Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Thought of the day

“Your silence will be considered your consent.”

                        — Laurie Anderson, "Another Day in America"

Speaking for many

Emily Witt on the resistance to fascistic thuggery in LA: "The public reaction to the presence of the ICE agents is often hostile. One morning, I followed a Unión del Barrio alert to an Army Reserve center in the city of Bell, which, that morning, immigration agents were using as a staging area. A veritable hive of officials with covered faces was loading into a fleet of American-made vehicles with temporary license plates and dark windows, and rolling out into the city for their day of work. Outside, helpless to stop them, someone pulled up and simply leaned on his horn. Others tried to block the driveway with their cars, but the agents had another exit. One person shouted profanities. In the video of Nancy Urizar’s father, the anger of the strangers observing what was happening in the parking lot is also palpable. 'Fuck every single one of you motherfuckers,' one person says. 'Fuck every single one of you.'"

Salonen's farewell in San Francisco

Joshua Kosman, in his On a Pacific Aisle newsletter, celebrates Esa-Pekka Salonen's final concerts with the San Francisco Symphony but cannot ignore the stench of incompetence that emanates from the orchestra's administrative offices: "Even after Salonen is gone, the Symphony will still be in the hands of those who drove him out. The choice of the next music director will be left to the very people who thought Salonen was dispensable; how much faith do you have in their judgment? Patrons will be asked to step up their support for an organization that will now offer them less reason to feel excited about or committed to what is happening in Davies Symphony Hall. And keep your eye on the orchestral personnel — on the vacancies that go unfilled and the high-profile departures that occur because San Francisco is no longer perceived as a good career investment. Angry? You’re goddam right I’m angry." 

Salonen himself said from the stage, with typical pith: "You’ve heard what you have in this city. This amazing orchestra, this amazing chorus. So take good care of them.”

For Alfred Brendel

This was the encore the last time I heard Brendel play, in 2008. Also lingering in my mind is his Beethoven cycle at Carnegie Hall in the nineteen-nineties. "Listening to him, the mind dances," I wrote then. A remarkable musician and man.

Lossless chords

"For myself, I can only say that I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the results of this evening's experiment — astonished at the wonderful power you have developed, and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever. But all the same I think it is the most wonderful thing that I have ever experienced, and I congratulate you with all my heart on this wonderful discovery."

                    — Arthur Sullivan to Edison, 1888 

The Scheyer House reborn

 

Photo: Justin Reinhardt, Max Reinhardt's great-grandson.

In April of last year, I sent a note to Benno Herz, the program director of the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles, asking if he knew that the Galka Scheyer House had come on the market. This is the hilltop gallery-home that Richard Neutra built in 1934 for Scheyer, a crucial figure in the propagation of modernism on the West Coast. I'd visited the house the previous year, at the invitation of its then owner, the late Frank M. Devine, and registered its significance. It is not only a major work in Neutra's output — part of his turn from modernist severity to a more open, mellow, landscape-oriented aesthetic — but also a landmark of Los Angeles cultural history, suggestive of Scheyer's spirited embrace of trends across the arts. Her primary calling was to advocate for the group she called the Blue Four —Kandinsky, Klee, Jawlensky, Feininger. Hence the name of her street in the Hollywood Hills: Blue Heights Drive. But she also supported younger talents such as John Cage and Maya Deren and threw herself into children's arts education. She was an astonishing and unclassifiable person who will have a chapter to herself in my forthcoming history of the German-speaking emigration in Los Angeles.

In 2016, another monument of that era, the Mann House, was in danger of being torn down when a minor miracle occurred: the German government purchased the house and converted it into a residency for writers, scholars, and thinkers. I idly wondered: could something similar happen to the Scheyer House? If anyone could work such a wonder, I knew it would be Benno. Amazingly, he did. He wrote an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine, which caught the attention of a German art-lover, who proceeded to buy the house with the idea of turning it into an artists' residency. EscherGuneWardena Architecture will begin a restoration process later this summer. At the moment, as KCRW reports, the house is being occupied by the artist Beatriz Cortez, who lost her home in the Altadena Fire. On a rainy day last winter, I met Raymond Neutra, the architect's youngest and only surviving son, for a conversation at the Scheyer House; a short film of our talk, augmented by rich documentation of Scheyer's life, is soon to be released.

Thomas Mann at 150

The arch-magus of ambivalence is being celebrated all over Germany today, most spectacularly in his home town of Lübeck, where the Lübeck Philharmonic will give a celebratory concert, the program beginning with the Prelude to Act I of Lohengrin, which had a transformative effect on Mann when he first heard it in his youth. Doctor Faustus had that effect on me when I first read it at age eighteen; my own writing career stems in some way from the experience of that novel. I wrote about Mann for The New Yorker in 1996, 2016, 2020, and 2022. In the current issue of Studia Philosophica I have an essay titled "Thomas Mann, Richard Wagner, and the Inescapability of the Political." Alles Gute! In a certain sense.

The rhythms of acquiescence

M. Gessen, New York Times: "We humans are stability-seeking creatures. Getting accustomed to what used to seem unthinkable can feel like an accomplishment. And when the unthinkable recedes at least a bit — when someone gets released from detention (as the Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi was a few weeks ago) or some particularly egregious proposal is withdrawn or blocked by the courts (as the ban on international students at Harvard has been, at least temporarily) — it’s easy to mistake it for proof that the dark times are ending. But these comparatively small victories don’t alter the direction of our transformation — they don’t even slow it down measurably — even while they appeal to our deep need to normalize. They create the sense that there is more air to breathe and more room to act than there was yesterday. And so just when we most need to act — while there is indeed room for action and some momentum to the resistance — we tend to be lulled into complacency by the sense of relief on the one hand and boredom on the other."

For Per Nørgård

The great Danish composer has died at the age of ninety-two. The cellist Jakob Kullberg pays tribute to a man who seems to have been as kindly and generous as his music was vivid and singular.

Success and value

"Today, I would not go as far to pretend, that every work which was a failure has to be considered as a masterpiece, I would even not pretend, that every masterwork ought to be at first a failure. But I want to pretend, that success is not a standard of value."

                            — Arnold Schoenberg, 1935

Trumpian realism

Leonard Slatkin on Trump's hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center: "Why is this dismantling taking place? Everyone has their own theories. Mine takes its cue from Oscar Wilde: 'Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.' If there is anything that scares the current administration more than individualism, I am not aware of it. Our job as creators and performers is to stimulate free thought. Others may judge the merits of our convictions but should not infringe on our rights to express them."