Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Sailing to Jersey

Our Girl in Chicago brings up the subject of humor in Henry James, which reminds me of a favorite passage in The American Scene. Absent from his homeland many years, James finds himself, for reasons not quite divulged, on a steamer to the Jersey shore within a few hours of his arrival. If I am not mistaken, what follows is the world's first New Jersey joke:

Heavy with fruit, in particular, was the whole spreading bough that rustled above me during an afternoon, a very wonderful afternoon, that I spent in being ever so wisely driven, driven further and further, into the large lucidity of — well, of what else shall I call it but a New Jersey condition? ... It might have threatened, for twenty minutes, to be almost complicating, but the truth was recorded: it was an adventure, unmistakably, to have a revelation made so convenient — to be learning at last, in the maturity of one's powers, what New Jersey might "connote." This was nearer than I had ever come to any such experience; and it was now as if, all my life, my curiosity had been greater than I knew.

This seems as good a moment as any to reveal that I am taking another break from the blog; I must spend a few dark weeks in the maw of Book. I'll be back in time for Actual Easter. Please patronize Music Blogs. Support a starving composer.

Agenda 3/28 - 4/3

A good week ahead. On Monday I'll be at the Boston Symphony concert already adumbrated. If the new pieces by Harbison and Wuorinen don't pan out, Levine puts on a grand Brahms Second. On Wednesday I'm in NJ for Harry Partch opera's Oedipus, in Montclair. Why Montcair? The armory of microtonal instruments that the remarkable Partch constructed for the performance of his music is now in the possession of Montclair State University. I will thus miss a Juilliard recital by violist Nadia Sirota, who is playing the Bach Chaconne, the Britten Lachrymae, and two premieres by Ryan Streber and Nico Muhly, the second an electronic piece featuring pre-recorded vocals by Antony of Antony & The Johnsons and programming by Björk's longtime collaborator Valgeir Sigurdsson. On Thursday, the Orchestra of St. Luke's plays Carnegie under the direction of Donald Runnicles, who shot up sharply in my estimation after his fluid and characteristic Rosenkavalier at the Met. The program includes Martinu's Revue de cuisine, a nineteen-twenties "jazz" ballet involving kitchen implements, and Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 25 with the hyper-musical Ivan Moravec. Saturday night, the American Youth Symphony presents a new piece by Lera Auerbach, a young Russian-émigré composer who's written music of extraordinary power and intensity. Finally, on Sunday, the New York City Opera introduces a new production of Puccini's Girl of the Golden West, which hasn't been staged in this city in years.

Wuorinen v. Wuorinen

There's a mini-symposium in the New York Times among conductor James Levine and composers Charles Wuorinen and John Harbison, all of whom figure in a Boston Symphony concert on Monday at Carnegie Hall. The discussion is moderated by Daniel J. Wakin, the Times' classical-music reporter, who's been doing a fantastic job on his beat. Here Wakin asks some sharp questions, with interesting results:

WAKIN: ...you wrote [in 1979] that the tonal system could be found only in backward-looking serious composers, is no longer used by serious mainstream composers, has been replaced and succeeded by the 12-tone system.

WUORINEN: Well, that's a categorical statement which cannot be — of course, it had more to it then, although to some extent it is obsolete now. But it depends on what you mean by the tonal system.

LEVINE: That is spoken by a man who is tired of how difficult it is to make anything understood, in any of these distinctions.

So that's all cleared up. I like what John Harbison has to say about the future of contemporary music: "I'm very optimistic. Somewhere along the way I became the opposite of worried. And I think it's because I began to understand the carrying power of the intensity, as against the rule of numbers. And intensity wins every time." Yes! Intensity is what composers have to offer. They have the opportunity to work on big canvases, in forms and languages entirely of their choosing, and whether they write pure diatonic tonality, pure atonality, twelve-tone, microtonal, spectral, computer-electronic, neo-medieval, or, perhaps, all of the above, they will find their audience if they write with intensity of feeling and clarity of purpose. Those who teach should ask not whether their students are writing in the "correct style" but whether they are achieving what they're aiming at. I think composition teachers have learned from the mistakes of previous generations, and now understand this. I think.

Boulez is alive

A fascinating piece in the Guardian compiles various composers' assessments of Pierre Boulez, who celebrates his eightieth birthday tomorrow. They range from the effusive to the dismissive; the comment by Thomas Adès is especially striking. Would it have been better to suspend, at least for one day, the endless feuding that the name Boulez inspires? Absolutely not — it would betray the splendidly pitiless spirit of this singular man, who spoke so contemptuously of his elders when he was young, and who still happily goes on the warpath. Just last year he had this to say about his old friend Stravinsky: "[He] began so well, pursuing a real line of development. But then he becomes an epigone, trying this historical style, then that one. There is virtuosity of gesture, but no content." Oh, Pierre. Happy birthday!

What would Elgar say?

Composers have been generating some nutty headlines lately. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen's Musick, was recently questioned by the Northern Constabulary when a half-eaten swan carcass turned up on his Orkney Islands estate. The swan is a protected bird in the UK, and the police were unamused when Sir Peter offered them swan terrine. (Would this taste good, Amateur Gourmet?) In Russia, Leonid Desyatnikov, a polymorphous composer with minimalist leanings, has written a wildly controversial opera entitled Rosenthal's Children, in which a renegade Nazi geneticist  succeeds in cloning Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky. All five geniuses sing onstage, and there are also fleeting appearances by Stalin, Krushchev, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin. No word yet on whether Stalin and Krushchev have sex, as happens in the novel on which the opera is based.

Rather less nutty, and all too familiar, is another story out of Scotland, this one concerning the composer James Dillon. He threw a public fit when the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, under the direction of Alexander Lazarev, mangled his latest work. Any composer will be able to reel off a few horror stories of this kind: orchestras, who pride themselves on extreme professionalism, do not always include decent treatment of living composers in their job description. Most of the victims suffer in silence, anxious not to bite the hand that offers them crumbs. Dillon has bravely chosen to speak out. Lazarev, by the way, is the same self-righteous twit who mocked and humiliated a Sydney, Australia audience after they applauded the third movement of Tchaikovsky's Sixth.

Woefully underrepresented in this odd litany are American composers. Let's work up some publicity, people! I want to see Aaron Jay Kernis arrested for trying to smuggle zebra meat through LaGuardia; or Jennifer Higdon wiretapped by Homeland Security after writing an opera entitled Condi's Secret; or Richard Danielpour banned for life from Lincoln Center for throwing pies at Lorin Maazel. In my dreams....

Okey Denoke

The German soprano Angela Denoke is giving a first-rate performance as the Marschallin in Rosenkavalier at the Met. Any New Yorker who loves Strauss' sixteen-ton comedy, or who wants to experience the ultimate artistic meditation on the self-absorbed minitragedies of thirtysomethings, should try to see it. Denoke sings with phenomenal purity of tone, yet she is also an emotionally transparent, actorly performer; there's a welcome lack of expert caution in her delivery, and an expressive dark lining to even her brightest upper notes. Last night, Kristine Jepson was an excellent, athletic Oktavian; the appealing Laura Aikin had maybe a bit of an off night as Sophie (constricted in the early part of Act II); Peter Rose cut a likeable, consistently funny figure as Ochs, enlivening parts of the opera that can otherwise drag (as it were). Donald Runnicles avoided the over-refulgent, singer-swamping sound that has marred some of James Levine's performances of this work; in all, it was a luminous, fleet-footed night. Ja, ja!

Messiaen's Beyond

The great event in New York this week is the return of Olivier Messiaen's Éclairs sur l'Au-Delà, or Illuminations of the Beyond, which had its premiere at the New York Philharmonic in November 1992. The composer of the Quartet for the End of Time finished this eleven-movement cycle shortly before his death in April of the same year; it is a long, difficult, wayward, fiercely eloquent, and stupendously beautiful work. More than that I won't say; if you live in New York, hear for yourself.

The boy who cried zwolf

Kyle Gann writes, in a long disquisition on Schoenberg and twelve-tone music: "I think what we need to do is quit teaching 20th-century history with a dishonest thumb on the scale in Schoenberg’s favor. For decades, academic historians have presented the Second Vienna School as central to a European modernist canon, at the expense of dozens of other composers more popular, outside academia, than Schoenberg: Copland, Milhaud, Cowell, Hindemith, Shostakovich, Gershwin, Messiaen, Britten, Weill, Cage, Partch. It’s time to restore these composers to the center of 20th-century music, and redraw 12-tone music as the interesting but infertile cul-de-sac that it was." This is more or less what I am trying to do in my book, though I wouldn't go so far as to say that Schoenberg is less significant than Milhaud, or, for that matter, less popular than Partch. The big story in 20th-century music is, in my view, not the "death of tonality," which in fact never happened, but the rejuvenation of tonality, which began with Debussy and Satie. Schoenberg's positive achievement was to add new harmonies to the field. He didn't see it that way, of course; he wanted the new chords to replace the old. Even he, at the end of his life, realized that his earlier edicts had been too severe, as his correspondence with the hyper-dogmatic René Leibowitz shows.

I'm not sure about Kyle's choice of the word "infertile," though. Sometimes fertility works in mysterious ways. What's always worth mentioning about twelve-tone music is that it's not the same thing as "atonality," which is a fuzzy concept in itself. It does not dictate the content of a piece. It does not forbid the use of tonal elements, such as major or minor triads; indeed, unless precautions are taken in the construction of the row, it often generates them "by accident," as happens, rather mischievously, in much of Milton Babbitt's music both early and late. If you arrange your rows to encourage triads, say by choosing C E G D F A F# A# C# G# B D#, you will end up with a Richard Strauss-style barrage of chords: C major! D minor! No, wait! F# major! G# minor! Crazy! Whee! Alban Berg discovered this loophole right away, and rejoiced in it; he was able to resume writing grand late-Romantic music, which he had never really given up, while ostensibly following his Master's rules. He was like those prep-school kids who interpret "coat and tie" to mean sweatpants and T-shirts with tie and coat on top. It was Sibelius who said that Berg was Schoenberg's greatest work.

Paradox: By arguing with Schoenberg, we are reaffirming his importance. — Brendan McNamara has more.

Hello, hello, hello

A delightful article by Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker describes the new science of Popstrology, which analyzes your personality on the basis of whatever pop song topped the charts on the day of your birth. Michael Eisner, for example, was born under the sign of Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Cocktail," while 50 Cent is a child of the Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight." My Birthsong, I'm proud to say, is the Beatles' "Hello Goodbye." Not exactly my favorite Beatles song, but far better than the annoying "Judy in Disguise," which I missed by just forty-eight hours. (Birthmate John Anderies, don't you agree?) Particularly apposite to my life as a classical music critic are the lines, "I say high, you say low / You say why, and I say I don't know."

Poul Ruders, Mark Adamo

"Kafka Sings."

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, March 28, 2005.

The Danish composer Poul Ruders is one of contemporary music’s free agents — a lover of sweet melodies with a yen for dark chords, a comedian with a flair for apocalypse. His previous opera, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” made sonic thunder out of Margaret Atwood’s novel of a dystopian America ruled by Christian  fundamentalists. His major orchestral pieces — “Thus Saw Saint John,” the “Solar Trilogy," a First Symphony subtitled “Rejoicing from the Heavens, Grieving Unto Death” — unfold hypnotically wayward narratives that reel from antic joy to frozen despair. (There are excellent recordings on the Bridge and Da Capo labels.) Ruders has a special knack for reinventing familiar tonal harmonies and styles; he uses them sometimes to mourn lost worlds, sometimes to suggest otherworldly innocence, sometimes to convey the banality of evil. All these devices are hurled at the audience in his latest work, “Kafka’s Trial,” which had its première on March 12th at the Royal Danish Theatre.

Composers are mysteriously drawn to “The Trial,” Kafka’s tale of a bank clerk randomly hounded by the Law. Perhaps, like poor Joseph K., they feel persecuted for no reason. Gottfried von Einem produced a straightforward, solemn adaptation in 1953. A decade later, Gunther Schuller, in “The Visitation,” boldly transposed the action to black America. Ruders, in tune with modern times, makes the story all about sex and guilt. The libretto, by Paul Bentley, blends scenes from Kafka’s life with scenes from the novel. The plot is framed by the author’s crazed epistolary engagement to Felice Bauer, who, in July, 1914, convened a family tribunal in a Berlin hotel room to confront her fiancé with his neuroses. In the wake of that fiasco, Kafka wrote “The Trial.” Bentley believes that Kafka considered himself guilty of misleading Bauer, and that the killing of Joseph K. at the end of the novel is a form of self-criticism. Kafka scholars may not buy that theory, but there’s no harm in rewriting history if it makes for good theatre.

Alas, it doesn’t. Ruders has said in interviews that he wanted to write a Kafka comedy, or, rather, a comic nightmare. The problem is that the material of both the novel and the life is, at best, morbidly amusing, and Ruders can’t make it funny by force. The score has too many grotesque, wheezing episodes, too much infernal-machine music. The parodic touches are stale: klezmer references in the Kafka sections (the only sign of the writer’s Jewishness), a groaningly obvious quotation from “Don Giovanni” (“Joseph K.! Joseph K.!,” à la the Commendatore). Kafka’s air of gnomic mystery, his Hebraic awe before the inexpressible, fades away. The climax of the novel is the chapter “In the Cathedral,” where Joseph K. glimpses fate in all its hostile majesty. Ruders ordinarily thrives on gothic atmosphere—he once made a bone-chilling setting of Poe’s “The City in the Sea”—but his cathedral scene feels strangely attenuated, as if he were afraid of losing comic momentum. The music acquires the right dark magic only at the end, when Felice confronts Kafka. Here, finally, is urgent word-setting over pungent chords, such as Ruders supplied throughout “The Handmaid’s Tale.” (Both Ruders operas, by the way, can be performed in English.)

I hesitate to render a final judgment on “Kafka’s Trial,” because the opera was hobbled by a spectacularly stupid production, which erased the distinction between real life and fiction and buried all the characters in an onslaught of puerile sexual imagery. Both Kafka and Joseph K. became idiots of id, desperate to try out every imaginable sexual act—anal, oral, you name it—with every woman who sauntered past. Watching it was like being trapped at a really gross Eurotrash orgy. There were also four Kafka doppelgängers wandering about the stage; at one point I thought they were about to get it on with each other, which might at least have brought us closer to Kafka’s real sexual issues. Johnny van Hal soldiered bravely through the unsympathetic title role(s), but the standout in the cast was Gisela Stille, lending a warm, rich soprano to Felice.

The première took place at the Royal Danish Theatre’s new opera house, on an island in the Copenhagen harbor. It is a sleek, cool, thoroughly Danish building, with bulbous glass walls and a severe overhanging roof. The acoustics are vivid, though lacking in focus and bass. From the look of things, the management wants opera to be racy, hip, not too deep. Coming next season is a world première by Elvis Costello.

At the beginning of the month, the Houston Grand Opera gave the first performance of Mark Adamo’s “Lysistrata.” Like “Kafka’s Trial,” it is an opera based on a familiar literary  source, in this case the comedy by Aristophanes. And, as in the Ruders opera, a certain amount of creative violence is done to the original. Adamo wrote his own libretto, and he shows little interest in the political issues that have made “Lysistrata” a favorite of left-leaning theatre companies since the invasion of Iraq. In Aristophanes, the women of Athens and Sparta go on strike against the men of the two belligerent city-states, demanding  that their endless war end. The “sex strike” still  happens in Adamo’s version, but it becomes the backdrop for the central drama of a relationship — the one between Lysia and the Athenian general Nico (a character that Adamo invented for the occasion). A brittle antiwar satire becomes a sumptuous love story, poised between comedy and heartbreak.

And it works. I can imagine a roomful of European progressives snarling at Adamo’s bourgeois sensibility, but I relaxed a minute after the music began, knowing that I was in the hands of a brilliant theatre composer. Adamo’s effortless expertise was on display in his 1998 maiden effort, “Little Women,” alongside spells of cutesiness and clumsiness. He still indulges in cloying gestures—enough with the jokes in the supertitles!—but he has taken several big leaps forward, particularly in integrating his proudly tonal melodies with more dissonant connective material. Adamo’s accompaniments would make a good primer for any young composer learning to write for and around singers. Each strand of the vocal line is punctuated by some perfect short gesture: cello pizzicatos and a smattering of harp; a four-note horn solo; a vaguely Balinese rustling of mallet percussion and string glissandos. The orchestral writing is often little more—or nothing less—than a play of light around the voices.

Act I is stocked with pratfalls and silliness. In Act II, the story takes a much more serious turn. Lovers on both sides fall into melancholy contemplation of the competing demands of private love and public life. The audience is invited to read “work” for “war” throughout. “Our will is not our will,” sings Nico. “I am not my own,” sings Lysia. Slow dotted rhythms, reminiscent of Britten in his ceremonial mode, give the music a sudden grandeur. As the cities work their way toward reconciliation, the women sing radiant, flowing chorales around the Greek word “Evoe!,” the exclamation of praise in the Bacchanalia. At the end, the gods descend to warn the humans of their folly: “Never will it end. Never will it end. Time to time, it may suspend, but never will it end.” The orchestra constructs a huge passacaglia based on intertwining downward scales, and the chorus gathers for one last chant of “Evoe!” It’s almost shocking how deep this seemingly lighthearted opera goes.

The Houston production was on the ugly side, with cartoonish sets colored orange and bright blue. But it didn’t sabotage the drama, as the Copenhagen production did. The singers were excellent: Victoria Livengood, Myrna Paris, Chad Shelton, and, especially, Emily Pulley, as Lysia, who mastered every nuance of the opera’s wide emotional range. Opening night was a bittersweet occasion, for it was the last Houston première presided over by David Gockley, the company’s visionary general director. Gockley has introduced thirty-three new works in about as many years, writing himself into musical history in the process: Adams’s “Nixon in China,” Meredith Monk’s “atlas,” and Bernstein’s “A Quiet Place” came into being on his watch. Next year, he decamps to the San Francisco Opera. Too bad he isn’t moving to New York.

Stars and stripes forever

The Newark St. Patrick's Day Parade, which I planned to see in connection with a future article, was canceled because of rain. I wish I'd known before going to Newark this morning.

Orbiting

The conversation gets ever livelier at Sequenza 21, where composers of all stripes thrash through old internecine debates — atonality good or bad, 12-tone music dominant or nonexistent, John Adams overrated or very overrated, etc. — and sometimes deliver deliciously brittle reviews of colleagues. The composer-as-critic is a tradeoff I'll always happily take: professional biases and jealousies may come into play, but the opinion is never fuzzy around the edges. The layout of the site is complex, like a Knotty Twelve-Tonish Figure. There's the forum on the main page, also a Composers Forum and individual composer blogs.... Bryant Manning is keeping it spunky on Mysteries Abysmal, as his blog has been renamed.... Take note again of Heather, very thoughtful pianist in Oakland, and of The Laurel Letters, offering beautifully composed reviews of Boston musical life.... Vilaine fille reigns supreme.

Abbreviated Agenda: 3/19

There's an awkward pile-up of events on Saturday, all of which I'd ordinarily like to see. Soheil Nasseri, the gifted young pianist whom I mentioned at the end of my Lupu column, is giving another recital at Alice Tully Hall. The program includes the premiere of a piece by the Israeli composer Avner Dorman. Tickets are $10 for those under 25. Simultaneously at Merkin, the Azure Ensemble is playing new and new-ish works by Libby Larsen, Judith Shatin, Jennifer Higdon, Marilyn Bliss, David Stock, and Zhou Long. I've never heard the group but the performers are all solid new-music veterans, and there's something poetic simply about the titles: Black Birds, Red Hills; Three Summers Heat; Light Refracted; Under the Azure Sky; A Vanished World; and The Elements. Finally, at 10PM downtown, Vox Novus will be presenting the video version of its 60 X 60 project — a series of 60-second works by 60 composers.

Bolero 911

A strange thing happened at the New York Philharmonic last night. Right at the start of Ravel's Bolero, as the snare drum entered with its soft, relentless beat, four policemen glided down the far left aisle and took up positions close to the stage. They stood still throughout the seventeen-minute crescendo, keeping their eyes fixed on the front rows. The possibility that something unexpected or even violent was about to happen added a tingling new sensation to Ravel's already sensational piece. But nothing did happen; no one was dragged off in cuffs. What it was all about, I don't know. I had previously noticed that one gentleman in that section seemed to have a boisterous personality; he stood up to applaud each item on the program, including the Wolfgang Rihm work, which almost no one else in the hall found exciting. He even gave a one-man ovation to the players as they filed out for the second half. Did his neighbors find his enthusiasm so alarming that they alerted the police? Was he a Rest Is Noise reader, acting on my incitements to inappropriate applause? Was MTT's posse in the house, ready to start a Hot 97-style beef? Were the guys from the 20th Precinct just looking to unwind? I prefer to savor the mystery of it all.

I had trouble deciding where to go last night — the Philharmonic affair or Anthony de Mare's recital at Zankel. Since I've Zankled quite a bit this season, I thought I should lend Maazel's merry band an ear. The Rihm thing, Two Other Movements, turned out to be a strange, grand, haunting creation. Prof. Dr. Rihm is hard to classify these days; he is a "difficult" German composer, ja, but he does not toe the Euromodern party line. He writes in the grip of palpably strong emotion, indulges long, songful phrasing, and gives glimpses of tonality everywhere — broken Hindemith chorales, occluded Debussy progressions, shrapnel from an explosion at the Parsifal factory.  The strongest twentieth-century presence is, interestingly, late Sibelius. Like the Master's Tapiola, the piece unfolds in one continuous arc, gathering to a black storm at the center and then subsiding toward silence. (The "two movements" are elided.) The gloomy coda is perhaps too protracted, but the final upward-spiraling string phrases have the "sense of an ending" that only a master composer can produce. Take note of the Ensemble Intercontemporain's upcoming performance of Rihm's huge instrumental cycle Jagden und Formen, on May 25.

The Philharmonic gave a committed reading. Beautiful soft trumpet solo. Maestro Maazel was on good behavior throughout; perhaps the police were there to prevent him from doing weird things to Bolero. Lisa Batashvili was a dazzling and vivid soloist in Chausson's Poème and Saint-Saëns' Introduction and Rondo capriccioso. The pro-forma Haydn opener, Symphony No. 95, was several notches above a snooze, dark-toned and agile. There are more promising Philharmonic concerts coming up, especially Messiaen's final masterpiece Éclairs sur l'Au-Delà, under Kent Nagano. Also, in an effort to reach new audiences, the Philharmonic has named Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith (upper left) as its new artistic administrator. Wait, no — they've named Los Angeles Philharmonic administrator Chad Smith. Sorry for the confusion. Given the LAPhil's remarkable programming in the last couple of years, this is good news, I think.

Afterward, on the 66th St. subway platform, concertgoers were treated to a new Lincoln Center institution, Well-Prepared Saxophone Man. He's a top-notch player who times his performances to the end of each concert at Lincoln Center, and goes to the trouble of playing a bit of what you've just heard. Sometimes the choices are a stretch — Rosenkavalier doesn't sound so good on the sax — but Bolero, with its big sax solos, is a natural. W-PSM even worked in portions of the Bolero rhythm beneath the melody. I love the post-concert music-nerd subway ride. It's wonderfully strange to be sitting in a car full of people who've listened to, say, Katya Kabanova. Everyone instantly puts his or her affectless subway mask on, which seems a shame. We ought to be prattling gaily about the tempos.

Copenhagen Diary

In the tradition of my Bayreuth Pilgrimage from last summer, here's a photolog of my trip to Copenhagen, on the occasion of the premiere of Poul Ruders' opera Kafka’s Trial. A review will appear in the New Yorker next week, alongside a report on Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata at the Houston Grand Opera.

As always when I'm in Copenhagen — OK, I've been here one other time — I stay at the Radisson SAS Royal Hotel. (One more movie line for Our Girl in Chicago: "It's a Radisson, so you know it's pretty good, yah.") The exterior is nondescript sixties modern, the lobby is nothing to get excited about, but the interiors, the work of the great Danish architect-designer Arne Jacobsen, make it seem unnecessary to go outside:

The view out the window:

But there's hardly time to relax. Music criticism, as some of you may not realize, is punishingly hard work, albeit not so much physical as mental. Here I am furiously studying the score, on the lookout for fugitive triads of E-flat minor:

The new Copenhagen opera house is called OPERAEN, or THE OPERA. There has apparently been some kind of architectural controversy about it. To my dilettantish eye, it looks pretty cool, as almost everything in Denmark does:

The Saw is opening in Denmark (sign in middle):

Back at the hotel, it’s time for the fun part — writing the review!

Night of the Living Dead, Pt. VI

Two stories on ArtsJournal: "Did Toscanini Kill Classical Music in America?" and "The Day Aussie Orchestras Died?" The big question is, of course, whether Toscanini killed orchestras in Australia. In the conservatory, with a candlestick.

Attersee redux

For a few moments of pure off-kilter pleasure, pay a visit to Edmund Welles, a Bay Area bass-clarinet quartet — "heavy chamber music, muzak for conspiracy theorists, songs of lunacy and purpose." Be sure to listen to their version of "Creep."

Bone-foresaking beauty

It's been a while since I've gone on a Bob Dylan bender, right? James Tata recommends Luc Sante's magisterial review of recent Boblications in the New York Review of Books. I recommend it, too, though, as often in Dylan criticism, there’s a reluctance to discuss the music. One of Sante’s few attempts at musical description occurs in the following paragraph:

Among the four fifths of the Basement Tapes material that remains officially unreleased is a song called "I'm Not There" (1956). It is glaringly unfinished—Dylan mumbles unintelligibly through parts of it, and throws together fragments of lyrics apparently at random—and yet it is one of his greatest songs. The hymn-like minor-key melody, rising from mournful to exalted, is certainly one reason for this, and another is the perfect accompaniment by three members of The Band, but the very discontinuity of the lyrics, in combination with Dylan's unflagging intensity, creates a powerful, tantalizing indeterminacy that is suddenly if provisionally resolved by every return of the refrain: ‘Now when I [unintelligible] I was born to love her / But she knows that the kingdom weighs so high above her / And I run but I race but it's not too fast or soon [?] / But I don't perceive her, I'm not there, I'm gone."

Two ultra-pedantic points. First, “1956” isn’t the date of composition; it’s part of the title. What it means, no one knows. Second, the song’s in B major. Why it ends up sounding sad and “minorish” is an interesting topic. I think it has something to do with the curious, not quite logical order in which Dylan shuffles through the five chords of the song (three major, two minor), and the way he lands on a G#-minor chord at the beginning of the second phrase of the refrain, where you might expect the tonic. You hear the same major-key mournfulness in “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” In any case, the fact that you can’t really make out the lyrics to this song, and yet keep listening, should be a clue that the music itself is the heart of the matter. As Eyolf Ostrem writes on his excellent Dylan-as-composer site, “’I'm Not There’ is Dylan's most musical song …. The meaning is veiled in the same way as the meaning of an utterance in a language that one does not understand is veiled: there seems to be a meaning there, but it is hidden.” This is not to deny that there are powerful verbal images at work — “the kingdom weighs [or waits] so high above her” — but if you go chasing after only the words you’ll be left with nothing, because much of the time Dylan may not have had words in mind at all — only chords, shorn tunes, and unsayable feelings.

Walt Whitman on Beethoven's Septet

“Dainty abandon, sometimes as if Nature laughing on a hillside in the sunshine; serious and firm monotonies, as of winds; a horn sounding through the tangle of the forest, and the dying echoes; soothing floating of waves, but presently rising in surges, angrily lashing, muttering, heavy; piercing peals of laughter, for interstices; now and then weird, as Nature herself is in certain moods—but mainly spontaneous, easy, careless…”

Daring in Duluth

On the subject of brilliant programming, see this season's programs by the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra: Love of Country, Tragic Love, Love of Nature (the Pastorale and the Rite of Spring), Unrequited Love, Forbidden Love (Tchaikovsky, naturally), Fatal Love (Carmen), and Love of Music. An article by Chester Lane in Symphony magazine alerted me to this venture, which is the brainchild of conductor Markand Thakar. Last season they did the Seven Deadly Sins, and for Wrath (paired with the virtue of Brotherhood) they put Beethoven's Ninth next to William Grant Still's And They Lynched Him on a Tree. Gives me chills just to think about.