Glass and steel

Via Geoff Edgers, John Mellencamp on how the corporatization of America has wrecked the music industry. I agree with a lot of this, although I think it's complicated by the fact that the rise of the popular music industry was also fueled by an economic quirk: the post-WWII increase in adolescent disposable income. Corporate money started flooding into pop music in the 1950s, even if the corporations had no clue about the content—it just took a while for technology to render that ignorance moot. And, for the record, I can sing the chorus to "All I Want For Christmas Is You," and frequently do, at seasonally inappropriate times.

The winners of the first Guthman Musical Instrument Competition were announced earlier this month. None of them, though, I'm betting, are as big as the Mid-Hudson Bridge, which Joseph Bertolozzi turned into percussion to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's journey up the eponymous river. (I'm still trying to imagine what that initial $2.2 million budget would have entailed.)

Singing astronomer! I'm a big enough nerd to get behind that. Have you ever drunkenly confused Messier and Messaien? I have. (Take a listen here.)

And "Beverly Hills Housewife," David Hockney's portrait of patron Betty Freeman, is expected to bring $7-10 million when it's auctioned in May.

He that planted the ear, shall he not hear?

Happy Birthday Julius Reubke!







Reubke: Der 94^ste Psalm. Sonate für die Orgel (played by Dong-ill Shin, Arjen Leistra, and Dora Barclay)

Light=Dark

Rodgers and Hart: "Spring Is Here" (Jessye Norman; Boston Pops/John Williams)
Philips 412 625-2 (available in compilation)

Arrangement by the prolific Joe Reisman. It's pretty brisk for spring here in Framingham—and the way things have been going, I'm expecting snow any day now. Sure, it's not in the forecast, but around these parts, that means nothing. (Cornelius Cardew would have been a fantastic New England weatherman.) But those crocuses are going to bloom because it's spring, dammit, and nobody tells crocuses what they can and can't do.

OK, back to work. Seriously, wasn't the computer revolution supposed to boost leisure time?

Manual transmission

Bruckner: Symphony no. 8
Mozart: Symphony no. 38 "Prague"
Staatskapelle Dresden
Bernard Haitink, conductor
Profil PH 07057

Travelling music in the official Soho the Dog 1999 Honda Civic as of late have been these excellent CDs, recorded live in 2002. We've been blasting this thing all week, to and from the store, to and from work, to and from various parcels of conservation land—today it was even warm enough to roll down the window and serenade the environs. Critic-at-Large Moe, it turns out, loves the stuff, as it seems to call forth ancestral memories of Medieval hunts, inspiring an unusually regal mien.

Noble mobile Brucknerian Moe.

What I like about this recording is that Haitink and the orchestra know when to just let the music sit there, a crucial part of successful Bruckner performance. There's no getting around that much of Bruckner's symphonies consist in large part of big, static chunks of music. Beethoven has his moments like this, of course, but Bruckner goes all out—where Beethoven uses Legos, Bruckner builds symphonies out of Duplo blocks. It is, I think, one of the things that people who don't like Bruckner's music don't like about it. But if you try and massage that aspect of the music, you usually end up with a counterproductive see-saw. Haitink and the band build up a good head of steam, polish the balance, and then just let Anton be Anton.

Even more than Messaien, I think, Bruckner is the one composer whose music always immediately gives away his organist identity. Not just in the orchestration, although you can almost hear him pulling the stops every time he gears up for a big crescendo—8' strings, add 4' winds, start tossing in reed stops (trumpets and horns), a 32' on the pedal, and finally mixtures of the higher winds. It's that modular construction, letting a particular texture sound for a span of time, changing dynamic by changing forces instead of individual volume. (When Bruckner does subito dynamic effects, it's usually by changing instrumental choirs, like shifting to a different manual.)

The "Prague" is a better pairing that one might think—the connecting thread being Bruckner's hammered articulations in the 8th's finale (an unusually pianistic texture for him) which nicely sets up Mozart's motoric Classicism. The performance is dangerously energetic—it's usually encouraging me to speed. I need to swap it out for something more serene.

"I took many a lump, but 'twas all in good fun"

Guerrieri: Clog Dubh Rag (2009) (PDF, 4 pages, 264 Kb; MIDI here)

This month's rag (previously: 1, 2) celebrates St. Patrick's Day in typically loud and chaotic fashion. The Clog Dubh Phádraig, the "Black Bell of St. Patrick," is now in the National Museum in Dublin. William Wilde (Oscar's father) described it thus in his 1867 book Lough Corrib, its Shores and Islands:

It was believed in the locality that this bell was a present from an angel to the saint, and was originally of pure silver, but that it was rendered black and corroded, as at present seen, "by its contact with the demons on Croaghpatrick, when the Apostle of Ireland was expelling them thence."

One legend connects the bell with Patrick's driving the snakes out of Ireland—the snakes were so persistent in their harassment during Patrick's mountaintop hermitage that he finally threw the bell at them, which scared them sufficiently that they didn't stop slithering until they were in the sea. (Hence the C strain, which makes liberal use of "Banish Misfortune" from the Petrie Collection.)

Lucha libro

I'm part of a distinguished mob spending the week over at Molly Sheridan's Mind the Gap chewing on Lawrence Lessig's latest book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Grab a cup of coffee and stop in.

A suitable soundtrack: remix pioneer Shep Pettibone's 1983 gloss on First Choice's "Let No Man Put Asunder":

Unlikely music critic of the day

6/7/2003	23:49:47	Reply from THE MAYOR is I'm AT THE GAP BAND, ISLEY BROS. CONCERT. JUST WORN OUT FROM HANGING. (06/08 12:49AM EDT) to What are you doing?
6/7/2003	23:56:19	WHAT Are YOUUUU DOING? MAYOR KILPATRICK (06/08 12:56AM EDT)
6/7/2003	23:58:03	Reply from Christine Beatty is I am laying here watching Antoine Fisher. Just chillin. (06/07 11:58PM CDT) to WHAT Are YOUUUU DOING? MAYOR KILPATRICK
6/8/2003	0:01:11	Reply from THE MAYOR is That's HOW I WAS PICTURING U. DAMN NEAR NECKADE, JUST CHILLIN! (06/08 01:01AM EDT) to I am laying here watching Antoine Fisher. Just chi
6/8/2003	0:07:11	Reply from Christine Beatty is LOL. I actually have on my Ralph Lauren pajamas and I'm chillin! (06/08 12:07AM CDT) to That's HOW I WAS PICTURING U. DAMN NEAR NECKADE, J
6/8/2003	0:19:35	Reply from THE MAYOR is That's CLOSE ENOUGH. (06/08 01:19AM EDT) to LOL. I actually have on my Ralph Lauren pajamas an
6/8/2003	0:33:58	Reply from Christine Beatty is LOL. I just had a little mini dream about you. (06/08 12:33AM CDT) to That's CLOSE ENOUGH.
6/8/2003	0:35:56	Reply from THE MAYOR Is LOL! I'm HAVING MAJOR DREAMS. THE ISLEYS Are KILLING THEM. (06/08 01:35AM EDT) to LOL. I just had a little mini dream about you.
6/8/2003	0:37:24	Reply from Christine Beatty is The Isley's are killing what? (06/08 12:37AM CDT) to LOL! I'm HAVING MAJOR DREAMS. THE ISLEYS Are KILLI
6/8/2003	0:42:32	Reply from THE MAYOR is THEY ARE STILL PERFORMING! AND JAMMING: HELLO, CHOOSEY LOVER, ATLANTIS, ETC. ( 06/08 01:42AM EDT) to The Isley's are killing what?
6/8/2003	0:44:32	Reply from Christine Beatty is Ohhh. Those are the jams! You still think of me when you hear love songs? (06/08 12:44AM CDT) to THEY ARE STILL PERFORMING! AND JAMMING: HELLO, CHO
6/8/2003	0:47:46	Reply from THE MAYOR is HELL YEAH! LIVIN FOR THE LOVE OF YOU! (06/08 01:47AM EDT) to Ohhh. Those are the jams! You still think of me wh

Some of the approximately 6,000 text messages released this week by order of Wayne Circuit Judge Timothy Kenny, part of the scandal that drove both Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick ("THE MAYOR") and his chief of staff, Christine Beatty, from office. Kilpatrick was in Denver in June 2003, attending the 71st Annual Meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors; the concert was at Red Rocks.

The Isley Brothers' 2003 tour was in support of their R. Kelly-produced Body Kiss album, but former Mayor Kilpatrick shows a discerning taste for the classics: "Hello, It's Me," a Todd Rundgren cover, comes from the Brothers' funk-heavy 1974 album Live It Up, "Voyage to Atlantis" comes from 1977's platinum-selling Go For Your Guns, and "Choosey Lover," from Between the Sheets, was a late-night-radio slow-jam hit in 1983. But the best comes last: "For the Love of You Pts. 1 & 2" was one of the two biggest hit singles from 1975's epoch-making The Heat Is On, the other being "Fight the Power".

Take Care of This House

A serendipitous footnote to yesterday's ramble on places, real and virtual, is this story, which you probably have seen: Leonard Bernstein's composition studio is being shipped to Indiana.

Leonard Bernstein’s children have donated the carefully preserved contents of his main composing studio to Indiana University, which has promised to recreate the space.

The items run from the deeply meaningful to the banal. They include Bernstein’s stand-up composing table; a conducting stool that may have been used by Brahms, given as a gift by the Vienna Philharmonic; an electric pencil sharpener; a telephone; an ashtray and disposable lighters; 39 Grammy-nomination plaques; and a piece of the Berlin Wall.

The first time I ever went wandering around the main branch of the Boston Public Library, I turned a corner and found Walter Piston's studio, similarly transplanted from his home in Belmont, Massachusetts, after his death. Another Massachusetts example: in 2001, Julia Child's kitchen was moved, lock, stock, and barrel, from her house in Cambridge to the Smithsonian Institution.

Does this sort of thing happen in Europe? Not the preservation of an artist's studio—you can still visit Mahler's composing shed, for instance—but dismantling it and reassembling it somewhere completely different? I find it a very American thing to do, both in terms of American vices—prioritization of convenience, fetishization of stuff—and virtues: mobility, reinvention, history that accrues to people and not places. I started thinking about Bernstein's musicals and operas, all of which concern very specific places, from his early hit On the Town to his late flop 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It struck me that trucking his studio across the country would be a return to form for Bernstein, for whom the protean transience of New York was a better muse than the weighty history of the White House.

One more song about moving along the highway

Reviewing the Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma.
Boston Globe, March 12, 2009.

Where'er you walk

Richard Florida has an article in The Atlantic this month speculating on the relationship between place and recession-pain level. It's basically a disaster-movie extension of his "creative class" brand.

Economic crises tend to reinforce and accelerate the underlying, long-term trends within an economy. Our economy is in the midst of a fundamental long-term transformation—similar to that of the late 19th century, when people streamed off farms and into new and rising industrial cities. In this case, the economy is shifting away from manufacturing and toward idea-driven creative industries—and that, too, favors America’s talent-rich, fast-metabolizing places.
...
What will this geography look like? It will likely be sparser in the Midwest and also, ultimately, in those parts of the Southeast that are dependent on manufacturing. Its suburbs will be thinner and its houses, perhaps, smaller. Some of its southwestern cities will grow less quickly. Its great mega-regions will rise farther upward and extend farther outward. It will feature a lower rate of homeownership, and a more mobile population of renters. In short, it will be a more concentrated geography, one that allows more people to mix more freely and interact more efficiently in a discrete number of dense, innovative mega-regions and creative cities.

Florida advocates using the economic crisis as an opportunity to reshape society to privilege such creative industries.

It's interesting that the idea of a critical mass of creative people in a particular place still holds for classical music, at least. Historically, that's par for the course—culture has been a big-city phenomenon going back to the Renaissance. But, given the hype of the game-changing nature of the Internet, you might expect to see a bit more evidence for a decentralized cultural ecology. Take the case of new music: will the Web eventually supplant geographical centers of activity with geographically scattered by digitally aggregated ones? Or will Florida's dense, creative cities consolidate their historical lead?

What makes this hard to predict is that much of it depends on the nature of the artistic activity in question. David Galenson, who made a splash last year with his economic investigation of why different artists bloom early or late, used his conceptual/experimental framework to look at the dissemination of artistic style in an NBER working paper called "The Globalization of Advanced Art in the Twentieth Century." Galenson reasoned that 20th-century styles spread comparatively rapidly because they were more conceptual (based on a pre-determined method or aesthetic stance) than experimental (based on trial-and-error):

The dominance of conceptual forms of art during most of the twentieth century was largely responsible not only for the increased speed with which innovations were made, but also for the greater speed with which they diffused geographically. Collage was an early example of a major innovation that was so highly conceptual, and so versatile in its uses, that artists could adapt it to their own purposes simply after hearing descriptions of it, without even seeing actual examples. The innovations of such movements as Dada and Pop put greater emphasis on ideas relative to execution than virtually any earlier artistic movements, and this allowed many of their new practices to spread almost spontaneously. Throughout much of the century, the great importance of written manifestos was symptomatic of the centrality of conceptual innovation, and these manifestos contributed to the rapid spread of the conceptual practices of the movements that produced them.

Galenson is writing about the visual arts, but the spread of the serialist and minimalist conceptual frameworks fits the pattern. However:

The dominance of artistic centers was reduced by the progress of globalization. During the twentieth century it became possible, for the first time in the modern era, for artists to make important contributions to the artistic mainstream without working in the art world’s central place.... Yet predictions like those that some art scholars and critics made in the late 1960s, that place would no longer matter for artistic innovation, appear to have been wrong. As in the past, it remains true today that artists who have already created novel styles or methods can work nearly anywhere they please, but also as in the past, it is unlikely that any contemporary artist can develop, or at the very least begin to develop, significant innovations anywhere other than in one of the central locations of the art world. The mainstream of western art still runs through central places.

For new music, even more so, now that the serialism/minimalism paradigms have become but two elements in an experimental eclecticism.

Back to the Internet—will the connectedness of the Web ever become sufficient to replace the geographic connectedness of artistic centers? Web-based social networking, for all its buzz, is as yet a diverting gimmick, with nowhere near the flexibility, nuance, and signal-to-noise ratio of an actual geographic artistic community. One assumes that, given Moore's Law, the capacity for that robustness will eventually be achieved. But will there still be a market for it?

Florida again:

[W]e need to encourage growth in the regions and cities that are best positioned to compete in the coming decades: the great mega-regions that already power the economy, and the smaller, talent-attracting innovation centers inside them—places like Silicon Valley, Boulder, Austin, and the North Carolina Research Triangle.

Of course, what we could also do is encourage research and development in making talent-attracting innovation centers in the virtual world that would rival those in the physical world—online social networking as rich and productive as real-world social networking. What it would mean is deciding, as a society, if geographical diversity is a worthwhile goal. Cities and states watching their manufacturing base dry up might not be able to retool themselves into a New York or a Silicon Valley, but would it be a worthwhile investment to develop the technological capacity to compete with those places virtually?

One more thought: the Internet has been a boon for artists and the arts. But remember, it was developed by the military, out of their R&D budget. So imagine: what would, say, the NEA look like if it was more like DARPA—if it had both the wherewithal and the goal of not just supporting artistic projects, but developing artistic infrastructure? Not just bringing the arts outside of artistic centers, but funding research that could make artistic centers accessible regardless of location? Small-town-to-big-city dreams might not have the same romance. But think what you'd save on gas.

Auction chant

The Longwood Symphony in Boston, made up mostly of doctors (a lot of doctors in Boston), and one of the more adventurous community orchestras around (hey, they're doing Antheil's McConkey's Ferry in May), is known for raising money for various medical causes, but later this month, they're having an auction to raise money for themselves. Benefit auctions are nothing new, but get a bunch of doctors together, and they'll slip in some wacky items for bid. Personalized blood analysis? An MRI of your brain while you're listening to the piece of your choice? Sure, why not?

The objet de résistance is a violin autographed by (so far) 33 Nobel laureates. (Including new Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, who, I learn from a Longwood press release, played trombone in high school.) I'm looking under the cushions for change, but if that's too nerdy for you, there's also the opportunity to bid on a chance to play some chamber music with Yo-Yo Ma. (Beta blockers not included.)

Areopagitica

Is your Monday as bleary as mine? A tonic: go here to watch The Bad Plus rip through Babbitt's "Semi-Simple Variations." With dancing girls. Though I suspect the Broadway-connoisseur Babbitt would have liked a kick-line finale.

Was (Not Was)

My lovely wife had a psychic reading over the weekend, which revealed this interesting factoid: according to the psychic, yours truly was, in a former life, a composer in a German court around the turn of the 18th century—not a particularly famous one, but apparently, someone who was held in some esteem by his colleagues.

After a bit of hunting around, I've narrowed it to four suspects:

Ernst Christian Hesse (1676-1762)

Composer and viol virtuoso (who, on a Parisian sojourn, managed to simultaneously study the instrument with Forqueray and Marais, who hated each other), attached to the court at Giessen and, later, Darmstadt. He scored one of the all-time great musician day jobs, as well: secretary of war for the Darmstadt court. His second wife was a singer, and the resultant general singer cattiness prompted his resignation as Kapelldirektor. Travelled much; knew everybody. Cause-and-effect, from his Grove entry: "In 1726 he was promoted to the war council; besides this, he devoted himself to his lucrative wine business and to his property. Later he withdrew still further from musical life, suffering acutely from gout."

Reinhard Keiser (1674-1739)

Employed at the Brunswick court until he took over the Hamburg Opera in 1703; in his day, one of the most highly regarded composers of opera. (His Croesus has seen recent revival.) Handel admired his music enough to steal it wholesale (friction resulting from the two composers' competing settings of Almira forced Handel to leave for Italy and, ultimately, England). Frequently beset by financial and administrative misfortune; ended up taking on a church gig as well (Kantor of the Hamburg cathedral). World-class indolence, from his Grove entry: "Following the final collapse of his administration in 1707, Keiser appears to have absented himself from the opera house for more than a year, passing much of his time visiting the estates of noble friends."

Johann Christoph Pez (1664-1716)

Choir-school brat made good, he became choirmaster of the Peterskirche in Munich, but musical old-fogyness on the part of his superiors led him to the Munich court; later Kapellmeister for the Württemburg court in Stuttgart. Spent time in Rome picking up the Italian style; his choral writing is compact and, according to Grove, "largely homophonic" (which may explain my Brian Wilson fixation). Out-of-the-frying-pan career move, from his Grove entry: "In 1701 the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession caused him to return to Munich, where, however, music was almost non-existent."

Agostino Steffani (1654-1728)

Venetian-born composer and organist at the Munich and, later, Hanover courts. In his mid-30s he embarked on a second career as a diplomat, first on behalf of the Hanoverian court, then for the Elector Palatine, Johann Wilhelm of Düsseldorf. Made general president of the Palatine government and a curator of Heidelberg University. Oh, and he managed to get himself appointed a bishop, too—first the titular Bishop of Spiga, then Apostolic Vicar of northern Germany. Composed a few works during his diplomatic career, published (for propriety's sake) under the name of his copyist; late in life, in financial difficulty, he was elected president of the Academy of Vocal Arts (later the Academy of Ancient Music), for which he wrote a handful of works in return, including a superb Stabat Mater setting. They'll-get-you-coming-and-going, from his Grove entry: "Apart from [his appointment as Abbot of] Löpsingen, he had three sources of income—a stipend from the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide in Rome, the abbacy of San Stefano in Carrara, near Padua, and a provostship in the Rhenish town of Seltz. The stipend was small, his agent in Padua was a swindler, and most of the revenue from Seltz was seized by French Jesuits at Strasbourg."

So there's our past-life police lineup, as it were. Let's throw it open to the mob!

On differing interpretations of Andantino ingenuo

"O mio babbino": the right tempo for?
Have Fleming and Callas keep score—
By the time that Renée
Gets to "Dio, vorrei,"
La Divina could toss in a Suor.

I can catch the moon in my hands

Reviewing Lang Lang.
Boston Globe, March 4, 2009.

Mod squad

I've been feeling awfully lazy and unproductive lately, but I suppose it's always a productive day when you can predate the Oxford English Dictionary. The word in question is atonal, which the OED dates in English from 1922:

1922 A. E. HULL in Musical Opinion Oct. 48/1, I have been working for two years at a system of non-tonal harmony, which I had long been unable to christen. Now, after visiting no less than seven foreign countries I not only find that the thing is widely known as Atonality, but [etc.]. Ibid. 48/3 Keyboard chord-writing as well as linear, tonal as well as Atonal.

Well, if the thing is already widely known, then maybe we're not quite getting on that bandwagon early, are we? And, in fact, a little investigation finds the French-English critic M. D. Calvocoressi using the term a full decade earlier than that. From "The Origin of To-Day's Musical Idiom" in the December 11, 1911 issue of The Musical Times and Singing-Class Circular (writing about Mussorgsky):

A score and more of such examples could be quoted. Not only these soft 'atonal' harmonies, but also the harsher whole-tome scales and aggregates, much used by Debussy and other contemporaries, appear in several parts of 'Boris Godounov'[.]

Calvocoressi was a member of Les Apaches, the group of French artistic young-men-in-a-hurry that also included Ravel and de Falla, making a musical splash by defending Pelleas et Melisande from its critics. So it's interesting to find atonal soon being taken up by the composer-pedagogue Vincent d'Indy, one of those critics, as a bit of a cudgel. D'Indy's 1912 article "Le Bon sens" isn't online, but you can find the American composer Daniel Gregory Mason quoting it:

"In the nineteenth century," [d'Indy] says, "some Russian composers, in the interest of certain special effects, employed the scale of Whole tones, which one may name atonal because it suppresses all possibility of modulation. In the twentieth century Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel elaborated these methods, making often very ingenious applications of them; but they made the mistake (one must dare to speak the truth of those one esteems) of erecting processes into principles, or at least of letting them be so erected by their muftis, so that the formula now established by fashion is: 'Outside of harmonic sensation and the titillation of orchestral timbres there is no salvation.'["]

Because it suppresses all possibility of modulation. You start to understand why, even given late-Romantic levels of dissonance, atonality so bothered the d'Indys of the world—dissonance was OK as long as the movement from key center to key center remained purposeful and perceptible, but lose that modulation, and things start to seem random. Debussy doesn't seem atonal to us, but his penchant for using familiar chords (dominant 7ths, for example) for color rather than modulatory function must have exacerbated that modulatory uncertainty—in a Heisenberg-like way, in fact. D'Indy's ideal Conservatoire ear could never correlate where Debussy's music was with where it was going.

We should be on by now

A couple weeks ago, in preparation for reviewing Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto, I did something that most critics or performers have probably done when faced with a similar prospect: I listened to Rachmaninoff's 1939 recording. I have it on a pretty good Naxos transfer which is now out of print, but as the link indicates, it's not hard to find at all. Now think: this is the chronological equivalent of a critic/listener/performer in 1909 having access to a recording of Beethoven playing the "Emperor" concerto. Piano nerds, at least, don't take Rachmaninoff's recordings for granted—once you discover them, they and the scores end up their own synoptic Two-Source Hypothesis—but I don't think we realize how much their existence says about our relationship with the musical past.

In fact, I think what Rachmaninoff's recordings show—what the advent of recorded music shows—is that our perception of a musical past is, in many ways, an illusion. In general terms—

The perceived difference between the musical past and the musical present is a symptom of the limitations of information technology.

As information technology improves, the distance between past and present shrinks. You can make a taxonomy of musical examples. Nearly the entire corpus of surviving Ancient Greek music fits on a single web page, with tempo and tuning largely educated guesses. Chant and medieval music exists in more complete sources, along with more detailed instructions. Western classical music is documented in standardized notation and fuller contemporary accounts. Music written since 1900 has increasingly—an with increasing fidelity—been recorded by or, at least, under the guidance of the composer.

That brief rundown might be considered coincidental—the steady progress of information technology, directional over time, corresponding to how "old" a musical epoch seems to us. But much musical scholarship of the past century has been devoted to, in a way, improving the backwards compatibility of more rudimentary information technology. If we know more about how Renaissance music, or Medieval music, or Ancient Greek music is supposed to sound, it's because scholarship has filled in gaps that make performers better able to assemble the existing instructions—notation and treatise—into realized music that exists in the present.

In other words, all music—regardless of age—is ideally immediate and timeless, and as the technology of reproducing music—regardless of age—improves, the "pastness" of music falls away.

I already see the two implicational poles of this with the digital reproduction and distribution of music—old music ceases to gain an advantage from the imprimatur of age, but also ceases to suffer in comparison with music of greater chronological novelty. (This is, I think, why concerted efforts to bring classical music into alignment with pop music, to make it "appeal to new generations," always come off as tinny to my ear: they're trying to solve a "problem" that's fading away on its own, and, ironically, dating themselves—the technology advances faster than the solution.) As the reproduction converges on the fidelity and immediacy of live performance, and as those reproductions become ever-more immediately available, the "dead white guy" factor of classical music diminishes. It's like Faulkner famously said: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Here's another card in this file, one I will almost certainly be returning to in the next few months. Brian Wilson finished his unfinished masterpiece, the aborted "SMiLE" album, in 2004, ending over thirty years of fan speculation via bootlegs and homegrown reconstructions. Nevertheless, additional bootlegs and reconstructions of "SMiLE" have continued to surface since 2004. Why? Because of information technology—the raw materials of the original "SMiLE" sessions, once released into the digital world, have proliferated such that anyone with Internet access has near-instant access to them. Fragments of music originally thought lost have made their own way, to the point where they're constantly re-introduced into the present, refusing to be pinned down to 1967 or even 2004. Mahler's piano rolls, Rachmaninoff's 78s, studio tapes from the 1960s—they're all here and now. And, as the present continually renews itself, only more so.

Reaches your reflex, so let it work

Reviewing the Stockhausen Intuitive-Musik marathon by the Callithumpian Consort et al.
Boston Globe, February 27, 2009.

Spend some time and rock a rhyme / I said, It's not that easy

Wow, Jessica Duchen sure doesn't like Handel very much.

But did he compose anything that has the intense, sublime, genuine spirituality of Bach’s St Matthew Passion? Is there a single Handel aria remotely comparable to its heartbreaking ‘Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben?’ Not even the beautiful ‘Ombre mai fu’ is on that level. Where in those operas can we find the degree of perception and compassion that Mozart showed in Don Giovanni? And Handel’s pleasant chamber and orchestral works reduce to Muzak the minute you encounter Beethoven’s.

Beethoven said: “Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived.” He was wrong: he deserved that epithet himself. Handel can’t hold a candle to Bach, let alone Beethoven. A one-man baroque-and-roll hit factory, he compromised his art by selling out.

The problem with comparing Handel and Bach is that, while Handel is a flashy composer, the thing he does better than Bach is something distinctly non-flashy: mixed emotions. Irony, regret, resignation—Handel is astonishingly good at this sort of thing.

Bach does the grip of despair extremely well—"Seufzer, Tränen," for example. But has there ever been a better portrayal of the exhaustion of despair than "Lascia ch'io pianga"? "O sleep, why dost thou leave me?" from Semele is a touchstone of bittersweet. Even "Ombra mai fù" is more than it seems because it's supposed to be funny—but the sheer, simple beauty of it shows Xerxes' lovesick loneliness as well. No wonder Beethoven would exalt Handel that way: Fidelio mines much of the same territory (particularly the first act). And no wonder Handel is at his best—something I think he never gets enough credit for—with the complicated characters of older women, usually powerful, but afraid of the passage of time. Give me Alcina over the Marschallin any day. There, I said it.

But opinions are just opinions. (God knows I purse my lips at enough music that other people love not to get too upset over it.) There's something else about this anti-Handel barrage that's interesting, though.

Occasionally a gifted director will work magic – David McVicar’s Giulio Cesare at Glyndebourne was a case in point. But in lesser hands these operas can feel interminable, and today they are regarded as sacred country, so cuts are frowned upon.

Duchen seems to be criticizing Handel because his music has a low immunity to bad performance. Perhaps she's been lucky enough never to sit through a really poor St. Matthew Passion—I have, and trust me, it's as brutally relativistic an experience of the passage of time as any mediocre Baroque opera. But should that even be a criterion? Is great music, by definition, foolproof? I have a higher tolerance for badly-performed Shostakovich than badly-performed Verdi—but I don't think that really means Shostakovich is the better composer.

In fact, a lot of my favorite pieces and composers are particularly tricky to pull off in performance: Tippett operas, Sibelius symphonies, Sondheim musicals. Berlioz is a continent unto himself in this regard. A spectacular rendition of Kontakte can convince you of Stockhausen's asserted greatness, but how many spectacular renditions of that are you likely to get? A first-rate performance of Carter is thrilling—a second-rate performance leaves the audience downright sullen. Is that Carter's fault? I would be the first to admit that I'm attracted to works of emotional subtlety and ambiguity, and bad performances of those make for long evenings indeed. But if a piece of music has demonstrated its potential to be an amazing experience, I'm less concerned with how often that amazement is likely to happen. Some pieces have a high batting average, but never hit it out of the park. In this case, I prefer the possibility of the long ball.

Word Count

Brownian-motion-like arts-funding update:

• The House Appropriations Committee has proposed raising the NEA's annual budget by $10 million for the next fiscal year. (The nitty-gritty can be found on page 183 of the relevant statement for Division E of H.R. 1105.)
• In the meantime, state arts funding, already in trouble in Michigan, is also on the bubble in South Dakota and Minnesota.
• And perhaps Louisiana, after Governor Bobby Jindal—who gave the Republican response to President Obama's economic address last night—prefaced his speech by disparaging arts funding:

  Jindal, tapped to give his party's response to Obama's address to Congress on Tuesday night, said he appreciated Obama's remarks but still had problems with the bill, including funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, "that it's not apparent to me what they have to do with actually stimulating the economy.''

  Somebody has not been reading this blog. (Though, if early reviews are any indication, Gov. Jindal might reconsider the value of theatrical training.)
• And then there's this report from the Los Angeles Times detailing the first family's arts consumption, with mild speculation as to how that might translate into policy.

The LAT article has an interesting quote at the end, from the director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company:

It sends a good message that the arts count.

That use of the word count has made me raise my eyebrow for a long time. This is because I am a native of not unpleasant and intermittently scenic Niles, Illinois. Tangent: Niles's Wikipedia page currently imparts this wisdom (click to enlarge):

Amazingly! Anyway, at some point, the village had a contest to determine a village slogan, and the winner was this kid who had his visage slapped across a billboard near my house, along with his slogan: "Where People Count." Which promptly became an object of mockery for moppet and adult alike. (My mom used to drive by the sign and say, "In Morton Grove they read.")

According to the OED (yes, I know, argument by etymology, always a suspect maneuver, but then again, it is the Unparalleled Playland That Is The Oxford English Dictionary we're talking about), this use of count dates only from 1885:

1885 PROCTOR Whist App. 186 Many doubt whether good play really counts much at Whist.

It is the absolute form of definition number 14: "To enter into the account or reckoning".

Now, this is a minor thing, and, after all, it's just an offhand comment that I quoted above, but there's a causality implied here that I think is suspect. Would the arts be less likely to enter into the reckoning if the First Family weren't reasonably avid patrons? It's the sort of thing I file in the same drawer as books with titles like Why the Arts Matter. My experience is that, if you're not answering that in a sentence or two, you're usually either a) asserting that the audience is bigger than we think, or b) apologizing for the fact that it's not. In other words, I think asking whether the arts count is the same thing as asking how big a network effect the arts create, and that's something that I think is irrelevant to artistic value.

On the other hand, I'd hardly call raising the public profile of the arts a bad thing, so even I would categorize this as nit-picking. But I find myself more and more attuned to—and fascinated by—the 20-year linguistic hangover from the last round of major cultural warfare. The arts haven't been left with a whole lot of room to maneuver right now, and it's a fine line between realism and diffidence. Like Orwell says, "[I]f thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."

National measure

Reviewing the Boston Philharmonic and Gabriela Montero.
Boston Globe, February 24, 2009.

Theory and Practicing

Reviewing the Manhattan Sinfonietta.
Boston Globe, February 24, 2009.

As soon as I came up with the phrase "mutable sonic orreries" I immediately began tinkering with the idea of starting a steampunk/psychedelica band so that could be the title of our first album. Then I ran the phrase through the Mac's built-in speech synthesizer a few times, and it sounded goofier every time. So I left it in. Sometimes I have a little too much fun at my job.

The Boston Sound

James Levine (music director) and Mark Volpe (managing director) held a press conference at Symphony Hall yesterday for the primary purpose of highlighting the release of the first four Boston Symphony Orchestra/Levine recordings on the in-house BSO Classics label. The line-up:

• Ravel: Daphnis et Chloe (CD and download)
• Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem (CD and download)
• Bolcom: Symphony no. 8/Lyric Concerto (download only)
• Mahler: Symphony no. 6 (download only)

Levine talked about each recording, and also played excerpts through a surround-sound set-up, which resulted in a rare and entertaining glimpse of Levine the itinerant huckster—

"Did you hear the dynamic range?" [pause] "Did you hear the top-to-bottom range?" [pause] "The left-to-right range—and especially the front-to-back range?"

—and so forth. He's actually quite good at it.

The CD/download duality is, both Levine and Volpe admitted, experimental—it's designed to see how various releases sell in the various formats. (The download formats are 320 kbs MP3 and WMA Surround HD—no lossless Mac-compatible options as yet.) The all-BSO structure—an in-house label, distributed through the BSO's own website—is based on 1) maximizing revenue and, Volpe seemed to hint, 2) a belief that the major labels other orchestras have partnered with (New York and Los Angeles, for example, both release digitally through Deutsche Grammophon) might not be around for the long haul. "It's basically taking our destiny and putting it into our own hands," Volpe said, "and not relying on media companies, and partnerships with companies that, in their heyday, were significant, but less and less so, given the new world we're living in."

All the releases are live, concert recordings. No doubt this reflects the good-news-bad-news combination of the increasing quality of live recording and the increasing cost of studio recording, but for Levine, it was all good, as he repeatedly expressed a preference for live recording over studio recording, capturing the electricity of a concert hall experience over filling in the repertoire. "I watched this when I was George Szell's assistant," Levine said. "The record company said, 'Dr. Szell, we want to come every week and record a Haydn symphony.' So they did. Meanwhile, he played the Sixth Mahler... the Siegfried Idyll: no recordings. Simply unbelievable performances." Levine specifically cast the BSO's lot with concert recordings. "It shouldn't come from the old aesthetics of studio recording," he said. "What one always hoped would happen was that the technology would make it possible to get an exciting enough, vivid enough souvenir of that live feeling you get at concerts." The BSO had recorded every one of Levine's programs since he took over as music director, but they held off releasing any of them until the technology caught up with that goal. "I thought, what I want is to release a kind of recording that has certain characteristics that are now possible that were not possible this way before, not at this level," Levine said, "and even if they were possible, they weren't the aesthetic of the time, maybe."

Noticeable was an interesting shift in that aesthetic—Levine seemed eager to use recording to build up the BSO as a unique brand, in both sound and repertoire. (Singular was a word that came up a lot.) In the first four releases, you get the BSO's long association with French music (Daphnis); its initial at-that-time modern German orientation (Brahms); its Koussevitzky-incubated reputation for new music (Bolcom—the symphony was a BSO commission); and the addition of Levine's own stamp (Mahler). It's a throwback to the time—not coincidentally, the time that Levine first came into the business—when orchestras cultivated distinct sonic personalities, before the movement towards homogenized versatility in the 70s and 80s. Levine spent a fair amount of time pointing out how big a part the sound of Symphony Hall itself plays in the new recordings. "Even one of the characteristics of the hall that was really fascinating is preserved there," he said. "You know that tendency for the upper-middle to be the strongest register in the room? It is—it always is. We could artificially change it, but I didn't want to."

The orchestra also took the occasion to release Levine's concert repertoire for next season (guest conductor programs will have to wait until March). Most noticable was an October-November series of all nine Beethoven symphonies—something the BSO apparently has never done. (Levine revealed that he himself has never gotten around to conducting the Fourth.) Levine sold it as a chance to rethink the symphonies from the ground up, rather than simply tack them on to programs as a rehearsal-management technique, which I thought was pretty good spin, at the very least. The BSO is also honoring retiring harpist Ann Hobson Pilot with a John Williams commission and an October farewell. Other premieres include a baritone/orchestra cycle by Peter Lieberson, a violin/cello Double Concerto from John Harbison, and the American premiere of Elliott Carter's Flute Concerto. No concert opera from Levine next season, although Mendelssohn's Elijah gets an airing in the spring.

(You can read the BSO's press release about the new recordings here.)

Coming up short

Guerrieri: Epitome Rag (2009) (PDF, 5 pages, 313 Kb; MIDI here)

This month's rag (previously) honors February's oddball brevity with 28-bar strains in place of the usual 32. It also gets awfully MGM-esque towards the end, which I attribute to a lingering excess of Valentine's Day candy. (I think Valentine's Day is a bit of a scam, but chocolate-covered torrone is OK by me no matter how sketchy the pretenses.)

(Word builder: the original title was "Brachylogy Rag." I am a big nerd.)

What we've had and what's to come

Reviewing Anne Sofie von Otter, Bengt Forsberg, and Brad Mehldau.
Boston Globe, February 17, 2009.

Seriously, "Att angöra en brygga"—a celebration of the ability to park a boat, from the ultimate cinematic expression of man's struggle to simultaneously possess booze and crayfish—is my new favorite song. Here's the original, sung by Monica Zetterlund.

Summer school

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Boston Globe, February 16, 2009.

The last arts funding post of the week, I promise

(Click to enlarge.)

Get real

As promised, even more beard-stroking on the question of arts funding.

Today is Abraham Lincoln's birthday. (It's also Charles Darwin's birthday. It's also my wife's birthday. Coincidence? I think not.) Last night, President Obama made these remarks at the rededication of Ford's Theatre:

We know that Ford's Theatre will remain a place where Lincoln's legacy thrives, where his love of the humanities and belief in the power of education have a home, and where his generosity of spirit are reflected in all the work that takes place.

This has been an extraordinarily fitting tribute to Abraham Lincoln that we've seen and heard from some of our most celebrated icons of stage and of screen, because Lincoln himself was a great admirer of the arts. [MG: ceremonies included the awarding of the Lincoln Medal to Sidney Poitier and George Lucas. George Lucas? Anyway, back to Lincoln:] It's said he could even quote portions of Hamlet and Macbeth by heart, as we've seen here this evening. And so I somehow think this event captured an essential part of the man whose life we celebrate tonight.
...
Not far from here stands our nation's capitol, a landmark familiar to us all, but one that looked very different in Lincoln's time. For it remained unfinished until the end of the war. The laborers who built the dome came to work wondering whether each day would be their last; whether the metal they were using for its frame would be requisitioned for the war and melted down into bullets. But each day went by without any orders to halt construction—so they kept on working and they kept on building.

When President Lincoln was finally told of all the metal being used at the Capitol, his response was short and clear: That is as it should be. The American people needed to be reminded, he believed, that even in a time of war, the work would go on; that even when the nation itself was in doubt, the future was being secured; and that on that distant day when the guns fell silent, a national capitol would stand, with a statue of freedom at its peak, as a symbol of unity in the land still mending its divisions.

There's your stimulus priorities: education in the lede, construction in the main story. No doubt this is reflective of political realities, and Obama is nothing if not a political realist. (Who knows? Maybe trying to sneak $50 million in arts funding back into the stimulus while doing one's best not to mention the subject counts as pragmatism.) But let's bounce something unrealistic off of that.

As part of a proposed transition to a society in which self-organized groups contribute more to what he calls "high-energy democracy," the legal/political philosopher Robert Unger suggests this:

An example of such a reform would be to reserve part of the tax favor received by tax-protected charitable gifts to independent social trust funds, administered by trustees drawn from different walks of life. Groups in civil society could apply to such funds for grants, as they now do to private foundations. We would have expanded the resource base of voluntary action.

—Roberto Unger, False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy, from Politics (new edition), p. xcviii

It's easy to imagine what this would look like in an arts funding context. Donations to arts organizations would still be tax-deductible, but on the receiving end, the NEA would skim off a percentage. Sound like a scam? Actually, it happens all the time—it's not uncommon in colleges and universities, for example. If I give $100 to my alma mater's scholarship fund, I'm really only giving a portion of that—maybe $85 to $95. The remainder is taken by the university to cover operating budgets and administrative costs. (In reality, they would levy the assessment on the payout side. But you get the idea.)

According to the the NEA, charitable contributions to United States arts organizations totaled $13.5 billion in 2005 (the last year for which there's data). A one-percent levy on that almost equals the NEA's current yearly budget. A five-percent levy—and here's where things get interesting—would, in six years, collect enough money (just over $4 billion) that the NEA could maintain their current funding level on interest alone, making the Endowment an actual endowment. (I'm assuming a standard four-percent endowment payout.)

I can think of objections aplenty to this plan, though some of them are mitigated:

• It won't change anyone's mind in Congress about arts funding. I don't know, I think you could make a case: it's money the government wouldn't get anyway; it rewards private initiative; it could gradually wean the NEA off of budgetary appropriations. Try that one, Tom Coburn: give it six years, and you never have to worry about funding the arts again!
• Donors would be ticked off. Yeah, probably. But that doesn't stop them from giving to universities and colleges. Stanford levies 8 percent; Yale 12 percent; Harvard varies by school, but tops out at 20 percent. Harvard still raised $651 million last year.
• Private donors would give less. That's what traditional economics predicts, but as has been noted in this space, the available data suggests the opposite: that increased government spending on the arts creates more private philanthropy.

Here's the fundamental objection to our funding plan, though. Is it realistic? Are you kidding? It's not realistic at all. But what arts organizations and advocates should be asking—what they haven't been asking for far too long—is why something like that is so unrealistic. Why do we take it for granted that such a scheme—any scheme that ambitious—isn't likely to come to fruition? Because of governments? Markets? Both? Does it go against "human nature"? If so, is that nature unchangeable, or the result of societal structures that we assume are inherent and inevitable? The crucial question: what if they're not?

Go back to that last point in the list for a minute, which circles back around to Unger, in a way. Traditional economics often seems to malfunction when dealing with the arts; while one might think that there must be some other economic factors at work, Unger raises the possibility that economics itself is coming up short. While we like to think that institutions and their structures are responses to our beliefs, our nature, &c., Unger continually insists on the reverse—that human nature, the "natural" laws governing politics and economics are actually the result of our institutional structures. If the arts don't follow economic "rules," that may be because the structures of arts organizations are crucially different. And if that's true, then economic or political "reality" may be malleable in as much as we make the corresponding institutions malleable.

Here's what Unger has to say about realism:

Deriding both popular mobilization and ideological contests, this disenchanted idea of politics sees its work to strike compromises with powerful interests, the better to solve disparate practical problems. It imagines the existence of a range of "issues," each of them calling for sober solutions that respect the constraints of political as well as technical feasibility.... Once established, this conception of politics in turn bestows a halo of realism on the arrangements and practices that made it plausible in the first place.

The votaries of this deflationary view of politics flatter themselves on their own realism. They believe that they have discarded the dangerous romantic illusions of an earlier age. They pride themselves on their practical attitude. Nevertheless, the outcome of their false practicality is to leave politics paralyzed, and the basic recognized problems of each society unsolved.

The reason for this apparent paradox is simple. The fundamental problems of a society—both those it acknowledges and those it does not—are entangled in its organization, and in the ideas that represent and sustain it. We cannot solve such problems until we reorganize some of the established arrangements and revise some of the entrenched assumptions. We do not need to reorganize them altogether, or all at once; in fact, we never can. If, however, we treat politics as no more than an exercise in interest-balancing, devoted to finding discrete solutions to separate problems, we never reach the presuppositions. We remain too captive to the limits of our situation to become true realists. From this captivity, calamity alone can release us.

Unger is, to be sure, embracing those dangerous romantic illusions with both arms—but he's also reminding us that the basic right of democratic society is not having to take things for granted. If you believe in the importance of the arts to society, then why wouldn't you think big? I feel like the whole discussion has reached the point of politely ignoring the possible, even the unlikely, in favor of the probable. Theoretically, at least, we have leverage over democracy—and not the other way around. But it takes practice to make that into reality.

I once was lost, but now am found

OK, enough whining. Back to this month's Topic of Fun™: government arts funding!

First, an update: according to this summary, courtesy of Talking Points Memo (and seriously, if that crew doesn't pick up an online-only Pulitzer, you'll know the fix is in), the $50 million funding boost for the NEA, torpedoed in the Senate, has been restored in conference negotiations. Accurate? We'll see when the actual bill gets filed....

More later.

Update (2/13): Still there (Title VII, page 11).

I catch the paper boy / But things don't really change

Couldn't call it unexpected, and I never had any real prospect of winning, but solely from an entertainment standpoint, this was totally worth fifty bucks:

Dear Mr. Guerrieri:

Thank you for your interest in the Pulitzer Prizes. We would like to accept your entry but it does not fit within our rules.

Submitted online material must have appeared on a Web site "primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories." In our guidelines, we urge entrants to ask themselves if they "genuinely fit the criteria" and we specify that an entry's cover letter should provide "ample evidence" of an online-only news organization's "primary devotion to original news reporting." We do not find the requirements to have been met.

I am very sorry to disappoint you. Although entry fees are non-refundable, we will make an exception in your case because this is a transitional period for the Pulitzers. In due course, we will return your check.

Sincerely,

Sig Gissler, administrator
Pulitzer Prizes

That turned up in my inbox yesterday, a response to my submitting a spiral-bound exhibit of Soho the Dog posts, seeing as how the Pulitzer board had made such a big deal about allowing "online-only" entries this year. Let's look at the details, shall we? (Heck, if I was writing for The New York Times, I could do a six-part series, and that Pulitzer would be in the bag.)

Submitted online material must have appeared on a Web site "primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories."

Classical music has over a thousand years of history. That's not "ongoing" enough for you?

In our guidelines, we urge entrants to ask themselves if they "genuinely fit the criteria"

Hey, self—do you genuinely fit the criteria? No, but my blog does.

and we specify that an entry's cover letter should provide "ample evidence" of an online-only news organization's "primary devotion to original news reporting."

My primary devotion is to my wife. Well, that and plagiarism....

We do not find the requirements to have been met.

By the way, here's what I submitted as the bulk of my entry: reviews from last summer's all-Carter Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood. Until it was pointed out to me, I thought that I had actually gone out to Tanglewood for a week and reported on what I saw. Now I know I was at home the entire time.

OK, OK, I'm no Seymour Hersh. I'm no Woodward and Bernstein. I'm not even Walter Duranty. But if my focus is criticism (or if it was, say, commentary, to bring up another Pulitzer category), why am I getting penalized for not doing more "original reporting"—when, if I had submitted newspaper reviews, the original reporting done by the paper's other reporters would be enough to get me in? Here's what that Duranty-justifying press release says:

a Pulitzer Prize for reporting is awarded not for the author's body of work or for the author's character but for the specific pieces entered in the competition

And yet the specific pieces I entered in the competition won't even be considered because apparently I didn't sufficiently justify my body of work. Guys, warn me when you're going to unleash that kind of cognitive dissonance—I need time to appropriately pair it with the proper mind-altering chemicals.

Like I said, I didn't have any expectation of winning. (I figured that if forcing jurors to read my best stuff led to even one bit of freelance work down the line, that pays for the entry fee several times over.) But the Pulitzer Board's passive-aggressive attitude towards online writing is the comedy gift that keeps on giving.

At least—

In due course, we will return your check.

That'll pay for a few days of drinking like a reporter, anyway.

Gauge match

Reviewing Dominique Labelle and Michael Chance with the Sarasa Ensemble.
Boston Globe, February 10, 2009.

I'm gonna live forever

Reviewing Schola Cantorum of Boston.
Boston Globe, February 10, 2009.

They shop around / Follow you without a sound

Hey, look! The United States Senate, that allegedly august body, went ahead and passed the Coburn amendement, which prevents any of the stimulus money currently being considered in our nation's capital from being spent on the arts. By a 73-24 vote! Let's party like it's 1989! (Darcy, as always, has a good roundup of links and righteousness.)

Having been alive and reasonably mentally alert since the Reagan era (It's morning in America! No, you can't have any coffee) I can't say I'm surprised, nor will I spend much time pointing out that, politically speaking, this is just standard demagogic crap. In fact, I wasn't going to write anything at all about this, since anything I did write would just be repeating things I've already written. But since 1) according to the Senate, I apparently don't have a real job anyway, and 2) we bleeding hearts do like to recycle, I will once again spell out why, if you're objecting to the arts being included in a stimulus plan on economic grounds, your grasp of political economy might leave something to be desired.

So, some salient points. First off, It's a stimulus plan. I saw recently where Greg Sandow, either out of disingenuousness, sloppiness, or ignorance—take three shots if you're making this into a drinking game—kept referring to an arts "bailout," an obfuscatory rhetorical trope I've been seeing lately from opponents of the current bill. So, just in case some of that is not simply cynical misinformation: a stimulus is not a bailout. The object of the bill at hand is not to bail out the arts or anything else—unlike the handouts that automakers, &c. were lining up for a couple months back. The object is to get the economy out of its current stagnation. The economic theories this is based on come from John Maynard Keynes. Keynes is not uncontroversial—I happen to think he knew a thing or two about the pounds and shillings, but there are very smart people who demur—but if you're going to sniff at the stimulus, you'd better be prepared to say why The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is mathematically unsound, rather than just screaming bailout! on cable TV.

Now, it's not hard to find assertions that the arts shouldn't be part of a stimulus, because, unlike manufacturing jobs, jobs in the arts don't produce anything concrete. First of all: have you ever tried to move a piano? Second of all: in this economy? Doesn't matter. For over a century, the engine of economic health has been consumption, not production. The economy hums when people are spending money, and frankly, the economy doesn't care where that money comes from. The idea that the hundred bucks I get for a few hours of accompanying has less spending power than the hundred bucks a factory worker gets for a few hours of assembling widgets is economically preposterous. If your house is on fire, you don't worry about whether firemen are using filtered water or not.

A related foofaraw is that there are more important things to spend money on than the arts. Even if you think that (I don't, but I'm biased), you're still talking about things, and not about the economy. Remember, the whole point of a stimulus is to jump-start the economy by getting people to spend more money. Which is why I laughed out loud, with a little snort at the end, even, when I read the supposed purpose of the Coburn amendment:

Purpose: To ensure that taxpayer money is not lost on wasteful and non-stimulative projects

Arts money is non-stimulative? Every arts organization I know spends money as fast as they can get it. Every artist I know lives paycheck to paycheck. Compared with the banks, some of whom are still sitting on their supposedly stimulative TARP billions, money for the arts would get pumped into the economy with the indiscriminate speed of an Yngwie Malmsteen solo.

But who am I kidding? Arguments like this are never about economics. They're about scoring political points. And the Coburns of this country can always score political points by whacking the arts. Why? Because we let them.

I heard a talk by high-level diplomat once—the Chatham House rule prevents me from saying who, but this is someone who's carried more than one difficult brief—and that diplomat had this advice for negotiating with tyrants and dictators: get in their face, and stay there. Because if you're not in their face, someone else will be in their face, undoing any progress you might have already made. If you want to know why the NEA is still getting shafted over a $50-million supplement—an amount of money that would fund four hours of the Iraq War—there's your answer. Artists have been playing nice. Someone else has been in the government's face.

What those people dismissing cabinet-level arts representation don't get is that—forget an acknowledgement of cultural and economic importance—even benign neglect requires constant advocacy. (Would you like to lay odds that the tax-deductibility of philanthropic donations to arts organizations comes under renewed scrutiny in the next few years—without a corresponding boost in governmental support?) The engine of American politics runs on money and false zero-sum mentalities. If you want to change that: get in their face.

Look: maybe the Coburn amendment is just the usual grandstanding. Maybe the thin slice of the stimulus in the House version will be restored in conference. Maybe Senator Coburn, once the economic crisis begins to pass, will happily vote for a substantial increase in arts funding as part of the normal appropriations process. (Whoops, I snorted again.) Maybe the administration has a master plan for making sure that the best artists and the arts can expect from their representative government is something more than ignorance. You know what? They better.

Introductions and Goodbyes

A master of music's complexities. Remembering Lukas Foss.
Boston Globe, February 7, 2009.

The Globe asked for an appreciation of Foss, so this is kind of a slightly more formal version of last Monday's post (but only slightly). It's a testament to Professor Foss's entertaining nature that there's not very much overlap—though I reserve the right to tell that Katharine Hepburn story for the rest of my life.

We are still here

The protest movement that took to the streets of Athens last December—partially sparked by the police killing of a Greek teenager, and partially a vanguard of the wave of economic discontent sweeping across Europe—has finally set its sights on the bourgeois excess of opera, occupying the Olympia Theatre of the Greek National Opera. From the protesters' blog-posted manifesto:

In response to those who understand the rebellion as a brief spark, and undermine and dismiss it by simply saying "life goes on", we say that the fight not only continues, but has already redefined our life on new foundations. Nothing is finished, our rage continues. Our agony has not subsided, we are still here. Rebellion in the streets, in schools and universities, in trade unions, municipal buildings and parks. Rebellion also in art. Against art as entertainment consumed by passive voyeurs. Against an aesthetic that excludes the "Different". Against a culture that destroys parks and public spaces in the name of profit.

Current performances of Tannhaüser and upcoming performances of the ballet Giselle have been postponed. In the meantime, the protesters are having an "Open General Assembly of the Liberated Opera" every evening, which, Critic-at-Large Moe was pleased to see in the above picture, means open to dogs, too.

Other opera news, apart from the revolving-door tenor casting in the Met's Lucia, which I gave up trying to follow:

When the Six Nations Rugby Championship gets underway this weekend, the English squad will have an extra advantage: opera singers, courtesy of the sports-betting company Betfair.

The country's top opera sopranos—led by Christine Rice, one of the biggest stars of English National Opera—will be strategically placed around the stadium to activate the vocal cords of England's 82,000-strong supporters and inspire the national team to glory.

Betfair, the official betting partner of the England rugby team, has trawled the nation's top opera houses to recruit a crack team of sopranos who will elevate the singing standard of traditional rugby anthems such as "Jerusalem" and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" to give England a competitive edge over their opponents.

As a Betfair spokesman puts it: "[T]he opposition won't know what's hit them when they hear the opera singers belting out the most beautiful chants Twickenham has ever experienced."

Elsewhere, magnificently immodest director William Friedkin has backed out of the operatic version of An Inconvenient Truth, citing the inevitable "irreconcilable creative differences" with the librettist.

And finally, La Cieca's far-flung web of correspondents return reports that Renée Fleming has gone all Rita Streich with her wardrobe.

Composer in the Kitchen (2)

(Click to enlarge.)


(Previously.) For Felix on his two-hundredth birthday. Luxuriate in a 9/4-8/3 double suspension in his honor. (More Mendelssohn love here.)

There's so much that we share

Reviewing the Lydian String Quartet.
Boston Globe, February 3, 2009.

Composer's Holiday

Lukas Foss, my old teacher, died at the age of 86 yesterday. I was going to write about what he was like as a teacher, but it turns out I already did, in the comments section of an old post:

He was style-agnostic (actually pan-stylistic) and could immediately pinpoint weak spots in any piece, no matter the vocabulary. Other teachers I had would look at what I was trying to do, and offer suggestions as to similar pieces in the repertoire that I could go study. Foss, though, would go through and say no, this note should be up an octave, you need to clean up the voice leading from this harmony to this harmony, this chord should come a beat later, you should separate these contrapuntal lines into separate octaves, etc., etc. And damned if he wasn't right every time. Every so often I'll still send him a piece that I think he might get a kick out of. He sent the last one back with a note: "I'm not convinced by the harmony." Know what? Neither was I, but I thought I could finesse it.

As a person, he's charming and mischevious, and yes, absent-minded, albeit with a crucial caveat. If I see him, I have to re-introduce myself, but if I send him a piece of music, he remembers everything I've written. Every so often, I'd have a lesson where I hadn't actually written anything new; I'd pull out a sketch from a couple years previous and try to pass it off. He'd look through it for a minute, then turn to me and say, "I've seen this." Another student of his and I used to theorize that he deliberately forgot non-musical things in order to pack more music into his brain.

One other highly entertaining thing: he's met everybody. In fact, that same student and I once decided that we would name-drop in lessons, just to try and find someone he didn't have a story about. Bernstein? An endless fountain. Cage? Great material there. I once brought a copy of The Magic Mountain to a lesson; turns out he used to play soccer with Thomas Mann's son. Finally, one day, I was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Katherine Hepburn on it. "She's seen me in my underwear, you know," he said. Turns out that he once rented her guest house, and she turned up one day and forgot to knock first. I gave up after that.

Here's another story, macabre in a way he would have liked: for a while, I was Professor's Foss's first lesson of the day (he would fly from New York to Boston every Monday, and pack all his week's teaching into one day). So one morning I show up at his office, next door to the faculty lounge. No sign. I push the door open and go in. No sign. I peek into the faculty lounge, and there's Foss, curled up on the floor, not moving. "Oh, great," I think, "he's dead." But I give him a nudge, and he wakes up—and I mean instantly, completely awake, as if he's been up for hours. "It is time?" he asks. He was amused over this for about ten minutes.

He was amused over a lot of things. He loved wordplay—nothing could summon a grin like an outrageously punning title. He enjoyed tweaking expectations of humility or self-deprecation. I first discovered he was teaching at Boston University—thus sealing my grad school destination—when I read an interview with him in the BU alumni magazine. "How often do you see genius?" the interviewer asked. "Every time I brush my teeth," he replied. (If you knew him, you can hear the grin.) I realized once that I had seen Foss tired, seen him bored, even seen him disdainful on occasion—but I don't think I ever saw him angry.

Foss's music, probably because he was hard to categorize, never got as much attention as it deserved. He did avant-garde crazy better than anyone, mostly because his theatrical sense of humor was the final arbiter instead of some conceptual framework. Paradigm, with its theatre-piece vibe and its "insane" percussionist, matches Mauricio Kagel at his own game, and American Cantata was possibly the most atmospherically accurate Bicentennial commemoration the country ever got (which is why it's never, ever performed). And Baroque Variations still remains one of the all-time great—maybe the great—orchestral deconstructions. (It was, in fact, the old Nonesuch record of Baroque Variations, with Cage's Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra on the flip side, that got me hooked on the avant-garde in the first place.) But even The Prairie, with its uncanny stylistic Americana, always gave me the sense, at its core, that it was as much a witty commentary on the artifice of that style as much as a paragon of it. He was a composer for whom "cleverness" was an unqualified virtue.

Foss's music, though, defies a lot of analysis, simply because it's so bound up in performance—he was a composer as fascinated by how you get an idea realized by musicians as what the idea was in the first place. The craftsman side of him valued elegance and efficiency; the mischievous side of him valued the ability to tap into the chaos of live performance, feeding off that chaos, rather than trying to alleviate it. He loved music that purposefully sounded "wrong," music that made you unsure of just how well the performance was going: repetitive figures that start to go down irreverent alleys (as in Solo), entire chunks of counterpoint or harmony thrown out of phase into dissonant multiplicity (as in his Renaissance Concerto). There was a Mozart minuet that he adored simply because at every turn, it zagged instead of zigged. He prized any reminder that music was more fantastic and unpredictable than we could guess.

The last time I saw him perform was at Tanglewood, where he played the keyboard part in Bach's Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 (on a modern piano, a cheeky old-school move) with, among others, James Galway. For much of the piece, you could hear that Foss and the ensemble wanted different tempi; finally, Foss just went with his own speed, ensemble or no ensemble. The thing was, it wasn't angry or vindictive—it was as if Foss decided that, if people wanted two tempi, well, bi-temporal Bach might just be fun, so why not give it a try? That's the image of him I'll remember: in the midst of the scramble, everyone else trying to keep up, while, smiling, he cheerfully ran on ahead. Thanks for the help, Professor Foss.

To please the dull fools

I'm sitting in the library today, and next to me on the shelf is this oddly addictive First-Line Index of English Poetry, 1500-1800, in Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, edited by Margaret Crum and published by the Index Committee of the Modern Language Association of America in 1969. (Reference works always have such enjoyably expansive bibliographic information.) Skip to page 575, and there's a meta-poem about music:

Music dear solace to my thoughts neglected
And to thy voice, her voice atone.

Music the master of thy art is dead
Let's howl sad notes stolen from his own pure verse.

Music, thou queen of souls! get up and string
Strike a sad note, and fix them trees again.

Music thou soft uniter of our hearts,
By whose almighty charms the heaven and earth were made.

Music thou soul of Heaven care-charming spell
As thou enchantest our ears.

Music, tobacco, sack and sleep
The tides of sorrow backwards keep.

Musical sounds some calls harmonious charms
The spark of grief into a sable blaze.

Music's a crochet the sober think vain,
To please the dull fools that give money for wit.

First stanza from an air by Francis Pilkington; second stanza by William Lawes; third stanza by Thomas Randolph; fourth stanza by John Chatwin; fifth stanza by Robert Herrick; sixth, seventh, eighth stanzas anonymous.