Admirers of John Schaefer's long-running and hugely influential WNYC show New Sounds are reeling in shock from the station's decision to cancel the program — or, to quote a stomach-churning locution in an internal e-mail, “sunset the New Sounds brand." Laurie Anderson's succinct reaction: "Why would they do that?"... The Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz, creator of one of the twentieth century's more formidable string-quartet cycles, is the focus of the third annual Bard Music West festival, an extension of the Bard Music Festival in upstate NY. It runs Oct. 18-19 at Noe Valley Ministry, in San Francisco. The Chronicle's Joshua Kosman has a preview.... From Oct. 23 to Oct. 26, CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College jointly present Unit Structures, a conference and mini-festival around the magnificent legacy of Cecil Taylor.... The reinvigorated Monday Evening Concerts series in LA has announced an enticing 2019-20 season: Feldman's For Philip Guston, Xenakis's Pléïades, an Éliane Radigue mini-festival, a Davóne Tines recital, an Anne Carson/Beckett evening, recent works by Trevor Bača and Caroline Shaw, and so forth.... A similarly seductive WasteLAnd Music season leads off on Nov. 8 with a Matt Barbier evening of "sludge, debris, virtuosity, and fascination," as evidenced in works of Timothy McCormack, Michelle Lou, and George Lewis.... In the New York Times, Zachary Woolfe writes about Lena Herzog's unclassifiable and singularly haunting Last Whispers, which plays at Peak Performances in Montclair, NJ, Oct. 16-20.
Links
There was a third book
Last week I turned in the manuscript of my third book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. Having spent nine years writing it, I'm now not entirely sure what to do with myself. To be sure, much work remains: copy-editing, fact-checking, determining the placement of more than a hundred illustrations. But the work on my end is largely done. The publication date is September 2020.
I say in the prelude that working on this book was the great education of my life. It took so long partly because I enjoyed the process of research so deeply. The central topic is Wagner's impact on non-musical artists, from his own lifetime forward. The list of Wagner-inflected poets, novelists, painters, dancers, architects, theater designers, and filmmakers is almost infinitely long. It begins, roughly, with Baudelaire and George Eliot; encompasses such titanic modernist novelists as Proust, Mann, Joyce, Woolf, and Cather; and continues into the present, with the likes of Terrence Malick and Werner Herzog finding new images for Wagner on film. Add to this the composer's effect on philosophy, from Nietzsche to Alain Badiou, and, of course, his huge political ramifications, which are not limited to Hitler and the far right. The education consisted in reading, re-reading, viewing, and reconsidering a vast swath of cultural production. I'm not sure how many hundreds of books I read in the process, but I am much the better for it, and I hope that the book reflects a maturation of perspective.
It's not yet clear how many pages Wagnerism will consume, but it will be longer than The Rest Is Noise, which was not a short book. If it turns out to be anything other than an unreadable monster, Eric Chinski, my heroically patient and exacting editor, should take most of the credit. A great many scholars and critics have helped me along the way; I will do my best to give thanks to all in the Acknowledgments. The book will be dedicated to the memory of my beloved and brilliant friend Andrew Patner, who had many doubts about Wagner but loved Meistersinger nonetheless. May it be worthy of him.
Here is the table of contents:
PRELUDE: Death in Venice
1. RHEINGOLD: Wagner, Nietzsche, and the “Ring”
2. TRISTAN CHORD: Baudelaire and the Symbolists
3. SWAN KNIGHT: Victorian England and Gilded-Age America
4. GRAIL TEMPLE: Esoteric, Decadent, and Satanic Wagner
5. HOLY GERMAN ART: The Kaiserreich and Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
6. NIBELHEIM: Jewish and Black Wagner
7. VENUSBERG: Feminist and Gay Wagner
8. BRÜNNHILDE’S ROCK: Willa Cather and the Singer-Novel
9. MAGIC FIRE: Modernism, 1900 to 1914
10. NOTHUNG: The First World War and Hitler's Youth
11. RING OF POWER: Revolution and Russia
12. FLYING DUTCHMAN: “Ulysses,” “The Waste Land,” “The Waves”
13. SIEGFRIED’S DEATH: Nazi Germany and Thomas Mann
14. RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES: Film from “The Birth of a Nation” to “Apocalypse Now”
15. THE WOUND: Wagnerism after 1945
POSTLUDE
A Nightafternight playlist
New and recent releases of interest.
— Morton Feldman Piano; Philip Thomas (another timbre)
— Feldman, For Bunita Marcus; Aki Takahashi (Mode)
— Bruckner, Symphony No. 9; Manfred Honeck conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony (Reference)
— Julia Wolfe, Fire in my mouth; Jaap van Zweden conducting the New York Philharmonic, The Crossing, Young People's Chorus of New York City (Decca)
— Andrew Norman, Sustain; Gustavo Dudamel conducting the LA Philharmonic (DG, digital only)
— Hannah Lash, Filigree; JACK Quartet (New Focus)
— Alkan, Etudes, Op. 39; Paul Wee (BIS, Nov. release)
— Scarlatti, Sonatas; Lucas Debargue (Sony)
— Schubert, Schwanengesang, Brahms, Vier ernste Gesänge; Gerald Finley, Julius Drake (Hyperion)
— Cipriano de Rore, Madrigals; Blue Heron (BHCD)
Nightafternight playlist
New and recent recordings of interest.
Feldman, For Bunita Marcus; Aki Takahashi (Mode)
Beethoven, Complete Piano Sonatas; Igor Levit (Sony)
Clara Schumann, Piano Concerto, Piano Sonata in G Minor, and other works; Isata Kanneh-Mason with Holly Mathieson conducting the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (Decca)
Mark Andre, hij 1 and 2; Mariano Chiacchiarini conducting the WDR Symphony, Marcus Creed conducting the SWR Vocal Ensemble (Wergo)
Weinberg, String Quartets Nos. 11–13; Silesian Quartet (Accord)
Ronald Stevenson, Piano Works vol. 2; Kenneth Hamilton (Prima Facie)
Luke Bedford, Through His Teeth; Opera Factory Freiburg (bastille musique)
Christopher Cerrone, The Pieces That Fall to Earth; Lindsay Kesselman, Theo Bleckmann, Christopher Rountree conducting wild Up (New Amsterdam)
Catherine Lamb, Point / Wave; Cristián Alvear (another timbre)
John Luther Adams, Become Desert; Ludovic Morlot conducting the Seattle Symphony (Cantaloupe)
in manus tuas: works of Andrew Norman, Caroline Shaw, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Anna Thorvaldsdóttir; Lanzilotti, Karl Larson, Sarah Mullins (New Focus)
Bookshelf
New and recent publications of interest.
Melissa Burrage, The Karl Muck Scandal: Classical Music and Xenophobia in World War I America (Boydell and Brewer)
Cate Haste, Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler (Basic Books)
Shayne Carter, Dead People I Have Known (Victoria UP)
Mark Stryker, Jazz from Detroit (University of Michigan Press)
Walter Everett and Tim Riley, What Goes On: The Beatles, Their Music, and Their Time (Oxford UP)
Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (FSG, out 8/27)
Katherine M. Kuenzli, Henry van de Velde: Designing Modernism (Yale UP)
The Karl Muck affair
For the New Yorker website, I've written a Cultural Comment on two recent books that describe the absurd and frightening Karl Muck hysteria of 1917-18. Above is a cartoon from the period. One rumor pegged Muck as Wagner's illegitimate son, prompting a poem from Lincoln Kirstein: "Karl Muck conducts the symphony; a steel svelte villain, he— / Ma says he's Wagner's bastard son ('Daddy, what's bostordy?')" Other eminent German- and Austrian-born musicians suffered consequences during the First World War, including Ernst Kunwald, who was interned; Frederick Stock, who temporarily stepped down from the Chicago Symphony; and Fritz Kreisler, who stopped performing for the duration of the war.
Miscellany
"No musical administrator is more widely respected or well liked than Ara Guzelimian," I wrote on this blog in 2007, shortly after Ara left Carnegie Hall to become Dean of Juilliard. Ara recently announced that he will step down from Juilliard next year, and the song remains the same. During his tenure, Juilliard has diversified and deepened its mission while retaining an exalted status among American conservatories. I look forward to seeing what institution will profit next from Ara's wisdom and warmth.... The keen critic and Bruckner authority Richard Lehnert has left Stereophile after thirty-four years of service as the magazine's copyeditor. He's written a delightful memoir of his adventures in editing.... The Louth Contemporary Music Society, whose leader Eamonn Quinn won the Belmont Prize last year, has an entrancing new CD out, KLANG, on which the Goeyvaerts String Trio plays Wolfgang von Schweinitz's Sounds on Schön Berg La Monte Young.... On August 10, Indexical will take over much of the Californian city of Santa Cruz, as Carmina Escobar leads a daylong event entitled Feast of Beams, Keepers of Light. Indexical is seeking musicians, dancers, artists, surfers, and bicyclists.... The NYC activist orchestra The Dream Unfinished ends its season on July 11 with a program devoted to climate change and its effect on communities of color.... Composer and YouTube analyst Samuel Andreyev has a fine segment on Ruth Crawford Seeger's awesome Quartet.
Gay life
On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall, I've assembled some of my writing on gay topics, going back to the first piece I wrote for The New Yorker, in 1993. The photo is from my marriage to Jonathan at Toronto City Hall, 2005.
Love on the March. Nov. 4, 2012.
Gay Berlin, Jan. 26, 2015.
Oscar Wilde, Aug. 9, 2011.
Willa Cather, Oct. 2, 2017.
Corigliano's First Symphony, May 30, 2019.
Gay opera, July 27, 2017.
Julius Eastman, Jan. 15, 2017.
Women, gays, and classical music. Oct. 3, 2013.
Beyond the gay-marriage victory, March 25, 2013.
Gay-rights victories, Nov. 7, 2012.
Thomas Mann, March 11, 1996.
In memoriam River Phoenix, Washington Post, Nov. 7, 1993.
On Wayne Koestenbaum's The Queen's Throat, April 12, 1993.
