I know, again with the Dylan. But I have to share something I found in Oliver Trager's Keys to the Rain: The Definitive Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, one of fifty-five books on Dylan published in the last two hours. One of my favorite Dylan rhymes has always been from the song "Angelina": "I was only following instructions when the judge sent me down the road / With your subpoena / ... Angelina." Turns out that none other than W. S. Gilbert perpetrated the same rhyme in Trial by Jury: "For to-day in this arena / Summoned by a stern subpoena / Edwin, sued by Angelina / Shortly will appear." Which is more unlikely, that this is a total coincidence or that Dylan whiles away his afternoons listening to Gilbert & Sullivan? Correct, the former.
"Angelina," which can be found only on the "official" Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3, is one of Dylan's greatest, spookiest songs. No one has ever been able to say what it really means, but one line after another gently rocks the mind: "It's always been my nature to take chances / My right hand drawing back while my left hand advances ... Do I need your permission to turn the other cheek / If you can read my mind, why must I speak? ... There's a black Mercedes rolling through the combat zone ... I see pieces of men marching, trying to take heaven by force / I can see the unknown rider, I can see the pale white horse ... Beat a path of retreat up them spiral staircases / Past the tree of smoke, past the angel with four faces / Begging God for mercy, weeping in unholy places / Angelina." Apparently the song spooked Dylan himself, for he never touched it after making the recording.
Don't get me started on "The Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar," from the same early-eighties period: "Prayed in the ghetto with my face into the cement / Heard the last moan of the boxer, seen the massacre of the innocent / Felt around for the light switch, became nauseated / Just me and an overweight dancer between walls that have deteriorated..." Kids, don't ever mix coke with the Book of Revelation.
Update: A reader points out that the rhymes in "Angelina" — concertina, hyena, subpoena, Argentina, arena — can all be found in standard rhyming dictionaries. Perhaps it's a coincidence after all. Too bad Dylan couldn't find a way to work in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
When Jacques Derrida died, I thought of writing a mini-essay on my college experiences as a Derrida-head, until I realized that every Ivy-League-y blogger born between 1965 and 1975 was doing the same. I sort of wish I'd spent my years as an English major reading actual English books, but Derrida was, as Marlene Dietrich says of Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil, some kind of a man. This gorgeously written appreciation by Leland de la Durantaye makes me want to dig my "passionately tattered" copy of Of Grammotology out of the storage space.
Nov. 16: Brenda Patterson, a mezzo I've heard good things about, sings an offbeat program at Tully Hall, including Haydn's Arianna a Naxos cantata, Crumb's Apparition, some Ives songs, and the world premiere of Edward Bilous' Night of the Dark Moon. More about Patterson here. Nov. 17: Three rival new-music concerts tonight. American Composers Orchestra presents a typically all-over program, everything from Morton Feldman to Sondheim to Randall Woolf's new work Women at an Exhibition (with film by Mary Harron and John C. Walsh). Also, Wet Ink is presenting another show at Bowery Poetry Club, again with the Zs. I went to Wet Ink back in September and was bewitched by the Zs' collective composition Bump, which is now available on Planaria Records. (You can listen to a sample here.) And the freewheeling postsomething double-bassist / composer Stefano Scodanibbio plays at Columbia's Italian Academy. Nov. 18: Soheil Nasseri plays Beethoven sonatas at Weill Hall. Nasseri is an exceptionally elegant pianist who also has a serious commitment to music education, giving morning mini-recitals at schools all around New York. Nov. 19: Joel Sachs leads another of his famous "Who dat?" programs with the New Juilliard Ensemble. Works of Josef Bardanashvili, Stefano Gervasoni, Wei-Chieh Lin, Paul Desenne, and Virko Baley. Alice Tully Hall, 8PM, free (but you have to pick up tickets at the Juilliard Box Office). Nov. 20: Because of my Evening of Conversation with Sonic Youth down in DC, I'll be sadly missing Kremerata Baltica's all-Shostakovich concert at Carnegie, which includes the crushingly powerful Symphony No. 14. This will be great. Nov. 21: The first of two Bartok programs by the Orion Quartet, at the Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center. $72 for both concerts is a good deal. Bartok bangs.
This announcement will probably be of limited interest to the wider readership, but I am in the process of revising the list of fellow bloggers in the column to the right. I've wanted for a while to expand my links, but I have aesthetic objections to the sort of endless, featureless list that appears on some other pages. Therefore, I've created separate pages for "Music Blogs" and "All-Over Blogs," with descriptive phrases to be attached to each. So far, I've heard at least one quiet yelp of discontent from elsewhere in the bløgösphère. Rest assured that I will continue to refine the categories and descriptions. Please, dear Reader, patronize the fine sites that I've listed.
AC Douglas writes to ask for a phonetic rendering of the term "bløgösphère." I'm happy to oblige. It's pronounced VLOHNKH-yow-shpairrrrr (with a sharp trilled "r" at the end). A debt is owed of course to The Fredösphere.
The other day, taking a break from my forthcoming book Apocalypse Forever: How Overwrought Book Titles Are Destroying America, I went to seeRay. I strongly recommend it, insofar as my suspect taste in movies can be trusted. (I happen to love all those bloated blockbusters my film-crit counterparts tear their hair out over.) Yes,Ray does have conventional biopic elements, particularly in the latter pop-star-bottoming-out parts, but Jamie Foxx’s reincarnation of the late great Mr. Charles is everything it’s cracked up to be. Over and beyond the emotional power of the performance, it’s one of the most technically convincing portraits of a musician ever put on film. Foxx, as you wouldn’t necessarily guess from his turn in Booty Call, studied piano from the age of three and attended the International University at San Diego on a music scholarship. He has a natural authority at the piano that can’t be faked. So often you see movie actors flailing meaninglessly around a keyboard. Foxx bends not only with the rhythms but with the chords: you could tell with the sound turned off where the tonic is and where the dominant is. Even the way he stands around the instrument, acquiring social confidence as he reaches toward the keys, is true to life. I hope Foxx one day plays a classical pianist on film. After all the insulting caricatures of classical musicians that Hollywood has perpetrated over the years, it would be great to see a movie about music made with knowledge and love.
Today I listened to Jascha Horenstein's 1959 live recording of the Mahler Eighth, one of the most electrifying documents of a performance in existence. This being Royal Albert Hall, the audience is primed to explode, and right after the last blast of E-flat you hear what sounds like a simultaneous "Bravo!" from two or three people in different parts of the hall. The rest of the crowd starts screaming a split second later. I then put on a 1988 Proms recording of the Busoni Piano Concerto, with Mark Elder conducting the BBC Symphony and Peter Donohoe doing a hair-raisingly brilliant solo turn. Here a solitary soul manages to get in his "Bravo!" a beat before everyone else, perfectly punctuating the demented giddiness of the ending. At the Met and elsewhere, overzealous bravo artists can sometimes have a ruinous effect, but in Royal Albert Hall the diehards know their cues. I can't imagine these two favorite recordings without the anonymous yelps of joy; they are integral to the performance.
Mahler:
Busoni:
Update 2011: Inexplicably, these great recordings are both out of print.
I just finished Seth Mnookin's new book Hard News, about the scandals at the New York Times. It's sleek, gripping, and, in places, wildly entertaining. I wouldn't be surprised if someone wants to turn it into a movie. Seth has also unveiled SethMnookin.com, which archives some excellent music writing in and amongst the "serious" commentary. His 1999 article about addiction affected me as much as anything I've ever read.
Das Teachout addresses the syndrome of "critical paranoia" — the persecution complex that overtook B. H. Haggin when he found that other critics did not always share his view of musical reality. "Critics need constant reminding," Terry says, "that criticism is not an exact science—or, indeed, any kind of science at all." It is so. Every critic has heard numberless variations on the phrase, "I don't think you and I were at the same concert." It's an extreme but commonplace exaggeration that dramatizes the sort of communication breakdown that Terry describes. Rather than accept the possibility of simple human disagreement, a certain type of irate single-space-typing listener prefers to deny that the offending critic was there at all. Which, in fact, is perfectly true. No two listeners are ever at the same concert. Each inhabits his or her own richly differentiated world. Two equally informed listeners may come away with a disparate set of sensuous facts, even if they generally agree on whether the concert was a thrill or a spill. (Consensus is more likely in the case of CDs, where fewer subjective variables are in play.) Please note that I'm not espousing some facile sub-Derridean relativism. As a critic, I'm obliged to describe musical reality precisely as I hear it; I can't sway in the breeze of intermission chatter. All the same, I want to write a review that will be of use even to a listener who had an entirely different experience. This entails writing with a certain humble awareness that my experience is not universal, that my account will never be carved in granite. Criticism is at its best where confidence meets generosity. It's a tricky business: the slide into fake omniscience is deliciously quick. But I'm working on it.
Nov. 10:
Composer/flutist Alejandro Escuer presents a program of contemporary Mexican works at the Americas Society — part of the ambitious, citywide Mexico Now Festival.
Nov. 11: Karita Mattila sings Kaija Saariaho's Quatre Instants at the New York Philharmonic; Sakari Oramo conducts. I'll be in Boston for James Levine's solar-plexus double bill of Carter's Symphonia and Beethoven's Eroica.
Nov. 12: John Adams' second annual festival of
non-denominational contemporary music at Zankel Hall presents the
Paul Dresher Ensemble.
Nov. 13: Evan Ziporyn and his avant-gamelan ensemble Gamelan Galak Tika at Zankel, 4PM. At 7:30PM, Pomerium sings Ockeghem at Cooper Union — enough said.
And, self-recommendingly, Steve Reich plays the Met Museum. Nov. 14: Too much to choose from. Leon Botstein conducts rare works of Carl Czerny. Orchestra 2001 of Philadelphia plays George Crumb's American Songbook at Miller Theatre. The pure-toned Norwegian vocal trio Trio Medieval appears at Corpus Christi Church. And that's just the afternoon.
Having operated The Rest Is Noise for a scant sixth months, I can claim spurious status as an elder statesman and express pleasure that the bløgösphêre (classical bloggerdom) has grown rapidly since I started out. The Muse at Sunset is the work of Chapel Hill-based composer Forrest Covington, who just posted a delightful Chord of the Month: "Let added sixths, sevenths and ninths soothe the savage beast within." (But where's the added sixth?) Lisa Hirsch, a San Francisco-based connoisseur and jujitsu artist, has inaugurated the Iron Tongue of Midnight. Marcus Maroney is a Messiaen-venerating composer who recently posted some passionate thoughts on whether there can be a "gay" sound in music (yes, he says). And Adam Baer's brand-new Glass Shallot offers up a bracing mix of music, pop culture, and politics. Baer on Lang Lang: "If [he] ever gave up music, he
might easily become a successful politician. He’s all smiles, and these days he
sports slick threads and side-swept bangs. A born crowd-pleaser, he appears
doused in self-regard, content to keep other emotions off the stage."
Here, by unpopular demand, is an old review from the New York Times: a mildly brain-damaged report of a twenty-hour performance of Erik Satie's pioneering conceptual work Vexations. As I mention in the review, the original "complete" performance took place under John Cage's direction in 1963, at the Pocket Theater in New York. In the audience for part of the time was Andy Warhol, who would remember the experience when he began making radically uneventful minimalist films the following year. In the audience for part of the time was Andy Warhol, who
would remember the experience when he began making radically uneventful
minimalist films the following year. In the audience for part of the time was Andy Warhol, who
would remember the experience when he began making radically uneventful
minimalist films the following year. In the audience for part of the time was Andy Warhol, who
would remember the experience when he began making radically uneventful
minimalist films the following hi Mom year. In the audience for part of the time was Andy Warhol, who
would remember the experience when he began making radically uneventful
minimalist films the following [etc.]
It is hard to think of a thing more out of time than nobility. Looked at plainly it seems false and dead and ugly. To look at it at all makes us realize sharply that in our present, in the presence of our reality, the past looks false and is, therefore, dead and is, therefore, ugly; and we turn away from it as from something repulsive and particularly from the characteristic that it has a way of assuming: something that was noble in its day, grandeur that was, the rhetorical once. But as a wave is a force and not the water of which it is composed, which is never the same, so nobility is a force and not the manifestations of which it is composed, which are never the same. Possibly this description of it as a force will do more than anything else I can have said about it to reconcile you to it. It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.
— Wallace Stevens, "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"
If the soul of an audience could be photographed it would resemble a flight of scattering dipping birds, who belong neither to the air nor the water nor the earth. In theory the audience is a solid slab, provided with a single pair of enormous ears, which listen, and with a pair of hands, which clap. Actually it is that elusive scattering flight of winged creatures, darting around, and spending much of its time where it shouldn't, thinking now "how lovely!", now "my foot's gone to sleep," and passing in the beat of a bar from "there's Beethoven back in C minor again!" to "did I turn the gas off?" Beethoven does not flicker, Beethoven plays himself through. Applause. The piano is closed, the instruments re-enter their cases, the audience disperses more widely, the concert is over.
Over? But is the concert over? Here was the end, had anything an end, but experience proves that strange filaments cling to us after we have been with music, that the feet of the birds have, as it were, become entangled in snares of heaven, that while we swooped hither and thither so aimlessly we were gathering something, and carrying it away for future use. Schumann — or was it Brahms? — sings against the gas and obliterates the squalor, or, sinking deeper till he reaches the soundless, promotes that enlargement of the spirit which is our birthright. The concert is not over when the sweet voices die. It vibrates elsewhere. It discovers treasures which would have remained hidden, and they are the chief part of the human heritage.
— E. M. Forster, quoted in Robert Philip's Performing Music in the Age of Recording
Penelope and Maulina in 2008. A stronger, fishier America.
I have discovered the tricky part of this blogging business. The idea is to be more casual, more candid, more spontaneous. That's fine and dandy when you're feeling fine and dandy — when you get up in the morning ready to natter on about this and that, weigh in on whosit and whatsit, etcetera. But if you happen to wake up one fine day feeling deeply troubled, if a queasy fear stops you from doing much of anything, if on the train to Providence you find that the woman across the aisle is looking at you funny because tears are running down your cheeks, if you start to feel like an alien in your own country because of this hypocritical pseudo-religious detestation of the minority to which you belong (Jesus Christ, silent on the subject of homosexuality, said rather pointedly, Judge not that ye be not judged), then it gets a lot more difficult to natter on as you did before. Activity may be minimal here for a bit.
Between out-of-town missions and a touch of the flu, I'm not going to make all of the following shows, but I recommend them to the idle and the restless:
Today: Andres recital mentioned below. Nov. 4: For anyone in Philadelphia, the top-notch new-music band Eighth Blackbird is playing at the Kimmel Center. Nov. 5: Lutenist Paul O'Dette and the viol consort Parthenia brood upon John Dowland's masterpiece Lachrimae, at Corpus Christi Church, 529 W. 121st, 8PM. Nov. 6: Tania Leon portrait concert, Miller Theatre, 8PM. Nov. 7: Thurston Moore, Maryanne Amacher, and Jim O'Rourke, plus David First and the Note Killers, at Tonic.
Speaking of Moore and Sonic Youth, I will be interviewing their dissonant majesties at a New Yorker "College Tour" event on Nov. 20, at Georgetown University in my hometown of DC. Tickets are on sale now for $5-10. Details here. Sonic Youth piece here.
In "Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues," the second chapter of my new book Listen to This, 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'll focus on two such elemental patterns: a dance form called 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. It's a story both of radical transformation and of surprising continuity.
The chacona was a sexily swirling dance that appeared in South America at the end of the sixteenth century and quickly spread to Europe, becoming popular both in the elite courts and in the general population. One early written-down example comes from the Spanish musician Juan Arañés—"Un sarao de la chacona," or "A Chaconne Soirée" (see manuscript at the top of this page). Here it is performed by the singer Montserrat Figueras, the brilliant Catalan viol player Jordi Savalli (her husband), and the group Hespèrion XXI:
The chords you hear at the outset—with a bouncy stress on the second beat—are repeated over and over in the instrumental ensemble as the song goes on. Chacona lyrics were generally bawdy: these tell of all manner of nefarious goings-on at the wedding of Almadán, including an African heathen dancing with a Gypsy and a blind man poking at girls with a stick.
How do you get from this happily naughty music to Bach's tragic Chaconne? To follow the winding path, you have to first examine the history of musical lament. There are two classic bass lines of lament, one proceeding down the steps of the minor scale and the other down the steps of the chromatic scale (consecutive black and white notes on a piano):
The association of such descending, drooping figures with sadness is very old. You can find the four-note lament in much folk music—for example, the Romanian bocet:
Or laments from Hungary, Russia, and Kazakhstan:
You hear those same descending notes in Johannes Ockeghem's "Fors seulement," a chanson by a master composer of the Renaissance. "Save only for the expectation of death / No hope dwells in my weary heart":
When a person cries, he or she generally makes a noise that slides downward and then leaps to an even higher pitch to begin the slide again. Not surprisingly, something similar happens in musical laments around the world. Those stepwise falling figures suggest not only the sounds that we emit when we are in distress but also the sympathetic drooping of our faces and shoulders. In a broader sense, it implies a spiritual descent, even a voyage to the underworld. At the same time, laments help to guide us out of the labyrinth of despair. Like Aristotelean tragedy, they allow for a purgation of pity and fear: through the repetitive ritual of mourning, we tame the edges of emotion, give shape to inner chaos.
When, in the early seventeenth century, the great Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi—the creator of Orfeo, the first masterpiece of opera—wrote a Lamento della ninfa, or Lament of the Nymph, he did something exceedingly clever. He combined the by now iconic figure of lament with the steady, hypnotically repeating bass line that was associated with the chacona and other popular dances. He'd already written his own popular chaconne, titled "Zefiro torna":
Introducing such repetition into Lamento della Ninfa, Monteverdi created an aria that was peculiarly sensuous in its sadness, pulling you into its pleasurable sphere of melancholy:
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.
Francesco Cavalli, one of Monteverdi's most important disciplines in seventeenth-century Venice, directly copied the master in an aria from his opera Gli amori d'Apollo e di Dafne. Here's a bit of the score, with the four-note bass line paired with the heading Lamento:
The god Apollo is singing of his misery over the loss of Daphne, who has been turned into a laurel tree:
Mario Zeffiri, tenor, with Alberto Zedda conducting the Galician Youth Symphony Orchestra; Naxos 8660187.
In his next opera, Didone, Cavalli writes several laments for the women of Troy—Hecuba and Cassandra—and, of course, for Queen Dido, abandoned by Aeneas. He again devises a lamenting aria with a chaconne-like bass line, but this time he adopts the chromatic version. It's the second of the two examples I played badly on the piano above:
Now here is Hecuba's lament from Didone, a great cry of rage at the destruction of Troy, with the chromatic bass line snaking underneath:
Marie-Nicole Lemieux, contralto, with Emmanuelle Haïm leading Le Concert d'Astrée; Virgin Classics 19044.
Henry Purcell, at the end of the seventeenth century, used the same device in his own telling of Dido's sad tale. Now it underpins her lament at the end of the opera—"When I am laid in earth," one of the most famous arias in operatic history. The singer here is the great Lorraine Hunt Lieberson:
Meanwhile, the chacona, or the chaconne as it came to be known, had undergone a surprising development. Having risen from lowly beginnings, it achieved 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":
Ballet Music for the Sun King: Kevin Mallon conducting the Arcadia Baroque Ensemble; Naxos 8554003.
In Baroque 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:
Finally, Bach, in his Ciaccona for solo violin, transforms the dance into an extended soliloquy of tragic character. It sounds entirely unsuitable for a wild wedding, yet the triple rhythm of the original dance is implicit throughout, as is the pattern of a repeating chord progression. At 1:44, you can hear the telltale chromatic descent, showing that the lament and chaconne traditions have been fused together:
From Gidon Kremer's recording of Bach's Sonatas and Partitas; ECM 506502.
Here the great Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia plays the Ciaccona on the guitar, allowing us to hear, perhaps, a bit of the "Spanish" flavor in Bach's music:
In the "Crucifixus" of the B-Minor Mass (a portion of the manuscript is above), Bach seized on the lament as it had been practiced by Cavalli and Purcell. Again a chromatic figure unwinds over and over in the bass while the chorus sings of Christ's suffering on the cross:
Philippe Herreweghe conducting the chorus and orchestra of the Collegium Vocale Gent; Harmonia Mundi 5901614.15.
Chaconne and lament faded away during the Romantic nineteenth century, when repetition gave way to constant variation and musical expansion. Yet Beethoven, the original Romantic liberator, was probably thinking of Bach when he introduced a repeating chromatic bass into the coda of the first movement of his Ninth Symphony, where a hero seems to be borne to his grave:
Osmo Vänskä conducting the Minnesota Orchestra; BIS 1616.
Here's the climactic lamenting passage of the final movement of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony, with four-note and chromatic laments overlapping:
Valery Gergiev conducting the Kirov Orchestra; Philips 456580.
The power of these elemental forms persists into classical music of the twentieth century, even as the familiar signposts of classical harmony disappear. The great twentieth-century composer György Ligeti, who heard folk laments such as the "bocet" as a child, ended his Horn Trio with a furiously expressive movement entitled Lamento:
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano, Marie-Luise Neunecker, French horn, Saschko Gawriloff, violin; Sony Classical 62309.
But it's really in jazz, blues, and rock 'n' roll where the lamento bass has a surprising revival. In an early Delta Blues song like Willie Brown's "Future Blues," a familiar repeating figure is heard:
See also Skip James's "Devil Got My Woman" and "I'm So Glad":
Or Robert Johnson's "Walkin' Blues":
This isn't the same, of course, as the Cavalli, Purcell, and Bach examples above, where a descending chromatic line repeats in the bass. But exactly that device suddenly became à la mode in pop music of the 1960s, for reasons that are difficult to pin down but that may have to do with the revival of interest both in folk ballads and in Baroque music. Here's a montage "Chim Chim Cher-ee" (from Mary Poppins), the Beatles' "Michelle," the Eagles' "Hotel California," and Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man," with more or less the same bass line appearing in each:
Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused" is a more distant extension of the old idea. The song is anchored in a descending bass line of the "lamento" type, which later undergoes ostentatious transformations, sometimes shimmering on Page’s bowed guitar and sometimes shrieking in the high falsetto zone of Robert Plant’s voice. This is from an epic live performance at the LA Forum in 1972:
Just as the dance abides in Bach’s chaconne, the lament lingers in the rock arena. "Dazed and Confused" and other Baroque-tinged rock songs demonstrate how the same deep musical structures keep materializing across the centuries. Later in Listen to This, I talk about Bob Dylan's "Simple Twist of Fate," where the classic downward-trudging bass reappears, as in Dido's Lament. In both pieces, as it happens, the words keep stressing the inscrutable destiny that drives human affairs ("forgot about a simple twist of fate ... but ah! forget my fate"). This bass line is a fate from which we cannot escape.
I'm not sure what to make of the announcement that Peter Gelb, head of the Sony Classical label, will be the next general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. I was expecting the house to go in a more safe, predictable direction and hire Placido Domingo. That they picked Gelb is an encouraging sign that they're thinking outside the parterre box. On the other hand, Gelb's record as a label head has been rather mixed. He is responsible, among other things, for James Horner's godawful Titanic soundtrack. I have nothing against movie soundtracks — they should all be put on CD for fans to enjoy or discard — but I do have a thing against promoting Hollywood hackwork as a leap forward in contemporary composition. There is, note, a long tradition of profit-shifting at Columbia / Sony — using blockbuster pop records to pay for more abstruse classical fare. Goddard Lieberson used the My Fair Lady soundtrack (a wonderful thing in itself) to underwrite the complete Stravinsky and Webern. Bob Hurwitz and Manfred Eicher have done something of the same at Nonesuch and ECM. But two big differences between, say, Nonesuch and Sony: 1) their "pop" releases are superior; 2) the classical releases are usually superior, too. (Footnote: Allan Kozinn, of the Times, once made an inspired analogy between Lieberson's strategy and Wotan's, in the Ring — building Valhalla with other people's money.)
Still, I'm cautiously optimistic. Greg Sandow testifies that Gelb is an energetic, curious man. (I don't know him.) He obviously has a surer understanding of the infinitely changeable, unpredictable twenty-first-century music market than Joe Volpe and James Levine ever did — or Placido Domingo, for all his big-media celebrity, ever would have. Gelb already has a relationship with Julie Taymor, whose Magic Flute was hailed almost everywhere but at the Times. With solid artistic administration under him, with canny choices in commissioning and recent repertory (maybe we'll finally get to see some John Adams at the Met), Gelb should be fine. If he starts talking about a James Horner opera, though, we're up the creek.
