Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

An Ig Henneman moment

Of Outside the Rain has stopped, Henneman writes: "Pianist/improviser Cecil Taylor’s intuitive, energetic, loosely structured flow is an important source of inspiration for this composition. Endless, nearly exhausting variations, caused by material I often employ as an improviser. Open strings are an essential colour throughout the composition. The Luna String Quartet was a great sparring partner in developing the material. The title is a sentence taken from Nicole Krauss’s novel The History of Love, which stuck in my memory."

Lubitsch

From Lady Windermere's Fan.

Laughter in the Dark. The New Yorker, Aug. 15, 2022. 

A note on the Wu Tsai Theater

Lincoln Center made a slightly startling announcement today: the auditorium at David Geffen Hall, which reopens in the fall, will be called the Wu Tsai Theater, after the business couple Claire Wu Tsai and Joe Tsai. The proliferation of naming opportunities in the arts-donor world has meant that in many places the auditorium bears a different name from the building itself, even when there is only one performance space. But the Geffen / Wu Tsai case is an especially odd one because the word "theater" usually denotes a site for dramatic performances, not concerts. It's as if the building on Lincoln Center Plaza now has competing identities.

It also bears mentioning that Joe Tsai, the co-founder and executive vice chairman of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, is a figure of some controversy, especially in the world of professional sports, where he owns the Brooklyn Nets, the New York Liberty, and the San Diego Seals. Some paragraphs from an April 2022 ESPN story are worth quoting:

In the United States, Tsai donates hundreds of millions of dollars to combat racism and discrimination. In China, Alibaba, under Tsai's leadership, partners with companies blacklisted by the U.S. government for supporting a "campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-tech surveillance" through state-of-the-art racial profiling.

Tsai has publicly defended some of China's most controversial policies. He described the government's brutal crackdown on dissent as necessary to promote economic growth; defended a law used to imprison scores of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong as necessary to squelch separatism; and, when questioned about human rights, asserted that most of China's 1.4 billion citizens are "happy about where they are." ...

Alibaba is "effectively state-controlled," according to a recent study on the company by Garnaut Global, an independent research firm that analyzes the Chinese Communist Party structure and China's technology footprint.

Under Tsai's leadership, Alibaba funded companies that helped China build "an intrusive, omnipresent surveillance state that uses emerging technologies to track individuals with greater efficiency," according to a 2020 congressional report.

Those technologies have been used widely in the western region of Xinjiang, where the government has forced more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities into barbed-wire "re-education" camps, policies that have been described as cultural "genocide" by the United States, several other countries and human rights organizations.

The matter merits further discussion.

A Richard Barrett moment

Says ELISION's note: "In physics and cosmology a world-line describes the path an object takes through four-dimensional spacetime. Here, the journey is marked by the energies of fifteen different vortices that fling the listener and performer ever outwards into new sonic dimensions . . . 'world-line' described as a 'cycle' is not some kind of Baroque suite. Rather, its sections are conceptualised as universes in which a 'particle' of sound in one position can potentially find non-linear connection to any other sound. Theoretical physics proposes a way of imagining musical relations that are emergent in nature also allowing for the contingency of improvisation and split-second responses in a complex notational net."

The Schindler House at 100

A Cultural Comment at the New Yorker website.

Previously: Neutra, Shoshone

An Elijah Daniel Smith moment

A Messiaen moment

A Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir moment

Listening with fascination to the Icelandic artist's new album strengur, a collaboration with Mirjam Tally.

Wagner Journal

I'm pleased to have an article in the latest issue of The Wagner Journal, Barry Millington's scholarly-critical periodical. It's titled "Götterdämmerung 1945: Wagnerian Fantasies in English-Language Reports of Hitler's Death." After questioning widespread assumptions that Siegfried's Funeral Music was played round the clock on Nazi radio after Hitler's death, I observe that almost from the beginning of the war English-language journalists had been priming their readers to see the end of the Hitler regime as a "Wagnerian" event. The issue, guest-edited by Chris Walton, also includes an essay on Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark, by Kate Hopkins, and an exploration of Götterdämmerung themes in the work of the South African novelist Etienne Leroux, by Paula Fourie.

For Richard Taruskin

The most formidable of musicologists, one of the most formidable writers on music who ever lived, died early this morning in Oakland, California, at the age of seventy-seven. William Robin has written an obituary for the New York Times. I can hardly overstate his impact on my own work, and I can hardly imagine a world without him.