Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

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.

Never have I turned since then

I liked Tony Tommasini's piece about Rufus Wainwright in the Times. The same paper a few weeks ago had some snide remarks about the singer's plans to appear at an "Opera For All" event at New York City (it's happening tonight, but I'm on the road). You got the impression that City Opera had hired some unlettered pop urchin to make itself look young and hip. As Tony's piece makes clear, Wainwright is a keen opera fan who probably knows more about the art than many people on the City Opera board. Years ago, when I still ventured out into what might be called bohemian café society, I met the balladeer in a bar in the East Village. When I told him I wrote about classical music, he launched into a paean to Richard Strauss' Die Ägyptische Helena. If he's new to you, listen to his dazzling song "Art Teacher." He's being interviewed by Andy Young at the New Yorker Festival on Sept. 24, though the event is sold out.

Staying on the subject of New York's brainy pop luminaries, I was elated to see that Antony & The Johnsons, whose record I Am a Bird Now is one of the best releases of this or any year, won the big-deal Mercury Prize in Britain, beating out the rhyme-biting vampires of Coldplay. If you have iTunes, go to the store and listen to "Hope There's Someone." I challenge you to listen to it only once. In my mind, it plays over images of this terrible, irrevocable week in American history.

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!