Leftover Beethoven Miscellany: BPM

From time to time until the book comes out, this space will feature bits and pieces that were too esoteric, tangential, or just plain odd to make it into the final version.

The Allegro was taken, as we thought, too fast;—the common fault of all our orchestras. Beethoven was constantly lecturing his leaders on this matter. It is true that the whole rate and standard of time has accelerated lately, in perfect keeping with the restless character of the age; we live fast. And it is true that time is rather relative than positive, and that the most rapid prestissimo seems to glide on without hurry when the tempo of our own nerves and feelings and whole system corresponds.

The pioneering American music critic (and Beethoven fiend) John Sullivan Dwight, from an article (“Musical Review: Boston Philharmonic Society”) in the Feb 27, 1847 issue of The Harbinger, the Fourierist journal produced at the short-lived Brook Farm commune on the outskirts of Boston.

Hey, sport. You connect the dots

Thanks to holiday temporal creep, the Hammacher Schlemmer Christmas catalog showed up in the mail yesterday. Back before the World Wide Web—that dark, dark age when Abe Vigoda's complete filmography was esoteric knowledge, people with extreme opinions talked mainly to themselves, and pornography was mildly difficult to procure—the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog was actually something, full of things that one really couldn't find anywhere else. Nowadays, it's lost a little of its wherewithal, but, as a loyal American—and thus unable to resist the siren song of consumerism—I dutifully flipped through this year's catalog.

On page 37, there's something called the "No Wrong Notes Strumstick."


"It uses the unique, diatonic fretting of an Appalachian dulcimer," the description says, "tuned in a drone relationship such that there are no wrong notes." Now, I was all set to exercise my inner Victorian parliamentarian on that wrong-note thing. That is quite the sweeping generalization of systems of musical hierarchy and coherence you are making, good sir! But then I kept reading:

A major scale is played by simply fretting just one string and strumming like a guitar.

Now, I try to be forgiving when non-musicians trip on musical terminology, which—let's face it—can be quirkier than a Wes Anderson movie. But it's a red-letter day when I can't even figure out what they're trying to say. My best guess is that, if you fret one string in a particular place, or maybe fret all three strings, you get a major chord. But the more I think about it, the more I like the thought of propping this thing on your lap, randomly fretting one string, and then strumming away while cascading major scales pour forth. Can you imagine what Terry Riley would pay for something like that?

They're growing mechanical trees

Over at Mind the Gap, Molly Sheridan has cranked the Book Club back to life, which means all this week you can find Alex Shapiro, Marc Weidenbaum, Marc Geelhoed, and yours truly (along with, perhaps, special guests) fulminating on Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants. Is it cookies? I hope it's cookies. Anyways, the forecast says there's a 60% chance of me defaulting to a dystopian world-view, which is always fun. See you there!

Image via.

All of nature talks to me. If I could just figure out what it was trying to tell me.

Reviewing the Radius Ensemble.
Boston Globe, November 16, 2010.

The whole megillah

Reviewing Jean Barraqué's Sonata at the Boston Conservatory New Music Festival.
Boston Globe, November 15, 2010.

I also caught the first concert of the festival; you can read a review here.

And I trust that you'll excuse my dust when I step on the gas

Reviewing the Discovery Ensemble.
Boston Globe, November 15, 2010.

One of us

Schumann's symphonies, up close and personal. Previewing the Boston Symphony Orchestra's Schumann cycle.
Boston Globe, November 14, 2010.

Past present

In seeming counterpoint to the curiously inconclusive G-20 summit in Seoul this week, there was a development in the curiously inconclusive posthumous political travails of the Korean violinist and composer Hong Yeong-hu, better known by his pen name, Hong Nan-p'a. Hong is popularly, if slightly inaccurately, considered the father of Western classical music in Korea; while others were working the vein before him, it was the success of Hong's song "Garden Balsam" (Bongseonhwa), first written as a violin piece in 1919, that showed the viability of combining Korean-style melody with Western harmonies and instrumentation.

Hong's career coincided with the Japanese military occupation of Korea, and, as a result, standard textbook encapsulations of his biography emphasize his patriotism, how his student years at the Tokyo Conservatory were cut short by his participation in the March 1st Movement for Korean independence, how "Garden Balsam" became an unofficial anthem of the Korean resistance, how, in 1937, he was arrested and jailed for six weeks, an ordeal usually cited as contributing to his death, in 1941, at the age of 44. So it was a little dissonant to read that, this week, Hong's descendants dropped their lawsuit to keep him off of an official government list of pro-Japanese collaborators:

Accordingly, the composer, who has been exempt from the list under a temporary court order issued last November, will likely be put back on the “disgraced” register.... The court said more extensive inquiries should be carried out to confirm whether the composer actively cooperated with Japanese authorities during the colonial rule.

Hong's alleged collaboration came in the last four years of his life, as the Japanese rather fiercely ramped up their imperial pressure across Korea; having suffered a recurrence of pleurisy during his prison stay, Hong apparently compromised with the colonial government, possibly in return for medical treatment. His accommodation included editing music publications and advising the government on cultural matters.

However, if you're wondering about a ruling that puts a dead man on a "disgraced" list at the same time that it admits to needing more extensive inquiries, welcome to the somewhat strange world of the Korean Presidential Committee for the Inspection of Collaborations for Japanese Imperialism (PCIC). Given that Korea has spent two-thirds of the past century under either foreign occupation or military dictatorship, the country certainly has more than the usual number of skeletons in its closet, but the PCIC has always been as much about contemporary South Korean politics as a reckoning with the past. The first attempt to identify collaborators, just after World War II, was stymied by the Republic's first president, Syngman Rhee. The effort was suddenly restarted under Roh Moo-hyun, who became president in 2003; while the move was, plausibly, long overdue, the Presidential Committee also allowed Roh to both stoke anti-Japanese sentiment (always a popular move in Korea) and, at the same time, tar those of his conservative opponents who came to power under a succession of Japanese-trained military leaders. As if to confirm the politicization of the investigation, the administration of Roh's successor, the conservative Lee Myung-bak, has both tried to sideline the PCIC and has pretty well scrubbed any mention of its activities from Korean government websites. And there's the danger of financial corruption as well—descendents of named collaborators can have land taken away if the government says that the land was originally illegally granted by the Japanese occupiers. The broad brush wielded by the PCIC and related bodies doesn't seem to have brought Koreans any closer to coming to terms with their history.

Anyway, here's Bongseonhwa (along with another Korean resistance song, Jun Su-rin's "Imperial Ruins"), sung by the great Korean pop singer Cho Yong Pil, from his 2005 concert in Pyongyang:



Fun fact: Hong Nan-p'a lived in the United States from 1931 to 1933, studying at Chicago's Sherwood Music School (now part of Columbia College). Had he stuck around until 1934, he could have been classmates with Phyllis Diller—demonstrating, once again, that the only force strong enough to reliably bring humanity together is coincidence.

Qui habitat in Jerusalem montes in circuitu eius

In the modern, compulsory-service era, there are plenty of examples of composers and musicians who also had military careers, but, in honor of Veterans' Day, a composer-veteran from a time when the combination was fairly rare: Kryštof Harant. Born in 1564, Harant (full name: Kryštof Harant z Polžic a Bezdružic) was a minor Bohemian nobleman and actual Renaissance man whose military service came in the 1590s, soldiering for the Hapsburgs during their Long War against the Ottoman empire. The experience seems to have given Harant a taste for adventure, as he and his brother-in-law promptly embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, a fairly dicey proposition for a pair of veterans of a religious war that was still going on. (The pair disguised themselves as monks from non-combatant lands.) Harant recorded the journey in a book, Cesta z Království Českého do Benátek, odtud do země Svaté ("Journey from Bohemia, by Way of Venice, to the Holy Land"), for which he himself provided some 50 woodcuts; the book also included a six-voice motet, Qui confidunt in Domino, which Harant composed in Jerusalem.

Harant became an advisor in the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who had moved the seat of the empire to Prague; but, as the power of the tolerant, art-loving (and somewhat libertinistic) Rudolf declined, the court moved back to Vienna, and Harant retired to his castle to write music. Throughout the early 1600s, the rest of the Hapsburgs were driven by increasing Catholic, anti-Protestant zeal, a tendency that bode ill for the Reformation in Bohemia. By the time matters came to a head, Harant himself had converted—to a sect called neo-Utraquism, whose nominal sticking point with Rome was whether the laity could partake of communion wine or not, although the underlying power struggle was essentially that of Lutheranism.

When, following a series of political twists and turns, the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, was elected King of Bohemia, Harant became his Privy Councillor. An unfortunate promotion, as it turned out—Frederick's ragtag forces were decisively defeated at the 1620 Battle of White Mountain by mercenaries sent by the new Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, a ruler who took his duty to defend the faith awfully seriously. Harant was one of 27 nobles subsequently beheaded in Prague's Old Town Square on what Bohemian Protestants came to call the "Day of Blood," June 21, 1621.

Harant was the most important Bohemian composer of his time, which means he was the most important Bohemian composer for a long time, as Bohemia essentially ceased to exist, completely subsumed into the Hapsburg empire. Harant's music was old-fashioned for its day, contrapuntal and firmly within the old Franco-Flemish school; one of his few surviving works is a cantus firmus mass on a Marenzio madrigal that was already a century old when Harant used it. Only a few months before the Battle of White Mountain, one of Harant's masses had been performed with great pomp and ceremony in Prague's Catholic church of St. Jakub, not far from the square where Harant would be executed. Inter arma enim silent Musae.

Harant's music has been recorded by the Prague Madrigalists, the Capella Rudolphina, and the Italian vocal ensemble Triaca Musicale; the latter has audio samples on their site.

Well, there's your problem

Part of this week's to-do list is some clearing of the briar-patch that is chapters 2 and 3 of the book, which gets into the heavyweights of German philosophy—Kant and Hegel. One of the habits I developed while poking around Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment European thought on this trek was that of looking at the course of 19th-century Western philosophy as successive claims on intellectual real estate, a kind of dance between incomplete zoning and squatting. The Romantics set up shop where Kant's aesthetics ran out of steam, Marx colonized the materialistic no-man's-land that Hegel tried to jump over with a leap of faith, &c. Nietzsche pretty much made an entire career out of going back and opening up all the boxes that previous philosophies had left discreetly closed. It explains his brio—the process is, in itself, kind of exhilarating.

Now, almost all of these revisionist vacuum-fillings had a musical parallel—the Romaniticization of Beethoven, the Schopenhauerization of Wagner, and so forth. In fact, I think there's an interesting case to be made for music as the canary in the philosophical coal mine. Music—and the way we talk about music—has a kind of tendency, in this interpretation, to coalesce around the weak point(s) of whatever philosophical movement is currently taken for granted. At the very least, it's a provocative source of leverage, kind of like Feuerbach's old trick of reversing the subject and the object in Hegel—it doesn't reveal the truth, but it gives you a hint where to look. Probably the last thinker to really effectively work the lever was Adorno, using the increasing commodification of music to unpack the ways in which the free market is a lot less free than we might like to think.

I got to thinking about this again because, just for fun, I was reading some of Adorno's student, Jürgen Habermas. (It is recognized that I have a funny sense of fun.) The fun of Habermas, for me, is that he embodies certain traits of the Frankfurt School in a kind of amplified, straight-to-the gut pop-music-ish way. The first is analysis; where the first generation of the Frankfurt School took aim at contemporary society, Habermas takes apart the whole of philosophical history. The book I picked up this week, Knowledge and Human Interests, bounces through Idealism, Positivism, Pragmatism, even a bit of psychoanalysis with the confidence of a chef walking through a market—that won't work, that's tasty, but then we'll need this, but make sure it's not that, and, oh yes, that can be lovely if you know what to do with it.

And then Habermas takes all his ingredients and comes up with something way more optimistic than I, at least, would be able to justify. This too is an amplification: the Frankfurt School was always more optimistic than their dour reputation might have indicated—they were Marxists, after all, so there was at least a lingering whiff of Utopia. But Adorno's optimism, for example, was tempered by his suspicion of human nature, especially collectively; he believed that a better society was possible once one clearly saw the current society's structure and mechanisms, but that was balanced by his pessimistic assessment of the political and corporate forces standing in the way of that vision. Habermas, though, with his program of "communicative rationality," puts an awful lot of faith in the desire of human beings to interact with the common goal of logical understanding. Instead of searching for truth through self-reflection of phenomenological perception, Habermas thinks that it is in the very nature of communicative action that truth can be found, that our ways of communicating with each other will reveal universals. The mechanisms of civil society—for that is where we interact and communicate—at some level reach a consensus. Here's how he puts it in his book Communication and the Evolution of Society:

In action oriented to reaching understanding, validity claims are 'always already' implicitly raised. These universal claims (to the comprehensibility of the symbolic expression, the truth of the propositional content, the truthfulness of the intentional expression, and the rightness of the speech act with respect to existing norms and values) are set in the general structures of possible communication. In these validity claims communication theory can locate a gentle, but obstinate, a never silent although seldom redeemed claim to reason, a claim that must be recognised de facto whenever and wherever there is to be consensual action.

Habermas is judiciously qualified in his description, but the key here is that first assumption—that civil society consists of "action oriented to reaching understanding". If you find that a little too optimistic, then you've recapitulated the main criticism of communicative rationality—that, if history is any guide, the mechanisms of civil society are pretty easily turned towards creating and reinforcing power irregardless of justice or rationality.

Here's the really fun thing. Given the question of which era or aspect of music might be, as is its wont, hanging around the weak points of communicative rationality, a plausible answer is: all of it. Music is, essentially, communicative irrationality, an art form that goes through all the public motions of civil discourse without saying anything. Or, rather, saying whatever each individual listener needs it to say—which is the equilibrium civil society always reverts to in the absence of exceptional coercion, positive or negative. In philosophical terms, you can almost imagine music hovering behind any utopian speculation, aping its movements, making goofy faces.

The Boston Globe has, in the past year, taken to running e-mail addresses for its reviewers, which means that there's rarely a notice of mine that passes without a dissenting note, and rarely a dissenting note that doesn't rehearse some variation on the phrase "I wonder if you went to the same concert that I did." A venerable sarcasm; but, then again, there are numerous levels—epistemological, phenomenological, communicative—on which we actually didn't go to the same concert. It's why, like so many previous philosophies, music structurally demurs on communicative rationality. Utopias only work in music because we can each pick the utopia that best matches our nature. When it comes to civil society, you're lucky if you can just get everyone to tune up.

Now she's leading him on, and she'll lay him right down

Reviewing Boston Lyric Opera's Tosca.
Boston Globe, November 9, 2010.

Frelon Brun

Today in limited-quantity musically-themed beer: Dogfish Head Brewery's Bitches Brew, honoring the 40th anniversary of the release of Miles Davis's fusion-jazz classic.


It's a beery interpretation of tej, Ethiopian mead; like that drink, it's brewed with honey and gesho, an African shrub that lends a hop-like bitterness. The result? Wow, this is a toasty beer—a stout on steroids, all dark chocolate and roasted coffee overtones.

"Frelon Brun" was the opening track off of Davis's Filles de Kilimanjaro, which came out the year before Bitches Brew. The album title was another drink reference, a nod to the Kilimanjaro African Coffee Company, in which Davis was an investor. (The company's founder, Arthur "Buddy" Gist, later donated the trumpet Davis used to record Kind of Blue to the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.)

(Previously in musical beer: Monk, Zappa.)

The Honored Dead

So we had an election this week here in the United States which pundits are eagerly shaping into Larger Significances, but I don't buy it. This is the third election cycle in a row driven by one emotion—throw the bums out—which rather implies to me an electorate driving around, hopelessly lost, but too stubborn to stop and ask for directions. And if you know that taxonomy of that cliché, you know that the choices basically boil down to comedy movie (e.g., the end of the British Empire), horror movie (e.g., the end of the Inca Empire), or comedy-horror movie (e.g., the end of the Roman Empire).

It's appropriate that, in popular culture right now, the monsters du jour are those favorite allegories of hegemonic dissolution and concomitant alienation, zombies. The lively deceased turn up every time an empire collapses—all those seances and spirit mediums in Edwardian Britain, all those skeletal dances of death and mementi mori in the waning Dutch golden age. It's so prevalent that I find myself wondering where, exactly, the late Romans hid their cache of zombie stories. (It's fun to imagine that one of the literary casualties of the dark ages was a Catullan Nox Vivum Cadaverum.)

So that's where we are—driving blind towards a possible dystopian rendezvous with brain-eaters. Now, based on all the zombie movies I've seen, the the one essential accessory you're going to need is a shotgun. So might I suggest this beauty?


That's an Ithaca Sousa Grade shotgun, the style based on a prototype made for John Philip Sousa himself in 1917. Sousa Grade guns—the highest-end model the Ithaca Gun Company offered—were available to the public at prices running from 500 to 700 pre-WWII dollars. The hand-engraved scrollwork was incredibly intricate and extensive. The inlays were all gold; in addition to the usual dogs-and-ducks hunting motifs, there was this fanciful addition on the underside of the trigger guard—


—a buxom mermaid, courtesy of Bill McGraw, Ithaca's master engraver. Custom-ordered and hand-built, only a couple dozen Sousa Grade guns were ever made. As such, they're expensive—not the most expensive antique shotguns out there, but expensive enough. This particularly lovely single-barreled example—


—was sold by the Maine-based James D. Julia auction house for $22,425 last spring.


Sousa wasn't just a celebrity endorser, but was an avid trapshooter, the first president of the American Amateur Trapshooting Association (later absorbed into the current ATA), and an inductee into the Trapshooting Hall of Fame. In other words, the March King would have himself been a crack shot against a zombie horde. So if you come face-to-face with his rotting, reanimated corpse, I think he would appreciate the tribute of being dispatched with his own gun. It's only fair.

Variety theater

Reviewing the New England Philharmonic.
Boston Globe, November 1, 2010.

It is possible!

It's Halloween this weekend. I did a quick Google search for "karlheinz stockhausen mask" and nothing came up, so I made one. (Click to enlarge.)


While enjoying your resultant candy haul (which, if you want to be clever, you can separate into seven different categories and then eat by following the score to Plus-Minus), fire up the video-on-demand and take in The Mephisto Waltz, a 1971 bit of devilish goofiness (from the director of Gidget!) featuring Curt Jürgens as a dying concert pianist who becomes very interested in Alan Alda's hands.



(The score is by Jerry Goldsmith, getting a nice avant-garde warm-up for his music for The Omen series.)

Sing a song of old Detroit, for she's the flashing, dashing pioneer of motor glory

Here's something interesting: the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's Chief Operating Officer, Patricia Walker, talking (back in July, I'm guessing) about the importance of getting everybody on board when implementing organizational change.



Now, 20/20 hindsight and all that, certainly. Still, mentally replace every instance of the word "change" with "a salary cut of a third and a pension freeze" and it turns into a masterpiece of deadpan comedy.

The Detroit Symphony owes much of its prestige to half of the auto-building Dodge brothers, John and Horace. It was Horace, the more mechanically-inclined of the two—and a decent enough amateur musician, by all accounts—that elevated the DSO into a first-class ensemble by making a hefty contribution to the group when Ossip Gabrilowitsch was hired as music director, and leading the fund-raising for Orchestra Hall, which Gabrilowitsch had stipulated as a condition of his accepting the job.

The Symphony was what finally smoothed the way into Detroit high society for Horace. Prior to that, the brothers were repeatedly blackballed—they were hard-drinking brawlers who didn't much care what other people thought of them. (Their first major success was in manufacturing parts for Henry Ford's assembly line. John Dodge was asked why the brothers abandoned that lucrative work to make their own cars. "Think of all those Ford owners who will someday want an automobile," he snarked.) By the time the brothers suddenly died in 1920—both from complications of the influenza then raging world-wide, although Horace's condition was precipitously undermined by John's death—such was their renown that none other than Victor Herbert paid tribute with "The Dodge Brothers March." The Dodge Brothers company distributed both the sheet music and, according to one source, 100,000 recordings of the piece.


It's a lot of fun, actually. Here's the first couple of strains:



The brothers may have maintained their salt-of-the-earth ways, but they still spent money like water. Horace Dodge had a particular penchant for yachts; his final commissioned vessel, the Delphine, was big enough to be appropriated as a flagship during World War II. The Delphine was restored a few years back and is currently for sale. The asking price? 38 million Euros.

Leftover Beethoven Miscellany: Roll Call

From time to time until the book comes out, this space will feature bits and pieces that were too esoteric, tangential, or just plain odd to make it into the final version.

An article in a 1918 issue of Sunset magazine reported the opinion of one Professor Arthur Conradi that the World War I anthem “Over There” owed its popularity to the same factors that made Beethoven’s Fifth a hit:

The great German—the Germans were great in his day—heard a rapping on the door. It suggested the tap of the hand of Fate, and he wrote his deathless symphony. George M. Cohan took a bugle call, a three-note idea, like the rat-a-tat-tat on the door, and in the cold analytical view of a serious musician has written a war song that will live forever.¹

That the comparison necessitates the elimination of one-fourth of Beethoven’s actual motive went unmentioned.

1. Robin Baily, “Songs Our Soldiers Sing.” Sunset, vol. 40, no. 5 (May, 1918), p. 23.

Another Saturday night, and I ain't got nobody

There's a new gang on the block, and they're called the Boston Composer's Coalition, and their inaugural concerts are this weekend—and you can watch them online for free. Shows are tonight at 7:00 EST (hey, that's just about now, isn't it) and tomorrow at 1:30 EST. If you're reading this right now, let's face it, your Saturday night is not turning out as exciting as it could be, so click on over. These concerts feature works composed especially for the ensemble The Fourth Wall, made up of—wait for it—flute, trombone, and percussion. Awesome.

Now, maybe you're like me, and you like to make your entertainment decisions based on the cleverness of the logos involved:


Well played, my friends, well played.

Full disclosure: some of them actually are my friends.

Believe half of what you see, run and hide from what you hear

News from there and here:

There's a Facebook campaign going to make John Cage's 4'33" this year's Christmas #1 single in the UK. Question of the day: on how many different axes would this have made Theodor Adorno's head spin?

This looks like fun: music-cognition popularizer Daniel Levitin is joining the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony for an evening called "Beethoven and Your Brain," which will use a live performance of Beethoven's Fifth to illustrate concepts in the neuroscience of music.

You will find out what is going on in the mind of the conductor, the musicians, and the audience (you!) in this interactive presentation. With live audience surveys using the latest technology, this will be a Beethoven experience that you will never forget!

Am I the only one thinking of this?


More specifically: am I the only one thinking of that as a possible selling point?

Coming to Australia later this month: music to put budgies to sleep by!

Finally, R.I.P., Ari Up, leader of The Slits, creators of what just might be my favorite cover version ever:

De Havenvinding (1599)

If you have some interest in the history of science and technology, you might have heard of the Dutch scientist and engineer Simon Stevin, who died in 1620. He was one of those old-fashioned Renaissance polymaths—James Burke, that expert web-weaver of technological history, has often found occasion to mention Stevin, since his range of activity connects him to so many different streams of innovation. He popularized decimal notation in Europe; he updated Archimedes' theories on hydrostatics; he wrote the earliest textbook on milling, a guide to navigation (De Havenvinding, "finding harbors"), and a treatise on artistic perspective; he designed fortresses and military camps for his patron and student, Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, with whom Stevin used to ride up and down the beach on large, wind-powered land yachts he constructed. He demonstrated the law of the equilibrium on an inclined place—and, at the same time, the law of the conservation of energy—with a brilliantly simple diagram that came to be called the Epitaph of Stevinus:


As Richard Feynman once said, "If you get an epitaph like that on your gravestone, you are doing fine." As if that weren't enough, Stevin also worked out something that you hear every day: he calculated the ratios for equal temperament about a century before it came into wide use. The modern 12-note chromatic scale, for better or for worse: that was Stevin's doing.

So now you know who Simon Stevin was. Why bring him up? Because of an aphorism Stevin saw fit to jot down once, with his signature, a memento reproduced in the introduction to the 1955 edition of his Principal Works:


The translation:

A man in anger is no clever dissembler.

This month, four centuries later, Stevin's observation has been twice borne out in relation to the arts, including in his home country. Right-wing governments in the Netherlands and Great Britain have proposed gutting arts funding. The Dutch Rutte-Verhagen cabinet (which owes its coalition power to the far-right, anti-Islam Geert Wilders) plans to pretty much shut down the Dutch public broadcasting music division, including three Dutch orchestras; and even if they try to survive on their own, they'd be looking at an increase in the value-added tax on concert and theater tickets from 6 to 19 percent. Meanwhile, across the channel, David Cameron's coalition—which might as well be a Tory government, the way the Lib Dems are rolling over at every opportunity—wants to cut arts programs by 30 percent.

In other words, both sets of conservatives, angry men all around (and, indeed, mostly men), are no longer dissembling with any sort of cleverness. And anyone who thinks that this was a matter of the arts not "making their case"—like Norman Lebrecht, trying to spin Tory cuts as a failure of Labour hard enough to sprain something, or Bob Shingleton, saying that "classical music must put its house in order"—is either being disingenuous or, I think, missing the point. Because those governments aren't going after the arts simply as a soft target—they're going after the arts because art is naturally in opposition to any government relying on spin, isolation, and fear.

Simon Stevin was himself a fundamentalist about the Dutch language, claiming that it was inherently superior for scientific discourse than the Latin then in vogue, and imagining that there once was a golden age of science and knowledge in which wisdom was available to all, because it was in Dutch. The editor of Stevin's above-mentioned Principal Works was compelled to demur:

The whole theory forms a typical example of how the most rational and scientific of minds may at the same time foster the most irrational and phantastical ideas on topics lying outside the sphere of his specific competence.

I think this is how we like to think of opponents of arts funding: they just don't understand it. I rather think that what we're seeing in Europe is a result of politicians understanding the power of art all too well. And, as Samuel Vriezen points out, ignoring the political aspect of attacks on the arts only bolsters the attackers. Mark Rutte, the new Dutch prime minister, is apparently an accomplished pianist who once considered the conservatory-then-performance career track—he certainly has an inkling. Geert Wilders, whom the Dutch cuts are no doubt meant to partially appease, is an expert propagandist—he knows. The British cuts fall more on provincial performing arts companies than London museums, venerable visual arts being far less likely to undermine the Tory narrative than unpredictable actors and musicians in the back of beyond. The 2010 UK Spending Review whacks the arts, the public sector, and the poor disproportionately hard. That's not political convenience—that's political calculation.

And, more likely than not, it's a calculation that might well be crossing the Atlantic sometime soon. Look at the appropriation for the National Endowment for the Arts—a useful enough benchmark of how important the arts and artistic livelihoods are to those in power. Arts advocates have been playing nice for decades now, emphasizing consensus and economic impact statements. Those are important, but it's ultimately been a holding strategy: the NEA's 2010 appropriation just about gets it back to its funding levels in 1988—and that's in real dollars, not inflation-adjusted ones. And the demagogues are starting to get just angry enough to stop dissembling. So artists might want to get ready to channel some anger of their own—not into anger, but into clarity. Like I've said: get in their face. Playing nice, after all, is just clever dissembling, too.

Update (10/22): Bob Shingleton takes exception. For the record, I thought Norman Lebrecht was the one being disingenuous, and that Shingleton was just taking his eye off the ball. But, as much as I like his writing, I just think he's dead wrong about both the cause and the response. The cuts in both the Netherlands and the UK have nothing to do with how transparent/efficient/above-board the classical music industry or other performing arts organizations are or are not. (I mean, the Tate Gallery has at least as many management skeletons in the closet over the past decade as any orchestra, and they got off far easier.) And I confess that I have a reflexive horror of the idea that, if you're attacked on unfair grounds, the best response is to self-examine and wonder what it is that you did wrong. American progressives did this for years and were outflanked every time. The classical music business is always in need of housecleaning—any business is. (The root of all evil, &c.) And Bob is right, unfortunately, when he notes that "Everyone is going to have to share the pain." The problem is, everyone is not sharing the pain, and that fact is a reflection of political agendas, not the state of arts management, however dire. In both these particular situations, the onus is on the governments to own up to the fact that the brunt of their hazardous austerity schemes are being borne by organizations and individuals that neither caused the crisis nor exacerbated it, not on those in the arts to put on sackcloth and hope for future absolution.

He'll be filled with diff'rent mixtures

The blog's gone purple today for Spirit Day, in support of LGBT teens and against anti-LGBT bullying. If you're an LGBT teenager, be proud! On the other hand, if you're one of those who needs your consciousness expanded on this particular point, then the golden age of the Hollywood musical would like a word with you—specifically, Ethel Merman and Mitzi Gaynor in 1954's There's No Business Like Show Business, throwing "don't ask, don't tell" and traditional gender roles to the wind:



As those better qualified than me to say it have said, it gets better—and if your definition of "better" includes Ethel Merman in sideburns, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Transition, transmission

Notes unnoticed. On Maryanne Amacher.
Boston Globe, October 19, 2010.

More information about Friday's MIT tribute can be found here. Information on this month's New York City performance of CityLinks can be found here. The online Maryanne Amacher archive is here.

Savoir-Faire is everywhere

Reiewing the Boston Symphony Orchestra Chamber Players.
Boston Globe, October 19, 2010.

Just as in the Frankie and Johnny song, he done her wrong

Reviewing Boston Baroque and Barbara Quintiliani.
Boston Globe, October 18, 2010.

Never believe it's not so

Reviewing Russell Sherman.
Boston Globe, October 8, 2010.

Some people work for a living, some people work for fun

After too long a delay, I'm back with more rambling over at NewMusicBox. This is what happens when I get told I can't like what I like one too many times.

Also, some Boston Globe catch-up:

Some CD reviews: part one (scroll down), part two.
Reviewing Garrick Ohlsson.
Reviewing the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The book is nearing an end. But I could use some help on something. I was writing up my bit on Landsberg 6—the sketchbook that contains the first inklings of Beethoven's Fifth. Now, there isn't much, if anything, left to say about Landsberg 6, which musicologists have pretty well picked over since Nottebohm first wrote about it back in 1880. But, my brain being what it is, I ended up spending all of yesterday banging my head against the wall over the paucity of information on the sketchbook's namesake, Ludwig Landsberg. Born in Breslau (in 1804, 1805, or 1807, depending on who you believe), a tenor in the Berlin Opera chorus, also a violinist, he ended up living in Rome for twenty-some years, hosting soirees and promoting German music (most scholarly mentions surround one such salon at which the guest of honor was Fanny Mendelssohn). But he also owned a trove of manuscripts—not only Beethoven, but also Schubert, and Chopin, and scads of early music. My question: where did he get the money to amass that collection? Sure, manuscripts were cheaper back then, but they weren't free, and Landsberg's collecting was on a scale I would not expect on an expat violinist's salary. Was he well-connected? Did he have family money? (Apparently his brother back in Breslau was a banker, according to Thayer, who didn't bother mentioning his brother's first name.) My spidey sense is going crazy thinking that there has to be something more interesting going on with Landsberg that indicated in his Grove blurb, but every lead hits a brick wall.

Follow the Fleet

All kinds of recent business, including this hefty bit of concision:

Reviewing the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.
Boston Globe, August 19, 2010.

A couple of other reviews:

Reviewing the Monadnock Music Festival.
Boston Globe, August 10, 2010.

Reviewing Pierre-Laurent Aimard.
Boston Globe, August 12, 2010.

Oh, and this bit of goofiness over at The Faster Times.

And, since I'm trying to finish a book, and writers always drink to excess, I've been dipping back into the greatest cocktail book of all time, that being the second volume of Charles H. Baker, Jr.'s The Gentleman's Companion. On page 110, Baker trots out something called "Admiral Schley Punch," named for Winfield Scott Schley, troublemaking hero/loose cannon of the Spanish-American War. Take it away, Mr. Baker:

ADMIRAL SCHLEY PUNCH

This is supposed to have been named after the American admiral, and we shouldn't mind such a pleasant piece of business being named after us.

St. Croix or Barbados rum, ½ jigger
Bourbon, ½ jigger
Sugar, 1 tsp
Lime, peel and juice, 1

Shake with fine ice, and turn into goblet—ice and all. Garnish with sprigs of mint, a stick of ripe pineapple, and so on.

Holy mother of pearl, this might just be the best summer drink ever concocted. We salute you, Admiral Schley!

Wish I Was Here

I've been terribly remiss on linking to Globe stuff, so here's a month's catch-up:

Classical Notes.
Boston Globe, July 23, 2010.

Subbing for David Weininger with my usual terminal obliqueness. (Yes, I did play a lot of deep left field during my brief and thoroughly undistinguished career as a Little Leaguer. Why do you ask?)

Reviewing Audra McDonald.
Boston Globe, July 20, 2010.

Damn, this was a good recital.

Reviewing the SICPP Iditarod.
Boston Globe, June 22, 2010.

Summer doesn't really start for me until the Iditarod. Tricks of the trade: how do you make it through a seven-hour concert? You smuggle in iced coffee and gummi bears.

Reviewing the Boston Trio.
Boston Globe, June 19, 2010.

Joe Barron sent me a nice note wondering why the Ives Trio doesn't get more love, and I'm inclined to agree with him. It might be the perfect Ives piece for people who think they don't like Ives—he does all his usual Ivesianisms, but the context makes the connections to his recurring underlying worldview unusually clear. (The new Rockport hall really is as gorgeous as everyone says.)

Reviewing Blue Heron Renaissance Choir.
Boston Globe, June 15, 2010.

An unusually smart program, this one, one of the only musicological-connection-type early-music concerts I've heard where the connections were all absolutely audible.

Anyway, it's still going to be bare-bones links for another couple of months around here, but the end of the book is in sight. I'm currently in a tag-team wrestling match with, alternately, August Röckel and Walter Murphy. Funny, I don't remember them making it into Grout and Palisca.

See it in your face. See it in your eye. Lazy idle little schemer.

Hey, it's Bloomsday. Yes I said yes I will Yes! I'm celebrating by plowing through a little more of the book at a protracted, Joyce-like pace. Today's assignment: Karl Marx and History. I love that song!



As far as I know, Marx only gets one mention in Ulysses, as Bloom taunts the anti-Semitic "Citizen" in a pub:

Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.

Anyway, back to work corralling my insatiable appetite for tangent. But I could talk about leftist punk rock and Joyce and Lacanian psychoanalysis and somehow tie in Stalin's "Marxism and Problems of Linguistics"! No, no you can't. Now write that damn transition into that discussion of Nietzsche's concept of Eternal Recurrence already!

Through restful waters and deep commotion

It's Robert Schumann's 200th birthday today. Happy birthday! Over at The Faster Times, there's some more celebratory rambling, in which I propose that Schumann was, among other things, the first great classical-music fan. One bit of evidence: as far as I can tell, Schumann is the first composer to use the B-A-C-H motive as a tribute, in his six op. 60 Fugues. (Beethoven, apparently, did toss around the idea of a B-A-C-H overture, but never actually wrote it.) Here's Silvio Celeghin playing the second of Schumann's B-A-C-H fugues on one of Schumann's favorite instruments, the incredibly cool pedal piano:



Incidentally, the more I think about it, the more the comparison I make between Schumann and Brian Wilson holds up. One other parallel: they both love repetition, taking comfort and sustenance in particularly nourishing harmonic or melodic loops. When you think about it, both musically and biographically, "Sail On Sailor" might be the most Schumannesque rock song ever written.

Large and in charge [plus an Ivesian ramble]

Reviewing the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
Boston Globe, May 31, 2010.

Also, I forgot to link to this one over the Memorial Day weekend:

Hailing the 54th With Monumental Works. The joined Civil War memorials of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Charles Ives.
Boston Globe, May 28, 2010.

Ives's original proposed context for his "St.-Gaudens" movement is a little mysterious. It was to have been the third movement of a triptych—the second being his Wendell Phillips piece, the piano study known as "The Anti-Abolitionist Riots." It's the first movement that's a puzzle. Ives's memos refer to something called "The Common (Largo) (Emerson & Park Ch)" (scroll down here to x683). Most Ives biographers have taken this to mean "Emerson and Park Church," a reference to Park Street Church, across the street from Boston Common—but that doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense, Park Street Church having been (and still being) an outpost of rather conservative Congregationalism, and one that, in the 19th century, was not very sympathetic to abolitionists. The best possibility of an Emerson-Park Street Church connection would be the 1846 funeral of Charles Turner Torrey, an early anti-slavery activist who died in a Maryland penitentiary; Park Street Church withdrew their permission to host Torrey's funeral, after which it was moved to Tremont Temple (Emerson attended the funeral but did not speak at it). James Sinclair raises the possibility that Ives really meant Park Square, not Park Church—and Boston's Park Square does still have its copy of Thomas Ball's Freedman's Memorial, the original of which is in Washington, D.C. One other far-fetched possibility—well, maybe not so far-fetched, given the way Ives abbreviated names in his memos—is that "Park Ch" refers to a pair of Emerson's fellow abolitionists: Theodore Parker and William Henry Channing. That reading could circle back to Torrey as well: Channing did speak at Torrey's funeral, and Emerson's subsequent "Ode to W. H. Channing"—

Virtue palters, right is hence,
Freedom praised but hid;
Funeral eloquence
Rattles the coffin-lid

—has often been interpreted as a reaction to that event.

It's All True

Sorry it's been quiet around here, but I've been busy gearing up to respond to the new standards for history textbooks imposed by the Texas School Board. Like all good Americans, I want a piece of that action—textbooks are high-margin! So I've been coming up with a music history text that'll reorient a thousand years of Western music away from liberal brainwashing and towards divinely-sanctioned American exceptionalism. Here goes:

Jazz was invented by Paul Whiteman as a musical expression of his love for traditional values.

THE END

Oh, and George Gershwin borrowed from the blues a lot because he was sad he wasn't a Christian. Yeah, that'll work. (And I agree that textbooks always overlook Joe McCarthy's achievements. For example, the man could drink like a fish.)

In other news, I've been horribly remiss about linking to Globe reviews. Here's a couple recent ones:

Reviewing Michael Maniaci and Boston Baroque. (May 10, 2010)

Reviewing the Back Bay Chorale. (May 17, 2010)

In the Maniaci review, I talk about speculation that Venanzio Rauzzini, Mozart's favorite castrato, wasn't a castrato at all, but a natural male soprano. (More detailed speculation here.) I don't know if I buy it, though, especially after reading this contemporary description, from the April, 1807 issue of a magazine called The Monthly Mirror:

SIGNOR VENANZIO RAUZZINI, the subject of our present memoir, is by birth a Roman, and at a very early period of life evinced a fondness for music, which induced his parents to devote him, as it were, entirely to the study of that enchanting science.

As it were. On the other hand, the story about Haydn composing a setting of the epitaph for Rauzzini's dog is totally true.

As long as we're housecleaning, I found this on my hard drive. I have no idea why I originally made it. So here it is to haunt your dreams for no reason:

The Efficiency Expert

Reviewing Maurizio Pollini.
Boston Globe, April 28, 2010.

If my ears weren't deceiving me (always a possibility), whether by design or accident, Pollini hit a Picardy third in the final chord of the B-flat-minor Sonata. Interestingly, it kind of works.

Escapism

Reviewing Shirish Korde's "Phoolan Devi: The Bandit Queen."
Boston Globe, April 26, 2010.

His clothes are loud, but never square

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Boston Globe, April 14, 2010.

Arnie's Army

Reviewing the Chameleon Arts Ensemble.
Boston Globe, March 29, 2010.

The weather started getting rough—the tiny ship was toss'd

Reviewing the Stephen Petronio Company's "I Drink the Air Before Me."
Boston Globe, March 22, 2010.

Rake leaves during dinner? He does what he pleases (3,8)

Reviewing New England Conservatory's Don Giovanni.
Boston Globe, March 16, 2010.

Prior engagement

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Chamber Players.
Boston Globe, March 16, 2010.

I'll buy a top hat to brighten up my lonely life

Reviewing Max Raabe & Palast Orchester.
Boston Globe, March 9, 2010.

Rosin the Beau

Reviewing the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
Boston Globe, March 9, 2010.

"Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily"

Is this thing still on? Apologies to anyone still checking this channel and only finding a desultory string of Globe review links. As might be obvious, the book has now completely colonized my time and headspace (my physical space, too—from where I'm sitting, I can see nine research books. And this is in the kitchen.)

The latest chapter was, in part, a hefty digression from Beethoven's Fifth into general anti-German sentiment during World War I, when everybody in America seems to have lost their minds on the subject of the abominable Hun. The book's focus is Karl Muck, the Boston Symphony composer who was arrested and deported under circumstances that would be hilarious if they hadn't actually happened. Another performer who got swept up in the hysteria was the violinist Fritz Kreisler. To be fair, Kreisler did time in the Austrian army, and made no secret of his financial support of Austrian war relief; but when an assortment of wealthy wives in Pittsburgh forced the cancellation of a scheduled Kreisler recital in Pittsburgh, there began to be the sense that things were getting a little out of hand. From the November 15, 1917 issue of Life magazine:

By all means let him fiddle.... It does no harm, but quite the contrary. If it is true, as was reported, that he lost a lot of money going short on Bethlehem Steel at the wrong time two years ago, and is now trying to pay it back, it cannot be true as the Pittsburg ladies supposed, that he is shipping vast sums of concert money home to Austria.

Keep in mind that Life had pushed as hard as anyone for an American entry into the war. And I like the implication that Fritz Kreisler was a pioneering victim of globalization.

The other aspect of this chapter that's been chewing up a lot of time is that Oscar Wilde was right: seemingly every single novel written during the Victorian era was, in fact, three volumes long. I must have plowed through a couple dozen of these, at least. Some are surprisingly good—I'm now something of a fan of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, for example. But it's remarkable how many of these novels were enormously popular in their day and are now completely—and I mean completely—forgotten. I would guess that not many people outside of English departments have made it through Augusta Evans's 1866 St. Elmo, for instance, in the past century—but it was an enormous hit. Towns were named after it, for gosh sakes. St. Elmo is not my favorite nineteenth-century three-volume novel, but it did earn some sympathy from me on the strength of a catty review in The New York Times, September 23, 1899. "We can hardly understand a generation that took these books seriously," the reviewer wonders:

Miss Evans's novels combine impossible characters with the most naïvely preposterous pedantries. One thinks of her as a literary Van Amburgh, who

Goes into the lion's cage
And tells you all she knows.

Hey, wait a minute, that's pretty much my entire m.o.!

It's Oh So Quiet

Reviewing Vittorio Ghielmi and Luca Pianca.
Boston Globe, March 1, 2010.

Integritas, Consonantia, Claritas

Reviewing the Claremont Trio and the Setzer-Finckel-Han Trio.
Boston Globe, February 23, 2010.

I made it from a 1:30 concert at the Gardner Museum to a 3:00 concert at Jordan Hall by running a nine-minute mile. Not bad for an overweight critic! Two days later, my knees still hurt.

It's Nice to Go Trav'ling

Reviewing Continuum at Harvard.
Boston Globe, February 22, 2010.

Strangers in the Night

In memoriam, Katherine Grayson and Frank Sinatra in 1947's It Happened In Brooklyn, singing "Là ci darem la mano" from Mozart's Don Giovanni. Make fun of it all you want, I still think this is forty kinds of awesome. The pianist is André Previn; somewhere out there is an alternate take with Previn and longtime MGM stalwart Johnny Green manning two pianos, just to further mess with the purists.

Parts and labor

Reviewing Collage New Music.
Boston Globe, February 10, 2010.

Collective bargaining

Reviewing the Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet.
Boston Globe, February 8, 2010.

I've been through the mill of love

Reviewing Randall Scarlata and Jeremy Denk.
Boston Globe, January 20, 2010.

Great Moments in Parody

Edward M. Favor: "Who Threw the Overalls in Mrs, Murphy's Chowder?" (1901, Edison Concert Cylinder #7697)

Harry "The Hipster" Gibson: "Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?" (1944, Musicraft Records #346)

Tokay Computer

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Chamber Players.
Boston Globe, January 12, 2010.

The Victorian Tongue

We may live without poetry, music, and art:
We may live without conscience, and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man cannot live without cooks.
He may live without books,—what is knowledge but grieving?
He may live without hope,—what is hope but deceiving?
He may live without love,—what is passion but pining?
But where is the man that can live without dining?

—Owen Meredith, Lucile (1860)

Owen Meredith was the pen name of Edward Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton; as Viceroy of India, Lytton counted on his résumé the Great Indian Famine of the late 1870s as well as the Pyrrhically expensive Second Anglo-Afghan War, the latter decisively contributing to the 1880 downfall of Disraeli's second (and final) premiership. For his efforts, Lytton was created 1st Earl of Lytton. "Genius does what it must," Lytton/Meredith famously wrote, "talent does what it can."

Vertical hold

Taking a stand for Messiah.
Boston Globe, December 19, 2009.

I would probably quote George Bernard Shaw in every article I wrote if I could, but his riff on standing for the "Hallelujah" chorus was cut for space: calling Handel not just a composer, not just an institution, but “a sacred institution,” Shaw mischievously judged the tradition “the nearest sensation to the elevation of the Host known to English Protestants.”

The playing of the merry organ

My lovely wife picked up a veal kidney for me at the store, with the stipulation that I could only cook it when she wasn't in the house. So Critic-at-Large Moe and I had our own office holiday party today.

(Rognons de veau en casserole courtesy of—who else?—Julia Child.) Why, look who else is here—it's Franco Corelli!



That "stella d'argento" he's giving Callas looks like it was made out of pure radium.

All is calm

Reviewing Boston Baroque's annual Messiah.
Boston Globe, December 15, 2009.

Word up

Reviewing the Firebird Ensemble.
Boston Globe, December 9, 2009.

I get the sense he might not like it

Hey, Robert Evett, what do you think about Charles Ives? I mean, seeing as how it's 1954 and he's just died and all.

Ives never developed a style, indigenous, American or otherwise. He spent at least half of his creative life writing in a bastardized romantic idiom which was little more than a caricature of Schumann, Franz, Brahms and the the others.... Later, he dressed this music up with a number of singularly ugly or impractical elements, but these elements were never fused into anything consistent enough to be called a style.
...
[T]here is no reason to doubt that Ives meant to give music—at least his own music—its freedom. Perhaps Ives had the imagination he would have needed for bringing this about, but he didn't have the technique.... In his effort to get free of convention, Ives was usually reduced to a kind of mindless banging around which disguised sometimes the poverty of his materials.
...
Charles Ives will surely merit a case history by some future musicologist as an example of the 20th Century composer whoring after novelty.
...
All American artists are unfortunate in that the first of us who enjoyed any particular international vogue was Mr. Whitman, and that it is his work which has become, like Betty Crocker's recipes, a touchstone for things American.... For musicians it is worse. We had nothing to offer before Ives, and he smelled like Whitman's armpits.

—Robert Evett, "Music Letter: A Post-Mortem for Mr. Ives,"
The Kenyon Review, vol. 16, no. 4 (Autumn 1954)

Whitman's armpits? But that's an aroma finer than prayer!

She's Gotta Have it

Malibran had borne along the first two acts [of The Maid of Artois] on the first night of performance in such a flood of triumph, that she was bent, by some almost superhuman effort, to continue its glory to the final fall of the curtain. I went into her dressing-room previous to the commencement of the third act, to ask how she felt, and she replied, "Very tired, but" (and here her eye of fire suddenly lighted up) "you angry devil, if you will contrive to get me a pint of porter in the desert scene, you shall have an encore to your finale." Had I been dealing with any other performer, I should perhaps have hesitated in complying with a request that might have been dangerous in its application at the moment; but to check her powers was to annihilate them. I therefore arranged that, behind the pile of drifted sand on which she falls in a state of exhaustion, towards the close of the desert scene, a small aperture should be made in the stage; and it is a fact that, from underneath the stage through that aperture, a pewter pint of porter was conveyed to the parched lips of this rare child of song, which so revived her, after the terrible exertion the scene led to, that she electrified the audience, and had strength to repeat the charm, with the finale to the Maid of Artois.

—Alfred Bunn, The Stage: Both Before and Behind the Curtain (1840)

Bunn, manager of the Drury Lane Theater and Covent Garden, also wrote the libretto of The Maid of Artois for Michael Balfe. A couple of months after her triumph, Malibran fell off her horse, triggering an illness that would claim her life shortly thereafter. The Countess de Merlin's 1841 Memoirs of Madame Malibran reports that during Malibran's final illness, her landlady ventured the opinion that the porter Malibran drank with her customary oyster breakfast might not be agreeing with her. "What can I do?" Malibran replied. "I must take something for my voice, and I find this the best thing I can take."

Into the Woods

Reviewing the Boston Early Music Festival's Acis and Galatea.
Boston Globe, November 30, 2009.

'Tis the season

And then a face came peering over Stella's shoulder. A face with grizzled jowls and red-rimmed eyes under spikey, dark tousled hair. Kerouac? The face said, "Yeah," and then: "You want to come in?"

Although the sun was two hours from taking its evening dip in the Gulf ten miles to the west, the house was dim inside. A television set in the corner was on, soundless. The sound you heard was Handel's Messiah blaring from speakers in the next room.

"I like to watch television like that," Kerouac said.

—Jack McClintock, "Jack Kerouac Is On the Road No More,"
St. Petersburg Times, October 12, 1969

Glam compilation

Reviewing the Boston Philharmonic's all-Wagner program.
Boston Globe, November 23, 2009.

During Benjamin Zander's leitmotif-tour, I doodled my own Ring synopsis:

Blueprint machine

Reviewing Katherine Chi and Aleksandar Madzar, playing Stockhausen's Mantra.
Boston Globe, November 18, 2009.

Beguiled again

Reviewing Boston Opera Collaborative's The Crucible.
Boston Globe, November 17, 2009.

The Globe copy desk is apparently not the Carolyn Leigh fan that I am—the last line of the first paragraph should be, of course, "What good would common sense for it do?"

Please stop

I got a press-release e-mail this week with the subject line "Survey Reveals People Love Classical Music During Tough Economic Times". Curious? I was. (I mean, does that mean they hate classical music when the economy picks up again? Because that would be kind of weird.) Turns out, it's an online survey by the mp3-dealer Classical Archives. The question was this: "Why do you think you love classical music?" And, sure enough, 20.3% of the respondents clicked on "Relaxes me when life is stressing me out". Now, they didn't specify just what was stressing those respondents out specifically, but OK, bad economy is pretty universally stressful, fair enough.

But here's how the press release spins that: "The survey suggests that classical music, more than rock and pop, is able to calm the nerves in tough times." COMMENCE COMEDY SPIT-TAKE NOW! I sure hope somebody at Classical Archives is frantically looking under the cushions for some longitudinal data to support that conclusion, considering they forgot to even mention rock or pop—or jazz, or musical theatre, or polka, or Sacred Harp, or Pansori, or anything else—in the wording of their survey. More from the press release:

Nolan Gasser, Artistic Director, Classical Archives, notes, that “Are the results surprising? Hardly."

I wouldn't think so, given that the sample pool consisted exclusively of customers of a classical music website.

Of course, 60.2% of the respondents love classical music because "It is simply the best music there is," an statement of such impressive intellectual vacuity that I'm guessing it could liquefy nitrogen. Me? I love classical music because the majority of it doesn't characterize the relationship between life, art, performer, and listener as "simply" anything, but as an opportunity to acknowledge and explore that relationship's complexity, because there are still some of us who think that complexity is fun and rewarding. That's probably too long for a multiple-choice poll answer, isn't it? Yeah, I thought so. OK, fine—I'll take "I'm a freak for culture."

The Girl Can't Help It

Today's bit of tangential Beethoven history: the reason Franz Liszt wasn't invited back for the 1870 Beethoven centennial festivities in Beethoven's birthplace of Bonn. Back in the 1840s, when the city's plans for a Beethoven monument looked as if they might falter because of insufficient funds, Liszt stepped in, pledging his talents and enough of his then-considerable concert receipts to support the statue and the 1845 festival surrounding its unveiling. At a banquet following the festival's final concert, Liszt (speaking in German, not his most comfortable language) offered a toast to the assembled representatives from throughout Europe, but failed to mention the French, and the result was an uproar, with speakers being shouted down, insults being hurled, and all manner of nationalistic and anti-Semitic bile let loose.

As if that weren't bad enough, at the height of the disturbance, Lola Montez, the Irish-born, Spanish-impersonating dancer, who had followed her one-time lover Liszt to Bonn and crashed the banquet uninvited, attempted to quell the disturbance by drunkenly jumping up onto a table and spinning around. Insulting the French might have been OK by the Bonn city fathers, but the unexpected presence of the scandalous Montez was something else. A quarter-century later, Bonn's centennial celebration went off without Liszt, who stayed in Weimar.

There might be movies with final shots as good as that of Max Ophüls' 1955 Lola Montès, but I don't think there are any that are better. Un dollar...

Immortal hand or eye

Reviewing the Boston Classical Orchestra.
Boston Globe, October 29, 2009.

Frenzy and frolic, strictly symbolic

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Boston Globe, October 28, 2009.

Orientation

Reviewing the Juilliard String Quartet.
Boston Globe, October 27, 2009.

I sit down and write a brand-new rhyme

Beethoven's early believers. The Transcendentalists' Ludwig Van.
Boston Globe, October 25, 2009.

What you hear is not a chorus. "Rapper's Delight" and the vestige of minstrelsy.
Boston Globe, October 25, 2009.

Updates in this space have pretty much dropped off the radar, haven't they? But at least I'm keeping busy. (The first article previews Chapter 4 of the ever-impending book; if I can get "Rapper's Delight" in there as well, I'll at least have reached new levels of expressive tangentiality.)

Noticeable absence

Reviewing the Boston Chamber Music Society.
Boston Globe, October 20, 2009.

Les adieux

Reviewing Ann Hobson Pilot and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Boston Globe, October 5, 2009.

Reviewing Frederica von Stade (and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa).
The Faster Times, October 4, 2009.

Trade agreement

Reviewing Lynn Chang, Wu Man, and A Far Cry.
Boston Globe, September 28, 2009. (Yes, I forgot when it was going to run.)

Fun item that didn't fit #1: Lynn Chang announced that the concert was originally supposed to be called "East Meets West Meets East," to which, he admitted, Wu Man said "no way."

Fun item that didn't fit #2: While I couldn't find any confirmation of it on deadline, I'm assuming that when Lou Harrison titled the slow movement of his pipa concerto "Threnody for Richard Locke," he was referring to Richard Locke the gay activist and porn actor, who died the year before the concerto's premiere. (L.A. Tool & Die has to be one of the best porn titles ever.)

Long since disrelished

The usage of Instrumental Musick in our Public Worship of GOD, hath been long since disrelished among His Faithful People. Justin Martyr long ago exploded it. Yea, Aquinas himself, as late as less than Five hundred Years ago, decried it. Indeed it was one of the Last Things which the Man of Sin introduced, in the Worship of our SAVIOUR, which he had already fill'd with a Multitude of Superstitions. We will then for the present look on the Jewish Trumpets, and Organs too, as a part of the Abrogated Pedagogy.

—Cotton Mather, India Christiana (1621)

That's it: from now on, every prelude and postlude gets listed in the church bulletin as "Abrogated Pedagogy."

Room for Souvenirs

Reviewing Boston Musica Viva.
Boston Globe, September 28, 2009.

Parallel lines, who meet

Reviewing the Concord Chamber Players.
Boston Globe, September 23, 2009.

Four Once

Reviewing the Muir Quartet.
Boston Globe, September 14, 2009.

The propitiatory intent

Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red grass had been ploughed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr. Shimerda's grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross. As grandfather had predicted, Mrs. Shimerda never saw the roads going over his head. The road from the north curved a little to the east just there, and the road from the west swung out a little to the south; so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft gray rivers flowing past it. I never came upon the place without emotion, and in all that country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence — the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.

—Willa Cather, My Ántonia