Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

à la Mode

Happiness came the other day in the form of a fat envelope from Mode Records, the august New York new-music label. For years I've been treasuring Mode's releases of John Cage and Morton Feldman. The new batch contains vol. 8 of the Feldman Edition, Triadic Memories, available either as a single DVD or as 2 CD's, with Marilyn Nonken tickling the ivories; a 2-CD of the music of Cage-Feldman henchman Christian Wolff; the slow, static, largely tonal music of Somei Satoh, with Petr Kotik conducting the Janacek Philharmonic; and nervously expressive works of Jason Eckardt. So far the one I've really fallen for is a disc devoted to Swiss composer-trombonist Roland Dahinden, born 1962, who roams around in the rich landscape between the classical avant-garde and post-free jazz. The big work on the program, silberen, for piano quintet, strongly recalls Feldman in its hushed dynamics and glacial tempo, but something about the mood and sound is quite un-Feldmanlike. The language is not as chromatic as Feldman's, and sometimes hovers on the border of modal tonality, especially at the beginning. While Feldman often has secret narratives and dramas at work in his music, Dahinden avoids even a ghost of tension or conflict; he proceeds serenely from one collection of tones to another, as if puttering around a lunar garden. The Arditti Quartet and pianist Hildegard Kleeb play with magical purity of tone. I'm eager to hear more from this composer.

Shostakovich, Volkov, et al

"Unauthorized"

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, Sept. 6, 2004.

There are few documented examples of the fake or forged autobiography, although the genre probably has a long, secret history. Its most famous practitioner was Clifford Irving, who, in 1971, tried to publish the tell-all memoirs of Howard Hughes without telling Hughes. Irving’s manuscript began with a brazen announcement that “more lies have been printed and told about me than about any living man” and that it was time for the “elusive, often painful truth.” Irving made the mistake of releasing his manuscript while Hughes was still alive. Nothing kills an autobiography like a flat-out denial by the author.

In 1979, the Russian-émigré musicologist Solomon Volkov published “Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov.” It was a grippingly embittered monologue by the greatest of Soviet composers, denouncing Communism and chronicling a life lived in fear. In retrospect, something about the first page should have set off alarms. Like Irving’s Hughes, Volkov’s Shostakovich seems to protest too much. “Others will write about us,” he says. “And naturally they’ll lie through their teeth.” This book would “speak the truth about the past”; “reminisce . . . only in the name of truth”; “try to tell only the truth.”

The book arrived with impressive credentials. According to Volkov, each chapter had been read and signed by Shostakovich, who had died in 1975. Irving never met Hughes, but Volkov was acquainted with Shostakovich, and was known to have interviewed him. A year after publication, though, “Testimony” hit a snag. The American scholar Laurel Fay pointed out that seven of the eight chapters began with word-for-word quotations from older Shostakovich essays. Given that these pages bore Shostakovich’s signature, it looked as if Volkov might have obtained the composer’s approval under false pretenses — perhaps by showing him an innocuous collection of previously published material, then weaving the signed pages into a monologue of his own invention. Volkov never answered these charges, but other writers stepped in to defend him. The most persuasive argument, which I repeated in this magazine in 2000, was that Fay had found no borrowings on the first page of Chapter 1, which proclaimed the truth of the very book that was in the reader’s hands.

A couple of years ago, Fay got hold of a copy of the Russian typescript of “Testimony.” She has now reported her findings in Malcolm Hamrick Brown’s new anthology, “A Shostakovich Casebook” (Indiana). There is no signature on the first page, it turns out; that claim was something other than the truth. Instead, there is a signature on the third page, which perfectly overlaps with a bland essay that Shostakovich published in 1966. Fay subjects the entire document to Sherlockian scrutiny, noting that a couple of the recycled pages had been doctored to remove datable references. A mention of the Chekhov centenary — “I am sincerely happy that the hundredth anniversary of his birth is attracting anew to him the attention of all progressive humanity” — disappears under correction tape. The American publishers could not easily check back issues of Literaturnaia Gazeta, where this statement originally appeared, but they might have noticed that a man allegedly interviewed in the seventies was suddenly speaking from the year 1960.

Recently, at a Shostakovich festival at Bard College, Fay spoke once more about “Testimony,” which Limelight Editions has ill-advisedly reissued in a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition. She added new evidence to her suggestion that “Testimony” is a hoax: a memo, drafted by Shostakovich’s friend Isaak Glikman shortly after “Testimony” was published, records Shostakovich, in the last months of his life, railing against the business of writing memoirs. Shostakovich is also quoted as saying, “What sort of a person is this Solomon Volkov?” The words hung in the air as Fay repeated them. You could almost hear the fear germinating in Shostakovich’s harried mind: this Volkov character is hatching something. Glikman, by the way, is an unimpeachable witness, whose writings have been cited by Volkov’s defenders and detractors alike.

Fay leaves little doubt that Shostakovich saw nothing of “Testimony” beyond the eight pages he signed. (I can imagine another, less likely scenario: the composer read the manuscript and refused to grant his approval, whereupon Volkov obtained the signatures by subterfuge.) Whether the composer made any of the statements attributed to him in Volkov’s book is a trickier question. As Fay readily admits, many of the anecdotes and opinions have been corroborated by other sources; Volkov may have heard some from the composer, others from his friends. The musicologist Lev Lebedinsky, who liked to say that Shostakovich’s symphonies were secret diatribes against the Soviet system, has been suggested as a secondary ghostwriter. It could well be that the bulk of the manuscript consists of things that Shostakovich did say at one time or another, in so many words. Some have shrugged their shoulders over the entire affair, saying that, yes, some hanky-panky went on, but that it doesn’t matter in the end, because Volkov told little lies in order to convey a larger truth about Soviet music.

I don’t buy that argument. It isn’t enough for the memoirs of a major artist to have an ambience of authenticity. A book that subjected Picasso or Joyce to such manipulations would never have made it to publication. For some reason, though, music is treated as a childish realm in which fables serve as well as facts. Russian composers seem especially vulnerable to urban legends, as if facts mattered even less behind the old Iron Curtain. To dismiss Fay’s evidence is to disregard a great artist’s right to speak in his own voice. If Shostakovich had known what was going to be printed under his name, he might have hated Volkov with a passion that not even Joseph Stalin inspired in him.

For years, Volkov’s book provoked nonsensically polarized arguments over whether Shostakovich was a Party ideologue or an anti-Communist dissident. The composer had long served as a caricature of Soviet nationalism; Volkov and his acolytes had now made him a puppet for the other side. The most effective “Volkovian” interpreter was Ian MacDonald, the author of a book entitled “The New Shostakovich,” who, sadly, committed suicide last year. Perhaps the so-called “Shostakovich Wars” are ready to end, and a more evenhanded assessment can begin. The Bard festival, two weekends of concerts in which Shostakovich was heard along with twenty other Soviet composers, offered a sometimes confusing picture, but there was no doubt of the composer’s vital appeal. Every performance at the splendid new Fisher Center was packed, and even 10 a.m. panels drew crowds.

In conjunction with the festival, Fay edited another new collection, entitled “Shostakovich and His World” (Princeton), which contains an illuminating essay by Leonid Maximenkov on the composer’s relationship with Stalin. Stalin knew Shostakovich primarily as a film composer, and admired him on that count. He famously disliked Shostakovich’s opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,” which was denounced in Pravda in January of 1936. But there was no personal animus, as Volkov claims. The Pravda editorial spearheaded an attack on modernist tendencies which had been in preparation for months. As one Pravda editor remarked, the government targeted Shostakovich not because he was the worst offender but because he was deemed “worth saving.” Transcripts of a meeting at the Kremlin show that Stalin simply wanted Shostakovich to stop writing “rebuses and riddles” and create a “clear mass art.” Stalin was probably more interested in intelligence reports on what other cultural figures were saying. Those reports have been published in Russia, and they are deeply chilling. Two check marks were placed next to the name Abram Lezhnev, who denounced Pravda’s Nazi-style tactics. He was shot in 1938.

When the Pravda editorial appeared, Shostakovich was starting work on the final movement of his Fourth Symphony. On the opening weekend of the Bard festival, Leon Botstein, a co-director of the event and the president of the college, conducted the American Symphony Orchestra in a performance of the Fourth; the tempos were rigid, but the effect was tremendous. The first two movements evoke a surreal landscape in which the late-Romantic symphony seems to have collapsed on itself, its grand themes supplanted by trivial material. The clobbered, staggering tone persists through much of the finale. Then, several minutes before the end, cellos and basses take up a low, chattering figure borrowed from Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony, and an epiphany seems at hand. Soviet listeners would have expected a pageant of triumph after the struggle.

But when the bombastic major chords arrive they make a ghastly sound. The phalanx of brass seems to split apart and collide violently. As the musicologist Richard Taruskin has pointed out, there is a strong resemblance to the Gloria of Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex,” in which Jocasta is hailed as the queen of a “disease-ridden Thebes.” After the aborted resurrection, a long recessional ensues, taking up two hundred and thirty-five dismal, monotonous bars. Nothing in music is quite as scary as this ending, for its aesthetic of catastrophe was tantamount to suicide. If the première of the Fourth had gone ahead as scheduled, in the fall of 1936, the composer might have met the same fate as Abram Lezhnev. At the last minute, however, he withdrew the symphony. In its place, he produced the angrily affirmative Fifth, and bought another forty years of life. Shostakovich’s urge to defy authority was always tempered by an instinct for survival.

The Fourth Symphony was the only giant slab of Shostakovichian oratory on the festival’s opening weekend. What we got, for the most part, was a refreshing emphasis on the sly, comic Shostakovich—the fidgety, neurotic, soccer-loving genius who had somehow retained his deadpan sense of humor even as Stalin’s terrors unfolded around him. Zuill Bailey and Simone Dinnerstein gave a deeply felt, freely flowing performance of the 1934 Cello Sonata, in which Shostakovich simplified his language without help from Pravda. Melvin Chen gave a raw, roaring account of the First Piano Sonata. The Bard Festival Quartet avoided the usual doom-and-gloom in the Eleventh Quartet, finding an elusive balance of sweetness and sadness.

Best of all were two Shostakovich theatre events, presented as part of Bard’s SummerScape series. One was Francesca Zambello’s production of Shostakovich’s 1959 operetta-musical “Moskva: Cheryomushki,” or “Cherry Tree Towers,” which has long had a dull reputation but came to life here as a witty, goofy, even touching affair. The plot, mildly subversive in its mention of Communist Party corruption, follows the love lives of young Soviets who are scrambling for apartments in a horrible new high-rise. The score is infested with satires and self-quotations, including a reprise of Shostakovich’s greatest hit, the “Song of the Counterplan,” which Stalin had mentioned approvingly in 1936. Lauren Skuce and Jonathan Hays were graceful and vivid in the romantic leads, but the show belonged to two Russian speakers—Andrei Antonov, as the gleefully corrupt superintendent, and Makvala Kasrashvili, wielding her luxurious soprano to comic effect in the role of the gold-digger Vava. They tore up the stage with the joy of performers liberated from convention.

The other Shostakovich show of the summer was “The Nose,” based on Gogol’s absurdist tale. Zambello again directed, creating a simulacrum of early radical Soviet theatre, with its abstract designs and madcap movement. A large cast, Antonov and Kasrashvili among them, performed with zany high spirits. Instead of pondering the music, these singers relished its pleasures and its dangers, its precarious balance between profundity and kitsch, its love of life and its yen for death. An epigram of Karl Kraus’s flashed through my mind: “You don’t even live once.”

Partial sayonora

Intersection of 30th St. and Kent Ave., Nowhere, CA.

With the Reupholstery Convention happening just a few blocks from our apartment, Jonathan and I thought it wise to get out of town. I'll be gone all of next week, and the computer's staying home with the kitties. However, thanks to Typepad’s wizardly Publish in the Future feature, the blog will continue bloviating into oblivion without me.

Nordic idée fixe

Thomas Bartlett critiques my use of the phrase "Nordic idea" in the non-online Björk profile. Point well taken, though it was actually Björk who introduced the phrase. (A last-minute cut hid this fact.) I kept trying to work out what she meant by it, and I may have assigned it too much importance because it happened to be the first thing she said when we met. "Icelandic music" would have served better than "Nordic idea" in the case of the song "Vökuró." Some of the repetitions were meant to be tentative/ironic. Still, there is some kind of there there, even if I never effectively mapped it out. As a way of making peace with Glenn Gould, whom I just semi-dissed, I'll quote from his radio essay "The Idea of North": "Something really does happen to most people who go into the north — they become at least aware of the creative opportunity which the physical fact of the country represents and — quite often, I think — come to measure their own work and life against that rather staggering creative possibility: they become, in effect, philosophers." Philosophers of what, Gould wisely does not say.

ADDENDUM: Bartlett responds, gently circumambulating my soporific discussion of the "Nordic idea" on his way to a nice discussion of modern Bach playing. With you on Schiff, got me on Evelyn Crochet and Robert Siemers. I'd love it if some of the rock / pop critics out there dabbled in classical writing, just as I've dabbled in pop, and did it without any change of style. Basically, in the end, when the long black cloud comes down, no one really knows how to talk about this stuff.

ADDENDUM 2: This link from Jason Kottke is much appreciated.

On hockey

So, the Coyotes signed Keith Ballard! This could change a lot, or it could be more of the same. (In response to Delicious Pundit.)

The Rest Is Noise New Music Preview

There’s a crazily vast array of new music being heard around New York in the fall, and I’m not going to try to impose some feeble narrative on it ("Speaking of oboes..."). Click on the date for more info. I've included some non-New York events, too. God bless America.

Sept. 8: The gagaku orchestra Reigakushka gives a concert of ancient and modern Japanese music, including premieres by Keiko Fujiie and Kazuo Kikkawa, at Zankel Hall. They also play at the Terrace Theater and the Freer Gallery in DC (Sept. 9 and 10) and at UC Berkeley on Sept. 12.
Sept. 9-12: US premiere of Bill Morrison and Michael Gordon’s Decasia, in which a film narrative composed of decaying stock footage is paired with an eerie orchestra of retuned and detuned instruments. At St Ann’s Warehouse in DUMBO.
Sept. 13: Kent Nagano conducts Unsuk Chin's new Violin Concerto at the Berkeley Symphony, UC Berkeley.
Sept. 22: The Wet Ink new-music series, whose house ensemble the Zs espouses an aesthetic of “bombastic precision” (yeah!), opens with music of three elders (Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, and Fredric Rzewski) and two youngsters (Alex Mincek and Matt Hough). At the Bowery Poetry Club, $10 a seat.
Sept. 28: John Schaefer's New Sounds Live series at Merkin presents excerpts from Scott Johnson's How It Happens together with Phil Kline's searing anti-war Zippo Songs and his already legendary settings of the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld.
Oct. 6-9: Terry Riley's Sun Rings, which Mark Swed of the LA Times hailed as the In C maestro's late-period masterpiece, comes to BAM.
Oct. 8: John Ashbery settings by Elliott Carter, Lee Hyla, Charles Wuorinen, Milton Babbitt, and John Zorn, together again for the first and last time. At Cooper Union (website out of date).
Oct. 14: Steve Reich’s 1971 Drumming, also at Cooper Union.
Oct. 14-17: Sounds Like Now festival at La MaMa, a major convocation of alternative / downtown / how-you-call-it composers presented by the Interpretations series. The roster includes Robert Ashley, Phill Niblock, Joan La Barbara, David First, William Duckworth, Pauline Oliveros, and the blogosphere’s own Kyle Gann.
Oct. 18: Music from Copland House concert at Merkin, including a Chen Yi premiere.
Oct. 20-23: Alan Gilbert conducts John Adams’ masterly Naïve and Sentimental Music at the San Francisco Symphony. Take a moment to check out MTT's stunning Keeping Score site if you haven't seen it.
Oct. 21, Nov. 11, Dec. 3: Conlon Nancarrow festival at Miller Theatre. Not new music as such, but Nancarrow is so wired that he always sounds new.
Oct. 22: Young composers from Juilliard and the Royal Academy in London, including the brilliant Nico Muhly, write "responses to Webern." My own response to Webern is as follows: Yeah, whatever. Paul Hall, Juilliard, absolutely free.
Oct. 24: Big new piece by Steve Reich, You Are (Variations), for chorus, instruments, and electronics, lights up at Disney Hall in LA, with the Los Angeles Master Chorale.
Oct 24-25: Four excellent young composers — Mason Bates, Kenji Bunch, Daniel Kellogg, and Kevin Puts — appear at the Guggenheim as part of the "Works and Process" series. All have been part of the Young Concert Artists composer program.
Oct. 28: Wildly inventive avant-garde vocalist-composer Pamela Z at the Kitchen.
Oct. 28: English composer-arranger Joby Talbot, formerly of the stylish pop group Divine Comedy, gives a chamber concert at Merkin Hall. On Oct. 30 Merkin presents Talbot's score for Hitchcock’s The Lodger.
Oct. 29: Daniel Catán's Salsipuedes bows at the Houston Grand Opera. One of two premieres to celebrate the house's 50th anniversary: the second is a new Mark Adamo opera in March.
Oct. 31: Charles Wuorinen's Haroun & the Sea of Stories is given birth at New York City Opera.
Nov. 1: A Green Umbrella concert at Walt Disney Hall in LA, including premiere of Omnivorous Furniture, for “sinfonietta and electronica,” by aforementioned Mason Bates, and Henry Brant's almost-new Tremors: Spatial Declamations for 4 Singers and 16 Instrumentalists.
Nov. 4: First Eos Orchestra concert of the season, on a music-and-image theme. Program includes director Jonathan Sheffer's Filmusic #2, John Corigliano's Three Hallucinations From Altered States, and Schubert's Ninth Symphony with computer-generated video.
Nov. 6: Tania León portrait at Miller Theatre.
Nov. 11: Elliott Carter's Symphonia at the Boston Symphony. I'm no Carter fan in general, but I was deeply impressed by this churning slab of a work when I heard it on disc.
Nov. 12-14: John Adams returns to Zankel Hall to direct another pan-genre festival, this year including gamelan works by Evan Ziporyn, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, a Joshua Redman set, and the fantastic Iranian composer/kamancheh-player Kayhan Kalhor.
Nov. 17: American Composers Orchestra season opens with a typically all-over-the-place program of Randall Woolf (music for video by American Psycho director Mary Herron), Michael Daugherty, Morton Feldman, Tan Dun, and Sondheim.
Dec. 5: Joshua Penman's Songs The Plants Taught Us at the New York Youth Symphony. Penman classes himself as "ambient" and "spiritual," but some of the music on his website packs a considerable punch.
Dec. 11: Premiere of William Bolcom's A Wedding at the Chicago Lyric Opera, with a libretto by Arnold Weinstein and Robert Altman. Based on Altman's 1978 comedy of old money and nouveau riche.
Jan. 13-15: Babbitt's brand-new Concerti for Orchestra, Boston, sandwiched between the Fourth and Fifth symphonies of Sibelius. Part of James Levine's season-long series "You vill now like ze Tvelf Ton Musik!"
Jan. 20: The Phil Glass Seventh, National Symphony, DC.

Heartfelt plea to symphony orchestras: Have an easy-to-find place on your sites where the people can find a complete, chronological season listing. Sometimes this basic information is devilishly difficult to find amid all the subscription series profiles. What's more, listings often go out of their way to conceal any new music lurking in their midst: a composer may have labored for a year on a new concerto, but the headline is "André Watts Plays Tchaikovsky!" Having spent the better part of three days straight staring at websites, I am handing out the Rest Is Noise Fall Preview Webtastic Award to Ethel, the sleek new-music quartet, whose site is to die for.

G. G.

Terry beat me to the punch: I was going to excerpt the exact same paragraph from Angela Hewitt's piece on Glenn Gould in the TLS. It's a knowing, sympathetic, non-hagiographic look at a pianist whose posthumous reputation is somewhat overwrought. It's not that I don't love Gould's playing; it's just that I'm more comfortable seeing him as one of many great postwar pianists, rather than the one and only. Hewitt is herself a major Bach player whose recordings of the keyboard works on Hyperion hold their own with Gould's.

Mahler was heavy

Stopped by Academy Records on 18th Street yesterday. The moment I walked in, David Raksin's "Laura" began playing on the P. A., in the wacked-out Spike Jones version. This seemed a perfect accidental memorial to Raksin, who, I'll wager, loved Jones' maltreatment of his hit tune. I dropped $32 on a big stack of records that included Scott Johnson's John Somebody, Sviridov's Poem in Memory of Sergei Esenin, the Vainberg Seventh Symphony (I'm on a Soviet kick), a Thomas Weelkes disc with Peter Pears' Wilbye Consort, Kirsten Flagstad singing excerpts from the Ring with Furtwängler conducting, Peter Maxwell Davies' Vesalii Icones, the entire 1954 Furtwängler Die Walküre, and, best of all, Raymond Lewenthal's classic recording of Charles-Valentin Alkan's Funeral March for a Papagallo, which, in a visionary anticipation of Monty Python, enacts the funeral of a parrot. Alkan's text is as follows: "Have you had lunch, Jaco? And what? Oh." The cover art is, as you can see, possibly the greatest in the history of recording.

As I browsed, I kept seeing less fortunate, wannabe-hip record jackets — Bauhausy sans-serif fonts and abstract forms for 50s-era discs, trippy psychedelic collages for Mahler in the 60s ("Mahler is Heavy" was the Utah Symphony's slogan), ghastly soft-porn scenes for the 70s. The Vesalii Icones LP comes with cover art by Ken "Lisztomania" Russell — a picture of a black guy in partial whiteface and thong underwear. The Johnson disc, issued in 1986, carries a note by Greg Sandow, sounding a familiar theme: "Classical music is hard to place these days. Once it was part of a continuum that included folk and popular music at one end and complex works of art at the other.... Since Mozart's time there's been a divorce ... Johnson wants to heal the divorce. He's not alone: he's joined by other composers, by critics like myself, and, thank God, by a growing audience." It made me melancholy to read these words. Greg and others have been trying for a long time to heal the breach between classical music and popular culture. Kurt Weill was trying to do it back in the twenties. The road is littered with failures and false starts: Mahler, in the end, isn't heavy. But it's still worth pressing on. Better this than the dead-parrot procession of music as usual.

Correction

Carnegie Hall informs me that, alas, Michael Tilson Thomas' Stravinsky concerts in December have been canceled. I've removed those events from the Concert Preview below.

Tubthumping studies

Scott Spiegelberg pointed me toward a new academic journal from Cambridge University Press, Twentieth-Century Music. I haven’t had time to digest all the articles, but it looks like a strong debut. The range of topics is vast, everything from Boulez’s Pli selon pli to Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping.” Some of the titles seem ripe for journalistic mockery — Ian Biddle’s “Vox Electronica: Nostalgia, Irony and Cyborgian Vocalities in Kraftwerk’s Radioaktivität and Autobahn,” for example — but I got a lot out of the scholarship even when the jargon made me fidget. I liked Mark Spicer’s definition of “accumulative form”: “A random sampling from the albums on Billboard’s Top 200 will likely confirm that many current pop-rock songs feature at some point on their musical surface a cumulative process of textural growth: various interlocking riffs – such as drum rhythm, bass line, and guitar vamp – are introduced one by one until the groove is complete, a technique most often employed at the beginning of songs.” I also enjoyed Charles Wilson’s critique of György Ligeti’s recent music, or, more accurately, of the promotion of Ligeti as maverick individualist: “Being valued for your individuality may be gratifying; but being valued only for your individuality ultimately implies that any individual will do just as well as you.” Good point — yet the overall picture of some vast corporate machinery promoting Ligeti is a touch absurd.

Most relevant to my current task — writing up the Shostakovich Festival at Bard — is Marina Frolova-Walker’s “Stalin and the Art of Boredom,” a deft overview of Socialist Realism in music. Prof. Frolova-Walker delivered a truncated version of this article at a Bard panel. Like many recent writers on Soviet culture, she draws on the files of the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police. Here is her arrangement of quotations from the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934, as reported by informants:

M. M. Prishvin: All the time I’m thinking I should leave as soon as possible – the boredom is unbearable . . .

Valeryan Pravdukhin: All we have in the literary world at the moment is unabashed demagogy and publishers’ terror. . . . As for the Congress, even to talk about it seriously is shameful: something more lively was expected of Radek’s and Bukharin’s papers, but even these wilted before they could bloom, since they had, after all, been subjected to drastic cuts by Central Committee officials.

A. Novikov-Priboy: The period of the final bureaucratization of literature has begun.

Panteleymon Romanov: Intense boredom and stifling bureaucracy, which cannot be enlivened by the beat of any drum. Gorky’s paper might be of interest to those who read it in the newspapers, framed by all sorts of enthusiastic comments, but for those of us who heard the speech, it was quite pathetic: there wasn’t an ounce of enthusiasm in it. The head of the Department spoke according to the orders of his superiors, with no inner passion.

P. Rozhkov: A kingdom in slumber.

Ukrainian delegates: Talk of ‘the futility of this whole comedy’ . . .

Babel: The Congress is running in a deadly fashion, like a Tsarist parade.

Semenko: Everything is running so smoothly that I’m consumed by a maniacal desire to take a piece of shit or rotten fish and hurl it at the Presidium of the Congress. Perhaps this would inject a little life into the proceedings. . . . [I]t is a fraudulent ceremony. . . . A good half of the audience, especially the delegates from the national republics, would really like to cry out passionately about gross injustice, to protest, to demand, to speak as human beings, not as lackeys. But instead, they are forced to listen dutifully to our leaders reading their papers, which are nothing but lies – they are assured that everything is just fine. And we sit and clap like clockwork soldiers . . . while the true artists, those who fight for their national culture, are rotting away somewhere in a Karelian swamp or a GPU prison.

Here is her impressive windup:

All too often, Socialist Realism is viewed as something unique and hermetic, incomprehensible to those who have never experienced it. But perhaps this is prompted not so much by humility, but by a complacency that allows us to imagine nothing remotely comparable can be found in the West. This was certainly not the perception of Russians as they were tossed from the Soviet frying pan into the free-market fire. Where the roadside hoardings and television screens had formerly presented the iconography of the old regime, they now presented the iconography of the new: out with Lenin, in with Marlboro Man. They soon became weary of the repetitive gabble of advertising, just as they were once weary of the dull monotony of Politburo speeches. Even before perestroika, the similarities were noticed by those capable of distancing themselves from the over-familiar. Andy Warhol remarked on the affinity between Soviet propaganda art and the Western commercial art he parodied in his pop-art works (compare his multiple images of Marilyn Monroe to the sixty or so faces of Lenin on the walls of the Lenin Museum). Or from the other side, the Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid had become famous for their satirical broadsides at the pompous pretensions of Soviet Realism; they were not long in the West before they transferred their satire to Western banality and kitsch. Where Socialist Realist art once was used to cocoon the Soviet citizen from reality, in the West we have the shopping mall, those temples to the free-market, with their archways, fountains, and mood music. No, if we remove the blinkers, Socialist Realism no longer seems an alien phenomenon.

Oasis Lyric Carefully Copyedited

"All of my people — right here, right now. Do you know what I mean?"

The Rest Is Noise Fall Concert Preview

Apologies to the non-New York reader — limits of space, time, and brain prevent me from looking outside Manhattan in this companion to the Opera Preview and the New Music Preview.

Carnegie Hall: The season opens on October 6 with a de-luxe all-Strauss program — Christoph Eschenbach conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra, Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, the works. Ian Bostridge, who delivered a hair-raising Die schöne Müllerin at Zankel Hall last season, sings Winterreise on Oct. 15, with Leif Ove Andsnes miming the hurdy-gurdy. On Oct. 25, James Levine marshals the Boston Symphony in Mahler’s Eighth; he’ll have made his debut as the new Karl Muck three nights before. On Nov. 20, Gidon Kremer’s Kremerata Baltica in an all-Shostakovich program, including the death-shrouded Fourteenth Symphony; Kremer’s way with Shostakovich is spellbinding. On Nov. 29, the Venice Baroque Orchestra plays the serenata Andromeda Liberata, which may or may not be Vivaldi’s; no matter whose it is, the Venetians will make it glow. On Dec. 1, the poetic young Austrian pianist Till Fellner, whose recording of the Well-Tempered Clavier has serious traction on my playlist, gets his Zankel on.

The New York Philharmonic: Lorin Maazel’s merry band begins the season on Sept. 21 with a shockingly innovative program of the Beethoven Violin Concerto and the Dvorak New World Symphony. There are scattered points of interest in the months that follow. From Sept. 29 to Oct. 5, Maazel unveils Augusta Read Thomas’ Gathering Paradise, a set of Emily Dickinson settings. Also, Lang Lang will either bang or sing his way through Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto, depending on his mood. October: not a whole lot going on. November 11-13: Sakari Oramo, Simon Rattle’s successor at the City of Birmingham, who English chums swear is the real deal, does Sibelius, Saariaho, and Tchaikovsky, with the aid of Karita Mattila. Dec. 2-4, David Robertson leads the string orchestra version of Steve Reich’s Triple Quartet. Dec. 16-18, the divine Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sings Britten's Phaedea with Colin Davis conducting.

Great Performers at Lincoln Center: Jane Moss’ fastidiously progressive series plays it safe this fall with dollops of Brahms, who, as Gunther Schuller demonstrated in his book The Compleat Conductor, is the most badly played great composer in the repertory. I’m not too worried about Herbert Blomstedt’s programs with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (Oct. 18 and 19), which anchor the series. Blomstedt is a greatly underrated conductor whose secret is that he’s got rhythm (at least of the Brahmsian kind). On Oct. 17, Wolfgang Holzmair sings Brahms Lieder, hopefully reminding us how powerful Brahms’ songwriting can be. On Oct. 31, the absurdly gifted scholar-violinist Andrew Manze dispels the Hamburg fog with a program of Mozart and Vivaldi; I stress again that Manze’s new Vivaldi disc (not out til Sept. 14) is beyond. Curiosity will lure me to Leon Botstein’s all-Czerny program with the American Symphony (Nov. 14). To give over a whole program to Czerny, long-reigning tyrant of piano finger exercises, sounds like a self-parodying gesture on Botstein’s part, but some people actually consider Czerny some sort of lost great composer, and in 2002 the pianist Anton Kuerti went so far as to organize an entire Czerny Festival in Edmonton. We’ll czee. Lastly, you wouldn’t be a fool if you bought a ticket to Simon Keenlyside’s song recital of Schubert, Brahms, and Mahler (Dec. 5).

A sped-up, inadequate tour of other New York halls: The New York Early Music Celebration (Oct. 1-10) has dozens of worthy events — count me in for Pomerium’s program of Ockeghem and Gombert at Corpus Christi Church. That same afternoon, the Mozartean Players are playing at the Frick Collection, which hasn’t yet announced its entire fall schedule. The never boring New York Festival of Song presents a Kurt Weill / Berlin–in-the-twenties evening at Merkin Hall on Oct. 14. On Oct. 24, the Metropolitan Museum of Art presents the really early music ensemble Sequentia in selections from the group’s new CD, Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper, up at The Cloisters. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center has the Orion Quartet doing the six Bartok quartets (Nov. 21, 23; $72 for the set). Miller Theatre is generally pegged as a new-music clubhouse, but under George Steel’s direction it has become a hotspot of early musicking as well. See Europa Galante reuniting Bach and Vivaldi et al (Oct. 14) or the Tallis Scholars belting out Palestrina, Lassus, Isaac, and de Rore (Dec. 10; “belting out” ironic). The Miller season opens on Sept. 18 with a Leonard Bernstein tribute; it includes excerpts from the great man’s troubled but potent late opera A Quiet Place, which New York has never heard. Finally, poking my head into jazz, I’ll put in a probably unnecessary plug for Black, Brown, and Beige chez Jazz at Lincoln Center on Oct. 25 — part of the new jazz hall’s opening festival. I have never experienced Ellington’s symphonic masterpiece live, and I’m as eager to hear this show as anything else on the fall schedule.

ADDENDUM: I know I've limited myself to Manhattan, but I want to add that the New Jersey Symphony looks to be in great shape under its new conductor Neeme Järvi, despite all that risky business with stolen and/or fake violins. The indefatigable Estonian adds to the Brahms flux with a program of the Second Serenade and German Requiem (Nov. 19-21) and presides over a festival of Scandinavian music in January.

The immortality game

One more thought about film music, following on the Elmer Bernstein obituary below. Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, and David Raksin, by doing their utmost for a few immortal films, have, in the process, gained a certain kind of immortality. This is an ironic turn of events because film composers are so often dismissed as the hacks of the composing world, the manufacturers of imitative background pap. "Sounds like a film score" is the put-down of choice for tonal orchestral music. "Serious" composers are supposed to suffer neglect in their lifetimes, with the gratitude of posterity their invisible reward. The my-time-will-come mindset was especially widespread in the twentieth century, with composers believing that if they invented a new sound or came up with a "big idea" they would win their place in history. The result was a great deal of superficially difficult, emotionally disposable music, whose ultimate historical value is now very much in question. By contrast, it seems certain that in a hundred years people will still be talking about Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo, Goldsmith's Chinatown, Raksin's Laura. They have gone down in history, because they found a way to make their music matter.

Elmer Bernstein 1922-2004

The fact that Jerry Goldsmith, David Raksin, and now Elmer Bernstein have all died in the space of a month may make people talk about the end of an age in film music. Bernstein himself addressed this issue in an impassioned speech in 1998:

People say to me, 'You know, what has happened to film scoring?' I hear this all the time. I hear it from filmmakers. 'You know, what happened, you know, what happened to the great film scorers?' Well of course it's a nonsensical question because I'll tell you, I teach a class at USC, and I'm here to tell you that there's nothing wrong with film scoring and the people that I teach there, I just hope to see them fed into our business. There's nothing wrong with film scoring and there's nothing wrong with the talent, but there is something wrong, seriously wrong with the process and the system.

Bernstein went on:

The composing of music is an art. In our business, art is the only three-letter dirty word because art requires courage, and it's very hard to have courage when you spend a year and a half ... two years developing a project, shooting a project. A project which costs millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars. And you blow it out all one weekend on sixteen hundred screens, and what happens on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of that weekend determines whether that picture is going to survive or not. It's a numbers game. Everything about our business has become a numbers game. We're automated and that is not a good atmosphere for art. And that is the problem we're facing.

In any case, Bernstein wrote a lot of wonderful music, from Man With the Golden Arm in 1955 to Far From Heaven two years ago. Sweet Smell of Success is my personal favorite — it hints at the hot emotion behind the film's ice-cold facade.

Today's special

From Christopher Isherwood's Prater Violet, lately purchased at the Rodgers Book Barn:

There is one question that we seldom ask each other directly: it is too brutal. And yet it is the only question worth asking our fellow-travelers. What makes you go on living? ... I supposed, vaguely, that it was a kind of balance, a complex of tensions. You did whatever was next on the list. A meal to be eaten. Chapter eleven to be written. The telephone rings. You go off somewhere in a taxi. There is one's job. There are amusements. There are people. There are books. There are things to be bought in shops. There is always something new. There has to be. Otherwise, the balance would be upset, the tension would break.

It seemed to me that I had always done whatever people recommended. You were born; it was like entering a restaurant. The waiter came forward with a lot of suggestions. 'What would you advise?' And you ate it, and supposed you liked it, because it was expensive, or out of season, or had been a favorite of King Edward the Seventh. The waiter had recommended teddy bears, football, cigarettes, motor bikes, whisky, Bach, poker, the culture of Classical Greece. Above all, he had recommended Love, a very strange dish....

Death Cab for Dmitri

Carl Wilson, aka Zoilus, has an excellent piece on the insecure friendship of literature and rock. Choice line: “How do you get 50 novelists out of the swimming pool? Tell them there's an argument in the kitchen about Dylan's gospel period.” Harry Pata, you’re my hero for this unexpected take on the somber giant of Soviet music: “Dmitri Shostakovich, we love you. And your little circular-rimmed glasses. Because you were emo before the word even existed.” Bard College’s program is doctored to illustrate the thesis. George Hunka, Jessica Duchen, and Helen Radice, all linked to the right, have joined forces on a new site called ArtsBlogging. It will be taken into account. Greg Sandow has written another aggressively sensible overview of the classical predicament. And Terry Teachout has finished his seventeenth book of the year. Excuse me while I stare moodily into space for an hour.... Damn book ... the summer's over ... hopeless ... how do you cut 100,000 words? ... Teachout! ... Should have chosen an easier topic, like Debussy’s Parakeet, or Spinal Apocalypse: How Overwrought Book Titles Are Ruining Publishing, or An Oral History of Anal Sex ... apathy, despair ... [more coffee] ... OK, I'm back. Congratulations, Terry!

Björk profile illustrated

Back in January, I traveled to Iceland to work on a profile of Björk, which appears in this week's New Yorker. I later went to Salvador, Brazil, and London, England. Here I'm posting scattered snapshots from the Iceland and Brazil trips, fleshing out scenes described in the profile. Some of the pictures will already be familiar to close readers of the blog. I did not photograph Björk herself, for obvious reasons. I was grateful enough that she'd let me in to her extraordinary world.

Below are various views of Reykjavík, beginning with Mt. Keilir as seen from the airport road:

What I saw when I talked to Björk about the "Nordic idea":

Moving on to Brazil, this is the view from the house where Björk worked on Medúlla for several weeks:

Here is a shot of the Cortejo Afro drummers, whom Björk recorded for "Mouths Cradle" and then left out because they didn't fit the (nearly) all-vocal concept of the album:

Next are several shots of Matthew Barney's float in the Salvador Carnaval, taken from the balcony where Björk was observing the procession. Valgeir Sigurðsson, who engineered Medúlla at his Greenhouse Studios, can be seen in the white coat on the right-hand side of the top of the float.

The man in the green and pink shirt is the great Caetano Veloso:

At this point, alas, the battery in the camera gave out, and the next day I was flying back to New York. The remaining drama of the making of Medúlla was sonic rather than visual.

Dogma breath

A reader sent me a link to the Pierre Boulez Project, in which Josh Ronsen takes at face value Boulez's old proclamation that "all the art of the past must be destroyed."

Another reader pointed the way to David Rakowski's site, which gives a hilarious and harrowing picture of the pedantic gobbledygook that still infuses composition classes at some American universities. Imagine the expletives Mozart might have spat out if you'd told him to "keep all registers active." Rakowski also has a Lexicon with definitions for "Lenny's Revenge" ("Contemporary concert music that sounds like warmed-over Bernstein, especially ze mambo from ze Vest Side Story") and "Dogma Breath" ("A person with an overdeveloped sense of Manifesto Destiny"). Wise and funny stuff.

Shostakovich was here

...Frank Gehry's performing-arts center at Bard College, where I spent the weekend. Bard's Shostakovich Festival continues for another week, the probable highlight being the Fourteenth Symphony with the great Russian bass Nikita Storojev. Fans of the Solomon Volkov controversy will be interested to know that Laurel Fay has uncovered a memo by Shostakovich's close friend Isaak Glikman, reporting that the composer railed against the writing of memoirs in the months before his death. He also asked, "What sort of person is this Solomon Volkov?" A full report will appear in the New Yorker in a couple of weeks.

On Saturday I broke away from the round-the-clock socialist-realist hilarity to visit the other chief cultural destination in upstate New York, the Rodgers Book Barn. It's one of the most delightful used-book stores in the country, not just because of the selection (large, cheap) but because of the adventure of getting there. Study the map closely and watch out for those little signs. I picked up first editions of Isherwood's Prater Violet and Klaus Mann's Pathetic Symphony.

I wrote a brief discography to accompany my Björk profile, which appears in the New Yorker this week but is not yet online. Some more Björkiana will follow later this week.

Scattered threads

I'm heading upstate today for Bard College's weekend-long Shostakovich Festival. Unfortunately I will miss the opening ceremony of the Olympics, which is supposed to have interesting music. I may meet up with a rural S/FJ to plot our co-blogging venture, the Popular Vs. Classical Extreme Eustace Tilley Smackdown. My profile of Björk will shortly be flying toward the presses, to appear on Monday alongside some New Yorker online-only and Rest Is Noise barely-online features. This is the "top-secret project" I've been not very subtly hinting about. The passing of David Raksin (see below) is much on my mind.