Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Zalvader Ipako, 1903-2007

I am almost entirely certain that Paul Griffiths is putting us on with this obituary for a one-hundred-four-year-old Maltese composer named Zalvader Ipako — the post is dated to the week ending April 1 — but experience has taught me to hedge my bets. When I first encountered the name Alexei Stanchinsky, on a 1998 recital program by Thomas Adès, I initially assumed that Adès had amused himself by inventing a fin-de-siècle Russian composer-madman, but it turned out that Stanchinsky actually existed, and was very interesting indeed. I have a sinking feeling, though, that we will never get to hear Ipako's satirical revue Lenine! or the Tosca Violin Concerto. — Alex

Playlist:
— Ben Frost, Theory of Machines (Bedroom Community)
— Evan Ziporyn, Frog's Eye (Cantaloupe)
— Andrew Shapiro, Quiet Kissing EP (Airbox)
— Chris Lastovicka, Fortune Has Turned (Ahari Press)
— R. Luke DuBois, Timelapse (Cantaloupe)
— Slow Six, Noreaster (New Albion, forthcoming)

Not-so-Motley Crews

By Justin Davidson

I'd like to pick a little more at the question of the link between what orchestras look like and what they sound like. Let's back up.  Nearly a month ago, I wrote a column in Newsday claiming that the Vienna Philharmonic's de facto reluctance to admit women was, besides being reprehensible on the face of it, a symptom of an intellectually moribund, radically preservationist mentality that also permeates the ensemble's music-making. Alex agreed (in the last paragraph). The writers of the most vitriolic e-mails I received did not. Missing the aesthetic argument completely, they suggested that if I was so hot for orchestral justice, I should look at just how diverse American orchestras are, which I did. Among the responses I got for that story was one published in The American Spectator, which opens ingratiatingly: "If there were a Moonbat award for the worst solution to a non-existent problem, Aaron Dworkin would win the prize hands down." Now the reason that Dworkin, the founding president of the Sphinx Organization and an agitator for more minority representation in orchestras, elicited that reaction was that I quoted him as saying, among other things: "We should look again at the current standard of screened auditions. I believe that more information about the candidate should be incorporated, in the same way that institutions of higher learning take cultural and racial background into account."

For the record, I don't agree with Dworkin on this point at all, for reasons encapsulated by 27-year-old flutist in the New World Symphony, Ebonee Thomas, who told me: "Sometimes, people assume I got where I got because I'm black. One thing that drew me to classical music was that most of the time, people really just want to know how you play." Screened auditions have been enormously successful in reducing the effects of prejudice; the fact that they're not a panacea is not a reason to scrap them.

But orchestras should be doing a better job developing minority apprenticeships, extending educational activities, forging more meaningful ties with community organizations, fundraising for subsidized instrument programs, and loudly advocating more music in public schools, starting in kindergarten. While they're busy doing that, the rest of us might give a little more thought to what drawing on a large, varied pool of musicians has already meant for American music, and what drawing on a larger, more varied pool could portend. It's got nothing really to do with race: Black flutists don't sound black any more than female violinist sound female, so let's leave that preposterous debate alone.

However, if American orchestras are especially versatile, stylistically eclectic and quick to learn new music, that's partly because so many of their musicians arrive at their jobs with an arsenal of musical experiences that audition committees aren't generally interested in hearing about. Bluegrass fiddlers, salsa-playing trombonists, percussionists who double as drummers in rock bands, violists who improvise in Hungarian avant-folk groups — these are some of the people who populate and enrich today's Philharmonics. And that's in a system that attracts its members from a relatively restricted segment of the population.

Widening the embrace of the symphonic world to include not just the perpetually yearned-for younger audiences but also a greater range of musicians would give orchestras access to that much more flexibility, that many more flavors of talent. Pursuing this goal has nothing to do with social justice or political correctness: it's pure self-interest.

— Justin Davidson

I second the above. It's amusing to see The American Spectator, a magazine that generally ignores classical music, rushing to the defense of high musical standards. Try spelling Juilliard correctly for a start. I also laughed out loud at the line "the San Francisco Symphony and the U.S. Marines are beyond compare." Let's hope no one tells them MTT is gay. — Alex

Hello everyone

In the last hour or so this blog has been read in LA, Brooklyn, Phoenix AZ, Zalaegerszeg (Hungary), Vancouver, Hong Kong, Rancho Cucamonga CA, Toronto, Seattle, Kenmore WA, Herndon VA, Sydney, Paris, Bogotá, Kirkland WA, Boston, Chicago, Huntington Beach CA, Virginia MN, London, Taipei, Bellevue WA, Claremont CA, Redwood City CA, Bay Shore NY, Aliso Viejo CA, Beacon NY, Edgewater NJ, Asheville NC, Rochester, Tokyo, Houston, Pasadena, Helsinki, Bluffton SC, Santa Barbara, Male (Maldives), San Pedro CA, Miami, San Francisco, Tallinn, and Hamamatsu (Japan).

MTT Speaks! (So What Else is New?)

By Justin Davidson

On April 1, radio stations in 18 states will start carrying “The MTT Files,” Michael Tilson Thomas’ reminiscence-laced excursion through the musical landscape as he sees it — and he has seen a lot. Why radio stations in the remaining 32 states (including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and most of the Eastern Seaboard) have not picked up the show, I’m not quite sure. True, it's yet another scion of the marriage of media strategy and cult of personality. Yes, it adds luster to the MTT brand, even as it promotes music in general. But it’s also very good radio.

Rather than leading listeners on a dutiful trudge through history, MTT tells stories of the “I remember when Stravinsky told me...” variety. Like any accomplished raconteur, he has buffed each memory to a blinding sheen of significance, poignancy, or wry humor — or all three. He has a well-stocked storehouse of anecdotes, but if I can recognize some of them from the half a dozen hours I have spent interviewing him over the course of ten years, I suspect his close friends have his stories cataloged and numbered by now.

Each show rambles pleasantly down a thematic boulevard, pointing out curiosities and ironies along the way. The first episode is about the shifting intersection of music and noise, and it begins, like most music history courses, with Gregorian Chant. When he is discussing music composed by people he never actually had a drink with, MTT has a tendency towards offhand generalizations and casual historical compression. “That’s how it was with all early music,” he declares: “a sense of serenity, whether the spiritual serenity of Gregorian Chant or, several hundred years later in the Renaissance, the serenity of the planets moving back and forth inside a cosmic space — the music of the spheres.” It would be pedantic to point out that this single sentence covers a period that also includes non-serene battle music, lusty dance tunes, the gnarled counterpoint of late 14th century motets, and chansons that enshrined permanent sexual frustration. After establishing his street cred by remarking that “by Mozart’s day, music was way more in your face than it had been before,” MTT finally gets to the heart of his argument: that the densifying, intensifying and increasingly overwhelming sound of 19th and 20th century symphonic music arose from the need to compete with the rising din of urban life. That, I’ll buy.

By the second half-hour, MTT is in more comfortable territory. He reports that the young Edgar Varèse (whom he knew) attended rehearsals that Stravinsky (whom Tilson Thomas also knew) conducted in Paris and was entranced by the level of disorganized cacophony produced by musicians who couldn’t make sense of what they were playing. Unfortunately, musicians eventually learned to play Stravinsky well, and Varèse had to write music that would emulate the chaos of those early read-throughs. We also hear the voice of John Cage (yup: old friend), rhapsodizing serenely about noise: “The Sixth Avenue traffic sound is extraordinary. It’s continuous, night and day. And I listen to it with the greatest pleasure. I prefer it to my own music, or to any music that I’ve ever heard. It’s absolutely unpredictable and never disappointing.” Which, you might say, makes it predictable.

Update: The first episode, "You Call That Music?!", can be heard in its entirety here.
 

Bullets and Bach

Here (via Salon's "Video Dog") is what it sounds like to live in Baghdad just now: a "Symphony of Bullets."

— Justin Davidson

The Flying Dutchman Moors

By Justin Davidson

Hamburg — that's the Free and Hanseatic City, not Hamburg, NY — is getting a dramatic new concert hall, which will look  like a glass galleon that has foundered on a warehouse. The design, by the Swiss firm Herzog & De Meuron incorporates a number of current architectural gambits. It invokes nautical imagery, as do Frank Gehry's new IAC headquarters on the West Side of Manhattan and Santiago Calatrava's Milwaukee Musem addition. It anchors (sorry, boating words are hard to avoid) a new harborfront district, as does Diller Scofidio + Renfro's new Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. And it recycles an Industrial Age relic - in this case a disused 1960s warehouse - into a cultural showcase, as does Herzog & De Meuron's own Tate Modern in London.

I have to admit to some queasiness about the current enthusiasm for fitting out power plants, factories and warehouses as postindustrial pleasure domes. Isn't there something inherently decadent about taking the means of production and transforming into the means of consumption for the bourgeoisie?

Dime store liberal scruples aside, Hamburgers will enter the maw of the brutalist brick warehouse  from the long pier that juts into the harbor. They will then be wafted up through the structure to a vast window that offers a glimpse of the view to come, then turn a corner and ascend to a vast public plaza that sprawls across the warehouse roof or beneath the new structure's bottom, depending on how you choose to look at it. The hall itself is just a kernel of the complex, which includes an apartment building and a hotel, all sheathed in milky glass.

The auditorium merits a picture of its own:

In a press conference at Carnegie Hall today, Jacques Herzog  remarked that he and his associates had learned more about designing symphonic spaces from the stadiums they've done (notably the Beijing Olympic bird's nest) than they had from the whole history of concert halls. Here, the stage, like a soccer field, is in the middle, rather than at one end, and the seats rise up along a bowl's precipitous walls. That enormous ceiling navel is apparently an acoustical feature. (The hole on top gives the hall a tent shape, which in turn suggests the canopied look of the exterior.) To me it looks perfect for sucking up sound, swirling it around the cupola, and then dropping it back down in an echoey cascade, but the record of Disney Hall suggests that acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota knows what he's hearing about. Christoph von Dohnanyi, chief conductor of the NDR Symphony Orchestra, which will make is home in the Elbphilharmonie, was there, too, and he made the most honest official statement about musical architecture I have heard in a long time: "Acoustics is like psychiatry  it's a starting science, and you have to be very lucky. But if it looks great, it sounds good, too."

— Justin Davidson (click the link to send me an e-mail)

Update: Daniel Beckmann, from Toyota's firm Nagata Acoustics, writes to point out that the navel in the ceiling of the auditorium "is an outie, not an innie." Which is to say, that a giant sound-reflecting disc will hang from the ceiling, suggesting (here comes a radical metaphor switch) a flying saucer full of Beethoven-loving aliens. Anyone planning a trip to Hamburg, think about going in 2010.

Experiment in modern music

I obtained the track below from a service called IODA, which supplies select indie-label MP3s to bloggers (no money changes hands). The composer Alexandra Gardner is presenting a concert tomorrow night (3/29) at Greenwich House Music School. This piece, Luminoso, for guitar and sampled sounds, will be on the program. The guitarist is Enrique Malo Lop.

Download "Luminoso" (mp3)
by Alexandra Gardner
Innova Recordings

More On This Album

— Alex

I am merely a rumble of the holy voice, yo

Let me briefly invade Justin's turf — Newsday critic and New Yorker contributor Justin Davidson is guest-hosting this week — is to say that I've written something for the blog of the 92nd Street Y. Next Sunday I'm appearing in the Y's Poetry Center series, where I will look at the poetic roots of two works that forever altered the musical landscape: Debussy’s Prelude to "The Afternoon of a Faun" and Schoenberg’s Second Quartet. In Debussy’s case inspiration came from Mallarmé’s gloriously enigmatic long poem “The Afternoon of a Faun" —  “the motionless and weary swoon / Of stifling heat" —  and in Schoenberg's case it was Stefan George's "Rapture": "I feel the wind of another planet.... I dissolve in sounds, circling, weaving...." I’ll discuss how conventional harmony crumbled underfoot as the composers chased these elusive images. In addition to a lecture-plus-brunch deal, the Y is offering $10 for people under 35. One day I'll have a real photo. (Speaking of which, Steve Pyke, who's supplied some brilliant portraits to accompany my pieces, including this one of Ian Bostridge, has a show at Flowers gallery from March 29 to May 5.) — Alex

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By Justin Davidson

Don't be fooled by the professorial mien: Christopher Rouse likes his music as loud as any teenage headbanger does. He's the sort of composer who wouldn't trust a battalion of trombones to play out enough without some encouragement — half a dozen or more ƒs, say. Judging from Mark Swed's eloquent review, Rouse's  cloud-stirring Requiem, which had its premiere in Los Angeles over the weekend, sounds like it doesn't just honor the dead: it wakes them.

Rouse descends from a proud lineage of cacophonizers. The first episode of Michael Tilson Thomas's forthcoming public radio show, "The MTT Files" proposes that the ever-increasing noise factor in music comes from the need to compete with an ever more deafening urban environment. (More about DJ MTT anon.)  Rouse writes for a generation reared on stadium concerts, but he does so in the spirit of the late 19th century. Even when he emerged from the morbid mode that occupied him through the 1980s, he remained one of our loftiest, most passionate and most anachronistically sincere composers. Not for him the finely wrought irony of postmodernism, or its ethnic potpourris. He means what he screams.

I'm looking forward to the day when Rouse's monster of a piece finally slouches towards New York.

        Justin Davidson

A Time for Thoth

By Justin Davidson

For most of us, March is a little early in the season for a loincloth, but a bracing spring breeze isn’t enough to deter Thoth - not the Ibis-headed Egyptian god, mind you, but the sandaled and feathered prayformer of his own soloperas. Thoth has been a fixture of Central Park for years,  his celebrity documented in  articles, interviews, and even a documentary that won an Academy Award in 2002. For a while, though, he was in  in exile from his preferred venue, Angel Tunnel near Bethesda Fountain, while it was being restored. Now the tunnel's open and he's back, his incantatory chants and droning violin reverberating off the gorgeously restored tile ceiling.

The music is mesmerizing. In a voice that ranges from a Tibetan monkish baritone to a pristine soprano, Thoth (a.k.a. Stephen Kaufman, who lives in Jamaica, Queens) sings his  ritual epics, while whirling, fiddling, and accompanying himself on bells wrapped around his ankles. Since the libretto is in a language of his own invention, it’s hard to know what exactly is going on in “The Herma: The Life and Land of Nular-In,” but then the same could be said for “Lucia di Lammermoor.” Whatever they mean, those are some funky phonemes.

Being a technologically adept mystic, Thoth maintains a website (which had been disabled by hackers the last time I checked) and a myspace page, where he chronicles the thrill of his return to Angel Tunnel. “I have noticed that I am having less visions than I was having at Trefoil Arch. I'm not sure I understand why.” (I think he means that’s a good thing.)

        Justin Davidson

Lincoln Center on My Mind

(Thanks to masck (old skool) for the photo)

By Justin Davidson

Thought I: Lincoln Center is Molting

Remember a few years ago, when the talk was that Lincoln Center's gaggle of constituent organizations would never stop bickering over the renovation plans, never raise the money, never take the plunge? The travertine dowager, it was said, would keep sinking elegantly into disrepair. But take a look at it now: Juilliard has shed its skin, in preparation for adding a whole new wing, including a glass-walled dance studio facing onto Broadway. It's more than a little ironic that the dismantling begins with Pietro Belluschi's Juilliard building, which architecture critics of the 1960s praised as the one true incarnation of modernism in a campus rife with aesthetic compromise. Ada Louis Huxtable, the dean of critics at the time, called it “a marriage of form and function in terms of rational simplicity and bare-boned solutions.” Neither Huxtable nor anybody else, however, has been leading protests or writing novella-length Op-Eds defending the building against depraved acts of renovation. Maybe that's because generations of Juilliard students have found the building more  a marriage of ugliness and unfriendliness in terms of labyrinthine confusion.

Thought II:  Long Way to Go

As I squirmed through New York City Opera's  superfluous new production of Rossini's "La Donna del Lago" (loosely translated as "The Lady who Jumped in a Lake"), I kept imagining the company's new director-in-waiting Gerard Mortier sitting rigidly in the audience, his Flemish frown getting longer and deeper by the minute. The company is usually better than this, and the lame-duck director Paul Kellogg should at some point get his due as a resourceful executive with good taste and an ear for talented young singers. Still, it's a long way from lame Rossini to the extravaganzas of vulgarity and bold vision that Mortier is famous for. Will he be able to sweet-talk some extra millions out of City Opera loyalists to support his plans, or will the company only be able to afford a few knockoff shockers?

Thought III: Mini-Moderne

Children are the cruelest critics. They need better music, better playing and better seats than adults do before they'll clap like they mean it, let alone jump to their feet. So I was delighted at the reception that the New York Philharmonic Young People's Concert of "modern" music on Saturday got from the pre-tween crowd, including my own discriminating 9-year-old. "I liked that," he volunteered, which in today's praise exchange rate is equivalent to a wild, stomping ovation.  The young conductor James Gaffigan made his debut on that concert; I authorize his publicists to use my son's endorsement for marketing purposes.

And get this: the boy's favorite work was not by Debussy, Bartok, Stravinsky or Copland. It was "Katydid Country," a movement from Mason Bates' symphony, "Rusty Air in Carolina." Composed in 2006.  Bates uses field recordings of the noisy bugs - a solo, plus a choir of millions - and turns them into an electronic rhythm section for his high-energy orchestra. (My son also enjoyed Webern's "Five Movements for String Orchestra," which the orchestra played three times.)  When I pointed to a photo of John Adams in the program (the Philharmonic did a lovely job with his "Tromba Lontana") and bragged that I knew him, my son answered coolly: "How come you don't know all the other composers, Dad?" There's your audience of the future.

        Justin Davidson

Lang Lang, Yundi Li

The Wow Factor. The New Yorker, April 2, 2007.

Reendtroducing Justin

I'm ensnared in a Teachoutesque jungle of work — among other things, working on my Esa-Pekka Salonen / LA Philharmonic piece (to appear April 30) and preparing for an April 1 lecture at the 92nd Street Y on Mallarmé, Debussy, Stefan George, and Schoenberg (party!). Stepping in for me next week will be guest-blogger Justin Davidson. Expect shocking revelations, convulsive hilarity, ageless wisdom.... The Rambler amusingly sums up the state of classical music, a topic that has become tiresome. When my desk is overrun with new recordings, when I can't decide which of ten new-music concerts to attend on a given night, to talk about the death of anything is ridiculous. I've sworn off before, though.... New York Times subscribers should be reading The Score, a bloggy symposium involving such major maverick composers as Michael Gordon, Annie Gosfield, Alvin Curran, Glenn Branca, and, not least, Steve Reich.... The consensus is that Alan Gilbert made a powerful impression with his latest appearance at the New York Philharmonic.... In April, the Utah Symphony gives its first performance of Messiaen's From the Canyons to the Stars, as part of an ambitious American Horizons festival. I dream of one day hearing the piece live in Zion Park, with Reinbert de Leeuw conducting.... Noted on MySpace: Ryan Francis's Woman, Bird and Star.... Is it just me or is there a reference to Sibelius's Fifth at 0:34 of Sinatra's "Angel Eyes"? Not to mention the Schoenbergian fourth-plus-tritone at the beginning of "It's a Lonesome Old Town." Nelson Riddle in excelsis.

Pictured: Teachout, not Davidson.

My Rachmaninov

Matthew Guerrieri, who gets some secret crazy music-news feed that the rest of us don't, notes that a twenty-one-year-old, scotch-drinkin', Jay-Z-listenin' Rachmaninov heir named Alexander Temple Wolkonsky Rachmaninoff Wanamaker wants to reassert copyright control of his great-great-grandfather's works by publishing them in new arrangements. According to an Arizona Daily Star story, "Wanamaker said the family already has approached a few composers about doing the rearrangement." This is intriguing. What composers? I nominate the German avant-gardist Hans-Joachim Hespos, whose works have called for, among other instruments, an oil tank with a 5mm-thick casing and a welding torch [for more on this merry tunester, read Geelhoed]; Dean Drummond, curator of Harry Partch's array of microtonal instruments; and Milton Babbitt, who could create a very fresh-sounding Rach 3 with a quick serialization of dynamics.

But all this is moot, I'm afraid. Those who know my world-famous opera Tristan + Isolde will not be surprised to learn that I have also composed a corpus of works that bear a superficial resemblance to Rachmaninov's, although the differences are in fact profound — sufficiently profound that I am claiming retroactive royalties on all Rachmaninov performances to date as well as on all iterations of the Dies irae, together with Alexander Temple Wolkonsky Rachmaninoff Wanamaker's daily allowance since birth. Above is a page from my glorious Symphony No. 2 (click on the image to make it bigger).

For a serious critique of copyright law run amok, read Gann. Rachmaninov will survive, but the idea of all these great new contemporary-classical web-radio stations shutting down is too depressing for words.

Rouse Requiem agenda

Southern Californians, take note of the fact that the long-awaited premiere of Christopher Rouse's Requiem is happening at Disney Hall on Sunday, courtesy of the intrepid Los Angeles Master Chorale. David Salvage has an enticing preview. I have the score, and it looks to be a tremendous, floor-rattling experience. Britten's War Requiem is the obvious model: the traditional Latin texts are interwoven with poetry of Seamus Heaney, Siegfried Sassoon, Michelangelo, Ben Jonson, and Milton. A solo baritone recitation of Heaney's "Mid-term Break" begins the work: "I sat all morning in the college sick bay / Counting bells knelling classes to a close, / At two o' clock our neighbors drove me home." Then the chorus sings a dense, semi-archaic, motet-like setting of the Kyrie. At the end of that section, percussion instruments steal in pppp — snare drum, bass drum, timpani, cymbals, tomtoms, tam-tam — and build to a raucous ffff. A wild setting of the Dies irae begins, explosive percussion combined with a singing, shouting, chanting, glissandoing chorus. Only in the following Tuba mirum does the rest of the orchestra finally enter. I'll look for full reports by Swed, Rich, and Mangan. [Links added 3/26.] This is a work that ought to be done, indeed should have been done, in New York; it is indirectly a memorial to September 11. Rouse is generally an underrated composer, a great musical storyteller.

New York won't lack for events in the next few days. Mitsuko Uchida is playing Mozart with Colin Davis at the New York Philharmonic. The MATA Festival continues at the Brooklyn Lyceum. The awesome Gerald Finley sings at Zankel Hall on Friday. The same night, Wordless Music offers another genre-spanning event,  this one bringing together rock, electronic, and classical artists from Canada: Polmo Polpo, Toca Loca, and Social Music Work Group. And if you missed the sublime Music for 18 Musicians at Carnegie last fall, So Percussion reprise Steve Reich's masterpiece on both Friday and Saturday nights at Miller Theatre.

Dead or Alive: A Rest Is Noise Special Report

In recent weeks I've had interesting adventures in the world of record-sales accounting, a landscape alien and forbidding to an aesthete such as myself. Back in January I noted with some amazement that the "classical" category reported a rise of 22.5% in album sales in 2006. Was this resurgence the result of blockbuster records by the "classical crossover" titans Andrea Bocelli, Josh Groban, and Il Divo, as one might first assume? I thought there might be more to the story — that increased sales of core classical repertory online and on iTunes could be contributing to the rise. Thinking along the same lines was Chris Anderson, whose brilliant book The Long Tail attacks the fallacy that "the only success is mass success" and posits that money is to be made in selling to niche markets. You can't, of course, get more niche than classical music.

Scelsi shrine

Fans of Giacinto Scelsi may be interested to know that the Montreal artist Charles Stankievech has put together a multimedia installation called Timbral, in honor of Scelsi's music. It will be on display through the end of this week (March 24) at the Parisian Laundry in Montreal. Inspiration came from the famous story of Scelsi playing one note over and over in a psychiatric hospital, not losing his mind but finding the source of his mature style. Last summer, the artist was in residency on the Venetian island of San Servolo, long the home of the local insane asylum. To quote the press release: "Stankievech found a derelict piano once used for music therapy in the asylum, and, for an eleven-hour recording session, reenacted Scelsi’s timbral meditations, pounding away at a single note within the closed remains of the island’s thirteenth-century church."

Photo: Guy L'Heureux

Advisory

The Juilliard Bookstore, which is about to move from its present location to a temporary home on West 66th, is holding a 50% off sale on its stock of scores, CDs, and other merchandise. I picked up Ives's Fourth Symphony, Shostakovich's Fourteenth, Copland's Piano Quartet, and various CDs on the col legno and Kairos labels for a whole lot less than I ordinarily would have. Sale ends and store closes on March 24. Thanks, M. G_.

More characterful seafood in Strauss

The return of The Omniscient Mussel to the Met stage inspired composer-critic Russell Platt, editor of the New Yorker's classical listings, to devise the following supplemental list (in league with Peter Kolkay):

The Curious Bivalve (Die Liebe der Danae)
The Frisky Seahorse (Intermezzo)
The Nefarious Monkfish (Guntram)
The Epileptic Squid (Feuersnot)
The Incontinent Mollusk (Die schweigsame Frau)

I'm reminded of the Jellyfish in Spew's Gazebo of Ecstasy.

No turning back now...

I'm on Amazon. (Via The Standing Room.)