surface soon after the coup was put down, the generals, prior to their execution, had been tortured by Gerwani members who had been specifically trained and brought to the base for that very purpose. The women allegedly slashed the generals' genitals with razor blades, gouged out their eyes, and then watched them bleed to death as they danced naked around them (the reports specified a traditional Indonesian dance, the "Dance of the Fragrant Flowers") in a sexual, sadistic orgy.

The stories were complete fiction, as Benedict Anderson demonstrated from unpublished autopsy reports. And it seems almost unfathomable that such a ludicrously lurid tale could actually be taken seriously. But the Dutch scholar Saskia Wieringa has pointed out how threatening female empowerment would have seemed to highly patriarchal Indonesian society—a lethal, unleashed feminine sexuality would have been regarded as an all-too-potent threat. The perceived size of that threat can be seen in the astonishingly bloody reprisals that followed.

In the months following the coup, it's estimated that between 500,000 and one million Indonesians were killed in a cataclysm of violence. The merest hint of PKI sympathy was enough to warrant summary execution by roving bands of vigilantes. The country's anti-Communist Muslims proclained a jihad; Suharto, for all practical purposes running the government, did nothing to restrain the bloodshed. (Nor did the United States; the CIA even supplied death lists to the army, as journalist Kathy Kadane has reported.)

One of those hints of PKI involvement, as it turns out, was "Genjer-Genjer." The song had become associated with Gerwani members in less violent times; the composer, Arif, had hailed from the PKI-friendly Banyuwangi region, and had been a member of LEKRA, the PKI's cultural committee. That hadn't prevented the song from becoming an apolitical hit—now, though, it became a stigma. A typical story:

Sumilah, then aged fourteen, was arrested on 19 November 1965, and was to spend fourteen years in detention, much of the time at the Plantungan prison camp in Kendal, Central Java. She had no idea why she has been picked up along with 47 others but thinks it was because she was fond of singing "Genjer-Genjer." Later it turned out that it was a case of mistaken identity; she had been mistaken for her mother who was active in a teachers' organisation. When her mother was captured, this didn't lead to Sumilah's release. As fate would have it, she spent fourteen years in detention while her mother spent "only" four years. Sumilah describes how during her incarceration in a women's prison, she was lacerated with a knife, whipped and burnt with cigarettes on her naked body.

Not long after the bogus Gerwani stories appeared, a parody of "Genjer-Genjer" began to circulate, with the lyrics altered (Jendral-Jendral, "general-general") to incorporate details of the supposed torture. The source of the parody is unclear, but the government used it as a pretext to ban the song outright. Nevertheless, it would make one more notorious appearance.

In 1984, the government-produced propaganda film Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI ("The Treason of the G-30-S/PKI") was released. Directed by Arifin C. Noor, the four-and-a-half-hour epic recreation of the government's mythical version of the coup became required viewing for Indonesians. Schoolchildren were bused to periodic screenings; the film was shown on television every September 30th. The tale of the generals' torture was re-enacted in prolonged, graphic detail, while the celluloid Gerwani, of course, did the "Dance of the Fragrant Flowers." The music chosen to accompany their frenzy? "Genjer-Genjer." A song about soup had thus come to symbolize the country's greatest and most enduring trauma.

Suharto has been gone for nearly a decade, but the old myths die hard. Attempts to set up South-Africa-style Truth and Reconciliation commissions surrounding the 1965 genocide have so far come to naught, and long after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the majority of its satellites, "PKI" still remains a powerful slander in Indonesian politics. This past week, the Jakarta Post, on the anniversary of the coup, tracked down Muhammad Arif's son.

"People attacked our home in Tumenggungan area in Banyuwangi city. They set fire to the house and everything there," said Sinar, who was 11-years-old when the incident took place.

Muhammad fled with other PKI and Lekra members but was captured.
"From that point on, my father's fate is unknown," Sinar said.

But Sinar reveres his father as the family's hero. He said the original song lyrics, which are considered taboo even today, have been safeguarded.

"For me, these books are [a part of] my family's history, which should be safeguarded so my grandchildren will know what really happened," he said.

One hopes with him: "what really happened" has been far too elusive a target in this story.

It's a coincidence, but on reflection, this makes an appropriate post for Blogging for Burma Day.

Around the World in Eighty Shopping Days Until

You know, the Christmas/Hanukkah pas de deux is just around the corner, at least in geological time, and our librarian friend (we've said it before—really, everyone should have a librarian friend) Rebecca Hunt has spotted the perfect stocking-stuffer in this year's Neiman Marcus holiday catalog: Valery Gergiev conducting the Kirov Orchestra.

Classical music lovers, hold on to your batons. The world-famous Kirov Orchestra. Uber-maestro Valery Gergiev working his Russian magic. Firebrand virtuoso Lola Astanova beating the daylights out of a Steinway® Concert Grand. Performing The Nutcracker Suite, the Tchaikovsky "Piano Concerto," and another Tchaikovsky masterpiece of your choice. In your hometown, at a private holiday concert for you and 499 of your closest friends. Hosted by Regis Philbin!

The concert will be filmed as an after-party favor for each of your guests. You even get to keep the tour piano after all the artists autograph it. BRAVO!, if we do say so ourselves. (And we do.)

The price? $1,590,000. (Are cannons extra?) That's an awful lot of money. On the other hand: it's hosted by Regis Philbin! Time to make some billionaire friends.

Let me just savor that again: hosted by Regis Philbin. God, I love this country.

Provocation of the Day

[T]he piano [in the "Quartet for the End of Time"] in particular often has "tangles" of notes thick with dissonance. Not one, but crowds of notes compete for attention under the hand of the pianist. Yet Messiaen makes of this cluster of discord something lustrous: "Tangles of rainbows." There is something spiritual in these dissonances which makes me wonder whether the most beautiful sound might not be the most various, the most discordant. Dissonance here is not experienced as rivalry or irresolution but as an infinite and all-inclusive unity. The "harmony of heaven" might not be silence but on the contrary the capacity—and the willingness—to hear every note, to the fullness of its truth, at once. Again, there is a strong sense in which reading Schoenberg only as the creator of an authoritarian order, a musical fascist, does an injustice to his role in developing this new aesthetic. For Schoenberg, long before Messiaen, claimed to be involved in the "emancipation of dissonance" and the destruction of the old order of human certainty. In its place he founded a vast new palette of expressive possibilities on which composers such as Messiaen have been able to build with imagination and freedom. As Schoenberg wrote, "here, liberated dissonance became anew harmony, psychological chaos, a meta-sensuous order." Releasing the potential of dissonance from the shackles of Romantic harmony is emblematic of what amounts to an ultimate pluralism.

—Desmond Manderson, Songs Without Music:
Aesthetic Dimensions of Law and Justice
(University of California Press, 2000)

Ask La Divina

(Soho the Dog is pleased to welcome to these virtual pages the operatic luminary and advice columnist La Divina, to answer readers' questions on life, love, career, and fioratura.)

Dear La Divina,

I am a guileless diva who was recently fired from a production of La Bohéme simply for missing one or two unimportant rehearsals in order to see my tenor husband open a production at, let's face it, a far more internationally renowned house. How dare they deny me permission to be by his side at this important time! And now my replacement is garnering the glowing reviews that should rightly be mine. Shouldn't my public be rallying to my defense for placing romantic fidelity before a mere run-through of an opera that I could, and frequently do, sing in my sleep?

Signed,
Tanto freddo in Chicago

Dear Tanto,

Tired repertoire is not the issue here. And the only place you should be by your husband's side is on stage. Otherwise, you can only share in his applause vicariously. A diva is never vicarious. I don't care how prone to a meltdown this man is.

But your real problem is this guilelessness you mention. There is simply no excuse for finding yourself released from a contract on any terms but your own. You should have walked out long before any simple administrator had the chance to fire you. Now, if certain legal issues meant you had to push this bean-counter into dissolving the contract, the proper response on your part is to blame them for overworking you, for treating you like a farm animal, for deliberately endangering your voice through all these pointless run-throughs. Whining that they failed to give you permission to leave? Unacceptable. The prima donna neither asks for nor, indeed, requires permission. As for your replacement, let this be a lesson to you: always demand that your understudy be incompetent and, if possible, physically unattractive. If you cannot, through threats or histrionics, obtain this guarantee, you hardly deserve to call yourself a diva.

Signed,
La Divina

Back to the Future

Reviewing violinist Maria Bachmann.
Boston Globe, October 1, 2007.

Holy mackerel

They certainly didn't make it easy on themselves, but the Chicago Cubs, my favorite team, finally clinched the National League Central Division championship a couple hours ago. Now, my hands-on experience with baseball was limited to a brief and abysmal Little League career; nonetheless, honesty and the ghost of my North Sider grandfather compel me to trumpet my own not insignificant part in this championship. For it was on June 28th, on this very blog, that it was revealed that the Cubs' main competition down the stretch, the Milwaukee Brewers, were doomed.

If you recall, the discussion concerned Milwaukee's long-time classical music radio station WFMR, which the owners had decided, after more than 50 years, to switch to a—shudder—smooth-jazz format. At the time, I tried to caution against the dire consequences of such a move:

You Milwaukeeans should be more careful with your civic institutions: the Brewers are having their best season since 1982. The last thing they need is a curse.

Did WFMR's management heed this warning and amend their easy-listening ways? No. The result? In the three months since, the then-first-place Brewers have gone a dismal 35-46, coughing up a 7½-game lead, surrendering the division to the Cubs. The Cubs, mind you. Anger not the gods of classical music.

(I should mention that I have no particular animus towards Brewers fans, who I remember as being an unusually discerning lot. The last time I saw the team was in 1998, when some brothers and sisters and I journeyed to old Miller Park for a Cubs-Brewers contest, hoping to fill up on bratwurst and beer before they tore the place down. This was late in the Sammy Sosa-Mark McGwire modern-medical-miracle home-run chase; needless to say, everyone was on their feet whenever Sosa came up to bat. But the highlight of the game was when Mickey Morandini, a veteran infielder who had come over to the Cubs from the Phillies, I think, beat out an infield single with a head-first slide. The crowd went bananas, demonstrating that, far from succumbing to the louche blandishments of the long ball, they remained connoisseurs of the true National League style of play.)

In order to promote the spread of Cub Fever (WARNING: Cub Fever is hazardous to your health), here's a few musical souvenirs of the last time the Cubs won the World Series—that would be 1908, thanks for asking—that I found deep within the online bowels of the Library of Congress.

First is "The Glory of the Cubs," dedicated to the "World's Champion Base Ball Team"—a somewhat pedestrian number (sample lyric: "That's why I'm going to sing this song to you / For I know it is true / The Cubs have won the champion game," etc., etc.) mainly notable for being a comparatively unsyncopated effort from Arthur Marshall, one of the early masters of ragtime. A protégé of Scott Joplin, Marshall wrote some of the best rags in the older, folk-like Missouri style, so I won't begrudge him cashing in on a topical novelty. Obligatory inside Cubs joke: hey, that bear on the cover throws a lot like Trachsel, doesn't he?

Next we have "Cubs on Parade," a march and two-step by the otherwise unknown H.R. Hempel. The publisher's name would seem to indicate that the piece originated from Chicago's significant German immigrant population, who provided the meat-packed foundation for that most sublime of culinary delights, the Chicago hot dog. This one is cool because the scan is actually of a full set of parts for a theatre-pit-sized orchestra. Plus, the bear winding up in the box there would be an absolutely righteous bit of tattoo flash, wouldn't it? If they go all the way, I'm seriously considering it.

And finally, this oddity: "Between You and Me," a non-baseball-related love song credited to Johnny Evers and Joe Tinker, two-thirds of the most famous double-play combination in baseball history. Highly unlikely—Tinker and Evers hated each other, as a result of Evers abandoning his teammates in a hotel lobby and taking a cab for himself on one 1905 occasion. The two didn't speak to each other for the next 23 years, including the championship 1908 season. I think we chalk this one up to some enterprise on the part of the publisher, Will Rossiter (another significant name in the world of ragtime, by the way: at one time or another, he published works by most of the style's leading exponents).

Anyway, depending on how many tie-breakers the rest of the Senior Circuit needs to sort everything out, I should get about a week's reprieve before this team starts giving me daily angina again. Hey, for a Cub fan, that's like a lifetime.

Image at top from a 1932 Cubs program, lifted from this excellent site. Look, the Red Sox clinched, too!

Quote of the Day

I don't believe people when they say "I don't understand this music, will you explain it to me?". It means they don't understand themselves and the place they occupy in the world, and that it doesn't occur to them that music is also a product of collective life. Sometimes I have a strange feeling that musical processes can be more intelligent than the people who produce and listen to them; that the cells of those processes, like the chromosomes of a genetic code, can be more intelligent than the perceptive organs that should be making sense of them. It's as if the music were miming one of the most incredible of natural processes: the passage from inanimate to animate life, from molecular to organic forms, from an abstract and immobile dimension to a vital and expressive one.

—Luciano Berio, in Rosanna Dalmonte and Bálint Andás Varga,
Luciano Berio: Two Interviews, translated and
edited by David Osmond-Smith (1985)

The answer was found in two words

News from all over:

With the exception of a distant summer spent almost exclusively on the Massachusetts Turnpike, I've never been much of an audio-book guy. But now that books are coming out in audio-only format, I might have to listen. First up is a new thriller conceived by Jeffery Deaver and written by a round-robin of mystery authors. The title? The Chopin Manuscript.

"The Chopin Manuscript" is the tale of a former British war-crimes investigator and musicologist who comes across a rare manuscript by 19th century composer Frederic Chopin that was buried by the Nazis during World War II. Murder and mayhem naturally ensue.

Naturally. (I love the war-crimes/musicology combo. I imagine a dashing academic nailing a witness at Nuremberg with a subtle explication of watermark discrepancies on variant manuscripts of the Horst-Wessel-Lied.) One gets the feeling that Chopin is replacing Beethoven as pop-culture's go-to classical reference.

War crimes? The arts? Randol Schoenberg is on the case!

Meanwhile, in England, Bösendorfer redeems the movers.

We're Running Out Of Media To Plunder Dept.: the musical-comedy adaptation of the TV show "Happy Days" continues apace, helmed by ubiquitous 70s tunesmith Paul Williams:

The biggest challenge, Williams says, was finding a way to make Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli sing. "He's such a cool guy, how do you get him to open up to his concerns and fears and sing?" he asks.

The answer was found in two words: Pinky Tuscadero.

Funny, I was expecting "Frederic Chopin." Anyway, if I'm going to see a TV-inspired musical, Neal Fox's "Thank You, Dan Rather" sounds a lot more fun. (Although a well-placed comma in this headline could make for a really interesting show.)

And a reminder: only two more days to bid on the Beethoven-hair diamond. (At least that foolishly-spent money will go to a good cause.)

No problem

Even if you were able to exorcise the demonic, mythical Historical Arrow of Musical Progress from the bargain Amityville Dutch colonial of your thought process, there would still remain the almost unbreakable habit of considering the appearance of new musical styles and vocabularies to be responses to whatever immediately preceded them. You know the drill: Classicism cut through the ornamental profusion of the Baroque era, Romanticism rejected the objective rationalism of Classicism, atonality dissolved late Romanticism's anachronistic adherence to tonal-based structures, Minimalism was a reaction against the dissonance of atonality. And so on.

This pattern, of giving equal billing to what each style is not, in comparison with its predecessor, as what it is, has always vaguely bugged me, even as I deployed it myself. Being simply a negation of previous practice, it seems to me, wouldn't inspire the profound and often joyous creativity that accompanied most of these movements. (As a benchmark, compare with political thought: did anti-Communism ever strike you as a particularly rich intellectual playground? Anti-Zionism? Making fun of the French? Well, maybe that last one.) And yet, all those turnovers of the musical odometer were contrasts, breaking with the previous generation in crucial ways.

I think there's a more interesting way to think about this, related to a pattern found perhaps most notably in 19th-century history. One of the main undercurrents of Victorian thought in England, for example, was the steady erosion of religious dogma by rational science. It's around the 1850s and 60s that this particular wave crests, and writers and thinkers begin to seriously propose atheism, as profound a negation as you could come up with at that time. Needless to say, mainstream Victorians were horrified by the atheists in their midst, but what really puzzled them was that the heathens were so happy, even giddy, about the prospect of a godless universe; as Charlotte Brontë remarked, "The strangest thing is, that we are called on to rejoice over this hopeless blank." Or as the theistic Thomas Carlyle wrote in his journal, "An immense development of Atheism is dearly proceeding, and at a rapid rate, and in joyful exultant humour."

But what brought the atheists such joy was not the absence of a benevolent deity, but the way denying His existence cleared away an entire philosophical bramble-patch in one stroke. In his vital study The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870, the late Wellesley professor Walter E. Houghton put it this way, commenting on the above Carlyle quote:

In [Carlyle's] fear of materialism he forgot the release it could bring from the weary and frustrating effort to reconcile religion and science.... Accept it, wrote John Morley, with his own experience in mind (the trying struggle to maintain his Christianity, followed by the happy conversion to agnosticism), and "the active energies are not [any longer] paralysed by the possibilities of enfeebling doubt, nor the reason drawn down and stultified by apprehension lest its methods should discredit a document, or its inferences clash with a dogma, or its light flash unseasonably on a mystery." The mind is freed from the whole pressure, social and personal, to think within a traditional context which has become incredible.

In other words, the need to work around the question disappears, because the question itself becomes meaningless. The radical Victorians squeezed the elephant in the room out the door, and were thrilled to discover how much space it freed up for new furniture.

If we look at epochs in the history of classical music in this light, not what each movement cast aside from the previous one, but what seemingly intractable aesthetic argument it rendered moot, you can start to understand the infusion of energy with each turn of the wheel. Atonality isn't a casting aside of tonality, but a slice through the Gordian knot of trying to reconcile an increasingly dissonant vocabulary with formal structures built around consonance. Minimalism isn't a throwback reaction to serialist dogma, but but a way to cast aside the seeming incompatibility of the intuitive rhetoric of triadic tonality with the deteministic processes of the 12-tone method. Because of the nature of music, this sort of thinking doesn't necessarily imply any progressive timeline, either: there are still composers who find that the inherent conflicts in Romanticism, or serialism, or what have you, provide the appropriate drama for their expressive goals. But for other composers, such questions only crowd the table, and need to be swept aside.

This way of thinking can help explain supposed musical revolutions that don't, in retrospect, seem all that revolutionary. Neoclassicism, for example, at the remove of the better part of a century, often sounds tame and hermetic compared with other musical currents between the wars. But as an effort to work through classical music's perennial wrestling between the push for innovation and the veneration of the past, it fits the pattern nicely. The idea also reveals distant mirrors: both the 14th-century ars nova and current post-minimalism can in part be seen as a dissolution of the supposed boundary between art and vernacular musics.

Historical upheaval fans will no doubt by now be thinking that I'm promulgating a view of music history as a series of quasi-Hegelian dialectics. They're right, to a point. But it's a good way to get a sense of what Hegel and those who appropriated Hegel's ideas were really after. The caricature of the dialectic is a boiling-down of every historical or philosophical pattern to two concepts in conflict with each other—depending on the caricature, either one concept inevitably prevails, or the two are mashed up into a crude "synthesis." But the real Hegelian process is finding what the fundamental, intractable, unresolvable problems of a situation are, and then figuring how to change the situation so such problems cease to be an issue. That's what Marx—the most famous, and infamous, disciple of the dialectic—tried to do. It's what the Victorian atheists tried to do. It's what composers have periodically tried to do throughout history.

And it's why all those 19th-century revolutionaries had such consistent and, for the most part, unwarranted optimism, the old conflicts melting away to nothing, a clear, wide path seemingly open in front of them. The socialists saw their revolution founder on the shoals of human nature, but music, happily, lives in a parallel universe of unlimited, unhindered possibility. The Romantics, the futurists, the minimalists, they all felt revolutionary euphoria, for the same reason that revolutionaries do—but composers push to new dialectic syntheses in a forum far more amenable to them than the world of politics and money. Utopias can't survive in everyday life, but in art, they continually sprout anew, a lush, perennial garden.

I had this thing drafted out before I saw Phil's "Dial M" post on, among other things, utopian visions in popular music. You know what they say: one of us, it's a crackpot theory—two of us, it's a movement!

Strauss and Mahler Re-Enact Your Favorite Movie Moments (3)

(Click to enlarge.)


Previously: 1, 2.

Vinyl Exam

Reviewing DBR and DJ Scientific.
Boston Globe, September 24, 2007.

"Bodacious," huh? No, I don't write the headlines. I would imagine the more accurate bit of 80s argot would be "fresh." Still, I always liked "bodacious" because I could imagine its etymology to be improbably but appropriately descended from "Boadicea."

Come up to My place

[Leonard] Bernstein came from a family of Talmudic scholars, but was only moderately observant in his adult years. However, Bernstein would hire a taxicab for Yom Kippur and go around Manhattan "shul-hopping." He did this because he loved to hear many different cantors' interpretations of the traditional prayers.

Bernstein knew, of course, that riding was forbidden on the holiday, so he would have the cab driver drop him off a block away from each synagogue so that synagogue-goers would not see the famous conductor riding on the holiday.

—Jewish World Review, October 10, 2005

Caveat: A morning in the library hasn't turned up corroboration of this story, even by Joan Peyser, who presumably would have jumped on it like a Pomeranian on a meatball. Sounds like Lenny, though.