Searching for Love

Cultural economics has come a long way since Baumol and Bowen first started poking around, but the fact remains that it still revolves around money—the delicate dance of legal tender among producers, sellers, and buyers. More so than other goods, there's almost always a disconnect between the price of a work of art and its value, and traditional market economies are notoriously slow and inefficient at minding that gap; while the art market as a whole can give a reasonably predictable return on investment, the market for individual works or categories of art can be dauntingly volatile. And that's the plastic arts, something you can take home and display. Music? Even cloudier.

So here's a thought experiment: what if, instead of cash, one considered curiosity as the main currency of culture? Curiosity drives cultural consumption. We keep looking until we find what we like, or what we think we like—maybe we come across a style or repertoire that seems to be enough of what we like that we consider any further search too expensive, in terms of curiosity. In this scheme, art that is harder to find is more "expensive"—and consumers who are more curious spend more. (Note that what is about to follow is laughable as economics—how do you quantify curiosity? Think of it more as a metaphor on steroids.)

In terms of curiosity, popular culture is very cheap indeed—almost free, in fact. (Try to resist applying favorable or unfavorable connotations to "cheap" and "expensive" for this one.) Popular culture comes to you via the mass media. If that's what you like, or what you decide you like, you haven't had to spend very much curiosity at all. Whereas, if what you really like is avant-garde tape-manipulation music from early-1970s Scandanavia, but you don't know that yet, you're going to have to spend a considerable amount of curiosity to find it.

The interesting thing about this goofy scheme is how, under it, one would interpret the impact of the Internet. You could argue that, back in the pre-tubes dark ages, music was actually cheaper in curiosity terms, but there was a greater chance of having to settle for less than you were prepared to "pay" for. There was whatever was being pumped out over the mass media, but beyond that, you were limited to whatever record companies were willing to record and distribute, or whatever happened to be performed near where you lived. For recordings, once you stepped into a record store, the curiosity price of anything that happened to be in the store would be pretty much the same, but if it wasn't there, you weren't very likely to find it without a huge jump in curiosity price. Live performance would be so balkanized by geography—New York? cheap; central Nebraska? not so cheap—that comparing curiosity spending would be almost apples to oranges. (Hopping on the subway=low curiosity price; moving to New York=high curiosity price.)

With the Internet, though, all music (or at least enough information to know whether it's what you want) is available, theoretically with near-immediacy—that is, if you know where to look, or, more probably, you have the time and curiosity to sift through the much wider array on offer. Has this made music cheaper or pricier in terms of curiosity? Back in the Reagan era, sifting through the bins at my local record store would take me, at most, a couple hours. A couple hours on the Internet, and I've barely scratched the surface. With greater variety comes greater investment of time, effort, judgement. (It's the same reason I can shop for shoes exponentially faster than my lovely wife, since, at size 14, my selection is usually limited to one or two pair.) Has the increased digital availability of culture, paradoxically, raised its curiosity price across the board?

As the economist Alfred Marshall once pointed out, artistic styles don't usually have diminishing marginal utility—once we find what we like, we can like the same thing pretty much forever. The thing is, most people, even music lovers, are going to decide they like some kind of music and stop spending their curiosity earlier than than those of us sufficiently obsessed with the stuff to blog about it. When curiosity prices were fixed and relatively low (i.e., record store), the chance of a given outlay of curiosity leading into jazz, classical, world music, showtunes—basically anything not served up free by the mass media—was not all that variable, once you walked in the door. (The downside? Opportunity costs, that is, the amount you give up by making a decision one way or another, were relatively high.) If curiosity prices have become higher with the advent of the Internet, the chance of a given outlay leading to a specific category is just that: a chance. It's much more of a crapshoot. There's a greater chance of stumbling on something you didn't expect, but an equal or greater chance of missing what you really want—or giving up before you find it. It all depends on how hard you want to look.

So in terms of the curiosity expended to find it, the initial price barrier to culture has gone way down, but the average price of the wanted cultural experience has, perhaps, gone up. Inflation, in other words. Is it a valid trade-off? I think so: since the resources aren't scarce—it's all out there somewhere, at the click of a mouse—opportunity costs go down. For now, the increased opportunity to at least stumble on what isn't expected seems to be raising the tide for all kinds of boats. The question is whether the way people are able to search for music on the Internet will evolve towards a more sophisticated, Pandora-like guided journey, or whether the old corporate categories will re-assert themselves, leading to more dead-end or prematurely stifled spending of curiosity.

The former, most likely. Here's why, although I admit it's a bit of a stretch. The previous way of buying and selling music was based on a certain assumed valuation of curiosity. If that curiosity is going through inflation? All bets are off. Inflation has the power to mutate economic systems at the genetic level. It's why central banks throughout the Capitalist Era have never stopped worrying about it. Here's how John Maynard Keynes put it, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace:

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency.... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

I wonder if the Internet is really what changed things—or if a decrease in available musical variety in the years just before the Internet caused a change in the way people allocated and expended their curiosity, and the resulting, imperceptible disintegration of the traditional recording industry was already underway when the Web came along to accelerate it. Most revolutions, after all, are as much a culmination of historical trends as an instigator of them. That causality is probably a stretch, too, but how else do you explain how the record companies were caught so flat-footed? Corporate stupidity is hardly rare, but when an entire industry is still playing catch-up a dozen years on, deeper shifts become more plausible. Did the recording industry shoot themselves in the foot just before the Internet came along to stomp on it? Curious.

When in Rome

Reviewing Teatro Lirico d'Europa's Tosca.
Boston Globe, January 22, 2008.

Deep covers

One big difference between books and sheet music: nowadays, any reasonably experienced musician can identify the publisher of a piece of sheet music from about twenty feet away. The pale-green-plus-giant-composer-name design of Peters; the yellowish-beige-sans-serif-small-caps of G. Schirmer; the flush-right-lower-case-bold-black-and-white of Universal Edition, etc., etc. Even a Dover score, with its clip-art-plus-white-text aesthetic, can usually be spotted on a podium stand from the second balcony.

Which is why I still love hunting down antique scores. As my lovely wife will confirm with a roll of her eyes, I love old stuff, and that includes sheet music. Popular sheet music, of course, is extremely collectible on account of eye-catching covers, but there was a time when classical wasn't that far behind. Here's five favorites I pulled from my shelves.


Monteverdi/Krenek: L'Incoronazione di Poppea (Universal Edition, 1937). Pure neo-classicism, by way of Napoleonic archeological surveys. I picked this up at a Boston Conservatory library sale; from the library of Ingrid Kahrstedt Brainard, the early dance historian, which is pretty cool.


Clementi/Tausig: Gradus ad Parnassum, ed. Gustav Damm (Steingräber-Verlag, n.d.). No date, but I'm guessing sometime before absinthe became illegal. I can imagine Alma Mahler wallpapering her bathroom with that pattern.


Joseph Marx: Marienlied (Universal Edition, 1925). The lithograph is by Alfred Keller. I don't know what Rubenesque nudes holding up a proscenium arch in front of craggy landscape has to do with the song, and I don't care.


Penderecki: Quartetto per archi (Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1963). A classic piece of abstract expressionism from the Polish state music publisher, who opted for these sorts of far-out covers quite a bit. Purchased at a used-book sale in Chicago many years ago—the previous owner was composer Alan Stout, which I initially thought to be an amazing coincidence, until I realized that there were probably at most a couple dozen copies of this in all of Chicago.


Janáček: The Cunning Little Vixen (Universal Edition, 1924 [reprint]). This is such a fantastic cover that it's criminal there's no artist credit. (And I looked—it does seem to be the same artist who did the cover for UE's edition of Krenek's Jonny Spielt Auf). It's been years and years since I saw an album cover or movie poster that good. In some ways (not many, but some), the old days were better.

Trying to get home

It's Martin Luther King Jr. Day here in the United States. Given the persistence of human nature, the quotation I posted last year will no doubt remain apt for many years to come.

Counter service

Reviewing David Daniels.
Boston Globe, January 21, 2008.

The undiscover'd country

A composer's faith rewarded. On Elgar and The Dream of Gerontius.
Boston Globe, January 20, 2008.

You probably think this song is about you

The scholars of the week here at Soho the Dog HQ are psychologists Brian P. O'Connor and Jamie Dyce, of Lakehead University and Concordia University, respectively. Back when both were at Lakehead, they wanted to test a particular model of self-perception called the looking-glass self chain. Previous tests of the model had focused on the role of the opinions and perceived opinions of peers and colleagues; O'Connor and Dyce were looking to build on more recent work that had factored in the opinions of significant others. What they needed was a situation in which both sets of opinions would be in play.

Felson (1989) found that the actual and reflected appraisals of parents affected childrens' self-appraisals of academic and athletic ability, and to a lesser degree self-appraisals of physical attractiveness and popularity. Edwards and Klockars (1981) and Schafer and Keith (1985) exmined the perceptions of marriage partners and found significant relationships among actual, reflected, and self-appraisals. One purpose of our study was to replicate these findings using a very different sample of subjects: musicians in bar bands.

As they reported in their 1993 study "Appraisals of Musical Ability in Bar Bands: Identifying the Weak Link in the Looking-Glass Self Chain" (published in Basic and Applied Social Psychology), O'Connor and Dyce surveyed 171 bar band musicians, having them rate, on a scale of 1 to 5, their own perceptions of all five steps in the looking-glass self chain:

Actual appraisals: what other people really think of you.

Feedback given: what other people tell you they think of you.

Feedback received: what you hear when other people tell you what they think of you.

Reflected appraisals: what you think other people really think of you.

Self-appraisal: what you think of yourself.

Two particular criticisms of the looking-glass self chain could then be evaluated. O'Connor and Dyce again:

The communication-barriers hypothesis suggests that the weakest link is between actual appraisals and feedback given by significant others. People do not communicate their true perceptions to self-appraisers. In contrast, the cognitive-processes hypothesis suggests that the weak link is between feedback given by significant others and individuals' perception of that feedback. Information is lost on the way from sender to receiver.

Any wagers? The researchers found that musicians, in fact, say what they think—but only hear what they want to.

Of particular interest in this study is the finding that the correlation between actual appraisals and feedback given (r =.62) and the correlation between feedback given and feedback received (r =.38) were both significant, but the actual appraisals-feedback given correlation was significantly stronger according to the formula for comparing dependent correlations recommended by Cohen and Cohen (1983, p. 56), t =3.61, p <.01, two-tailed. This indicates that the weakest link in the looking-glass self chain is between feedback given and feedback received, and not between actual appraisals and feedback given.

Brutally blunt to others, stubbornly pleased with ourselves—sounds like most musicians.

O'Connor and Dyce took the opportunity to have the same 171 musicians complete Inter-personal Adjective Scale-Big Five (IASR-B5) measures of personality. Their findings?

The results suggest that [popular] musicians tend to be more arrogant, dominant, extroverted, open to experience and neurotic than university males. However, no significant differences were found among singers, guitarists, bass players and drummers.

Just remember, if you argue with the results, you're further undermining the weak link in the looking-glass self chain. Those scientists—always thinking two moves ahead.

Picture-in-picture

Reviewing the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra.
Boston Globe, January 16, 2008.

Jetzt immer Schnee

High 60s last week, a foot of snow this week. Here's how screwy the climate has been in New England this winter: while Critic-at-Large Moe and I were on this hike, we saw a mosquito fly by.

Someone to watch over me

Today's fun fact:

Mrs. A. Lincoln Filene of Boston, music patron and philanthropist, and George Gershwin, American composer, are among those who have contributed towards scholarships with Arnold Schönberg, internationally famous musician and teacher, who will come here next month to teach at the Malkin Conservatory of Music in Boston. Schönberg is an exile from Germany.

From a September 26, 1933 New York Times report. (That's Filene as in Filene's Basement, by the way.) Most of us Schoenberg fans know of his one-year stint at the Malkin Conservatory, before he left for California on the grounds of, depending what you read, health or disappointingly poor students (probably both). I'd even run across mention of Gershwin's support. But his remarks were new to me.

Gershwin's gift to the Schönberg scholarship fund was made as soon as he was informed of the great modernist's coming to the United States. Himself an exponent of the use of the modern, native idiom in composition, Gershwin was delighted to come to the aid of the man who has been one of the most daring musical experimenters of our time.

"America may well consider herself fortunate," Gershwin said yesterday, "to have so distinguished a composer and teacher choose this country for his home. It is my sincere hope that Schönberg will stay a long, long time. His teaching at Boston cannot fail to stimulate and better musical expression here.

"Furthermore, it will once more prove to Germany our intense disapproval of its tyranny and bigotry. Germany's loss will be this country's musical gain."

Time magazine also covered Schoenberg's arrival.

He has upset conservative concertgoers more than any other modern composer. Philadelphia and New York have not forgotten the harrowing chromatics in Die Glückliche Hand, which Leopold Stokowski gave three years ago. The much talked-of Wozzeck, which the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company put on, is a Schönberg stepchild. His pupil Alban Berg wrote it.

Three weeks ago Arnold Schönberg landed in the U. S., surprised everyone by being a shy, mild little man not a bit fierce or radical in his comments on music or German politics....
...
Critics took the stand that in his effort to develop something new Schönberg had lost his real inspiration and become a hard-headed mathematician.... But no one has denied his genius as a teacher. In Europe where he had the facilities he took his pupils into his home to live, helped them study Bach and Beethoven, then let them write the kind of music which came naturally to them. His U. S. pupils will have to go through the same fundamental training. The one thing he will not encourage is imitation Schönberg.

It's interesting that at this point, Gershwin had not actually met Schoenberg;* most likely Gershwin's enthusiasm stemmed from his 1928 meeting with Alban Berg in Vienna. Also note Schoenberg's high reputation in the press—even in Time, which doesn't think much of the music—contrasting with the prophet-in-the-wilderness perception of Schoenberg's arrival on these shores (a perception cultivated not a little by Schoenberg himself). Gershwin's comments, assuming they reflect his thinking (the quote does sound a bit like a press release), show him on the cutting edge for 1933, both culturally and politically; this is, after all, only a few months after the Reichstag fire, and still prior Hindenburg's death.

The Malkin Conservatory seems like a great topic for study, incidentally—it was only in existence for a decade, yet attracted such students and faculty as Schoenberg, Roger Sessions, Ernst Krenek, Nicolas Slonimsky, Conlon Nancarrow, Harold Shapero, and Arthur Fiedler. Imagine those convocations.

*Update (1/15): Or had he? A murky minor mystery of history—see comments.

You Don't Know Me

Today's top story is this very odd one out of the Czech Republic, via Norway. Czech composer Barbara Skrlova was arrested in Norway after impersonating a 13-year-old boy named "Adam." As it turns out, Skrlova has been wanted in her home country as a witness in a child-abuse case.

Norwegian police detained Skrlova on January 5 in the northern town of Tromso thinking that they had finally located a 13-year-old runaway Czech boy named Adam, whom they believed was being abused.

At the time, police had no inclination that they had ended an eight-month-long manhunt for a 33-year-old crown witness in a bizarre and intricate child-abuse case in a distant Central European country.

Skrlova, who was escorted to the Czech Republic and placed in custody earlier this week, had pretended to be Adam for four months. She even went to school in the Norwegian capital Oslo under her new identity.

Skrlova had apparently previously impersonated a teenage girl named "Anna," who had been adopted by a woman named Klara Mauerova. Back in the spring, that deception was unmasked when Mauerova and her sister were arrested under bizarre circumstances for child-abuse; authorities suspect the sisters, and possibly Skrlova, are members of a breakaway faction of the Grail Movement, dedicated to the individualist teachings of Oskar Ernst Bernhardt, a.k.a. Abd-ru-shin, a German mystic who died in 1941. (A representative of the Grail Movement in the Czech Republic stated that the movement had cut ties with the sisters "after they added to the Grail Message with their own imaginings and fantasies".) At this point, no one is quite sure whether Skrlova was one of the abusers or one of the abused. The case is being called "one of the strangest in Czech criminal history".

In other, lighter news, it appears that Bollywood has found its own Jay Greenberg.

A ninth standard student from Kerala is all set to achieve a rare distinction by becoming the music composer for a feature film at the age of 13 years.

"I am very happy to get a chance to compose songs in the Malayalam movie 'Plavilla Police'," a jubilant Ramatheerathan told PTI after the 'pooja' for recording of songs at a studio here.

This is probably actually a bigger deal than Greenberg—Bollywood music composers are celebrities in their own right, rivaling the films' stars in both billing and tabloid attention.

For his part, a film musical has inspired Norman Lebrecht to linguistic invention:

Sweeney Todd the musical is, of course, famously indestructible. I have seen it raise the roof at the Royal Opera House and in half-rehearsed college productions, with full choreography and in John Doyle’s compact version for nine singing instrumentalists. Sweeney never fails. Getting it onto screen, though, was fraught with ibstgacles.

Fraught with WAIT A MINUTE I DON'T THINK THOSE LETTERS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ALL NEXT TO EACH OTHER THAT WAY. I like it! It's like visual onomatopoeia—you're reading along, and then your eyes stumble over ibstgacles like, well, an insurmountable ibstgacle. Update (1/11): alas, they've fixed it online. Good thing I took a screenshot:


Finally, fellow church music director Frank Pesci points out this MSN story in which the seventh-fastest growing salary in America is revealed to be that paid to "music directors and composers". (We're tied with agricultural inspectors! We're at least as important to the economy as detecting whether that turnip is really organic or not!) And I see by the average that some of you bourgeois pigs out there are making 50 grand a year at this. No kidding! Next time I'm out with other composers, they're buying—and I'm ordering good beer.

A quoi ça sert l'amour?

The president of France apparently has a thing for the progeny of composers. If you recall, back in October, President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that he had divorced his second wife, Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz, a great-granddaughter of the Spanish composer-pianist Isaac Albéniz. Now, a mere three months later, rumors are swirling that Sarkozy is about to marry his new girlfriend, the model-turned-singer Carla Bruni.

Bruni is the stepdaughter of the late Italian composer Alberto Bruni Tedeschi (1915-1996), who divided his time, Ives-like, between composing and running CEAT (Cavi Electrici Affini Torino), the tire and cable company founded by his father. (Bruni Tedeschi sold CEAT to the Italian tire giant Pirelli in the 1970s, but the brand lives on via its Indian subsidiary, founded in 1958.) From 1959 to 1971, he was also sovritendente of the Teatro Regio di Torino (where the current music director is the increasingly in-demand Gianandrea Noseda). Bruni Tedeschi's music is mostly in a romantic-modernist style reminiscent of Dallapiccola; there's a plethora of recordings and videos on his posthumous website. Still, his leading passion seems to have been collecting—art, furniture, houses, all manner of stuff.

Carla Bruni got her start as a model for Guess jeans back in the 80s, and, as every single news article about her never fails to mention, has at one time or another dated Eric Clapton, Donald Trump, Kevin Costner, and, most infamously, Mick Jagger, driving Jagger's wife Jerry Hall to distraction for the better part of a decade. Until recently, she was married to the philosopher Raphaël Enthoven, who she began an affair with while she was still in a relationship with Enthoven's father; the younger Enthoven's wife at the time, Justine Lévy (daughter of the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy), later wrote a thinly-diguised roman-á-clef about the whole scandal. Did you follow that? Then again, Sarkozy met his second wife when, as mayor of Neuilly, he officiated at her wedding to somebody else. They sound like they were made for each other.

But even the normally tolerant French find the quick turnaround a little unseemly—the latest polls show that Sarkozy's approval rating has dropped nearly 20 points since the summer, and 7 points in the last month alone. It should be noted that Sarkozy's disinclination to keep his private life private—the couple took a well-publicized Christmas trip to Egypt—is in stark contrast with his predecessors, who have traditionally been discreet with their amorous activities while in office. The problem is not the affair, in other words, but that, in flaunting it, Sarkozy is coming off as a bit gauche—a danger for someone whose predilection for the luxuries offered by his wealthy friends and supporters have already earned him the derisive title of le Président Bling-Bling.

But this is a music blog, after all, so let's get to the real question: can Carla Bruni sing? Well, she has better pitch than Rex Harrison, at least. Personally, I don't go in for ultra-wispy breathiness (except from Blossom Dearie in one of her sly moods), but more than a few Europeans do, based on the success of her 2004 debut single, "Quelqu'un m'a dit." She gets this sincere compliment: she's the polar opposite of American Idol.

In the corners of my mind

The weekend's non-required reading was Daniel Goldmark's Tunes for 'Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon. Goldmark does some breakdown of compositional practice in the Golden Age of Hollywood animation, but the focus is mostly on cultural studies: what the way that music was used in cartoons tells us about how various types of music were viewed and referenced at the time. It's a fun, fun book, although you get the feeling that Goldmark has simplified his analysis somewhat in order not to scare off a non-specialist audience. You're a college professor—go ahead and write that tome! Still, a welcome addition to a library category that remains scandalously small.

Goldmark, inevitably, spends a chapter analyzing the Chuck Jones-directed Bugs Bunny Wagner parody "What's Opera, Doc?". If you're one of the four people who have never seen the cartoon, you can watch it here. (For my money, "Rabbit of Seville" is funnier. But I digress.) "What's Opera, Doc?" has become such a staple that it's taken on a life of it's own, beyond parody—as I was reading, I realized that uses of "Ride of the Valkyries" in TV or advertising over the past couple decades or so are probably referring just as much to the cartoon as to the original opera. In other words, it's taking advantage not of our collective knowledge of Die Walküre, but of our collective knowledge of Elmer Fudd singing "Kill the wabbit."

That's a fairly odd state of affairs, even given the way popular culture appropriates anything it can get its hands on. You can compare another warhorse, the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Symphony no. 9. The "Ode" has made its way through pop culture, probably most famously in the Bruce Willis Die Hard franchise. (A grungy guitar version turns up in the trailer to last year's Live Free or Die Hard.) Yet the piece remains stubbornly fixed in its Ninth-Symphony context.

Over Christmas (hence, you may have missed it), the Slovenian philosopher/iconoclast Slavoj Žižek made a surprise visit to the New York Times, ruminating on the European Union's adoption of the "Ode to Joy" as their anthem, in light of his own idiosyncratic hearing of the original. Jonathan at "Dial 'M'" didn't think much of the article—me, I rather enjoyed it. But regardless of whether you buy Žižek's argument or not, the point is, his intellectual strategy was dead-on. The EU chose the Beethoven for their anthem precisely because they wanted to appropriate the perceived qualities of the original: a paean to freedom and brotherhood. Žižek, looking to poke mischievous holes in the EU's self-image, knew that muddling the original context of the "Ode" would be the best way to undermine the EU's use of it. Goldmark, on the other hand, barely mentions the original context of the Wagner selections in "What's Opera, Doc?"—he correctly points out that the cartoon instead follows a generic operatic narrative for which Wagner's music serves merely as a signal. The music has become so shorn of its original context that even someone who has no knowledge of the Ring responds to it in a semiotically particular way. (Here's another way to think about it: if the late Karlheinz Stockhausen had created Hymnen, his electronic national-anthem kaleidoscope, in the past five years rather than the late 60s, he would have been faced with the decision whether to include the EU anthem or not: a recognizable bit of the "Ode to Joy" would almost certainly be heard as a comment on Beethoven's Ninth rather than the EU, or nationalism in general.)

Why is this? I don't know. It could be that more people have experienced the Beethoven in its original context—performances of the Ninth are certainly more common, and readily accessible, than performances of the Ring. It could be that more people have actually sung the Beethoven, probably in the form of Henry Van Dyke's hymn "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee"—perhaps that's fixed the "Ode" as a specifically musical experience instead of a more generically "cultural" one. It could be a sign of the success that propagandists had in associating Wagner with the Nazis in World War II—and, in turn, disassociating it from the actual operas. (Goldmark points out that much of the imagery of "What's Opera, Doc?" is foreshadowed in a WWII-era anti-Nazi Bugs Bunny short, "Herr Meets Hare"—although the music in that one was, curiously, Strauss waltzes.) It could be the more stylized (read: more easily parodied) aspects of opera vs. concert music. Or it could, after all, just be one of those quirks of history—I actually gravitate towards this one, since the idea of a piece of music having a biography as wayward and rich as a person appeals to me.

Of course, I haven't yet mentioned the most famous post-Bugs use of Wagner, the helicopter assault in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (the "Ride" begins around the 3:20 mark).



This is an absolutely fascinating use of the music because the movie gets to have it both ways. No doubt Coppola and his screenwriter, John Milius, were fully aware of the plot of Die Walküre, the ingenious portrayal of the helicopter gunships as modernized, mechanized Valkyries—the music both romanticizes combat and wryly points out the absurdity of ancient notions of chivalry in a war where the killing is almost industrialized. But Coppola also gets the benefit of the general, vague familiarity with the piece, giving the scene an almost banal overtone that works in counterpoint with the intense violence.

The most intriguing detail of the use of the music is that it's diagetic, that is, it actually exists within the movie. We hear the "Ride" because the soldiers are hearing it: Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall) explains its presence, gives the "psyops" order, and we see the reel-to-reel tape begin to play. It's a way to massage the surrealism of the soundtrack, and I think it's very subtly aided by the shared 20th-century music-appreciation-via-cartoon that "What's Opera, Doc?" epitomizes. The film's creators may have familiarized themselves with the mythology of the Ring, but the surfing Army lifer Col. Kilgore? He probably learned it from Bugs Bunny.

Everything the traffic will allow

Reviewing the Boston Pops' new CD.
Boston Globe, January 6, 2008.

What a movie

Psst... hey, Hollywood:

Sean Penn as Leonard Bernstein. Just a suggestion.

Penn photo by the Associated Press. Bernstein photo by Jack Mitchell.

Update (1/4): Our good friend Mark Meyer works the requisite celluloid magic:

Who is the partisan whose deeds are unsurpassed?

Kim [Il-Sung] described his father as a young man consumed by patriotism who exhorted his schoolmates: "Believe in a Korean God, if you believe in one!" After the family moved to Manchuria, his father went to every service at a local chapel and sometimes led the singing and played the organ, teaching his son to play also. But this, insisted Kim, was just a chance to spread anti-Japanese propaganda.
...
By 1947, [Kim] had become the center of a personality cult, modeled on Stalin's, in which he was pictured as wise, strong, compassionate—and energetic enough to involve himself in virtually every significant decision. He was reported to have supervised closely even the composition of the national anthem. Perhaps calling upon his experience as a church organist, he urged the committee involved to insert a refrain between the verses, to "improve the rhythm and harmony of the music [and] add to the solemnity of the song as a whole, and inspire the singer with national pride and self-confidence." According to an official biography, "none of the poets and composers assembled there had thought of this until he pointed it out."

—Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly
Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (pp. 16, 59)

Kim Il-Sung, the authoritarian ruler of North Korea for over forty years, started out as a church organist? Explains an awful lot, actually.

Come Fly With Me

The death of Oscar Peterson on Christmas Eve caused a brief spike in what I think to be one of the most fascinating tropes in music reception: the reflexive mistrust of virtuosity. Peterson, was, of course, one of the greatest virtuosos of the past hundred years. A lot of the coverage of his passing, even that in a favorable tone, still cast a qualified eye towards all that technique.

Though Peterson has sometimes been criticised as a musician in thrall to his own runaway technique, he remained a great virtuoso of piano jazz, and an equally effective populariser of the music among those who might otherwise not have encountered it.

—John Fordham in The Guardian

Accolades followed him everywhere, but Peterson always had to fend off some critics who believed his technical prowess outweighed his ability to express emotion on the keyboard.

—Jeffrey Jones for Reuters

The critical ambivalence was typified in 1973 by a review of a Peterson performance by John S. Wilson of The Times. Mr. Wilson wrote: “For the last 20 years, Oscar Peterson has been one of the most dazzling exponents of the flying fingers school of piano playing. His performances have tended to be beautifully executed displays of technique but woefully weak on emotional projection.”

The complaints evoked those heard in the 1940s about the great concert violinist Jascha Heifetz, who was occasionally accused of being so technically brilliant that one could not find his or the composer’s heart and soul in the music he played.

—Richard Severo in The New York Times

I wasn't going to bother with my own obituary of Peterson, since I figured it would simply be a lot of fanboy gushing: Peterson was the first jazz pianist I ever heard (via record albums appropriated from my dad—thanks, Dad), he pretty quickly became my favorite, and he never really relinquished the crown, although I fully admit I never had the time to keep up with his fearsomely prodigious output of recordings. If I'm going to talk about his virtuosity, though, it might be helpful to briefly analyze just what it was that set Peterson's playing apart. Lots of pianists play fast; some of them play extremely fast. But Peterson played extremely fast and swung very hard, which is kind of a violation of piano physics. It's relatively easy for fast passagework to either float above the beat or get you from a particular beat A to beat B. (This is why I've always thought the phrases in bebop tunes are always beginning and ending on odd parts of the bar—it delineates the outline of the swing without necessarily having to swing itself. It's very cool in an op-art sort of way.) Peterson could judiciously vary the touch, tone, and weight of every one of those many notes so that the swing was embedded within the passagework. It was simultaneously solo and rhythm section. Pianists know how amazing this is; it's the same as practicing a Scarlatti sonata for hours on end, trying to even out the sixteenth notes, then hearing Horowitz do it with such preternatural smoothness that you just throw up your hands. I never met another pianist who didn't regard Peterson with awe. We'd tried it. We knew how hard he had worked to be able to do what he did.

In other words, I never thought that Peterson was letting his technique go on autopilot; rather, he was always putting his technique at the service of the rhythm. A lot of the critical ambivalence towards Peterson may have also had to do with another 20th-century trope, the idea that harmonic innovation is more important than rhythmic innovation. (I sometimes think that, a hundred years from now, the real importance of atonality will not be its supposed emancipation of dissonance, but that its abandonment of specifically harmonic tension and resolution enabled explosive growth in the field of rhythmic possibility.) Peterson's allegiance to blues-based harmonies was simply a result of his creativity being more fully engaged in sculpting the rhythmic flow. Peterson's rhythm is often compared to Count Basie's, that hard, rock-solid swing, but Peterson's technique let him keep that swing in more fluid, moment-to-moment play. It's telling that, when I went from Peterson to Thelonious Monk, it didn't seem all that big a jump to me. To my ear, Monk was using silence and accents the way Peterson used streams of notes and flourishes.

The difference, though, was that the basic building blocks of Monk's vocabulary were the basic building blocks of sound: hard attack, soft attack, loud sound, soft sound, no sound. For Peterson, one of the main components of his vocabulary was his virtuosity, in the same way as a Chopin or a Liszt: technical difficulty, and the overcoming of technical difficulty, as an expressive resource in and of itself. Nowadays, whether out of a need for some sense of "authenticity," or some inability to connect the craft with the art, or maybe even simply the lack of widespread instrumental musical experience as a frame of reference, Monk's style (which, it should be pointed out, was just as much constructed and polished and practiced as Peterson's) is held up as more "emotional", "soulful", "communicative"—insert your own word. I like Monk and Peterson, in large part because I don't regard virtuosity as a sort of second-class musical element. But a lot of people do.

So why this distrust of virtuosity, this assumption that somehow, if your technique is astonishingly good, your emotional connection with the music must necessarily suffer? I think it has to do with the similarity between music and magic. (I've talked about this before; it's one of my favorite pet ideas.) And, by extension, the connection between magic and outright chicanery. Magic is, after all, a benign con; at a certain point, the patter becomes so smooth and faultless that we instinctively start to protect our valuables. With virtuosity, too—it's that omnipresent fear of looking like a rube or a fool. So instead of the natural reaction, which is to just let one's jaw drop all the way to the floor, we try and assert some control over the situation, establish some parameter where we can at least seem to be engaging the experience on equal terms with the performer. And a big part of that is dismissing what the performer does that we can't as impressive but somehow irrelevant to what really matters. (Professional athletes get this a lot. Yeah, but he's still just throwing a ball.)

In Peterson's case, this was exacerbated by the fact that the emotional content of much of his music-making was built around one of the most basic but uncomplicated emotions there is: joy. I don't think it was a case of cynicism resisting that joy, just that it was so obvious that perhaps a critical exploration of it didn't seem necessary, or didn't seem to go beneath the surface. But that joy was powerful stuff, indeed. Every day, Oscar Peterson, a high-school dropout from suburban Toronto, the son of black immigrants, sat behind the piano and did things that nobody else on the planet could do. If you don't think that there's a deeply profound statement about the human condition right there, you're just not paying attention.

Not a creature was stirring

(Click to enlarge.) Critic-at-large Moe is listening to Al Green: O Holy Night (MP3, 3.4 MB). He has had it up to here with all of your cat pictures. Nevertheless, he wishes everyone a peaceful holiday season. See you next year!

Update (12/25): In memoriam, one more song to the playlist:

Anita O'Day and the Oscar Peterson Quartet: Taking a Chance on Love (MP3, 2.2 MB)

More on this after break, probably. But consider: two of the all-time great side-job accompanists—Rostropovich and Peterson—gone in the same year.

Where's your Messiah now?

Reviewing three Christmas CDs.
Boston Globe, December 23, 2007.

This article was limited to recent releases, but here's two other Boston-area holiday recommendations: A Christmas Album, by the Choir of the Church of the Advent, particularly Rodney Lister's austere, modernist-by-way-of-Schütz Kings and Shepherds; and the Boston Camerata's An American Christmas, which introduced me to one of my all-time favorite Christmas songs, the George Elderkin revival hymn "Jesus the Light of the World."

Far Out

On Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Slate magazine, December 21, 2007.

Silk purses from sow's ears

We finish up the week's holiday scribbling (previously: 1, 2, 3, 4) with a boar's head carol, one of the oldest Christmas traditions there is. When super-intelligent aliens take over the planet and interrogate humanity about our customs, I imagine that the boar's head will come up around Day 23 or so.

SUPER-INTELLIGENT ALIENS: OK, that's all we need to know about the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts. Moving on. Now, this whole boar's head thing....

HUMANITY: Oh, yeah. The boar's head—for Christmas.

SIA: That would be the infant-in-a-feeding-trough holiday.

H: That's the one.

SIA: Now, you'd cut the head off a pig...

H: Yep.

SIA: And you'd put it on a plate...

H: Yep.

SIA: And then parade it around the room and sing to it.

H: Yep, that's pretty much it.

SIA: And why would you do this?

H: Well, I mean, we had to, didn't we? That boar is vicious, with those tusks and all. And he's constantly eating all the crops, isn't he? We worked hard raising those crops. We had to kill him.

SIA: So it's revenge, basically.

H: Yeah, I suppose.

SIA: Which you then made into a Christmas thing.

H: Yeah.

SIA: Like Die Hard, but with a pig.

H: Come on, man, you put it that way, it sounds stupid.

Voice and piano, with violin and cello obbligato. Why? Because I can. (Maniacal laughter, &c.) For my brother Dan and his new bride Jenn. (And Jessie, too.) Musically, this one is pure cop show. Not the "Dial 'M'" cop show-as-slang-for-cool—I mean it sounds like the theme to a 1970s cop show. Sing it while riding on the hood of a speeding car.

Guerrieri: Nowell, Nowell (PDF, 176 KB; surprisingly appropriate MIDI here)

No Soliciting

Today's carol (previously: 1, 2, 3) provides an unusually concise summary of the wassailing philosophy—i.e., we'll stand out here giving you musical guilt until you cough up the swag! And then on to your neighbors! A present for my sister Joy, currently spending her birthday somewhere in Mexico. On purpose, I think.

Guerrieri: A Jolly Wassail-Bowl (PDF, 110 KB; demented music-box MIDI here)

Food, Glorious Food

Today's carol (previously: 1, 2) comes to us courtesy of 17th-century England, where carving a roast was apparently regarded as a descendant of jousting—an oddly Proustian trigger for chivalric nostalgia. For Karen and Mike (you can share some with the boys if they've been good). Tritones and augmented triads make everything festive!

Guerrieri: My Master and Dame (PDF, 99 KB; Cooperstown-Giant-authentic-sounding MIDI here)

Can I start you off with some drinks?

Today's carol (previously) tells the heartwarming tale of a group of pushy carousers who demand nothing but alcohol. We have no need of your "food"! It might be nutritionally unsound, but I'll bet a roast goose they gained less weight in December than I will.

For Jeana and Glenn, and critic-at-large Moe's rural Midwestern counterpart Dougal. Musically: as if 19th-century wassailers were carrying around pocket transistor AM radios.

Guerrieri: Bring Us In Good Ale (PDF, 148 KB; Casiotone-esque MIDI here)

Knock knock

New England has been whomped by two major winter storms in relatively short order. The one on Thursday resulted in the cancellation of choir practice; the one yesterday resulted in the cancellation of church services and our yearly nursing home Christmas service and our yearly community carol sing. Apparently the pagan gods of nature are gaining the upper hand in the mythical War on Christmas. Look for Bill O'Reilly to denounce the singing of "Let It Snow" as an insult to Christian America.

Anyway, I took it as an opportunity to tinker with some original carols. My personal preference is for wassails—if you're not sure what a wassail involves, the almost always suspect Wikipedia actually nails this one:

Wassailing is the practice of going door-to-door singing Christmas carols until paid to go away and leave the occupants in peace.

Nothing epitomizes the holiday spirit quite like roving bands of musical extortionists, does it? Today's offering, a stocking stuffer for my brother Tony, is pretty much all about how two-over-three rhythms sound somewhat inebriated to my ear.

Guerrieri: The Wassaile (PDF, 104 KB; curious-sounding MIDI here)

Stay tuned—a new wassail every day this week!

Update (12/21): the rest—2, 3, 4, 5.

It's up to your knees out there

That was the awfully pretty view out my window this morning, but I think spending the night shoveling it all left too much of a brain fog for proper blogging. Nevertheless, here's some topics I was thinking about delving into. Maybe I'll get to the bottom of some of them at some point in the future. For today, I think I'll eat a whole bag of potato chips. Realistic goals, you know.

The New York Philharmonic goes to North Korea. It sounds kind of like the highbrow version of a "Bad News Bears" sequel, doesn't it? I always find these sorts of cultural exchanges fascinating, because you can make equally good arguments that they're almost inevitably failures because, at the end of the day, they don't really mean anything politically, or that they're almost inevitably successful, because, at the end of the day, they don't really mean anything politically. I'm curious to see just how much the view of this will hearken back to the Cold War: somebody's always keeping those Soviet-era journalistic lenses well-polished.

The 2008 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees were announced this week. More and more, the lesson of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame seems to be that the surest path to artistic immortality is to a) get in on the ground floor of b) a medium pitched towards impressionable teenagers who grow up to be nostalgic critics. I mean, I like the Dave Clark Five, but were they really that good or that important? I'm starting to get the feeling that, fifty years from now, every single act who released a record between 1955 and 1970 will be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (And again, "Weird Al" Yankovic is passed over. For shame.)

Punkte and Circumstance. For future publication, I spent a good deal of this week studying Karlheinz Stockhausen; for future publication, I'm embarking on a study of Edward Elgar. Maybe it's just the accidental juxtaposition, but I think there's a particular connection between them that has a lot to do with how easily music can paper over awkward aesthetic impulses: namely, the fact that both composers rose to positions of public prominence at the same time the strong religious aspects of their music were publicly soft-pedaled. Elgar's Catholicism was politely discounted for pretty much his whole career; Stockhausen's everything-and-the-kitchen-sink didn't receive much mention until the late 1960s, when it became too front-and-center to ignore.

I'll close with a commercial: here in Framingham, I live within shouting distance of about a hundred shopping malls, and if the traffic I have to crawl through when I'm not even going to the mall is any indication, there's a lot of holiday-gift aggravation out there for the having. Why not just stay home and give everyone t-shirts? Not to be an insufferable shill or anything, but proceeds do go to a good cause. (Don't like mine? Darcy's are pretty stylish. And Matt has cornered the market on wearable puns—my favorite is "Fine and D'Indy," with its subversive anti-anti-Semitic vibe.)

Deck the walls

It's dueling art collector day on Soho the Dog!


Pablo Picasso's Head of a Woman in Profile (Jacqueline), a 1970 canvas that's part of the Lazarof collection, a major trove of modernist art that was given to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this week.

The "fractional and partial'' gift, in which title passes to the museum over a number of years, includes 20 paintings and drawings by Picasso, seven bronze sculptures and a painting by Alberto Giacometti, 11 drawings by Klee, two versions of "Bird in Space'' by sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and late 19th-century works by Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro.

Not a bad haul for a composer. Yes, a composer—that's Lazarof as in Henri Lazarof, longtime UCLA professor—though it would seem that the main wherewithal came from Lazarof's wife Janice, daughter of noted LA philanthropist Mark Taper. LACMA has been very, very good this Christmas—the collection is one masterpiece after another.

Now, yesterday in Milan, Sotheby's was auctioning off some other artwork, as part of a sale of letters, paintings, and various other tchotchkes formerly owned by Maria Callas. And what did La Divina grace her walls with? Sad clowns!


That's a Clown by A. Morgante, which sold for 750 Euros—which, it should be noted, was well above the 350-500 estimate: the Callas mystique still holds. To be fair, there was quite a bit of worthy stuff—this Baldassare Carrari (free registration required) is rather nice—and maybe the clowns were Meneghini's, anyway. (I see Maria walking through the house, passing the clown painting in the hallway, and, every time, giving it that dagger-sharp big-eyed Callas look.) But honestly, what is that tie made of? Lemon meringue? The eye of the beholder, indeed.

Dasher and Dancer

Reviewing the Boston Pops.
Boston Globe, December 12, 2007.

(Get Your Kicks On ) Route 126

Reviewing Gilbert Kalish.
Boston Globe, December 11, 2007.

In Flanders' field

Reviewing the Tallis Scholars.
Boston Globe, December 10, 2007.

fl. 2007

MT: You know you're considered a strange case of prudence and foresight. And yet you don't give up electronic production, which is a kind of gamble. Why?

KS: Because the sense of risk is actually indispensable to me. At this point, my argument is about to become metaphysical. Most people have no intention of following me to this level; but I'm convinced that the tangible results of my work, the electro-acoustical material, could even end up destroyed, and that it wouldn't matter, because the inner impulse which compels me to bring a work to completion would remain. The idea which takes form and materializes in a substantial design of metallic molecules; the spirit which coagulates when pressed on to tape—what else are they but the exact equivalent of an abstract order? When the ear—that is, the auditory imagination—is no longer conditioned by the body, and the membrane of the loudspeaker disappears into the dust, along with the entire universe, the only thing to survive, in so far as it is 'idea', will be the spiritual force which emanates from my music.

—Mya Tannenbaum (trans. David Butchart),
Conversations With Stockhausen (1987)

Image from Klavierstücke VI. More from: Marc Geelhoed, Alex Ross, Tim Rutherford-Johnson, ANABlog, Associated Press.

The envelopes

This year's Grammy nominations were announced yesterday, and my own irrelevance was staved off yet again—every year, I expect to reach the level of complete non-familiarity with the rock/pop nominees, but some passing radio encounters with Amy Winehouse and a couple of excursions to Starbucks saved me. (Though if Amy Winehouse got six nominations, that means that next year, Sharon Jones should get, I don't know, a hundred.)

The classical nominations reveal a fair number of smaller labels, I think reflecting the way the Internet has completely changed the rules of promotion and distribution. The big story, of course, is the multiple nods for Peter Lieberson's Grawemeyer-award-winning Neruda Songs, which deserve as many statuettes as possible. I've decided, though, that the rooting interest here at Soho the Dog HQ will be for the Brian Setzer Orchestra, who scored a nomination in the Best Classical Crossover category for the thoroughly goofy/awesome warhorse/surf-guitar mashup Wolfgang's Big Night Out. (You can hear a few tracks on their MySpace page.)

High church

Tomorrow is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on the Roman Catholic calendar, which is one of the six remaining non-Sunday Holy Days of Obligation in the American Catholic church. The feast itself officially goes back to 1476, and unofficially even further, but the Immaculate Conception of Mary—the doctrine that Mary was born without original sin—was first proclaimed as dogma by Pope Pius IX in 1854. Popes like to make pronouncements like this every few generations or so just to remind everyone about that whole papal infallibility thing. Wait a minute—he can still do that? Pius XII did the same thing with Mary's bodily assumption into heaven in 1950. Look for Benedict XVI to come up with something any day now.

Papal infallibility is one of the main Protestant objections to Catholicism—yet, oddly enough, it was one of the things that gave Catholicism an unlikely avant-garde cachet from around the time of Pius IX's proclamation to, say, World War II. Particularly in England and France, artists and writers who had a particular bent towards modernism often were attracted to the Roman church. In England, home of Henry VIII's schism and a long history of antagonism with Catholic France, conversion was, for a time, the upper-class anti-Establishment gesture of choice, inspired by the famous apostasies of Cardinals Manning and Newman. Oscar Wilde flirted with Catholicism as an Oxford student in the 1870s, based in large part on the elegance of Newman's prose (one of the only things that kept him from taking the plunge was his father's threat of disinheritance). Wilde evetually decided his subversive tendencies led in other directions, but he's a prime example of the rebellious attraction of Catholicism for up-to-date Victorian college students, the 19th-century equivalent of a Che Guevara poster. (Note that, in England, this was mostly an aristocratic impulse—Edward Elgar, for example, felt his own outsider status had more to do with his working-class roots than his Catholic upbringing.)

The paradoxical modernity of Catholicism was even more explicitly perceived in France. The clearest statement of it is probably Guillaume Apollinaire's long poem "Zone," published in the collection Alcools in 1913. He name-checks Pope Pius X (who, coincidentally, had reduced the number of Holy Days of Obligation from 36 to a more manageable eight in 1911):

Religion alone has remained entirely fresh religion
Has remained simple like the hangars at the airfield

You alone in all Europe are not antique O Christian faith
The most modern European is you Pope Pius X

Apollinaire adopts the conceit that technology is only aiming for what the church has already achieved:

It is God who died on Friday and rose again on Sunday
It is Christ who soars in the sky better than any aviator
He breaks the world's altitude record

(Translation by Roger Shattuck.) One can start to see the attraction of Catholicism, bestowing a miraculous poetry on technological advance, while anchoring the dizzying speed and confusion of the modern world in archaic ceremony. Some saw its strictness as a bulwark: Wilde (who eventually converted on his deathbed) once made the unlikely claim that Catholicism might have tempered his homosexuality, while Jean Cocteau, the most self-conscious modernist of all, briefly returned to the church in the late 1920s while unsuccessfully attempting to overcome an opium addiction.

But mostly, I think that modernist artists and writers, attempting to create entirely new worlds by fiat, saw a kindred spirit in the all-powerful, deliberately ancient pontiff. The high modernism of the pre-World War II era was as much backward-looking as forward: Stravinsky's neo-Classicism, Pound's neo-Medievalism, the influence of Greek antiquity on Picasso. In a culture saturated with jazzy modernity, the sort of bracing anachronism exemplified by the Catholic church could seem the most avant-garde movement of all.

This sort of relationship has never been far from the surface in music, which turns again and again to the past for structure, inspiration, or effect. There's a fair amount of Renaissance influence in post-minimalist music, but, then again, there was also a fair amount of Renaissance influence in serialist music, too—Webern's expertise in the music of Heinrich Isaac bore fruit in just about all of his own compositions. Punk rock was in many ways a return to the 50s; today, almost the entire pop spectrum can be read in terms of retro influences, be it AM-radio easy listening, 70s soul, 60s psychedlia, Basement-Tapes-style recycled roots music, etc. All over the map, yet, I think, traceable to the same post-Romantic impulse that made the cutting edge a fellow traveler with Catholicism for a while: not just the shock of the new, not just the reinvention of ancient innovation, but a necessarily foolhardy assertion of the infallibility of the artist's taste. The appeal of Catholicism was not just its discipline, but also the model of its hierarchical theology. The dogmas vary, even from work to work, but the ability to decide what they are remains the creator's fundamental privilege. Every piece is an encyclical: we claim our own imprimatur.

Antiquing

A fact most characteristic of the Renaissance and of Italy is the specialization of the orchestra, the search for new instruments and modes of sounds, and, in close connection with this tendency, the formation of a class of 'virtuosi,' who devoted their whole attention to particular instruments or particular branches of music.

From Jacob Burckhardt's 1860 study, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. One of the biggest criticisms of the modern symphony orchestra is that its museum-like nature has put Burckhardt's analysis seriously out of balance—the focus on virtuosic practice has atrophied the search for new instruments and modes and sounds. Interestingly, last week's Boston Symphony concerts (which the group brought to New York) had small object lessons in both the validity and the irrelevance of such a protest. Henri Dutilleux expertly and hauntingly deployed a very non-orchestral instrument, the accordion, in his song cycle "Le Temps L'Horloge"—one could certainly conjure up a reedy facsimile with some clever orchestration, but the actual presence of the instrument was both more convincing and more poetic. On the other hand, in Debussy's "La Mer," I spent most of the performance mesmerized by veteran BSO percussionist Frank Epstein, manning the cymbal parts. Cymbals can be a one-dimensional flourish, but Epstein put on a clinic, coaxing inexhaustible, surprising colors out of an instrument that's hardly changed since it made its way into the orchestra a couple of centuries ago. Never mind the new instruments, Epstein's mastery seemed to say, we've barely scratched the surface of the old ones.

Also from Burckhardt:

In singing, only the solo was permitted, 'for a single voice is heard, enjoyed, and judged far better.' In other words, as singing, notwithstanding all conventional modesty, is an exhibition of the individual man of society, it is better that each should be seen and heard separately. The tender feelings produced in the fair listeners are taken for granted, and elderly people are therefore recommended to abstain from such forms of art, even though they excel in them. It was held important that the effect of the song should be enhanced by the impression made on the sight.

Peter Gelb, Renaissance man.

Comparative Ponerology of the Day

"Obviously rock climbing firms the upper regions of the will. But it's quite a process. And just as dangerous as black magic. For every fear we are ready to confront is equally open, you see, to the Devil. Should we fail, the Devil is there to soothe our cowardice. 'Stick with me,' he says, 'and your cowardice is forgiven.' Whereas, rock climbing, when well done, pinches off the Devil. Of course, if you fail, his nibs returns twofold. If you are not good enough then, you spend half your days getting the Devil out. That is marking time. And so long as we stay in place, Satan is more than satisfied. He loves circular, obsessive activity. Entropy is his meat. When the world becomes a pendulum, he will inhabit the throne."

—Norman Mailer, Harlot's Ghost

"Who knows today, who even knew in classical times, what inspiration is, what genuine, old, primeval enthusiasm, insicklied critique, unparalysed by thought or by the mortal domination of reason—who knows the divine raptus? I believe, indeed, the devil passes for a man of destuctive criticism? Slander and again slander, my friend! Gog's sacrament! If there is anything he cannot abide, if there's one thing in the whole world he cannot stomach, it is destructive criticism. What he wants and gives is triumph over it, is shining, sparkling, vainglorious unreflectiveness!"

—Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

Smile

Photo of the day from Reuters. That's Brian Wilson, looking pretty much as I'd look if I found myself trapped between Diana Ross and Condolezza Rice. Wilson was fêted at this year's Kennedy Center Honors with, among other things, a medley of his songs performed by Hootie and the Blowfish. Hootie and the Blowfish, huh? Can you excuse me for a moment? (sound of head banging against wall)

Elsewhere, Lord Goldsmith is recommending that some lyrics to "God Save the Queen" be changed. I'd start with the second verse, which has long spread the pernicious idea that "cause" and "voice" somehow rhyme. (Critic-at-large Moe suggests working in something about paws.) Or just scrap the whole thing and start over.

And film critic Jim Emerson has a good time comparing Bob Dylan to Beethoven's Ninth. (If you've never seen director Todd Haynes' infamous all-Barbie-doll Karen Carpenter biopic, you really should.)

Hanukkah starts at sundown tonight. I should come up with a celebratory post, but honestly, am I going to top last year's? Not bloody likely. So think of it as one of those endlessly repeated holiday specials. Shalom!

Last Fair Deal Gone Down

Via The Concert and Deceptively Simple, a fine meme/questionnaire/procrastination aid.

The rules:

1. Put your iTunes/ music player on Shuffle
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER WHAT

CAPITAL LETTERS! I MUST OBEY!

1. If someone says ‘Is this OK?’ you say?
"America" (Van Dyke Parks' arrangement from Tokyo Rose).
There's a bright future for me in politics, apparently.

2. What would best describe your personality?
"Wonderful" (Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers).
Thanks, Sam! I left the money in your dressing room.

3. What do you like in a girl?
"Pu Pu Pa Doo" (The Gaynotes).
No way I'm touching that one.

4. How do you feel today?
Berg: "Im Zimmer" from Sieben frühe Lieder (Anne Sofie von Otter/Bengt Forsberg).
"When my eye rests so in yours, as quietly the minutes pass." I love you, too, computer!

5. What is your life’s purpose?
Britten: "The Death of Nicholas" from Saint Nicholas (the old Decca Britten/Pears recording).
Revenge shall be mine.

6. What is your motto?
"I Can't Go On (Rosalie)" (Fats Domino).
That's me—Samuel Beckett without the follow-through.

7. What do your friends think of you?
Poulenc: "Toréador" (Michel Sénéchal/Dalton Baldwin).
Scoff all you want, but bolero jackets are making a comeback.

8. What do you think of your parents?
Brahms: Symphony no. 2: III. Allegretto grazioso (quasi andantino)—Presto ma non assai—Tempo I (Wiener Philharmoniker/Bernstein).
Coincidentally, the tempo marking of pretty much every report card review of my childhood.

9. What do you think about very often?
Schumann: "O wie Lieblich," op. 138, no. 3 (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau/Jörg Demus).
My wife is distractingly cute, OK?

10. What does 2+2=?
"C'est Si Bon" (Don Byron, from Don Byron Plays the Music of Mickey Katz).
Two plus two? It's all good! L'chaim!

11. What do you think of your best friend?
Adams: "Landing of the Spirit of '76" from Nixon in China.
Well, every time I go to his house, I do have to shake the hands of all his ministers.

12. What do you think of the person you like?
Donizetti: "Voglio dire, lo stupendo elisir" from L'elisir d'amore (Battle/Pavarotti/Levine).
It sure is.

13. What is your life story?
Wolf: "Das Köhlerweib is trunken" (Elisabeth Schwarzkopf/Gerald Moore).
I was tricked by red wine. Is that an accepted legal defense plea?

14. What do you want to be when you grow up?
Tallis: The Lamentations of Jeremiah: Ghimel. Migravit Juda propter afflictionem (Pro Cantione Antiqua).
Judah is gone into captivity because of affliction, and because of great servitude: she dwelleth among the heathen, she findeth no rest: all her persecutors overtook her between the straits. A restless, cranky old man. I'm well on my way.

15. What do you think when you see the person you like?
Bach: "Ich folge dir Gleichfalls" from St. John Passion (Elly Ameling).
I likewise follow you with eager steps and will not forsake you, my Light and my Life. Let it not be said that I don't know what's good for me.

16. What do your parents think of you?
"I Know You Got Soul" (Eric B. and Rakim).
Thanks, Mom and Dad! I left the money in your dressing room.

17. What will you dance to at your wedding?
Bernstein: "A Boy Like That," from West Side Story (original Broadway cast).
Not actually what I danced to at my wedding, and truth be told, I'm kind of kicking myself.

18. What will they play at your funeral?
"Que Sera, Sera" (Sly and the Family Stone).
How do you sum up a man's life? Meh.

19. What is your hobby/interest?
"Keep Your Hand on the Plow" (Mahalia Jackson).
Wait, I have to get something to pull the plow, too? No wonder nothing's growing.

20. What is your biggest secret?
"I Don't Like Mondays" (The Boomtown Rats).
That's no secret! Well, the shooting part, maybe.

21. What do you think of your friends?
"Heard It Through the Grapevine" (The Slits).
As soon as they read this post, they'll find out on the sly.

22. What should you post this as?
"Last Fair Deal Gone Down" (Robert Johnson).

Witches can be right, giants can be good

In my ADD way, I rarely revisit topics once I've posted on them—I say what I have to say, and them I'm done. (Of course, some topics always pique my interest, usually for strange reasons: the gilt Art Nouveau rotary hotline has been silent as of late—hello?) So I wasn't planning on further deconstruction of the whole Gustavo Dudamel-Hugo Chávez-Venezuela thing, but it's been flaring up again (Although, as Darcy points out, we've probably been focusing on the wrong demagogue).

The opposition to El Sistema is basically this: Chávez is awful, El Sistema has connections with Chávez, therefore it's tainted, no matter how much good it does. Patrick at The Penitent Wagnerite (linked above) put it this way:

You cannot assert that Chávez is bad, but part of his regime (no matter when it was founded) is good, without contradicting yourself and implying that Chávez is good. It's just that simple.

Here's my question (which goes well beyond the ostensible topic at hand): why is this whole evil-tainting-good idea invariably a one-way street? Patrick paints himself into a corner because his definitions of "evil" and "good" are so acid-and-base exclusive. (A professor I know would have diagnosed this as "hardening of the categories.") But even those of us who take a more pragmatic (or, from a pejorative standpoint, "morally relative") standpoint still have a tendency to default to the same direction of moral flow. Evil taints good, but good doesn't, as it were, taint evil.

I wonder how far back in human history that lopsided equation goes. Pandora's Box, maybe? Adam's fall? Unusually for this infidel, I thought of a biblical passage, from Mark's Gospel:

And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

My suspicion is that the modern iteration of the unwashable stain is a hangover from the rise of Nazi Germany. Many decent people chose to take a charitable view of Hitler for too long, with disastrous results—as a result, our reflex is to believe the worst of any even mildly evil figure, and morally quarantine ourselves.

But take a look at that passage from Mark again: the point isn't that evil needs to be violently amputated from our souls, the point is that even flawed souls can, on balance, be saved. The morally maimed can still enter into eternal life. Your hand is evil? Your foot? Your eye? That's OK—it's not like you're all evil.

Jesus, in other words, was optimistic about the human soul. If you're afraid of being infected by the evil you see in Chávez and his ilk, you're too late: it's been there all along. That's the pessimistic reality of the human condition that we're all-too-familiar with after the last couple of centuries—the darkness that resides in all of us, periodically, sometimes catastrophically erupting into the world. But we miss the optimism: sure, there's evil in everyone's soul, but most of us don't let it erupt. It manifests itself as petty selfishness or occasional intolerance, but not authoritarian megalomania. We try our best to be good people, and that good taints our evil. Is it enough? Not always—sometimes not even often. So what do we do? We keep trying. It's foolishly optimistic. And foolishness is the most universal human trait there is.

Chávez, by the way, lost his bid to alter the constitution and make himself permanently re-electable. Did he call in the army? Declare the election invalid? Throw it into the courts? Nope—he sucked it up and gave a concession speech. At least in this instance, he did the right thing. Did some of El Sistema's good taint his soul? Probably not—but considering the possibility is a nice workout for an intellectual muscle that, it seems, we may have forgotten how to use.