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Interrogations
It's always hazardous to open mail when there's work to do. Two items — the second volume of Prokofiev's diaries, from Cornell University Press, and a two-CD set of the music of Johanna Magdalena Beyer, from New World Records — have thrown me off course over the past couple of days. The Prokofiev diaries, first of all, are totally riveting. Although the composer could be drearily self-centered — what genius isn't? — he sharply observed the world around him and his prose has considerable flair. This volume cover the years 1915 to 1923, when Prokofiev witnessed the Russian Revolution, tried his fortunes in America, and wound up in the Russian émigré community in Paris. Here are two quick teasers. First, from the end of 1917:
The month's end passed in transcribing Seven, They Are Seven and contemplation of an engrossing new idea: Lina Collini mentioned in passing one day that she was planning to leave Russia for America — and it suddenly struck me that there was no need for me to stay in Russia either. In the flow of idle chatter this tiny spark was seemingly extinguished almost at once, but in fact what appeared at the time to be no more than a passing remark proved to be explosive material that in an instant flared up into a conflagration. To go to America! Of course! Here was wretchedness; there life brimming over. Here, slaughter and barbaric rhetoric; there, cultivated life. Here, shabby concerts in Kislovodsk; there, New York, Chicago! No time for hesitation. In the spring I will go. If only America does not turn against a Russia that has now abandoned the war! Such was the flag under which I greeted the New Year. Surely it will not disappoint my hopes?
Some months later, in San Francisco, Prokofiev finds himself under interrogation from American immigration authorities:
"What is this?"
"Music."
"Did you write it yourself?"
"I did, on board ship."
"Can you play it?"
"I can."
"Play it, then."On the piano in the ship's saloon, I played the main theme of the Violin Sonata on its own, without accompaniment. It was not appreciated.
"Can you play Chopin?"
"What would you like me to play?"
"The Funeral March."I played four bars. The official evidently enjoyed it.
"Very good," he said, with feeling.
"Did you know for whose death it was composed?"
"No."
"His dog's."
Prokofiev is detained for a couple of days, and another conversation ensues:
"Have you ever been in prison?"
"Yours."
I could go on — it's an amazing book and a precious historical resource.
Johanna Beyer is an early twentieth-century American modernist who is slowly emerging from the shadows. I first encountered her music on a fine New Albion CD by the pianist Sarah Cahill. At the time, it didn't make a strong impression — the Nine Preludes by Ruth Crawford Seeger were for me the disc's main draw — but I'm beginning to see why Beyer has cast a spell over various latter-day composers, musicians, and scholars, among them Cahill, Charles Amirkhanian, Larry Polansky, John Kennedy, and Amy Beal. Beyer was born in Leipzig, in 1888, and came to America in the twenties. She took up composing at a relatively late date, and was heavily influenced by "dissonant counterpoint" and other ultra-modern techniques espoused by Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell, and Ruth Crawford. The last-named was plainly her primary model. The two string quartets on the New World set — evocatively played by members of the Astra Chamber Music Society, of Melbourne — are closely allied to the Seeger Quartet, a masterpiece of twentieth-century chamber music. But Beyer has her own voice. Glissandos, cluster chords, obsessive ostinatos, and complex tempo structures are woven together with startling bursts of lyricism and flashes of wit. Polansky properly describes the finale of the First Quartet (1933-34) as "nothing short of astonishing," a prophecy of minimalist and post-minimalist music of the seventies and eighties. I imagine Kyle Gann having a field day with it.
The historian in me is especially fascinated by two works for chorus entitled The Federal Music Project and The Composers Forum Laboratory. In researching my book I spent some days going through the records of the Federal Music Project at the National Archives, studying that brief but remarkable period when the federal government funded orchestras, opera houses, music-education projects, and, yes, contemporary-music concerts. I found Beyer's name in the files of the Composers' Forum-Laboratory, which gave composers a platform to present their work and then obliged them to answer questions from the audience. The latter part of the process could prove exasperating, as in Beyer's Q&A of May 20, 1936:
Q: Really, Miss Beyer, is there any beauty in your pathological sounds and noises? Or does it appeal to some other sense?
A: Apparently it is nothing but noise.
The Laboratories drew forth many complaints about supposed excesses of dissonance and rhythmic complexity, although sometimes a tonally oriented composer got a grilling from the modernist faction, as in this session with Henry Holden Huss:
Q: Why does Mr. Huss prefer to retain the "major triad formula" as late as 1935?
A: You take two tones and add them to a third and you have a star, and you must look to the stars and heaven.
With the permission of New World, I'm supplying audio of the beginning of Federal Music Project, which was written in 1936, in the heady early days of the federal arts projects. Here's the text: "I know of an active bee-hive, / it buzzes and bubbles all day, / is full of creative ideas, / a nucleus of a future so gay!" You'll need headphones or good speakers to catch the low buzzing at the outset.
There's something intriguingly mournful about the music, as if Beyer already sensed that this "future, oh, so bright" — to quote the last lines of her text — would never come to fruition. And doesn't the repetition of "I know, I know" sound eerily like the flute and violin lines in the opening seascape of Peter Grimes, written some years later? Beyer died in total obscurity in 1944, her last years made horribly difficult by ALS, and it's a wonderful thing that she's seeing the light of day again.
For Wilfrid Mellers
Wilfrid Mellers, a wise, passionate, deeply generous writer on music, has passed away at the age of ninety-four. I treasure his books on Percy Grainger and Poulenc, his twentieth-century survey Caliban Reborn, his not entirely convincing but always captivating studies of Dylan and the Beatles, and, above all, his 1965 work on American classical and jazz composers, Music in a New Found Land. It's a scandal that the last-named has long been out of print. I've quoted before and I'll quote again Mellers's visionary salute to Morton Feldman:
The tones [in Durations 1-5] are always isolated, immensely slow, and delicately soft, and when instruments play together, because the durations overlap, the simultaneous sounds are often unisonal or concordant. An infinitely slow drone on muted tuba, a major third on muted string harmonics, sound as though the players are creating the tones out of the eternal silence, and we are being born afresh in learning to listen to them. Music seems to have vanished almost to the point of extinction; yet the little that is left is, like all of Feldman's work, of exquisite musicality; and it certainly presents the American obsession with emptiness completely absolved from fear. The music's passive, rarefied tenderness seems to have the therapeutic property of making us saner, rather than more mad. Since the question of sanity or madness can hardly be decided, however, without some human criterion as reference, it may be that the cycle of "consciousness" has, willy-nilly, started again.
In Mellers's honor, a bit of Grainger's "Shallow Brown," with John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Choir and English Country Gardiner Orchestra (Philips/ArkivMusic):
Chapter 2: Chacona, Lamento (for iPad)
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In this chapter, written fresh for the book, I tell a story of pattern recognition, tracing a few simple figures that show up in music across the centuries and across many genres. While I don't believe in the idea of music as a "universal language"—try telling that to a tired mom who is being forced to listen to her teenager's hip-hop, or, for that matter, a teenager who has to sit through his grandmother's Mozart records—there is much common ground in world cultures, recurring strands of musical DNA. Here I focus on two such elemental patterns: the old dance known as the chaconne and a pair of bass lines associated with lament. The path leads from Renaissance madrigals to Led Zeppelin, by way of Monteverdi, Purcell, and Bach, whose great Chaconne for solo violin is at the heart of the chapter.
Here is an early written-down chacona, Juan Arañés's "Un sarao de la chacona" (p. 23; first edition above):
From Villancicos y Danzas Criollas; Jordi Savall leading Hespèrion XXI and La Capella Reial de Catalunya; Alia Vox 9834; also available as download.
Here are the bass lines at the top of p. 25:
The bocet, an old Romanian folk lament (p. 26):
Other folk laments, from Hungary, Russia, and Kazakhstan:
The flamenco singer Manuel Torres and the guitarist El Hijo de Salvador perform "Siempre por los rincones" in 1922 (p. 27):
Daniel's lament in the lion's den, from the medieval Play of Daniel (p. 28):
Dufay Collective; Harmonia Mundi 907479.
Guillaume de Machaut's "Mors sui" (p. 28):
Orlando Consort, Dreams in the Pleasure Garden; DG 457 618-2.
In Johannes Ockeghem's mid-fifteenth-century chanson "Fors seulement" (p. 29), the classic falling figure of lament makes an unmistakable and perhaps influential appearance:
Edward Wickham leading The Clerks' Group; ASV Gaudeamus 168.
The same pattern recurs in John Dowland's "Flow my tears" (p. 31), a masterpiece of Elizabethan melancholy:
Andreas Scholl, countertenor, and Andreas Martin, lute; Harmonia Mundi 901603.
Claudio Monteverdi, master of Italian music in the early seventeenth century, took hold of the chaconne fad with a duet titled "Zefiro torna" (p. 34):
Alan Curtis leading Il Complesso Barocco; Virgin Classics 45293.
In his Lamento della ninfa (pp. 35-36), Monteverdi made canny use of the device of ostinato, or strict ("obstinate") repetition, turning the four-note lament pattern into a steady ground bass:
Bernarda Fink, mezzo-soprano, with René Jacobs leading the Concerto Vocale; Harmonia Mundi 901736.37. These and other longer excerpts by kind permission of Harmonia Mundi.
The Venetian opera composer Francesco Cavalli, in his 1640 opera Gli amori d'Apollo e di Dafne (p. 36-37), directly copied Monteverdi's lamenting bass. When Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree, Apollo sings a lament for her, in a short aria marked "Lamento" at the outset:
The four-note bass again serves to generate a seductive, almost comforting kind of sadness:
Mario Zeffiri, tenor, with Alberto Zedda conducting the Galician Youth Symphony Orchestra; Naxos 8660187.
Cavalli's next opera, Didone (pp. 37-38), has laments galore. In Hecuba's cry of rage over the destruction of Troy, the ostinato bass now proceeds downward by chromatic steps (consecutive white and black keys on the piano):
Marie-Nicole Lemieux, contralto, with Emmanuelle Haïm leading Le Concert d'Astrée; Virgin Classics 19044.
The chaconne, having risen from lowly beginnings, achieves its apotheosis at the court of Versailles, where Jean-Baptiste Lully writes such stately dances as the "Chaconne des maures," or "Chaconne of the Moors" (p. 39):
Ballet Music for the Sun King: Kevin Mallon conducting the Arcadia Baroque Ensemble; Naxos 8554003.
In keyboard pieces such as Frescobaldi's Partite sopra ciaccona (p. 40), meanwhile, the dance begins to evolve in a more complex and emotionally darker direction:
Colin Tinley, harpsichord; Dorian 90124.
In Dido's Lament, the famous closing aria of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (pp. 40-41), the chromatic bass line operates much as it did in Cavalli:
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, mezzo-soprano, with Nicholas McGegan conducting the Philharmonia Baroque; Harmonia Mundi 907110.
We now enter the world of Johann Sebastian Bach, where "chaconne" and "lament" characteristics are almost fused together. Here is the beginning of Bach's great Ciaccona in D minor, from the Second Partita for solo violin, (pp. 43-44), with a chromatic descent at 1:44:
A descending chromatic line in the major-key middle section of the Ciaccona:
The convulsive turn back to minor:
The above three samples come from Gidon Kremer's recording of the Sonatas and Partitas; ECM 506502.
Andrés Segovia plays the same passage on the guitar, perhaps bringing out a bit of the old "Spanish" flavor of the dance:
You can see the manuscript of the Ciaccona, in Bach's own hand, at Bach Digital, the online site of the Bach archive at the Staatsbibliothek Berlin.
In the "Crucifixus" of the B-Minor Mass (pp. 44-46), Bach used the chromatic lamenting bass to represent nothing less than the suffering of Christ on the cross. It appears at the bottom of this portion of the original manuscript:
Here is the "Crucifixus" in its entirety:
Philippe Herreweghe conducting the chorus and orchestra of the Collegium Vocale Gent; Harmonia Mundi 5901614.15.
Beethoven, who once asked his publisher to send him a copy of Bach's "Crucifixus," employed a doleful chromatic bass line in the coda of the first movement of his Ninth Symphony (pp. 46-47):
Osmo Vänskä conducting the Minnesota Orchestra; BIS 1616.
The climactic lamenting passage of the final movement of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony has four-note and chromatic figures overlapping (p. 47):
Valery Gergiev conducting the Kirov Orchestra; Philips 456580.
György Ligeti (pp. 48-49) talks about the figure of the lament at the New England Conservatory, on March 9, 1993.
In a discussion of Schubert's Quartet in G the following day, he returns to the topic, singing the beginning of Dido's Lament:
The above excerpts by kind permission of the New England Conservatory.
The beginning of the Lamento of Ligeti's Horn Trio (p. 49):
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano, Marie-Luise Neunecker, French horn, Saschko Gawriloff, violin; Sony Classical 62309.
A chromatic descent in Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" (p. 50):
Willie Brown's "Future Blues" (p. 51):
Skip James's "Devil Got My Woman" and "I'm So Glad":
Robert Johnson's "Walkin' Blues":
Richard Rodgers's "My Funny Valentine," as sung by Sinatra (p. 52):
A montage of descending chromatic bass lines from 1960s pop and rock — "Chim Chim Cher-ee," "Michelle," "Hotel California," and "Ballad of a Thin Man" (pp. 52-53):
Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused," from an epic live performance at the LA Forum in 1972 (p. 54):
Many elements of "Dazed and Confused" were taken from a song of the same name written and recorded by Jake Holmes. Jimmy Page and the band have to this date never given Holmes credit, although a pending lawsuit may finally force them to do so. Will Shade, in an article for Perfect Sound Forever, describes Holmes's remarkable career; he not only co-wrote one of the most famous rock songs of the late twentieth-century but is also responsible for the commercial jingles "Raise Your Hand If You're Sure," "Be a Pepper," and "Be All That You Can Be."
Chapter 20: Blessed Are the Sad (for iPad)
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Brahms in 1853, at the age of twenty.
Widely played, not quite universally loved, charged with hidden passions, Johannes Brahms stands as a symbol of how much we lose when we turn composers into marble statues. There are museums dedicated to him in Hamburg, his birthplace; in Mürzzuschlag, Austria, where he wrote the Fourth Symphony; in Pörtschach, where he wrote the Second; and in Gmunden, another favorite holiday spot. The Brahms Institut in Lübeck has the most extensive online archive, including pictures, letters, concert programs, and first and early editions of Brahms's entire published output. A major presentation of digitized manuscripts is planned for the fall of 2010. Yet few latter-day composers are trickier or more elusive when it comes to the question of musical meaning. I chose to end this book with Brahms because I have always responded to his work with an intensity that I have never fully understood. When I listen to music purely for pleasure, with no assignments pending, I often turn to this master of the double-edged chord.
The beginning of the Second Symphony, with its rumble of "black wings" in the trombones:
Charles Mackerras conducting the Scottish Chamber Orchestra; Telarc 80522.
The beginning of the vocal quartet "Why Is Light Given to One Who Is in Misery?":
Marcus Creed conducting the RIAS Chamber Chorus; Harmonia Mundi 501591.
Wilhelm Furtwängler conducts the entire first movement of the Second, in a remarkable 1945 performance (the "springtime" motif enters at 4:26 of the second part):
The house where Brahms was born, in the Gängeviertel, which, by the time this photograph was taken, had become a slum:
From the Andante of the First Piano Sonata:
Sviatoslav Richter, piano; Philips 438477 (out of print).
Schubert's "Der Leiermann," for comparison:
The opening of the First Piano Concerto, with its intimations of Robert Schumann's plunge into the icy waters of the Rhine:
Clifford Curzon, piano, with Georg Szell conducting the London Symphony; Decca 417641.
A demonstration of the opening chord at the piano:
Here's a youthful account of the entire first movement, with Kirill Gerstein at the piano and Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra. After the initial colossal D, you can hear the successive notes of the "lamento" motif at 0:47 (C-sharp), 1:09 (C-natural), 1:13 (B-natural), 1:16 (B-flat, briefly), and 1:17 (A).
The opening movements of A German Requiem, "Blessed Are They That Mourn" and "All Flesh Is As Grass," with Claudio Abbado conducting the Berlin Philharmonic and Swedish Radio Chorus at the Vienna Musikverein (on DVD):
Klemperer conducts the opening of the First Symphony:
Brahms in Gypsy mode — the finale of the Piano Quartet in G Minor:
Gidon Kremer, Yuri Bashmet, Mischa Maisky, and Martha Argerich; DG 463 700-2.
Falstaff counts off the chimes of midnight in Verdi's Falstaff, a paragon of late style:
Tito Gobbi, with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra; EMI 67162.
The seemingly humdrum opening of the Fourth Symphony, followed by the "abyss" at the beginning of the recapitulation:
Charles Mackerras conducting the Scottish Chamber Orchestra; Telarc 80465.
The chaconne chorus "Meine Tage in den Leiden," from Bach's Cantata No. 150, with a bass line that helped to inspire the finale of Brahms's Fourth:
John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists; Soli Deo Gloria 131.
The great Carlos Kleiber leads the entire final movement:
Chapter 19: Fervor (for iPad)
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Photo: Avie Records.
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, the violist turned vocal oracle, whom I describe in this chapter as "the most remarkable singer I ever heard," died in July 2006. I was one of many people who were devastated by her death; Sidney Chen, at his blog The Standing Room, gathered a long list of memorials. Charles Michener profiled her for The New Yorker in 2004. On this blog I prepared a discography.
She sings "Deep River" :
With Roger Vignoles, piano; Wigmore Hall Live 0013.
"Ombra mai fu," from Handel's Xerxes :
With Harry Bicket conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment; Avie 30.
"Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen," from Bach's Cantata No. 82, "Ich habe genug":
With Craig Smith conducting the Orchestra of Emmanuel Music; Nonesuch 79692.
"Pues mi Dios ha nacido a penar," or "Because My Lord Was Born to Suffer," from John Adams's El Niño:
With Kent Nagano conducting the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and London Voices; Nonesuch 79634.
"Bane of virtue, nurse of passions" from Handel's Theodora, in a production directed by Peter Sellars:
Dido's Lament, one more time:
With Nicholas McGegan conducting the Philharmonia Baroque; Harmonia Mundi 907110.
The beginning of "My love, if I die and you don't," from Peter Lieberson's Neruda Songs:
With James Levine conducting the Boston Symphony; Nonesuch 79954.
Chapter 18: I Saw the Light (for iPad)
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The Puyallup Fair, 1998.
The official website of the monumentally elusive Bob Dylan contains lyrics for close to five hundred songs, sound samples for more than fifty albums, a gallery of photos, and a smattering of videos. The leading source of Dylan-related news is Karl Erik Andersen's site Expecting Rain. BobLinks has set lists for some fifteen hundred shows since 1995. How Long Has It Been... tells you the last time Dylan played a given song. And so on—hundreds, if not thousands, of other Dylan sites exist.
A poster for Dylan's first high-profile New York show, in November 1961:
An ad for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan :
The original album version of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."
The great "Judas!" fracas, at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966:
The beginning of the scalding version of "Like a Rolling Stone" that ensued:
From The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966.
The beginning of "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll":
From The Times They Are A-Changin'.
The street in Duluth, Minnesota, where Dylan lived as a small child:
The Duluth News-Tribune advertises Dylan's long-awaited return to the city of his birth. Highway 61 is in the background:
Railroad tracks near Hibbing, where Dylan grew up:
"Tangled Up in Blue," from 1974:
Different versions of the refrain of "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands":
From Blonde on Blonde.
"Mama You Been on My Mind":
From The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3.
"Simple Twist of Fate," with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing Dido's Lament for comparison:
From Blood on the Tracks.
"Not Dark Yet":
Chapter 17: The End of Silence (for iPad)
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Internet holdings on the topic of Cage are fairly vast. Laura Kuhn, the executive director of the John Cage Trust, maintains a lively blog; the picture above, of a Cage pocket calendar, was taken at the Trust's archive at Bard College, in New York. The site JohnCage.info has a comprehensive database. The Electronic Poetry Center in Buffalo has a good collection of Cage links. The musicologist James Pritchett has placed online his writings on Cage. UbuWeb has various sound files, including the complete 1988-89 Norton Lectures. In 2009 I wrote about my visit to the Anarchy of Silence exhibition in Barcelona.
The pianist David Tudor gave the première of 4'33" at the Maverick Concert Hall in 1952. Here is film of him performing the piece:
A delightful video assembled from various YouTube performances of 4'33":
Here is an excerpt from Cage's pioneering 1939 piece Imaginary Landscape No. 1, for variable-speed turntables, cymbal, and piano:
With Cage, Xenia Cage, Doris Dennison, and Margaret Jansen; from the 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage, Town Hall, New York, May 15, 1948; Wergo 286 247.
David Greilsammer plays Sonata V from Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes—a prime example of the composer’s eerily beautiful writing for prepared piano:
Here Greilsammer demonstrates the preparation of the piano:
After encountering radical new European styles on a trip in 1949, Cage began to work with more violent, disorderly sounds. Inspired by the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer, he constructed his own tape collage, Williams Mix, made up of some six hundred tape fragments arranged according to the demands of the I Ching. You can listen to it at the German site Medien Art Netz, along with Imaginary Landscape No. 1 in its entirety. In the third movement of his Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra, Cage uses the I Ching to decide which element from an array of sixty-four sounds should come next. Some of the sounds are, in fact, silences:
Stephen Drury, prepared piano, with the Callithumpian Consort of New England Conservatory; Mode 57.
In the later 1950s and into the 1960s, Cage helped to create the new discipline or anti-discipline of performance art, an outgrowth of his legendary "happening" at Black Mountain College in 1952. One essential piece of Cagean footage is the composer’s magnificently surreal appearance on the CBS game show I’ve Got a Secret, from 1960. Unfortunately, no footage has yet surfaced of Cage’s earlier stint on the Italian game show Lascia o Raddopia?
There's an extraodinary DVD of Cage's Variations VII, performed in 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory; you can see an excerpt here.
Cage makes music from cacti and plant materials:
Laura Kuhn writes on her blog about Lecture on the Weather, one of Cage's most mesmerizing later pieces, and in some ways the most politically pointed work of his career. You can hear his explanatory remarks here, together with still photographs of a 2007 Bard installation.
Cage's meditative Ryoanji, in a version for voice and percussion, with Liz Tonne and Tim Feeney:
Cage talks about music, sound, and silence, with reference to the noise from Sixth Avenue below his window:
Chapter 16: The Music Mountain (for iPad)
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I visited Marlboro Music, Rudolf Serkin's fabled chamber-music retreat in Vermont, three times in the summer of 2008, and wrote about the experience for The New Yorker the following year. Above and below are pictures of the Marlboro grounds — formerly a dairy farm, currently a small liberal-arts college:
The coffee shop, hub of social activity (pp. 246-48):
This short video gives the flavor of the place:
Rudolf Serkin and Adolf Busch, Marlboro's co-founders (pp. 250-52), perform the Andante moderato from Schubert's Fantasy in C:
Recorded in Small Queen's Hall, London, May 6, 1931. From the set Franz Schubert: Chamber Music, on the greatly missed Andante label.
Serkin plays the first movement of Beethoven's Sonata Opus 111:
Haydn in the dining hall :
The infamous scheduling board — all these rehearsals took place on a single weekend:
Mitsuko Uchida, Soovin Kim, and David Soyer perform the Andante of Schubert's Piano Trio in E-flat (pp. 257-58):
Recorded live at Marlboro on July 13, 2008. By kind permission of the artists and Marlboro Music.
David Soyer's music stand inspired an epic prank (p. 260):
Another prank: someone photoshopped Uchida's Peggy Guggenheim sunglasses onto pictures of everyone on campus:
Uchida practices the Choral Fantasy in the concert hall (pp. 262-63)
The cemetery in Guilford where Serkin and Busch are buried (p. 264):
Serkin's grave is marked by the first flat stone on the left; Busch is to the right, beneath the bush:
Chapter 15: Voice of the Century (for iPad)
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Marian Anderson sings "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 (pp. 239-40):
More footage of the event can be found here. A recording of the entire event can be found in the online resources of the National Archives:
As the following juxtaposition suggests, Martin Luther King, Jr. almost certainly thought back to Marian Anderson when he gave his momentous "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 (p. 240):
Anderson sings "Deep River":
Her chilling version of Schubert's "Der Doppelgänger":
Nina Simone sings "Strange Fruit" (p. 244):
Compare "Der Doppelgänger," in its original key:
Ian Bostridge, tenor, and Antonio Pappano, piano; EMI 42639.
And the four-note bass line of Monteverdi's Lamento della ninfa:
Bernarda Fink, mezzo-soprano, with René Jacobs leading the Concerto Vocale; Harmonia Mundi 901736.37.
Two more photographs of the Lincoln Memorial event, from the Library of Congress:
Chapter 14: Learning the Score (for iPad)
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The Malcolm X Shabazz High School Marching Band.
Hassan Ralph Williams, the longtime leader of the Shabazz band (pp. 226-28), standing amidst his charges at the Memorial Day Parade in Nutley, New Jersey:
A recent video of the Shabazz band in action:
The site for the Music for All Foundation has much useful information about the never-ending struggle to maintain music education in American public and private schools. The California Music Project has archived a copy of Music for All's alarming 2004 report, "Sound of Silence," on the drastic decline of music education in California (p. 230).
The remarkable Community MusicWorks organization in Rhode Island, which is the focus of the latter part of the chapter, has a well-stocked website. Among other things, you can read Sebastian Ruth's essay "Music and Social Justice." Maxine Green, a major inspiration for Ruth's conception of Community MusicWorks, has a website here. Here's a video about the organization and its core ensemble, the Providence String Quartet:
The members of the Providence Quartet outside their storefront headquarters:
The final minutes of a 2004 recording of the Brahms Piano Quintet by the Providence Quartet and Jonathan Biss (pp. 235-36):
Chapter 12: Almost Famous (for iPad)
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Photograph © Eric Cheng.
The St. Lawrence Quartet, a group that passionately avoids classical-music business-as-usual, has a well-stocked website, with news items, a touring schedule, and soundclips.
The quartet as I first heard them, on Nov. 17, 1992, playing Alban Berg's String Quartet Opus 3 in the Young Concert Artists series at the 92nd St. Y (p. 205; review here):
A short documentary of the quartet's Chamber Music Seminar at Stanford University:
The present-day version of the quartet — two players have departed since I wrote about the group in 2002 — plays the scherzo of Dvořák's Quartet Opus 106:
And here is the beginning of the Adagio from the same work, in the St. Lawrence's ArtistShare recording:
Chapter 11: Verdi's Grip (for iPad)
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Maria Callas as Violetta in La traviata.
Verdi remains popular. A search on the site Operabase, made early in September 2011, yielded listings for 969 forthcoming performances of 174 productions in 112 cities, from Albuquerque to Zurich. The Fondazione Verdi has much information on the composer, including sound and pictures. There are also sites for the Casa Verdi, the composer's home for retired singers; the Institute for Verdi Studies, which also has a good photo gallery; the Verdi Museum in Busseto, the composer's birthplace; and the Villa Verdi, the composer's longtime home in Sant'Agata, outside Busseto. Opera Glass has librettos for all the Verdi operas; scores can be found at IMSLP.
Film footage of a funeral cortège for Verdi in 1901, with, oddly, Verdi and Mozart on the soundtrack:
Caruso sings "La donne è mobile," from Rigoletto (p. 190), in a Victor recording made in 1904:
From the Internet Archive; restoration by Bob Varney.
The Grand Inquisitor scene from Don Carlo, with Ferruccio Furlanetto as Philip II and Eric Halfvarson as the blind master of the Inquisition (p. 193):
Callas at the height of her powers, singing "Amami, Alfredo" from La traviata at La Scala in 1955 (pp. 194-95):
With Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the orchestra of La Scala; EMI 556 330‐2.
Video of Callas in Traviata at Lisbon, 1958:
Some riveting footage of Callas in concert, singing Lady Macbeth's opening scene:
Frida Leider sings "D'Amor sull'ali rosee," from Il trovatore, in German translation (p. 196):
Francesco Tamagno, the original Otello, singing "Ora e per sempre addio" (p. 196):
From the Internet Archive; restoration by Tim Ecker.
Sondra Radvanovsky works to hold her own against the archives of the past in "D'amor sull'ali rosee" (p. 197):
With Constantine Orbelian conducting the Philharmonia of Russia; Delos 3404.
The great Plácido Domingo sings the final scene of Otello (pp. 197-98):
One of the more outré examples of Regietheater — a production of Un ballo in maschera set at the site of the collapse of the World Trade Center (p. 199, lady Hitler not visible):
Peter Konwitschny's remarkable staging of the auto-da-fé from Don Carlos (p. 201):
"Va pensiero" at the Met, 2002 (pp. 202-203):
Chapter 10: Song of the Earth (for iPad)
Part of the Listen to This Audio Guide
Igor Stravinsky once spoke of the "violent Russian spring that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking." The Alaska-based composer John Luther Adams, the subject of this chapter, quoted that line to me when he picked me up at the airport in Fairbanks, on an April afternoon in 2008. The great Alaskan thaw had begun quite suddenly the previous day, and the snow was already half gone:
The chapter begins with a description of The Place Where You Go to Listen (pp. 176-79), Adams's permanent installation at the Museum of the North, on the grounds of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. In the photo at the top of this page, the composer sits in the place he devised. Here is the building's titanium-clad, somewhat Gehry-esque exterior, followed by another shot of the room:
For a very rough sense of what the music is like, see this slightly silly YouTube video. For more about the installation, read Kyle Gann's NewMusicBox article. The composer / programmer Jim Altieri assisted in the creation of the piece.
Views from Adams's home, outside Fairbanks:
A brief video portrait of the composer:
You can also watch a teaser from a forthcoming documentary by Steve Elkins, in which Adams figures prominently. In a video made by Evan Hurd for the New Yorker's website, Adams discusses his recent piece Inuksuit, for nine to ninety-nine percussion players.
Adams, a rock musician in his youth, turned toward composition after discovering the music of Edgard Varèse, via a Frank Zappa record jacket (pp. 179-80). You can listen to Varèse's Poème électronique here and read about the original 1958 installation here. Zappa wrote about his reverence for Varèse in 1971. For samples of Harry Partch, Conlon Nancarrow, Lou Harrison, and Morton Feldman (pp. 180-81), see the Chapter 14 audio guide for The Rest Is Noise.
One of Adams's earliest characteristic works is songbirdsongs, begun in California in 1974 and finished in 1980 (p. 181). Here is the beginning of "Morningfieldsong":
Stephen Drury leading the Callithumpian Consort, New England Conservatory; to be released next year by Mode Records.
In the transitional orchestral piece The Far Country of Sleep (1988), Adams comes close to the Americana style of Aaron Copland, although the slow-motion narrative presages his mature style:
JoAnn Falletta conducting the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra; New Albion NA061.
An excerpt from the 1998 work In the White Silence (p. 183):
Tim Weiss conducting the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble; New World 80600-2 (more excerpts here).
Ensemble 64.8, the resident percussion ensemble at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, performs "...and dust rising" from Strange and Sacred Noise (p. 183):
The California EAR Unit performs the 2007 piece The Light Within:
A section of the electronic work Veils (p. 183):
Adams's orchestral piece Dark Waves, in its entirety (p. 184):
A live recording of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Jaap van Zweden, at the Saturday Matinee concert series at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on December 15, 2007. Courtesy of the composer and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic. The Chicago Symphony will perform the piece on Oct. 28 and 29, 2010.
Here are pictures taken during our drive south toward Lake Louise (pp. 184-85):
The oil flows through the snow:
Lake Louise at dusk:
Out on the lake in the white silence:
Snowmobiles approach:
The composer inspecting his "cormorant isle" (p. 185):
The author confronts a blank page:
Views on the drive back to Fairbanks:
While traveling the Richardson Highway, we stopped in at the cabin and outlying buildings where the poet John Haines lived in almost total isolation after the Second World War (pp. 186-87). Haines's book The Stars, the Snow, the Fire is a startlingly intense and vivid memoir of his time on the homestead.
John Haines recites lines from his poem "Return to Richardson, Spring 1981":
Chapter 9: Symphony of Millions (Part 2) (for iPad)
Part of the Listen to This Audio Guide
The raw-edged music of Guo Wenjing (pp. 168-70) remains little known in the West, and recordings are scarce, but online you can find an excellent video of his percussion piece Parade by Oberlin Percussion:
There is also footage of Guo's Chou Kong Shan, for bamboo flutes and Chinese orchestra:
Below are some shots from 2 Kolegas, where the sound-artist, critic, and poet Yan Jun (pp. 170-71) hosts a weekly series called Waterland Kwanyin. The performers shown are Li Zenghui and 10.
Yan Jun's recording of the "moment of silence" in honor of the Sichuan earthquake (p. 172):
Yan said to me, of life in Beijing: "You see the traffic lights change, but nobody cares, they drive through or cross the street anyway. There are many laws saying you can do this and you can do that, but people have their own rules. They have their way to share the power, find the relationship between safe and tough, keep the balance. Beijing people know this, they have this balance, but nobody writes it down."
An atmosphere of seeming freedom prevailed at Beijing's leading alternative-rock club, D22 (p. 171). It was founded by Michael Pettis, a longtime regular on New York's downtown scene and the founder of a club called Sin.
I was fortunate to see a performance by the gifted young guitarist and composer Zhang Shouwang (pp. 171-72), who also goes by the name of Jeff Zhang. Performing with him is Simon Frank, a teenager whose father was working at the Canadian embassy. There's a YouTube video of one of their performances, under the moniker Speak Chinese or Die.
Zhang plays in at least two bands, the experimental-leaning White and the more mainstream Carsick Cars. When I was in Beijing, Carsick Cars had won a following with a song called "Zhongnanhai" — a title that refers both to a local brand of cigarettes and, more riskily, to the Party leadership compound.
A casual performance of traditional Chinese music (pp. 172-73) in Jingshan Park:
A bamboo flutist, dressed in a park attendant's uniform, playing alone in the woods. He stopped when I approached.
A recording I made on one of my walks around Beijing:
One night I went to the Mei Lanfang Grand Theater for a performance of Peking opera. The auditorium was full, but the audience was noticeably older than the crowds I saw at the Egg; the youth element was largely absent.
Before the performance, I talked to three young performers, all of whom were in their twenties. In their hoodies and track pants, they looked like ordinary, Americanized Chinese youth, but when they spoke about their early immersion in Peking opera style, their years of training, the politics of the opera academies, and the struggle to establish the relevance of their work in modern China, they sounded very much like fresh Juilliard graduates who've spent too little time outside the practice room. The actor in the middle is Liu Kuikui.
The guqin player Wu Na (pp. 173-74) has blended the ancient tradition of the instrument with jazz and avant-garde techniques. Here she performs with Chanyuan Zhao and Vincent Royer (she is on the left):
A magnificent array of instruments for a performance at the Divine Music Administration, on the grounds of the Temple of Heaven (pp. 174-75):
A fragment of what I heard:
Alas, this wonderful museum of China's musical history does not seem to attract a crowd:
Some photographs on this page were taken by Nick Frisch, who also served as my guide and translator in Beijing, and who was enormously helpful in the making of the article.
Chapter 9: Symphony of Millions (Part 1) (for iPad)
Part of the Listen to This Audio Guide
I traveled to Beijing in the spring of 2008, curious to see whether — as others had claimed — the future of classical music lay in China. I begin my account with a description of the National Spirit Achievers Awards, at which the composer Chen Qigang was one of the honorees (pp. 159-60). The event was underwritten in part by Mercedes-AMG, and I thought I could sense a slight awkwardness in the voices of the German car executives as they repeated the vaguely sinister slogan of the night, WILL POWER DREAM. Here are other photographs from the ceremony:
Chen Qigang is the man in the overcoat on the right:
Chen studied in Paris with Olivier Messiaen, and many of his works have a French tinge, although they also absorb elements of traditional Chinese music. This is Reflet d'un temps disparu:
The influence of Messiaen is less obvious in "You and Me," the pop song that he composed for the Olympics in 2008, although there's a touch of Debussy in the piano at 1:05:
Tiananmen Square at twilight:
Art and politics in close proximity: on the right, the National Center for the Performing Arts (pp. 161-62), and, on the left, the Great Hall of the People.
Another shot of the "Egg":
The interior of the Egg's concert hall:
Over the courtyard of the Central Conservatory (pp. 163-65) hangs a poster of China's musical heroes. In the picture below, you see in the top row the composers Guo Wenjing, Chen Qigang, Tan Dun, and Chen Yi, all of whom attended the conservatory together in the late seventies and early eighties.
More modern-music heroes in a music shop and coffee house near the school. I don't think Morton Feldman would be happy to be positioned underneath Boulez:
In the period of the Cultural Revolution, Madame Mao famously banned the tuba. The restriction has been lifted:
A scene from the Maoist ballet Red Detachment of Women (p. 166):
Tan Dun is the most famous of contemporary Chinese composers, notable for having given a populist spin to avant-garde techniques derived from John Cage. Here is an excerpt from the Water Concerto (p. 167):
A video documenting "One World, One Dream," Tan Dun's submission to the song competition of the Beijing Olympics. The Cage influence has disappeared entirely:
