Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Cameo

I can't resist linking to this astounding obituary for harpist Sidonie Goosens, dead at the age of one hundred five. Elgar, she recalled, was "an absolute darling." Courtesy of Leo Carey.

Rodelindamania

I'll save my comments on the Met's sumptuously produced and grandly sung Rodelinda for an upcoming column. In the meantime, read overnight reviews by Hilli Heihmenn at Trill and by Sieglinde's Diaries, who are blogging the Met with vigor.

Neck and neck

I believe I've linked more often to AC Douglas' site than to any other, Teachout possibly excepted. He has the rare gift of being vastly fun to read even when he is completely wrong. We have disagreed before on the question of classical music's place in the firmament. With a carrot in the form of generous praise offered before the stick, he proposes to disagree again. I respectfully decline; I am not interested in writing about music as a horse race with Beethoven or Charlie Parker out in front. I ask this, though: if the ideal critic writes about classical music and nothing but, where would you put G. B. Shaw? E. T. A. Hoffmann? Wagner? The writer who can encompass more than one realm is the one whose words will resonate longest. The best piece of music criticism I've read in a decade was Alan Hollinghurst's TLS review of the Bayreuth Ring in 2000. Why? Because he didn't write like a parochial expert; he wrote like the major novelist he is. In an ideal world, poets, presidents, painters, and priests would talk about music, and there would be no critics. We're just filling the void.

Jack the Ripper and Teddy Bear

No one seems to have had a go at my little quiz question below. I was quoting from Karl Kraus' 1905 lecture about the plays of Frank Wedekind: “The great retaliation has begun, the revenge of a man’s world which has the audacity to punish its own guilt.” Alban Berg was in the audience for Kraus' lecture and for the ensuing performance of Pandora's Box, in which the playwright himself played Jack the Ripper. The seed of Lulu, possibly the greatest and certainly the darkest opera of the twentieth century, was planted. There was a heart-tugging romantic side to the evening: Wedekind ended up marrying the actress Tilly Newes, whose character he had slaughtered onstage. Awww.

Above is the seating chart for the 1905 performance, with Berg's place circled. (Courtesy of George Perle's Lulu book.) He was next to his brother Hermann, who, I recently discovered in a great Google moment, co-invented the Teddy Bear. In 1903 Hermann bought 3000 unsold Steiff bears in Leipzig and put them on sale at Wanamaker's in New York, where they became a sensation. At one point Alban was going to go to America to join his brother's firm. It's difficult to imagine what might have ensued. Perhaps Gershwin would have had a rival.

Karl Kraus was of course the inventor of blogging.

Logrolling in our time

I received an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award yesterday for my article "Ghost Sonata," and I was honored to be in the company of many writers I admire: jazz critic Gary Giddins, whose imposing new collection of reviews I'll talk about in a separate post; Dean Robert Christgau; Kyle Gann, who won an award for his internet radio station PostClassic; Michael Beckerman, whose New Worlds of Dvorak may be the best book yet about the composer; Denise Von Glahn, whose book The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape studies neglected links between geography and music; Joseph Dalton, formerly the pathbreaking head of CRI Records, now a critic in Albany; and Henry Fogel, head of the American Symphony Orchestra League. It was great to see Michael Tilson Thomas' Keeping Score project recognized. The highlight of the evening, though, came when one of the presenters read aloud from James Pegolotti's highly entertaining biography of the critic, composer, and radio personality Deems Taylor, who gave his name to the awards. In 1923 Taylor found himself in the awkward position of reviewing a concert at which one of his own works was played, and his solution reveals why he won a place among the wits of the Algonquin Round Table:

The novelty of the evening was another of the American works that Henry Hadley is introducing this month, a symphonic poem, "The Siren Song," by Deems Taylor. The work was written in 1912. As George Bernard Shaw points out in the preface to "The Irrational Knot," human beings are entirely renewed every seven years, so that an author may properly treat a twenty-year-old novel of his own as the work of a stranger. Such being the case, perhaps a reviewer may be similarly distant toward his own eleven-year-old symphonic poem. So far as we are concerned, "The Siren Song" is virtually a posthumous work, written by a young man. We thought it a promising work with a certain freshness of feeling and a disarming simplicity of utterance that partly atoned for its lack of well-defined individuality. On the whole, "Siren Song" interested us. We should like to hear more works by the same composer.

Little Goebbels in Alabama

From the Birmingham News, via Andrew Sullivan:

An Alabama lawmaker who sought to ban gay marriages now wants to ban novels with gay characters from public libraries, including university libraries. A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda." "Our culture, how we know it today, is under attack from every angle," Allen said in a press conference Tuesday. Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed. "I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," he said.

It should be quite a mass grave: Proust, Thomas Mann, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Isherwood, André Gide, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, William S. Burroughs, Jean Genet, Gore Vidal, Mary Renault, Marguerite Yourcenar, and a hundred others, to make a start.

Apex 04

Notational music:

1. Handel Arias, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson (Avie)
2. Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro, René Jacobs conducting (Harmonia Mundi)
3. Schubert, Sonata in B-flat, Leon Fleisher (Vanguard)
4. Popov, First Symphony, Leon Botstein and the London Symphony (Telarc)
5. Vivaldi, Concertos for the Emperor, Andrew Manze and the English Concert (Harmonia Mundi)
6. Phil Kline, Zippo Songs and Rumsfeld Songs (Cantaloupe)*
7. Daniel S. Godfrey, String Quartets, Cassatt Quartet (Koch)
8. Bach, Beethoven & Webern, Piotr Anderszewski (Virgin)
9. Rachel Barton Pine, Solo Baroque (Cedille)
10. Rachmaninov Concertos, Stephen Hough and the Dallas Symphony (Hyperion)

Also hott: Monteverdi, Orfeo, Emmanuelle Haïm conducting (Virgin); Ysaÿe Solo Sonatas, Thomas Zehetmair (ECM); Ludwig Senfl, Im Maien, Charles Daniels and Fretwork (Harmonia Mundi); Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier Book I, Till Fellner (ECM); John Adams, On the Transmigration of Souls (Nonesuch); Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Christian Thielemann conducting (DG); Anna Netrebko, Sempre libera (DG); Alvin Curran, Lost Marbles (Tzadik); Roland Dahinden, Silberen (Mode); Eighth Blackbird, Beginnings (Cedille)

More about some of these here and here.

Semi- or non-notational music:

1. Björk, Medúlla (Elektra)
2. Scissor Sisters, Scissor Sisters (Universal)
3. Prince, Musicology (Sony)
4. Kanye West, College Dropout (Roc-A-Fella)
5. Melonie Cannon, Melonie Cannon (Skaggs Family)
6. Rokia Traoré, Bowmboï (Nonesuch)
7. Sonic Youth, Sonic Nurse (Geffen)
8. Jill Scott, Beautifully Human, Vol. 2 (Sony)
9. The Walkmen, Bows & Arrows (Record Collection)
10. Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1 (Simon & Schuster)**

Singles: Kanye West, “Jesus Walks”; Björk, “Who Is It”; Prince, “A Million Days”; The Walkmen, “The Rat”; Scissor Sisters, “Laura”; Jill Scott, “Family Reunion”; Melonie Cannon, “Tennessee Roads”; Ghostface Killah, “Tush”; Múm, “Weeping Rock, Rock”; Snoop Dogg, "Drop It Like It's Hot"; Kelis, "Trick Me"; Fiona Apple, "Extraordinary Machine"; Caetano Veloso, "So In Love"; Brad Mehldau, "Someone To Watch Over Me"

*actually semi-notational
**non-musical notation that resonates musically

Jay Greenberg

Interesting discussion at AC Douglas, Steve Hicken, and Marcus Maroney of the Juilliard composing prodigy Jay Greenberg, who was interviewed on 60 Minutes this Sunday (I didn't see the show). I wrote briefly about Jay in my student composers column earlier this year. It's difficult to evaluate someone so young, and I deliberately kept my comments to a minimum in order not to overhype an extraordinary young man who has yet to make the hazardous transition to maturity. I hope Jay is able to keep an even keel through the storm of publicity that 60 Minutes will bring. The social and cultural pressures for a modern American classical prodigy are so unlike those faced by Mozart that no comparison is possible. Then, the market demanded such a talent; now, the market is hostile. As I once wrote in the Times, if Mozart were alive today, he'd be dead. How about a TV profile of a grown-up composer — say, Steve Reich on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 2006, highlighting his mammoth influence on every form of contemporary music?

Snap review: Andromeda

The Venice Baroque Orchestra's presentation of Andromeda liberata, by Vivaldi and others, was the first early-music event I'd heard at Zankel Hall, and, as others have hinted, Baroque bands take to the space like cats to leftover Thanksgiving turkey. You don't have that feeling of listening through the wrong end of the telescope: the music is full, present, vibrant. For many reasons, this was a very good night. Only the time-stopping aria "Sovvente il sole" sounds like top-drawer Vivaldi, but it's a beautifully crafted score that actually builds romantic suspense as Andromeda and Perseus work through their relationship issues. Andrea Marcon's orchestra was, as expected, a potent mix of precision and swing. Simone Kermes, who sang Andromeda, is an unusual and powerful talent — a lyric soprano with an edgy, forceful way of shaping a phrase and an obvious urge to make the scenery nervous, if not to chew it outright. Ruth Rosique stepped in at the last moment as Cassiope and showed a gleaming, pure voice. Marijana Mijanovic, Enrico Onofri, and Max Cencic were also strong. It was great to hear the audience getting involved in the show as it went on. Early on, some righteous ignoramus actually shushed his neighbors after an aria, but by the end people were cheering after every number. Overall, the evening passed what my friend Jason Royal calls the Zankel Subway Rumble test: I only noticed the N / R train once. There's an excellent DG recording to match.

Boston update

I recently reported that James Levine, newly ensconced at the Boston Symphony, seemed to be the object of widespread adulation in Beantown, despite (or even because) his heavy investment in new-music programming. Alas, there are now scattered signs of unease, although so far the contemporary programming doesn’t seem to be the cause of the trouble. Instead, oddly enough, Levine is drawing criticism from audiences because of his rehearsal style. From the beginning of its history, the BSO has regularly opened rehearsals to the public. As Richard Dyer recently wrote in the Boston Globe, conductors have traditionally made these open rehearsals little more than run-throughs — essentially, extra performances for a reduced fee. Levine, bless his stubborn soul, is actually rehearsing during the Open Rehearsal. Writes Jean Natick to the editor of the Globe: “The Boston Symphony Orchestra open rehearsal on Nov. 11 conducted by James Levine was a disaster. My friends and I understand that Levine is a perfectionist, but I do not understand why there had to be such an extraordinarily large number of interruptions… If this type of rehearsing is to be the norm, we suggest that there be no admission charge or no audience. It would have been appropriate for Levine to acknowledge the audience at least once.”

This attitude is perplexing. Does Ms. Natick want a great orchestra, or merely a mediocre one? Great orchestras are made in rehearsal. Perhaps the gripping intensity of the Eroica that night was owed to the extra burst of rehearsal in the afternoon. Plus, isn’t it interesting to hear how a one-in-a-million musician like Levine rehearses? In defense of Ms. Natick, the conductor’s comments on the podium are apparently all but inaudible, so that to the audience it does sound like nothing more than stopping and starting. Dyer suggests that Levine be given a small microphone so his comments can be heard. And, yes, a little hello or goodbye to the onlookers wouldn’t hurt.

Where's Pablo?

Present somewhere in this throng are Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Picasso, Diaghilev, Cocteau, Stravinsky, Satie, Milhaud, Man Ray, Miró, Duchamp, Ford Madox Ford, Aaron Copland, the Prince of Monaco, and the Princesse de Polignac.

The image comes from the richly stocked American Mavericks website, allied to the public-radio series of the same title. I've looked at this site many times, but I only just discovered that it has some spellbinding film clips relating to the avant-garde showman George Antheil, who began his career as one of the chief Futurist noisemakers of twenties Paris and ended it as a Hollywood film scorer, love-advice columnist, and amateur torpedo inventor. The page linked here contains an interview with Paul Lehrman, who's restored the film that Fernand Léger made to accompany Antheil's Ballet mécanique, scored for sixteen player pianos, masses of percussion, and airplane propellers. The real find, something I'd been hoping to see for years, is an excerpt from Marcel L'Herbier's 1924 film L'Inhumaine, which tells of a Faustian scientist who starts raising people from the dead in an effort to win the favor of a famous opera singer. Having not seen the entire film, I can't elucidate the plot further, but what's apparently happening in this scene is that a crowd is demonstrating for and against the imperious diva (Georgette Leblanc). Where does Antheil come in? Some of the crowd shots were actually filmed during his Paris debut, on Oct. 4, 1923, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.

As Lehrman tells it — repeating the story given in Antheil's wildly entertaining and sometimes wildly inaccurate autobiography Bad Boy of Music — L'Herbier showed up with his cameras at the concert, anticipating that a photogenic riot would occur. In fact, the researches of ballet historian Lynn Garafola suggest that the whole thing was a setup. An advance piece in Figaro announced that the concert would be filmed and that a riot was not only expected but desired. Still, it's fun to see a high-class Parisian audience looking and acting like the crowd that went nuts during the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring ten years before — yes, in the same space. I've tried and failed to glimpse the mesdames and messieurs named above; perhaps readers with high-tech equipment will have better luck.

On the same theme, see my old post about Edgard Varèse's appearance in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Agenda 11/30-12/5

A good week for the music in NYC:

Nov. 29: Andromeda liberata, a concert-length serenata that may or may not be the work of Vivaldi, arrives at Zankel on the heels of a "wildly controversial" DG recording. Whoever wrote it (OK, I did), the Venice Baroque Orchestra under Andrea Marcon are destined to make a glorious noise.
Nov. 30: The composers of Bang on a Can, whose work seems to deepen with the passing years, collaborate with electronic artist DJ Spooky and director François Girard on the theater piece Lost Objects. It has its gala premiere tonight at BAM, with performances to follow Dec. 2-4. Iron your black stretch T.
Dec. 1: Till Fellner, the deft young Austrian pianist whose Well-Tempered Clavier on ECM was almost too pretty, rolls into Zankel with Liszt, Beethoven, Haydn, and the Bach.
Dec. 2: Rodelinda at the Met. La Fleming, La Daniels, Mehta, Blythe, Relyea, the works. Stephen Wadsworth, who directed a smokin' Xerxes at City Opera with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson a few years back, will try to repeat the Handel magic. Also tonight: David Robertson conducts the NY Philharmonic in Bartok's Second Violin Concerto (with Christian Tetzlaff),  Steve Reich's Triple Quartet, and some crazy thing by Beethoven.
Dec. 3: The haughty hotties at Trrill are recommending the regal young Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman (pictured above), who sings tonight at Weill Hall a deliriously tasteful program of Ravel's Cinq mélodies populaires grecques, Britten's Auden cycle On This Island, Montsalvatge's Canciones negras, songs of Copland and Bolcom, and, not to snub the Germans, Lieder of Joseph Marx. Essential: www.measha.com.
Dec. 4: The Arditti Quartet lights up Zankel with an irrepressibly tuneful program of Nancarrow's Third Quartet, Carter's Fifth,Ligeti's Second, and Helmut Lachenmann's Third, subtitled Grido ("Scream"). Same group plays diffferent program at LACMA in LA on Nov. 29 — part of the grand old Monday Evening Concerts series. (I found this out by Googling, not by looking at the Arditti's site or Colbert Artists' Arditti page. Similarly, there is a lack of good tour info on Till Fellner's page at ECM or the Venice Baroque Orchestra's page at DG.)
Dec. 5: I'm going on a wild new-music bender this afternoon, trying to see part or all of the following events: the premiere of Joshua Penman's Songs the Plants Taught Us at the New York Youth Symphony; an Arvo Pärt concert by the venerable Continuum ensemble, which played the composer back when he was a Soviet footnote; and Birtwistle's Pulse Shadows at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Noted

1. Hot pic of the ninety-one-year-old Licia Albanese chez Trrill.
2. Tim Johnson on music and national identity.
3. Alex Abramovich and I will be talking about the Dylan book on WNYC's Soundcheck Wednesday Dec. 1 at 2PM. Alas, NBC's Passions is on at the same time.

Did someone say turkey?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sonic quiet

Several years ago I looked on in horror as MTV pundit Gideon Yago sweated through an interview all five ferociously smart members of Radiohead. The memory of that encounter made me more than a little nervous in advance of my New Yorker College Tour interview with Sonic Youth, which took place last Saturday. In addition, I had a certain personal investment: the band's Daydream Nation was the second rock record I ever bought, during my belated discovery of non-classical music in college, and it permanently rearranged my view of the musical universe.

In the end, it went pretty well, despite several dumb questions from the interviewer. Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, and Lee Ranaldo have been playing together since 1981 (drummer Steve Shelley joined in 1984), and they muse on their long career with the ease and wit of people who have nothing left to prove. The most interesting part for me was when they talked about their creative process, which mixes conventional song-oriented work — filling in the outlines of an acoustic sketch — with a procedure much more like that of a jazz group or solitary composer. A lot of the time, they said, they simply set a process in motion — patterns and textures in collision — and see what emerges from the mix. They never talk about chords in the studio, they said; no one ever says, "OK, let's go to F." Yet the result is not nearly as dissonant as you might expect (ferociously dissonant as this band can be), because they nourish clear forms when they rise up. There's an obvious kinship with the working methods of the minimalists. Sonic Youth's new album, the semi-eponymous Sonic Nurse, has some of their sweetest melodies to date, alongside the usual hallucinatory soundscapes.

On the train back, I was happy to read in Arrive, the official magazine of Amtrak’s Acela Express, of the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Quiet Car, which I rhapsodized in a previous post. (The irony of a Sonic Youth fan sitting in the Quiet Car is duly noted.) Quiet Car turns out to have been brainchild of Alma Goodwyn, pictured above. She is the deacon of a Philadelphia church and an activist on behalf of the homeless. After she worked with sympathetic passengers and conductors to create a Quiet Car on her regular commute, Amtrak made the institution official. “I just like to make things better if I can,” Goodwyn said. Alma Goodwyn is an American hero.

Give the gift of Popov

Leon Botstein's marvelous recording of Gavriil Popov's First Symphony, which I raved about back in September, is now in stores, on the Telarc label.

More non-breakthroughs

A few months back I noted how scientists are in the habit of touting musical "discoveries" which have long been commonplace among composers and musicologists. A new example arrives from The Guardian (link via Byzantium's Shores): "Why is Elgar's music for 'Land of Hope and Glory' so quintessentially English, while Debussy sounds so French? It is all because the music mimics the composer's native language, say scientists. The researchers studied the question because while many classical scores have a distinctly national feel, no one had put forward a good explanation for why that should be." No one? People have been obsessing over this question for centuries: writings on the subject would fill many volumes. Rousseau wrote in his Essay on the Origins of Languages: "At first there was no music at all other than melody, nor any other melody than the varied sound of speech, the accents formed the song, the quantities formed the meter, and one spoke as much by sounds and rhythm as by articulations and voices." Johann Gottfried Herder wrote prolifically on similar topics, noting how each country's language formed a body of folk song. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Bartok and Janacek were measuring with extraordinary precision how folk songs mirrored the rhythms of everyday speech and the qualities of particular languages. Unless there is some genuine methodological breakthrough that the writer has concealed, this is a non-event.

Cindy Adams moment

I looked out my window today and saw, many floors down, Bono holding a pizza on a truck. U2 was doing some sort of parade down Seventh Avenue. Only in New York.

Balanchine in every pot

The Right Venerable Maharajah Terry-Thierry Auguste Baron von Teachoutismus Ah Um has received official confirmation from the US Senate as our nation's first Secretary of Brahms. In all seriousness, I heartily congratulate Terry Teachout on his appointment to the National Council on the Arts. It's almost enough to make you think the Senate knows what it is doing.

Alex Ross, Alex Ross

Regarding the Google predicament I wrote about below, I am deeply touched by the outpouring of support from the bløgösphère, the blogizzosphere, and all the other spheres. Thanks to you all. Special thanks to Byzantium's Shores and Zeke's Gallery, who went above and beyond the bounds of duty. Here's hoping Google takes a page from Yahoo, which has the right idea. I promise now to shut up on this topic.

The great retaliation has begun...

O uncanny apparition! O terrible figure! We are trembling, etc. etc. Mme. Grisi Pasta, Leyla Devereux, and Hilli Heihmenn, three alleged old-school sopranos of Seattle, New York, and Atlanta, have unveiled Trrill: Florid Passages from Queer Opera Zealots. The co-authors of the site have declared themselves unhappy with the state of modern opera singing and have "decided to take a torch to every major opera house in America. We figured someone would get the message. It's gonna be like the Jedi Purge of the Old Republic! They'll all either die or go into hiding!" An early target is Anna Netrebko. Enjoy, at your own risk. The bløgösphère will never be so placid again. (The title of this post does have operatic relevance. Any guesses?)

Note also that New York critic and Italophile Marion Rosenberg has a new blog titled Vilaine fille. In which Anna Netrebko is also attacked. Poor girl. For now, I like her fine.

Through a glass darkly

Le Teachout posts this fascinating musicological digression by our incoming Secretary of State: "I love Brahms because Brahms is actually structured. And he's passionate without being sentimental. I don't like sentimental music, so I tend not to like Liszt, and I don't actually much care for the Russian romantics Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, where it's all on the sleeve. With Brahms it's restrained, and there's a sense of tension that never resolves." Don't we all love the tension that never resolves!  When was the last time an expert apostle of Absolute Music rose to such an exalted position of power? (No, not him; he hated Brahms.) I'd like to have it noted for the record that Brahms was a patriotic liberal who detested the religiously motivated bigotry of late nineteenth-century Vienna. In honor of Ms. Rice, I am now listening to the last of Brahms' Four Serious Songs: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal ... And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity."

Fellow bløggers!

If you are so gracious as to link to this site, one kind favor I ask of you: please put the link under my name, not under "The Rest Is Noise." For reasons I don't understand, it's very difficult to find this blog on Google using "Alex Ross" or some variant thereof. The first thing you see, after the shrines devoted to the famed DC Comics illustrator, is a terrible piece I wrote in 1998 for Slate. Of course, if you're searching for "pusillanimous pussyfooters," "rockism," or "he wrote," this site pops up right away.

Update: Adam Baer has a funny post about the perils of being Adam Baer: "This is how I'm constantly imaged by search-engines: a blowhard college student, postmodern artist, and sex-mag journalist obsessed with some poor girl who achieved urban-legend status for a dorm-room striptease."

Book fatigue

Just now I found myself typing the sentence, "La Mer, of course, depicts the sea." Has anyone else had the experience of more or less forgetting how to write — not to mention forgetting how to talk or think — toward the end of a book-writing process? The other troubling sensation I have is that the more verbiage I produce, the farther I am from being done.

Schlingensief update!

What is the notorious Parsifal director up to these days? Thanks to Berlin Blog, a lively site maintained by an American in Berlin, I have new information. Schlingensief — a so-called Aktionskünstler or "action artist" with a history of assuming Nazi poses in order to make pseudo-leftist political points — has been standing around Checkpoint Charlie dressed up as Adolf Hitler, having his picture taken with tourists. This latest stunt is publicity for his play Art and Vegetables: A. Hipler, which recently opened at the Volksbühne theater. The great detail that Berlin Blog discloses is that Schlingensief has been asking for money from his tourist victims. He probably thinks he is exposing their sick fascination with Hitler. In fact, he is exposing himself. The title of the play (or whatever it is) recycles Monty Python's brilliant "Mr. Hilter" sketch, also starring Ron Vibbentrop and Heimlich Bimmler. Cool it, Führer cat!

Conversation-stopper of the day

Birds are atonal.

Subpoena / Angelina

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.

Derridiadem

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.

Agenda 11/16-21

The following concerts might be great.

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.
 

Work in progress

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.

Feline perspectives: Copland

Penelope listens to the grandly populist Third Symphony. The sound of the heartland was forged in Manhattan.

Booty sonata

The other day, taking a break from my forthcoming book Apocalypse Forever: How Overwrought Book Titles Are Destroying America, I went to see Ray. 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.

A fray I dare not enter

AC Douglas vs. (?) George Hunka.

Perfectly timed bravos

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 his "Bravo!" in 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.

Google is goofy

This site is currently #1 out of 17,600,000 possibilities in searches for the phrase "he wrote."

Update, 11:11 PM: Phil Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog has pulled ahead. I suspect dirty tricks.

Update, 3:22 PM, after which enough: I've discovered how this happened. The all-powerful Jason Kottke used the phrase "he wrote" in a link to my Radiohead piece.

Mnookin!

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.

The "same concert" myth

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.

Agenda 11/9-11/14

Check it, New York:

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.

The new masses

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."

Satie marathon

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.]

Nobility

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"

Audience

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.

For the Senate and House, I endorse penguins.

I can't resist posting Canada 2.0, via Place and Thyme. Sasha, there is an alternative. OK, back to the music.

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.

Agenda 11/2-11/7

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.

Then and now

From Jean Edward Smith's biography of Lucius Clay, the U.S. military governor of occupied Germany from 1945 to 1949:

When World II ended, the United States Army became the custodian of what Clay described to Secretary Stinson as "the greatest single art collection in the world." This collection included not only the various masterpieces of Rembrandt, Rubens, Tintoretto, and El Greco (to name but a few) looted from Nazi-occupied Europe, but almost all of the really valuable German artworks that had been removed from their museums during the war and stored for safekeeping in that portion of western Germany liberated by U.S. forces.

Clay took an immediate personal interest in preserving the artworks the Americans captured. He expanded military government's Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives branch to include some of America's most celebrated art historians and curators (including James Rorimer, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), and instructed them "to identify, salvage, and restore everything worth saving." And Clay told Stinson he hoped to get immediate approval to return to their original owners the works the Nazis had looted throughout Europe, and to preserve the prewar German art collections in trust for the German people.

Stinson applauded Clay's plan and assured him of his support. To Stinson, the preservation of Europe's cultural treasures and of Germany's own important artworks bespoke the dignity of America's war aims....

Donald Rumsfeld, April 11, 2003:

The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times and you think, "My goodness, were there that many vases? [Laughter from press corps.] Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?"

The Gelb Ambiguity

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.

Addendum: After hearing extremely harsh assessments of Peter Gelb from extremely knowledgeable observers, I'd like to change "should be fine" to "might be OK" above.

Quiet Car

Amtrak’s Acela Express is the only form of travel I look forward to, chiefly because of the Quiet Car. The conductor on my trip back from Boston went so far as to request a “sort of library atmosphere” in the Quiet Car. If only life had a Quiet Car.

Rockism

I don't know. You tell me.

Dissonate the vote

Timothy Andres is a formidable young composer-pianist who figured in my piece about New York-area student composers last spring. In June he gave a powerhouse performance of Ives' Concord at the CAMI recital hall; Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe was there and raved. On Election Night, Andres is playing at Sudler Hall at Yale, in a program that includes Adams' China Gates, Barber's Excursions, Rzewski's Four North American Ballads, and his own piano sonata. He also designed the gripping red poster above.

Say nothing

A platform for a speech is being built in Copley Square.

The joy in Boston

James Levine's challenging programs of atonal music are arousing unexpected enthusiasm in Boston. No, wait, wrong pictures. We'll go back to music shortly. Here are my observations on the Red Sox World Series victory: "YOW! WOOOO!!!! YEEAAAH!!!" My mother grew up in Boston, and, as you can tell from the souvenirs below, attended the 1946 World Series. I was here for the unspeakable events of 1986. An obscure wound is healed, to take a phrase from rabid Sox fan Henry James. It seems kind of absurd that I am here to attend a concert of Mozart, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Ligeti. Then again, as Joseph Horowitz notes in his forthcoming history of American classical music, Isabella Stewart Gardner used to wear a Red Sox headband to Boston Symphony concerts.

I'm boarding the Acela today for another visit to the Boston Symphony under James Levine. The program this week includes Ligeti's Lontano, Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring — a fearsome phalanx of twentieth-century masterpieces. Let's hope the diabolism in the music doesn't fuse with Red Sox mania to incite a riot. While up there, I'll be giving a talk at Harvard on the musical activities of the Office of the Military Governor, United States (OMGUS) in Germany from 1945 to 1949. It's at 5PM on Thursday at the Barker Center, Room 133 — free and open to the public. The topic may sound kind of snoozy, but it's actually kind of hot. Two years ago I spent a week or so going through the files of OMGUS, and I came away awed by the scope and thoroughness of the effort, not only in the musical field but in every aspect of German life. Military Governor Lucius Clay, a forgotten American hero, conducted himself with adamantine neutrality and showed a fearsome eye for detail. Even before the war had ended, he had taken steps to ensure that Germany's great art collections would remain untouched by looting. When he left, in 1949, hundred of thousands of Germans poured into the streets to wish him goodbye. Readers are invited to draw their own comparisons with the occupation of Iraq.

Anyway, GO SOX!!!

Addendum: WOOO!!!!

Note on Eminem

Not that anyone asked, but I used to think of Eminem as a very talented guy who was egregiously full of himself and lacking moral compass. I am now flip-flopping on that position.

Black Brown & Beige

Without making the slightest pretense toward expertise in jazz, I'll venture some hazy and ill-informed impressions of last night's Jazz at Lincoln Center program. As most people know, Wynton Marsalis' empire of swing has moved into a huge new performance space in the Time-Warner building at Columbus Circle. The lobby areas are unpromising, extending the highbrow Wal-Mart feeling of the entire development, but the Allen Room, where Wynton and orchestra played last night, is one of the most visually astounding music halls in the world — huge raked glass windows affording a billionaire's view of Central Park and surrounding buildings. The moon glimmers through clouds, reflections of the lights of 59th Street go straight up in the air. It's a perfect place for glamorous young Manhattan couples to celebrate their anniversary. I went primarily to hear Duke Ellington's Black, Brown, and Beige — Benny Carter's Kansas City Suite filled out the program — and I was mesmerized by the playing. Eric Lewis' piano solos floated in from some Ravelian heaven. (Please note: I'm agnostic on the whole pro/con Wynton brawl.) The work itself is about as sublime and deep as American music gets. Let it never be forgotten that aesthetic policemen on both sides of the classical-jazz divide denounced Ellington in 1943 for attempting this brave symphonic experiment. Paul Bowles, in the New York Herald Tribune, called it "formless and meaningless … a gaudy potpourri of tutti dance passages and solo virtuoso work." That's one of the stupidest reviews in the history of criticism, right up there with Hanslick on Tchaikovsky and Virgil Thomson on Sibelius. If Bowles had been able to write music one-tenth as beautiful or haunting as "Come Sunday," he would never have given up composition in favor of books.

Points west

New composer-blogger Paul Bailey describes the premiere of Steve Reich's big new choral piece You Are (Variations) in Los Angeles. Argh, I wish I could have heard this. Meanwhile, up in Bagdad by the Bay, The Standing Room gives a thumbs down to Alan Gilbert's performance of Naive and Sentimental Music at the San Francisco Symphony, while Josh Kosman gives it a thumbs up. Read either piece for a discerning appreciation of Adams' symphonic tour-de-force.

Here are the texts that Reich set in You Are:

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov: "You are wherever your thoughts are."

Psalm 16: "I place the Eternal before me."

Ludwig Wittgenstein: "Explanations come to an end somewhere."

Rabbi Shammai: "Say little and do much."

Game 3

Courtesy of long-suffering Red Sox fan Daphne Ross.

It's getting a little cold outside

Today is the 42nd anniversary of James Brown’s famous live show at the Apollo. It’s also the 42nd anniversary of John Cage’s experimental piece 0’00”, which asks the performer to “perform a disciplined action” of an undetermined nature. I learned of this coincidence in Douglas Wolk’s meticulous, poetic new book James Brown Live at the Apollo, which puts the Godfather of Soul in the context of the Cuban Missile Crisis and other roiling events of the time. I’ve been listening obsessively to “Lost Someone,” and I'm in love with the modulation at the beginning of the song— the plunge down a whole step after the brassy introductory chords. It’s the feeling of a door opening, of stepping from a shiny modern place into an old carved room. (Something similar happens in the final section of Janacek’s Jenufa.) There’s another seismic harmonic shift later on: after five straight minutes of I, IV, I, IV, you suddenly get a V chord underneath the phrase “ten thousand people.” Another door opens to another secret room. I’ll let Mr. Wolk say the rest.

How gay is it?

A good piece by Tony Tommasini on Nadine Hubbs' new book The Queer Composition of America's Sound, an attempt to analyze Copland, Virgil Thomson, David Diamond, and other mid-century American composers in terms borrowed from contemporary gay studies. I've been grappling with the book myself, and I share many of Tony's frustrations. It's great to have a study that celebrates these composers' sexuality instead of cloaking it in euphemism. Yet Hubbs goes astray in trying to connect musical style to sexual politics. The fact that so many of these composers embraced tonality does not, I think, have much to do with the fact that they were gay, nor does it have much to do with how they were publicly received, scattered bits of in-house gossip aside. Where did Copland get that wide-interval open-prairie sound? From Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments, not from Thomson's alleged camp aesthetic. Meanwhile, experimental, non-tonal sounds ran rampant in the work of gay composers Henry Cowell, John Cage, Harry Partch, and Lou Harrison — Partch and Harrison with their alternative scales and systems of tuning; Cowell with his violently dissonant "cluster chords"; Cage with his chance procedures. Why couldn't these outlandish sonorities be considered an authentic expression of outsider sexuality? Several scholars have argued as much, and it's hard to reconcile their work with Hubbs'. She doesn't deny that gay composers made all different sounds, but she talks herself in circles trying to maintain that tonality and gayness have some special relationship:

The careers of Cage, Harrison, and even the eccentric Partch (a longtime member of gay hobo subculture) flourished in the viciously homophobic Cold War era. We might surmise that this was because 1) their (mostly nonserial) music — perceived as internationalist, advanced, and cerebral — aligned well with prevailing masculinist and imperialist values; and 2) their homosexuality, whether or not rumored, remained deniable.

These are two very problematic sentences. First, it's weird to suggest that Harrison and Partch "flourished" in the fifties. Both men were far outside mainstream musical life. Second, I'm unaware of any extant commentary that categorized their music as "internationalist" or "cerebral." The published philosophies of each artist pointed in exactly the opposite direction. Cage, a composer of international repute, was a different case, but I'd be interested to know what "masculinist and imperialist values" he was ever said to have embodied. Finally, it's insulting to the memory of the great Lou Harrison to suggest that he ever denied his sexuality. From an early age, he matter-of-factly announced it to everyone he met. A full account of homosexuality in American composition will need to pay more attention to the facts and more respect to each composer's individuality.

A final irony: Hubbs models her methodology on the work of Michel Foucault. Is she aware that for some time Foucault's lover was the impeccably atonal composer Jean Barraqué? And that Foucault once said: "If my memory does not deceive me, then I got the greatest cultural shock from the French representatives of serial music and 12-tone music — from Boulez and Barraqué, with whom I was acquainted. It was they who first tore me from the dialectical universe in which I had lived until then"? I get nervous whenever people try to put sexuality in a conceptual box, even when they do it with the best intentions. It doesn't get us any closer to freedom.

Ends and odds

The linkerrific Zoilus has what appears to be the definitive nuancing of Dylan's relationship with activist politics.

Having had a good time decorating the Dylan piece with old road-trip photos, I've done the same for the gorgeous men of Radiohead. The Björk piece is coming soon.

Now is the time of year when New York concert organizations drive everyone nuts by scheduling all the best concerts simultaneously. I'll be at Miller for Nancarrow tonight, but I'd just as soon be at Carnegie for a David Daniels Handel thang, or downstairs at Zankel for a Robert Levin Mozart thang, or at the Met for the last Magic Flute, or at Cooper Union for a program of new works incorporating the spinet (“Spinet: an experiment on Gesamtkunstwerk - Totalart"), with — I kid you not — Prof. Kyle Gann performing the role of Abraham Lincoln.

Is it possible that Boston is going to win everything? And I don't mean just the World Series. I'll be going up on Friday for James Levine's grand debut as the Boston Symphony's music director. Mahler's Eighth: "The unattainable here becomes fact..."

Addendum: A reader queries the application of the phrase "gorgeous men" to Radiohead. I didn't mean it quite literally.

Dance music

The prize for the most madly eclectic program of the season goes to the NYC ensemble Fireworks, whose "Dance Mix" show at Club Makor tonight includes Johann Strauss's "Thunder and Lightning Polka," Aphex Twin's "Analogue Bubblebath," Lully's Bourgeois Gentilhomme Suite, Duke Ellington's "Don't Get Around Much Anymore," New Order's "Blue Monday," the Minuet from Haydn's Quartet No. 62, and The Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive." Here's Fireworks' site. I liked their semi-electric Rite of Spring CD, though it doesn't rock as hard as the original.

Transformation

Helen Radice, on her harp-driven site Twang Twang Twang, quotes W. H. Auden: "Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance." Genau, babe. When I hear Deborah Voigt soaring up effortlessly to A in "O hehrstes Wunder" in Die Walküre, I think, this is going to change the world somehow.

Julie Taymor's Magic Flute

"Taymor's Mythology"

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, Oct. 25, 2004.

In the fall of 1791, Mozart was a sick man who felt his life slipping away. Still, he was intensely happy. The motive for his joy was “The Magic Flute,” which had opened at the end of September, in Vienna. Representatives of the musical élite were hailing the opera as perhaps the richest of Mozart’s career. Antonio Salieri told his sometime rival that it was “worthy of being played at the greatest festival for the greatest monarchs.” Members of the brotherhood of Masons smiled among themselves as they recognized a kindred spirit at work: the tale of handsome young Tamino, who passes a series of tests set by the mysterious magus Sarastro, was both a parable and a parody of the rituals of Freemasonry. Yet “The Magic Flute” wasn’t a proper opera at all; it was a Singspiel, a hybrid genre akin to musical theatre. The staging aimed to astonish the eyes: one visitor reported seeing “a thousand grotesque forms.” Tickets cost between seven and seventeen kreuzer—about what you’d spend on a round of beers after the show. Mozart had made his imperial art democratic, and he exulted in the many-sidedness of his appeal. “What really makes me happy,” he wrote to his wife, “is the Silent applause!—one can feel how this opera is rising and rising.”

I reread stories of Mozart’s last months just before seeing Julie Taymor’s production of “The Magic Flute,” at the Metropolitan Opera. They stayed with me as Taymor’s deeply dazzling vision took hold. “Silent applause” is an apt phrase for what happens when a listener’s inward experience locks in synch with the experience of several thousand others. It’s the sense of a performance “rising and rising,” as Mozart said; of a jaded, lonely crowd made to grin like kids; of a world gone right. I hung on to the feeling as long as I could.

"The Magic Flute” is half mystery play, half street comedy. Directors usually bend it in whatever direction their sensibility lies. Taymor, who first directed the opera back in 1993, well before she created her Broadway production of “The Lion King,” does not try to resolve its tensions. Instead, she mobilizes every device in her repertoire to render with extreme vivacity whatever Mozart and his librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, throw at her. To the usual Masonic symbology she adds motifs from the Kabbalah, Tantric Buddhism, Bunraku, Indonesian puppet theatre, and so on. The Met stage has never been so alive with movement, so charged with color, so brilliant to the eye. The outward effect is of a shimmering cultural kaleidoscope, with all manner of mystical and folk traditions blending together. Behind the surface lies a melancholy sense that history has never permitted such a synthesis—that Mozart’s theme of love and power united is nothing more than a fever dream. But Taymor allows the Enlightenment fantasy to play out to the end.

Mystery sets the tone before comedy takes over. Forty-three triangles hang in a spooky, asymmetrical pattern on the stage curtain. James Levine’s tempos have been exhilaratingly fleet of late, but I wish he’d lingered longer on the three majestic, light-dark chords that set the music in motion—E-flat major, C minor, E-flat in first inversion. They pose a question that the opera never quite answers. George Tsypin, who created sets for “War and Peace” at the Met two seasons ago, suspends Masonic and Kabbalistic emblems in towering Plexiglas façades, gateways, and columns. That these sets could serve as the backdrop for some very scary Vegas magic show—David Copperfield raising the dead, perhaps—is part of the whimsical appeal of the production, which stops well short of taking itself too seriously.

An incredible variety of figures and creatures swirl through Tsypin’s hieroglyphic castles. Tamino and Sarastro both look like Japanese princes, while Papageno, the bird-catcher well on his way to being a bird himself, has a streetwise look, wearing a green jumpsuit and a sporty beak cap. The Queen of the Night, who tries to lure Tamino from his appointed path, appears with huge moth wings fluttering behind her. Monostatos, Sarastro’s wayward henchman, is a bit of a bat. What might have seemed arbitrary in another production here seems simply right, because Taymor controls each tableau with a painter’s eye. Mark Dendy obtains some of the sharpest dancing I’ve seen on the Met stage; when Papageno immobilizes Monostatos’s would-be tough guys with his magic bells, they become screamingly gay Broadway hoofers. Meanwhile, all manner of puppet beasts, including serpents, bears, and the entire contents of Papageno’s birdcage, stream around the singers. The animals, created with the help of Michael Curry, become co-stars of the piece, not because they impart a “Lion King” glamour but because they move so buoyantly to the music. At times, the entire stage is dancing to Mozart’s time.

Matthew Polenzani, a lyric tenor with a lovely, stately voice and a stiff stage presence, never looked altogether comfortable as Tamino. Dorothea Röschmann, as Pamina, relished the challenge, projecting a dusky gleam in her lower register that I don’t remember hearing in her “Figaro” début last year. L’ubica Vargicová was dangerously hesitant in her opening aria, but she showed fire alongside the required coloratura precision in “Der Hölle Rache” later on. Kwangchul Youn was a noble Sarastro, although he lacked some strength at the bottom of his range. With no fewer than four singers performing in the house for the first time—Anna Christy did well as Papagena—this was a potentially nervous cast, but Levine kept them all on track and maintained a limpid tone from beginning to end.

One singer stood out from the others in his enthusiasm to embody Taymor’s vision: twenty-six-year-old Rodion Pogossov, who until recently had been part of the Met’s Young Artist program. He filled in on short notice for Matthias Goerne as Papageno, having never sung a major role at the Met or anywhere else. He has a mellifluous baritone voice and is a natural, extroverted performer. Basically, he rocks. In place of the cutesy clowning that star baritones often indulge in, he created an antic, athletic, sexy bird-man on the prowl. Perhaps the Old Guard disapproved when Papageno broke into a strutting, arm-swinging hip-hop dance, but it’s about time the Met got some flava.

Two lessons emerge from the soon-to-be-legendary phenomenon of this “Magic Flute.” One is that Taymor has a great future at the house. If I were Joseph Volpe—and, happily, I’m not—I would be stalking her with offers for future projects; at the top of the list would be Wagner’s “Ring.” The Met’s eighteen-year-old “Ring,” the “Walküre” installment of which is now playing in a wildly uneven, weirdly cast performance under Valery Gergiev, has tilted from the grand to the grim. Taymor, with her flair for myth, might produce a “Ring” for the ages.

The other lesson is more wistful. When I got home, I wanted to write, Gene Shalit style, “This Flute’s a hoot! Run, don’t walk!” But there was no point in telling anyone to go anywhere; only a few three-hundred-dollar tickets remained, and these were quickly sold. (There will be five more performances in April; tickets go on sale November 21st.) Whenever the Met stumbles onto something truly wonderful, such as this “Magic Flute,” or “Salome” last season, those in the know snatch up all the tickets before those in the dark can get a taste of what opera can achieve. Such is the enigma of classical music; the better it is, the more inaccessible, until, in its most rarefied form, it hardly exists. Perhaps Mozart took joy in the triumph of “The Magic Flute” because it showed him a way out of that gleaming prison: he could see a real public at last. Then he wrote his Requiem and died.

Dylanogue

I'm doing a Slate dialogue with Alex Abramovich, the stylish gentleman on the right, about the new Bob Dylan memoir. A warm welcome to those visiting from that fine publication.

...if not to Dershowitz

From the Lincoln Center Playbill: "Johannes Brahms' place in musical history is assured. Indeed, while he was still alive, conductor Claus von Bülow already spoke of him as one of the great B's, equal to Bach and Beethoven."

Three chords and the truth

Warning: This post contains wacky technical lingo.

E-flat major, C minor, E-flat major: the opening chords of Mozart's Magic Flute. I mention them briefly in my review of Julie Taymor's new production, appearing in the New Yorker next week. There is so much more to be said about just these three chords (five, if you count the brief upbeats to the second and the third). They seem simple in construction, yet they create an aura of power and mystery. The first is the purest chord there is, rising up from a core E-flat in the bass. It's Pythagoras' chord of nature, the lowest tones of the harmonic series sounding together. The C minor is the relative minor of E-flat: two of the tones, E-flat and G, are the same in both chords. It's the natural harmony tilted downward, turned toward the darkness. Finally, E-flat again, but it sounds more sober and resigned, as if the darkness of C minor has been subsumed into the light. It is "first inversion," meaning that there is a G instead of an E-flat in the bass. The bass notes — E-flat, C, G — together spell out C minor, again bringing out the shadows of the scene. Yet the top notes — E-flat, G, B-flat — anchor the sequence melodically on the major triad. All told, it's as if Mozart has written the emotional stages of an entire life in three bars: hope, pain, wisdom.

Popov resurfacing

A little while back, I extolled the bewitchingly strange music of Gavril Popov, a Soviet composer who more or less disappeared into the shadows of Stalinism. I stated that no Popov CDs were currently available, although a sensational recording of the First Symphony is forthcoming on the Telarc label. A reader writes to say that reproductions of Olympia's Popov recordings can be purchased at the top-notch classical site Arkiv Music. Here, for example, is the recording that pairs the Chamber Symphony with the Sixth Symphony. As for the First, I recommend strongly that you wait for Leon Botstein's Telarc recording. It's one of the top recordings of the year, along with Rene Jacobs' Figaro, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's Handel, Andrew Manze's latest Vivaldi explosion, and Leon Fleisher's two-hand return.

Janacek speaks

"Are you familiar with the dead silence of a deep forest? It almost hurts one’s ears. You are more likely to hear the strange rushing sound of your own blood, as if somebody was shaking tiny bells, like kernels of mist. The silence and coolness descend on your thoughts, on your steps, on your words. You have time to think, your thoughts are not racing, you stand here and there, your speech is sparse."

Not much else to offer today. It's nice to be alive. I commend to your attention some excellent posts at ionarts on Messiaen's St. Francis and the underrated Alessandra Marc in DC. And congratulations to the excellent Jens Laurson on his Post debut. We've seen political bloggers make the leap into the so-called mainstream, and now classical blöggères are doing the same.

Epiphany #9: Korngold

Attempt at a catalogue of life-altering musical moments.

My high school had (has) a beautiful art room, a sunny space with exotic plants, where I used to while away the hours painting pseudo-Turneresque paintings and listening to records. A prior teacher, the legendary Mr. Stambaugh, had accumulated a large, eclectic record collection, which I employed to educate myself about composers like Sibelius and Prokofiev. I loved John Barbirolli’s recording of the Mahler Sixth, with its geological, plate-tectonic tempo in the first movement. I also loved Rudolf Kempe’s recording of the Erich Wolfgang Korngold Symphony in F-sharp. I didn’t know at the time that you were supposed to dismiss Korngold as a second-rate overdue-Romantic composer who had found his fortune in Hollywood. The symphony struck me as a vast, dark, towering thing, and it shook me to the core every time I heard it. It still has the same effect. Korngold wrote the piece in 1950, at a time when he had almost given up concert work in favor of Hollywood scoring. Nothing he had done in the past, not even the prodigious operas of his teens, had suggested that he was capable of such furiously sustained eloquence. It was almost as if the ghosts of the German Romantic age had taken possession of him. I can’t improve on what Nicolas Slonimsky wrote in the liner notes: “The lengthy Adagio takes us deep into the sublime world of symphonic art. Not since Bruckner and Mahler has there been such an important slow movement.” I remember listening in the art room late at night, the volume turned up so high that the brass chords splintered in the air.

Previous epiphanies: #34, #32, #17.

Thank you, Goldstines!

Agenda 10/11-10/17

Who says music critics don't work?

Oct. 11: Evening of Joan La Barbara's music at NYU's Frederick Loewe Theatre, 35 W. 4th St., "with live interactive videoscapes by Kurt Ralske and performers including Joan La Barbara and musicians from Ne(x)tworks."
Oct. 12: New production of Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites at New York City Opera.
Oct. 13: Mikhail Pletnev recital at opening of Lincoln Center Great Performers season.
Oct. 14: Sounds Like Now festival at La MaMa.
Oct. 15: Sounds Like Now concert #2.
Oct. 16: Music critics' symposium at 9AM. Sounds Like Now concerts at 2PM and 8PM.
Oct. 17: Music critics' symposium at 9AM. Joint appearance with Justin Davidson at 4PM. Sounds Like Now at 8PM.

Sounds like exhausting.

Taymor's Magic Flute (revised)

Just saw Julie Taymor's debut production at the Met. Since I'm writing a review for The New Yorker, I won't upstage myself by saying anything too specific here, but suffice to say this was one of the most bloody marvelous things I've ever seen on stage — one joyfully imaginative tableau after another, a dream world dancing to Mozart's time. There are only four more performances this fall, all of which are sold out except for a few $300 seats, but five more performances follow in April, with an even better cast — René Pape as the Speaker! Also (special for ACD): Taymor must direct the Ring. People at the Met should be calling her every hour on the hour until she agrees to do it.

CD shelving tips (with Maulina)

I have a lot of CDs, probably more than ten thousand of them. To some, this may sound like a windfall, but it gets to be a bit of a problem after a while. When I moved from Brooklyn to the big city a few years ago and faced a drastic reduction of space, I decided to consign large numbers of the little silver wonders to a storage facility. I made draconian decisions about who was staying in the major leagues and who was going to be sent down. Elgar, for example, was condemned to storage en masse. Lately, I've been cocking an ear to Elgar again, and he's returned from exile. The question, of course, is where the collected Elgar will go when Eisler and Enesco have that shelf locked down.

A couple of years ago, I found the solution. It has almost literally saved my life, and I'd like to spread the word to any other suffering souls. It is a plastic CD sleeve put out by Jazz Loft. I'm sure other companies put out similar products, but my loyalty is to Jazz Loft, with whom I just placed another order. What you do is this: you crack open a jewel case, take out the CD, booklet, and paper liner, and transfer them to the plastic sleeve. The genius thing is that you can fold the liner in such a way that you can still read the "binding," though it's at an angle. It takes up about one-tenth the space of a jewel case. I've been able to squirrel away a thousand or more new CDs without needing an inch of extra space. The transfer process is tiresome, but you can make a festive occasion of it, as Pack can attest. I am not, by the way, in any way affiliated with the Jazz Loft company.

To the tune of a concertina

Some excellent Dylaniana over at Zoilus. Apparently Sean Penn is doing the book-on-tape of Chronicles. If not Bob himself, I was hoping for Morgan Freeman. Carl and I are trying to figure out what in heaven's name Dylan is talking about in the Oh Mercy chapter when he unveils his new harmonic system ("If you're using the [diatonic] scale, and you hit 2, 5 and 7 to the phrase and then repeat it, a melody forms"). Has he been reading Schillinger? Is he going to convert to twelve-tone music late in life, like Copland and Stravinsky? Momentary opacities aside, it is a gobsmacking great book. Among other surprises, it turns out that Dylan derived his entire songwriting art from Brecht and Weill's "Pirate Jenny," and that at some point in the early sixties he was listening to the violin concertos of Darius Milhaud. Time to get those out of storage, I guess.

La grande porte

Here's a choice passage from Herbert Breslin and Anne Midgette's book The King and I, a riveting and darkly funny memoir of Breslin's career as manager of Luciano Pavarotti and other would-be opera stars:

I used to represent a Russian soprano named Nina Rautio. Ever hear of her? I thought not. Madame Rautio was someone who was very clear about where she belonged.
“I want to enter par la grande porte,” she would say. Through the big door.
In other words, she wanted to make a big splash. No modest entrances for Madame Rautio.
Her husband, a little Russian man, used to come around the office.
“What is she doing next? Remember, she wants to enter par la grande porte.”
“Well, I’m afraid la grande porte doesn’t exist.”

This is not quite a tell-all book about Pavarotti's antics, though there are many amusing anecdotes. It is really a book about the ineffectual flailings of classical musicians and their handlers in the wilds of American culture. Breslin is a man interested in selling musicians to a large public, and most of them are unwilling or unable to play along. Most are still waiting for La Grande Porte to open: they expect to proceed effortlessly to a now imaginary position of high-culture celebrity. Pavarotti, for all his foibles, was humble enough to work for his fame. There are much bigger fools elsewhere in the business.