Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Let's play pfootball!

I'm flattered to find that Seattle blogger-singer Peter Garbes has named his fantasy football team the Hans Pfitzner Blues Explosion, in honor of an old post on this site. The Fredösphere is the great originator.

Merkel's Wagner

It appears that Angela Merkel might become the next Chancellor of Germany. Which would mean, among other things, that Germany would once again be run by an enthusiastic and knowledgeable Wagner-lover. Before you see anything sinister or regressive in that potentiality, though, you should read some comments that Merkel made in July of this year, in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The article ran to nearly five thousand words, and it was devoted entirely to the subject of Wagner. An excerpt, roughly and hastily translated:

F.A.Z.: In the third act of Parsifal, God himself speaks. Or so said Romain Rolland. As a Protestant minister’s daughter, what did you make of the voodoo-magic which Christoph Schlingensief unleashed last year in Bayreuth?

Merkel: After Schlingensief’s Parsifal in Bayreuth, I attended Lehnhoff’s Parsifal in Baden-Baden. I confess I had a better time there. On the day of the Bayreuth opening, I resolved to be an open listener. I did not want to batten down the hatches; I wanted to give the new a chance. But this production made excessive demands on me. Herr Schlingensief had many very interesting ideas, but I found that the piece now radiated too many stimuli, a multilayeredness of perceptions, which had a distracting character. The music moved into the background, which led some singers to have the impression that they were no longer at the center of things. It is also interesting to learn from younger people that they had a better time dealing with this immense quantity of stimuli. I probably should admit to the fact that I belong to the over-fifty crowd, and that younger people obviously have an easier time navigating this flood of stimuli around us. I belong among those who are comfortable with silence. For example, I regard Lufthansa’s innovation of playing disembarkation music as no improvement on my quality of life.

F.A.Z.: Kundry experiences redemption through annihilation. It is well known that she is not the only figure in Wagner’s oeuvre in whom traces of anti-Semitism have been discovered. On the other side we know about Hitler’s Götterdämmerung fantasies in the Führer bunker. As a Wagner-lover today, can you simply set this aside this dimension of the work?

Merkel: To set aside is to suppress. One cannot dismiss the concatenation of Wagner with National Socialism, because it was, unfortunately, a historical reality. That is the way it is. Wagner’s work must be interpreted anew and seen anew for today's time — as has been tried in various ways since the end of National Socialism. For me, the Kundry figure is a rather interesting female character. Nevertheless, we should be at all times conscious of where anti-Semitic tendencies might lie. Once you put it out in the open, you banish the danger that such a connotation could remain implicit in interpretations which are no longer acceptable [or something like that]. The total reduction of Wagner’s music to the ideological dimension, which happened in the National Socialist period, later led many people to a total rejection of Wagner. That reduction was an abuse, which covered up the unbelievable many-sidedness of the music, its textual and motivic connections, its progressive tendencies, and it still blocks the entrance to Wagner today. As a result, the modernity of Wagner’s music is, alas, completely overlooked. Many twentieth-century composers partook of Wagner’s compositional technique. I urge that the abuse of Wagner be looked at an open and critical fashion, so that more people can gain access to this great musician. And it’s good to see that exactly this is already happening.

Trent Lott's sonata

There is now a composition entitled Trent Lott's Porch, courtesy of M. Keiser. It uses the first of the two Katrina hexachords.

All things shine

Having spent five days locked in a hotel room writing, I escaped for a few hours and drove up Highway 1 to the paradise of Point Reyes. Next week, a New Yorker column on new CDs, plus notes on many more recent recordings on the blog.

Dr. Gene Scott

The admirably weird Dr. Gene Scott is still on TV here in San Francisco, despite the fact that he died last February. During the dismal post-college year that I lived in Berkeley (my fault, not Berkeley's), I fell into the habit of watching Dr. Scott in the middle of the night, trying to grasp what on earth he was driving at. He was a maverick televangelist with a Captain Ahab beard who held forth in an inexplicably mesmerizing Idaho baritone on a bizarre variety of topics, from the minutiae of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin versions of the Bible (he was evidently quite learned, and earned the "Dr.") to the secrets of the Pyramids. Sometimes he would disappear from the screen for long stretches, to be replaced by footage of racehorses or polka dancers. One evening, as he was reading aloud from the occult pop history Holy Blood, Holy Grail. I decided to make a tape composition out of his recitation of facts concerning the Spear of Destiny, and combined it with a loop of the final notes of Salome. The result was judged uniquely disturbing by the two people who heard it. Dr. Scott seemed free of the hard-heartedness that drives other pseudo-Christians on TV; he avoided hot-button social issues, although he did once advise George Bush Sr. to nuke Iraq. There were questions about the financial structure of his church, which, no doubt, the IRS is still busy sorting out. If he did engage in chicanery, he couldn't really be accused of being a hypocrite, since his religious system was so murky to begin with. He was a divine American kook of a sort they don't manufacture anymore.

No argument there

Peggy Noonan: "...it's a bad sign.... No president should be surrounded by dry heavers."

Miau

Justin Davidson: "The Metropolitan Opera commissions new works with the cautiousness of a cat on the edge of a bathtub."

One Eagle Hill

I essentially haven't moved from this hotel room in three days, except to buy new socks and meet a couple of people. I'm trying to write a very long article in a very short span of time. As you can see, I have been working on the world's smallest desk. I am quite proud of the improvisation with the ironing board. The red book on the desk is Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which might give you some clue as to what I'm doing here. (No, not that, Homeland Security!) Sade's Lovers Rock is playing — a record that gets better with time.

Cupcake wars

There is an entertaining but erroneous article about cupcakes in New York magazine. The author expends much ink detailing a feud between the Magnolia and Buttercup bakeries, failing to acknowledge that Billy's is better than either.

New blogs

Please welcome Marc Geelhoed, who promises to deliver sharp coverage of the music scene in Chicago, and Classical Domain, which aims for a comprehensive listing of classical events in New York City. (More new music, bitte, but this is a great resource that I'll be checking every day.) And note two singer blogs, which are new at least to me: Histoires de Moi and the Canadienne. In my last column for The New Yorker, I touted Jeremy Denk's site; I'd have done the same for Mostly Mozart breakout star Erin Wall (aka the Canadienne) if I'd known she was in the game. Blogging seems to be an excellent outlet for singers on the road: living in hotels can be lonely. Here I am, watching Adamsian tankers rise from San Francisco Bay.

Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound
But the dark italics it could not propound.

— Wallace Stevens

Trent Lott's porch

The tragically destroyed neo-segregationist verandah where President Bush is "looking forward to sitting" (hopefully as a premature retiree) now has its own website.

JD Considine has analyzed the chord that Bush is playing in the famous guitar picture, taken at the height of the Katrina disaster. It seems to be a strongly dissonant sonority consisting of the notes G, G#, A, B, C, and D. Considine speculates that Bush was trying to play a G-major chord and messed up, but I suspect that our Commander-in-Chief, mindful of the inherent tendency of the musical material, has followed Schoenberg over the threshold of atonality. Here he plays the pitch-class set named 6-Z11 in the Allen Forte system — a hauntingly ambiguous chord that brushes against the ghost of a now defunct tonality even as it stares ahead remorselessly into the chromatic future. I am looking forward to the rigorously atonal works that Bush will have time to write on Trent Lott's porch.

Update: Paul Mitchinson has cast doubt on Considine's description of the Katrina dissonance. He says it's a different collection of discordant tones, namely B, C#, E, F, G, G#. Now, I know less than nuttin' about gee-tar-playin', so I will let these two gentlemen duke it out amongst themselves. But I am excited by the news that Bush might be playing pc set 6-Z49 rather than 6-Z11. He thereby shows awareness of the possibilities of octatonicism as the basis for a coherent atonal language.

Adès Violin Concerto

I've been following the music of Thomas Adès since I first encountered it at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1995. His latest work is a Violin Concerto subtitled Concentric Paths, which had its first performance in Berlin on Sept. 4 and its second at the Proms on Sept. 6. BBC 3's "listen again" feature allows you to hear the work until Sept. 13. Blogger Fin Keegan has linked to the relevant portion of the broadcast, so you don't have to sit through Beethoven's Consecration of the House Overture and Stravinsky's Pulcinella. I shan't say too much after only two hearings, but the work seems an imposing addition to the Adès catalogue. It signals a new austerity, if not simplicity, from this formerly devil-may-care composer: phantoms of Shostakovich, particularly the later, haggard Shostakovich, haunt the scene, though none of that composer's characteristic tricks appear. The slow movement is a landscape of awesome breadth.

Florence Bernstein

I am very sad to learn of the passing of Florence Bernstein, the doyenne of PR at the New York Philharmonic — dispenser of tickets, keeper of secrets, master of knowing smiles.

For Charley Patton

About four years ago I wrote that Beethoven is the only composer who makes sense when the world becomes apocalyptic. I forgot Bob Dylan. Carl Wilson (condolences, Carl) has quoted some lines from Dylan's last album, the one released on September 11th, 2001, and I'll quote them too:

High water rising, six inches above my head
Coffins dropping in the street
Like balloons made out of lead
Water pouring into Vicksburg
Don't know what I'm going to do
"Don't reach out for me," she said
"Can't you see I'm drowning too?"

The trouble with the song, though, is that it's using disaster as a metaphor for free-floating anomie. We are in a moment where metaphor breaks down and reality overpowers the imagination. I have trouble knowing how to write at times like this.

Dark September

Terry Teachout and Our Girl in Chicago have broken away from the arts beat to compile links relating to Hurricane Katrina. The breaking-news site and readers' blog at the New Orleans Times-Picayune are heartbreaking beyond belief. No victims count more than any others, but two stories haunt me: this one, about two teen-aged brothers who reached out to their teacher, and this one, about the disappearance of "Fats" Domino. (Update: He's been found.) Meanwhile, George W. Bush is playing guitar, Condoleeza Rice is buying thousand-dollar shoes, and FEMA is being run by the former lawyer of the International Arabian Horse Association (where he was forced to resign!). Here are links to the United Negro College Fund and the American Red Cross, although the Department of Homeland Security is not allowing the Red Cross into New Orleans. They're taking care of everything beautifully on their own.

"We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast, but the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history. I am personally asking our bipartisan congressional delegation here in Louisiana to immediately begin congressional hearings to find out just what happened here. Why did it happen? Who needs to be fired? And believe me, they need to be fired right away, because we still have weeks to go in this tragedy. We have months to go.  We have years to go. And whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chain-sawed off and we've got to start with some new leadership. It's not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now....

"The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, "Are you coming, son?  Is somebody coming?" And he said, "Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you.  Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday.  Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday." And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night...."

— Aaron Broussard, President of Jefferson Parish, New Orleans

"Out of the rubbles [sic] of Trent Lott's house — he's lost his entire house — there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."

— George W. Bush, President of the United States

Elsewhere

Kyle Gann has announced Women Composers' Month on Postclassic Radio. I'm listening now to Maggie Payne's hauntingly folkish Aeolian Confluence. Composer Corey Dargel has started up a funny-informative new podcast called Composers and the People Who Love Them (with a team of satirical experts in the Gerard Hoffnung / Glenn Gould tradition). The inaugural episode features Eve Beglarian. Bernard Sherman has written an excellent wrap-up of the Lionel Sawkins controversy for Andante. The same site has an essay by ethnomusicologist Marc Perlman, who points out that copyrighting a Baroque motet is not unlike copyrighting a folk song. Once a work has passed into the public domain, it should stay there, or the concept of copyright devolves into nonsense. See, for example, the Berlin Sing-Akadamie's so far successful attempt to claim ownership of Vivaldi's opera Motezuma on the grounds that the score was discovered in the Sing-Akademie's archives. I also recommend this properly angry post by Greg Sandow on pop-culture ignorance in the classical world. It never ceases to amaze me that classical musicians complain about how mainstream culture neglects them, and, in the next breath, display total cluelessness about that culture.

Guest blogger: Maulina

While I'm on the road this week, Maulina has generously offered to take over the reins. Take it away, Maulina!

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Overheard (classical division)

Two acquaintances run into each other on the street:

Man #1: What's on your iPod?
Man #2: Uh, Dvorak.
Man #1: Wow!

Shining II

A while ago I complained that Piano Man, a nameless virtuoso mental patient, was receiving widespread media coverage principally because the media like to depict classical musicians as freaks. Now it turns out that Piano Man may not be much of a pianist: "Other reports have surfaced that the patient did not, in fact, give a virtuoso piano performance, but, the Mirror said, tapped at one note repeatedly. The hospital disputes this claim." Har. For more on deviant pianists, visit Adam Baer.

Update: John Burke proposes a solution to the mystery — Piano Man is in fact a piano tuner.