Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

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."

For Guy Klucevsek

The bewitching accordionist-composer has died at the age of 78.

The authoritarian enablers on the Supreme Court

Josh Marshall: "This remains a renegade and corrupt Supreme Court majority making up its own Constitution as it goes and most times, if not every time, enabling arbitrary and untrammeled presidential dictatorship."

Salome at the Met and Heartbeat Opera

Head Cases. The New Yorker, May 26, 2025.

Previously: Salome with Mattila in 2004; the Salome critical edition; Salome as play and opera (for the Times); a roundup of Salome recordings (for The Gramophone). 

Nightafternight playlist

New and recent releases of interest.

Bach, Mass in B Minor; Raphaël Pichon conducting Pygmalion (Harmonia Mundi)

Raven Chacon, Voiceless Mass, Biyán, Owl Song; Chacon, Present Music (New World)

Begin the Song!: A Purcell Academy; Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian, Le Consort (Harmonia Mundi)

Licht und Schatten: Schubert Lieder of 1824; Samuel Hasselhorn, Ammiel Bushakevitz (Harmonia Mundi)

Czernowin, Seltene Erde, Atara; Uli Fussenegger, Johannes Kalitzke conducting Klangforum Wien, Sofia Jernberg, Holger Falk, Christian Karlsen conducting the Vienna Radio Symphony (Kairos)

Timothy McCormack, mine but for its sublimation; Jack Yarbrough (another timbre)

Korngold, Symphony; Korngold (piano transcription), John Mauceri conducting the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana (Supertrain)

Ash Fure, Animal (Boomkat)

Haydn, Quartets Op. 77, Scottish Folk Tunes; Maxwell Quartet (Linn)

Strana armonia d'amore: Madrigals by Vicentino, Gesualdo, Nenna, Verunell; Geoffroy Jourdain leading Les Cris de Paris (Harmonia Mundi)

Gabriel Dupont, Complete Songs; Cyrille Dubois, Tristan Raës (Aparté)

Trump's assault on the arts

Here is a crushingly long list of organizations and programs whose National Endowment for the Arts grants have been canceled, on the grounds that “funding is being allocated in a new direction in furtherance of the Administration's agenda." The affected groups are desperately seeking alternative funding to maintain their planned programming. They can also appeal the termination notice.

A Timothy McCormack moment

Ryan Bancroft at the LA Phil

The young conductor Ryan Bancroft, a Los Angeles native who has ascended rapidly in recent years and is now based at the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, led the LA Phil last weekend in a sensational account of Nielsen's murderously difficult Fourth Symphony. I adore this piece, but I've managed to hear it live only once, in 1994, when Herbert Blomstedt brought it to the NY Phil. (I missed Alan Gilbert's later rendition with the same orchestra.) That 1994 performance threatened to fall apart in the finale, where different sections of the orchestra must trade off unison lines at breakneck speed. The LA Phil managed those passages more or less flawlessly, as Richard Ginnell notes in a San Francisco Classical Voice review. I'd previously encountered Bancroft delivering a cannily controlled, expressively potent Shostakovich Tenth at the Hollywood Bowl — not an easy undertaking in that venue. Ginell goes on to write: "Bancroft may not have the flashy charisma of Dudamel, but based on this performance, if the LA Phil is looking for deep musicianship from a music director candidate, the orchestra might want to give Bancroft a further viewing." He will be back next season, with Shostakovich and Sibelius.

For David Thomas

Annals of appeasement

"A vitality gap has opened up. The Trump administration is like a supercar with 1,000 horsepower, and its opponents have been coasting around on mopeds. You’d have to go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in 1933 to find a presidency that has operated with such verve during its first 100 days."

                                — New York Times columnist

Gleichschaltung

The word that best describes what the Trump regime is trying to do to Harvard University.

Weill's Threepenny Opera and Love Life

Berlin to Broadway. The New Yorker, April 21, 2025.

A Bach moment

An astonishing, incontestably great new recording from Raphaël Pichon and Pygmalion.

Fellow Travelers at the Kennedy Center

The New York Times circa 1950.

The creative team behind the 2016 opera Fellow Travelers — composer Gregory Spears, librettist Greg Pierce, director Kevin Newbury, producer Jecca Barry, and novelist Thomas Mallon — have decided to withdraw their work from the 2025-26 season of Washington National Opera, in protest of Trump's hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. They write in a statement: "The expansion of freedom and liberty for all people are core values of the opera and the book upon which it is based. The current administration’s takeover of the Kennedy Center and many of its policies contradict those values." In light of a feeble response from the W.N.O. — “Art and music have the power to rise above division and bring people together to find common ground," blah blah blah — it's worth specifying why, over and above the personal convictions of the creators, Fellow Travelers doesn't belong at Trump's Kennedy Center. The opera, which I wrote about in 2018, is based on Mallon's 2007 novel about the lives of two men who have an affair in 1950s Washington. The context is the "lavender scare," the purging of some five thousand gay men and lesbians from the federal work force. Many lives were ruined; more than a few people chose suicide. We are now living in a time where trans people are being demonized by the Trump regime. The draft-dodging president is attempting to bar trans and nonbinary people from military service, declaring, with his usual mind-bending hypocrisy, that their identity "conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle.” Precisely the same logic targeted gay men and lesbians in the fifties: our very nature marked us as un-American. Add to this the bans on transgender topics in schools, on trans people in sports, and on gender-affirming medical care for people under nineteen. As M. Gessen wrote in the Times: "The message, consistent and unrelenting, is that trans people are a threat to the nation." History is repeating itself, in even more vile fashion. Under such circumstances, a presentation of Fellow Travelers at the Trump Center would have been grotesque.