Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Nightafternight playlist

New and recent recordings of interest.

— Salieri, Armida; Lenneke Ruiten, Florie Valiquette, Teresa Iervolino, Ashley Riches, Christophe Rousset conducting Les Talens Lyriques and Choeur de chambre de Namur (Aparte)

— Josquin, The Golden Renaissance: Missa Pange lingua and other works; Stile Antico (Decca)

— Rebecca Saunders, SOLO: Shadow, Dust, Solitude, Flesh, Hauch, to an utterance; Klangforum Wien (Kairos)

— George Lewis, The Recombinant Trilogy; Claire Chase, Levy Lorenzo, Seth Parker Woods, Dana Jessen, Eli Stine (New Focus)

— Beethoven, Symphony No. 9; Manfred Honeck conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony, with Christina Landshamer, Jennifer Johnson Cano, Werner Güra, Shenyang, and the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh (Reference)

— Catherine Lamb, Muto Infinitas; Rebecca Lane, Jon Heilbron (another timbre)

— Gesualdo, Tenebrae Responsoria; Graindelavoix (Glossa)

— Stanchinsky, Sonata in E-flat minor and other works; Peter Jablonski (Ondine)

— And the sun darkened: Compère's Officium de Cruce and other Passiontide works; New York Polyphony (BIS)

— Coleridge-Taylor, Piano Quintet, Fantasiestücke, Clarinet Quintet; Catalyst Quartet, with Stewart Goodyear and Anthony McGill (Azica)

Tarkovsky footnotes

The Icon-Maker. The New Yorker, Feb. 15 and 22, 2021.

This is a piece that I started writing in 1993, on the occasion of the American publication of Andrei Tarkovsky's diaries, and then set aside. The year 2020 felt like the right time to resume. I first saw the director's films at the Harvard Film Archive in the late 1980s, when the indomitable Vlada Petric was in charge of the programming. I revisited them mainly by way of the Criterion Collection, which has crisp and richly supplemented editions of Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, and Stalker. The Ivan issue throws in Tarkovsky's elegant VGIK graduation film, The Steamroller and the Violin. (Two earlier student films, The Killers and There Will Be No Leave Today, circulate on YouTube, although only the true obsessive will glean much from them.) A new restoration of Mirror is now streaming from Film at Lincoln Center. Kino Lorber has reissued Nostalghia and Sacrifice. If you have a subscription to Criterion Channel, you can not only see Ivan, Rublev, Solaris, and Stalker but also explore the work of Tarkovsky's Soviet-era colleagues: some highlights are Mikhail Kalatozov's pathbreaking The Cranes Are Flying; Larisa Shepitko's spellbinding WWII film The Ascent; Sergei Parajanov's wildly imaginative The Color of Pomegranates; and Elem Klimov's Come and See, a war film of shocking and crushing power.

The Tarkovsky literature is considerable. The essential book is Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie's The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue (Indiana UP, 1994). It is valuable both for its keen, clear-eyed analysis and for its fastidious summaries of the films, which shed much light on their more oblique passages. Another excellent starting point is Geoff Dyer's Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (Vintage, 2012), which bores deep into the riddles of Stalker. Tarkovsky's two published books, Sculpting in Time and Time after Time: The Diaries, are mesmerizing on every page, even if certain of the director's grandiose musings on time and fate grow stale on re-reading. Both are translated by Kitty-Hunter-Blair. (Incidentally, this blog's inaugural entry, posted back in 2004, came from the diaries: "I have four razors and a dictaphone.") In 2004, Thames & Hudson published Instant Light, a collection of Tarkovsky's Polaroids, which are, inevitably, more mysterious and stupendous than anyone else's Polaroids. John Gianvito has edited a compendium of Tarkovsky interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2006).

I also consulted Mark Le Fanu's The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky (BFI, 1987); Marina Tarkovskaya's About Andrei Tarkovsky (Progress Publishers, 1990); Peter Green's Andrei Tarkovsky: The Winding Quest (Macmillan, 1993); Natasha Synessios's Mirror (Tauris, 2001); Robert Bird's Andrei Rublev (BFI, 2004); Gunnlaugur A. Jónsson and Thorkell Á. Óttarsson's essay collection Through the Mirror Reflections on the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky (Cambridge Scholar Press, 2006); Nathan Dunne's lavishly illustrated anthology Tarkovsky (Black Dog, 2008); Robert Bird's Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (Reaktion, 2008); Nariman Skakov's The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky: Labyrinths of Space and Time (Tauris, 2012); Phoebe Pua's Compositions of Crisis: Sound and Silence in the Films of Bergman and Tarkovsky (Ph.D. diss., Australian National University, 2013); Tobias Pontara's Andrei Tarkovsky's Sounding Cinema: Music and Meaning from "Solaris" to "The Sacrifice" (Routledge, 2019); and, just out from Edinburgh University Press, Sergey Toymentsev's anthology ReFocus: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky.

Other useful sources were Gilles Deleuze's commentaries in Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Caleta (University of Minnesota Press, 1989); P. Adams Sitney's The Cinema of Poetry (Oxford, 2014); Steven Dillon's The Solaris Effect: Art and Artifice in Contemporary American Film (University of Texas Press, 2006); Peter Green's "Apocalypse and Sacrifice," Sight and Sound 56:2 (1987), pp. 111–18; Roger Hilman's "Tarkovsky's Odes to . . . Joy?," Slavic and East European Performance 17:3 (1997), pp. 30–36; Boris Natanovich Strugatsky and Erik Simon's "Working for Tarkovsky," Science Fiction Studies 31:3 (2004), pp. 418–20; Robert Bryan's "Lighting Boris Godunov with Andrei Tarkovsky," Opera Quarterly 26:1 (2010), pp. 122–28; and John A. Riley's "Hauntology, Ruins, and the Failure of the Future in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker," Journal of Film and Video 69:1 (2017), pp. 18–26. An especially fascinating document is Stan Brakhage's "Brakhage Meets Tarkovsky," Chicago Review 47/48 (2001–2002), pp. 42–46, which describes Tarkovsky's almost comically rude response to the great experimental filmmaker. One of the most haunting pieces ever written about the director is Robert Bird's "The Omens: Tarkovsky, Sacrifice, Cancer," which Apparatus published last year. I knew Robert over e-mail and was planning to reach out to him as I set to work on this article. I was saddened to discover that he had died in September, at the age of fifty.

I frequently visited the Nostalghia website, whose trove of Tarkovskiana includes passages from the diaries that are not available in the standard English edition. I also browsed a cache of YouTube videos uploaded by Charles M. Here you can see various interviews with the director, behind-the-scenes footage, documentaries in several languages, a glimpse of Tarkovsky's funeral, his occasional acting appearances, and interviews with his associates. Among the oddities on offer is a snippet of film showing Tarkovsky touring Monument Valley in 1983. This was his only American visit, the result of an invitation from the Telluride Film Festival. That appearance went poorly, with Tarkovsky's haughty strictures against Hollywood alienating American filmmakers and inspiring a protest from none other than Richard Widmark. In 2008, Jim Emerson wrote an amusing account of the brouhaha for Roger Ebert's blog.

The films have a potent appeal among musicians and composers. When I interviewed Alfred Schnittke in 1994, I couldn't resist asking him about Tarkovsky. Schnittke, who wrote an extraordinary score for Shepitko's The Ascent, told me: "Unfortunately I never worked with him. I would be happy if that were true, if that had actually happened. It had been a dream of ours, but it never actually happened." Toru Takemitsu, Luigi Nono, Gyorgy Kurtág, Wolfgang Rihm, and Beat Furrer all wrote works in Tarkovsky's memory; Claudio Abbado presented four of those pieces at a Wien Modern concert in 1991 and recorded them for DG. Paul Griffiths reviewed the disc insightfully for the New York Times. It was Abbado who enticed Tarkovsky into the opera house, for a production of Boris Godunov at Covent Garden in 1983. The staging was later re-created at the Mariinsky and released on video, though its impact was diminished in the process. The most potent image is a pendulum that swings at the back of the stage in several scenes; when I saw it, I thought of the swinging censer in Andrei Rublev (see the third freeze frame above). At the time of his death, Tarkovsky was preparing to return to opera, again at Covent Garden. The piece? Wagner's Flying Dutchman.

Much thanks to Anya Kordunsky, Daniel Zalewski, David Remnick, Nico Chapin, Vida Johnson, and Mikhail Ratgauz.

Heine v. Platen

A Cultural Comment on the New Yorker website.

Bibliographic notes: George Prochnik's Heinrich Heine: Writing the Revolution appears in Yale University Press's Jewish Lives series. Jefferson Chase's Inciting Laughter: The Development of "Jewish Humor" in 19th Century German Culture (De Gruyter, 2000) has an incisive analysis of the Heine-Platen affair, seen against the German publishing industry of the period. (I used Jeff's translation of "The Baths of Lucca," and he also improved my translation of Platen.) Modern writing on Platen in English is scant, a notable exception being Adrian Daub's "Platen's Retreat: On the Poetics and Ethics of Memorizing Ballads," German Quarterly 85:2 (2012), pp. 137–155. The standard work on Platen in German is Peter Bumm's August Graf von Platen: Eine Biographie (Schöningh, 1990). You can read a translation of Karl Kraus's fascinating essay "Heine and the Consequences" in Jonathan Franzen's The Kraus Project (FSG, 2013). I also consulted Jeffrey Sammons's Heinrich Heine: A Modern Biography (Princeton, 1979); Max Brod's Heinrich Heine (Allert de Lange, 1934); Robert C. Holub's "Heine's Sexual Assaults: Towards a Theory of the Total Polemic," Monatshefte 73:4 (1981), pp. 415–428; Jens Brüggemann's Der Kampf der Außenseiter: Die satirische Heine-Platen Kontroverse als Spiegel antijüdischer Ressentiments im Vormärz (GRIN Verlag, 2008); Thomas Mann's 1930 essay on Platen; and Hans Mayer's Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters, trans. Denis M. Sweet (MIT Press, 1982).

An F. Andrieu moment

There is, alas, no other F. Andrieu moment.

Fred Rogers, Wagnerian

Jim Smith, the proprietor of Sunstone Press in Santa Fe, was a longtime friend of the great television educator Fred Rogers. Smith recently drew my attention to a fascinating Santa Fe New Mexican piece, by Mark Tiarks, about Rogers's musical career. Rogers majored in composition at Rollins College; his graduation piece is above. Tiarks notes that Rogers's roommate at Rollins was the future Metropolitan Opera baritone John Reardon, who would also sing the lead roles in the miniature operas that were a recurring feature of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. The tradition ended when Reardon died of AIDS in 1988. After graduation, Rogers served for a time as a floor manager at NBC, learning the television business. One of his assignments was the NBC Opera Theatre, where he worked on Amahl and the Night Visitors, Trouble in Tahiti, and a condensed Billy Budd. He discusses that phase of his career in an Archive of American Television interview; at 6:55, you can hear him singing a snippet of Billy Budd. Tiarks writes: "Although his ego was at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to Richard Wagner’s, Rogers took Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk approach, writing all the scripts, as well as the lyrics and music for the more than 200 songs performed on [the show]." I will see if I can incorporate that provocative insight into a revised version of Wagnerism. Years ago, Jim Smith told me Rogers enjoyed reading my New Yorker columns; it's the best compliment I've ever received.

Three William Byrd moments

Miscellany

WasteLAnd, the LA-based new-music series, makes a virtual return on Jan. 29 with the première of Davíð Brynjar Franzson's evening-length voice fragments, featuring soprano Stephanie Aston .... On the same day, the Berlin Philharmonic will introduce CATAMORPHOSIS, a new piece by Anna Thorvaldsdottir.... Tyshawn Sorey, recently the focus of a brilliant New York Times Magazine profile by Adam Shatz, has a new vocal piece called Save the Boys, which Opera Philadelphia will introduce on Feb. 12, with John Holiday singing. ... No Mozart or Beethoven, lots of Chabrier, Schreker, and Robert Simpson: John Ashbery's CD collection, circa 2008.... A Joshua Rosenblum review in Opera News led me to Tulsa Opera's wonderfully quirky baseball-diamond production of Rigoletto.... It was a great honor to sit for an epic-length Do the Math interview with Ethan Iverson. Don't miss Ethan's survey of the Wagnerian Piano.... The composer Michael Hersch has uploaded a video of his ten-hour piece sew me into a shroud of leaves, as heard at the Wien Modern in Nov. 2019.... Ekmeles returns to live performance on Feb. 27, with world premières by Jeff Myers and Rebecca Bruton and older works by Kaija Saariaho, Carolyn Chen, and Nomi Epstein.

Two Sigrid Onégin moments

Via David Shengold.

Valitutto, sunrise to sunset

Here is the program of simple lines / quiet music / silent songs, a remarkable marathon recital that the pianist Richard Valitutto gave today at his apartment in Ithaca NY, as part of Wild Up's Darkness Sounding festival. I am now catching up with a recital that Valitutto gave at Cornell last month.

​SET 1 — 9:58am-11:40am EST // 6:58am-8:40am PST

“gardens, cities, palaces” (100 min)

​eva-maria houben: le jardin suspendu (2015)

eva-maria houben: a walk through the bamboo garden (2020)

​Alvin Curran: Inner Cities 1 (1993)

Morton Feldman: Palais de Mari (1986)

SET 2 — 11:50am-2:30pm EST // 8:50am-11:30am PST

“soft, silent 1” (45 mins)

Federico Mompou: Música callada, Book I (1959)

Valentin Silvestrov: Silent Songs, Book I (1974/77)

“hin und da” (110 mins)

Ann Southam: Simple Lines of Enquiry (2008)

Jürg Frey: La présence, les silences (2014-15)

SET 3 — 3:00-5:00pm EST // 12:00-2:00pm PST

“soft, silent 2” (60 mins)

Federico Mompou: Música callada, Book II (1962)

Valentin Silvestrov: Silent Songs, Book II (1974/77)

“nocturnes, lullabies, chorales” (60 mins)

Taylan Susam: Nocturnes (2009)

eva-maria houben: three lullabies (2007)

Wolfgang von Schweinitz: Plainsound Lullaby (2014)

Linda Catlin Smith: Nocturnes & Chorales (2013)

Richard Valitutto: giant moon / light steps (2020)

SET 4 — 5:10-6:20pm EST // 2:10-3:20pm PST

​“soft, silent 3” (70 min)

Federico Mompou: Música callada, Books III & IV (1965-67)

Valentin Silvestrov: Silent Songs, Books III & IV (1974/77)

SET 5 — 6:35-8:08pm EST // 3:35-5:08pm PST

​“philosophia” (100 min)

Laurence Crane: Jacques Derrida Goes to a Nightclub (1986)

Chris Rountree: Immediate Tragedy (2020, 7 min)

​Laurence Crane: Jacques Derrida Goes to a Massage Parlor (1986)

Thomas Feng: This Illusion Meant Something (2018)

Laurence Crane: Kierkegaard His Prelude (1986)

​Andrew McIntosh: I have a lot to learn (2019)

Nick Norton: On Nothing (2020)

Laurence Crane: Jacques Derrida Goes to the Supermarket (1986)

​jürg frey: sam lazaro bros (1984)

Laurence Crane: Jacques Derrida Goes to the Beach (1986)

Alvin Curran: Endangered Species (1994-96)

​Laurence Crane: Kierkegaard His Walk Around Copenhagen (1986)

Linda Catlin Smith: The Underfolding (2001)

Encore:

Michael Finnissy: Love is here to stay

Wagnerism alert

There is an absolutely superb Wagnerian moment in Emerald Fennell's new film Promising Young Woman. I won't divulge details, but Isolde's Transfiguration is involved.

A Percy Grainger moment

An extraordinary recording, one of John Eliot Gardiner's finest.

Respite

In a stream from Wigmore Hall, members of Apartment House play Feldman's Piano and String Quartet.

David Hockney's Wagner Drive

Road Trip. The New Yorker, Jan. 18, 2021.

Below are directions for the first of David Hockney's Wagner Drives, the Malibu Canyon version. The Adrian Boult recordings that Hockney used are not easily available, but substitutes with similar timings are suggested below.

1. Begin at the corner of Las Flores Canyon Road and Pacific Coast Highway. Play "America" from West Side Story. Repeat if necessary until step 2.

2. Turn right onto Malibu Canyon Road. Play "The Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla" from Das Rheingold, duration 8:49. Suggested recording: Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Simón Bolivar Symphony Orchestra (DG).

3. Turn right onto Piuma Road; after 6.4 miles, continue briefly onto Rambla Pacifico. Play the Prelude to Act I of Parsifal, duration 12:45. Suggested recording: Georg Solti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic (Decca).

4. Turn left onto Las Flores Canyon Road and return to the PCH. Siegfried's Funeral Music from Götterdämmerung, duration 8:14, should be beginning at about this time. Suggested recording: Gustavo Dudamel / Simón Bolivar (DG).

The Kanan Dume drive is more difficult to replicate, but I've traced the route on Google Maps. The playlist is: "America," "Blue Danube" Waltz, Entrance of the Gods (at the turn onto Kanan Dume), Parsifal Act I Prelude, Parsifal Act I Transformation music, Parsifal Good Friday music, Siegfried's Funeral Music, Parsifal Act I Prelude.

Directions for the San Gabriel drive are here. The playlist is: three Sousa marches (Hands Across the Sea, The Thunderer, The Belle of Chicago), Entrance of the Gods, first movement of Schumann's "Rhenish" Symphony, Parsifal Act I Prelude, second movement of the "Rhenish," Sousa's Liberty Bell march.

Much thanks to Arthur Kolat for making these expeditions possible. His excellent thesis Twilight of the Roads can be found at Academia.edu.

The marginal lament of a DC native

To be from Washington, DC is in some sense to be from nowhere. There is no DC accent, no identity. Too much of the city's population is impermanent and transient for such markers to take hold. Nevertheless, none of us can escape a primal attachment to the place from which we came. Some usually inactive nerve of DC-ness, of DC pride, was touched by the grotesque and appalling images that came out of the US Capitol yesterday. I am not in the habit of shouting expletives at the television, but so it turned out. It didn't seem possible that I could loathe this pestilential president even more than I had loathed him the day before, but so it turned out.

My father grew up in the city and worked for the government his entire career, at the US Geological Survey. My late mother worked part time for the Smithsonian Institution, at the National Museum of Natural History, on the Mall. She also volunteered at the White House during the Bush and Obama administrations. These somnolent, seemingly impregnable monuments were always in the background of my youth, though I very seldom ventured inside them. My only visit to the Capitol, as far as I can recall, was for a second-grade field trip in which we were given a tour by Senator Edward Kennedy, one of whose sons was in my class. We sat at desks in the Senate chamber, but I remember being most impressed by the underground train that carried people from one part of the complex to another.

My rage at Wednesday's events gave way to tears when I tried to imagine my mother's reaction to them. She was deeply devoted to Washington's ceremonial trappings and architecture. We had dozens of books about the White House, the Capitol, and other buildings on the Mall. She was also politically very conservative. I don't know if she would have accepted any of the right-wing justifications or distortions that are circulating around the terrorist incident at the Capitol, but I am certain that the sight of democratic symbols being violated and destroyed would have caused her very intense distress. I can't help feeling the same, even if the physical damage is incidental to the lives that were lost, and even if the entire circus-like spectacle drove home the concept of white privilege in incontrovertible fashion.

Agamemnon is listening

A Jürg Frey moment

This new work by Frey, played by violinist Anouck Genthon and gambist Pierre-Yves Martel, takes its title from a poem by the Swiss poet Anne Perrier: "Ce chant trop lourd / Je laisse à la nuit son poids d’ombre / Et le reste / Je le donne à l’espace / Qui le donne à l’oisseau qui le donne / A l’ange éblouissant." Or: "This too heavy song / I leave its weight of shadow to the night / And the rest / I give to space / Which gives it to the bird which gives it / To the dazzling angel."

David Elliott tribute on WHRB

Today I've been listening raptly to WHRB's David Elliott Memorial Orgy, a tribute to Harvard radio's spiritus rector, who died last month at the age of seventy-eight. It was a melancholy joy to hear again David's mellifluous, unpretentious, effortlessly knowledgeable voice. Was there was ever a finer announcer of classical-music radio? I know of none. But he was a great deal more than that; he was an educator of rare ability, a mentor of unstinting generosity, one of the most selfless people I have ever met. In a segment aired toward the end of the program, I tried to convey my gratitude to and for David, without whom I would probably have never become a music critic. Here's the audio I sent to Allison Pao and Xilin Zhou, two Harvard undergraduates who managed the brilliant feat of putting together the program and sending it out remotely:

Many more memories came to mind as I listened to dozens of alumni, performers, listeners, and friends extol David. What he created at the station was an atmosphere of dedication, seriousness, and thoroughness, which applied not only to classical music, his primary interest, but also to folk, jazz, rock, and R&B. Each department had a particular identity, a sense of mission, and whether or not David liked the music in question — he blanched at the ruder eruptions of post-punk rock and hip-hop — he appreciated anyone with an assiduous streak. When, for example, my friend Jason Shure went to superhuman lengths to pay tribute to Captain Beefheart, he earned David's respect, if not his comprehension. Obsession was the rule during the winter and spring "Orgy" periods — orgies being multi-hour or in some cases multi-day explorations of a composer, artist, band, ensemble, genre, or period. Orgies are said to have begun when a student expressed relief at having finished his exams by playing all nine Beethoven symphonies in a row. Thanks primarily to David's influence, such stunt-like escapades became ambitious undertakings of research and explication. Shortly before I arrived at WHRB, the station aired a complete traversal of the works of J. S. Bach, with Prof. Christoph Wolff serving as scholarly adviser. Nothing quite like it had taken place anywhere; David and Michael Rosenberg, who produced the program, were able to make use of Hänssler Classics recordings of cantatas that had just been issued.

My somewhat maladjusted post-adolescent temperament was immediately drawn to these exercises in exhaustiveness. David recognized me at once as someone who would join him in his quest to uncover little-known composers, neglected performers, and obscure oddities of all kinds. Although he loved the core repertory as much as anyone, he refused to let WHRB become the sort of easy-listening classical station that would play snippets of Vivaldi and greatest hits of Mozart. Indeed, there was a list of "warhorses" that were more or less forbidden, although they were allowed to run rampant on a semi-annual Warhorse Orgy. I inherited from David a wide-open conception of the repertory, running from Alkan to Zelenka. There was never the one perfect recording. Whenever I fastened on to a favorite — say, Karajan's Mahler Ninth — he would say, "Have you heard Bruno Walter live from Vienna?" I might have stuck with my Karajan, for the time being, but the interplay of alternatives was all important. As historically informed performances of Baroque music came to the fore, he retained a charming fondness for the likes of Alfred Cortot's Brandenburgs, Malcolm Sargent's Messiah, and Klemperer's St. Matthew Passion. I have a distinct memory of him listening in awe when the Passion came on the air. As I was bustling on to some pressing task, he said, "Just listen!"

During my time at WHRB, I presented two weekly shows, the Twentieth-Century Symphony and Music Since 1900, and hosted a procession of orgies, including complete surveys of Britten, Shostakovich, Brahms, and Nielsen, as well as a multi-genre program called the Avant-Garde of the 70s and 80s, with sections on jazz and experimental rock curated by Mike Pahre and Mike Vazquez. David's vast record collection would fill in many missing gaps in these programs: only he could have supplied Shostakovich's Moscow, Cheremushki or Britten's Paul Bunyan (yet to be commercially recorded, but David had an off-the-air tape). The orgies would include historical-performance sections, for which David usually served as guest announcer. (We could not, of course, announce for 50 or 60 hours straight, though we'd stretch the limits of what was possible.) For my final WHRB project, Mahler and the Fin de Siècle, David contributed an impeccable segment on Mahler's Singers, playing rare discs of Anna Bahr-Mildenburg, Leopold Demuth, Selma Kurz, Leo Slezak, and Richard Mayr. I spent so many hours chatting with David, looking over Schwann record catalogues, browsing the Harvard Music Library catalogue, plotting how to obtain the seemingly unobtainable. It was in David's spirit that I ended up writing to György Ligeti in the hope of locating a recording of the Poème Symphonique for 100 Metronomes. Ligeti duly told me how to find one — a letter that I subsequently lost, to my eternal regret.

At times, this pursuit of the elusive became absurd. Not until WHRB's 75th-anniversary celebration in 2015 did I discover that David had recorded a delirious moment from my Nielsen Orgy of January 1990. He proceeded to play that tape to the anniversary gathering, sending me into a vertiginous state of pride and embarrassment blended. What happened was that I had listed in the program guide a recording of Nielsen's final finished work, the 30-second-long Piano Piece in C, Fog-Schousboe 159. It was supposed to appear on Hyperion's two-CD set of Nielsen piano music, with Mina Miller at the keyboard. But when I got out the discs I was bewildered to find that tiny piece was not there. I made this discovery just before the the final section of the program, which presented legendary symphonic performances by Thomas Jensen, Launy Grøndahl, and Erik Tuxen. David, observing how crestfallen I was by the absence of FS 159, came up with a crazy plan: why not find the score at the Harvard Music Library and make an instant recording? I was no great shakes as a pianist, but the music was brief enough, and simple enough, for me to tackle. During Grøndahl's Second Symphony, I ran to the library to check out the score, and during Tuxen's Fifth I ventured with David to the Adams House Junior Common Room to make the recording. This is what ensued on air:

It's doubtful that anyone would have cared if the Piano Piece in C had failed to appear, but at that moment it mattered to me immensely. David took obvious delight when the students were seized by manias of this kind, which set WHRB apart from every other station. I thank him for having cultivated my obsessive drives, directed them, put them to constructive use. What he did for me is what all great teachers do. And, although he had no official role in the money-devouring monster that is Harvard University, he was one of the two best teachers I encountered there — one of the best teachers I ever had.

Year in writing

I wrote four longer pieces for The New Yorker this year: an article about the Great Basin Bristlecone Pine, in January; an essay about the German-speaking emigration in L.A. in the 1930s and 40s, in March; a profile of the pianist Igor Levit, in May; and an essay on white supremacy in classical music, in September. I also fashioned a piece on Wagner in Hollywood from the final two chapters of my book Wagnerism, which appeared in September. My Musical Events columns touched on Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony, the LA Phil's Weimar Republic festival, The Flying Dutchman and Agrippina at the Met, Yuval Sharon's Sweet Land in L.A., CDs by Víkungur Ólafsson and Liza Lim, online marathons by the Met and Bang on a Can, new music after George Floyd, Poulenc's songs, the LA Phil at the Bowl, Jennifer Walshe, Sharon's Twilight: Gods, and virtual orchestral seasons. My online contributions included a year-end list, a piece on Hitler in the bunker, short notes about Nick Neely's Alta California and Garth Greenwell's Cleanness, a look at the Spektral and JACK Quartets, a meditation on Billy Budd and Beau Travail, an examination of the ecological cost of recording, an interview with John Williams, a piece on Willa Cather's One of Ours, and a musical memorial for my mother, who died in February. Deep thanks to all who found time to read my work in this horrendous year, and still deeper thanks to The New Yorker for giving me the space and time to write.

Dawn in Panamint Valley

As a reward for the end of the long haul with Wagnerism, I spent a week in the area of Death Valley, my favorite place on earth. Based in the lovely town of Shoshone, I passed several lazy days reading Don Quixote, watching Antonioni movies, and observing the play of color on the Resting Spring Range. My major expedition involved renting a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon from Farabee's and driving up to Urehebe Crater, where I went on to the Racetrack road. I hadn't seen the Racetrack playa, with its famous sliding rocks, and Teakettle Junction (I performed the obligatory teakettle exchange). I then followed the White Top Mountain Road and hiked a bit at the top of Bighorn Gorge before going back south on the Hunter Mountain Road. I camped on Lake Hill Road in Panamint Valley — a new moon enabled the most extraordinary night sky I've seen since I was in Djibouti in 1999 — and began the second day driving down the Trona-Wildrose Road (photo above). I went off pavement at Ballarat and made my way over to the Goler Wash, driving behind mining trucks that sent up photogenic plumes of dust in the dawn sun. At the top of Goler Wash I made the inevitable stop at Barker Ranch and then ascended to Mengel Pass, trusting my Farabee's beast to handle an alleged road that consisted mostly of piles of rock. It did not fail. Butte Valley was the reward on the other side, with the geological wonder of the Striped Butte at its heart. I went down Warm Springs Canyon and got on the West Road. With an hour or so remaining before sunset, I branched off on the Trail Canyon Road and briefly explored one of the canyons at the top. Back in Shoshone, I resumed inactivity, though I spent one day hiking the gorgeous trails of China Ranch and driving in the Nopah Range wilderness. This was my tenth trip to Death Valley, but there's still so much more to see. My next goal will be the far north part of the park. Deepest thanks as ever to Darrel Cowan.

Previously: Desert Bloom

A Trevor Bača moment

Bača's ( H A R M O N Y ), from a Monday Evening Concerts event in January 2020. Paul Holdengräber recites Paul Griffiths's text; Jonathan Hepfer leads the Echoi ensemble.