I am flattered and slightly stunned to be receiving a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center. I doubt whether I deserve such a thing, particularly in the vicinity of Milton Babbitt, but I will gratefully accept it. Incidentally, the ever-buoyant Babbitt, who celebrates his ninetieth birthday on May 10, was the first famous composer I met (after Leonard Bernstein, in childhood). I talked to him for thirty seconds or so at WHRB in 1988. When, some years later, I met him again, he remembered our encounter with uncanny precision, down to the diseased color of the rug in the room we talked in.
I'm giving a few out-of-town lectures in coming weeks. Next Thursday, I will speak on the sinister topic "Stalin and Hitler as 'Music-Lovers'"
at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. Having become aware that April 20
used to be Hitler's birthday, I wish to assure potential attendees that
it will not be a particularly pro-Hitler presentation. The kind of love
we are talking about is that which Oscar Wilde described in "The Ballad
of Reading Gaol" — "Each man kills the thing he loves." Much of the
material comes from the central section of my book
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century — chapters on music in Stalin's Soviet Union, FDR's America, and Hitler's
Germany in the 30s and 40s. It's the best work I've done, I think.
On April 28, I will be in Seattle to talk at On the Boards, and the next day I will give a paper at the Experience Music Project Pop Conference.
At On the Boards I will hazardously attempt to sum up, with the aid of
an iPod, the entire twentieth century in about an hour. We'll
see how far I get. I can guarantee that Hanns Eisler's
"Heimliche Aufmarsch" will bring the house down (if played at
ear-splitting, bourgeoisie-annihilating volume). As in the book, my aim
is to map out the sheer dizzying diversity of music of the
last hundred years — the extremes of pure beauty and pure noise to
which composers lunged, both in imitation and defiance of the
times in which they lived.
As for the book itself, I am beginning to see a flicker of light at the end of the "profound dull tunnel" (War Requiem). I have now cut a full 100,000 words from the manuscript, and I am getting somewhere close to publishable length.
Happy Passover and "Easter" (actual Easter is April 23).
