Down a Country Lane

The Boston Symphony Orchestra e-mailed out a press release today detailing a curious promotion.

Tanglewood, Gulf Oil, and the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority are teaming up this summer for a special promotion at Gulf gas stations along the Massachusetts Turnpike between Boston and Tanglewood. For every $50 of gas purchased at participating Gulf gas stations, travelers can earn a free lawn pass to Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The promotion will run June 30 through August 22.

The participating Gulf stations, it should be noted, are those actually on the Mass Turnpike. So this is targeted primarily at people who use the Pike to get to and from Tanglewood, or who possibly have a regular commute that involves a big enough stretch of the Pike that they would be buying gas. (My own commute into Boston, for example, never passes any of the participating stations.)

It's interesting to break this down a little. How many people would even spend fifty bucks on gas getting to Tanglewood and back? Let's say that the Boston-to-Tanglewood commute is 130 miles, and we'll go with today's AAA average of $4.07/gal in Boston. At that rate, if it's costing $50 for a round trip, you're getting at best just over 21 miles per gallon—for almost totally highway driving. (I think we all know what kind of cars those are.)

Is it worth it, environmental concerns aside? Kind of, actually—a year ago, gas was, on average in Boston, $2.94 a gallon; if you're driving a 21 mpg vehicle, it's costing you $13.88 more in gas to get to the Shed and back this summer. A Tanglewood lawn ticket is 19 bucks. So that trip, all told, is $5.12 cheaper than it would have been last year, keeping ticket prices level for sake of argument. (The break-even mileage on that calculation is 15.46 mpg; worse than that, and you're still paying more compared with 2007.)

But here's the odd thing: if you have a car with decent mileage, it's not much of a deal at all. Think of it—if it doesn't cost you $50 in gas to get to Tanglewood and back, you're going to need to go twice in order to get the free pass. The break-even for two Boston-Tanglewood round-trips in order to collect one free pass is 30.92 mpg; if your mileage is between 22 and 30 mpg, you lose money compared with last year. Here's the breakdown for the official vehicle of Soho the Dog, the 1999 Honda Civic (29 mpg):

260 miles round trip x 2=520 miles
520 miles/29 mpg=17.93 gallons
(17.93 gallons x $2.94/gal) + $38 [two tickets] = $90.71 [2007]
(17.93 gallons x $4.07/gal) + $19 [one ticket] = $91.97 [2008]

(Mileage is from Boston for comparison; in reality, I'd be coming from Framingham, which is only 111 miles one-way, but even then, I'm only saving $1.70 over last year.) Above the 30.92 threshold, you're saving money, but in order to match the 21 mpg one-trip savings of $5.12, you'll need to be getting at least 42 mpg.

So this is a promotion tailored to people who own cars that get a) lousy but not abysmal mileage, or b) spectacular mileage. I'd be more inclined to regard this as a good idea if all Massachusetts Gulf stations were participating; even trying to drive less, I'll almost certainly be buying two or three free passes worth of gas this summer. But by limiting it to stations on the Pike, it's clearly aimed at those people driving the Pike to get to Tanglewood.

This will probably be a boost for sales at those participating Gulf stations and Pike toll revenues. Is it all that good a deal for Tanglewood? Here's the thing—parking at Tanglewood is, to its credit, free. In other words, Tanglewood's take doesn't depend at all on how people actually get there. The argument is that, by making it less of a financial hassle to cover the distance, more people will show up (and presumably buy at least one more ticket in addition to the free one). But might that subsidy be better spent enlarging the Tanglewood bus service? The BSO actually runs buses out to Tanglewood for $30 round-trip—a deal if your vehicle gets less than 35 mpg these days—but it's a limited schedule, Fridays and Saturdays only. Make that schedule more flexible, and I'd bet they'd get a lot of takers. (Including those prospective patrons with no car at all, who might be more inclined to buy a lawn ticket than someone who could afford to blow fifty bucks on gas.) And it's a somewhat greener option to boot.

And if that doesn't get people in the door?

Food goes in here

From the July 2008 issue of Gourmet magazine, a recipe for porterhouse steak with pan-seared cherry tomatoes.

Delivering a lot of summer glamour for very little work, this gorgeous dish balances the baritone flavor and fat of the steak with the tomatoes’ coloratura acidity.

Did Gourmet just call baritones fat? (Next month: the tenorial high-maintenance gloss of hollandaise sauce.)

Mush

I only caught the second half of this year's Sick Puppy Iditarod, the summer program's marathon final concert that took up a good part of last Saturday, but that was still 4+ hours of fun. Some of my favorites: pianist Eiko Sudo's sharp-dressed, unscheduled reading of John Cage's "Seven Haiku"; Meghan Miller, David Russell, and Nicolas Gerpe's appropriately spacey, far-out rendition of George Crumb's Vox Balanae; and pianist Christina Wright's bouncy, balmy playing of "Short Summer Dance" by SICPP's composer-in-rsidence, Jo Kondo.

Part 6, the last of the concert, might have been the best. Frederic Rzewski's "Moonrise With Memories" was limpid and gorgeous, anchored by trombonist Brandon Newbould, who was memorably joined by violinist Ethan Wood and clarinetist Ariana Lamon-Anderson taking vocal turns in the introduction to the second part. Helmut Lachnemann's "temA" found mezzo-soprano Thea Lobo, flutist Miller, and cellist Rachel Arnold crisp and crazy, gracefully surmounting each new extended technique. And guest percussionist Mathias Reumert fomented a terrific six-player account of Louis Andriessen's "Workers Union," a riot of loud, funky lockstep clusters that is now my favorite post-midnight programming choice.

As usual, the long evening closed with Michael Finnissy's "Post-Christian Survival Kit," with the new-to-SICPP addition of singers bringing out the ecclesiastical echoes behind the freeform folly. The marathon has become one of the best nights among Boston's dog days.

You can find a review of last year's Iditarod here.

Listener discretion advised

Our good friend Jack Miller may not be the world's most rabid Dresden Dolls fan, but he has baked cookies for them, which is probably more than you've ever done. Anyway, Jack bought tickets to this week's Boston Pops concert, which features Dresden Dolls front-Kabarettist Amanda Palmer. The BSO then sent him an e-mail asking him if he knew what he was getting himself into.

From: myBSO
Date: June 17, 2008 11:33:12 AM EDT
To: XXXXXXXX
Subject: Attn: June 19 & 20 Amanda Palmer Ticket Holders
Reply-To: customerservice@bso.org

As part of the Pops Edgefest series, the June 19 and 20 concerts will feature alternative rock singer Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls. These concerts will not follow the traditional Pops model and may contain explicit lyrics.
If you wish to exchange your tickets to these performances, please contact SymphonyCharge at 888-266-1200 or visit the box office at Symphony Hall.

I applaud this sort of initiative. I have been to many a concert that could have used such a warning.

As part of our continuing mollification of superannuated subscribers, this week's concerts will feature a big-name soloist playing a very old piece while the rest of the musicians phone it in. If you wish to exchange your tickets to these performances, please contact us or visit the box office.

As part of a misguided effort to appeal to Generations "Q" and higher, this week's concerts will feature the conductor filling time that could have been devoted to music with long spoken introductions and awkward jokes. If you wish to exchange your tickets to these performances, please contact us or visit the box office.

As part of our marketing department's desired pattern of risk-averse programming, this week's supposed new-music concert will be made up entirely of pieces that sound like watered-down John Williams. If you wish to exchange, &c.

Classical Music: second-guessing the audience since 1970!

Dancing In the Dark

Cyd Charisse, who died yesterday, really was one of my favorite dancers. She was famous for the femme fatale roles she exemplified throughout the 1950s (beginning with one of the all-time great film entrances in her appearance in Singin' In the Rain), but she was in a different category than most of her female colleagues—at a time when the prevalent style of female dance in Hollywood musicals was the high-octane athleticism of Eleanor Powell or Ann Miller, Charisse was effortlessly smooth. Here's perhaps my favorite example, her and Fred Astaire in the "Fated to be Mated" number from Silk Stockings—precise, casual grace.



Her New York Times obituary reports that she "was believed to be 86"—a nice bit of old-time movie-star historical fog.

One-Armed Bandits

In light of Daniel Wolf's plea for more intellectual property law expertise and input on the part of music scholars, it's worth pondering this little cautionary tale: CBS Home Video has just released another volume of the 1960s television series The Fugitive on DVD, with one rather glaring change—all the original music has been stripped out and replaced by a recomposed substitute. As The Classic TV History Blog reports:

This is not the removal of occasional snippets of songs, which has (lamentably) become commonplace in the DVD realm because it’s expensive to clear the rights to popular tunes for home video. Instead, it’s the wholesale deletion of the entire original musical element of the series—and without any warning to consumers beyond a standard boilerplate disclaimer in tiny print. This is the first time any television show has arrived on DVD in such an aurally mutilated form. It’s a very big deal.

It's not entirely clear why the change was made. The Fugitive relied on a tailor-made library of themes and cues by jazz composer Pete Rugolo, though sometimes also licensing stock music from CBS—but all concerned entities are now owned outright by Viacom. Was hiring composer Mark Heyes to substitute music on the fly simply cheaper than tracking down the old stock music composers and negotiating a royalty? (On the Film Score Monthly message boards, there was a report that the publishing rights for some cues were owned by a defunct company, and there was no clear transference; but, as others pointed out, that didn't seem to affect the DVD release of the show's first season.) Maybe we can get all the lawyers to fight it out on top of a carnival tower.

Bulldog on the premises. But he's a Trinity student.

Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowskimming gull. The man's shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His snout lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking, plashing, from far, from farther out, waves and waves.

—James Joyce, Ulysses

Ambiguous gerund-participle of the day

A new arrival at the MIT Music Library:

Hommann, Charles (1803-?1872). Surviving Orchestral Music.

Collected edition or how-to manual?

Nail salon

Reviewing opening night of Boston GuitarFest.
Boston Globe, June 12, 2008.

By the way—if you're going to take photographs at a concert? You might want to get one of these.

Down on the disco floor, they make their profit

From a 1962 Time magazine profile of composer William Sydeman:

Son of a Manhattan stockbroker, Composer Sydeman studied piano halfheartedly as a child, went to Duke to study business administration but got so involved with writing a college musical that he chucked business in favor of study at Manhattan's Mannes College of Music. There he decided to become a composer. The work, he admits, does not pay as well as business administration: $600 last year, including commissions.
...
Some older composers are better off—but not much. Veteran Henry Cowell, 64, the composer of 1,000 works, last week confided that "I could live on what I make from music, but not as I care to live—and so I am a professor.'' Cowell's 1961 take from his music: $5,500. He is reputedly one of the eight best-paid composers of serious music in the U.S.

Henry Cowell was one of the eight best-paid American concert composers in 1962? Really? Reputedly? What, this was common gossip fodder at the time?

BARFLY #1: Cowell? You expect me to believe that? Even Samuel Barber makes way more than that cluster-boy.

BARFLY #2: I've got a crisp new ten-dollar bill here says he's in the top eight, buddy.

BARTENDER: Maybe you boys ought to take this outside.

Of course, composer salaries didn't really take off until the Big Five abolished the reserve clause.

Sometimes a clarinet is just a clarinet

Woody Allen playing clarinet on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971.



Bonus Woody: brilliantly absurdist stand-up from 1965.



Bonus Dick Cavett Show: Mel Brooks does his Sinatra impression.

Spacious firmament

Reviewing the Brentano Quartet and Peter Serkin.
Boston Globe, June 9, 2008.

Roadrunner

The exceptional Bo Diddley.
Boston Globe, June 8, 2008.

Fancy paints on memory's canvas/Scenes that we hold dear

Musicians are always talking about form. You learn all the forms in music school—bar form, binary form, sonata form. You learn how to spot the signposts. You learn how to articulate the form (which is basically just being aware of the signposts in performance). It's useful in talking shop: "Maybe get softer when we get to the trio"; "We should slow down as we come into the recapitulation." But is it really that important?

Last weekend, I went to the local multiplex (capitalist absurdity update: my iced coffee was cheaper than either a small soda or the box of Whoppers I needed to wash down) to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I enjoyed the hell out of it. But critical reaction has been decidedly mixed. Here's a sample from the negative side of the ledger. Rick Groen in the Toronto Globe and Mail:

The once-pressing question of how long a culture can go down that particular well—or bat cave, or torch-lit cavern, or fortress of solitude—has itself become a weary cliché. By now the answer is obvious: Interminably, albeit with diminishing aesthetic returns and at some risk to its creative vibrancy, but that's a small price to pay to ensure the safety and well-being of a thriving box office. Familiarity, our culture has learned, breeds enough mass adoration to extinguish any lingering critical contempt.

So, nearly two decades after the last appearance, Indiana Jones is back, along with its diminishing returns and its aging principals and their trademark tools.

Peter Travers in Rolling Stone:

Audiences looking for emotional resonance in Indy 4 are doomed to the temple of disappointment. Spielberg and Lucas aren't upping their creative game—they're taking care of business.

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times:

There’s plenty of frantic energy here, lots of noise and money too, but what’s absent is any sense of rediscovery, the kind that’s necessary whenever a filmmaker dusts off an old formula or a genre standard.

Most of the bad reviews that I read hinted at this point—that the formula is tired, that the movie is too formulaic, that director Steven Spielberg et al. are just going through the motions. I'm not trying to say that those critics are wrong—my own cultural consumption would strike enough people with sufficient horror that I'm willing to give that benefit of the doubt, up to a point—but maybe they're watching the movie in a different way and with different expectations than I was.

Indiana Jones movies are formulaic, and the latest fits the pattern like a glove. Crazy opening action sequence? Check. Hallowed halls of academia? Check. Plane/map superimposition on the way to exotic locale? Check. Audience-surrogate sidekick? Check. Puzzle-like clues? Check. Over-the-top vehicular chase scene? Check. And so on. Part of the genius of the first of the bunch, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was that all this stuff already felt like a formula—neat trick. But now it really is a formula. In a broad-stroke sense, you know what's going to happen before the thing even starts.

I got sucked in anyway, because I started watching for craft. Over the opening credits, there's a scene in which a hot rod full of 50s teenagers tries to egg an army convoy into a drag race through the desert. It's not much more than a kinetic establishment of period and locale. (It's over the opening credits, for God's sake.) Early on in the sequence—I think it was a cut to a long shot of the convoy, Spielberg using a long lens to flatten the procession against the desert landscape like a cave painting—I started looking at it in mind of just what it took to get those shots on film: camera placement, camera movement, lighting, &c. And it's pretty amazing. Over the opening credits, Spielberg (abetted by his cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski) is tossing in shots that a lot of other directors would kill to be able to pull off. Low angle, high angle, reverse tracking, deep focus, all in high-speed motion down the highway. If you're only focused on the formula, it's liable to breeze by you—after all, you're still essentially waiting for the movie to start. But pay a little bit of attention, and suddenly Spielberg is slipping you extra candy which the movie hasn't structurally bothered to pay for.

Which, it strikes me, is what at least I listen for in a lot of the classical repertoire. Even the most adventurous Mozart symphony is still at least as structurally formulaic as an Indiana Jones movie, and often much more so. But the form—the formula—is just the scaffolding for craft. It's not the signposts, it's how you get there—the lead-up to each dramatic waystation determines the dramatic payoff. Some might demur that you listen to music for the emotional effect, and craft is not emotion. But the emotional content depends on the craft with which it's implied, illustrated, imparted—and I would strenuously argue that craft carries its own emotional content, that there's a shared exaltation of the human condition in the apprehension of exceptional craft. (Cf. Palestrina, Bach, Schubert, Berg, Gershwin, not to mention Einstein, Joyce, Gehry, etc.)

I think this is something that popular culture might actually be evolving away from. Pop songs are formulaic in the extreme: verse-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-chorus. You can still dig deep into the craft, the idiosyncratic variations on the formula, the expertly shaped turn of phrase within the formula, but to my ear, there's even more of a sense of diminishing returns than Groen finds with Indy. I saw a fair amount of American Idol this season—my wife was pulling for Archuleta—and one of the things that really struck me about Idol performances is how one-dimensional they are from the standpoint of craft as well as form—from the outset, you don't just know what's going to happen (melisma, octave leap, high note), you can fairly accurately predict how it's going to happen. The song becomes a self-contained artifact, consistent from every angle. There's a certain impressive craft in conjuring a specific sonic atmosphere that is both immediately emotionally perceptible and impeccably maintained over the length of the song. But it does go against music's temporal aspect, its forward motion in time—a frozen lake rather than a swirling river.

This isn't always a bad thing—I'm a big punk rock fan, and most of the classic punk repertoire is high-octane blocks of undifferentiated mood. But there, the torrent of energy was the point, and besides, a three-minute punk song would be considered epic. And I don't think all pop music is like this, but it does seem to be more prevalent. Put it this way: every so often, a pop song will surprise me at the outset—a strong riff, a particularly heavy groove, an unexpected instrumental combination—but it's been a long time since a pop song surprised me in the middle. I find myself more and more listening to only the first thirty seconds of a lot of pop songs, not just because I know where it's going to go, but because there's nothing left to hear that I haven't already heard.

A number of years back, I caught a Phil Woods gig at the old Jazz Showcase in Chicago. I still remember it, because every song on the playlist had the identical form—I don't recall it exactly, but it was something like this: everybody played the head, then four choruses of sax solo, then four choruses of piano solo, then the drums and the bass traded eights, then everybody played the head. Exactly the same for every song. Was it too formulaic? It did get funny after a while, and I suppose if you were really attuned to structure, it would have been maddening. But Woods and company got away with it because most of us, even those of us who traffic in musical form, are not that attuned—we're listening for detail, for individual moments, for everything that happens along the way. The fact that we knew where each chorus was going to roll around gave the players something to work with and against. Every chorus was there, but every chorus was different; the transitions came in the same places, but in different ways.

I wonder if some of the critical skepticism at the latest adventures of Dr. Jones is, in part, because popular culture is eating away at our ability to get past the surface formulas of culture. (I mean, there is the possibility that they simply didn't like it, but that wouldn't be much of a basis for a blog post.) If all you sense is formula, three minutes of shiny pop is not going to feel like much of a burden, but two hours of Hollywood might seem rather bloated indeed. But if you're used to regarding formula as merely the boundaries of the playing field, Crystal Skull is pretty generous fun. (One of the main reasons I didn't like the last one, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, was that the screenplay regarded articulating the formula as the main point, and didn't leave enough time for the movie to waste on gratuitous entertainment.) Musical form is the same way—it's effectiveness is in the way it provides room for invention. I've learned—and taught—classical sonata form in all its technical detail: is that a transition or the closing theme? Is that a recapitulation or just a developmental feint? Is that particular cadence a modulation or a tonicization? It's easy for such minutiae to suck the life out of a piece. But in the context of the sonata's overall dramatic arc—the end of the development, the transformation of the exposition's dominant into the recapitulation's tonic—all that minutiae becomes the tricky camera shots and throwaway jokes that make the ride so much fun. Pay a little bit of attention, and that sonata starts to resemble an Indiana Jones movie.

The Hills of Tomorrow

I've been reading an awful lot of Milton Babbitt lately (part of a project I am, of course, way behind on—this week for sure), and, given that arch-modernist's not-so-secret fondness for American popular song, it's surprising just how little he's written on it. His Collected Essays only includes one such effort, a 1985 essay on Jerome Kern written as liner notes to a Joan Morris/William Bolcom album. What's interesting is his disdain for many of Kern's lyricists.

One need not be concerned, perhaps, for the fate of songs that have survived "I chaffed them" ("Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" [lyrics by Otto Harbach]) or "sequester'd days" ("Yesterdays" [also Harbach]) by virtue of their musical strength. But such awareness does not lessen the discomfort of hearing Ira Gershwin's "Life's a four-leaf clover. Sessions of depressions are through," in "Long Ago [(and Far Away)]."... [R]arely is there reflected, even in a clever Dorothy Fields lyric, the general care and craft, and the specific subtleties of variation and reference, so often displayed in the music.

Now, I'm a big Ira Gershwin fan, but I admit that it took me a while, and for the reason that I think Babbitt is hinting at here: Ira Gershwin's lyrics deliberately and consistently call attention to themselves.

Let's compare one of the Kern lyrics Babbitt commends, Leo Robin's for "In Love In Vain"—

It's only human for anyone to want to be in love,
But who wants to be in love in vain?
At night you hang around the house and eat your heart out,
And cry your eyes out
And wrack your brain.

You sit and wonder why anyone as wonderful as he
Should cause you such misery and pain.
I thought that I would be in heaven,
But I'm only up a tree,
'Cause it's just my luck to be
In love in vain.

—with the aforementiond "Long Ago (and Far Away)":

Long ago and far away,
I dreamed a dream one day,
And now that dream is here beside me;
Long the skies were overcast
But now the clouds have passed;
You're here at last!

Chills run up and down my spine;
Aladdin's lamp is mine;
The dream I dreamed was not denied me.
Just one look and then I knew
That all I longed for long ago was you.

Gershwin's lyric is, indeed, much more self-consciously written than Robin's, reveling in wordplay (note the extravagant conduplicatio on long and dream), various types of rhyme, and allusions far removed from everyday conversation (that whole "Aladdin's lamp" thing).

Babbitt places partial blame for this on Kern's habit of writing the music prior to any lyric, sending a dummy lyric off to the lyricist, one that indicated rhythm and possible rhyme, but no real dramatic sense. (The story goes that Kern's dummy lyric for "Long Ago" started off, "Watching little Alice pee.") But that wasn't terribly uncommon practice in Kern's time. I think that there was a certain expectation that lyrics would be self-evidently clever and playful. And no one could go over the top in that regard quite like Ira Gershwin. Here's a lyric he won the Pulitzer Prize in part for, from Of Thee I Sing:

Love is sweeping the country;
Waves are hugging the shore.
All the sexes
From Maine to Texas
Have never known such love before.

See them billing and cooing
Like the birdies above—
Each girl and boy alike,
Feeling joy alike,
Feels that passion'll
Soon be national.
Love is weeping the country;
There never was so much love.

The song is not much more than an excuse for some fairly outrageous rhymes. It works because Ira is in on the joke, and brings you with—at a certain point, the cleverness becomes so extroverted that the listener begins to share in the delight of anticipation, not just presentation. The Gershwins occasionally would even self-referentially mock that penchant. "Beginner's Luck," a song from the 1937 Astaire-Rogers musical Shall We Dance, starts off:

I've got beginner's luck:
The first time that I'm in love, I'm in love with you.
Gosh, I'm lucky!

The last line is set to a jazzy little punctuating riff. The next stanza:

I've got beginner's luck;
They told me beginners win, now I know it's true.
Gosh, I'm fortunate!

That last line is awkwardly shoehorned into the same riff as before, a slapstick rhythmic speed bump.

Nobody writes lyrics like this anymore, except as a throwback. (There's some nice examples in The Producers, for example, but they don't really approach Ira Gershwin's exuberance/shamelessness.) Even a songwriter like Tom Lehrer gets laughs primarily because of the outrageousness of his content, not his language. I suspect this is a common stylistic evolution—early hip-hop, for example, was pixilated on language in a way that current hip-hop is not. From a classic, Eric B. and Rakim's "Microphone Fiend":

The invincible microphone fiend Rakim—
Spread the word, 'cause I'm in
E-F-F-E-C-T
A smooth operator operating correctly.
But back to the problem, I gotta habit,
You can't solve it, silly rabbit;
The prescription is a hypertone that's thorough when
I fiend for a microphone like heroin

"Thorough when" rhymed with "heroin"? Even Ira might have smiled at that one—or maybe the self-referentiality of Run DMC:

This beat is my recital;
I think it's very vital.
To rock a rhyme that's right on time?
It's tricky—it's the title

Inevitably, I guess, such virtuosity begins to seem raw and unsophisticated to people. One-time Babbitt student Stephen Sondheim, a fair candidate for the greatest lyricist alive, has spent his career precisely navigating the fine line between naturalism and stylization, specializing in lyrics that are just polished enough to parse as poetry, but flow like conversational prose. That's an ideal that really only came to the fore in the 1950s, as the variety-show-like musicals of the pre-WWII era gave way to more dramatically-conceived shows, led by the work of RIchard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein—not coincidentally, another Sondheim mentor. The sort of cleverness that the Gershwins' audience took as a given is now a seasoning to be judiciously doled out.

One of Sondheim's most seemingly effortless songs comes from his first big hit as a composer, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Hero is in love with Philia, but Philia has been promised in marriage to a soldier who is coming to take her away. Philia reassures Hero that their love will triumph by force of imagination, in a way that Hero finds not very reassuring at all:

When I kiss him, I'll be kissing you,
So I'll kiss him morning and night;
That'll show him!

When I hold him, I'll be holding you,
So I'll hold him ten times as tight;
That'll show him, too!

I will coo and tenderly stroke his hair;
Wish that you were there—
You'd enjoy it!

When it's evening, and we're in his tent for two,
I'll sit on his knee,
Get to know him intimately;
That'll show him how much I really love you!

"That'll Show Him" is still musically and structurally in an older style, but the rhymes, for all their intricacy, are not calling attention to themselves; the effect of the song is instead to tell us something about Philia's earnest, bubbly, but slightly dim character.

In one of Sondheim's later shows, the often underrated Merrily We Roll Along, he pushes that intricacy just over the line. Here's the bridge to the song "Good Thing Going":

And if I wanted too much,
Was that such
A mistake at the time?

You never wanted enough;
All right, tough—
I won't make that a crime.

It's a song that reflects the dramatic tension of the plot, but it's also serving to portray two of the main characters as songwriters, hence the slightly more deliberate construction. It's still dazzlingly polished—the density of internal rhyme is uncanny—but in a way you're supposed to notice more than Forum. (And polish itself is not the difference between Sondheim and Gershwin—the Library of Congress holds 17 pages of drafts for the lyrics to "Long Ago.") Sondheim has the skill to calibrate precisely along that scale, but it's the dramatic need that determines how far he goes. Gone are the days of stylization for the sake of stylization.

It says something about Babbitt's own aesthetic and historical outlook that he would see that as an ideal. Calling attention to surface ingenuity is a feature of young styles, of the brand-new; the subjugation of that ingenuity to the overall artistic intent is a feature of mature styles—the possibilities have been explored, now it's time to think about why more than how. Babbitt, writing in 1985, is also looking back on the journey of his own style of music, from scattershot experimentation to more systematic collation of technical knowledge to application of that technical experience to artistic vision. It might seem contradictory for Milton Babbitt, the poster- and/or whipping-boy for a style of music often perceived as nothing more than mathematical permutation, to be chastising Jerome Kern's lyricists for being too stylized. But Babbitt isn't writing as the brash polemicist we think of, but as a representative of tradition that had moved past the sort of try-anything facility he saw reflected in Ira Gershwin's freewheeling slang and sleight-of-hand rhymes.

Babbitt was also writing from the perspective of a music-theater aficionado (and occasional practitioner) who had lived through the revolution wrought by shows like Oklahoma and South Pacific, singular dramatic conceptions that were a far cry from the sorts of grab-bag plots that dominated in the 1920s and 30s. (One of the few exceptions being, of course, Show Boat, with a score by Jerome Kern.) It's not that there was any great clamoring for such musicals from the audience; musicals simply evolved in that direction, and audiences came along. Babbitt regards that evolution as natural, necessary, and salutary. It's an evolution you could find in almost any musical style or period in Western history. (Compare Buxtehude with J.S. Bach; C.P.E. Bach with Mozart; early Liszt with late Liszt, &c.) And, all his wry bemoaning of his minority status notwithstanding, it's an evolution Babbitt expected to apply to the path of atonal modernism. No wonder he likes Leo Robin better than Ira Gershwin.

It's fashionable to think that such an expectation has been proven to be fruitless. But before you go gumming up the comments with triumphalist obituaries to serialism (that this confirmed eclecticist only leaves undeleted out of a combination of courtesy and laziness), it's worth considering Sondheim's career, one that never strayed from the ambitious path that Babbitt hints at. Sondheim's elder-statesman, frequently-revived status today is a far cry from even a quarter-century ago, when he was still regarded by many in the community as a pretentious avant-gardist who refused to write crowd-pleasers. (I still remember a gleeful Jerry Herman implicitly insulting Sunday in the Park With George when La Cage aux Folles beat it for the Tony.) Times change.

"I keep in my bathroom a book by Nicolas Slonimsky called Lexicon of Musical Invective," says Sondheim. "It's a compendium of all these terrible reviews throughout musical history, from Beethoven to Shostakovich. The reviews are all about one thing: How dare they? How dare they? How dare they? Anything that's new is dismissed. Guess what, though? Progress is made anyway. Look at my career. Suddenly when I was 40 years old, some people began to say, hey, this is pretty good. And now I'm considered an icon. And old-fashioned!"

(Via.) Progress isn't one style superseding another style—it's a given style finding its audience. That's one reason defining musical styles in terms of what they're not, either from inside or outside, is never as inspiring as defining them as what they are. Music is not technology—it may become old-fashioned, or even temporarily out-of-fashion, but it never becomes obsolete. That's why the combative Babbitt, on behalf of the style he champions, and to the eternal frustration of his detractors, always gets to quote Sondheim: I'm still here.

Bring me my chariot of fire

Reviewing the Back Bay Chorale.
Boston Globe, June 2, 2008.

Just One of Those Weeks

California Klezmer, featuring Gerry Tenney:
"Schvereh Togedikeh Nakht" (mp3, 3.6 MB)

"Are You Working Every Day?" (J.F. Wyman, 1884) via the Library of Congress.

Mausfallensprüchlein

Today's opera news:

The Metropolitan Opera is infested with mice.

During an April 9 restaurant inspection at the Met, the department found "evidence of mice or live mice present in facility's food and/or nonfood areas," according to reports on the department's Web site.... The nation's largest musical organization also was cited for "food not protected from potential source of contamination during storage, preparation, transportation, display or service."

La Scala has commissioned an operatic adaptation of An Inconvenient Truth. (Hasn't this been done before?)

Why is opera so effective, anyway? Turns out that, on some level, we think it's trying to kill us.

According to musicologist David Huron, ... opera singers produce the bulk of their sound energy in the 3- to 4-kilohertz range. Humans are quite sensitive to this range, probably because it is also the range of a human scream.
...
According to Huron, researchers have discovered that several of the frisson's acoustic correlates—things that seem to induce the sensation in listeners—are fear-related. These correlates include rapidly large increases in the loudness of music, abrupt changes in tempo and rhythm, a broadening of frequencies and an increase in the number of sound sources, among other factors.

These are all "low-probability musical events" that surprise and startle us, Huron said. The factors that evoke a frisson are, in his mind, "suspiciously similar" to those that evoke fear.

To be fair, more often than not, the lady's got a knife.

Reigen

The gilt Art Nouveau rotary hotline here at Soho the Dog HQ lit up this morning with Geoff Edgers providing detailed background on the continuing dispute over Oskar Kokoschka's 1913 painting "Two Nudes." Boston's Museum of Fine Arts has filed suit in US District Court to establish ownership of the work over the claims of Claudia Seger-Thomschitz, the Austrian heir of Jewish art collector Oskar Reichel, whose 1939 sale of the painting may or may not have been the result of Nazi pressure.

An intriguing story, both for considering the problematic nature of drawing a nuanced line between personal exigency and external duress in situations of organized cruelty, and, it must be said, for how fast any nuance whatsoever flies out the window once attorneys start talking to the press. But what's the classical music angle? Naked pictures of Alma Mahler.


That's her on the right, with Oskar next to her, displaying just the sort of wistful apprehension I imagine most of her lovers displayed when she would insist on going "off the trail" during their walks through the woods. The historians Geoff interviewed are of the opinion that the MFA doth protest too much, but regardless of the outcome, there's a certain ad rem poetry in Alma's affairs necessitating a legal untangling. (Incidentally: does every single piece of Nazi-looted art have some connection with Alma Mahler? It is not outside the realm of possibility.)

Update (5/28): Geoff passes along further adventures of Alma and Oskar. John Waters should totally get his hands on this story.

Cross Road Blues

Reviewing the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
Boston Globe, May 27, 2008.

High Flying, Adored

It's been a week for awards—you probably heard about this year's Polar Music Prize going to Renee Fleming and Pink Floyd; or perhaps Amy Winehouse showing up late to pick up an Ivor Novello Award, a situation Ivor Novello probably would have turned into a wry, bittersweet song; or perhaps my own favorite, Jazzie B, OBE.

But have any of them been "examining the historical background and long-term implications of important public policy issues"? Andrew Lloyd Webber (don't make any jokes until you listen to Evita again—OK, go ahead and make jokes, but do listen to Evita again, it's better than you remember) is the latest recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service. Presented by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (named for the most insufferable academic snob we ever stuck in the White House), the award is given "to individuals who have served with distinction in public life and have shown a special commitment to seeking out informed opinions and thoughtful views." (Although they did give the award to Dick Cheney a couple years ago—there's obviously some wiggle room in the criteria.) Musical types are rare on the honor roll, which is dominated by politicians and world leaders, but Lloyd Webber does follow in the footsteps of Wayne Newton (huh?—hey, he works like a dog for the USO) and Dolly Parton (no explanation necessary, really.)

Long Day's Journey

Economists Nauro Campos and Renata Leite have been analyzing seven years worth of data from the Latin American art market.

Our results suggest that: (i) the reputation of an artist and the provenance of the artwork, often omitted variables in previous studies, seem to be more important determinants of the sale price of a painting than more standard factors, such as medium and size, (ii) the opinion of art experts seems to be of limited use in predicting whether or not an artwork sells at auction, (iii) there is little supporting evidence for the widespread notion that the best or more expensive artworks tend to generate above average returns (the “masterpiece effect”), although (iv) there is strong evidence in our data for the declining price anomaly or “afternoon effect” (that is, when heterogeneous products sold sequentially follow a decreasing pattern of prices.)

(Summary here; working paper here; via.) Today's assignment: consider the implications, if any, for the business of classical music presentation, in currencies both real and curious.

Decalogue

Reviewing Chameleon Arts Ensemble.
Boston Globe, May 20, 2008.

In the end

Reviewing Intermezzo Opera.
Boston Globe, May 19, 2008.

Feed me

Done with Ethan's Wagnerian Tristano epic yet? Here's more reads that caught my eye this week.

• Nico Muhly on the rest of the iceberg.
• Lisa Hirsch on composing from the distaff side.
• Joel Brown interviewing Keith Lockhart on pop and the Pops.
• Daniel Wolf lamenting, it occurs to me, the context of no context.

Bread and Roses

This year's orchestra crisis (there always seems to be one), the will-they-shut-down-or-won't-they Columbus Symphony, is in a grassroots community fundraising phase, as the board and the musicians wait for someone to blink or possible arbitration. The mayor of Columbus prefers the former:

A spokesman for Columbus Mayor Michael B. Coleman urged the sides to get together quickly but said Coleman would not mediate the dispute.

"The mayor is a fan personally of the symphony, but we have made our position clear: The board and the musicians need to take the next steps," spokesman Mike Brown said.

Coleman, whose mayoralty has been marked by fiscal discipline, probably doesn't want to be seen as spending political capital on a dispute within an "elitist" organization. But I'm guessing he isn't thinking about monopsony power.

Monopsony is the flip side of monopoly—unlike the latter, in which a market is dominated by one seller, in monopsony, a market is dominated by one buyer. "Pure" monopsonies are pretty rare—in economics, the term is usually used in talking about inefficiencies in the labor market.

Classical economics assumes that the labor market operates under pure competition—employers are forced to adopt wage rates set by the market as a whole, aiming for an equilibrium where available work and available workers are in balance. The classical model implies that, as soon as an employer drops wages, even a little bit, all that employer's workers will bolt, since other employers in the market would presumably respect the prevailing market-rate wage. But that happens so rarely that the idea of monopsony power was invented (by the British post-Keynesian Joan Robinson) to try and come up with a more realistic model of the labor market.

Think about it—if your employer cut your wages by a few cents, you'd probably grumble, but not necessarily leave your job. That's because there's other factors keeping you there—location, schedule convenience, the fact that you may enjoy what you do, the fact that switching jobs is an economic risk or hit that it's just not a good time to take. That whole laundry list, and more besides, adds to the employers' market power—their ability to offer a wage lower than what pure competition would dictate, yet still fill their available positions.

The classic example of a monopsonistic labor market is Major League Baseball under the reserve clause; the explosion of player salaries following the introduction of free agency is an indication of how artificially depressed those salaries were under the extreme monopsony that previously prevailed. A quick JSTOR search didn't turn up any studies of it in the literature, but it seems to me that a symphony orchestra is a classic monopsonistic employer: there's an extremely limited number (often only one) within a given labor market, and the employees—musicians—are liable to put up with an awful lot of crap in order to make any money doing what they love to do. The Columbus musicians, in fact, took a 20 percent pay cut three years ago rather than give up their orchestra jobs. (And reportedly offered to take another 6.5 percent cut to resolve the current impasse.)

The Columbus Symphony situation is particularly intractable because it would seem that the board has done a less-than-stellar job increasing philanthropic revenue, but is trying to make up that deficit with musician salary cuts. (All this at a time when ticket sales are actually up—so much for the Flanagan report.) In fact, the board—proposing both pay cuts and a reduction in personnel—is attempting to exercise classic monopsonistic power, which usually manifests itself in keeping wages and employment rates lower than an unfettered market would produce. (And in an unfairly ultimatumish way—it is not churlish at all to point out that the entire board membership will suffer no economic ill-effects from a shutdown.)

Even fairly libertarian types think that the government should regulate an inefficient market, and I would think that the labor market for orchestral musicians is about as inefficient as they come. One might think that, if the musicians feel their city's philanthropic capacity has gone untapped, a competing orchestra might find some traction—but keep in mind that the effort and risk in finding the credit or the cash to start up their own ensemble is another way the current organization increases its market value at the workers' expense. (And also keep in mind that such a move would fundamentally change, or at least add to, the workers' actual occupations.) This is not to say that forming their own orchestra wouldn't be a smart or even desirable move, but it is putting more of the onus for the board's possible mismanagement on the musicians, not the board.

That happens all the time, of course—over the past decade, far too many employees have been left holding the bag for executive misbehavior. (Enron, anyone? WorldCom?) But given the combination of orchestras' obvious monopsonistic power with their quasi-civic status, some sort of government intervention—even as simple as mediation—would be entirely appropriate in Columbus-type situations. Otherwise, the calculus is so skewed that brinkmanship is almost inevitable; boards have little financial incentive to avoid shutdowns, musicians have little recourse short of a strike. All that dramatic and emotional energy would be better off on-stage.

Update (5/16): The administrative slapstick continues.

All the Things You Are

Ethan Iverson's massive, multi-angled exploration of the music and mind of jazz pianist Lennie Tristano is the best couple hours you'll spend this week. A lot of the promise of the Internet circles around hyperlinked and non-linear texts, but this illustrates what is, to me, an even greater virtue—a platform to stretch out and explore a subject without having to worry about restrictions on length or scope or focus.

The history of race in America is, in so many ways, the history of America, period. Ethan's ultimate subject—the complicated role of racial identity in jazz—fascinates me to no end, especially since my own taste in jazz has always gravitated towards cultural mongrels, the sort of music that Stanley Crouch is casting a sideways glance in this quote from Ethan's post:

As you know, I do not accept the idea that jazz advances itself by following new directions, harmonies or rhythms from European classical music.

I listened to a lot of Dave Brubeck, partially because of his connection, through Milhaud, with Les Six; I listened to a lot of Oscar Peterson because of his Lisztian overtones; I delved heavily into that great American repertoire, jazz's precursor, ragtime, addicted to both the polyrhythmic modernity and the Chopinesque pianistic and harmonic cast. To me, one of the glories of American music is its seemingly ineradicable ability to take all manner of influence, from Protestant psalmody to hardcore serialism, and turn it into something recognizably American. And yet, such practice does walk a fine line between confidence and arrogance, between enthusiasm and entitlement. Tristano's effort to form his own sound and school is equal parts visionary and abrasive, and Ethan gets at both without descending into easy psycho-caricature or judgmental simplification. (Plus, he links to the gloriously crazy, overtracked, free-jazz rumpus that is Tristano's "Descent Into the Maelstrom." Far out.)

Siehe, ein Ackermann wartet auf die köstliche Frucht der Erde

As long as we're on a science kick this week: scrounge up some dipole magnets and build your own BRAHMS detector! Point it at any piece of music, and the resulting electro-magnetic field will measure the harmonic gravity, classicist formality, and preponderance of shifting triple subdivisions to determine if it is, in fact, a piece by Brahms.

No, of course that's not what it is. The Broad Range Hadron Magnetic Spectrometer is part of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in upstate New York. RHIC is currently the most powerful heavy-ion collider in the world, and while that title will be taken over by CERN's Large Hadron Collider later this year, RHIC will still maintain the lead in accelerating spin-polarized protons.

If you're not a rabid particle accelerator fan, know that this is a big deal because RHIC is able to produce conditions not seen in the universe since 10 millionths of a second after the Big Bang, when the whole place was filled with a quark-gluon pudding unlike any form of matter that currently prevails. (RHIC also seems to produce imitation black holes.) BRAHMS was designed to measure the momentum of scattered hadrons, part of the study of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), investigating the strong force that holds atomic nuclei together.

There were initial fears that the possibility of creating actual black holes meant that RHIC would be some sort of doomsday device; there's even a sci-fi novel set around the BRAHMS detector—Gregory Benford's Cosm, in which physicist Alicia Butterworth wants to spectrometrically measure collisions of uranium ions, but ends up creating a couple of new universes and a lot of havoc in the process. All that sounds more like Wagner than Brahms, so I guess there's not a lot of subversive connections to be found. Still, lest you think the name is just a coincidence, the team does devote a page of their website to all things Johannes.

Combine

What was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment – maybe, say, six weeks – nobody understood art. That’s why it all happened. Because for a short while, these people were left alone. Six weeks is all it takes to get started. But there’s no place now where you can hide out for six weeks in this town.

—Morton Feldman, "Give My Regards to Eighth Street"

Portrait of Iris Clert via UbuWeb.

Somewhere Out There

NASA has called a press conference tomorrow to announce something big. Big, people.

MEDIA ADVISORY : M08-089

NASA to Announce Success of Long Galactic Hunt

WASHINGTON -- NASA has scheduled a media teleconference Wednesday, May 14, at 1 p.m. EDT, to announce the discovery of an object in our Galaxy astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years.

Whaddya think? Pierre Boulez's softer side? Joan Sutherland's consonants? Herbert von Karajan's humility? Leonard Bernstein's sense of restraint?

(Smart money seems to be on a direct observation of a black hole, which would be pretty cool. And, honestly, I love Joan Sutherland. Just don't model your diction on hers, OK, kids?)

Update (5/14): It's the remnants of a supernova—one about the age of Orphée aux Enfers.

Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it

Washington, D.C., has always seemed to me a place suffused with intellectual insecurity (especially this millenium) but it seems to have spread into its musical life this past week. First, Greg "We Must Kill Classical Music In Order To Save It" Sandow—who's jumping the shark on pretty much a weekly basis these days—finds that Felicity Lott just isn't pandering to him as much as he would like. (He plays coy with specifically identifying the performance, but come on, your wife covered the thing.)

But let's look at the Baudelaire group. We weren't reading the poems, or hearing a lecture on them. We were reliving them, or at least reliving them as they were set to music by French composers. Which meant that the singer and pianist were reliving them, too, and that rather than think about them, or experience them distantly, they should have hit us right in the gut.

Did that happen? Of course not. Which isn't to say the performance was bad. By normal standards, it was quite good, thoughtful, nuanced, expressive. But that's not enough. Baudelaire is far more than that. He's uneasy, troubled, sick, sensual, seduced by evil, drenched with regret. Is that what we felt, hearing those songs? Of course not. The concert was far too genteel. If the spirit of Baudelaire had emerged -- if all of us wondered what secret we hid, what secret was making us suffer -- the unspoken rules of the concert would have been violated. It wouldn't have been artistic, thoughtful, genteel. It would have made us uneasy. We would have been troubled. We would have had fantasies, of nudity, jewelry, decay. Is that what we'd come for?

My initial reaction—which I still think is true—is that if your idea of listening is to sit back in your chair and wait for something to hit you in the gut, then, yeah, the glories of Duparc and Debussy and Baudelaire are probably going to slip past you. The power of Baudelaire isn't just in his transgression, it's in the combination of that transgression with his formal discipline and poetic restraint. Decadence is supposed to be elegant, after all—that's part of the whole point. It's why Duparc's Baudelaire settings, or, to give a more extensive example, Faure's Verlaine settings, are so successful—the polished surface in quiet tension with the implications of the poetry. That demands an active engagement on the part of the listener/reader, and active engagement is what those composers would have expected; the unease is more profound if you find it on your own. Duparc and Debussy knew what Baudelaire was up to. Sandow doesn't.

Sandow blames standard recital presentation—"The form of the concert at war with its content," he writes. As usual, he implicitly proscribes something closer to popular culture—a presentation that underlines whatever the content "is." (Felicity Lott in torn nylons and safety pins, maybe.) But the form isn't at war with the content—even given the way that term has been cheapened through overuse along the banks of the Potomac—the form is content-neutral. The conventions of recital performance are designed to stay out of the way of as wide a variety of content as possible.

It's that aspect of concert performance—be it vocal, chamber, or orchestral repertoire—that Sandow objects to. I don't think it's because the performance isn't telling him what to think about the music, but I do think it's because the performance isn't reassuring him that what he might think about the music is OK. There's nothing stopping him from approaching the songs and finding those aspects that would reveal Baudelaire to be an eloquent degenerate, but since the recital doesn't seem to be giving him explicit permission to go there, he doesn't. I suppose his gut would be adequately hit by a concert that goes out of its way to highlight an interpretative attitude that's congruent with his own—but then, of course, those of us who think Baudelaire comes off as more uneasy the less you wallow in the uneasiness would be left cold. I think that's a pretty high price to pay just to have Sandow's own opinion validated. I have a particular bent towards vocal repertoire, and I can say that men in tails and women in organza very frequently move me to laughter, desperation, shock, and enlightenment; if you're sitting around pouting that your gut remains unstruck, I rather think that's more your problem. To have a performance that highlights an aspect of the music that the performers want to highlight is fine, but to call that necessary to a meaningful audience experience? That's abdicating most of the joy of being in the audience.

What Sandow wants, I think, is closer to kitsch than art, if one uses those terms in the Greenberg/Adorno/Benjamin sense. My favorite explanation of this sort of kitsch comes from Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

A desire for the experience of kitsch is a symptom of insecurity. Sandow wants the focus not just on how the music moves him, but accompanied by a reassurance that everyone else in the audience is being moved the same way. Safety in numbers.

So it was interesting that D.C. was also graced last week by a masterpiece of kitsch in the somewhat different postmodern sense, the neo-romantic sprawl of David Del Tredici's 1976 Final Alice. I mean that sincerely, Final Alice being an early and persistent favorite of mine—Del Tredici is one of that small group of composers (like Richard Strauss) whose music gets more compelling as it gets more self-indulgent. That said, Stephen Brookes' preview of the piece for the Washington Post is a revisionist mess.

But in one bold stroke, Del Tredici jettisoned the strict composing system known as serialism (which dominated new American music, to the despair of most audiences) and embraced a neo-romantic style -- scandalizing his colleagues and setting off an earthquake in American music whose aftershocks are still being felt.

" 'Final Alice' changed the face of music in this country overnight," recalls Leonard Slatkin, the National Symphony Orchestra's music director, who was in the Chicago audience that night. "It destroyed all conceptions of what 'new music' was supposed to be, and many composers will tell you that they were now liberated to write how they felt. It was the start of a revolution."

Serialism dominated new American music? It changed the face of music overnight? Um, Samuel Barber and Leonard Bernstein and Duke Ellington and George Rochberg and Terry Riley and Steve Reich and Philip Glass might have something to say about that. Brookes is, of course, reiterating the simplistic serialist-hegemony-tonal-rebellion narrative which is turning into as hoary a "fact" as Abner Doubleday's invention of baseball. It's all here: Forbidden tonality! Outraged avant-gardists! Brookes even joins the too-long list of lazy critics who reference Milton Babbitt's "Who Cares If You Listen?" in such a way that reveals he never bothered to read past the title.

But reorienting that narrative around Final Alice—a variant on this past weekend's ruminations—is interesting. Unlike that above list of composers who either kept on with their longstanding tonal preference or reworked tonality into minimalist radicalism, Del Tredici's opus is such a conscious throwback, a deliberate re-creation of 19th-century Romantic rhetoric, that it would have been impossible to miss. The novelty of Final Alice was its time-machine aspect, not its return not to tonality—that was already in full swing—but its return to an era prior to atonality's existence. (And even here, Rochberg got there first, just not on Del Tredici's scale.) A reproduction of the past for an age saturated with reproduction: kitsch layered on kitsch, to exuberantly entrancing effect.

But it's important to note that the "revolution" that Slatkin and Brookes—and, to an extent, Del Tredici—keep insisting the work ushered in is kitsch as well, an ersatz revolution, a bid to conjure the emotional high of a revolutionary act without the uncertain prospect of revolutionary consequences. It was a novel expression of a style that everyone already knew how to interpret, that everybody already knew what to think of. To celebrate the work for what it is—a grand, emotionally promiscuous entertainment—is deserved. (I would be a little suspicious of anyone who couldn't enjoy at least part of the piece.) But to celebrate it as a revolution is a sigh of relief that it wasn't a real revolution, something that would have required the risk of uncharted critical engagement—and to fear that is to be insecure of one's own critical judgment. One could say that part of the genius of Final Alice is that is does make the form of an orchestra concert and the work's content, to a certain extent, congruent; Del Tredici even acknowledges the conventions by having the piece grow out of the sounds of the orchestra tuning. But in the process, the music's atmosphere and intent is at least partially fixed—some path of individual resonance and reinterpretation has been closed off. If you're constantly worried whether your own reinterpretations are right or wrong, that might be a good thing. But if you're like me, at a certain point, you're going to chafe at any presentation that insists that music can only be one particular thing. Because it never, ever is.

They put you down, they say I'm wrong

Over at Dial “M,” Phil picks up the coveted “Getting Dissed by Robert Christgau” Webelos pin. I’m hot and cold on “I was there, man” testimony—a valuable source of emotional evidence, but usually insufferable as an argument-killer. As an adolescent of the 80s, I find it especially eye-rolling coming from representatives of the 60s: you’re patronizing me on behalf of a cohort that ended up contributing to a landslide victory for Ronald Reagan? I’ll let you know when I start to envy that intellectual journey.

The thing is, I’m fascinated by the upheavals of the 60s, but more as a window into the human capacity for optimistic folly rather than a narrative of youthful triumph. (One could argue that the revolutionaries of the 60s might have made more of a lasting impact if they had considered the history of their 19th-century predecessors as the rueful comedy it was rather than the heroic tragedy they wanted it to be.) And one particular aspect of the 60s has really jazzed me ever since I first read one of my favorite “popular” histories, David Halberstam’s deceptively breezy survey The Fifties. Halberstam’s argument was that much, if not all, of the intellectual cast of the 60s actually began percolating in that previous decade. The caricature of the 60s is that the revolutionary movement was forged in the crucible of the Vietnam War, but what if the war was merely the peg around which all of those already existing currents coalesced? The intellectual tail wagging the historical dog, as it were? Unwittingly, perhaps—although anyone who knew their Lenin would have seen the parallel with his seizure of the Great War’s opportunity.

I was thinking about this yesterday, after the following question popped into my head: when did the idea of composing tonal music as an act of rebellion first originate? I’ve had a vague sense of this trope resurfacing in the past few weeks, the attitude that writing triadic “classical” music is somehow sticking it to the atonal/academic man. I’ve never subscribed to that motivation, although I have sympathy for it—an awful lot of my favorite composers wrote great music because they had something to prove. But what’s interesting to me is that such a stance almost certainly developed in the 1960s; it was only then that atonality would have acquired anywhere near the institutional and establishment credentials to make it worth rebelling against.

My gut reaction would be that it originated with the minimalists, but that seems too easy, especially in light of the genre’s 1950s precursors (Young, Nancarrow, Partch, Cage, &c., and yes, to use Phil’s term, I’m lumping and not splitting, but my sense is that the minimalist movement drew energy and inspiration from all those exemplars)—those composers were far more interested in forging independent paths than confronting the status quo head-on. It’s also important to remember that plenty of establishment composers continued on writing tonal music as atonality took root in America—Barber, Shapero, Ward, to name a few—perhaps the more radically experimental aspects of minimalism lent the accompanying tonality revolutionary credentials. Or again, maybe it was just a historical opportunity, that anything novel in the late 60s could easily claim the countercultural mantle, that it wasn’t a motivation at all, but just a post hoc political-historical framework for music that was going to be created anyway.

Just to be clear, I don’t know which, if any, of those scenarios might be more or less likely—this is something that’s taken up residence on my research-to-do list, and for now, I’m just spouting impressions off the top of my head, because, well, I’m a blogger, and we do have a certain irresponsible reputation to maintain, don’t we? But I'm going to start that research not with the minimalists, but with another, early signpost of bad-boy tonality—Leonard Bernstein's October 24, 1965 rhymed New York Times justification for the composition of Chichester Psalms, as he put it, "Certain to sicken a stout John Cager/With its tonics and triads in E-flat major." Sicken? Probably not. But, of course, that was an integral part of Bernstein's artistic personality: considering everything he did to be some sort of radical break with something. In the process, Bernstein pushed the origin of "the 60s" back even further; it was 1967 when he pronounced that Mahler's time had, indeed, come. The 60s did have their origin in the 50s—the 1850s. (Give or take a couple of decades.) Nobody left to make an "I was there" objection to that theory.

There you go

At long last, I am finally getting around to updating the blogroll. Be it unforgiveable lacunae (Musical Perceptions wasn't on the list? Sounds Like Now? NewMusicBox? Yipes) or correspondents from hometown old and hometown new, there's enough shiny new bloggy goodness that the whole unwieldy list has been moved off the sidebar and onto its own page. More additions in weeks to come.

Go on—the revolution's not going to come as long as you continue to be focused and productive.

Chiavi in mano

After a multi-year courtship, Riccardo Muti finally made an honest woman out of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra,agreeing to become their music director as of 2010. The announcement wasn't, in the end, much of a surprise (though the conspiratorial-minded might notice that the contract was signed only after Simon Rattle re-upped in Berlin), but now that it's official, pondering may commence as to what it all means for the future of the CSO, &c., &c. But really, the hire is a re-assertion of long-standing CSO tradition. And if the experience of this native is any indication, that might just be more forward-looking than it seems.

Muti is the latest in a line of CSO music directors who came in with a considerable European track record. (He is, in fact, the oldest hire in the position's history.) You could consider this sort of off-the-shelf approach a holdover from Gilded Age days, when big American cities took a look at their increasing commercial prowess and decided to import some culture to match. The standard line on this has always been fashioned around American insecurity towards native art, relying on more venerable and proven European traditions to class up the joint. But growing up just outside of Chicago, hearing Solti conduct, hanging out at the Art Institute, I always thought that the driving force was a sense of entitlement, not insecurity; we took the standard boilerplate—"a world-class city deserves world-class art"—at face value.

There's a downside to that, of course—the CSO never cultivated much of a relationship with local composers, the vibrant experimental and improvisation scene in Chicago mostly making their own way—but then again, that was never really the point of having the institution. The orchestra was always a civic crown jewel, an assertion that the city and its people were worthy of the best that classical music had to offer. (When Daniel Barenboim took over from Solti in the early 90s, the biggest question wasn't whether he would or wouldn't make the orchestra more local or more American, but simply whether he was really good enough.) Muti, an A-list hire if there ever was one, is fully in keeping with that pattern.

I grew up with the sense that the CSO brought classical music to Chicago not because Chicago needed it, but because Chicago deserved it. For me, that deserving was an important part of my musical development—my relationship to the classical-music canon was that I had as much right to it as anybody, that it wasn't a perk of class or status, but common civic property, the spoils of industry and curiosity. In the best possible way, I took the world-class orchestra in town for granted.

Civic pride is an odd thing. I've always been proud of Chicago's labor history, the fact that the city produced the types of workers fearless enough to stand up to rich bastards like Marshall Field and his ilk. But then again, I'm also proud to claim a connection with a city that produced such rich bastards to begin with. So I fully admit that I'm biased, that I'm liable to look with favor on a status quo at the CSO, just because it played such a strong part in making my musical outlook what it is. But regardless of how Muti addresses a lot of the usual concerns—more new music, more community involvement, more outreach to new audiences—there's a part of me that's happy that the CSO is continuing the pattern of old-school, high-reputation excellence, happy that another generation of Chicagoans will be able to brashly claim that music, and that music-making, as a right and not just a privilege.

Troy to Remember

In years to come, Sunday's big, blazing, two-concert, five-hours-plus-a-dinner-break, season-ending account of Berlioz's Les Troyens by the Boston Symphony Orchestra will probably not acquire quite the "I was there, man" stature of, say, James Brown's 1968 show at the Garden, but it certainly felt like an event, certainly the biggest event yet of James Levine's tenure as music director, and certainly one of the biggest events in Boston classical music in quite a while. It was, in fact, enough of an occasion that I think the BSO could have raked in some extra cash selling commemorative, rock-tour-style t-shirts.


I totally would have bought one of those.

Whenever Levine conducts music he really loves, he gets more energetic, as if the performance is a generator that he's plugging into. So it's worth noting that he was as kinetic as I've ever seen him in Boston. Levine did right by the opera in casting: the only qualm was Marcello Giordani, who ran out of steam in the fifth act—more shouting than singing—but even he was impressive for four-fifths of the day, giving Aeneas a ringing charisma. Anne Sofie von Otter's mezzo-soprano is perhaps a touch ethereal for Dido, but she didn't try and compete with the orchestra, instead confidently drawing the drama to her, with a stage presence and an unfailingly intelligent musicality that anchored the human dimension of Part II. (This was a fun-loving queen, too, if her exuberant toe-tapping during Act IV's dances of Egyptian girls and slaves was any indication.) Her two duets, with Giordani and with (I predict) future star Christin Marie-Hill, as Dido's sister Anna, were ideal demonstrations of Berlioz's penchant for grand-scale intimacy.

Eric Cutler was a crowd favorite, negotiating Iopas's song with ease. I also liked Philippe Castagner's ardent memories of Troy at the opening of Act V, after which David Kravitz and James Courtney held their own in the opera's only bit of comic relief, wishing to stay in Carthage for reasons far less exalted than Aeneas. The comparatively terse spectacle of Part I doesn't offer as much opportunity for vocal treasure—Yvonne Naëf, as Cassandra, sang through a head cold—but as Chorebus, Dwayne Croft's trombone-like baritone ideally suited his ardent, persistent rationalization of Cassandra's warnings. (It struck me that Part I is, in a way, an enormous proof of the rule that one's fiancée is always right.)

In the midst of some ravishingly meticulous sounds from the orchestra, the surprise was how much power they were able to unleash: from the second balcony, parts of Part I were possibly the loudest things I've ever heard in Symphony Hall. The playing not only demonstrated the depth of the BSO, but the depth of Boston's freelance community, as the stage doors kept drawing open to reveal yet another offstage ensemble. The orchestra has an institutional affinity for Berlioz that somehow gets passed down in Lamarckian fashion, but Les Troyens is a horse of a different color, as it were; the performance seemed to mark the transition from Levine's honeymoon period into a new era at the BSO.

A century-and-a-half on, Berlioz's stubborn ambition still causes polarized reactions. I've been on a real music-and-cinema tear lately, which explains my latest hypothesis: being a fan of Berlioz is strongly correlated with being a fan of David Lean movies. If you're the type that responds to the luxurious pace and painterly compositions of Doctor Zhivago or The Bridge on the River Kwai by wishing that David would just get on with the story already, you're probably best off sticking with Rossini. But if your idea of a good time is rearranging your work schedule to make room for a two-hour drive to catch a screening of a 70mm print of Lawrence of Arabia, then Hector's your man. Les Troyens is the Lawrence of Arabia of operas; there might be grander or even longer operas in the repertoire, but none of them can quite match Berlioz's magnum opus in the way it uses its epic pace and canvas to draw you in, to give you the room to absorb atmosphere and notice detail, to shape the human drama with such richly-apportioned care.

One last thought, for any and all prospective divas out there: do you think you can pull off a regal presence while wearing what is essentially a purple silk bathrobe? Because Anne Sofie von Otter can. Let that be the standard to which you aspire.

Take Me to the World

Reviewing Boston Baroque.
Boston Globe, May 5, 2008.

Passport photos

Reviewing Boston Musica Viva.
Boston Globe, May 5, 2008.

Friday's concert was part of a de facto valedictory tour for the busy local flutist Alicia DiDonato Paulsen, who heads west next season to join the Oregon Symphony.* I note, via Wikipedia: "Portland is also known for its large number of microbreweries." Enjoy!

P.S. For the first time in memory, the Globe copy desk got to my original headline idea first.

*Update (5/5): I originally called them the Portland Symphony, which I will blame on cold medicine.

Un Ballo

Critic-at-Large Moe and I are spending this May Day (and the rest of this week's lunch hours) in the company of that most aristocratic of communists, the Italian director Luchino Visconti—revisiting one of my favorite movies, Visconti's dazzling 1963 adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo. Roger Ebert wrote that it "was directed by the only man who could have directed it"—Visconti's noble ancestry and Marxist outlook subtly intersect all over the film, perhaps uniquely sympathetic to both the patrician way of life and its necessary decay.

Because of the film's historical backdrop—the Risorgimento and the campaign for Italian unification—it's not surprising that the music in the film pays extensive homage to Giuseppe Verdi. Nino Rota's score is skillfully Verdiesque, especially a dotted-rhythm theme that Giuseppe would have been pleased to come up with. Verdi's own music turns up as well, in two of the movie's best set-pieces. As the Prince of Salina and his family arrive at their summer palace in the village of Donnafugata, the municipal band greets them (in a detail lifted straight from the novel) with a wheezy rendition of "Noi siamo zingarelle," the gypsy chorus from La Traviata. It's a selection rife with connections: a bit of counterpoint with the town's name ("disappearing woman"), symbolizing both the family's literal journey and their figurative gypsy-like drift towards irrelevance—Visconti places the band in front of prominent "Viva Garibaldi" graffiti—the wealthy slumming of Violetta's party made real. Verdi also turns up in the final 45-minute ball scene, in the famous form of a then-unpublished salon waltz to which the Prince dances with Angelica, his nephew's non-noble wife, a reluctant legitimization of the ascendancy of capitalist wealth over hereditary privilege.

I can't think of an American movie that uses an individual composer's music and style to so completely conjure a specific time and place. A lot of that is due to the unique timing of Verdi's career, coming along just at the time when his creation would have the largest possible extra-musical resonance. (Visconti expertly uses this aspect of Verdi in his earlier film Senso.) Visconti's achievement is not only to effectively illustrate the film's setting, but also to reflect back on the Verdian style, to show how the time and place gave the music an added power. Almost certainly Lampedusa and Visconti intend the Prince to be the type of character—proud, impulsive, his intellect and his social responsibilities not always in sync—familiar in post-1860 Verdi: Philip, say, or Boccanegra. The Verdi and Verdi-like music on the soundtrack asserts a common influence of historical setting on composer, novel, and film; in a way, it's prompting us to imagine what Verdi himself would have done with the story, one that doubtless would have appealed to him. Visconti—a terrific opera director as well—even deploys the music operatically, in contrast with the way film music usually functions in Hollywood. Visconti almost never uses the music to smooth over transitions or to unobtrusively shape the mood; he brings it in with a flourish, a coup de théâtre to punctuate a scene, usually towards the end. Visconti's epic staging of the siege of Palermo plays out without music until the final moments: only when the Prince's nephew, Tancredi (note the name) is injured by an artillery shell does Visconti punch in the dramatic cue. In the ball scene, the near-continuous dance numbers provide the sort of ironic set decoration of a Traviata or Rigoletto.

Towards the beginning of The Leopard, there's a musical moment that's pure genius. Tancredi is riding off to fight with the Garibaldini, and Visconti sweeps him out of the Salina palace with broad camera arcs and Rota's swelling strains. But as the film cuts to the next scene, the music cuts off, abruptly, mid-phrase. It's a jarring transition that reminds us that Tancredi's enthusiasm is more cynical than idealistic—his ultimate goal is to gain political credibility in order to make his way in the post-unification society he shrewdly foresees. The romantic overtones of his departure are part and parcel with his own wily charisma; the music leaves the narrative along with him. But it's even more remarkable how the cut reinforces the realist undercurrent of the film. It's a self-conscious artifice, an emphasis of the cinematic surface, a reminder of the fact that we are, after all, watching a movie. But by placing Tancredi's music within the cinematic reality rather than layering it over, Visconti paradoxically gives the juxtaposition of the scenes a documentary quality. It's a combination of opulent fantasy and clear-eyed analysis that vaguely but appropriately echoes Marx himself.