Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Sailing to Jersey

Our Girl in Chicago brings up the subject of humor in Henry James, which reminds me of a favorite passage in The American Scene. Absent from his homeland many years, James finds himself, for reasons not quite divulged, on a steamer to the Jersey shore within a few hours of his arrival. If I am not mistaken, what follows is the world's first New Jersey joke:

Heavy with fruit, in particular, was the whole spreading bough that rustled above me during an afternoon, a very wonderful afternoon, that I spent in being ever so wisely driven, driven further and further, into the large lucidity of — well, of what else shall I call it but a New Jersey condition? ... It might have threatened, for twenty minutes, to be almost complicating, but the truth was recorded: it was an adventure, unmistakably, to have a revelation made so convenient — to be learning at last, in the maturity of one's powers, what New Jersey might "connote." This was nearer than I had ever come to any such experience; and it was now as if, all my life, my curiosity had been greater than I knew.

This seems as good a moment as any to reveal that I am taking another break from the blog; I must spend a few dark weeks in the maw of Book. I'll be back in time for Actual Easter. Please patronize Music Blogs. Support a starving composer.

Agenda 3/28 - 4/3

A good week ahead. On Monday I'll be at the Boston Symphony concert already adumbrated. If the new pieces by Harbison and Wuorinen don't pan out, Levine puts on a grand Brahms Second. On Wednesday I'm in NJ for Harry Partch opera's Oedipus, in Montclair. Why Montcair? The armory of microtonal instruments that the remarkable Partch constructed for the performance of his music is now in the possession of Montclair State University. I will thus miss a Juilliard recital by violist Nadia Sirota, who is playing the Bach Chaconne, the Britten Lachrymae, and two premieres by Ryan Streber and Nico Muhly, the second an electronic piece featuring pre-recorded vocals by Antony of Antony & The Johnsons and programming by Björk's longtime collaborator Valgeir Sigurdsson. On Thursday, the Orchestra of St. Luke's plays Carnegie under the direction of Donald Runnicles, who shot up sharply in my estimation after his fluid and characteristic Rosenkavalier at the Met. The program includes Martinu's Revue de cuisine, a nineteen-twenties "jazz" ballet involving kitchen implements, and Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 25 with the hyper-musical Ivan Moravec. Saturday night, the American Youth Symphony presents a new piece by Lera Auerbach, a young Russian-émigré composer who's written music of extraordinary power and intensity. Finally, on Sunday, the New York City Opera introduces a new production of Puccini's Girl of the Golden West, which hasn't been staged in this city in years.

Wuorinen v. Wuorinen

There's a mini-symposium in the New York Times among conductor James Levine and composers Charles Wuorinen and John Harbison, all of whom figure in a Boston Symphony concert on Monday at Carnegie Hall. The discussion is moderated by Daniel J. Wakin, the Times' classical-music reporter, who's been doing a fantastic job on his beat. Here Wakin asks some sharp questions, with interesting results:

WAKIN: ...you wrote [in 1979] that the tonal system could be found only in backward-looking serious composers, is no longer used by serious mainstream composers, has been replaced and succeeded by the 12-tone system.

WUORINEN: Well, that's a categorical statement which cannot be — of course, it had more to it then, although to some extent it is obsolete now. But it depends on what you mean by the tonal system.

LEVINE: That is spoken by a man who is tired of how difficult it is to make anything understood, in any of these distinctions.

So that's all cleared up. I like what John Harbison has to say about the future of contemporary music: "I'm very optimistic. Somewhere along the way I became the opposite of worried. And I think it's because I began to understand the carrying power of the intensity, as against the rule of numbers. And intensity wins every time." Yes! Intensity is what composers have to offer. They have the opportunity to work on big canvases, in forms and languages entirely of their choosing, and whether they write pure diatonic tonality, pure atonality, twelve-tone, microtonal, spectral, computer-electronic, neo-medieval, or, perhaps, all of the above, they will find their audience if they write with intensity of feeling and clarity of purpose. Those who teach should ask not whether their students are writing in the "correct style" but whether they are achieving what they're aiming at. I think composition teachers have learned from the mistakes of previous generations, and now understand this. I think.

Boulez is alive

A fascinating piece in the Guardian compiles various composers' assessments of Pierre Boulez, who celebrates his eightieth birthday tomorrow. They range from the effusive to the dismissive; the comment by Thomas Adès is especially striking. Would it have been better to suspend, at least for one day, the endless feuding that the name Boulez inspires? Absolutely not — it would betray the splendidly pitiless spirit of this singular man, who spoke so contemptuously of his elders when he was young, and who still happily goes on the warpath. Just last year he had this to say about his old friend Stravinsky: "[He] began so well, pursuing a real line of development. But then he becomes an epigone, trying this historical style, then that one. There is virtuosity of gesture, but no content." Oh, Pierre. Happy birthday!

What would Elgar say?

Composers have been generating some nutty headlines lately. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen's Musick, was recently questioned by the Northern Constabulary when a half-eaten swan carcass turned up on his Orkney Islands estate. The swan is a protected bird in the UK, and the police were unamused when Sir Peter offered them swan terrine. (Would this taste good, Amateur Gourmet?) In Russia, Leonid Desyatnikov, a polymorphous composer with minimalist leanings, has written a wildly controversial opera entitled Rosenthal's Children, in which a renegade Nazi geneticist  succeeds in cloning Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky. All five geniuses sing onstage, and there are also fleeting appearances by Stalin, Krushchev, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin. No word yet on whether Stalin and Krushchev have sex, as happens in the novel on which the opera is based.

Rather less nutty, and all too familiar, is another story out of Scotland, this one concerning the composer James Dillon. He threw a public fit when the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, under the direction of Alexander Lazarev, mangled his latest work. Any composer will be able to reel off a few horror stories of this kind: orchestras, who pride themselves on extreme professionalism, do not always include decent treatment of living composers in their job description. Most of the victims suffer in silence, anxious not to bite the hand that offers them crumbs. Dillon has bravely chosen to speak out. Lazarev, by the way, is the same self-righteous twit who mocked and humiliated a Sydney, Australia audience after they applauded the third movement of Tchaikovsky's Sixth.

Woefully underrepresented in this odd litany are American composers. Let's work up some publicity, people! I want to see Aaron Jay Kernis arrested for trying to smuggle zebra meat through LaGuardia; or Jennifer Higdon wiretapped by Homeland Security after writing an opera entitled Condi's Secret; or Richard Danielpour banned for life from Lincoln Center for throwing pies at Lorin Maazel. In my dreams....

Okey Denoke

The German soprano Angela Denoke is giving a first-rate performance as the Marschallin in Rosenkavalier at the Met. Any New Yorker who loves Strauss' sixteen-ton comedy, or who wants to experience the ultimate artistic meditation on the self-absorbed minitragedies of thirtysomethings, should try to see it. Denoke sings with phenomenal purity of tone, yet she is also an emotionally transparent, actorly performer; there's a welcome lack of expert caution in her delivery, and an expressive dark lining to even her brightest upper notes. Last night, Kristine Jepson was an excellent, athletic Oktavian; the appealing Laura Aikin had maybe a bit of an off night as Sophie (constricted in the early part of Act II); Peter Rose cut a likeable, consistently funny figure as Ochs, enlivening parts of the opera that can otherwise drag (as it were). Donald Runnicles avoided the over-refulgent, singer-swamping sound that has marred some of James Levine's performances of this work; in all, it was a luminous, fleet-footed night. Ja, ja!

Messiaen's Beyond

The great event in New York this week is the return of Olivier Messiaen's Éclairs sur l'Au-Delà, or Illuminations of the Beyond, which had its premiere at the New York Philharmonic in November 1992. The composer of the Quartet for the End of Time finished this eleven-movement cycle shortly before his death in April of the same year; it is a long, difficult, wayward, fiercely eloquent, and stupendously beautiful work. More than that I won't say; if you live in New York, hear for yourself.

The boy who cried zwolf

Kyle Gann writes, in a long disquisition on Schoenberg and twelve-tone music: "I think what we need to do is quit teaching 20th-century history with a dishonest thumb on the scale in Schoenberg’s favor. For decades, academic historians have presented the Second Vienna School as central to a European modernist canon, at the expense of dozens of other composers more popular, outside academia, than Schoenberg: Copland, Milhaud, Cowell, Hindemith, Shostakovich, Gershwin, Messiaen, Britten, Weill, Cage, Partch. It’s time to restore these composers to the center of 20th-century music, and redraw 12-tone music as the interesting but infertile cul-de-sac that it was." This is more or less what I am trying to do in my book, though I wouldn't go so far as to say that Schoenberg is less significant than Milhaud, or, for that matter, less popular than Partch. The big story in 20th-century music is, in my view, not the "death of tonality," which in fact never happened, but the rejuvenation of tonality, which began with Debussy and Satie. Schoenberg's positive achievement was to add new harmonies to the field. He didn't see it that way, of course; he wanted the new chords to replace the old. Even he, at the end of his life, realized that his earlier edicts had been too severe, as his correspondence with the hyper-dogmatic René Leibowitz shows.

I'm not sure about Kyle's choice of the word "infertile," though. Sometimes fertility works in mysterious ways. What's always worth mentioning about twelve-tone music is that it's not the same thing as "atonality," which is a fuzzy concept in itself. It does not dictate the content of a piece. It does not forbid the use of tonal elements, such as major or minor triads; indeed, unless precautions are taken in the construction of the row, it often generates them "by accident," as happens, rather mischievously, in much of Milton Babbitt's music both early and late. If you arrange your rows to encourage triads, say by choosing C E G D F A F# A# C# G# B D#, you will end up with a Richard Strauss-style barrage of chords: C major! D minor! No, wait! F# major! G# minor! Crazy! Whee! Alban Berg discovered this loophole right away, and rejoiced in it; he was able to resume writing grand late-Romantic music, which he had never really given up, while ostensibly following his Master's rules. He was like those prep-school kids who interpret "coat and tie" to mean sweatpants and T-shirts with tie and coat on top. It was Sibelius who said that Berg was Schoenberg's greatest work.

Paradox: By arguing with Schoenberg, we are reaffirming his importance. — Brendan McNamara has more.

Hello, hello, hello

A delightful article by Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker describes the new science of Popstrology, which analyzes your personality on the basis of whatever pop song topped the charts on the day of your birth. Michael Eisner, for example, was born under the sign of Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Cocktail," while 50 Cent is a child of the Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight." My Birthsong, I'm proud to say, is the Beatles' "Hello Goodbye." Not exactly my favorite Beatles song, but far better than the annoying "Judy in Disguise," which I missed by just forty-eight hours. (Birthmate John Anderies, don't you agree?) Particularly apposite to my life as a classical music critic are the lines, "I say high, you say low / You say why, and I say I don't know."

Poul Ruders, Mark Adamo

Kafka Sings. The New Yorker, March 28, 2005.

Stars and stripes forever

The Newark St. Patrick's Day Parade, which I planned to see in connection with a future article, was canceled because of rain. I wish I'd known before going to Newark this morning.

Orbiting

The conversation gets ever livelier at Sequenza 21, where composers of all stripes thrash through old internecine debates — atonality good or bad, 12-tone music dominant or nonexistent, John Adams overrated or very overrated, etc. — and sometimes deliver deliciously brittle reviews of colleagues. The composer-as-critic is a tradeoff I'll always happily take: professional biases and jealousies may come into play, but the opinion is never fuzzy around the edges. The layout of the site is complex, like a Knotty Twelve-Tonish Figure. There's the forum on the main page, also a Composers Forum and individual composer blogs.... Bryant Manning is keeping it spunky on Mysteries Abysmal, as his blog has been renamed.... Take note again of Heather, very thoughtful pianist in Oakland, and of The Laurel Letters, offering beautifully composed reviews of Boston musical life.... Vilaine fille reigns supreme.

Abbreviated Agenda: 3/19

There's an awkward pile-up of events on Saturday, all of which I'd ordinarily like to see. Soheil Nasseri, the gifted young pianist whom I mentioned at the end of my Lupu column, is giving another recital at Alice Tully Hall. The program includes the premiere of a piece by the Israeli composer Avner Dorman. Tickets are $10 for those under 25. Simultaneously at Merkin, the Azure Ensemble is playing new and new-ish works by Libby Larsen, Judith Shatin, Jennifer Higdon, Marilyn Bliss, David Stock, and Zhou Long. I've never heard the group but the performers are all solid new-music veterans, and there's something poetic simply about the titles: Black Birds, Red Hills; Three Summers Heat; Light Refracted; Under the Azure Sky; A Vanished World; and The Elements. Finally, at 10PM downtown, Vox Novus will be presenting the video version of its 60 X 60 project — a series of 60-second works by 60 composers.

Bolero 911

A strange thing happened at the New York Philharmonic last night. Right at the start of Ravel's Bolero, as the snare drum entered with its soft, relentless beat, four policemen glided down the far left aisle and took up positions close to the stage. They stood still throughout the seventeen-minute crescendo, keeping their eyes fixed on the front rows. The possibility that something unexpected or even violent was about to happen added a tingling new sensation to Ravel's already sensational piece. But nothing did happen; no one was dragged off in cuffs. What it was all about, I don't know. I had previously noticed that one gentleman in that section seemed to have a boisterous personality; he stood up to applaud each item on the program, including the Wolfgang Rihm work, which almost no one else in the hall found exciting. He even gave a one-man ovation to the players as they filed out for the second half. Did his neighbors find his enthusiasm so alarming that they alerted the police? Was he a Rest Is Noise reader, acting on my incitements to inappropriate applause? Was MTT's posse in the house, ready to start a Hot 97-style beef? Were the guys from the 20th Precinct just looking to unwind? I prefer to savor the mystery of it all.

I had trouble deciding where to go last night — the Philharmonic affair or Anthony de Mare's recital at Zankel. Since I've Zankled quite a bit this season, I thought I should lend Maazel's merry band an ear. The Rihm thing, Two Other Movements, turned out to be a strange, grand, haunting creation. Prof. Dr. Rihm is hard to classify these days; he is a "difficult" German composer, ja, but he does not toe the Euromodern party line. He writes in the grip of palpably strong emotion, indulges long, songful phrasing, and gives glimpses of tonality everywhere — broken Hindemith chorales, occluded Debussy progressions, shrapnel from an explosion at the Parsifal factory.  The strongest twentieth-century presence is, interestingly, late Sibelius. Like the Master's Tapiola, the piece unfolds in one continuous arc, gathering to a black storm at the center and then subsiding toward silence. (The "two movements" are elided.) The gloomy coda is perhaps too protracted, but the final upward-spiraling string phrases have the "sense of an ending" that only a master composer can produce. Take note of the Ensemble Intercontemporain's upcoming performance of Rihm's huge instrumental cycle Jagden und Formen, on May 25.

The Philharmonic gave a committed reading. Beautiful soft trumpet solo. Maestro Maazel was on good behavior throughout; perhaps the police were there to prevent him from doing weird things to Bolero. Lisa Batashvili was a dazzling and vivid soloist in Chausson's Poème and Saint-Saëns' Introduction and Rondo capriccioso. The pro-forma Haydn opener, Symphony No. 95, was several notches above a snooze, dark-toned and agile. There are more promising Philharmonic concerts coming up, especially Messiaen's final masterpiece Éclairs sur l'Au-Delà, under Kent Nagano. Also, in an effort to reach new audiences, the Philharmonic has named Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith (upper left) as its new artistic administrator. Wait, no — they've named Los Angeles Philharmonic administrator Chad Smith. Sorry for the confusion. Given the LAPhil's remarkable programming in the last couple of years, this is good news, I think.

Afterward, on the 66th St. subway platform, concertgoers were treated to a new Lincoln Center institution, Well-Prepared Saxophone Man. He's a top-notch player who times his performances to the end of each concert at Lincoln Center, and goes to the trouble of playing a bit of what you've just heard. Sometimes the choices are a stretch — Rosenkavalier doesn't sound so good on the sax — but Bolero, with its big sax solos, is a natural. W-PSM even worked in portions of the Bolero rhythm beneath the melody. I love the post-concert music-nerd subway ride. It's wonderfully strange to be sitting in a car full of people who've listened to, say, Katya Kabanova. Everyone instantly puts his or her affectless subway mask on, which seems a shame. We ought to be prattling gaily about the tempos.

Copenhagen Diary

In the tradition of my Bayreuth Pilgrimage from last summer, here's a photolog of my trip to Copenhagen, on the occasion of the premiere of Poul Ruders' opera Kafka’s Trial. A review will appear in the New Yorker next week, alongside a report on Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata at the Houston Grand Opera.

As always when I'm in Copenhagen — OK, I've been here one other time — I stay at the Radisson SAS Royal Hotel. (One more movie line for Our Girl in Chicago: "It's a Radisson, so you know it's pretty good, yah.") The exterior is nondescript sixties modern, the lobby is nothing to get excited about, but the interiors, the work of the great Danish architect-designer Arne Jacobsen, make it seem unnecessary to go outside:

The view out the window:

But there's hardly time to relax. Music criticism, as some of you may not realize, is punishingly hard work, albeit not so much physical as mental. Here I am furiously studying the score, on the lookout for fugitive triads of E-flat minor:

The new Copenhagen opera house is called OPERAEN, or THE OPERA. There has apparently been some kind of architectural controversy about it. To my dilettantish eye, it looks pretty cool, as almost everything in Denmark does:

The Saw is opening in Denmark (sign in middle):

Back at the hotel, it’s time for the fun part — writing the review!

Night of the Living Dead, Pt. VI

Two stories on ArtsJournal: "Did Toscanini Kill Classical Music in America?" and "The Day Aussie Orchestras Died?" The big question is, of course, whether Toscanini killed orchestras in Australia. In the conservatory, with a candlestick.

Attersee redux

For a few moments of pure off-kilter pleasure, pay a visit to Edmund Welles, a Bay Area bass-clarinet quartet — "heavy chamber music, muzak for conspiracy theorists, songs of lunacy and purpose." Be sure to listen to their version of "Creep."

Bone-foresaking beauty

It's been a while since I've gone on a Bob Dylan bender, right? James Tata recommends Luc Sante's magisterial review of recent Boblications in the New York Review of Books. I recommend it, too, though, as often in Dylan criticism, there’s a reluctance to discuss the music. One of Sante’s few attempts at musical description occurs in the following paragraph:

Among the four fifths of the Basement Tapes material that remains officially unreleased is a song called "I'm Not There" (1956). It is glaringly unfinished—Dylan mumbles unintelligibly through parts of it, and throws together fragments of lyrics apparently at random—and yet it is one of his greatest songs. The hymn-like minor-key melody, rising from mournful to exalted, is certainly one reason for this, and another is the perfect accompaniment by three members of The Band, but the very discontinuity of the lyrics, in combination with Dylan's unflagging intensity, creates a powerful, tantalizing indeterminacy that is suddenly if provisionally resolved by every return of the refrain: ‘Now when I [unintelligible] I was born to love her / But she knows that the kingdom weighs so high above her / And I run but I race but it's not too fast or soon [?] / But I don't perceive her, I'm not there, I'm gone."

Two ultra-pedantic points. First, “1956” isn’t the date of composition; it’s part of the title. What it means, no one knows. Second, the song’s in B major. Why it ends up sounding sad and “minorish” is an interesting topic. I think it has something to do with the curious, not quite logical order in which Dylan shuffles through the five chords of the song (three major, two minor), and the way he lands on a G#-minor chord at the beginning of the second phrase of the refrain, where you might expect the tonic. You hear the same major-key mournfulness in “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” In any case, the fact that you can’t really make out the lyrics to this song, and yet keep listening, should be a clue that the music itself is the heart of the matter. As Eyolf Ostrem writes on his excellent Dylan-as-composer site, “’I'm Not There’ is Dylan's most musical song …. The meaning is veiled in the same way as the meaning of an utterance in a language that one does not understand is veiled: there seems to be a meaning there, but it is hidden.” This is not to deny that there are powerful verbal images at work — “the kingdom weighs [or waits] so high above her” — but if you go chasing after only the words you’ll be left with nothing, because much of the time Dylan may not have had words in mind at all — only chords, shorn tunes, and unsayable feelings.

Walt Whitman on Beethoven's Septet

“Dainty abandon, sometimes as if Nature laughing on a hillside in the sunshine; serious and firm monotonies, as of winds; a horn sounding through the tangle of the forest, and the dying echoes; soothing floating of waves, but presently rising in surges, angrily lashing, muttering, heavy; piercing peals of laughter, for interstices; now and then weird, as Nature herself is in certain moods—but mainly spontaneous, easy, careless…”

Daring in Duluth

On the subject of brilliant programming, see this season's programs by the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra: Love of Country, Tragic Love, Love of Nature (the Pastorale and the Rite of Spring), Unrequited Love, Forbidden Love (Tchaikovsky, naturally), Fatal Love (Carmen), and Love of Music. An article by Chester Lane in Symphony magazine alerted me to this venture, which is the brainchild of conductor Markand Thakar. Last season they did the Seven Deadly Sins, and for Wrath (paired with the virtue of Brotherhood) they put Beethoven's Ninth next to William Grant Still's And They Lynched Him on a Tree. Gives me chills just to think about.

Atlanta, hello?

A story in Playbill Arts notes that the Atlanta Symphony has announced its 2005-6 season. Since Robert Spano, the Atlanta's director, is one of the most imaginative programmers in the business, I went to the Atlanta Symphony site to see what he had wrought. Alas, there was no way to look at the entire season. I've made this complaint before and I'll make it again. The site is designed only for people buying subscription packages, not for those who want tickets for individual concerts or who are interested in what the orchestra is doing. I clicked on "2005-6 Season On Sale Now." Then I clicked on "Compose-Your-Own" series, figuring that would tell me what each program contains. After clicking on "Order Series Now," and then on "Order Thursday," I got a list of composers' names — Mahler, Sibelius & Brahms, and so on — but no individual works. Even for subscribers, this paucity of information must be frustrating. By clicking on other series, I got a few fleeting glimpses of the programming, and, yes, it looks great.

The Met's new web site, on the other hand, is divina.

Three Oscars isn't bad

One of the most remarkable aspects of blogging is the ability to comment within minutes — even within seconds — on events as they unfold. Thus it is that I can weigh in via instantaneous electronic transmission on the Oscars, which took place no more than eleven days ago. I enjoyed the Oscars; I thought Chris Rock was funny; I was happy when Morgan Freeman won. As usual, Jonathan and I invited some friends over to watch the broadcast, and whoever guessed the most winners received a spray-painted Mrs. Butterworth's bottle. In past years, Jonathan won twice and I won once. This year, our friend Ron took home the statuette, because he figured out both sound awards. As you can see, Penelope likes to sit on top of the TV with her golden friends. We think she uses them to blend in, so that unsuspecting apartment creatures — pens, pencils, bags, boxes, ribbon, birdie-toys, rainbow-colored mousie, and so on — will have no idea she is about to pounce. They never do.

Blitzstein blitzkrieg

Robert Gable reports on the Marc Blitzstein centenary tribute at Other Minds in San Francisco, or, more accurately, reports on a Financial Times review by Allan Ulrich that I don't want to go through the "15-day free trial" rigmarole to read. Writes Ulrich: "In Sarah Cahill's committed performance, the West Coast premiere of the unpublished 1929 Piano Percussion Music heralded a sophisticated musician, attuned to the emotive power of dissonance, the imitative capabilities of the traditional keyboard, a grounding in ornamentation and, in the repeated closing of the keyboard cover, a taste for the dadaist flourishes of the day." The piano-lid gambit recalls Hans Stuckenschmidt's First Piano Sonata, which caused a mild uproar at a Novembergruppe concert of "stationary music" in 1927. At the end of that work, the pianist (Stefan Wolpe, on this occasion) used the right pedal to trigger a mechanism that brought the piano lid down "from a moderate height." So Stuckenschmidt discloses in his memoir Born to Hear — he was eventually more famous as a critic and biographer. Cahill, by the way, is a wonderful Bay Area pianist who specializes in American music, and also plays Ravel about as well as anyone.

A shout-out to Byrant Manning, who has a new blog devoted promisingly to "Classical Arts and Mysteries Abysmal: resurrecting the forgotten, revisiting the familiar and reacting to anything else." That should just about cover it. Also to Oakland pianist Heather, who has a great post on pianists' hands. Cat-lovers should go right now to the Amateur Gourmet, and in particular to the "Video Message from Lolita" under "Funny Food Films" on the left-hand side. Coincidentally, the Gourmet has an informal review of Bright Food Shop, my favorite Chelsea eatery (at 8th and 21st, opposite the Rawhide).

Agenda 3/8 - 3/13

Ancedotal evidence suggests that these Agendas are prompting at least a few NYC'ers to attend the concerts in question — a disturbing development. Don't sue me if they suck. Tuesday: the rock-solid young pianist Jonathan Biss plays Berg, Mozart, Schubert, and Kirchner at Zankel — three Austrians and a guy from Brooklyn. Thursday: the Ba Ban Chinese Music Society unfurls works by Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Bun-Ching Lam, and Huang Ruo at Greenwich House Arts, a wonderful rickety old place on Barrow Street in the West Village. Or, if you're in the mood for hilarity at the expense of VH1's squawking pop-culture commentators, see The Name of This Play is Talking Heads at UNDER St. Marks (through March 26; nepotism alert). Over the weekend I'll be in Copenhagen for the premiere of Poul Ruders' Kafka's Trial, but otherwise I'd be checking out three Carnegie concerts by the Vienna Phil, which, after a few dullish tours, has a genius at the helm: Mariss Jansons. (Jansons was the conductor who lost points during the NY Phil's last maestro tryouts when he asked the orchestra to rehearse during the rehearsal.) On the new-music beat, Relâche, the downtownish group from Philadelphia, appears Friday at Symphony Space, and on Saturday the Fireworks Ensemble lights up the suddenly hot-hot-hot Tenri Cultural Institute with a program entitled "Surrealism in Music?" Come Monday there's a free show by Tactus, the Manhattan School of Music Contemporary Ensemble, whose explosive rendition of Michael Gordon's Decasia last fall is still ringing in my damaged ears. Presumably they'll be fully clothed this time; for Decasia, they performed shirtless / in bras. (Somehow I forgot to mention that fact in my review.) Notations are provided by Steve Reich (Proverb, Drumming), Martin Bresnick (his Der Signal, for ensemble, narrator, and shadow puppets), and Julia Wolfe (Early That Summer). Next week I'll catch up with Rosenkavalier at the Met, which opens on Friday. Laura Aikin, the Sophie, was the luminous still point of the SF Opera's never-to-be-forgotten production of St. Francis two seasons ago. To quote Hugo von Hofmannsthal, time is weird stuff.

Mt. Mahler

The Bruckner post below reminded one reader of the famous story about Mahler "composing the Alps," but she couldn't remember the details. From Bruno Walter's memoir of the composer: "I arrived by steamer on a glorious July day; Mahler was there on the jetty to meet me, and despite my protests, insisted on carrying my bag until he was relieved by a porter. As on our way to his house I looked up to the Höllengebirge, whose sheer cliffs made a grim background to the charming landscape, he said: 'You don't need to look — I have composed all this already!'" Mahler was referring to the opening of his Third Symphony, the D-minor theme for eight horns unison ff ("What the rocky mountains tell me"), and he exaggerated only slightly.

Picture courtesy of the Attersee tourist board. If you are interested in a Gustav Mahler Holiday, inquire here. Click here for pictures of Not Pierre Boulez on his own Mahler Holiday. The best recording of the Third Symphony is Jascha Horenstein's, now available only on a Brilliant Classics box set. Second best, I'd say, is Leonard Bernstein's second version, on DG. Mahler still grooves.

Bruckner Expressway

The Internet, which makes life so much easier that I never get anything done, allows me to keep up with critics I'd otherwise seldom read. One I've enjoyed getting to know is Tom Strini of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who recently wrote:

The tour bus is high in the Austrian Alps. The guide, Mr. Bruckner, is going on in the most earnest and expansive poetic terms about the Alpine grandeur and its proximity to God. The tourists ooh and aah and nod in solemn agreement with the insights of the mystic commentator. The mood breaks when a plaintive cry from the back of the bus — Are we there yet? — rises from the squeaky voice of a lone dissenter. That would be me, again encountering the music of Anton Bruckner at a Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra concert.

Alan Rich, too, is a card-carrying Anti-Brucknerite: he defiantly states that "the right of exit and re-entry during performances of Bruckner symphonies remains my prerogative." Me, I worshipped Bruckner as a youngster, but the fad is fading. One problem is the monumental lack of wit. Bruckner's Scherzos are stocked with Humor of the banging-the-beer-stein variety, which is anything but funny. Still, a fiery, vital Bruckner performance can be a glorious thing. Jascha Horenstein's live recordings are a case in point, as are Otto Klemperer's EMI discs of the Fourth and Sixth Symphonies. I'm not quite ready to join the Bruckner-haters, though one more turgid performance by a Club World Maestro might put me over the edge.

Update: Brendan McNamara leaps to Bruckner's defense. He says that Bruckner's symphonies are "an antecedent to modern minimalist music, at least in the 'expansion of our awarenss of time' and the 'slowly unfolding over time' aspects.'" I hear you. For me, the problem isn't so much the music itself as the prevailing style of performance — bloated, monumental, self-solemnizing. We need to get away from the image of Bruckner as a "real Cyclops," to quote from Goebbels' diaries.

Feline perspectives: Tan Dun

Penelope admires the lush melody and brutal orchestration of Tan Dun's Marco Polo.

Hard on the heels of the Ten Things I've Done... competition (see below) comes the Five Random Movie Lines competition, hosted by Our Girl in Chicago. Here are my entries:

1. "You have no idea." — Reversal of Fortune
2. "Well, it's very ... homey." — The Shining
3. "Where would you put Mr. James Joyce?" — The Third Man
4. "Prepare for total domination!" — Bring It On
5. "They're yelling in Baton Rouge!" — Network 

Five other favorite lines from The Third Man:

1. "Already in hell ... or in heaven."
2. "Oh yes, the Hindu dancers. Thank you, Sargeant."
3. "It's wonderful how you keep the tension."
4. "You were born to be murdered."
5. "Ballon, mein Herr?"

More ambitious posts on the deeper history of the key of E-flat minor, the sexual psychodrama behind Berg's Chamber Concerto, and the whole story of Gavriil Popov will have to wait; I'm in transit today to a southern destination.

Thursday miscellany

I'm not sure if I grasped the form of Chen Yi's Ballad, Dance, and Fantasy, which Yo-Yo Ma and the Singapore Symphony played at Lincoln Center last night, but the brooding first movement contains some of the most fantastic orchestral combinations I've heard in years: solo cello over deep winds, soft string glissandos and harmonics, whispered chants from the percussion section. For more on this concert, read Justin Davidson.... Are all students in the NYC area aware of Lincoln Center's hot student-ticket deal? For $20 you can get the best available seat in the house at any Great Performers, Mostly Mozart, or Lincoln Center Festival show. Most orchestras and performing-arts centers have a deal like this. Classical Music wants Young People! If you are in your late thirties or early forties and beginning to feel a little ragged round the edges, you will find Classical Music rejuvenating, because if you are under the age of 45 you are effectively pubescent.... New blogs: Sound Bites, Laurel Letters.... Excellent thoughts on the audience question from Jeffery Cotton.... Can't argue with Jessica, but our hearts were with Deltrice.... I've run aground at five items in Terry Teachout's "Ten Things I've Done That You Probably Haven't" contest, but here they are: 1. I once finished shelving adult titles as a video-store clerk in time to go to dinner at Katherine Graham’s house with Charles Krauthammer and Yo-Yo Ma. 2. I played four different recordings of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto simultaneously on the radio. 3. I was served tea by Richard Strauss’ housekeeper. 4. I spent a family vacation visiting Canadian asbestos mines. 5. I blew out a cylinder in my 1989 Hyundai Excel in Billings, Montana, then kept driving until I reached DC. Hello, old friend!

Blitzstein lives

Marc Blitzstein, the hard-left American composer whose steeltown musical The Cradle Will Rock was one of the most storied cultural events of the New Deal period, would have been one hundred today. He was born into a rich Philadelphia family and showed early promise as a piano virtuoso. Taking up composition, he studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and in Berlin with Schoenberg, who snarled at him, "Go ahead, you write your Franco-Russian pretty music." In the late twenties, his politics swerved far to the left, partly under the influence of the radical Berlin-born novelist Eva Goldbeck, who married him in spite of the fact that he was gay. The Cradle Will Rock was inspired by Brecht; according to Orson Welles, who directed the premiere, Blitzstein believed it would incite an American revolution. In the forties, the composer completed two other high-profile projects, the Airborne Symphony and Regina, despite a gathering storm against real and supposed Communist infiltration of the arts. Ironically, his greatest success was his forceful translation of The Threepenny Opera, which had failed to catch on in previous American incarnations. Some of Blitzstein's agitprop music now sounds pretty thin, and the specter of Stalinism lurks behind even his most innocent homilies to minorities and the working class. But at his best — in the anti-elitist anthem "Art for Art's Sake," for example — he rivals Weill and Eisler at their most savagely potent. Whatever else you think of him or his politics, Blitzstein's music has great historical importance; it reflects the strange soul of America in the thirties, when, according to polls, twenty-five percent of the country wanted some form of socialist government. Much more about this remarkable period in The Rest Is Noise: The Book.

Last week I stated that the Blitzstein centennial was being pretty much ignored on the East Coast. I stand by that generalization, but there's still activity to report. The biggest happening is the Kennedy Center's production of Regina, Blitzstein's operatic adaptation of Lillian Hellman's Little Foxes. The semi-staged production stars Patti LuPone, no less, and plays for four performances, from March 10 to 12. Here in NYC, the activist composer Leonard Lehrman has organized a string of events lasting through the summer: read more on his website. Tonight at 7:30PM, the Brecht Forum is holding a Blitzstein concert-symposium; the panel includes Ned Rorem and Eric Salzman, and Helene Williams and Lerhman will perform a selection of Blitzstein songs. Lehrman has also organized Blitzstein concerts this weekend, one at the People's Voice Café on East 33rd St., the other at the Aaron Copland School of Music in Flushing. The lineup of performers includes the Workmen's Circle Chorus, the Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus, and the Solidarity Singers of the New Jersey Industrial Union Council. (The Cultural Front lives on!) Note that Lehrman has put together a completed version of Sacco and Vanzetti, which was commissioned by the Met, no less, and which the alcohol-bedeviled composer struggled for years to finish. He died in 1964, at the hands of three sailors in Martinique. He did not write Franco-Russian pretty music.

Agenda 3/1 - 3/6

This week's picks: the Singapore Symphony at Lincoln Center on Wednesday, playing Chen Yi's almost brand-new Cello Concerto as well as He Zhanhao and Chen Gang's violin concerto The Butterfly Lovers, a charming relic of the Mao Zedong era (Yo-Yo Ma and Gil Shaham are the soloists); on Thursday, the Collegiate Chorale presenting Fidelio, with the radically slimmed-down Deborah Voigt in the title role; on Thursday and Friday, the New York Collegium doing the St. Matthew Passion, with bariblogger Tom Meglioranza as Jesus; on Saturday, the Gregg Smith Singers giving a concert at St. Peter's, including Dmitri Tymoczko's brilliant self-referential cantata The Agony of Modern Music (texts by Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Babbitt, and Bernstein); and, on Sunday, three masters of Persian classical music — Mohammad Reza Shajarian, Hossein Alizadeh, and Kayhan Kalhor — performing at Jazz at Lincoln Center. I've been listening avidly to this same group's CD Faryad, and thinking about how a global definition of "classical music" benefits all parties. If the term "classical" makes people think of Kayhan Kalhor as well as Bach, I have no problem with it. The group will also be in Atlanta on March 10, Boston on March 12, Cleveland on March 18, and Chicago on March 20; details here.

Milton Bizzabbitt

A tip from one of New York's leading younger composers led me to Gizoogle, a site that translates any given Google search or web page into Snoop language. Snoop language is, for those who don't know, a sort of additive English dialect devised by the eminent hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg. Here is the opening paragraph of Milton Babbitt's militant new-music manifesto "Who Cares If You Listen?" as rendered by Gizoogle: "This article might have been entitled 'The Wanna Be Gangsta as Specialist' or, alternatizzles n perhaps less contentizzles 'izzle Composa as Anachronism.' For I am concerned wit perpetratin' an attitude towards tha indisputable facts of tha status n condition of tha booty of what we wizzill, fo' tha moment, designate as 'serious,' 'advanced,' contemporary music, aww nah. His rappa expends an enormous amount of tizzle n energy — and, usually, considerable money — on tha creation of a commodity W-H-to-tha-izzich has little, no, or negative commodity value puttin tha smack down. ‘E is, in essence, a 'vanity' brotha. One, two three and to tha four. He general public is largely unaware of n uninterested in his music. Tha majority of performa shun it n resent it. Conseqizzles tha music is shawty performed, n T-H-to-tha-izzen primarily at poorly attended concerts before an audience perpetratin' in tha main of fellow professizzles in da club." I think I finally get it!

In memory of a friend

     ...I'm for and with myself in my otherness,
     in the eternal return of earth's fairer children,
     the lily, the rose, the sun on brick at dusk,
     the loved, the lover, and their fear of life....

                                           — Robert Lowell, "Obit"

Ravi Desai, il miglior fabbro, died on Feb. 19 at the age of 35.

Brahms and death

This is the Radu Lupu CD that I celebrated in my latest New Yorker column as one of the most beautiful piano records ever made. Brahms described his Intermezzos Opus 117 as "lullabies of my sorrow"; the first in the set embodies this emotional doubleness, being at once an innocent, pure, almost childlike thing and a message of practically infinite sadness. Lupu plays it so well because he does not try to enhance by artificial gestures the complexities that lie behind the simple surface; instead, he lets us find them for ourselves. There is a certain symbolism in the key structure of this piece. The "A" section is in E-flat, which is Beethoven's "heroic" key, the key of the Eroica and the Emperor. Yet outward heroism has been completely stripped away; only a steady current of inward power remains. Strauss' great farewell, "Im Abendrot" in the Four Last Songs, uses E-flat in a similar way. But the middle section is in E-flat minor,  which is for many composers the key of death. It is the chord on which Tristan dies; it is the key of the funeral march of Tchaikovsky's Third Quartet; it is the chord on which Elektra falls lifeless in her eponymous opera; it is the key of every movement of Shostakovich's Fifteenth Quartet, that requiem for requiems. In Brahms, the most quietly shattering moment comes when a C sounds miles deep beneath an E-flat-minor chord in the middle range, approximating the harmony of Tristan's death (a Tristan chord with no exit). Somehow the music pulls itself back from that abyss, and the opening music sounds again, with gentle vines of slow sixteenth notes wrapped around it. What happens in the final bars is beyond description.

Why, incidentally, does the key of E-flat minor seem to have a morbid sound? I once asked the St. Lawrence Quartet this question, with reference to the Tchaikovsky quartet, and they guessed that it has to do with the difficulty of playing E-flat minor on string instruments. Berlioz's orchestration manual calls this key "almost impracticable." Modern players don't have much trouble with it, but they still have to negotiate some awkward fingerings. The open strings, which produce the cleanest, brightest sound, are basically out of play. B-flat minor and A-flat minor have similar "dark" reputations, for not dissimilar reasons. Perhaps the hint of struggle puts a pall over the music — a deathly pall, if you like. This isn't an issue on the piano, where E-flat minor is theoretically interchangeable with any other minor triad. But the primeval key-associations linger, producing an intuitive shudder even in listeners who do not think they know the difference.

The dreaded redesign

Better? worse? To me, it "breathes".... Leon Dominguez, aka Sieglinde, has been on a tear lately, with raging posts on opera etiquette or lack thereof.... Jason Kottke, master of the coolest links, has bravely quit his day job and is soliciting funds for his blog. Support him if you can.... Please note a new link under "Links & News" to the right — Opus 1 Classical, a UK-based site that lists forthcoming musical events in cities around the world. It's incredibly helpful.... I was going to work up a post on the Gotham Chamber Opera's Ariadne in Crete, but Charles "Boss" Michener says in the New York Observer all that need be said. "Communist Albania" indeed. Good singers, though; Caroline Worra might be a new soprano powerhouse.... Lynn Sislo of Reflections in D Minor passionately defends Classical Etiquette. I don't agree, but I like her style, which, paradoxically, flies in the face of Classical Etiquette.... Endtroducing Pack! I first encountered Patrick Bringley on the Dylan message boards when I was researching my piece on the Maestro. Obviously the world's youngest, smartest Dylan fan, he gave me the precious quote, "Do you have to be from Elizabethan England to appreciate Shakespeare?" He worked two summers ago as my research assistant, looking up crazy articles on Uruguayan twelve-tone music and making uncomfortably sharp comments on my book. Now he's making his career as a poet, and he has a totally unique voice.... For NYC'ers, an extra plug for the NOW Ensemble show at Tenri Cultural Institute on Saturday night. It hasn't been very widely listed, and it should be good. Say "The Rest Is Noise" at the door, and you will get a weird look.

Record of the year

When I saw on Carl Wilson's site that Brian Joseph Davis had put out a limited-edition EP of quotations from Theodor W. Adorno's Minima Moralia performed in the style of agitprop punk, I had to put down my $20 to get me some. It arrived today, and it made me glad. Greil Marcus wrote in Lipstick Traces that Adorno's assaults on mass culture are punk-rock rants at heart; the Minima Moralia EP brings that conceit to hilarious, dubious life. Davis plays squalling guitars; Dawn Unwanted drawls the lyrics. The pick hit is "Every Work of Art Is an Uncommitted Crime," one of my favorite lines from the Meister's writings. The song consists of that one line, repeated over and over, followed by screaming. I bow in the presence of genius.

Lupu, Anderszewski

Four Hands. The New Yorker, Feb. 28, 2005.

Agenda 2/22 - 2/27

I'm beset by California envy again, wistfully reading the prospectus of the 11th Other Minds Festival, which begins on Thursday in San Francisco. Several principal personalities of what is variously called "experimental," "downtown," "avant-garde," or "post-minimalist" music will attend. As a proponent of Lower Midtown Music, I'm inclined to look at this us-vs.-them jargon with a skeptical eye, but it makes for a useful rallying point, if nothing else. The line-up includes Phill Niblock (whose guitar piece Sethwork was one of the highlights of Sounds Like Now last fall); veteran Bay Area sound-poet Charles Amirkhanian; hip-hop-inflected violinist-composer Daniel Bernard Roumain; a concert in celebration of left-wing firebrand Marc Blitzstein, whose centenary seems to have been overlooked on this more politically fearful coast; John Luther Adams, topographer of spacious, imaginatively detailed soundscapes (and not to be confused with the composer of Nixon); and Bang on a Can's Evan Ziporyn.

But there's plenty to see at home this week: an American Composers Orchestra concert on Wednesday night, including a premiere by former Bay Area stalwart Ingram Marshall (his vocal-electronic piece Hymnodic Delays is a digital-age masterpiece); Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream, semistaged with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at Lincoln Center on Thursday; a show by Antony & The Johnsons later that night (that's a link to Antony's lustrous new CD, not to the sold-out show*); two concerts by the bright young NOW Ensemble, both featuring Judd Greenstein's fantastic new piece Folk Music, the second with blogger-composer Mark Dancigers; and — could you ask for a more perfect warm-up for the Oscars? — a Sunday Met Chamber Ensemble concert including Kurtág's Hommage à R. Sch. and Berg's Chamber Concerto. If I were a supernatural being, I would also attend Wet Ink w/ Charles Gayle on Wednesday, the Philharmonia Baroque at Zankel on the same night, and Per Tengstrand at Scandinavia House on Thursday. Fans of dramatically batty, diction-free, intermittently gorgeous tenor singing will also want to hear José Cura in Samson at the Met on Thursday or later. Last night's premiere left me personally less than gobsmacked, but knowledgeable opéramanes in my circle were transported.

* "Indirection!" — Miss Gould

The fire this time

Jeff Chang's book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, new from St. Martin's, has received a huge amount of attention in the pop-music press, and with good reason. I couldn't say it any better than whoever wrote it up for the New Yorker's Briefly Noted column: "The birth of hip-hop out of the ruin of the South Bronx is a story that has been told many times, but never with the cinematic scope and the analytic force that Chang brings to it. Robert Moses unleashes the destructive juggernaut of the Cross-Bronx Expressway; landlords set fire to worthless tenements; police stand by and do nothing; and, against a backdrop of gang warfare, peacemaking d.j.s lay down the heavy beats and spidery loops around which a rapping, dancing, graffiti-painting culture grows. This is one of the most urgent and passionate histories of popular music ever written. Chang is blind to no one’s greed or viciousness, but he retains an idealistic view of a music that speaks the truth about the alternately stultifying and horrifying urban landscapes that the parents who hate hip-hop have made." OK, that was me. Chang blogs here.

Rampant narcissism

A warm welcome to San José Mercury News readers who've read Rich Scheinin's delightful story on classical blogging. He has some very kind words for this site, and, more importantly, for such bløgõsphëric powerhouses as Twang Twang Twang, Trrill, The Standing Room (I was joking with the é, TSR), Lisa Hirsch, and Vilaine Fille. See "Music Blogs" to the right for an extended list. The key quote is Lisa's: "There are a lot more people out there who can write intelligently about music than have outlets to write about it." Ain't that the truth!

Kittygates, oBoeblogging, I'm Stalin, etc.

I haven't been to see Christo's "The Gates" in Central Park: this crazy modern art is usually over my head. But I've very happily visited The Somerville Gates, which might be characterized as Gates for kitties.... An oboe blog! And another! ... The unpredictable Fredösphere writes: "Terry Teachout and Alex Ross are the Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin of the blogösphere, except without the genocide!" The exclamation point, he says, denotes irony, thank God.... A reader asks my opinion of a Details magazine piece on Maxim Vengerov. I was pretty stunned to see such an in-depth profile of a classical musician in a mainstream magazine. And it was good: Jeff Gordinier followed Vengerov on a trip to his childhood home in Siberia, working in observations about his personality and musicianship along the way. Whether it measured up to the Brazilian men's swimsuit portfolio that directly preceded it is hard to say. If magazines like Details decide that young classical performers are some higher form of cool — well, it won't solve all our problems, but it sure won't hurt.... Road to Stardom update: like, no way proudly eclectic "Jewbian" Akil should have lost out to "Orlando, Florida theme-park entertainer" born-again Timberfake Matthew. Not since Ravel failed to win the Prix de Rome has there been such a scandale.

Applause: A Rest Is Noise Special Report

Here is everything I have been able to discover about the history of applause between movements of symphonies and concertos, a topic which has taken over my blog like a crazy weed, and which I now intend to spray with Brahms. I’m sure there’s a musicologist somewhere who’s done an exhaustive study of the subject. Leon Botstein’s eagerly awaited History of Listening will probably reveal more. Below, I’ve combined some old posts with new material that I’ve dug up in libraries. Bernard Sherman has been very helpful in pointing me toward sources. The post rambles on at a length that will surely exhaust the attention span of all but the most terminally bored readers. Descend into the quagmire at your own risk.

More old reviews

Morton Feldman and Galina Ustvolskaya.

Music and the war

Between 1992 and 1996, I wrote about five hundred reviews and articles for the New York Times. I have no intention of putting all that old material on this site. Indeed, if there were a way to expunge a few of my neophyte efforts from the permanent record, I'd happily do so. My ill-considered attack on Bizet's Carmen, for example, did little to establish my credibility with the operagoing public. Some of the pieces, though, are worthy of preservation, not so much because they're electrifying in themselves but because reports of premieres and other happenings have archival value. In that spirit I put up my review of a marathon performance of Satie's Vexations. Here's another old Times piece: an essay on musical events surrounding the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. I spent the summer of 1995 traveling across Europe, and this was my summary report. It turned out to be the jumping-off point for my forthcoming book. The wonderful headline — "In Music, Though, There Were No Victories" — was Jim Oestreich's invention.

The decorum debate goes on

AC Douglas responds to recent posts on this site (at least I think I'm in there somewhere): "Classical music critics writing today who champion such changes in our present-day classical music concert etiquette for the express purpose of making the classical music concert more inviting to, and comfortable for, the masses (one of those critics goes so far as to mindlessly suggest that we turn the promotion of classical music, and the classical music concert itself, into the rough equivalent of a circus act to make it more appealing to the masses) are simply as wrongheaded about the matter as they could possibly be, notwithstanding how well-intentioned their championing, and seem oblivious of the wholesale damage that would obtain were their proposals put into actual practice." Or not.

Marcus Maroney is afraid of applause run rampant: "If we begin to allow — and then to expect — clapping between movements of certain works, won't the behavior become equally 'regulated'? What will an orchestra think at the end of the first movement of the Emperor Concerto five years down the road when there's only silence after the last note?  Is the audience disinterested (why bother with the other movements...)?  Has the performance been bad (or just not as good as last time...)?  Did the pianist not end with enough 'flourish' (or is he just saving that last amount of expression for the true finale...)?" Maybe orchestras ought to be thinking about those things while they perform!

Drew McManus is on my side, and goes so far as to endorse mid-concert booing. He says: "In the end, all of this business with strict rules of conduct and aversion to booing has to come from a sincere lack of confidence among the bulk of orchestra patrons in their own understanding of classical music." There's the dark truth behind so-called concert etiquette. It lets audiences off the hook. Instead of delivering an informed, passionate reaction to each segment of the concert as it unfolds, they can sit in neutral silence until the end. A truly engaged audience would applaud warmly when it's called for, remain silent when applause is inappropriate, and boo when the performance falls obviously short. See opera.

Readers may wonder: Does this man practice what he preaches? Indeed I do. I now routinely applaud after each movement of a CD. (Joke borrowed from Patrick Bringley.)

Did April really have to turn on you?

Thank you, Douglas Wolk, for posting an MP3 of the mysteriously great Death of Samantha song "Rosenberg Summer." You made my day.

Medved's masterpiece

I’m always on the lookout for mentions of the music in unexpected places. I was paging through a copy of Michael Medved’s Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons from a Controversial Life at my local bookstore — purely out of morbid curiosity, mind you — when I came across a semi-striking fact: while the film critic-turned-moral philosopher was attending Palisades High School, in LA, he and other students collaborated with Roy Harris on a musical pageant titled Liberty? I can find no such work in the Harris worklist in The New Grove, but Medved assures us he wrote the libretto for it. In a commendable spirit of self-criticism, which he is welcome to extend to his more recent work, he calls his text “insufferable, incoherent adolescent whining.” He is not, incidentally, the only televised film critic to play a cameo role in the career of a major American composer. Harry Partch scholars know Roger Ebert as the author of a discerning review of Partch’s microtonal musical Water! Water! Ebert was the student critic for the Daily Illini at the time. Ebert, by the way, is one of my favorite critics working in any medium. When I was first starting out, I used his collected reviews as a model. That’s neither here nor there. This entire post is neither here nor there. That’s what blogs are for!

The Gould

Eleanor Gould Packard, who was the New Yorker's hugely formidable watchdog of English style, died on Sunday night. Hundreds of New Yorker writers have had the humiliating but rejuvenating experience of being sent back to school by Miss Gould's proofs. (Or should that be: "...the experience — humiliating but rejuvenating — of being sent back to school..."? She lives on in our anxious minds.) I am forever grateful for the education, and I will long savor the memory of that triumphant day when one of my pieces came back with fewer than ten spidery annotations per page. Miss Gould had written one extra word at the top: "Good." I wish I'd saved that proof.

Whatever

The irrepressible Tom Hartley learned on Greg Sandow's site that John Cage's 4'33" actually consists of three movements — "I. Tacet. II. Tacet. III. Tacet" — and was prompted to ask: "Has there ever been a performance of 4'33" where the audience applauded between movements?"  

Willkommen!

Herzliche Grüße an unseren österreichischen Lesern! "Das Blog von Alex Ross" has been cited on Austrian Broadcasting (ORF) Online, in a feature on Finnland als Musik-Mekka.

I had been intending to write a follow-up feature on Finnish CDs. Here is an abbreviated version. Two outstanding Sibelius recordings by Osmo Vänskä, extolled in my New Yorker piece, are the First and Fourth Symphonies (BIS CD-861) and the complete incidental music to The Tempest (CD-861). Those seeking a deeper adventure into Sibelius' mind can pick up the two versions of the Fifth Symphony, which document the composer tearing his work to pieces and then putting it back together in miraculously perfected form (BIS CD-863). It's both thrilling and terrifying to behold — like that scene in Ronin when De Niro performs surgery on himself. Einojuhani Rautavaara's best work is his Seventh Symphony, recorded by both Ondine and Naxos. Gestures of the late-Romantic symphony unfold behind a dreamlike scrim. The darker-hued music of Aulis Sallinen is well represented on BIS CD-41. The avant-garde strain in Finnish music, which retained a certain humor and razzle-dazzle lacking in continental European forms (ahem), reached its apogee in Magnus Lindberg's junk-metal concerto KRAFT, which I was lucky to see performed live at the 1999 Ojai Festival (whence came the bunny pictures). Esa-Pekka Salonen recorded the piece in the 80s and recently made another version for Ondine (1017-2). The opening isn't quite as coolly explosive as the old disc, but the rest is raucous enough to cause the neighbors to call the police.

Update: Timothy Mangan of the Orange County Register, who was also present at that epic Ojai performance of KRAFT, reminds me that the instrumentarium included an array of radiators and brake drums dangling from a sycamore tree. At a climactic moment near the end, one of the Toimii jumped off the stage, ran down the aisle, banged on the auto parts with a mallet, and ran back to the stage. I'd like to clarify that the Toimii were no longer wearing their bunny suits at the time.

Agenda 2/15-2/20

Miller Theatre is not kidding around this week, with a Brian Sacawa  saxophone recital on Wednesday (works by Alvin Lucier, Martin Bresnick, Michael Gordon, u.a.), a Music from Copland House concert on Thursday (the Copland sextet, Sebastian Currier premiere), and a putatively delirious Alarm Will Sound show on Saturday (Nancarrow, Ligeti). Also on Wednesday, Church of St. Ignatius Loyola rolls out Schnittke's grand, mysterious Concerto for Choir, alongside other sacred Russian works. And two performances remain of Gotham Chamber Opera's Ariadne in Crete, on Tuesday and Friday.

The boredoms

I'm not a big Norman Lebrecht fan, as readers of this blog know, but I have to admit his latest column is right on:

Why the world has gone off classical concerts [sic] is a conundrum in which almost every reasonable assertion is disputable. Take the attention-span thesis. Many in the concert world believe that its decline stems from the public’s flickering tolerance for prolonged concentration. If politicians speak in soundbites, how can we expect voters to sit through a Bruckner symphony? It is a persuasive argument but one that I have come to find both fatuous and patronising. Around me I see people of all ages who sit gripped through four hours of King Lear, Lord of the Rings or a grand-slam tennis final but who, ten minutes into a classical concert, are squirming in their seats and wondering what crime they had committed to be held captive, silent and legroom-restrained, in such Guantanamo conditions...The concert hall atmosphere is about as lively as a cruise liner, its intellectual magnetism as potent as a pension plan. Why would any redblooded postmodern person want to spend an evening in God’s waiting room, even with a Co-co to sex up the da capo?

Stormin' Norman even goes so far as to offer a smattering of positive proposals. Drew McManus promises more ideas on how the concert atmosphere can be renovated.

Youth-off music

Here's an excellent article by Scott Timberg of the LA Times on the horrible trend toward playing classical music in public spaces to ward off homeless people and loitering teens. I've been meaning to write a rant on this subject. While many organizations are working desperately hard to attract younger people to the music, here it's being used, as Robert Fink says, as "bug spray, as pest control." This is the perfect consummation of the entire decrepit philosophy of treating classical music as "good music," "serious music," "art music," and so on. On the good-news front, the Palm Beach Post reports that the demise of the Florida Philharmonic has led to an explosion of successful smaller groups all over Florida, to the point where there's a shortage of players. When the age of the dinosaurs ends, the age of the mammals begins. Both stories via ArtsJournal.

Grammy commentary

What is Hoobastank?

Applause: the nightmare returns

When I said below that I had produced my "absolutely final applause post," I meant, of course, that I had written my absolutely final applause post in the Year of the Monkey. It is now the Year of the Rooster, and I am free to resume. Explosive new information on the history of classical concert etiquette has come over the transom, which I will need a few more days to digest. In the meantime, I'd like to quote a brief item that Emanuel Ax recently posted on his website:

...I have been trying to find out exactly when certain listeners and performers decided that applause between movements would not be "allowed," or at least would be frowned upon, but nobody seems to have been willing to admit that they were the culprit. Certainly when a composer like Beethoven wrote the symphonies and piano concertos that we hear today in the concert hall, he himself expected that if a movement ended with a flourish, such as the first movement of the Fifth piano concerto, the audience would leap to its collective feet and let the composer (and pianist) know that they had triumphed. Mozart often wrote to his family that certain variations or sections of pieces were so successful that they had to be encored immediately, even without waiting for the entire piece to end.

I really hope we can go back to the feeling that applause should be an emotional response to the music, rather than a regulated social duty. I am always a little taken aback when I hear the first movement of a concerto which is supposed to be full of excitement, passion, and virtuoso display (like the Brahms or Beethoven Concertos), and then hear a rustling of clothing, punctuated by a few coughs; the sheer force of the music calls for a wild audience reaction. On the other hand, sometimes I wish that applause would come just a bit later, when a piece like the Brahms Third Symphony comes to an end — it is so beautifully hushed that I feel like holding my breath in the silence of the end. I think that if there were no "rules" about when to applaud, we in the audience would have the right response almost always....

I think that just about covers it, but there's more to come.

Beethoven corrects Schoenberg

"What is truly great and beautiful finds kindred souls and sympathetic hearts in the present without withholding in the slightest the just privileges of posterity."

Guest classical hilarity

Reader Tom Hartley writes: "Wouldn't it be cool if, during the Adagio of Nielsen's Fifth Symphony, the 'mad drummer' did the solo from 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida'?"

More on WETA

WETA, the public radio station in Washington, DC, confirmed its decision to drop classical programming in favor of talk, despite an outcry from local listeners. It's a sad turn of events, and particularly puzzling since there is already an all-talk public radio station in the area (WAMU). "We're in the business of trying to create a larger audience and have more people join our station," WETA's president Sharon Rockefeller said. Is that all there is? Creating a larger audience? Will WETA be hiring shock-jocks to maximize its ratings? I got an interesting e-mail, though, from a radio professional who pointed out a long-standing problem with classical programming on public radio: listeners don't necessarily feel the need to make contributions. My correspondent writes: "A recent study showed that many classical listeners aren't aware if their favorite station is public or commercial -- they just consider anything that's not music to be 'a commercial.'" Since classical listeners will never be a powerhouse presence in the ratings, they have to compensate with extra support. There is, after all, no divine right for classical music to exist on the radio, or anywhere else. If you want it, you have to fight for it. Otherwise it will go away.

Gary Giddins

A while back I promised to say something about Gary Giddins' new book Weather Bird. It's a hefty but absorbing collection of the ex-Village Voice critic's recent jazz criticism. As a dilettante jazz listener, I learned something from every paragraph. I was particularly taken with the big essays that begin and end the book. The introduction is an autobiography of Giddins' early years as a listener, and it shows a free-roaming, non-dogmatic mind in formation: he's avid for Little Richard and J. S. Bach in equal measure. Interestingly, Giddins came to jazz a little later, and it's as if his rock and classical listening had prepared him to grasp jazz's double nature, its "pop" and "art" personalities. His first encounter with Louis Armstrong was filtered through his prior discovery of Bach: "It was the B Minor Mass all over again ... The world was not as it seemed, genius was not confined to the realm of marble busts and high-school music rooms ... [in "Muggles"] Armstrong alights for one of the most dramatic entrances in musical history and turns a blues into his own Kyrie eleison." The final chapter sets out a theory of "four stations" in the history of jazz: "native" (jazz emerging from a cauldron of local cultures and influences); "sovereign" (jazz becomes a universal, comprehensive art); "recessionary" (jazz loses its cultural centrality, yet otherwise advances in progressive and avant-garde forms and on recording); "classical" (jazz threatens to be overshadowed by its past, fights against media indifference, yet fuses new languages and looks to the future). Last year, coincidentally, I attempted to plot out a similar set of five stages in classical history. Giddins' scheme runs parallel to mine, and it ends on an encouragingly hopeful note, with a salute to Jason Moran.

Cleveland, Pelléas

The other day I agreed with David Salvage that the Cleveland Orchestra's playing at Carnegie, however mind-blowingly perfect, wasn't supplying "chills" — a sense of something urgent unfolding. The chills arrived in the second half of Saturday's program, with Schubert's Unfinished and Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra. I finally felt a current of emotion underneath the shining surface. Still, I couldn't quite put my finger on what Franz Welser-Möst was up to interpretively. I had the same quizzical reaction in 2003. He's a brilliant technician, and his programming is livelier than the norm. As a commenter at NewMusicBox observed, W-M violated an unwritten rule by putting two living composers — Birtwistle and Dutilleux — on the same concert. Horrors! I also like his nonconformist habit of playing works without a break: this time Schubert and Berg, last time Death and Transfiguration and the Four Last Songs. I'll save commentary on Radu Lupu's Beethoven concertos for a coming New Yorker column, also to include the mesmerizing recital that Piotr Anderszewski gave in Zankel last night.

Last Saturday I also saw Pelléas et Mélisande at the Met. Ah, Pelléas, penumbral, lambent, etc. etc. Since Jonathan Miller has recently been slammed here and there in the blõg¥sphêre, I think it's worth pointing out that this revival is a far cry from what Miller put on stage in 1995. I interviewed the director at the time, and he emphasized how important the servants were to his vision of the opera: hovering, gossiping, watching, and waiting, they should suggest the real world that these weary aesthetes have foresworn. (Villiers de l'Isle-Adam: "As for living, let our servants do that for us.") Now the servants are barely there. Mostly gone, too, are the Atget photographs that Miller wanted to have projected on the sets. It's become a static, vacant, monotonous production, and the singers have a hard time putting any life into it. Only in the final scene did the reigning stupor give way to something more human and involving. Mélisande's death was truly felt, largely thanks to the hugely idiomatic singing and acting of José van Dam (who gives NYC recitals on Sunday and Wednesday) and beautiful tremors in the Met orchestra (once more in perfect sync with Levine). When Robert Scandiuzzi's Arkel sang, "You do not understand the soul," van Dam gave a startled little shrug, which said everything. From then to the end, the chills were constant.

If anyone is looking for an introduction to Claude Debussy's great, shadowy world, I suggest this beautiful disc by Claudio Abbado on DG. Then listen again to Sinatra's Only the Lonely.

Literacy / notation #1

I started reading Richard Taruskin's grand six-volume history of music, and penciled my first question mark on p. xxiii, which proclaims the coming end of musical literacy. Daniel Felsenfeld has already raised questions about this end-time conceit in a NewMusicBox essay. Does anyone have statistics on how many people could read music in 1800 or 1900 versus today? We're always told that every member of the old middle class could read music. But the middle class was rather smaller back then than it is now, yes? American music education is currently in free fall, thanks in no small part to "No Child Left Behind," but Finland has compulsory music education for every child in the country, and if China has even a rudimentary music-education system then literacy will be increasing by untold millions. I'm just wondering. This will be the first of a series of posts on musical literacy, notation, and education. My jumping-off-point will be another NewMusicBox essay, by John Halle. I'll write about Taruskin's book in the New Yorker, if I live to finish it.

Ask Mr. Noise

I receive dozens of queries via Google and other search engines each day. I can’t possibly reply to every one of them in person, so I’ll try to answer them here in one fell swoop. I am Alex Ross, but not that Alex Ross. I don’t think Simon Rattle has got any violinists pregnant, but double-check with Norman Lebrecht. That’s an awful lot of pages of searches for Gideon Yago you’ve gone through. Sorry, no naked pics of Karita Mattila today. Indeed, Jay Greenberg is a composer. John Schneider, aka Bo Duke on The Dukes of Hazzard, is probably not Jewish, but that's just a guess. Kurt Cobain killed himself (or was killed) with a Remington M-11 20-gauge shotgun. Hip-hoppity sir, you’ve hit the jackpot: there is no better place on the Internet wherein to read of my main man Kanye West. Uh, yes I am — loud and proud, in fact. I know nothing about Terry Teachout's tendencies, and I can make only an “educated guess” about Alex Balk. “Borrowings” is a kind word for James Horner, my friend. I have no idea what Pavement’s songs mean. Wagner does not suck. “Holliger House” was a joke, people. That’s all I got on Caroliner. Deltrice is so much better than Jessica, girl!!! First I’ve heard of the Pandemonium Steel Band; I’m intrigued. Still no pics of Karita. Jay Greenberg remains a composer. Why, yes, Pfitzner is funkalicious! (That was me.)