soundbites

Miscellany

2005-09-10T13:42:00.000-07:00

“Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.”

Jean Genet

“It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites -- opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity -- where energies flow smoothly in one direction -- there will be much doing but no music.”

Eric Hoffer

Great music reaches into, and enriches, the soul of a listener. Such experiences cannot be termed “entertainment” and I chafe when it is so described, media-bundled together with films, Michael, Foxworthy, Oprah, and Vegas floor shows.

Paul

Daniel J. Wakin has written a provoking essay re concert attendance. See www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/arts/music/21waki.html

Peter Dorbin writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer that the cost of concert tickets have far exceeded the inflation rate and suggests that declining attendance may be because it is more than many people are willing to pay. see www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/entertainment/12543849.html (free subscription)

Farewell Readers

It has been a pleasant exercise during the past many months to post blogs. But, like all things, a time arrives to stop. My travels take much time and attention. Maybe again-later.

For those who have read my stuff, many thanks.

Agnus Who?

2005-09-09T06:28:00.000-07:00

For those music teachers who believe their message is heard, consider the following true and real answers from music students.

Agnus Dei was a woman composer famous for her church music.

Refrain means don't do it. A refrain in music is the part you better not try to sing.

A virtuoso is a musician with real high morals.

John Sebastian Bach died from 1750 to the present.

Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English. He was rather large.

Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling him. I guess he could not hear so good. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died from this.

Henry Purcell is a well known composer few people have ever heard of.

Aaron Copland is one of your most famous contemporary composers. It is unusual to be contemporary. Most composers do not live until they are dead.

An opera is a song of bigly size.

In the last scene of Pagliacci, Canio stabs Nedda who is the one he really loves. Pretty soon Silvio also gets stabbed, and they all live happily ever after.

When a singer sings, he stirs up the air and makes it hit any passing eardrums. But if he is good, he knows how to keep it from hurting.

Music sung by two people at the same time is called a duel.

I know what a sextet is but I had rather not say.

Caruso was at first an Italian. Then someone heard his voice and said he would go a long way. And so he came to America.

A good orchestra is always ready to play if the conductor steps on the odium.

Morris dancing is a country survival from times when people were happy.

Most authorities agree that music of antiquity was written long ago.

Probably the most marvelous fugue was the one between the Hatfields and McCoys.

My very best liked piece of music is the Bronze Lullaby.

My favorite composer is Opus.

A harp is a nude piano.

A tuba is much larger than its name.

Instruments come in many sizes, shapes and orchestras.

You should always say celli when you mean there are two or more cellos.

Another name for kettle drums is timpani. But I think I will just stick with the first name and learn it good.

A trumpet is an instrument when it is not an elephant sound.

While trombones have tubes, trumpets prefer to wear valves.

The double bass is also called the bass viol, string bass, and bass fiddle. It has so many names because it is so huge.

When electric currents go through them, guitars start making sounds. So would anybody.

Question: What are kettle drums called? Answer: Kettle drums.

Cymbals are round, metal CLANGS!

A bassoon looks like nothing I have ever heard.

Last month I found out how a clarinet works by taking it apart. I both found out and got in trouble.

Question: Is the saxophone a brass or a woodwind instrument? Answer: Yes.

The concertmaster of an orchestra is always the person who sits in the first chair of the first violins. This means that when a person is elected concertmaster, he has to hurry up and learn how to play a violin real good.

For some reason, they always put a treble clef in front of every line of flute music. You just watch.

I can't reach the brakes on this piano!

The main trouble with a French horn is it's too tangled up.

Anyone who can read all the instrument notes at the same time gets to be the conductor.

Instrumentalist is a many-purposed word for many player-types.

The flute is a skinny-high shape-sounded instrument.

The most dangerous part about playing cymbals is near the nose.

A contra-bassoon is like a bassoon, only more so.

Tubas are a bit too much.

Music instrument has a plural known as orchestra.

I would like for you to teach me to play the cello. Would tomorrow or Friday be best?

My favorite instrument is the bassoon. It is so hard to play people seldom play it. That is why I like the bassoon best.

It is easy to teach anyone to play the maracas. Just grip the neck and shake him in rhythm.

Just about any animal skin can be stretched over a frame to make a pleasant sound once the animal is removed.

Barely Worth a Glance

2005-09-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

Monday, August 15, 2005 Jerry, The Opera: No Funding Pressure... A tour of Jerry Springer, The Opera is in doubt, and some are saying it's because Arts Council England bowed to pressure from religious groups and denied funding. But a Council spokesperson says: "The decision not to provide funding for the tour was financial, as the musical was already a 'commercial success', and not over fears of a religious backlash. It is nonsense to say that the Arts Council has refused to fund the tour of Jerry Springer over fears of protests from Christian groups, or anyone else." BBC 08/15/05

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Yet Another Mozart Festival

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Hip-Hopping Mozart "The home of Britain's classiest opera parties is about to strike out in a new direction by staging 'hiphopera', complete with f-words and rap music, in the country house setting of Glyndebourne. The transformed version of Mozart's masterpiece is part of an increasingly successful attempt to draw new, and particularly young, audiences to the venue, which has a largely unfair but deep-rooted image of exclusivity and expense." (Re: Cosi) The Guardian (UK) 08/14/05

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Mozart “Buffets”

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Lecture: Hidden Symbolism in the Early Flute Sonata No. 62 in G by Pierre Solieux.

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BYOH: The Latest In Personalizing The Concert Experience The strangest new trend in live concertgoing is all about pretending that you're actually alone. Rather than piling up walls of speakers to pump sound into a room, several music festivals have begun providing a bank of headphone jacks for people to plug in their personal ear gear, and the whole room rocks in what sounds to a non-participant like silence. "The idea of a live show experienced solely through headphones originated eight years ago in France when a Paris musician named Erik Minkkinen streamed a concert from his closet. As the story goes, three people in Japan tuned in. Despite the tiny audience, the idea evolved into a decentralized organization under the name le placard, or the closet, a kind of open-source music festival where anyone can establish a streaming and/or listening room." Wired 08/31/05

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Lecture: An Implication/Realization Model of Mozart’s Symphony No. 25

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Oboist's Tell-All Is A Juicy Read
"Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music," (Atlantic Monthly Press, $24), a tell-all memoir by oboist and journalist Blair Tindall, zooms in on the unseemly, dysfunctional side of classical music. ...

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In Praise Of Mozart's Wife Mozart owed a lot of his success to his wife. "Constanze and her sisters were brought up in Mannheim, a centre of musical excellence. And, in addition to the sophistication she absorbed from this artistic milieu, she was intelligent - speaking excellent Italian and French as well as her native German. In many ways, she was an ideal wife for a composer. Mozart himself was firmly of that opinion." The Guardian (UK) 09/01/05

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The Power of a Mother, Music, and a Dime

2005-08-25T07:30:00.000-07:00

Reading about the state of classical music today is mostly pretty grim stuff. So, it is always happy reading when someone, somewhere, is doing something positive, either using classical music, or is fostering it. Read on.

This takes place in Jakarta where mother and housewife, Yayuk Rahardjo, has used music, classical in particular, as a means by which hundreds of young people can express themselves and do something constructive rather than take drugs, skip school or engage in other acts of delinquency.

She believes music as an art form can empower people, especially youths, who might be at a loss about their direction in life. Yayuk's endeavor comes from a firm belief that if nurtured from an early stage, music could provide people with an ethical foundation. Philosophers through the centuries have maintained the same belief; behavioral scientists, too.

Over the past eight years, an organization she helped found and now chairs, Indonesian Youth Music (YMI), which is a member of Jeunesses Musicales Internationale (JMI) in Canada, Germany, Netherlands, et al, (check out their website!) has recruited hundreds of talented young people from cities like Yogyakarta, Medan, Surabaya and Jakarta to form the National Youth Music Orchestra, an institution that provides them with scores of master classes by respected musicians, and has brought them to the spotlight by staging concerts in some of the city's venerated cultural centers. The orchestra has performed works by Beethoven, Bach, Schubert Mozart and others.

And this paragraph is especially noteworthy: For other less gifted young people, YMI has given them an opportunity to engage in activities relating to music in which they can explore the less glitzy side of performance art, such as artist management, sound system management and promoting hard-to-sell classical concerts. Scores of programs are designed to educate young people outside the organization about the merits of classical music, in a kind of lecture concert.

To nurture a love of music from an early age, Yayuk has also organized dance and music therapy for children between two and four years old -- an endeavor she considers a success as some of her students have become consummate musicians.

Almost every weekend, her office in Kebayoran Baru, South Jakarta, teems with young people who immerse themselves in music and other related activities. These young people also had big hand in organizing the 60th international congress of (JMI), the mother organization of YMI, between Aug. 15 and Aug. 19.

Indonesia is the third country in Asia and Pacific to hold the meet after Japan and South Korea. The programs were organized despite their being almost nothing in YMI's coffers. As a member of Belgium-based JMI, which bars its affiliates from engaging in commercial activities to finance their activities, YMI has had to rely on itself to keep its programs running.

Ever since its establishment, YMI has depended solely on sponsorship to support its programs. Such a budget constraint has prompted YMI to rely on word of mouth recommendation as its means of advertisement, even when it stages a major classical concert.

A wonderful story and achievement, and an inspiration to those who would like to DO something, as well as to those who don’t because “there’s no money”.

(This is an edited and recreated version of an article by M. Taufiqurrahman appearing in the Jakarta Post, Sanur, Bali) Aug. 18

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Then there is this head shaker:

Will The Internet Save Classical Music? "In the virtual absence of classical radio in America, the Internet can provide what radio does for other musical genres, namely a “free” means of hearing new and unfamiliar music, which if you like, you’ll go out and buy. But with the element of radio removed from the market structure, there are almost no places to randomly hear Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony or Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” while driving home from school or work. The Net provides direct access. With the stuffiness removed from the classical experience, people can hear just how glorious Stravinsky really is." Kansas City Star 08/21/05

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It’s as plain as the nose on your face. The financial problems of orchestras and the decline of classical audiences equals the incline of classical music as a business and its ever-increasing unimaginative, incompetent, MBAs and their salaries.

"It used to be orchestras had very small staffs and gave many fewer concerts," said Joseph Horowitz, the author of the recent book "Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall." "This is the nub of the issue. It's a surfeit of product that's causing many of the dysfunctions." That, he says, and the lack of charismatic music directors, amid an overabundance of marketing directors. (Most orchestras did not even have marketing departments until the 1970's. Today, a staff of a dozen is typical.)

A Voice In The Wilderness

2005-08-17T07:06:00.000-07:00

Walter Simmons, whose book Voices in the Wilderness: Six American Neo-Romantic Composers, is the first of a planned series of critical studies of modern American composers: Barber, Bloch, Creston (born Giuseppe Guttoveggio), Flagello, Gianinni, and Hanson. Mr. Simmons has championed lesser-known American composers for a long time, but with a caveat: their music must embody traditional aesthetic values of beauty, clarity, and emotional expression. Anybody else is dismissed… another Hanslick! (Sigh!)

What a turn around! Usually we read that atonal composers today have been/are neglected and that serialism is past its prime. Recently we have been told that gays are responsible for an American style, thanks to Nadine Hubbs. And now we are told that stylistically divergent Barber, Bloch, and Hanson, are neglected.. Their neglect is the reason for Mr. Simmons’ attention. It is also another of his salvos against “modernists.”

We may accept all this is with a de gustibus shrug, or plead the beholder’s eye, but Mr. Simmons’ goes on. He believes that these tonal, derivative, and neo-Romantics are neglected because they have been dismissed by universities and critics for not being “original” or atonal. It is at this point that I dismiss him for such desperate arm waving-even if he can drag up examples. As for critics, we should never mind them. They are wrong most of the time anyway. Mr. Simmons’ studies would likely stand more proudly without his unreasonable attack on musical society.

If you can overlook his bias against modernists, and probably academia too, the plus sides of Mr. Simmons’ work is that he is intimate with his material and it may help that one day we will have a more broadly balanced view of music in America.

Voices in the Wilderness: Six American Neo-Romantic Composers by Walter Simmons,
Scarecrow Press, 2004

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How come it takes years before we can hear a fine new score? Allan Kozinn writes, “Orchestras seem content to be museums now, even as they wring their hands about dropping subscription sales and graying listeners. But maybe there's someone in a programming department somewhere who sees the percentage in shaking things up, in treating new works as if they not only matter but have the power to breathe life into this sleepy business.” NY Times 8.15

Groans

2005-08-11T08:17:00.000-07:00

Wagner's music is better than it sounds. Bill Nye

A story is told that Richard Wagner was walking on a street in Berlin one day and came across an organ-grinder who was grinding out the overture to Tannhäuser. Wagner stopped and said, "As a matter of fact, you are playing it too fast." The organ-grinder at once recognized Wagner, tipped his hat, and said, "Oh thank you, Herr Wagner! Thank you, Herr Wagner!" The next day Wagner returned to the same spot and found the organ-grinder grinding out the overture at the correct tempo. Behind him was a big sign: "PUPIL OF RICHARD WAGNER."

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains. John Philip Sousa

Jazz is not a craze…its significance is that it is one of the greatest landmarks of modern art. George Antheil

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

How do you get a cellist to play fortissimo?
Write "pp, expressivo" on the music.

How can you tell that there's a vocalist at your front door?
They forgot the key and don't know when to come in.

The composer Robert Schumann wrote at the beginning of one of his compositions: "To be played as fast as possible." A few measures later he wrote: "Faster."

A man and his son were walking through a cemetery. The boy asked, "Daddy, do they bury two people in the same grave?" The father said, "Two people? Let me look."
So the father took a look, and sure enough, the marker said, "Here lies a symphony conductor and a humble man."

We know a guy who was so dumb his teacher gave him two sticks and he became a drummer, but lost one and became a conductor.

Musician: "Did you hear my last recital?"
Friend: "I hope so."

"Do you love music?"
"Yes, but never mind, you may continue playing."

Donny Osmond has van Gogh’s ear for music.

On Blogging (oops! excuse me-weblogging)

2005-08-03T12:11:00.000-07:00

I found another weblog,
I found another weblog,
I read another weblog and whaddaya think I saw?
I saw another weblog, etc.

I’m a relative newcomer to blogs and weblogging and I didn’t realize when I started that the network was so vast. It’s not only that there are blog sites on every conceivable subject, their categories and sub-categories, but the number of them on any specific topic is boggling. There were only 23 blogs in early 1999 but by September 2000, Rebecca Blood writes, there were thousands and she couldn’t keep track of them then. I don’t have any idea how many weblog sites and bloggers there are now and I suspect that my wildest estimate would fall far short.

So, seven years later, it was interesting to come across an exchange between A.C. Douglas and Forrest Covington on defining what a weblog is, and is not. The term itself is one of personal taste by Mr. Douglas, who eschews the term blog, preferring weblog. Both sides make a point so it can easily reduce itself to a verbal fray. I have a thin skin so I won’t enter into that except to cite that Web Hosting Glossary (WHG) defines a blog simply as “frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and web links.”

The reason I started weblogging is because, as a long-time subscriber to the New Yorker, going back to Winthrop Sargent days and a happy reader of Alex Ross’ columns, I was delighted to discover not long ago he had a blog site (I’m sometimes slow) with links that set me off on the journey of blog discovery. I’m not over it yet. Every few days I find another, and another, and another, and I wonder how can anyone read all this stuff? It’s a full-time, eye and brain - tiring effort.

Elimination may be a key. By eliminating webloggers who post stuff of no interest to me, and those that are poorly written, and those that become personal attacks between bloggers, and those who obviously don’t know what they are talking about, I’ve gotten it down to where I can almost handle it. The problem is that I’m still in a discovery mode and I find two for each one I toss.

I see weblogging as an opportunity to express myself on musical matters that concern me. I see blogging as a wonderful way to learn from one another. I see blogging as an avenue to writing - for me, a happy activity. I see blogging as opening doors into new rooms of knowledge and fancy. As I read more and more weblogs, I found more and more to interest me. I’m sure I’m not alone in this experience and it became apparent that my concerns would have to be limited to things that really interested me and avoid what I think is trivia. Maybe I should have avoided this one.

I had hoped that my take on things would encourage a positive exchange-even criticism can be positive, but I have experienced very little feedback, which leads me to believe that my interests are no one else’s. I note that there are conclaves of bloggers with specific interests who write and react only between themselves. Some require “membership” to join the group, perhaps a reaction against anonymity or the massive number of weblogs. I note that most bloggers do not permit comments or an exchange. And this brings me back around to the Douglas-Covington exchange that tries to nail down the nature of a weblog.

The only reason I found this is because ACD nicely corrected a statement I made that there is probably more written on Beethoven than any other composer. He pointed out that Beethoven comes in third after Wagner and Mozart. So, I looked up A.C. Douglas, and among many other posts by him found his exchange with Mr. Covington that explained quite ably his position, with which I respect but disagree. For the record I also disagree with Mr. Covington who is perhaps a long-time blogger and doesn’t care for change.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to handle even half of the music blogs out there. Maybe a solution is to only write, not read, them or v.v. - a sorry solution.

Larger and Smaller

2005-07-20T07:20:00.000-07:00

Two recent news pieces tell us how classical music performance is rapidly changing. The first story tells of the success of revamped 19^th century monster concerts, reminding us again that some things never really change. The second is a bit different-a signal that real change is upon us. Or is it revamped 18th century concerts?

On July 9, Carolyn Webb wrote on the remarkable success of conductor Raymond Gubbay, who also heads a franchise called Classical Spectacular(s) that popularizes classical music. The concerts have become an international success. Two concerts at Melbourne's Rod Laver Arena will be among the 30 Classical Spectacular concerts Gubbay will produce this year in Europe and Australia.

The formula is: take the world's most popular classical pieces - from Nessun Dorma to the Swan Lake Finale, Blue Danube Waltz and the Can Can theme. Engage a 90-piece symphony orchestra, 100-piece choir, military band and soloists to perform them. Package it with synchronised lasers, lights and fireworks. Put them on stage in an arena packed with 10,000 people, and, and….ZOUNDS! It’s Jullien and Gilbert resurrected! Maybe they didn’t really die. Shades of Yanni, Andre Rieu, and the Three Tenors!

Gubbay says the concerts introduce classical music to mainstream audiences, (Jullien’s almost exact words) who often go on to patronize the likes of the Royal Opera House. A capacity audience of 5000 turned up to hear the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Band of the Welsh Guards, and the London Choral Society perform a concert of classical music’s greatest hits. Singing, humming and clapping along was encouraged. A second show was added, then two more. This year, Royal Albert Hall will host two, six-show Classical Spectacular seasons. Manchester and Birmingham have been added to the calendar, as have Dublin, Scandinavia, Germany and Switzerland. There are two concerts in Sydney and plans for other Australian capitals next year.

The show does not have a chronology or theme. The conductor makes light banter with the audience, but information on the pieces and composers is confined to the program. Asked why the formula has been so popular, Gubbay says: "I think it's just struck a popular chord with people." Classical music can be fun, and a pleasure to listen to. It's just a great, fun night out. It's not stuffy, it's not starchy . . . we're just saying, come and enjoy yourselves." – words we read often these days from classical music marketers. Will there come a time when the great classics are performed by only a handful of great orchestras; the remaining survivors will entertain the masses? Maybe. But other things can happen too. Read on.

In a July 10 piece by Lawrence A. Johnson, the classical music writer for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, he discusses the musical aftermath of the folding of the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra. After playing its final performance in 2003, many predicted that the organization's demise would prove a fatal blow to the musical scene in South Florida. But, only two years later, far from a death knell, a number of new chamber orchestras are flourishing. What has occurred is a downsizing of the local classical scene and the repertoire being heard – chamber orchestras playing lighter scored Classical and Baroque works, rather than large orchestral music and late Romantic symphonies.

Classical audiences in South Florida are mostly retirees who have the interest, time and disposable income to attend performances. Most of them would rather drive 10 minutes to hear a local chamber orchestra than drive an hour to hear Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony. Access and convenience are a bigger draw than headline names and musical significance.

These chamber-sized groups can also be more adventurous in their programming. For example, while the 31-member Boca Raton Philharmonic Symphonia will perform works of Beethoven, Prokofiev and Mozart in its inaugural 2005-2006 season, there is also music of Aaron Jay Kernis, George Walker, Charles Ives, Antol Dorati, and a world premiere by Boca Raton composer Stuart Glazer.

I said long ago, that expensive ensembles will fold, but it is not the end of classical music (Applause and the Dinosaurs). Rather, a transition to dynamic smaller ensembles, fresh repertoire, composer stimulus, and new audiences will occur. Exciting times!

Aoxomoxoa, Or, Gay is "American" is Gay

2005-07-13T09:31:00.000-07:00

Do American gays compose classical music in a recognizable American “feminine”style? Read on.

Scott Cantrell wrote a book review/column for the Dallas Morning News on July 2 where he first refers to the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra and their July 4 programs, Fanfare for the Common Man, Lincoln Portrait, Outdoor Overture, and Billy the Kid, then reviews a book that’s been out for some time that focuses on Copland and other homo/hetero sexual composers, masculine and feminine if you will; the thesis being that American gay composers have composed “signature American music.

Mr. Cantrell writes, “Ironically, these (July 4^th) celebrations of outdoorsy, big-sky Americana, and of WASP home and hearth, were created by a homosexual Jew from Brooklyn… Copland was one of a group of composers who, starting in the 1930s, cultivated a new nationalist – or at least populist modernist – style. And most of them were gay, including Virgil Thomson, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, David Diamond, Lou Harrison, Paul Bowles, Marc Blitzstein and Ned Rorem (who) helped define in sound what it means to be an American.”

At this point Mr. Cantrell shifts to excerpting from Dr. Nadine Hubbs, a University of Michigan professor whose book, The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (University of California Press, 2004), explores how these composers, “together with certain cultural trends, created those distinctively American sounds.”

If you are unfamiliar with Prof. Hubbs book, what follows is a selective synopsis. By the 1930s, she says, “tonality and atonality had acquired sexual identities, even if they weren't yet widely expressed as such. Homosexual composers probably felt freer to defy the dictates of the avant-garde priesthood precisely because they already felt alienated from the dominant culture. Having less compulsion to prove macho bravery, maybe these gay men felt freer to cultivate a nurturing ‘feminine’ side.”

Mr. Cantrell comments: “They wanted to create an American music recognizably new, yet rooted in history, something fresh rather than frightening. Call that "feminine" if you will; it reached enthusiastic audiences that would never warm to the asperities of Elliott Carter.” Dr. Hubbs continues, “As the country worked its way out of the Depression and into World War II, Copland penned his classic essays in Americana: Billy the Kid (1938); Fanfare for the Common Man, Lincoln Portrait and Rodeo (all 1942); and Appalachian Spring (1944). Thomson got on the Americana bandwagon even before Copland, with his scores for the ballet Filling Station and the films The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River. Copland was a more sophisticated composer, but Thomson, also a hugely influential music critic, was there earlier.

"It was a masculine decade, during the Cold War," Dr. Hubbs writes. "We were quite threatened by the Soviet scare, so we were flexing our muscles. Our musical culture was masculinized by the influx of all those Germans, whose aesthetic ideals were of that sort that Copland and Thomson had arrayed themselves against. But the softer side of modernism flowered in American operas of the 1950s, in works by gay composers including Barber and his lover Gian Carlo Menotti and the heterosexual Robert Ward and Carlisle Floyd. It's still very much in evidence in Mr. Floyd's 2000 opera Cold Sassy Tree.”

Mr. Cantrell observes: “Dr. Hubbs doesn't much venture into more recent decades, but it's still true that many of the most successful classical composers are gay or lesbian, among them John Corigliano, Lowell Liebermann and Jennifer Higdon. By contrast, most of the pricklier modernists, including Charles Ives, Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions, were straight. The openly homophobic Ives chided hostile listeners to stand up and take dissonance "like a man." Indeed, Ives seems to have set up a kind of socio-cultural war between the edgier modernist composers, most of whom were straight, and the "softer" modernists (Copland et al.), most of whom were gay.

“The divide wasn't, and isn't, definitive, but it's surprising how easy it is to line up a dichotomy. By the middle of the 20th century, Schoenbergian serialism was the heterosexual high road. Mathematical rigor made music respectable to the mid-century cult of scientific progress. "Experimentalism and dissonance, precisely because they didn't taste so good – they were a more bitter medicine – were seen as more masculine and bold and daring," Dr. Hubbs says. "Tonality was feminized." Copland and Thomson, conversely, sparked a new vogue for studying in France. "Even now," she says, " 'French' has a connotation of queer, hyper-elegant, sissy." And their pivotal teacher there wasn't a man, but Nadia Boulanger.

“If the more aggressive modernists such as Mr. Carter and Milton Babbitt were the hunter-gatherers of modern music, Copland and company were the nurturers. If one side of the divide was intellectual, the other was sensual. One camp favored abstract internationalism, the other, personalized nationalism. One posited scientific argument; the other cultivated the elegant epigram.”

“Dr. Hubbs tends to interpret this divide as a matter of sexual politics”, Mr. Cantrell opines, “and that certainly played a role. But she also points out the exceptions, the avant-garde camp including Henry Cowell, who was jailed for sodomy, and John Cage, longtime lover of choreographer Merce Cunningham. The ranks of populist modernists included the heterosexual Roy Harris, Walter Piston and William Schuman. And the development of populist modernism in music had much to do with economic and political developments that get short shrift in the book.

"Copland's music is the echo of the American flag. No wonder we'll be hearing a lot of him this (4^th of July) weekend,” concludes Cantrell.

It seems to me that the argument flounders. To suggest that a certain idiom is somehow “American” is flawed. Open sonority? Wide chord spacings? Folk tunes? Athletic rhythms? These could be applied to any number of American heterosexual composers. And to suggest that it was Thompson and Copland who created this style is silly. OK, Copland has an identifiable sound. So does any other composer of worth.

Prof. Hubbs is riding the wave of a sexually obsessed society who will rally to anything that smacks of peeping -even of classical composers. Some musicologists, having exhausted their traditional research areas, have been delving into musico-sexuality. Anthony Tommasini thinks they are pioneers. I think they are academic opportunists who must publish or perish. So far the studies have proved little, but conjectured much. This book is an example. There is, as yet, nor will there likely be, a solid connection between the sexuality of a composer and the music. I reject out of hand the suggestion that music is somehow masculine or feminine, depending on its composer’s sexual preference. My pulse also jumps at the notion that a clique of gay composers (1930-1950) has defined “American” music.

The music remains. While biographical details can aid our understanding of a composer’s music, they can also take us into an intellectual quagmire. What’s next? Looking for references to androphilia in Copland's chamber and orchestral compositions? How about looking into Hubb’s work to see if there is a hidden, suppressed, or open code that might identify her as whatever? And what about critics or performers? Will an assistant professor soon write on Masculine Traits in the Later Performances of Three Scarlatti Sonatas As Performed by Mark Kroll? Can a gay properly interpret a straight “masculine”composition, say, of Ives? Oops! Ives wrote with open spacing sometimes. Maybe he too was an androphile. “This is unmusical, politico-sexual reductionism,” fumes Terry Teachout.

“…music moves us in powerful but indistinct ways. It's the one thing that cannot be analyzed or deconstructed for its expressive content, and thank goodness for that.” Tony Tommasini

Igor Stravinsky said that music expresses itself. “That’s why we love it, and never more so than in an age increasingly dominated by aesthetic politicians. It's too blessedly slippery for such misguided folk as Nadine Hubbs to put it in a box and nail the lid shut.” Terry Teachout.

“Gay or straight, black or white, male or female, the challenges are the same: try to understand and appreciate the rich musical values in the work itself, add a healthy dose of individual insight and interpretation, and then give it the most beautiful and intelligent performance possible. That is the responsibility of every performer, and what music is all about.” Mark Kroll (But not for musicologists like Dr. Hubbs).

Mark Twain's Musical Family

2005-07-07T18:23:00.000-07:00

Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, has many more books written about him than he ever wrote*. He’s an attractive subject, who had a way of eloquently saying ordinary things in extraordinary ways; who led a life that is a magnet for biographers and graduate students; and it may be that his family has also been scrutinized, for surely I am only an interested reader-not a Twain scholar, because I didn’t know until recently that his daughter, Clara, was a singer of some repute and that she married the conductor of the Detroit Symphony. That was a surprise because I remember some of what Twain wrote about opera - and he didn’t disown her. Here is a well-known example:

“….To me an opera is the very climax & cap-stone of the absurd, the fantastic the unjustifiable. I hate the very name of opera - partly because of the nights of suffering I have endured in its presence, & partly because I want to love it and can't. I suppose one naturally hates the things he wants to love & can't. In America the opera is an affectation. The seeming love for [it] is a lie. Nine out of every ten of the males are bored by it and 5 out of 10 women. Yet how they applaud, the ignorant liars! …”
Notebook # 15, July - August 1878

How is it that we who may love opera still laugh at this? That’s Twain. But, it is likely that there were two Twains-one who treated his public which consumed such acidic and humorous remarks with relish, and the Twain who would be unfamiliar to his public, a Mr. Clemens who really cared for music and encouraged his children in their musical aspirations. We know he sang, played the guitar, and the piano. His brother, Orion, wrote: “Samuel Clemens had a pretty good voice in those days and could drum fairly well on a piano and guitar. He did not become a brilliant musician, but he was easily the most popular member of the singing-class.” Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography: The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 3 vol. (1912).

Twain at the piano
with daughter Clara and friend

And, after an impressive recital by Stefan Czapka in Vienna, Twain revealingly autographed: “All of us contain Music & Truth, but most of us can't get it out.”

Aside from a piano and guitar Twain also owned an Orchestrella.

Mark Twain's orchestrelle.
Postcard from the Dave Thomson collection.
For more on the orchestrelle,
see related article in
Mechanical Music Digest

He was also a product of careful tilling by his wife Olivia. When they married he was somewhat crude, biographers write, but she was elegant and cultivated and slowly she softened and broadened her husband’s refinement. While “Livy” Clemens--from a refined, religious, philanthropic, abolitionist family--did ask her less genteel husband to give up some of his bad habits, letters show it was love--not badgering--that made him change.

Mark Hambourg comments wryly on Sam’s singing even at age 61: “Mark Twain used to keep open house in Vienna and musicians used to drop in for a meal. They were enormous meals, for artists are always hungry people. One day when I arrived, I heard an extraordinary noise, like a dog howling. I wondered if the animal was in pain and discovered it was Mark Twain singing one of the old Mississippi river songs."

Twain was also a close friend of Charles Ives' father-in-law, Reverend Joseph Twichell, who married not only Charles and Harmony Twichell Ives, but also Ossip and Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch (Twain’s daughter). Sam’s sister, Pamela, was an accomplished musician and teacher of voice and guitar. Perhaps some future studies will tell us more about Twain’s musical proclivities.

Twain’s daughter, Clara, a concert contralto, was born in Elmira, N.Y., in 1874. She had a varied education while growing up, including home schooling; a year at a public high school in Hartford, Connecticut; and tenure at a boarding school in Berlin. At the age of 21, Clara was the only Clemens daughter to accompany Sam on his around-the-world lecture tour in 1895/96. At age 23 the Clemens family went to live in Vienna in order for Clara to study piano under the renowned Leschetizky. Although she would eventually give up piano for singing, she did meet her future husband, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, the Russian pianist, in Vienna.

Not much could be found concerning her vocal accomplishments, but the NY Times printed a favorable review.

WINSTED, Conn., Sept. 22.--Before a large audience in the Norfolk Gymnasium, Norfolk, this evening, Miss Clara Clemens, the daughter of Mark Twain, made her debut as a concert singer. A large delegation of the young singer's friends was present from New York and other places. Miss Clemens was assisted by Marie Nichols, a Boston violinist. Miss Clemens, who is the possessor of a rich contralto voice, was enthusiastically received. New York Times. 9.23.1906

In 1909, Clara invited Ossip to the Clemens home in Redding, Connecticut, to recuperate from an operation he had in New York. By October of that year the couple was married. The wedding took place in the drawing room at Stormfield, Twain’s country home, with the Rev. Dr. Twitchell , as officiating clergyman. The bride was attended only by her sister, Miss Jean Clemens, but her cousins, Jervis Langdon of and Mrs. Julia Loomis, wife of Edward Loomis, Vice President of the Delaware Lackawanna & Western Railroad, were also present.

Clara’s husband, Ossip was pupil of Anton Rubinstein at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and of Leschetizky. His debut was made in Berlin in 1896. He was well-known both as a brilliant pianist and as conductor of the Munich Konzertverein Orchestra, 1910-14, and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, 1918-36. Ossip died in 1936 from stomach cancer, at the age of 58.

Miss Ethel Newcomb of New York City, a friend of Clara, a prominent concert pianist and student of Leschitzky, played a wedding march as the bridal party entered the drawing room. While the ceremony was being performed, Sam Clemens was attired in the scarlet cap and gown which he wore when the Degree of Doctor of Literature was conferred upon him by Oxford University.

Twain was interviewed after the wedding and said: "Clara and Gabrilowitsch were pupils together under Leschetizky, in Vienna, ten years ago. We have known him intimately ever since…The wedding had to be sudden for Gabrilowitsch's European season is ready to begin. The pair will sail a fortnight from now. The first engagements are in Germany. They have taken a house in Berlin."

Among the other guests at the wedding were Richard Watson Gilder, Mrs. Gilder and three daughters, Mr. and Mrs. A. M. Wright of Boston, Mrs. E. F. Bauer and the Misses Flora and Marion Bauer of New York, Miss Lillian Burbank, Miss Marie Nichols, Mrs. John B. Stanchfield, Mr. and Mrs. Frank J. Sprague, Miss Foot, Miss Comstock, Miss Mary Lawton, Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Gaillard, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hapgood, Mr. and Mrs. Albert Bigelow Paine, and Miss Ethel Newcomb, all of New York-a sparkling and distinguished array of musical and other guests indeed!

Several months after leaving for Europe to settle down, Clara and Ossip returned to Redding to Sam Clemens' bedside just four days before his death, April 21,1910. Clara became the sole heir to the Clemens estate, as both her sisters had already passed away. Caring for the Clemens’ estate became Clara’s lifetime occupation. After Ossip’s death Clara moved to Los Angeles. She remarried eight years later to another Russian musician, conductor Jacques Samossoud, and they moved to San Diego. In 1962, at the age of 88, Clara died in San Diego.

*Berkeley houses the world's largest collection of Samuel Clemens' manuscripts, letters and notebooks. Five full-time editors at the Mark Twain Project produce authoritative editions of Clemens' works. So far, 31 scholarly and popular books have been printed. The project aims to publish 70 volumes by 2010, the 100th anniversary of Clemens' death. And this is only Berkeley.

Nibbles

2005-07-02T09:41:00.000-07:00

ONLY IN TEXAS –
The Texas Music Educators Association has turned down a request from a male student who wishes to perform as a soprano in a state competition, the Dallas/Fort Worth Star-Telegram (6.17.05) reports. (I hope the Star follows up on this story.)

WE REALLY DIDN’T NEED A SURVEY-
A survey about classical-music critics released in May by the National Arts Journalism Program revealed what most of us have already suspected and may be yet another reason why classical music in America is in the shape it’s in. The survey, which was co-sponsored by the Music Critics Association of North America, took place between May and August of 2004, and 181 North American critics participated in it. The results tell us that:

· A majority of the critics are white males in their early fifties.

· More critics work as freelancers than not; 49 percent identify themselves as freelancers, and 47 percent hold full-time staff positions; more than 90 percent of critics feel that “it is [their] job to educate the public about classical music and why it matters.” (If "to educate" means Music Appreciation 101, which is so often the case, this is troubling. The heart of music criticism is a competent analytical review of a performance and/or the work itself. Beyond that, critics merely reflect their taste.)

· The topics they most enjoy writing about are orchestral music, standard repertoire opera, and chamber music; their least-favorite topics are pops and outdoor concerts, crossover music, and jazz. (Rather narrow interests I’d say.)

· Only 20 percent of reviews focus on works by living composers. One section of the survey found the critics relatively unfamiliar with many contemporary composers—too much so to rank their opinion of the composers’ work. (Doesn’t surprise me at all.)

· Opinions of contemporary music vary; more than half the critics surveyed felt that composers were not “breaking genuinely new ground these days,” although four out of five felt that “we can be proud of the new classical works that we have created in Canada and the U.S. over the past 25 years.”

· Younger critics—those 46 and younger—are more likely to be open to contemporary composers.

· The critics’ top five favorite historical composers are Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms; their top five contemporary composers are John Adams, Arvo Pärt, Krzysztof Penderecki, Ned Rorem, and John Corigliano. (I wonder if they picked these from a list? )

EAST MEETS WEST-
In a recent blog Midori reflects that historically, Western music is a recent phenomenon in Japan and that she-well let her say it: “…I grew up thinking (and feeling) that music was Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, even Stravinsky, Bartok, and Prokofiev. …All other genres of music were exotic and mysterious including jazz and Traditional Japanese music. For me, a Schubert lieder was much more "normal" and "understandable" than the infamous Japanese song "Sakura, Sakura." (AJBlogs) 06/22/05. (They make better cars too.)

SUBWAY MUZAK-A METAMORPHOSIS OR, ANOTHER WAY TO MARKET CDS? - Buffalo NY teens have been hanging around subway stations raising hell and authorities finally hit on a solution: pipe classical music into the stations. The Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority is airing the three B’s to hasten youths toward their destinations. Sad to note, it works. A senior at Bennett High School says, "It's irritating. We want it to go away, It's old people music. It makes you want to get away from it." If you can imagine the Brandenburg #2 in a subway - well, it would likely make me want to get away from it too-and I’m “old people” kid!

They took their cue from other cities. Toronto began filling subway stations with melodies in the mid-1990s after a string of fatal assaults involving gangs of youths. And the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority fills targeted stations with Boston Pops-style light classical tunes to battle youth crime, and the Montreal Metro system employs opera inside troubled subway stops. The New York Port Authority uses operatic strains to roust troublemakers and the homeless from its properties, and in Vallejo, Calif., classical music flows from speakers along downtown streets to deter drug dealers and other villains.

But, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra reps applaud the NFTA saying, "We want as many people as possible exposed to classical music, so we are pleased to hear about this program. It's a plus for commuters." …We are preparing an assortment of our CDs to send to the NFTA . . . We get sales and great reviews from all around the world. It would be wonderful for them to help increase our CD sales locally." (These are heartbreaking signals in our society.)

GOOD NEWS (almost)-FOR A CHANGE – Detroit may be getting a classical radio station for the first time in eight years, the Detroit News reports. The Detroit public schools and Detroit Public Television shook hands, and the television station will take over the schools' WRCJ 90.9 FM and broadcast classical music during the day and jazz at night. The station will operate at the Detroit School of the Arts and serve as a training facility for students. There has been no classical station in the city since WQRS 105.1 FM switched to rock in 1997.

REALLY GOOD NEWS!-
Last week, ASCAP named the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra as winner of its annual Adventurous Programming Award for orchestras with annual budgets in the $5-$13 million range. They give this award to orchestras that prominently feature music composed within the last 25 years.

Conductor Christopher Seaman said, "Playing new music isn't always good for the box office," says RPO Music Director "At the same time, we know people will like the music once they hear it. It's just a challenge to get them in the concert hall to hear it in the first place. But it's important to keep playing contemporary music because it makes the concert experience seem more vital."
(Bravo, Chris!)

The RPO TRIED to keep Rochester's concert life vital during the 2004-05 season by performing more than a dozen works by contemporary composers including David Diamond, the fine Rochester composer who died June 13.

The San Francisco Symphony, under Michael Tilson Thomas has made adventurous programming its bread and butter, and they won first place for orchestras with budgets exceeding $13 million. The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, led by Jeffrey Kahane, won first place for orchestras with budgets less than $5 million.

(It’s refreshing to read that someone on that level is doing something positive to assist contemporary programming and performance, instead of carping about how bad everything is.)

Marketers, Elitists, Video, and Gentility

2005-06-23T07:06:00.000-07:00

Mr. Henry Fogel, who is president and CEO of the American Symphony Orchestra League, warned arts leaders and all of us recently that classical music performance will have to change to survive. He echoes others, mostly orchestra administrators, who have been chanting the same lament for quite some time.

He noted that orchestras and other arts organizations have been separated by class and by race. Complex program notes, musicians in white ties and tails and dowagers who hiss if one claps at the wrong time, all keep newcomers out of the concert hall, he noted. After recently seeing a conductor wag his finger at concertgoers who applauded too soon, he wondered "how many more times those people will actually pay money for tickets so they can be humiliated?" Mr. Fogel also criticized concert presentations, which he said have become predictable and stale. "The impact of television, video and computers makes it impossible to continue our art form without some consideration of the visual," he said.

Marketers recite this litany to persuade us to allow them to make such changes as they pronounce necessary to correct falling ticket sales, empty seats, and diminishing endowments. Well, marketeering since the 90’s has changed almost every facet of our lives, not necessarily for the better, and not necessarily successfully. They presume to have the answers in the face of change; to reflect vox populi, the voice of the people, but is often instead aegrescit medendo, the remedy that is worse than the disease. Falling attendance is met by young, sexy soloists, selling “stars” with no mention of the music, Concert Companions (CoCos), seat monitors, and dumbing down “complex” program notes and decent social behavior. Marketers presume to have their cake as they toss it away.

This is what Thomas Frank calls "market populism", a very selective synopsis and paraphrase of which follows. Markets confer democratic legitimacy, markets bring down the pompous and the snooty, markets look out for the interests of the little guy, markets give us all what we want. Hollywood and Madison Avenue have always insisted that their job is simply to mirror the public's wishes - that movies, ad campaigns, and classical music concert presentations, succeed or fail depending on how well they conform to public tastes, not model it.

Marketeers guess that they serve all tastes, classes, and races, and they humiliate gentility. As marketers meld themselves theoretically with the will of the masses, virtually any criticism of them can be described as an act of "elitism", a sneer for the redneck and blue collar culture, or any attempt "to promote the interests of the few at the expense of the many." That pretty well defines me, so I’ll take aim.

I’ve repeatedly written (see Applause and the Dinosaurs) and said that change is a norm – inevitable- and we must change with it or be left behind. But, in not accepting the fact that most people, influenced by more clever marketing, just don’t care for classical music anymore, marketers for classical music now strive to change its presentation in concerts and will destroy what they are trying to preserve - even sooner.

I would reply to Mr. Fogel that of course classical music is separated by class and race. So is adventure travel and Harrod’s. Is he suggesting that somehow classical music discriminates or causes discrimination? That would be absurd. Complex program notes invites opinions. He sneers at hissing dowagers, but they are likely to be those that endow the orchestra, and someone needs to teach concert manners, whatever they are or will become-even conductors who wag their finger. His comments suggest a return to 19^th century Promenade Concerts with technogadgets.

I have heard that it is not classical performance that needs to change, but people; that American society, with exceptions of course, has become crude, vulgar, impolite, casual, and ignorant, with a stunning belief, led by marketers, that society should consist of a common denominator; all is equal: a classical concert must be visual to compete with the media; Indie pop is art music; a classical concert is like a rock concert; wear sweatpants or levis in a concert hall just as in a tent program, a spa, or doing Saturday morning chores; guzzle liquor at concerts just as at gallery openings. Marketers would likely offer hot dogs and beer between movements if it would increase attendance.

The great and unique art of music at a classical concert is primarily an aural, not a visual experience. Yet, who would not say that observing the conductor, watching the passion of string players, the colorful entry of the woodwinds, a thundering timpani roll, Herculean brass chords, sudden or subtle dynamics, is not visual? But, we’re being told that it must be dumbed down to video to sell tickets. The real performance is up front, folks! Must we have a Concert Companion or monitor that draws our eye and distracts our ear and attention from the live performance?

No one will deny that classical music in America is ailing and that a prescription is needed that might cure it. Stiff formality can be relaxed, prohibitive prices and palatial venues can be changed, moth-eaten programs can be more innovative, tiresome concerts can be shorter and begin earlier for folks who must be on the job early next morning, parking and child services could be provided, museum and gallery food services seems to work, etc. etc. Any or all these might improve attendance.

But the biggest problem remains: public taste. Marketers could try to change that but they won’t. Their first commandment is to follow, but incredibly, they have made us believe they are Moses. In any case, people being what they are, they could not be successful anyway, and even if they were, historic, period, classical music as we have known it is (let’s face it) a dying dinosaur. Marketing cannot change that.

Whether or not anyone recognizes it anymore, there are some things in our western culture that are splendid, fine, elegant, inspiring- and yes- with musical/social manners and expectations. Classical concerts can move us emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually like no other art. Visual technology can only diminish it. And, if someone doesn’t know enough not to clap, talk, drool Redman and spit, turn off their cell phone, tap, cat-call, wear Stetsons, cough, smoke, eat or drink, at a concert then someone indeed needs to tell them it is unacceptable. Buying a ticket does not entitle the holder to be boorish, or worse, that it be encouraged by marketeers.

No Comment

2005-06-19T16:43:00.000-07:00

The first week in June there was a Beethoven week on the BBC. By midnight on Friday Radio 3 had played everything he wrote - every symphony, every quartet, every sonata. And there was a series of three films on BBC2 in which conductor Charles Hazlewood told viewers about the composer's life, and three programs of musical analysis on BBC4. All this on prime time TV! And that’s not all. By the end of June all his symphonies will have been available to download free, courtesy of BBC.

There is a library of books, studies, and monographs on Ludwig, and not just on his life and music. His sexuality, deafness, diseases, genetics, pianos, underwear, friends, enemies, etc, have all been probed by reputable scholars and professionals. His music is a staple in symphonic programing, chamber music, and piano recitals.

But, Dylan Evans wrote in The Guardian recently that Beethoven was a narcissistic hooligan. He writes that Beethoven turned away from the ancient perception that music was supposed to transcend a composer’s idiosyncrasies and replaced it with “an inward-directed, narcissistic focus on the composer himself and his own tortured soul.” This led to “awful” serialism, or “, almost everything that went wrong with music in the 19th and 20th centuries is ultimately Beethoven's fault.” Mr. Evans compares “dark” Beethoven unfavorably to Mozart, Vivaldi, and Bach- lighter composers who cheer him up. Friends are trying to stop Dylan’s laughing!

**********

200 years ago bagpipes were outlawed in England.

Bagpipes-(noun)-I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made object never equalled the purity of sound achieved by the pig. -Alfred Hitchcock

Q. How do you get two bagpipes to play a perfect unison?
A. Shoot one.

Q. What's the definition of a minor second? A. Two bagpipes playing in unison.

Q. What's the difference between the Great Highland and Northumbrian bagpipes? A. The GHB burns longer [but the Northumbrian burns hotter]

Q. How do you make a chain saw sound like a bagpipe? A. Add vibrato.

Q. What's the definition of a gentleman? A. Someone who knows how to play the bagpipe and doesn't.

Q. What's the difference between a dead snake in the road and a dead bagpiper in the road? A. Skid marks in front of the snake.

Q. What's the range of a bagpipe? A. Twenty yards, if you have a good arm.

Q. What's the definition of a quarter tone? A. A bagpiper tuning his drones.

Q. How can you tell if a bagpipe is out of tune? A. Someone is blowing into it.

A Canadian Officer, pinned down with his unit in 1944 in Italy, urgently signaled his CO: "Need reinforcements to rescue us, please send six tanks or one bagpiper."

Ireland gave the Scots the bagpipes . . . and they still haven't gotten the joke yet

In The Valley of the Sun

2005-06-14T09:56:00.000-07:00

Music in the Valley of the Sun is unlike some other metro cities where it’s hard to choose which classical concert to attend any one night of the week; where world-class artists and ensembles parade through a Kennedy Center or Avery Fischer Hall and there is excellence found even among amateurs.

It doesn’t take long even for a newcomer to the Valley to realize that classical music is of little consequence to the community. Without intending to insult the many musical organizations here, (Lord only knows how they struggle to merely survive) perhaps it’s because there is little of high quality.

There is the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra, a mid-level professional ensemble, which for a city this size with so much money and so many high profile celebs living here, should be among the best. One reason may be that management doesn't pay the musicians enough and in 2002 cut their pay 14%. A deal made a few days ago gives them 4-4-5% increase over a three year contract. That’s still rather less than what they earned in 2001. It acts as though the musicians and the community should be thankful for whatever is thrown their way. Oscar Wilde said, "If that's the way you're going to treat a symphony, you don't deserve to have one."

That has been almost the case, but led by Maryellen Gleason, president and CEO of the Symphony, there are signs of improvement. Their bottom line is black this season and it’s expected to be even better next; management and musicians are not at odds; Michael Christie debuts this season and he’s almost certain to improve the past staid programming-eventually.

But, this season is disappointingly full of the same tired stuff of Mozart, Beethoven, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, et al. Notable though, are Adams’ Violin Concerto with Leila Josefowicz, and Aaron Jay Kernis’ Musica Celestis for strings. About half the season’s music is “Pops” programs (with Doc Severinson, Marvin Hamlisch), many Messiahs, and there are outreach programs too… well, you get the idea, trying to get the community interested and satisfying their grants obligations.

As the valley’s prestige classical performers, they certainly don’t get any help from the media. In all the several newspapers and TV stations, classical music events are rarely mentioned, and listings don’t include classical music. Showup.com gives the best arts listing in town. New Times completely ignores classical music, and Phoenix magazine lists only the high profile ensembles. Just a few years ago, solid music criticism by Dimitri Drobatschewsky was given space by the Arizona Republic, followed with lesser space by composer Kenneth LaFave, and now to almost none by Richard Nilsen, an arts journalist, et al. But, there is front page coverage for pops groups and entertainers. This from a major newspaper with thirty photographers on its staff! That pretty well defines my point.

The circle is small, but classical music and news in the valley is found in its lone classical radio station KBAQ (kay-bach ugghh!). Current events are announced and they provide a comprehensive listing on their web page. However, their programming is much like the Phoenix Symphony – traditional, safe, sterile - and hokey, like their daily noon Mozart Buffet, where it’s implied Mozart is aired on a platter to be tasted together with a listener’s pastrami on rye (rolling eyes!).

Almost every suburb surrounding Phoenix has its own orchestra and its own struggle: Sun City, Scottsdale, Peoria, Tempe, Chandler, and there are more. Arizona State University offers its music making to the community on campus, and it varies from very good to mediocre. And, it does community service.

The Mesa Symphony Orchestra just lost its conductor, Gordon Johnson, who amicably resigned because he hasn’t been paid. He travels to Mesa from Great Falls, MT, where he is the conductor there and has no doubt piled up a considerable expense tab. Financially strapped Mesa plans to fill in with guests for the next season.

Musica Nova, a string orchestra, led by Warren Cohen, does some adventurous and imaginative programming, but it lacks the experience and polish to bring it off. Perhaps time will mature them if they can survive. Jeffery Siegel has survived, traveling to Scottsdale from NYC for many years doing his popular Keyboard Conversations and flying out on the next day to another of 18 cities this season, performing 61 concerts in all.

Meantime, a breath of hope in the grand opening of the Mesa Arts Center, the largest in Arizona, with four theatres seating 99 to 1600. Their 2005-2006 season appears colorful and appealing with classical music headliners Kurt Masur and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Murray Perahia, and Ravi, among the almost 90 events, though not all musical.

The picture isn’t complete without noting the choral organizations. The quality ranges from a mere good to awful. None will knock your socks off. The professional Phoenix Bach Choir led by Charles Bruffy, enjoys a reputation, aggressive PR, and a strong following. Among the amateur groups (in no particular order) is the Phoenix Symphony Chorus directed by Robert Moody which ably assists the orchestra in those special works, you know – Messiah and Carmina, etc., the Phoenix Boys Choir, led by Georg Stangelberger, Sonoran Desert Chorale conducted by Jeff Harris, Carolyn Eynon’s Arizona Arts Chorale, Masterworks Chorale, Mary Ann Dutton, conductor, and Christopher Samuel’s Valley Chamber Chorale, Cantemus, led by Darrell Rowader, and there are others. Choral music here, as elsewhere, is much more likely to program contemporary scores and much more likely to be liked by listeners. ASU had, until three years ago, one of the best choruses and choral departments in the country but when David Stocker retired as head, it slid swiftly downhill.

To make the story shorter, and a recap, there is a noticeable lack of enthusiasm for any classical music here, and perhaps one of the reasons is there is so little, and so little of quality - a sort of cultural dustbin. To be sure, there are other reasons and maybe I’ll address these later.

Classical Music in Asia

2005-06-06T06:47:00.000-07:00

I just read that Spoleto (U.S.A.) is programming a 2 ½ hour Peking opera The Kingdom of Desire, a free version of Macbeth performed by Taiwan's premiere theater company. This is like holding hands in a continuing east-west love affair. Peking opera in China mirrors classical music in America: not much general interest and it’s in a survival mode. Peking opera may be an ugly maiden, but western classical music in Asia is as popular as Eros.

It’s not news that many top performers today are Asian or that young Asian classical musicians are taking prizes and honors in American and other competitions. Most recently it was when the Van Cliburn Piano Competition entered its final round. Three Asian women reached the finals and eight of the 35 contestants hailed from the People's Republic. Rounding out the Far Eastern contingent were two South Koreans and another Korean native now a citizen of the United States. The competition was grueling and controversial and two of the three top awards went to female Asian pianists-Joyce Yang of South Korea, and Sa Chen of China.

American orchestras are particularly well-represented in string sections, and have been for some time. But, the explosion of Asian pianists is a newer phenomenon. Nelita True, professor of piano at Eastman, says between 70 percent and 80 percent of the school's piano students are Asians. “The piano departments of the major schools in the United States would close if it weren't for the Asian students," True says. At Juilliard, it's more than 50 percent, says Kaplinsky. At the University of Texas, professor Anton Nel figures the Asian contingent is nearly 40 percent. Joseph Banowetz, professor of piano at the University of North Texas, says two-thirds of his students are Asians. From this, it might be argued, there are fewer non-Asian students prepared to apply.

But, they aren’t all trained in the U.S. Dan Zhaoyi, in Shenszhen, China is a maestro with a knack for catapulting young students to the highest levels of international competitions. His students have chalked up an extraordinary number of prizes. At the 2000 Frederick Chopin competition in Warsaw, Poland, Dan had two students in the contest's final round The 18-year-old prodigy who won, Yundi Li , has gone on to play the world's great concert halls. You'll be hard-pressed to find a more elegant performance of Chopin's B-minor Sonata than Yundi Li's 2001 recording on the DG label. His other student is Sa Chen, who took the crystal last night in the 12th Van Cliburn Competition.

Chinese Conservatories are bursting at the seams. China has nine hyper-competitive music conservatories, with students often moving long distances to enroll. The Sichuan Conservatory in Chengdu, a city in southwest China, recently divided hundreds of practice rooms in half to cope with the needs of its 14,000 (!) students.

Young people crowd symphony concerts. Private music schools are flourishing, and urban parents jockey to hire the best tutors, seeing music as a path to status and educational achievement. 38 million Chinese children study the piano. It's estimated that 100,000 children in Beijing alone are studying piano. Millions more practice the violin and other orchestral instruments. The nation has about 4 million professional musicians, and new concert halls and opera houses are being constructed regularly. And we mustn’t believe it’s only China.

How come? Classical music is big in Asia. There is a tremendous amount of government support for music in all these countries," Kaplinsky says. "When I was in Japan last August, judging a nationwide competition, the final ceremony was attended by a former prime minister, the minister of culture, a tremendous number of dignitaries. When we have a major national competition in this country, I can't think of any dignitary from any government that would think to appear. It adds clout and excitement as far as the students are concerned, to know that what they're doing is important not just to their parents, but to everybody else." Japanese still talk about Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic when they visited there in 1977. Now, there are important conductors such as Hisayoshi Inoue, Scotland-based Takuo Yuasa and Kent Nagano; composers Karen Tanaka, Somei Satoh, Yoshihiro Kanno, Toru Takemitsu, and too many more to list and the names of Japanese pianists, singers, and other musicians would be lengthy.

In Viet Nam three Vietnamese pianists from the Ho Chi Min City (Saigon) Conservatory of Music were among the winners at the Bradshaw&Buono 2005 international piano competition held in New York on May 18-19. Nguyen The Cuong Quoc, 12 years old, Nguyen Doan Thu Thao, 13, Hoang Ngoc Thien Y, 15, and the other winners were invited to perform in Carnegie Hall. And this is the first time young Vietnamese contestants have competed in an international piano contest in the US.

In Hanoi, Viet Nam, maestro Tetsuji Honna conducted performances by the Viet Nam National Symphony Orchestra at Hanoi’s Opera House on April 15 and 16. The 2005 Toyota Concert featured works by George Gershwin, (An American in Paris), Leroy Anderson, and von Weber, and Hilary Hahn made her Vietnamese debut at the Hanoi Opera House on May 6 in the ninth annual Hennessy Concert.

In Korea, a country smaller than Kentucky, there are 125 arts high schools and colleges, 49 performance management companies, 27 recording and publishing houses, 18 full-time chamber ensembles, 10 opera companies, 31 full-time orchestras, and 55 music performance facilities.

Composers Na In-yeong, Park Cheong-seon, and Lee Young-jo, incorporate Korean folk melodies to elevate Korean music from its purely ethnic or regional appeal to an art form that can solicit global interest. Chung Kyung-wha, one of the world's premier violinists, her sister Chung Myung-wha, a cellist, and their youngest brother, Chung Myung-whun, formerly music director of the French National Bastille Opera, established the Chung Trio during the 1970s. They have performed with world-class orchestras in every continent and have produced numerous recordings. In 1997, violinist Ko Bong-in won top honors at the Young Tchaikovsky Competition while still a student in the Korean National University of the Arts Preparatory School.

Korean sopranos Jo Su-mi, Hong Hye-kyeong, Shin Yeong-ok and Kim Yeong-mi, have earned international fame and baritone Choe Hyeon-su won top honors at the 1990 Tchaikovsky Competition. There are currently 31 orchestras in Seoul and other Korean cities. The orchestras have produced several talented conductors, including Chung Myung-whun, Lim Heon-jong and Chung Chi-yong.

Korean choral performances have also been internationally recognized. Korea won first prize at the World Chorus Competition in Vienna in 1997, and it hosted the World Choir Olympics in Busan in 2002. Yun Hak-won, Yu Pyeong-mu, Na Yeong-su and Park Chang-hun are among the nation's leading choral conductors. Prominent composers of choral music in Korea include Na In-yong, Park Jung-su, and Lee Young-jo. There are hundreds of amateur choirs across the country offering excellent performances.

Lately, the number of Korean students studying music in the U.S. has steadily increased, but Seoul National University, Yonsei University, Hanyang University and Ewha Womans University, each with its own college of music, have trained most of Korea's top musicians. In 1993, the School of Music at the Korean National University of the Arts was established by a presidential decree in order to enhance and promote musical training in Korea. The school incorporates a European conservatory style with an American university-type educational system with a faculty of well-known professors of music from the United States, Germany, Russia, and Hungary as well as many of Korea’s notable music teachers.

For the time being, the U.S. still has the money bags and Julliard, but it seems that classical music will increasingly become Euro-Asian. Chairman Mao, in a moment of candor, said something like, “After all, Europe is merely an extension of Asia.” Did he tactfully omit the U.S.? Or is it the other way around?

Memorials and Petty Celebs

2005-05-30T10:22:00.000-07:00

The first few days in May mark the 60^th anniversary of the capitulation of Germany and its allies to the American allied forces back in 1945. Only a few now remember a war that had cost millions of lives, caused untold agony, shattering the lives of millions of those remaining, leveled entire cities, and transformed the earth and society. Calendars rarely indicate the event. But, there was a memorial of sorts at the National Gallery (London) that Norman Lebrecht found to be hardly worthy of those momentous war years that inspired such momentous music.

He writes, “no conflict has produced so much art and of such elevated quality as the Second World War… it was Britten’s opera Peter Grimes and Walton’s film music for Henry V; …The great cultural act of remembrance was Britten’s War Requiem, premiered at the reconsecration of Coventry’s bombed-out Cathedral in May 1962.”

Mr. Lebrecht continues, “Even more remarkably, the cultural rebirth contradicted the old adage that when the cannons roar the muses are silent. … If one image prevails it is of thousands of bank clerks, civil servants and canteen staff queuing in their lunch hour to enter a National Gallery, denuded of art and under constant threat of air raids, where the white-haired Myra Hess was to play a piano sonata by Beethoven.

“How pathetic, then, was the travesty that was staged this weekend on the steps of that selfsame National Gallery to mark the 60th anniversary of victory. Pop singers and petty celebs were paraded before rain-soaked veterans in a rose-tinted event, no hint of the creative energies of those great days, no intimation of the numinous. In the anti-elitist mindset of those we have re-elected to govern us, greatness and art are two dirty words.”
(Norman Lebrecht, La Scena Musicale, May 13)

Well said! I have looked at many of our principal cities’ activities and it could apply equally to the “entertainment” on our Memorial Day events.

We despair for ignorance. In the U.S. the May events aren’t even officially recognized. Instead, because we have been embroiled in so many wars since 1775 (10 major conflicts are recognized-not counting the last two), we honor 3,727,423 killed and wounded (!!) in all those wars on a single Memorial Day established in 1868 after the Civil War, on May 30, but later changed to the last Monday in May so that it became a long weekend. In most American cities it has become a seasonal holiday. Its meaning, and “greatness and art” are minimized or forgotten, replaced by sales, races, Curious George, “pop singers and petty celebs”. Unnoticed, a solemn memorial is being transformed into a recreational holiday.

Like Mr. Lebrecht’s lament, much the same could be said of American music born of our wartimes. Look at the productivity of WWII alone, to say nothing of those previous and since that have contributed so much to greatness and art: Barber’s, Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Symphony No. 3 , Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, Bernstein’s On the Town, Copland’s Appalachian Spring, and Symphony No. 3, Diamond’s Symphony No. 3, and String Quartet No. 3, Harris’ Symphony No. 6, Schoenberg’s A Survivor From Warsaw, Grant-Still’s In Memoriam, R.Thompson’s Testament of Freedom, and the list has barely begun. If any one of these is ever performed on Memorial Day it would be a rare and notable event. All this too is forgotten when their greatness and art could enhance the dignity and remembrance of those historic days in May 1945 as well as those of the other nine wars.

“So what,” you ask? “That stuff is unimportant. We need to deal with the now, man... and I happen to like Puff Daddy.”

Well then, let us despair for the present first, then the future.

Cocktail Chatter

2005-05-25T12:38:00.000-07:00

Marketing Brahms With Cleavage
"You could say that classical music has sex on the brain, which, as D H Lawrence said, is a very bad place to have it. Bad or not, it makes for something jarringly out of tune with current notions of sexiness. How on earth can you combine the sublimated, secret yearnings of Brahms's chamber music with the up-front sexiness of, say, Bond? The short answer is, you can't. They belong to different worlds. It would be like adding lip gloss to the Mona Lisa." The Telegraph (

) 04/21/05

Hear! Hear!

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress. Claude Levi-Strauss

Now…What’s the moral again?

What's the moral here? Indie pop is art music. It's not designed for a large audience. Increasingly, you won't hear it on the radio. One radio station that plays has to be supported by its listeners. Indie pop is part of a Pittsburgh festival of visual art. Not that this is anything new to people who know pop. Rock bands were doing non-popular art music as far back as the late '60s, if you count the Velvet Underground. But people in classical music often don't seem to know this. They talk as if all pop was simple-minded junk for teens. While in fact pop has developed its own art music. This is a huge threat to classical music. Do we understand this? We talk about attracting a younger audience. But this younger audience already has art music of its own. Why do they need us?

artsjournal.sandow.com 4.25

…Yeah, and we know where that got him!

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement. Bonaparte

Barenboim’s successor

“…Beyond being a superior conductor, a fine musician and a strong leader who's respected by the orchestra, he or she should be thoroughly familiar with how American orchestras function in a changing social and economic landscape. And the next music director should be willing to help the organization stump for funds, a role Barenboim has declined to play but one that has become essential.’" Chicago Tribune 02/27/05-

But, that was shortly before Muti left La Scala. Within days after his resignation there, he was quoted as being propositioned by CSO, which must have shifted their priorities almost overnight, and brought on this comment:

“However, the reputation for aloofness and arrogance that dogged Muti at La Scala is the last thing the CSO needs in a new music director. Running a major opera house like La Scala is much more complex than presiding over any orchestra, no matter how eminent, and La Scala is notorious for its Byzantine political intrigue. The campaign that drove Muti from his post could be painting him with a tainted brush. But the CSO already has a music director with impeccable artistic credentials and a reputation for disliking the socializing and outreach work the orchestra so clearly needs and wants. Another aloof, European-based maestro would be a foolish choice, one that runs counter to everything the CSO says it is looking for in a new music director.

Whether that new landscape calls for high-speed travel is open to debate, however. Striking while the iron is hot has its allures, but the CSO could be in danger of getting seriously burned.” Wynne DeLacoma Classical Music Critic

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet. Jeffrey Tate

A musicologist is a man who can read music but cannot hear it. Beecham

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes. Beecham

The idea of marketing a musical composition like a tub of lard or a barrel of beer is to me as sad as it is ridiculous. Claude Debussy

Canned music is like audible wallpaper. Alistair Cooke

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is. Noel Coward

Pop, Pap, Rap and Heritage

2005-05-18T10:43:00.000-07:00

Almost daily someone writes woefully on the current demise of orchestras and opera companies, shrinking concert audiences, and fewer classical radio stations. Not infrequently there is a blast against music in the schools as being responsible for it all. If it were that simple, it would be simple. But, I will agree, with exceptions, that music teaching in lower schools is awful and that it, with marketing, shoves classical music into the remotest closet corner.

It would need a book to show how profoundly music education in schools contributes to classical music illiteracy and crude musical taste these days and it could be shown that teachers of school music are poorly prepared to teach the subject. Most do not have a background, cannot play piano, they read music poorly, don’t know much literature (certainly not contemporary), can maybe sing the latest pop songs, or play only an MP3 well. Most importantly, they themselves are classically illiterate. Their teaching materials rely on marketer publishers who push pop music in everything from lesson plans to singing books and emo quartos to “quick and easy” instrument methods and ensemble pap. Of course, the kids grow into musical illiterates.

An indicator of the poor quality of music and other teaching in public schools can be found in the spectacular nationwide increase in home schooling. The U.S. Dept of Education census in 2003 tallied 1.1 million students enrolled in home schools. Where I live it has increased 750%! in the past four years. But, as in the public schools, if parent/teachers are immersed and knowledgeable only in pop culture, what else would/could they teach their kids? Again, marketers to the rescue. A look at the music materials sold by commercial houses to home school parent/teachers show them to be woefully inadequate in promoting classical taste.

Charter schools? Since the AZ charter school law was passed in 1994, there are now 495 charter schools at last count, with 75.000 (+-) kids enrolled. Some of these charter schools are an aegis for the arts. I don’t know what they teach or who teaches them, but it points again to the dissatisfaction with the level of instruction in public schools.

But, maybe it’s not all doom and gloom.

Eating Chinese the other evening with my wife, who took a college sabbatical to teach in an elementary school for an experience update in vocal music education, the talk turned to her observations.

One of her more startling statements was, “I have my second grade kids singing do to do and down again, but my fourth graders just can’t do it,” she complained.

The reverse I might understand, so I asked, “Why is that”?

“Because all the fourth graders know is rap. Their CDs are rap. They know every word of every rap song (?) around. Second graders are still singing Sesame Street stuff. But, by the time they get to fourth grade they’ll be singing rap too, with its very narrow, limited range”.

“How could that change?” I asked.

“If I stayed at this school for five years it would change”.

That problem/solution seems to be that it needs a good, (note I did not say qualified) committed vocal music teacher (and instrumental) throughout the grades. Not many schools have that. And how long before the marketers get to the second graders too, if there’s any money to be made?

“Well, you judge at the Heritage festivals and hear the best school choirs around. Are they that good?”

“Oh, they are very good. The U.S. produces the best school choirs in the world with few exceptions-Finland, maybe Sweden. But, you have to remember that the Heritage finals festivals attract only the top choirs, only a very small percentage of them all.”

Maybe it’s always been that way. Only a few float on the puddle. I wonder how many in these choirs were home schoolers? But, that prompts deeper questions. Like I said, it needs a book.

New Pope. - New Music?

2005-05-11T13:03:00.000-07:00

Music for Roman church use was once the main occupation of composers who, at the behest of the clergy turned out myriads of masses, chants, motets, and organ compositions. Protestantism dampened the output somewhat, but music for concerts significantly changed things. The best of composers wrote for concert hall performance. The texts remained the same but the intent had changed from the sacred to the profane.

The Church, with some exceptions, seemed not too concerned, for it possessed and used its wealth of historical music. It became militant only when the concert type of religious music wormed its way into the liturgy. Then various pronouncements ordered that profane music was unacceptable. For example, before Vatican II, church musicians were instructed that the famous Ave Marias of Schubert and Bach-Gonoud were theatre, not church music and should not be permitted during liturgical functions. Similarly, it admonished the performance of the famous wedding musics of Mendelssohn and Wagner. They were done anyway.

Church composers at that time had to submit their manuscripts to a liturgical commission who ruled on the permissibility of the composition for use in the liturgy and thereby qualified it to be performed and published. Composers found that such commissions were frequently made up of non-musicians or musicians with little competence to judge, particularly if the music were in a non-traditional style. All this promoted mediocrity as evidenced by the mountains of Caecilian type music ground out by hacks, as well as the absence of meritorious works by good composers.

Vatican II, the “breath of fresh air” was hailed by some composers as a new opportunity for their creative efforts. Alas, they were buried by bland psalm compositions, trite pieces with guitar, folk and ethnic masses, folk arrangements, etc. that were seen by publishers to be much more profitable. Many hailed all this, waving their banner of “the past is prologue” – usually by amateurs who did not know the past. English was in, Latin was out. Choirs were out, congregational singing was in. Palestrina was out, Gelineau was in. Professional choir directors and organists were out and amps found their way into the sanctuary along with guitars and bad folk singing.

After almost 40 years of this renewed liturgy, some clergy questioned these practices and wondered if there wasn’t something better and began to seek professional competence. In America and in many other countries the euphoria of the liturgical movement had been replaced by disillusionment. The members of the clergy often tried to attract the interest of a bored generation with entertaining initiatives. New pap was still being promoted by publishers and with the advent of inter-denominational worship, it was further diluted by the use of contemporary “Christian” cocktail lounge music that was, and still is, popular with church goers. The ancient rites and liturgy that had been accompanied by music from the greatest musical minds of a millennium had become hollow tombs and the rites themselves had been blended and diluted into ceremonies not unlike bland Protestant services.

Of course there were bastions and citadels. Some cathedrals and monasteries and a few die-hard conservative Roman Catholic parishes in America and elsewhere continued using Gregorian chant, Latin masses and motets, as well as traditional rites that had faded elsewhere. Msgr. Richard J. Schuler and the Church Music Association of America, among others, including Cardinal Ratzinger, assiduously fought for the Motu Proprio of Pius X, and also for what they believe was the true intent of Vatican II.

Now comes Benedict XVI who has professed an interest in music and specifically, music in the church (see his bibliography below). In his book Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977 (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1998), then-Cardinal Ratzinger reflects on the atmosphere surrounding discussion of the sacred liturgy during Vatican Council II, and, like Msgr. Schuler, deplores the subsequent developments which distorted the Council Fathers' intentions. In the Cardinal’s view, classical music is an “elitist ghetto” for specialists; pop music is the “cult of the banal”; and rock music is the “expression of elemental passions” that opposes Christian worship. (His stand on birth control, pedophilia, women, homosexuality, theology and liturgy, and politics in the Church is equally archconservative.) If so, then of what should the music of the church consist? If church music has been so wrong since Pope John, whither the path? Back to the Caecilians, Gregorian chant, the canticles, the psalms?

Alex Ross may have been joking but he was nevertheless correct in his post Paging Palestrina (www.therestisnoise.com April 20) suggesting that Adorno and Benedict were cut from the same cloth, so to speak. They were post WWII German thinkers on art and society and they complement each other relative to culture industries, commodity fetishism, false individualism and standardization of music products. Later, maybe pulling our leg again, Ross hopes the new pope might commission new works that will combine classical and popular elements. That’s not likely since, in Benedict’s mind, both are unacceptable as liturgical expressions. Benedict writes that music must enhance the word (there goes instrumental music) and properly begins with the psalms. Oddly, that is precisely where the Vatican II flag-wavers began their overhaul of liturgical music forty years ago.

Benedict once wistfully wrote that true reform will "flourish in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council-reform that is not discontinuity and destruction but purification and growth to a new maturation and a new fullness". (That should give everyone pause.)

However, it is more likely that nothing much different will occur in today’s church music simply because the institution has a new musically interested pope. Pop and rock music in churches will not be replaced by male chanting from the Liber Usualis, or a polyphonic choir singing Nanino, however uplifting and gratifying that may be. If I can chant my own mantra: change is not necessarily progress but it is inevitable. Nostalgia is not change. Music and the Vatican, just as its human members and fellow travelers, is moving on a long, winding, scenic, but sometimes difficult road to an undefined and unknown destination. A pope can take a different road but cannot change the terminus.

Joseph Ratzinger on The Theology of Worship and of its Music. A brief bibliography

The basic starting point is H. HOEPFL, Bibliographie Kardinal Joseph Ratzinger : W. BAIER et al (edd.), Weisheit Gottes - Weisheit der Welt = FS Ratzinger (St Ottilien 1987) 2/1*-77*

A. Independent PublicationsJ.R. (tr. G. HARRISON), The Feast of Faith. Approaches to a Theology of the Liturgy (San Francisco 1986)

J.R. - V. MESSORI (tr. S. ATTANASIO-G. HARRISON), The Ratzinger Report (San Francisco 1985) 119/34, esp. 127/30
J.R. (tr. Sr M.F.McCARTHY), Principles of Catholic Theology (San Francisco 1987) 367/93
J.R. (tr. M. MATESICH), A New Song for the Lord. Faith in Christ and Liturgy Today (New York 1996)

B. Articles in Journals and collective Works

5) J.R., Zur theologischen Grundlegung der Kirchenmusik, in F. FLECKEN-STEIN (ed.), Gloria Deo - Pax Hominibus. FS Kirchenmusikschule Regensburg= ACV Schriftenreihe 9 (Bonn 1974) 39/62 English in 1) above, pp. 97/126
J.R., Kirchenmusikberuf als liturgischer und pastoraler Dienst : F. FLECKENSTEIN (ed.), Kirchenmusik im Gespraech. Ansprachen, Reden, Gruszworte, Diskussionsbeitraege zur 100-Jahrfeier der Kirchenmusikschule Regensburg vom 21.-27.5.1975 = ACV Schriftenreihe 12 (Bonn 1976) 24/7
J.R., Theologische Probleme der Kirchenmusik = Kirchenmusik eine
geistig-geistliche Disziplin 1 (Stuttgart 1978) English = Theological Problems of Church Music, in R. SKERIS (ed.), Crux et Cithara - MuSaMel 2 (Altoetting 1983) 214/22
J.R., Liturgie und Kirchenmusik : Musices Aptatio Yearbook 1986
(Roma 1986) 60/74 English = Liturgy and Church Music, in R. SKERIS, Divini Cultus Studium - MuSaMel 3 (Altoetting 1990) 185/97; Sacred Music 112 (1985) 13/22; Homiletic & Pastoral Review 86 (1986) 10/22. Also in "New Song," no. 4 above, under a new title (invented by the translator ? the editor ?), pp. 111/27.
J.R., Biblische Vorgaben fuer die Kirchenmusik : J. KNAPP (ed.), Brixener Initiative Musik u. Kirche : 3. Symposion 'Choral und Mehr-stimmigkeit' (Brixen 1990) 9/21 English = New Song, no. 4 above, pp. 94/110
J.R., In der Spannung zwischen Regensburger Tradition und nachkonziliarer Reform : Musica sacra CVO 114 (1994) 379/89 Eglish = Church Music in the Cathedral of Regensburg 1964/94: Betwixt and Between the Regensburg Tradition and Post-conciliar reform : Sacred Music 122/2 (Summer 1995) 5/17; also in "New Song," number 4 above, pp. 128/46 under the new title "In the Presence of the Angels I Will Sing Your Praise" : The Regensburg Tradition and the Reform of the Liturgy."
J.R., The Theology of the Liturgy : A. REID (ed.), Looking Again at the Question of the Liturgy. Proceedings of the Fontgombault Liturgical Conference 22/24 July 2001 (Farnborough 2003) 18/31
J.R., Assessment and Future Prospects : Looking Again, number 11 above, pp. 145/53.

Classical Music in America

2005-05-05T08:30:00.000-07:00

I finally got my copy of Classical Music in America and read it with gusto. It is a tour de force, a joy to read, and it has received rave reviews from everywhere. A few reviewers have aimed their barbs, but it remains an important contribution to our understanding of how classical music has come to be what it is today. Horowitz’ subtitle is A History of Its Rise and Fall. Many readers might not see “fall” as what classical music is today. It depends on whether you view it as a business or as an art.

It is not a history, since a lot of aspects of classical music are necessarily omitted- the development of bands, choral music, chamber music, liturgical music, music education, etc., in fact there are no musical examples-but rather it is a selective survey of the development and workings of major American orchestras, opera companies, and composers. His story begins with Patrick Gilmore and the colossal 1869 Peace Jubilee and in a sense it ends there as well. He closes by saying that Gilmore may suggest a future for classical music in America-Gilmore, who mixed high and low, New World and Old World music. Some contemporary composers are already in that arena: Reich, Glass, Adams, and Kremer. But, Horowitz (or anybody else) doesn’t know if such eclecticism will refresh or diminish the residual classical music landscape.

There is a concern that America can’t seem to escape European domination of literature and performers; that American music cannot find its voice. But, in the long view we all know that classical music was introduced into this country by itinerant European musicians performing European music. Most of them were German-over a century of it. During the Great Wars European musicians fled to the US adding to its domination. During and after the Great Wars, with Germany veiled, the musical scene turned to other countries, England, Finland, Israel, et al. Further, most American composers and performers “finished” their training in Europe until fairly recently. Many still do. All this European influence cannot be overemphasized. Small wonder that American composers from Francis Hopkinson to Roy Harris and beyond have worked in the shade of Europeans.

Readers of this book can’t escape from the feeling that classical music in America is all numbers. Success is measured by the size of the budget and how many are in an audience. When audiences shrink, boards panic, and they lay plans to accommodate the loss of income. Advisors speculate about how the classical music landscape can be refreshed, i.e., how to get folks back into the concert hall. What is needed is less formality, allow applause and/or drinks whenever, more/less contemporary music, more/less warhorses, smaller halls, leaner administration, reduced season, fewer players, jazz and pop music, electronic concerts notes and rolling translated libretti, etc. etc.

Horowitz writes that this demise began with hero conductors and performers who supplanted composers. But what did it take to create these heroes? There have always been Barnum type promoters but few could match David Sarnoff of NBC who didn’t really care much about music, except how it could be exploited. He created the Toscanini mystique; the dough rolled in; classical music in America was changed. “NBC’s public relations apparatus, promoted the Maestro accordingly: a skewed barrage of reverence and ballyhoo.” says Horowitz.

One NBC release shouted, ‘World’s Largest Drum Rushed to New York for Toscanini Concert.” This release echoed one issued a century earlier when John Dwight wrote, “ I was amused to read about Jullien’s monster ophicleide exhibited in Broadway, and there is much talk of his monster drum used in his concerts when great, striking effects are required; and played upon, it is said, by a drummer on each end. This has not yet arrived, it will probably take two ships to bring it. But, Jullien has a bigger drum than that at his command; namely the great press drum…one end of it in Europe, the other (now the loudest) in America; and Jullien is the king of the drummers thereon.” Read that Sarnoff.

The pattern was set. Promoters, now called executive boards, could dictate programs, who would be solo artists, the number of concerts in a season, salaries, and so forth. This change was complicated by performers and conductors demanding more money. Boards found themselves in a quandary they haven’t yet solved. And soon audiences tired of hearing the same works of the same composers, led by the same conductors. Boards tried to solve that by having more and more stars do the same old stuff. But, now audiences are getting tired of the “star” syndrome too, and Horowitz believes that living composers, performed by living artists, can stir their interest again.

There’s enough evidence to support this. Orchestras and opera companies all over America have been refreshed by promoting contemporary music. Only time will tell if living composers can breathe life into classical music around the rest of America.

This book should be required reading for conductors, students in classes of American Music, American Studies, and similar courses, and it wouldn’t hurt executive boards either.

Classical Music in America, by Joseph Horowitz. N.Y., W.W.Norton, 606 pp., $39.95.

Provocative Thoughts

2005-04-28T20:25:00.000-07:00

A good composer does not imitate; he steals. Igor Stravinsky

Composers shouldn’t think too much – it interferes with their
plagiarism. Howard Dietz

To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from
many is research. Anon.

A good composer is slowly discovered; a bad composer is
slowly found out. Ernst Newman

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one,
better to perform one than to listen to one,
better to listen top one than to use is as a means of distraction,
entertainment, or acquisition of “culture”. John Cage

(and any of the above is better than writing criticism of it?).

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains,
airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven quartet.
Witold Lutoslawski

Music is spiritual. The music business is not. Van Morrison

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.
Elvis Presley

I like Beethoven, especially the poems. Ringo Starr

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Igor Stravinsky

The manner in which Americans “consume” music has
a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using
it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie
- it’s consumed that way without any regard for how and
why it’s made. Frank Zappa

Modern so-called "classical" music has maneuvered itself, with some exceptions, into an elitist ghetto, which only specialists may enter -- and even they do so with what may sometimes be mixed feelings. The music of the masses has broken loose from this and treads a very different path. On the one hand, there is pop music, which is certainly no longer supported by the people in the ancient sense (populus). It is aimed at the phenomenon of the masses, is industrially produced, and ultimately has to be described as a cult of the banal. "Rock," on the other hand, is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship.
Cardinal Ratzinger now Pope Benedict XVI

A Different Palette

2005-04-21T09:46:00.000-07:00

Attending a pow-wow appealed to me not only because it would be a new experience near the end of a grueling semester, but I was also told that non-Indians are welcome. I would be with my Indian anthropologist friend who wanted my take on the music, and besides, I’m usually open to any new adventure that’s not life-threatening. So I said, “Sure!”

Pow-wow celebrations aren’t held only on reservations. Almost any large American city that has an Indian population frequently celebrates their Indianism locally with pow-wows. They come together in a large hall - men, women, and children - for an evening of food, dance, song, and camaraderie. Rowdy behavior, alcohol or other drugs are taboo and strictly enforced.

Many dancers were dressed in Indian costume: men in fancy head dresses, beaded buckskin leggings and moccasins; women in colorful, flowing dresses adorned with Indian style jewelry. But, anybody can dance and participate, costume or not. About 150 persons were in the hall. Maybe half participated in the dancing.

The atmosphere was electric and compelling; primitive, as though I went through a door into another era. It was motion, color, fantasy, hypnotic, vibrating, and totally irresistible.

There was a raised drum at the center of the floor and four men in Lee work clothes were hunched over and around it, drumming and singing. (Women singers are a rarity but they are slowly making their way into a male domain). The drum was a common bass drum just as those in a high school band. Songs were begun by a lone singer who intoned a chant, followed by the others, repeating the lead and continuing into a longer section with a coda that ended a song. Its form was iterative, an “incomplete repetition”, or AABCBC, and, I learned later, it is found throughout Indian America.

These songs had an astonishingly high, non-falsetto tessitura, beginning on the chant’s highest note, gradually falling, until it ended with a vocal “fall”. The men sang full throat, straining their vocal systems with taut facial and laryngeal muscles. The scale systems in all the songs were tetra/penta tonic and all the songs had a descending melodic pattern. The songs were “Plains” style. The leader decided how many times a song is repeated by gauging the interest of the dancers and the crowd. It’s usually four or five times, but could be more.

Dancing was done in a circle, counterclockwise around the drum mostly in a free style, moving with the spirit. Men’s dancing varied from very active and energetic turns, to leaps, bends, and shuffles. Women, wearing or carrying colorful shawls, danced with more reserve and restricted movements. Kids participated too; doing whatever dance imitation they chose. Small fry accompanied their parent, who held their hand while they tried to imitate the steps. Some of them, age 8-14, were already outstanding. Other small children slept on blankets at the edge of the circle or ran around enjoying themselves. There were no behavior problems.

Non-Indians would say that Indian songs all sound alike, but each song was different, not only the contours, but also the types and functions. There were war dance songs, honoring songs, women’s dance songs, and many more. They all used the same musical form, but the drumming patterns and tempo changed for some of them. Generations ago, all these song types had words. But today, most songs are sung with vocables, although words are sometimes part of some songs. The songs aren’t notated or composed as in the European fashion. Rather, they are “made up” by a singer and often modified by fellow singers before it is accepted. There is no copyright, but certain songs “belong” to a singer and others cannot sing it. Dozens of new songs are “made” in a month and they travel quickly across Indian America on the pow-wow circuit.

The atmosphere was joyful and deafening, rock-concert loud, reverberating from wall to wall, without amps. Oddly (I thought later), I didn’t feel in the least uncomfortable there. Indeed, before a Friendship dance, I was asked to join in, but I was too shy, even though the steps appeared easy. Some of the dancers came from reservations and one of them, from whom I had been asking questions, invited me to his reservation home. Of course, I accepted. There was no date, no time. I was told the invitation was sincere and typically open.

It was late when it ended. I’m not a night person but the exhilaration of the pow-wow kept me alert with a slight high, and it was much, much later before I slept with the drum still in my head.

"The Czar of All Conductors"

2005-04-12T18:33:00.000-07:00

I was fascinated looking at the list of orchestra members who played under Louis Antoine Jullien, the famous French conductor, when he visited the US in 1853-54.* M.Jullien brought 25 or 26 leaders (sources differ) and 2 vocal soloists with him from London, and then hired New York musicians to create his orchestra of 80+ players. Jullien was a stern, demanding, disciplinarian and his performances stunned the NY critics, even the hard-nosed Bostonian John Dwight, writing for the New York Courier.

Jullien’s “great orchestra” included members who were, or would become, prominent in American musical life. Theodore Thomas would become the first conductor to program an entire concert of serious music, and who toured widely in America introducing audiences to German music, especially Wagner, (but not American music, thereby setting future musical menus with mainly central and northern European music)and to set high standards for American orchestras. Ureli Corelli Hill was the founder of the NY Philharmonic and was its first American conductor. George Bristow championed American music; was a composer of operas, symphonies, overtures, etc. with American themes; played in the NY Philharmonic and was on its board of directors; and was a supervisor of music in the NY Public schools. William Fry, a composer, was the first American to compose a publicly performed grand opera, and an early espouser of American oriented music and American composers.

These better-known names leaped out from the list, but a closer look could probably find other contributors to American music. The influence of Jullien’s discipline and leadership on Thomas, Hill, Bristow, Fry, and others, must surely have been enormous, and his impact on the development of American orchestras (and bands) and their repertoire is also worth investigating further. Bandsmen have long ago acknowledged Jullien as a guru.

Jullien conducted 214 concerts in 10 months in the U.S. The dictionaries often accuse him of being, at best, a showman. He was indeed. But he was first of all, a distinguished and portentous conductor and splendid musician. He led his orchestras in the latest compositions of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, and Wagner together with Beethoven and other older masters. He also performed contrasting light dance music and program music with sensationalism to entertain his audiences. His concerts were always sold out, while other New York concerts were poorly attended. (Hmmm! and this was 150+ years ago).

Jullien was among the first conductors to use a baton. He was the first conductor strong enough to expropriate the power and authority from the concertmaster; to insist on uniform bowing; to demand, and get, precision of attacks and releases, accents, and wide, controlled dynamics. Neither Berlioz nor Wagner equaled him as a conductor.

His life, alas, was one of heights and depths; of enormous successes and disappointments. He died a broken man.

*Much of what is in this post comes from Adam Carse’s The Life of Jullien (Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 1951). The rest is from my own research. Also, if you bought a copy of Jos. Horowitz (Classical Music in America, NY, W.W. Norton, 2005), he mentions Jullien with several citations.

The Bells of Wuhan

2005-04-06T09:15:00.000-07:00

Two years ago I was traveling in China, taking a camel trek across the Taklimakan desert following Polo’s route, and earlier stopped in the great city of Wuhan located on the famous Yangtze River. What I discovered there was astounding.

I’d guess that most Western musicians are unaware of the ancient chime bells in Wuhan, a set of 64 ritual bells perfectly tuned to the 12 tone tempered scale. The bells were part of a 1978 excavation that unearthed 20,000 articles dating from the “Warring States” period, 2405 years ago (B.C. 400) from the tomb of Marquess Yi of Zeng, who was buried in the late fifth century-B.C. They are now in the Wuhan Provincial Museum and should rank as an earth’s wonder.

48 bells produce two notes of minor thirds (six are needed to produce twelve semitones) and 16 produce notes of major thirds (eight are needed to produce twelve semitones). Each bell is marked to show what notes it peals. The range is five octaves and each bell produces the two tones depending upon where it is struck. (This data was furnished to me and I think I have it worked out. Readers are welcome to try too).

At 2500 kilograms (over a half ton), they are likely the largest instruments in the world and required five players. The heaviest bell is 203.6 kilos (about 446 lbs) and 1.5 meters high (about 5'). The name of the tone and the date is inscribed on each bell in both Zeng and Chu scripts. The bells were played only for rituals and were last played in 1997 for the return of Hong Kong.

I had to go back to the Greek Pythagorus and about B.C.500 when he wrote about achieving a twelve note system by superimposing perfect fifths. Then I read in the The Spring and Autumn of Leu, a Chinese document from about the 3d century B.C., that “considerable care was taken by bell makers to produce intervals very close to modern semitones”. But, it is unknown whether they were guided by theoretically accurate pitches. We do know that in this time (Han dynasty), the octave was recognized as the basic unit and it was divided into twelve smaller units. The ratio 3:2 was used for fifths and 3:4 for falling fourths. This suggests considerable contact between east and west to me.

Sachs writes that the Chinese attempted the first tempered scale in A.D. 400 and adds that it was Ju Zaiyu who expounded on, and created, the first tempered scale of 12 notes in 1596. Evans says the same thing. The history of these bells appear to contradict them. I wish I could have heard them. Mmm-maybe not. I’d likely still hear them.

This should be of interest to Western musicians who usually think of the tempered scale as a 17^th century innovation and used first by J.S. Bach in 1722. Our Western histories trace the theory of equal temperament to H. Grammateus in 1518 and it was probably the result of Jesuits returning from China, who, as the bells show, developed it long before.

Anyone having more information on this please comment. Thanks.

Sources: Ruth Lor Malloy China Guide 1999, Open Road Publishing.

Curt Sachs Harvard Dictionary of Music 1969.

C.C.Evans Guqin Music, at http://members.aol.com/CCEvans42/welcome.htm

Robert Temple, The Genius of China

Nibbles

2005-03-31T08:46:00.000-08:00

While musician friends- brass players, singers, and choir leaders prepared for Easter, I was struck by the sameness of their activities. There were the popular Requiems, Passions, cantatas, etc for Holy Week. But, for Easter Sunday, the Resurrection, the centerpiece of Christian belief, there were the usual Handel/Beethoven Hallelujahs, various brassy anthems that incorporated Easter hymn tunes, but little else. But, there is plenty else available and useful. There are so many other big Amens and Hallelujas. Bach’s et Resurrexit, is worth the rehearsals, and I have always liked Flor Peeters’ Entrata Festiva, Horatio Parker’s Light's Glittering Morn, Schuetz’s Ich weiss, dass mein Er-loeser lebt, Honegger’s Cantique de Paques for women, and for large, able choirs, The Resurrection (from Christus) – Liszt-and there is so much more. For an extensive list with comments on Easter anthems, and more, see http://choralnet.org/resources/ . While the Requiem offers inspiring texts and mysticism to composers, the Resurrection hasn’t prompted either text or music to match.

*******

On diminishing audiences, one of the reasons that critics and reviewers are so popular today is because they are surrogates for participation. Many prefer to read about a concert than to attend it. Reading a column allows one to talk, and maybe even to think, about it as though the opinion were theirs. But, the reality is, there is probably as much musical criticism as there is music, but a larger percentage of it is bad.

*******

While it’s easy to learn who is performing at a concert, it is becoming more difficult to know what is being performed. The business of classical music has become so desperate that it has forgotten the foundation of its business.

*******

Applause and the Dinosaurs

2005-03-22T08:32:00.000-08:00

For whatever reasons, there is increased interest in audience behavior lately. There are those who want silence during music with applause only at the end of a multi-movement work; others think it’s OK to clap between movements; still others don’t seem to mind talking during performance-as long as it’s them. I’d guess that some want to clap and talk whenever they feel like it. Promoting such informality has to do mainly with “saving” classical concerts from further decline by making them more casual and palatable for more people. But, I suspect it’s only a sign of more to come.

We are changing, manners and morals are changing, musics are changing, orchestras and management are changing -all signs of a dynamic culture. Change causes stress in old-timers who find their values being upset. It causes stress to youngsters too, who are confronted with (to them) pointless tradition. In the same way as we came to the formal applause/silence customs from notorious informality (check your history), to silent temple worship, we are at the door again to Crystal Palace informality. We may as well get used to it. But, will Concert Companion, artists talking to an audience, talking by an audience, or claqueuers after bravura passages, make much difference in the size of, or appreciation by, audiences? Let’s take a leap to concert halls.

The cavernous halls built to accommodate thousands of music listeners are historically recent. It was a good idea while it lasted but, as far as classical concerts are concerned, its horizon doesn’t appear very bright now. Maybe we should start accommodating the fewer numbers with smaller halls and diverse ensembles, which may ultimately lead to a new “New Music” of composition, literature, performance, and audience.

Thirty-five years ago Alvin Toffler wrote in Future Shock, that consumer taste in the future (that’s now!) will become more and more fragmented; that we would be faced by overwhelming and confusing multiple choices, and new niches for these tastes will be formed, viz. foods, specialized industries, computer dating -you name it. It has clearly happened in popular music, just as Toffler said it would, with its plethora of styles and audiences large enough to warrant a radio station to broadcast, or organize a concert for, an exclusive, narrowly-defined style. And look what’s happened to the record industry.

Taste has changed in classical audiences too but there have been few changes to accommodate them. Some classical music listeners hail only Wuorinen or Babbitt, while others groove with Reich and Glass. Many sway with Menotti or Rorem; some dream with Debussy and Hovhaness, or dance with Stravinsky, Dukas, etc. Others powder their wigs with Bach and/or Pachelbel. Still others wallow in hard core Romantic literature. I won’t toy with the point further.

So what do we do with all these fragmented tastes? In some larger cities it is evident by the many ensembles each devoted to a different music causing the large halls to have fewer sales. But, elsewhere, the practice is to put more, or some of each style, in a concert, so audiences will enjoy something even if they hate the rest. Instead, many would rather play a choice CD at home in their pajamas and save $150. It may be that there are as many, or more, classical music lovers as ever. But, the typical concert hall audience decline seems to be occurring in all but a few places in America. A restaurant featuring a take it or leave it one meal only of a Cobb salad, a duck Lorene sandwich, turnip greens and grits, creamed Jello, and just a sip of Chateau Margaux 1787 or Corteux 1989, wouldn’t last long. The musical palette is changing quickly and heading into new territory. We can admire the dinosaurs, but they are dead.

keys and symbolism - da capo

2005-03-15T09:47:00.000-08:00

Things I can’t wait to read: Alex Ross on Radio and his take on E-flat minor
Jos. Horowitz on Classical Music in America

My blog on key symbolism provoked some response, namely that whatever the attached symbolism is, it lies with the listener. If I feel that C major represents jubilance, happiness, victory, etc. then that’s what it is – for me and whoever else shares that feeling-purely subjective. It’s probably true that many composers have selected particular keys to express particular feelings (but see below) and lists might be made about who wrote what in what key to show an agreement. But, we might find as many exceptions, too.

What I found hard to concede is, if a listener knows a piece is in “melancholy” G minor, and it is transposed down to “somber” F minor, would it sound melancholy or somber to that listener? Would “fate knocking at the door” sound as powerful in B-minor? The answer seems to be-no and yes. Play the C major Prelude from WTC Bk I in D major and the response is different. A friend said, “It’s not as calm - and brighter.”

To be sure, the matter has bothered us for some time. Aristotle and other ancient thinkers defined in detail the emotional/ethical features of the tonalities used in those times. This was typical for Middle Ages aesthetics too, with some additions and corrections. Later, it developed into a principle and a number of tables of tonalities and affects were made. I previously mentioned Berlioz. Here’s Charpentier's table for major tonalities:

C-dur - cheerful and warlike
D-dur - joyful and VERY warlike
E-dur - quarrelsome and irritable
Es-dur - cruel and stern
F-dur - violent and hasty
G-dur - tender and joyful
A-dur - joyful and pastoral
B-dur - majestic and joyful
H-dur - stern and sorrowful

Such tables, and others such as Scriabine’s table of colors, et al, are clearly subjective.

In his Characterization of Tonalities R. Shumann wrote that the difference between major and minor is a “creative, masculine principle” and a “passive and female one". On tonalities he remarks: “The simplest feelings need simple tonalities, more complex feelings seek for more rare ones, less common to the hearing sense". But, he derided assumptions that E-minor is "the girl in white with a bow on the bosom" and G-minor is"unpleasant feeling" and "the gloomy biting one's lips".

So, is “affect theory" right or wrong, and are the semantics of tonalities and the rules of handling them arbitrary? Schumann hints that "the truth lies in the middle, as usual. …The process that enables the composer to choose this or that fundamental tonality to express his feelings, is as inexplicable as the creative process of the man of genius, who creates both the new idea and a form, which serves as a container for it". He goes on: "One cannot say that any certain feeling, in order to be expressed adequately, needs to be translated into music by means of only one certain tonality". But, he can't agree with those who believe that "everything can be expressed in any tonality".

The question is muddled (or settled), by Stravinsky who says, "Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature. . . ." Poetics of Music

Closer to our own time, the Special Research Interest Group (SRIG) of MENC has acontinued interest in affected response. See Music Education Research, An Anthology from the Journal of Research in Music Education, 1998.

Finally, it must be conceded that instruments and ensembles have historically changed their pitch with no performer/audience outcry. C minor tuned to B would unlikely cause an uproar. Choral conductors often don’t hesitate to drop or raise the pitch of an a capella piece if it will better suit the sound or tessitura of the singers.

Maybe Alex will figure it out.

Radio? So, Who'sListening?

2005-03-09T10:09:00.000-08:00

It can be argued that a sign of our time is a lack of responsibility and leadership. Decisions are too often made from polls and bottom lines. This is evident by business decisions made by those classical radio executives who cannot see further than spread sheets with declining numbers.

WETA-FM in D.C. is among the more recent stations that have decided to drop classical listening. Diana West, writing for the Washington Times, is “on the mark” replying to the station executive who was quoted, “It is painful, but my job is to steward this public radio station in the best possible way," Daniel C. DeVany, WETA's vice president and general manager, said. Ms. West then observes, “This was a new one: The general manager was making it sound as if it were in the public interest for public radio to "steward" classical music right down the drain.… Call it decline, call it a trend, but don't call it stewardship. Because what the classical fade-out tells us more than anything is that the "custodians of public taste" have left the building.” (Washington Times 03/04/05)

In Pittsburgh, the Post-Gazette reports that Pittsburgh's non-commercial classical music station, WQED, just wrapped up its winter fund drive, with seriously disappointing results. Station officials pointed out that that almost no one is making any money playing classical music on the radio these days. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 02/22/05)
Is that a prognosis?

Current states, "News programming is much better than classical music at raising money to keep a station going. A listener-hour of NPR news may generate twice as much listener income and much more business underwriting income as classical or jazz." (Current 02/16/05)

These are discouraging items that can be heard all over the country. But, if we tune in to the stagnant stuff that is broadcast on most of these stations, it’s little wonder. And many stations have low power with a broadcast area of 45 miles ( +- ) with airless pockets within that. Others have announcers that can’t speak music. Some have both these and other detriments. If these go down the drain, who cares? No one is listening anyway. Most classical radio has become muzak.

Without citing where she got her stats, Pam Dixon writes, “ More people than ever are listening to classical music, and the audience is much broader than once thought. It's not just the elite listening to classical music stations; it's everyone from teen-agers doing their homework to teachers driving home from work” (Radio Guide Vol 1 No. 9 ). Pam, there is a difference between hearing and listening. One requires attention. What is needed, more than anything else, is adventurous programming that will smack a listener to attention. Ditto orchestra concerts and their declining audiences.

It must be added that everything in the world doesn’t have to pay for itself. How does having a baby pay for itself? A student is “worth” $3,340 to a school board? Does a new TV pay for itself? We can list the cost of everything but are dumbfounded by their value. Really true for the arts.

A yet to be written history of business in classical music should reveal how we got into this mess. The decline is one of leadership and responsibility to the value of music. The consequent station decline is merely a reflection of that lack.

Batons and Balance Sheets

2005-03-04T08:57:00.000-08:00

Dear Reader, I’m still struggling with this blog page technical stuff. Sometimes it just doesn’t do what it promises. Please be patient during my learning phase.

My last (and first) post dealt with key symbolism and while it was quite clear to me then, it took a note from Alex Ross, and later, in one of those incomparable moments of dazzling insight, to really muddle it. To make it brief, I didn’t consider the too obvious fact that we each hear differently. That fact deflated my thesis, but also tossed the often accepted “list” of key characteristics, such as noble, deathly, ethereal, etc. that are attached to keys- as soon as we ask, “as heard by whom”? Given that, there is no logical extension to perfect pitch either. Nobody mentioned it, but what about “keyless, non-tonal”, or “atonal” music? Well, the scenery was interesting, but I was driving too fast. Let’s take another trip.

Conductors and the Orchestra Business

St. Louis. More and more orchestras are hiring conductors for non-musical desiderata. I was living in St. Louis teaching theory, conducting, and orchestration as an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL) during the time the SLSO was searching for a new conductor. In April 2002, Hans Vonk, who had been suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease, stepped aside as music director, shortly resigned, and died in August, 2004. The search for a replacement began in Summer 2002.

So, what did they look for? - someone who could get along musically and personally with the orchestra and management; someone who was experienced, preferably young, and could project a feeling of energy and enthusiasm-traditional stuff; but equally important, it had to be someone who would participate in the St. Louis community. It took almost three years before they signed David Robertson to a three year contract. “In today’s symphony environment it is vital to have a music director who brings a multitude of qualities to lead an orchestra…. I know he will become very active in this community and will be a tremendous ambassador for St. Louis….” said Randy Adams, SLSO President and Executive Director.

What does that mean? Well, aside from conducting, it means raising money for the orchestra from arts and business groups, being visible at community events, etc. But, a key requirement was that the conductor was to be a baseball fan and would attend the games and root for the St. Louis Cardinals! I’m not making this up. No one said how many Cardinal players are required to attend SLSO concerts.

Chicago. A few miles north, in Chicago, Daniel Barenboim decided that he would rather dedicate his time to music than to fund-raising and other extra-musical duties, and resigned. As you might expect, the management is looking for a conductor who, in addition to the musical responsibilities, will raise money and appear to be a model Chicagoan.

These examples are clear admissions that orchestra management, there and elsewhere, is unwilling or incapable of doing its job and are redefining the role of a conductor-who is becoming a music director and assistant to the executive director. And, like administrators in every facet of American life, these businessmen have somehow become the baton wielders.

Mr. Ormandy, please stay at rest.

key symbolism

2005-03-02T09:07:00.000-08:00

What-another music blog site? Well, this one hopes to be different from the others-not that I’m dissatisfied with them. It’s just that I want to express myself on some issues and knowing my peculiar mind, they might be interesting to other musical readers. I don’t intend it to be a regular daily/weekly blog. But, when I have something on my mind, I’ll post it.

Within the past two weeks there have been allusions to the emotional connection to certain keys. Alex Ross started it with his review of Ladu Lupu’s CD of Brahms’ Op.117 , when he wrote, “There is a certain symbolism in the key structure of this piece. The "A" section is in E-flat, which is Beethoven's "heroic" key, the key of the Eroica and the Emperor. …But the middle section is in E-flat minor, which is for many composers the key of death.”

There was a quick follow-up in TheFredosphere: “ Alex Ross restarts the key character discussion. Alex identified E-flat minor as the key of death, so I rushed to my own key classification table to find out what I think about it. Some keys I can describe clearly: I know E minor is the key of loss, remoteness, loneliness, and nobody is ever going to talk me out of that opinion. Other keys I find harder to express concisely, and E-flat minor is one of them. Sure enough, on my list I chickened out and made a lame joke instead of describing it (where I referred to it enharmonically as D-sharp minor). Looking at the related keys, I see I called C-sharp minor is "desperate" and G-sharp minor is "really desperate." I suppose I could extrapolate from my own list and align my opinion with Alex's at the same time by calling E flat minor ‘suicidally desperate.’”

To be sure, this isn’t a new discussion. Berlioz, the super Romantic, writing about the violin, provided a description for every key and wrote that certain instruments such as the C clarinet, had distinct emotional characteristics. Many persons have attached certain characteristics to, say, Bach’s Bm, or Beethoven’s EflatM Archduke, or Chopin’s Csharp minor.

However, in my view, this is problematical if we view the development of pitch in relation to keys. The sound of the pitch D and its scale formation is contingent on its vibrations per second. If my piano drops a semitone, I only think it’s D (unless I have perfect pitch. More later). It is vibrating D flat.

We have to know that A440 became standard pitch only in 1939. Prior to that there was no agreed universal pitch standard and orchestras and instruments all tuned variously in different parts of the western world. As late as 1885 Vienna adopted 435.4, in 1880 Steinway in New York tuned to 436, but in London Steinway tuned to 454, while Erard tuned to 455.3! In 1877 Chappel tuned to 455.9 and in 1834 the Vienna Opera adopted A436.5. Imagine what that did to instrumentalists who performed in concert with the piano. In Beethoven’s time Broadwood’s C fork was 505.7, a semitone lower than today. Even in the same city pitches varied. In 1811-12 Paris, A was 427 at the Grand Opera while the Conservatoire used 440. During the 18^th century and earlier the tunings were even more varied.

So, if FM at 440 is heard as pastoral today, what would it have been to Handel, whose personal fork was tuned to 422.5? Bach, like all Baroque composers, frequently had to transpose parts due to different tunings of organs in different churches. Would the characteristics then change? If the Bm Mass actually sounded closer to Bflatm, or Cm, would the symbolism change? Would it be heard or felt differently?

Perhaps it’s only visual. Six flats on a stave do look lugubrious, and they probably put string players in a bad mood, while they smile at two sharps.

Then there is the matter of those poor souls who have “perfect” pitch. I wonder if anyone had it before 1939? This gift may have been called “imperfect” then. Anyone have more on this?