"... the magician and the prophet on the one hand, and in the elected war lord, the gang leader and condotierre on the other hand"

The Boston Symphony Orchestra is into the last two weeks of its season, under a pair of guest conductors who might also be reminders of the group's post-James Levine conducting predicament: Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, often touted as a candidate for a caretaker BSO music director, and Charles Dutoit, currently filling a similar role at the crying-poor Philadelphia Orchestra. I am hardly an expert in classical-music criticism—as Globe readers rarely hesitate to remind me—but I do have a good trick for gauging the relationship between a professional orchestra and a guest conductor, a ridiculously simple one, but one that usually tells a great deal about the concert at hand: is the orchestra looking at the conductor? It's not necessary, after all; I could probably get up in front of the Boston Symphony, give the downbeat for Brahms 2, and then walk away, and the orchestra would probably come up with a pretty decent Brahms 2 all on their own. There have been BSO concerts I've seen where the players spent more time stealing glances at the concertmaster than at the conductor. There have been a few that started out that way, but where, over the course of the concert, the conductor won them over, so that by the end, the players were hanging on every wave of the stick. And then there's the ones where the podium is the natural focus of attention from beginning to end. It's not foolproof, but, for the most part, that's a corresponding progression in the quality of the concerts as well.

It's a criterion that measures, among other things, a conductor's charisma, which is something I was thinking about in the context of both the Boston and Philadelphia situations. Not so much charisma in the sort of vague, strong-personality everyday use of it, but in the somewhat more specific way that the great German sociologist Max Weber used it. Weber's ideas about charisma come in a long lecture, Politik als Beruf ("Politics as a Vocation"), that he delivered late in his life, in the wake of World War I. (You can read "Politics as a Vocation" here; the translation, uncredited, is by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills.) Weber characterized three different kinds of political leadership:

To begin with, in principle, there are three inner justifications, hence basic legitimations of domination.

First, the authority of the 'eternal yesterday,' i.e. of the mores sanctified through the unimaginably ancient recognition and habitual orientation to conform. This is 'traditional' domination exercised by the patriarch and the patrimonial prince of yore.

There is the authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace (charisma), the absolutely personal devotion and personal confidence in revelation, heroism, or other qualities of individual leadership. This is 'charismatic' domination, as exercised by the prophet or—in the field of politics—by the elected war lord, the plebiscitarian ruler, the great demagogue, or the political party leader.

Finally, there is domination by virtue of 'legality,' by virtue of the belief in the validity of legal statute and functional 'competence' based on rationally created rules. In this case, obedience is expected in discharging statutory obligations. This is domination as exercised by the modern 'servant of the state' and by all those bearers of power who in this respect resemble him.

Weber's definition of domination is specifically in the context of the state, the power of which Weber analyzes as derived from its claim on a monopoly on the use of violent force: "The state is considered the sole source of the 'right' to use violence". The power wielded by a symphony orchestra is awfully garden-party by comparison. But one can, I think, find hints of Weber's three legitimations in every orchestra. Certainly the orchestra's artistic power is based, in large part, on the authority of an "eternal yesterday"; and some of the organizational power struggles could be traced to a conflict between that traditional authority and the rules-based legal authority of unions and corporate regulation.

But it's Weber's gift-of-grace (the literal translation of χαρισμα) that sets orchestras apart—they're some of the very few organizations whose leaders are, necessarily, even by definition, charismatic leaders. We might think of such charisma as a de facto requirement in the political sphere as well; Weber, in 1919, was already at least hinting at its predominance:

To be sure, the pure types are rarely found in reality. But today we cannot deal with the highly complex variant, transitions, and combinations of these pure types, which problems belong to 'political science.' Here we are interested above all in the second of these types: domination by virtue of the devotion of those who obey the purely personal 'charisma' of the 'leader.' For this is the root of the idea of a calling in its highest expression.

But charisma is a democratic choice, not a requirement. Garry Wills' polemic-disguised-as-a-meditation The Kennedy Imprisonment draws heavily on Weber's categories to make that point, contrasting the low-key, legalistic, trust-the-hierarchy administration of Eisenhower with JFK's explicitly charismatic brandishing—and appropriation—of presidential power. Since Kennedy, political success has, more often than not, been judged in charismatic terms. But political office is not inherently dependent on charisma—and such offices actually can resist charismatic leveraging. (As does the electorate—witness the pleasing-nobody limbo of Barack Obama, a charismatic figure but a temperamental legalist, trying to pivot from a Kennedy-esque campaign to a very Eisenhower-like style of governing.)

Orchestras, though, are predicated on charismatic leadership—you need somebody the players are going to look at. Wills' analysis, interestingly, suggests that such leadership is actually a chronic source of organizational instability. In the political sphere, charismatic leadership best flourishes in crisis situations—Wills points to the Kennedy administrations penchant for marathon, high-stakes convocations of decision-makers centered in the White House: "Since the charismatic leader's special powers grow from special dangers, the two feed on each other," Wills notes. "For some crises to be overcome, they must first be created." For orchestras, such crises tend to be centered around changes in leadership—music directors rarely depart except under circumstances of crisis, which, cyclically, gives the succeeding music director the fuel to exert a new round of charismatic authority. But such lacunae are perilous, especially now that the peripatetic, scheduled-years-in-advance conductor is the norm. The charismatic basis of music directorships means that the organizations are comparatively impoverished in the vacuum left by their departures. Wills again: "Charisma, the uniquely personal power, delegitimates institutions. Rule by dazzlement cannot be succeeded by mere constitutional procedure." He quotes Weber's biographer, Reinhard Bendix:

Such a transformation from charismatic leadership to traditional domination occurs most frequently when the problem of succession must be solved. In a strict sense that problem is insoluble, for charisma is an inimitable quality that some higher power is believed to have bestowed upon one person. Consequently a successor cannot be chosen at all. Instead, the followers wait in hope that another leader will appear who will manifest his own charismatic qualification. [emphasis added]

In that sense, the timing of the Philadelphia Orchestra board's decision to file for Chapter 11 is hardly coincidental, the weakness of the institution expressing itself in the absence of a permanent charismatic head. (Interim conductor Charles Dutoit, indeed, seemed surprised by the move.) As far as I know, the BSO is not in comparable financial distress (although, if Philadelphia gets away with their petition, I cynically would not be surprised to see every orchestra in the country try a similar maneuver the next time a contract re-negotiation is on the horizon). But they're most likely looking at a couple seasons, at least, without an official music director. Given Levine's history, one might chide them for not being more proactive in arranging for a successor, for letting the situation reach such a crisis point. Under Weber's analysis, though, the crisis is the point, the crisis is necessary before the institution can make a move, because the crisis is what lends authority to the next leader.

It's hard to imagine what a conductor who relied on Weber's "legality" would look like—even those who philosophically defer to "the authority of the score" tend to make such deference part of their charismatic aura (and can be among the most charismatic of all—Riccardo Muti, for example). Maybe such statute-based power can only be found in those ensembles that abstemiously avoid permanent conductorial authority—St. Luke's, Orpheus, A Far Cry, &c. For most traditionally-structured orchestras, though, charismatic leadership is par for the course—which means that, structurally speaking, so are regular doses of drama.

Update (4/25): Joshua Kosman thoughtfully looks on the bright side.

The Rachmaninoff Covenant

As of this morning, the International Music Score Library Project, the online repository of public domain music, is offline, due to a rather iffy (to say the least) DMCA takedown demand from the UK-based Music Publishers Association. The full tale is on the IMSLP forum; Tim Rutherford-Johnson has commentary and links.

The trigger for this latest skirmish is the IMSLP's posting of the score to Rachmaninoff's The Bells, a work that is not under copyright in the US, no matter what the MPA might claim. But is the use of that particular piece and that particular composer coincidental? Hmmmm.

To wit: off the top of my head, I can think of three rationales for the MPA's attempted shutdown:

• The MPA is a somewhat clueless organization, hoping to protect some royalties via corporate bullying.
• The sheer questionability of the takedown notice is aimed at sparking a legal challenge that can then be appealed, a UK version of Golan v. Holder.
• The copyright maneuverings behind the Rachmaninoff legacy are more cloak-and-dagger than I thought.

History inclines my opinion towards the first option; the devil-making-work-for-idle-hands aspect of certain corners of the legal profession might incline me towards the second. But my inner conspiracy theorist loves the fact that Rachmaninoff is at the center of this, because Rachmaninoff plus copyright equals fertile ground for at least mild conspiracy.

The majority of Rachmaninoff's works are public domain in the US for the simple fact that the nascent Soviet Union couldn't get their act together on copyright. Tsarist Russia had never signed on to the Berne Convention; Soviet attempts throughout the 1920s to create bilateral copyright treaties with various other countries were abortive. From 1917 until 1967 (when the USSR finally signed its first bilateral copyright treaty, with Hungary), the Soviets were not part of the international copyright system; works copyrighted in Europe or America, say, had no protection in the USSR, while works copyrighted in the USSR had no protection anywhere else. As soon as Rachmaninoff's music was published in Soviet Russia—The Bells, for instance, came off the press in 1920—it was PD everywhere else.

Stravinsky was in the same boat, which is why there are multiple versions of many of his pre-Soviet-era greatest hits—The Rite of Spring, The Firebird, &c.: Stravinsky revised the scores in order to copyright at least some version of them in the US and Europe. It's also a contributing factor, probably, to Stravinsky's demonic productivity. Rachmaninoff, though, neither revised his earlier works nor composed all that much after leaving Russia (though the selection was choice: the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and the Third Symphony both post-date his emigration and, thus, remain snugly under copyright).

That hasn't stopped Rachmaninoff's descendents from trying to reassert some copyright control over the PD works. Some efforts have been relatively above board—the Rachmaninoff Critical Edition, for instance, done with the full cooperation and input of Alexander Rachmaninoff, the composer's grandson, and duly copyrighted 2005—and some more curious: you might recall Alexander Rachmaninoff Wanamaker, Serge's great-great-grandson, who wanted to do new arrangements of the Rachmaninoff catalog, just different enough to warrant fresh copyright. Wanamaker died in a fire in 2009, and the status of his efforts isn't clear, although this refashioning of the Third Symphony into a "Fifth" Piano Concerto might be some indication of the trend.

Now, do I really think that shady Rachmaninoff-connected minions are somehow blackmailing MPA executives into pursuing this legal action? That'd be a great story, but, no, of course not. But the Rachmaninoff situation is exactly the sort of thing that's being contested in the above-mentioned Golan v. Holder. A little background: the Berne Convention, which originally dates from 1886, has been the general international framework for intellectual property ever since. Which doesn't mean that it's been hewed to ever since: the US and Russia only got around to joining the Convention in 1988 and 1995, respectively, and when they did, they did so while specifically exempting themselves from the Convention's stipulations for retroactivity—in other words, neither country wanted to try and sort out royalties on works that, in each country, had been public domain for the better part of the 20th century. However, subsequent treaties have muddied the water, both WIPO, from 1996 (and the basis for the DMCA law that provided cover for MPA's cease-and-desist), and the so-called Uruguay Round, the 1994 trade agreements that also brought you the World Trade Organization. It's the latter that is the basis for Golan v. Holder—the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, under which Congress ratified the agreement, amended the US Copyright Code, providing for "the automatic restoration of copyright in certain foreign works that are in the public domain in the United States but protected by copyright or neighboring rights in an eligible source country." (According to the US Copyright Office.) That would be one heck of a precedent right there. But note that, even if the URAA were to stand up under judicial scrutiny, The Bells should have remained unaffected—its theoretical 75-year copyright term expired the day the URAA took effect, and, according to the Berne Convention, such natural-causes temporal expiration of copyright is immune to retroactivity.

Hence the prima facie ridiculousness of the MPA's claim. But, given the US Supreme Court's conservative majority's combination of pro-corporate cheerleading and (except for Anthony Kennedy) anti-international skepticism, I, for one, am not quite sure what to expect from Golan v. Holder; as a legal stalking horse for a similar case in the EU (not to mention a mixed metaphor), The Bells might adequately toll. Or, again, maybe the MPA is just yet another hidebound entity, deciding to run down the Internet, but tying their legal shoelaces together. Either one is plausible, really. Far less plausible, but far more satisfying to my dark, mischievous soul, would be a cabal of Rachmaninoff intimates, making a solemn vow in 1943, fanning out across the Western world, insinuating themselves into the corridors of copyright power, biding their time until the trap was ready to be sprung. The Bells would actually be a pretty good soundtrack for that movie.

Update (4/21): The MPA backpedals, kind of.

Further update (4/21): IMSLP is back up.

I don't know when that road turned onto the road I'm on

Over at The Faster Times, some thoughts on the Philadelphia Orchestra's bankruptcy filing.

I wish I were happy

Reviewing Emmanuel Music's production of The Rake's Progress.
Boston Globe, April 18, 2011.

Nun hab' ich ewig Leid und Grämen!

There hasn't been much in this space lately—that's what an impending 11-service Holy Week gauntlet will do to one's productivity, I guess. But, in the interests of catching up: a couple weeks ago, the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra had an in-house "Composer Madness" competition, in which players got to vote on matchups in an NCAA-style bracket of the League of American Orchestra's list of most-performed composers. The final round pitted Beethoven against Mahler, at which point Kathryn Bacasmot flattered Soho the Dog HQ with a request for a commemorative cartoon, to run on the group's Facebook page.

No big upset here; Beethoven took the crown, so this is what ran (click to enlarge):


Had Mahler won, this is what would have run:


I love how, in that last panel, Ludwig came out looking like a pre-1960 Peanuts character.

Greased lightning

Reviewing the St. Petersburg Philharmonic and Alisa Weilerstein.
Boston Globe, April 12, 2011.

To the Victor belongs the spoils

Reviewing the Orchestra Sinfonica dell'Europa Unita's "Notte Tricolore."
Boston Globe, April 11, 2011.

Copyright claims mean Gramsci's writings tend to be search-only on the Web, but the writings of Benedetto Croce remain readily available.

Weekend Insomnia Playlist

Alex Ross posted a playlist last week that made me feel lazy for not blogging more; I mean, come on, just write down what you're listening to, how hard is that? Now, I think I've said it here before, but I am a pretty obsessive listener; items are listened to constantly and repetitively for a few days/weeks, only to then drop completely off my radar. So it might be fun to see what's in heavy rotation right now:

• "All Cried Out" (Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam) (see above). You know how some pop songs have isolated moments that you listen to the song over and over again just to sample? (For example, I once spent a month playing Blur's "Country House" to death solely for the transition into the second chorus.) "All Cried Out" is like two dozen of those moments strung together—and yet feels weirdly ephemeral when considered as an actual song. As if you can only measure it in parallax or something.
  
  
• Strauss/Godowsky: Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes from "Die Fledermaus" (Katherine Chi, piano). An excellent live performance I downloaded from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's website. Is there any composer who ever brought more technique, polish, and sheer elbow grease to self-indulgence than Godowsky? The wildly-overpriced-yet-insanely-good gourmet burger of Romantic pianism.
  
  
• Andy Williams' Greatest Hits (Andy Williams). Andy Williams: a man whose cool is predicated on how much he simply doesn't care whether you think he's cool or not. An inspiration for us all. (Seriously, I had totally forgotten just how smooth Andy Williams is; if there's even a dull edge on this record, I haven't found it.)
  
  
• George Antheil: Sonatas for Violin and Piano (Mark Fewer, violin; John Novacek, piano). This has been the go-to driving music for about five weeks now. Antheil's Second Sonata might be the most sardonically literate cartoon music ever; the First manages to both cheerfully plunder Stravinsky and Bartók while sassing them at the same time. The performance is some of the most committedly stylish 1920s provocation you're likely to hear. High-minded snotty punk music. I love it.
  
  
• 9 (Public Image Ltd). Speaking of high-minded snotty punk music—or post-punk, anyway.... I was cleaning the den a couple months ago when I found a cassette of this that poet and cultured, sophisticated man about town Jack Miller had dubbed off for me back in high school. Upon said finding, played it straight through and then played it straight through again, and have been going back to that well every couple of days ever since. 9 has the reputation of being too clean and polished for a PiL album, but something about John Lydon sneering over all those shiny, happy grooves at least partially redeems the late 80s for me.
  
  
• Charles Wuorinen: The Haroun Songbook. Here's what happened: I was throwing together a CD mix for a longish car ride, wanted a nice blast of atonal cheer to shift gears after Billy Joel's "Summer, Highland Falls," and somewhat impulsively settled on "It's a Princess Rescue Story," and then started to remember just how oddly catchy a lot of these songs are, and now they're all stuck in my craw. Especially "It's a Princess Rescue Story."
  
  
• "Summer, Highland Falls" (Billy Joel). Haters gonna hate, but, deep down, they wish they could come up with a melody this good.
  
  
• Bach: BWV 911, 826, 807 (Martha Argerich, piano). This one has been drifting in and out of the obsessive playlist for a few months. It's a great clear-out-the-muck aural reset album: it's like one of those really good understated 1970s thrillers where everything's in sharp focus and it's smart enough to assume you'll think for yourself and it's tricky enough to keep you on your toes, and when it's over, everything around you seems to have just a touch more clarity. I actually bought this album for a dollar at a library sale; I would have shed a tear for the declining cultural standards of civic institutions, but, on the other hand, that's a dollar well-spent.

Oxygen, oxygen right to the brain

Reviewing Harvard's Fromm Concert: Ensemble SurPlus and the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble.
Boston Globe, April 4, 2011.

Kinemacolor

Reviewing Sound Icon.
Boston Globe, April 3, 2011.

Concert last weekend, online now, in print on Sunday. Better late than never.

It's taking longer than we thought

From Dwight's Journal of Music, vol. III, no. 10 (June 11, 1853), pp. 75-76:

Music as a branch of Commerce.

The N.Y. Musical World and Times is informed that the music trade of this country, for 1852, amounted to twenty-seven millions of dollars.

The same journal says:

"The Piano-forte trade of this country amounted last year to upwards of twelve millions of dollars: and should it increase in as great a ratio for twenty years to come as it has for twenty years past, the Piano-forte crop of the North will exceed the Cotton crop of the South. Then, political economists will have a less discordant subject upon which to expend their learning and eloquence, and perhaps our national counsels will present the pleasing spectacle of "honorable gentlemen," from all parts of the country, engaged in acoustical, melodic, and harmonious discussions and experiments. When these tuneful days shall arrive, it is to be hoped that many of, if not all the discords which now rack the public tympanum, will be so "prepared" and "resolved" that they will no longer mar the harmony of our Federal organization, and sectional strifes be superseded by national concord—results which could probably be achieved by a proper distribution of the "flats" and "sharps" of the nation, or better, perhaps, by dispensing with them altogether."

If that's movin' up then I'm movin' out

Justin Davidson has an article in the latest New York taking a look at what he calls "the new New York School," those Gotham-based twenty- and (barely) thirty-something composers of fairly entrepreneurial bent dedicated to digital life, stylistic liberty, and the pursuit of a kind of grand, thoughtful eclecticism. (It's a little bit indicative of the atmosphere Davidson is sampling that most of the composers he mentions have first-name recognition: Judd, Nico, Missy, Timo, Tyondai.) Anyway, here's the money quote:

We idolize the radical who shreds the previous generation’s conventions, but every aesthetic revolution begets an ardent rigor of its own. The new New York School has a healthy distaste for tired conflicts and old campaigns. Despite their gifts and alertness to the moment, its composers seem muffled, bereft of zeal. What they badly need is a machine to rage against and a set of bracing creative constraints.

Chalk up another datum of proof of the ubiquity of the materialist conception of history! When I first read that, my left-Hegelian happy place lit up like a Christmas tree. I tend to regard music history as pretty Hegelian, not in the constant-historical-progress way, but in that it tends to shift about dialectically; and I certainly have more sympathy towards left-Hegelian interpretation—as troublesome as his philosophy can be, I tend to think that Marx got closer to the Way Things Are than Hegel ever did. But I confess that I found this article to be a little cognitively dissonant. That benchmark of a revolutionary shredding of previous conventions, of a necessity for conflict and constraint, is, itself, a leftover convention, and one that the new eclecticists haven't needed to shred. They've just moved beyond it.

When we think dialectic, we tend to think of the old thesis-antithesis-synthesis model (which was Fichte's, not Hegel's). Marx equated the historical dialectic with struggle, and, politically and economically, anyways, history bears him out. But the dialectic is not necessarily a conflict. Hegel's conception was that the dialectic expands understanding in such a way that what once seemed like conflicting information is revealed as just too limited a perspective. A few years back, I tried applying this idea to big-picture music history—one of my better meanderings, I think. Apply it to the new New York School, and what's the conflict they're rendering moot? I think you could make a plausible case that it's the very idea that aesthetic conflict is a necessary flag for generations to rally around.

This is not to say that constraint and/or rage can't produce great music. An awful lot of the music I love seems to be coming from that place—a sort of punk-ish, in-your-face energy—and it can sometimes buzz the mind to the extent that calmer music fades. (Here's an example of that happening to my critical self—to my ears, you put "Kontakte" on a program, most everything else is going to sound a little bit wan.) But, then again, I've heard plenty of music in which having something to prove was a curse, not a charge—all kinds of barely-warmed-over fake Copland that seemed to regard the mere act of having a tonal center as some sort of artistic triumph. Rage and constraint are aesthetic choices, not aesthetic necessities, and, like any aesthetic choice, it's what you make of the choice, not the choice alone. Anger is not the only kind of zeal there is—and it seems to me that the music Davidson is talking about has plenty of zeal, be it blinding cheer (Tyondai Braxton's Carl-Stalling-on-a-Skittles-bender Central Market) or quiet certainty (the scratched-negative vistas of Missy Mazzoli's Death Valley Junction). It's generous, not defiant. Maybe that seems a little weird nowadays.

Why am I going on and on about this? Well, it touched a nerve. Thinking about that article got me thinking about my own fairly unglorious career as a composer. It was about five years ago that I gave up trying to be a professional composer. I mean, I still compose—there's always something I'm tinkering with—and I still tend to engage music with a composer's brain. But I was pretty lousy at making a living at it, for two reasons. The first: you might not know it from my online persona, but I am very shy. If you ever see me having an extended conversation with anyone up to the level of casual acquaintance—listening, eye contact, the whole megilla—I am either a) enjoying at least my second drink, or b) working very, very hard. At the time I was trying to get some career traction, I was my own worst enemy. I remember going to new-music concerts and spending the entire first half in stomach-knot dread of intermission, when I would either screw up my courage and go network with all the other new-music types in the audience and then feel miserable because I was so graceless and awful at it, or I would stay safely in my seat and then feel miserable for not doing my job.

But the second reason is a little more interesting. I'm starting to think that I was, inadvertently, part of a kind of compositional lost generation. I didn't notice this until I was out at Tanglewood last summer, reviewing the Festival of Contemporary Music. This one was intended as a complete survey of Tanglewood's 70-year history. There was not a single composer born—like I was—in the 1970s. And I realized—of course there wouldn't be. We were all trained to be the next generation of academics and gatekeepers, but the previous generation of academics and gatekeepers were still around, holding ever tighter to those positions. That sense of aesthetic conflict—always dubious to begin with—was now, even worse, just going-through-the-motions office politics. And I found myself casting about for scraps. I was constantly second-guessing my own eclecticism (every call for scores I responded to, I always felt like Paul Newman trying to bribe his way into the poker game in The Sting: "That will get you first alternate, sir"). I began to resent when contemporaries had success (a truly squalid experience). I began to see opportunities as more important than the actual music. Finally, an opportunity came along, a last-minute concert for an ensemble I didn't have a piece for, so I threw something together. It was far too difficult, and a pretty terrible piece to boot, and it was cancelled on the eve of the concert. I was pissed and depressed—I mean even more so—for several weeks, until I finally wondered just why I was doing this to myself. So I quit. I was immediately a happier person. I have never regretted it.

Maybe I could have figured it all out, but I didn't, and I found other things to figure out that were better suited to me anyway. But I guess that's why, when I look at this new New York School, whether I like the musical output or not (though most of it I do), I don't see a group of composers who are lost, or tentative, or in need of a good old-school chip on their shoulder. I see a bunch of composers writing exactly what they want to write, building their own community of support, and making a go of it. In other words, in at least some partial way, they figured something out that I never did. I'm old enough that I can be happy about that. Because, both dialectically and practically, that's progress.

Nice 'n' Easy

Reviewing the Cantata Singers and Ensemble.
Boston Globe, March 21, 2011.

Hector of the flashing (green) helmet

I lost track of days this week, so it wasn't until I saw the third passer-by done up in neon green that I remembered that, yes, it's today that's St. Patrick's Day. I'm one-quarter Irish, which is probably just the right amount to enjoy an American St. Patrick's Day with some equanimity—not inclined to full-blown plastic leprechaun hat embarrassment, but not so Irish that I can't get behind the idea. Kind of like Christmas, I tend to embrace the sheer unmoored weirdness of St. Patrick's Day: a religious observance gone brazenly secular, a national celebration that thrives an ocean away from the nation it celebrates. (I remember once, a long time ago, spending St. Patrick's Day in a bar that marked the occasion by hiring a Highland bagpiper, kilt and all—even the Irish-Americans seemed to take it in the sort of "eh, why not" spirit in which it was intended.)

Driving around this morning, I got to thinking about who would qualify as the most "Irish" composer there is. Now, there are plenty of composers who are actually Irish (my go-to is always Charles Villiers Stanford, on the grounds that Elgar hated him; if you're annoying the English, then, as an Irishman, you're doing something right), but I'm talking about a composer whose personality and/or music fits the crazy American stereotype of Irishness that gets a lot of play every March. You know the image: a charming rogue, a garrulous spinner of tall tales, blasphemous yet sentimental, irresponsible yet lovable, &c., &c. There's not many. Wagner, maybe—nobody spins a tall tale like Wagner—but, then again, his irresponsibility isn't so much "lovable" as "obnoxiously self-centered and anti-Semitic." For a while, I toyed with the idea of Poulenc—the puckishness fits—but his Catholicism is more St. Teresa than Father Ted.

So I'm going to throw my one-quarter-Irish weight behind Hector Berlioz. Tall tales? In spades. More charming the more delusional his grandeur? Absolutely. And really, throwing a brass band into a Requiem mass is a pretty Irish move. Plus, he was Irish by marriage, at least for a little while. So there you go: Hector Berlioz, stereotypical Irishman. Strange? Sure, but not really any stranger than the holiday itself. Slainté!

If you want the job done right, you gotta use the proper tools

Reviewing the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin.
Boston Globe, March 15, 2011.

We're still singing that same song

Reviewing Paavali Jumppanen.
Boston Globe, March 15, 2011.

Until the world we roam, how can we be sure?

Reviewing the Emerson String Quartet and Sir James Galway.
Boston Globe, March 14, 2011.

Steve Smith's review of the players' Saturday performance in New York, including the Adès premiere, can, and indeed, should be read here.

Angry, wrinkled Old Majesty

Geoff Edgers, in today's Globe, reporting on the Boston Symphony Orchestra's search for a replacement for James Levine, interviews Jonathan Menkis, head of the BSO's players' committee:

Whom would he prefer? Menkis mentioned Bernard Haitink, the BSO’s principal guest conductor from 1995 to 2004, and “Lenny."

As in Leonard Bernstein. When life imitates comedy, that's a little scary, but when life imitates my attempts at comedy, a fallout shelter is probably your best bet.

One look and I had found a world completely new

Because it was a good day to play it: Percy Grainger's arrangement of "Love Walked In":

Sit right down and you'll hear a tale

Reviewing the Radius Ensemble.
Boston Globe, March 8, 2011.

Obéissant aux dieux, / Je pars et je vous aime!

In Li Hao-ku's 13th-century, Yuan Dynasty drama Chang Boils the Sea, Chang, a wandering scholar, benefits from divine assistance in his wooing of Ch'iung-Lien, the daughter of the Divine Dragon King of the Eastern Sea. As the title promises, Chang eventually triumphs by magically boiling away the sea, eliminating the watery barrier that protects the Dragon King's palace. A happy ending—except that, as the audience has known all along, neither Chang nor Ch'iung-Lien are who they seem, but rather, former immortals, exiled from heaven for the crime of falling in love. Just as wedding bells seem about to ring, the pair instead abruptly cast off their temporal identities and leave the mortal world.

I thought of Chang and his travails after the announcement yesterday that James Levine was, indeed, resigning as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Interestingly, no one is quite sure just what this means yet: there was already much talk of Levine reducing his role, so a continued presence as some sort of principal-guest-conductor-type doesn't seem out of the question—and the September 1st resignation date at least hints at the possibility that Levine will have another summer to put a stamp on Tanglewood. (Or, maybe, it was just the most administratively convenient date.) But irregardless, some sort of end is here, and the odd, long-anticipated precipitousness with which it happened would have resonated with those Yuan Dynasty audiences. Levine and the BSO were both made for each other and, somehow, ill-starred. They could repeatedly summon divine magic—a fierce Moses und Aron, stunningly impeccable Wagner, a Les Troyens for the ages—but, just as repeatedly, their romance ran into near-melodramatic complications, of both health and schedule.

Levine's leave-taking thus seems a little anxious and inconclusive, reflecting the uncertainty that the possibilities opened up by his departure can outbalance the possibilities lost. Or maybe it's just the way the story fits all too well in what increasingly feels like the advent of a protracted mean season. In that regard, Chang Boils the Sea really did have the happier ending; as the again-immortal Ch'iung-Lien puts it:

Idly we shall watch the Peaches of Immortality redden on the trees,
For we have cast off this World of Dust and its Boundless Bitter Sea.

Cross-posted at The Faster Times.

But when u got it baby, nothing come 2 hard

Reviewing Dmitri Hvorostovsky.
Boston Globe, March 1, 2011.

That was the curious incident

Reviewing the Boston Philharmonic.
Boston Globe, February 28, 2011.

CSI: Atonality

In 1914 young Frances Glessner fabricated a model of the famed Swiss quartette, the Flonzaley Quartette. Her handiwork was presented to the musicians at dinner one evening, an event remembered by her son: "It was covered with a large floral piece in the center of the table, which gave no hint as to what was underneath.... After dinner, the floral piece was removed with a flourish, and there, two feet from their noses, was this model of themselves playing!... For a moment nobody spoke, and then all four members of the quartette burst out in voluble language.... Each one of them pointed with delight to the eccentricities of the other three. I still remember Mr. Betti, with a magnifying glass peering over the shoulder of his own miniature, trying to read the music on the music rack. It had been specially written by Frederick Stock, the conductor of the Chicago Symphony, in the style of Schoenberg, but was impossible to play—a fact which Mr. Betti soon appreciated."

—Carol Callahan, Prairie Avenue Cookbook:
Recipes and Recollections from Prominent
19th-Century Chicago Families, p. 54

Prairie Avenue, on Chicago's South Side, was the address of choice for the city's Gilded Age industrial barons; the Glessner family—John Jacob Glessner was a vice-president of International Harvester—fit the profile in style, living in a mansion designed by H. H. Richardson and dispensing largesse as major supporters of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Due to family pressure, however, Frances Glessner Lee would have to wait until her 50s before she was able to pursue her true calling: forensic pathology. With George Magrath, the chief medical examiner in Boston, she founded Harvard's department of legal medicine. One can surmise that her model of the Flonzaley Quartet was impressive indeed; she later produced her famous "Nutshell Series of Unexplained Death" (example pictured above, via), intricately detailed one-inch-to-one-foot dioramas of crime scenes, designed as case studies for prospective investigators. Now located at the Maryland Medical Examiner's Office, the Nutshell Studies still serve their purpose, training the forensic eye to notice their crucial, grisly eccentricities.

What's there is cherce

Reviewing the Takács Quartet.
Boston Globe, February 21, 2011.

Di piu' risorgere speranza e' muta!

To be honest, there aren't as many perks as you might think to being a freelance classical-music critic, but one of them came in the mail yesterday: this new transfer of one of the great performances of Verdi's La Traviata: live, from Covent Garden in 1958, with Maria Callas as Violetta. Now, while, if forced to name my favorite soprano, I would probably pick Callas, I am hardly a Callas expert, but even I have long been aware of the run of Violettas she sang in the late 1950s—the La Scala performance in 1956, the famous Lisbon Traviata from 1958, and this Covent Garden version. (Callas also sang Violetta at the Met around the same time, before she was "fired" by Rudolf Bing; after Covent Garden, she took on the role one more time, in Dallas.) Callas in La Traviata is kind of like Citizen Kane—not everyone will agree that she was the best Violetta of all time, but the suggestion is more universally plausible than any other. And I'm not sure anyone has ever single-handedly raised the bar on a role the way Callas did; Violetta is, today, a much more challenging role, much more of a career benchmark, because Maria Callas sang it the way she did.

I am probably in a minority in that I prefer the Covent Garden Traviata to the Lisbon Traviata, but my rationale is pretty simple: for me, the heart of the opera is "Ah! Dite alla giovine," the duet that Violetta sings with Germont in Act II, and Callas's Covent Garden "Dite alla giovine" surpasses all others. With this new release, I thought I would try and figure out just why that is. It's tricky: by this point, Callas's general conception was pretty consistent. Compare the 1958 Lisbon with the 1958 Covent Garden, and they're pretty similar: the pared-down sound, the implacable rhythm. But there are differences—and, in the Covent Garden version, by design or accident, they pivot the duet from operatic drama to a traumatic critique of operatic drama.

"Dite alla giovine" is one of opera's great frozen moments. Germont has convinced Violetta to leave Alfredo, Germont's son, on the grounds that it will remove the scandal that would impair the marriage prospects of Germont's daughter. "Say to your daughter, so pure and fair," she sings, "that there is a victim of misfortune whose one ray of happiness before she dies is a sacrifice made for her." Germont expresses, rather effusively, his sadness at this turn of events. In the Lisbon Traviata, Germont was sung by Mario Sereni in booming fashion (to be fair, he's only following directions—Verdi writes the part up to a double-forte). This actually made for a neat dramatic moment: when Violetta returns to her opening phrases in duet with Germont, Callas's insistent quietness actually brings Sereni down from his heroic ring, and the effect is rather of the older man being jolted from public sympathy into a truer, private commiseration. But, perhaps anticipating the gap to be bridged, Callas has already opted for a stronger, bigger dynamic arch than she would use in London. By contrast, Mario Zanasi, the Covent Garden Germont, sings with a much leaner tone—almost tenor-like—and, as a result, the duet maintains a cooler, less roiled profile.

I think that coolness, that emptiness, is the key. You can hear it in the very start of the duet, the fermata "Ah!":


As always in 19th-century opera, the fermata is an implicit invitation to ornamentation. In the Lisbon Traviata, Callas does an elegant little portamento from the B-flat to the G. At Covent Garden, though, she did a stripped-down ornament: just the B-flat, then an A-flat, then a break before the next downbeat. And that's why I prefer the Covent Garden Traviata, because it's where Callas's conception of the character comes through with the most clarity. Her Violetta is not just a woman who has been forced by society into a corner. She is a woman who has, almost in a loophole way, leveraged the artifice of a projected personal image into a kind of defiant prominence. And, in punishment, she has that very artifice taken from her.

We sometimes compliment a performance or a work of art by calling it "artless"; it's an illusion, usually the result of an art so finely honed that it disappears from the artistic surface. Callas's "Dite alla giovine" is something more complex: it's the illusion of a loss of art. It's all the more shattering since her Act I singing, in both versions, is so vibrantly artful, a performance shot through with a confidence in its own performing flair. But Traviata is an opera all about pretense, and image, and how societal standing becomes more precarious as society gets more shallow. Like I've said before, the heartbreak is that Violetta is trapped in a world where Germont's argument actually makes sense to her. But then the ultimate emptiness of her own carefully-constructed artifice is laid bare.

Opera is, of course, one of the most artificial art forms there is, in a glorious way. It revels in its artifice; it posits it as more real than real, and sweeps you up in its amplification. Callas's Violetta plays off that, in a way that, perhaps, she knew would only work within the oppressive artificiality of La Traviata's world. For those few minutes of "Dite alla giovine," Callas rips down the curtain—the artifice is gone, the trappings are gone, the opera-ness of the opera is gone, and we're left with a palpably empty void. It is as if—to reference another opera—Salome were nothing but veils, her dance a dance of disintegration. Not many singers would dare to open up a glimpse of the abyss like that. Callas would, and it was, at least for me, quite possibly the most beautiful thing she ever did.

Unlikely music critic of the day

We are right off the park, and I get a lot of nature taking Harriet to the amusements. The other day, Anton Webern's music was on the radio. She heard it and said, "It's like wild animals thru the woods walking," and then, "It's like spiders crying together, but without tears."

—Robert Lowell to Randall Jarrell, November 7, 1961

At the time, Harriet Lowell was four years old. Her Webernian impressions would turn up in her father's poem "Fall 1961," an anxious meditation juxtaposing "the tock, tock, tock / of the orange, bland, ambassadorial / face of the moon / on the grandfather clock" with "the chafe and jar / of nuclear war; / we have talked our extinction to death":

A father's no shield
for his child,
We are like a lot of wild
spiders crying together,
but without tears.

Nature holds up a mirror.
One swallow makes a summer.
It's easy to tick
off the minutes,
but the clockhands stick.

In his biography of Robert Lowell, Lost Puritan, Paul Mariani points out that "Fall 1961" was Lowell's first poem after a difficult, fallow year following his wildly successful "For the Union Dead."

Just asking

Okay, I'll get to the fate of arts funding in the US federal budget in a minute. But first, let us pay proper regard to the parade of arts administrators falling all over themselves to preemptively pass the buck. First up: NEA head Rocco Landesman, who's been making all sorts of noise lately about how there are too many institutions and too many arts jobs, &c. Example:

“There are 5.7 million arts workers in this country and two million artists.... Do we need three administrators for every artist?”

I am somewhat surprised that Landesman has not been lambasted for the sheer disingenuousness of that statement, considering he in all likelihood pulled the 5.7 million figure from Amercians for the Arts and the 2 million figure from his own agency without bother to consider that a) the NEA's 2 million artists are included in AFTA's 5.7 million workers, and b) that 5.7 million is a tally of total full-time equivalent jobs, not just administrators. But, anyway: then there was Michael Kaiser, dodging blame: "The arts are in trouble because there is simply not enough excellent art being created." (Don't sell yourself short, Michael—you stuff your foot that far down your throat, it starts to look vaguely Philip-Guston-esque.) And then there was this blog post by New England Conservatory president Tony Woodcock that the Internet kept trying to direct my attention to the other day. On the surface, it's your standard classical-music-needs-to-reinvent-itself hand-wringing, full of concern over Relevance and Legitimacy and Its Place In Culture (i.e., in the thrall of irrelevant network effects). But this article was interesting: I scratched that surface, and was kind of amazed how little there was actually there, as it were. I mean, anybody who tries to take both sides in the Detroit Symphony strike is not really putting their foot down very hard. I took it as a sign that our public discourse on the arts may have finally reached the point where all sides have abandoned specificity for rhetorical wheel-spinning. Woodcock's peroration:

We need to reassert the power of music and the power of musicians to be extraordinary in their music making and in their ability to re-invent themselves for all our futures.

It sounds good, I'll give him that.

And give those administrators credit for sensing the shift in the wind: in terms of arts funding, the White House's new budget proposal starts the negotiation at a 13% decrease in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, from $168 million in FY2011 to $146 million in 2012. Keep in mind that the opposition started their negotiation at zero, and it's looking pretty grim. Here's the real fun: scroll to page 439 of this bit of high-performance eye-glazing, and you can see that the long-term assumption is a steady erosion of federal arts funding—that estimated $163 million in 2021 is, in real dollars (based on standard CPI inflation estimates), not even as much as the reduced proposal for 2012. If you think that this is a planned devolution and that states will pick up the slack, I will answer you as soon as I catch my breath from laughing.

But, as cynically satisfying as regarding the collapse of civilization can be, it's still, again, rhetorical wheel-spinning. So here's my line in the sand: I want to see that proposed $146 million tripled in a decade. I want a commitment to annual 11.5% increases—and, Race-to-the-Top style, I want state access to those increases tied to the ensured health of state arts agencies. And by 2021, the NEA budget should be $438 million. You want to spur private-sector activity? According to this research (which I've cited before), such an increase could potentially boost private donations to arts organizations by somewhere between $40 and $340 million annually. You want to create jobs? Compare this analysis and the AFTA analysis: the alternative energy industry—which the proposed budget supports to the tune of some $8 billion in research grants and breaks—generates 1.67 jobs per $100,000 spent, while the arts generates 2.94 jobs per $100,000 spent. You want some political cover? Tripling its budget would merely be returning NEA funding levels, in real terms, to their high-water mark under the Reagan administration (1984, which wasn't even the high-water mark for NEA funding overall).

Truth be told, I didn't do a lot of research and then come up with a tripled NEA budget as a result. I pulled that tripling out of thin air, and then went looking for justification. And, truth be told, it wasn't hard to find it. Does this indicate, perhaps, that I am less than serious about deficit reduction and/or economic growth? Well, as far as I can tell, that puts me in good company. Nobody in government, for all their shouting and posturing, seems really serious about it, either. Nobody seems serious about actually raising taxes or shoring up entitlements. Nobody, for instance, seems serious about scaling back military spending to 1990s levels, even though that's killing jobs in the long run. It's just political point-scoring—rhetorical wheel-spinning. Might as well spin that wheel towards the arts. At least they do some good.

The Golden Horn

So I arrived back home from an evening out, having missed the Grammys, and discovered that, apparently, I am some sort of inadvertent, telepathic kiss of death: nobody I was rooting for won. Darcy didn't win. Steve Mackey and BMOP didn't win. Harry Christophers didn't win. Janelle Monáe didn't win. The late, great Solomon Burke didn't win. Apologies all around for the magical jinx of my advocacy. (I am a Cubs fan, after all.) At least, in categories that had flown under my scattershot radar, Pete Seeger and Kaija Saariaho came away with awards.

Scrolling through the list of winners, my eye did alight on the category of Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance. The nominees: Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Robert Plant, and John Mayer. Average age: 57.6. Baby boomers: please step away from the levers of cultural power and keep your hands where we can see them.

Another one rides the bus

I don't normally stoop to highlighting contemporary-music-hurts-my-ears ridiculousness, but this lazy, ill-informed screed from one Michael Fedo (Contemporary music sounds like bus crashes! Supporting evidence: three vague anecdotes and a Terry Gross interview with Paul McCartney) commits the compounding sin of attempting a joke at the expense of tripe, which, as anyone with a modicum of culture knows, is at the pinnacle of the culinary pantheon. Begone, Michael Fedo! We're just fine with our bus crashes.

One of these days, I am actually going to write an article about how right now is a golden age for tripe eating in Boston. (Exhibit A: Jacky Robert's Tripes à la Provençale. Exhibits B, C, D....) Of course, the classic statement of Bostonian tripe was the eponymous staple of the old Parker House hotel; you can still recreate it at home.

Noblesse oblige

Apropos of nothing, or maybe something—you never know with the way my brainstorms play out—I got side-tracked yesterday digging up dirt on Boston Symphony Orchestra trustees from the 1950s. That's a lot of Ivy League WASP rectitude right there! But I did find a good story about N. Penrose Hallowell. Hallowell was a brahmin banker (his BSO trusteeship was an outgrowth of his partnership at Lee, Higginson & Co., BSO founder Henry Lee Higginson's firm), whose propriety was such that he wouldn't support his mistress until, after many years, they were properly married. But maybe the experience contributed to this instance of magnificent equanimity:

When Mr. and Mrs. N. Penrose Hallowell were selling their home to Mr. Howard Johnson of eatery fame, Mrs. Hallowell expressed the hope that Mr. and Mrs. Johnson would have a happy future in the house. There was a perceptible silence. Then Master Johnson, age nine, piped up, "There isn't any Mrs. Johnson. One's dead and one's divorced," adding hopefully, "but Daddy's got a girl friend." As the silence turned glacial, Mr. Hallowell rose from his fireside, smote the roadside restaurateur smartly on the back, and speaking for the first time said, "Bully for you, Johnson."

Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

Kansas is the latest state to take financial aim at the arts, with their governor, Sam Brownback (yes, he's a Republican—how'd you guess?), issuing an executive order abolishing the Kansas Arts Commission, though the abolishing is via some sort of gradual-privatization-through-the-auspices-of-the-Historical-Society smokescreen convoluted enough to make Freudian analysts rub their hands with glee. At least there's some nominal outcry. But this is par for the course—political point-scoring over economic impact. It is, in other words, the result of playing nice. And I was musing this morning: maybe part of that playing nice is something that arts advocates normally tout as an advantage, namely, institutions' deep ties to their communities.

You know why states never pull this kind of crap on corporations? Because corporations don't care about their communities beyond PR necessity, and governments know it. Go on, Kansas—rescind all the tax breaks on Koch Industries and see how long they stick around. Companies, factories, sports teams—they all know how to work this sort of blackmail. Arts organizations? Not so much. Now, I'm not saying that theaters and opera companies should go to war with their communities. But I, at least, would be curious to see what a little mercenary action could accomplish. Say this Kansas thing holds up—what if the Topeka Symphony could broker a little sweetheart deal with Nebraska to move it and its 100 jobs north of the border? How would that play in Wichita?

Realistic? Probably not. But arts advocates are now forced to deal with an entire generation of free-market fundamentalists that would never risk having their fragile faith tested by something as dangerous as the carrot of an economic impact statement—so why not consider the stick?

Das erinnert an vergangene Zeiten

Hey, tomorrow is Alban Berg's birthday! So here's an honorary cocktail for the party: rather lush, a little exotically perfumed, a little hell-fire in the background.

Lulu's Fix

3 parts gin
3 parts lemon juice
2 parts peppercorn syrup*
1 part strawberry purée
A decent bunch of mint leaves

Throw it all in a shaker with ice, and shake well—until the mint breaks up. Strain into a glass (with a coarse enough strainer that bits of mint are floating in the thing) and garnish with an expressionistically long peel of lemon rind.

*Peppercorn syrup: put ½ cup sugar, ½ cup water, and a handful of crushed peppercorns (black, green, whatever you've got) in a small pot and simmer until the sugar is dissolved and the peppercorns have imparted a nice burn.

Here's a little bit of Anja Silja (Lulu), Richard Holm (Alwa), and Carlos Alexander (dead on the floor), ca. 1968, in a typically awkward tryst:

Second time around

Reviewing Yehudi Wyner's Fragments from Antiquity with the Lexington Symphony and Dominique Labelle.
Boston Globe, February 7, 2011.

It's either sadness or euphoria

Reviewing Joshua Bell and Sam Haywood.
Boston Globe, February 7, 2011.

The way you hold your knife

Previewing Opera Boston's production of Hindemith's Cardillac.
Boston Globe, February 6, 2011.

Only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness

Everyone's starting to have fun with the New York Philharmonic's new digital archive, so in honor of the other big event in New York this week, here's a real rarity: Leonard Bernstein and Richard Nixon being civil to one another.


This was less than a decade after Bernstein had been called a fellow traveler by Life magazine, and just over a decade before Nixon recorded himself calling Bernstein a "son of a bitch." (Ironically, Life's accusation came on the heels of the infamous Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, which probably indirectly led to the above encounter. The Conference, organized by the Soviet Union, prodded the CIA to focus attention and money on pro-American cultural diplomacy; the Institute of International Education award to Bernstein was largely based on such diplomacy, in the form of Bernstein's international tours with the Philharmonic.)

These kinds of archives tend to be fertile ground for reading between the lines, but one figure whose personality comes through largely unfiltered is my old teacher, Lukas Foss. A folder of documents surrounding Foss's guest conducting stints in the mid-1960s is chock-full of Foss's scattered, exuberant graciousness and Carlos Moseley's good-natured exasperation in trying to pin him down. There's also this glimpse of Foss's typically cheerful pragmatism, in this case regarding Bach's St. John Passion:

Regarding St. John Passion text, I feel very strongly that we should have no translation. Main reason: leaf rustling, but also important that we don't get all that dated anti-Semitism into print. Whenever it is done..., it produces a flurry of letters. Why not have a little harmless synopsis for each number, and on a single page or an adjoining page so there is no turn.

Hourly Comic Day 2011

(Click to enlarge.)


(More hourly comics here.)

Multiplicity

Reviewing NEC's "Salute to Franz Liszt."
Boston Globe, February 1, 2010.

Sergey Schepkin sent a nice e-mail clarifying that the four-hand arrangement of the "Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2" was not Liszt's own, as was listed in the program, but that of Liszt's student Franz Bendel—to which Schepkin added additional ornaments and Hungarian-style scintillation. (Bendel, incidentally, performed at the famous 1872 "World's Peace Jubilee" in Boston; two years later, while on another tour, he died in Boston after being stricken with typhoid fever.)

Vogel als Prophet

A while back, I decided (and I quote):

I don't have a Twitter account, and I probably never will

As you can see on the right side of the page, I changed my mind on that one. What happened? Well, Emerson, after all. And flattery will get you everywhere. And I've been doing so much following on Twitter that my own account became a matter of efficiency.

But mostly, I became curious as to what a Twitter version of me would look like. I have a blog persona, a critic persona, a composer persona, a book-author persona—sure, they're all kind of like me, but they're also not really me (or they're only distilled portions of me) in a way that I find kind of fascinating. So I wondered what part of my personality would come to the fore when forced into a 140-character suit.

(Though I still think that tweeting during concerts is a bad, bad idea.)

Leftover Beethoven Miscellany: Everybody's Talkin'

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.

One of the casualties of the latest draft of the book was the 18th-century philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, reduced to a passing reference: even by my liberal standards, his connection to Beethoven is pretty indirect. But Herder is, I think, one of the most fascinating thinkers of the pre-Hegelian era, someone who, at times, seems to have wandered into the 18th century from some modern or even post-modern time. For Herder was a man fascinated by language.

Herder was a scrupulous thinker whose posthumous reputation was somewhat hijacked by his advocacy of the particular and all-to-easily simplified idea of German nationalism. But that was only a by-product of his overall philosophical goal, which was to put to bed the age-old problem of whether the mind was an understandable machine or a fundamentally mysterious thing, dualistically separate from rational analysis. Herder had the distinction of studying with both the über-rationalist Immanuel Kant and the loopy proto-Romantic Johann Georg Hamann; each held him in high enough regard to later feel betrayed whenever Herder tried to philosophically mediate between their two extremes.

Herder’s early career efficiently followed a best-and-brightest establishment path, aided by his own skill at wooing the power elite. He was so successful as a teacher that the city of Riga gave him two Lutheran churches to pastor in order to counter an offer from St. Petersburg. At the same time, his writings on German-language literature gave him a burgeoning regional reputation. Herder moved in the right circles, saying the right things. And then, in 1769, in his mid-twenties, he threw it all aside and took a six-month sojourn in France.

Herder’s reasons for going were not unlike those that drew a flood of expatriates to Paris in the 1920s and 30s—he had grown suspicious of his own respectability, and besides, French thinking enjoyed a continent-wide reputation for being on the cutting edge. But if Herder dreamed of becoming a philosophe, he was soon disillusioned, and the source of that disillusionment became the hub of Herder’s thinking: language. In Herder’s ear, the seeming universal appeal of French thought was, in reality, simply the appeal of the French language, its civility and polish and air of objectivity. From the diary Herder kept on his French journey (but which was only published over forty years after his death, in 1846, when the wave of German nationalism was once again cresting):

The question is not what a word can mean according to a few dictionaries, but what it means in the consciousness of living people—here, now, in all its capriciousness…

Languages, no less than governments, depend in this on the spirit of the age: this becomes striking to the point of being obvious, if one makes comparisons. The same spirit of monarchic manners which Montesquieu so strikingly portrays in his own person dominates his language also. Like the French nation, it has little real virtue, little inner strength; it makes as much as it can out of little, as a machine is moved by a small driving wheel.

French thought acquired its cosmopolitan reputation, Herder says, because the French language that such thought is beholden to is geared towards cosmopolitan niceties; but the demands of politesse and intellectual substance forms a zero-sum game. As scholar Harold Mah puts it, “In a society constituted by the requirements of civility, every linguistic act is a social performance, and every performance displaces the intellectual content of the linguistic act.” That, for Herder, marks the difference between the potential in French-language and German-language reasoning. In Mah’s summarization: “The French language suspends the mind above sense experience and therefore refers to nothing but itself; German goes all the way down to brute sense perception and, through it, goes all the way up to higher reason.”

Herder himself could indulge in less refined pro-German, anti-French rhetoric—“Spew out the ugly slime of the Seine!” read one poem, “Speak German, O you German!” But behind this linguistic chauvinism lies strikingly modern ideas, not only that the way we think is inseparably dependent on the language we are thinking in, but that the structures of languages themselves result less from human universality and more from particular cultural circumstances. (Contrasting the self-referentiality of French with the sensual omnivorousness of German, Herder not only anticipated the peel-back-the-surface approach of critical theory and cultural studies by nearly two centuries, he also offered an explanation why the German strains of such theory would focus on sociology, while the French strains would be more concerned with textual analysis.) Language became Herder’s philosophical touchstone. His theory of mind, which sidestepped the whole materialist-dualist question by positing the mind as a living organism, one with the body it inhabited (drawing on the latest biological research showing how muscles contracted when the attached nerve was irritated), was first delivered in the form of a theory of language acquisition: language evolved from man’s need to communicate survival techniques from generation to generation, reason growing out of the body’s needs. His view of philosophical discourse was bound up in the inescapability of language, leading him to elevate analogical argument to the point where he considers literature a better source of knowledge than philosophy:

[F]or the most part it was a single new image, a single analogy, a single striking metaphor that gave birth to the greatest and boldest theories. The philosophers who declaim against figurative language and themselves serve nothing but old, often uncomprehended, figurative idols are at least in great contradiction with themselves.

For Herder, “Homer and Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare and Klopstock have supplied psychology and knowledge of humankind with more material than even the Aristotles and Leibnizes of all peoples and times.” (It was this position that partially spurred Kant, a veteran declaimer against “figurative language,” to finish the third of his Critiques, the Critique of Judgement.) Herder’s pro-literature stance reveals Herder’s nationalism as more qualified than the following generation of German patriots. Herder’s nationalism was not based around geography or misty conceptions of the medieval Teutonic soul, but around language—his conception of German unity was a unification of everyone who spoke German.

Such a conception could introduce complications into an otherwise straightforward nationalistic spirit; any argument for national exceptionalism was actually an argument for linguistic exceptionalism, and, what’s more, an argument necessarily expressed within the language one wished to promote, and so on down the philosophical rabbit-hole. The way the German Romantics glommed onto instrumental music—that persistent claim that music picks up where language leaves off—can be read in part as a way to side-step the qualifications of Herder’s nationalism. That such instrumental music was so celebrated a product of German culture was an argument that there was something exceptional about the German soul that likewise went beyond language.

The Old Order Changeth

If [Milton Babbitt] had not opted to be a teacher and a composer, he would have been a great big league manager.

—Joseph Polisi, The Artist as Citizen

R.I.P.—nah, scratch that, rest in cheerfully generous, irascible opinions and good beer. I am forever indebted to Babbitt for instilling in me an admirable mistrust of authority—having heard that all his music was thorny and difficult and incomprehensible, it was a kick to discover how much fun those anthologized Semi-Simple Variations and All Set and Phonemena* and My Ends Are My Beginnings were.

This thing I wrote about Babbitt is something I rather liked, which is always a dubious sign. But here's something pithier: a lot of American history—and the history of the American relationship with American history—makes a lot more sense when you realize that Milton Babbitt was, actually, a quintessentially American composer.

*And Philomel, which I conflated with it in an earlier version of this post—Philomena would probably be a pretty fun piece, too.

O caro, o bello, o fortunato nastro

Soho the Dog HQ has seen its online wherewithal this week preempted by those infernal twins, Work and Life, which means that, among other things, I missed Mozart's birthday yesterday. Except that I didn't, because last weekend, I celebrated in agreeable company and high style by hearing Goli, Box Five, and Molly Zenobia play a Mozart's Birthday concert in Cambridge. The occasion was declared by Mary Bichner, Box Five's whirlwind driving force, and as obsessively committed a fangirl as a 255-year-old wunderkind could hope for. (Bichner was even game to sing an indie-rockish Count Almaviva to Evangelia Leontis's Susanna. La donna ognora tempo ha dir di sì.)

Appropriate costume was encouraged; here's what I came up with:


If you want one, you can get one; all of my royalties will go to the Greater Boston Food Bank. For cake, I hope.

Freestyle pairs

Reviewing the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
Boston Globe, January 24, 2011.

There is a bear in the woods

Yesterday, the Republican Study Committee, a group of House Republicans "organized for the purpose of advancing a conservative social and economic agenda," announced a proposal to cut government spending; among the proposed cuts is the complete elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I was amused to see that the animus to arts spending among this particular branch of conservatism has become so ingrained and predictable that nobody on the RSC felt the need to defend, justify, or even mention those line items. (Maybe arts organizations should start front-loading their economic-impact studies with a bunch of cherry-picked Friedrich Hayek quotes or something.) Then again, the RSC has bigger fish to fry:

Every component of our plan will undoubtedly raise the ire of one group or another, whether it is labor unions who want more benefits or Angora goat herders who want more subsidies.

An angora curtain has descended across the landscape of American free enterprise! Ed Wood, threat to democracy.

Anyway, when the RSC chairman complains that a "bigger and more intrusive government leads to a weaker and less innovative economy," I counter with the existence of piano-shaped toilet seats:


It's even better if you quietly hum "America the Beautiful."

If it stands up, you stay there

Reviewing Christine Brewer.
Boston Globe, January 18, 2011.

Update (1/18): For the sharp-eyed: no, Kirsten Flagstad was, of course, not American—but the set in question was making reference to her fame in America.

Update (1/19): And it's been fixed. The reviewer apologizes for his spasm of infelicitous clause-making.

Doesn't think she waltzes, but would rather like to try

So by now you've probably heard about this whole 10 Greatest Composers thing over at The New York Times. As link-bait goes, it's reasonably high-minded, and Anthony Tommasini is right to frame the whole exercise as cocktail-party game rather than serious cultural investigation. Still, two comments in—two—and someone is turning up their nose at Schoenberg because he isn't popular enough. There, as Gore Vidal would have Henry James say, it is.

So instead of wading into that morass, here's my kind of top ten list, a list situated at various intersections of greatness and obscurity: The Top Ten Composers That Will Never Appear Anywhere Near The New York Times' Top Ten Composers List.

• Etienne Nicolas Méhul. Wrote wildly inventive operas (listen to his greatest hit here); Beethoven ripped off a lot of his best tricks. Not enough influence for you? He was Napoleon's favorite composer. Beat that with a stick!
• Johan Helmich Roman. Often referred to as "The Swedish Handel." When Sweden needed a Handel, Johan Helmich Roman was there.
• Hans Rott. Only wrote one major piece, but made it count: the Symphony in E major is pretty much the template for the Mahlerian style—as Mahler himself admitted. Rott went mad at the age of 22, on a train: he started waving a gun around, claiming that Brahms had filled the train with dynamite. Talk about going in style.
• Muzio Clementi. Had he never lived, God only knows what millions of piano students would have started with. Besides, dude wrote "A Groovy Kind of Love."
• Anthony Philip Heinrich. Went broke, hiked 700 miles into the middle of Kentucky, and proceeded to come up with some of the most awesomely crazy and crazily awesome music of the 19th century. Like if Schumann had been one of the Beats.
• Pierre De Geyter. Wrote the Internationale. In a morning. What did you do this morning? I reheated some soup.
• Percy Grainger. Has there ever been a composer as cheerfully perverse as Percy Grainger? Playing Grainger's music feels like you're doing Freudian analysis while rock climbing. In a good way, of course. Also: probably the best composer to ever have his teeth X-rayed by the inventor of corn flakes:
  
  
  
• Simon Sechter. As a good God-fearing American, I know that quantity and value are synonymous. And Sechter wrote 5000 fugues. (He also taught Bruckner—by mail. Imagine the "can you draw this?" ad that could have inspired.)
• Luigi Russolo. Just remember, reactionary New York Times internet commenters complaining that modern music is nothing but "noise," Luigi Russolo was way ahead of you.
• Soorjo Alexander William Langobard Oliphant Chuckerbutty. Others got the glory, but no composer was ever more majestically named. While organs still play, the Chuckerbutty Paean will forever endure.

It was a dark and stormy night

Reviewing the Cantata Singers.
Boston Globe, January 17, 2011.

Now the gas station was closed, and the snow was eight feet tall

Snow day! Soho the Dog HQ has never looked lovelier—mainly because the snow covers up everything.


No better time to take in Ivan Ivanov-Vano's 1952 animated adaptation of Rimsky-Korsakov's Снегурочка (The Snow Maiden):



First time she really fancies a boy, she literally melts into a puddle? And you thought your first date was awkward. I was happy to find out that Irina Maslennikova, a Bolshoi Theatre stalwart in the 1950s who did the Snow Maiden's singing, is still teaching in Moscow.

Those dancing cranes about three minutes into part one are going to be fantastic nightmare fuel the next time I drink too much—which, given the amount of snow I still need to shovel, may very well be tonight.

Post title via Albert Collins, singing about the Blizzard of '79—still my personal touchstone for winter weather. The drifts really were eight feet tall.

Cori ardenti

So far, at least, I have spent 2011 feeling like I'm trying to swim through a pool of Lyle's Golden Syrup. I am just getting nothing done—or, if I am, it's taking so long that, by the end of it, there's not even any feeling of accomplishment left. Sunspots are back on the rise—can I blame that? Sure, why not.

I did start a blog post last week, after someone else on the Internet who has been known to say dumb things about classical music and culture said some exceptionally dumb things about classical music and culture—a kind of perverse masterpiece, in that I-can't-turn-away, car-crash-footage sort of way—but I got about halfway in and realized that my heart just wasn't in it. I'm beginning to think that one reason I like music better than, for want of more philosophically sturdy categories, we'll call objective reality is that, in music, when something is just plain wrong it can still make your day. Nana Mouskouri singing Bellini, for instance:



That is wrong on so many levels—and I know them all, because I've listened to it about twelve times in a row. I think this is my new cure for moping around. For whatever reason, my opinion of humanity is just a little bit higher knowing that Nana Mouskouri did a cover of "Casta Diva."

Anyway, there's some new ruminations on Stravinsky and Bártok over at The Faster Times for your procrastinatory edification. Armed with the power of Nana Mouskouri, will I actually start posting there more than once every two months? Stay tuned.

No more champagne, and the fireworks are through

Reviewing Boston Baroque.
Boston Globe, January 4, 2010.