Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is easily impressed, if this interview is any indication:

If you could sit down with one person from history, who would it be?

I would like to sit down and talk to Beethoven, my favorite composer. That would be amazing. I suspect what would be most fascinating is the discovery that these people are human too.

Really? That would be more fascinating than the discovery that Beethoven was a lizard-like creature from another solar system who needed twice-daily injections of growth hormones in order to survive Earth’s crushing atmospheric pressure? (That would go a long way towards explaining the whole middle period.)

Daniel Barenboim was at it again last week, announcing a plan for the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Israeli-Palestinian youth ensemble he co-founded in 1999, to perform the first act of Wagner’s Die Walküre at the Waldbühne, an open-air arena in Berlin built by the Nazis for the 1936 Olympics.

“Can you imagine that?” Barenboim was quoted as saying in the interview, released Wednesday. “The Waldbühne was built by Hitler. The music is Wagner. Played by us! Hitler and Wagner would turn in their graves.”

This is Barenboim the world-class provocateur; anyone who criticizes him as naïve is badly misjudging him—the man knows exactly what he’s doing. (For a sample of the consternation Barenboim tends to cause, see the comments at the end of this Ha’aretz report, or go here for a particularly heavy-handed approach.) For the record, I find Barenboim’s music-making and his provocations to be sincere and thought-provoking—even when I’m not convinced, I’d rather be disagreeing with Barenboim that agreeing with a lot of other musicians, if that makes any sense. Still, I would imagine that most Germans don’t immediately associate the Waldbühne with Hitler anymore—the Rolling Stones were already playing the arena in the 1960s, after all, and the Berlin Philharmonic traditionally closes its season there every June with a festive summer night. But Barenboim’s reminder is entirely in keeping with a way he has of approaching the repertoire, which is fascinating.

Barenboim’s use of repertoire and venue is, in a way, a complete reverse of how classical music has come to be promoted in modern culture. Usually, the fact that the classical canon was composed a) a long time ago and b) in a not-particularly egalitarian atmosphere goes politely unmentioned—the rationale (which I’ve often used myself) being that it doesn’t matter where the music came from, it speaks to something universal in all of us, loosing itself from its socio-politico-historical moorings and floating free as the common property of humanity. Barenboim flips this on its head: Wagner’s music is vital to us today not in spite of the politics of the composer and the music’s subsequent historical associations, but because of it. For Barenboim, the way music can embody the universal human condition is a choice we make, a choice that reflects an essentially optimistic view of the contest between good and evil within the human soul. We can look Wagner in the eye, as it were, and reject his anti-Semitism by embracing his music, the nobler aspect of his human existence. When Barenboim programs Wagner in Jerusalem, or takes the podium at a Nazi venue as a Jewish artist, he’s asserting that evil isn’t something that needs to be quarantined, it’s something that needs to be confronted and defeated by mankind’s capacity for good. Rather than passively ignore the potent historical baggage, he actively puts it front and center, then invites us to consciously choose the positive experience of the music over the negative aspects of its past misuse, or even its origins. It’s almost as if Barenboim is exercising the listeners’ minds in the method of engaging the world that he thinks is necessary for ever improving it.

Wagner is the most obvious vehicle for this sort of thing, but here’s another example that works in subtler ways. When Barenboim took the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra to Ramallah in 2005, on the program was a tribute to the late Edward Said, the Palestinian-American scholar who co-founded the ensemble with Barenboim: the “Nimrod” movement from Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Last summer, I participated in a discussion panel when a documentary of the concert was screened at the Boston Jewish Film Festival; at the time, I joked that Elgar was a canny choice, since the last time that Jews and Arabs in the region had been united was in their opposition to the post-WWI British Mandate. But scratch the surface, and there’s multiple levels of the sort of intellectual aikido that accompanies Barenboim’s Wagner: a piece that often memorializes heads of state being played for someone who spent his career trying to articulate the position of the disposessed, a composer indelibly associated with one of history’s greatest colonial empires put into service celebrating an originator of post-colonial theory. The great thing is that it reflects back on the music, too—hearing Wagner’s powerful beauty in Israel makes you realize the contrast between the large, deep humanity of Wagner the composer and the small, petty transience of Wagner the racial theorist; hearing Elgar in Ramallah highlights the ambivalence and poignancy forever present beneath the nobilmente Edwardian façade.

I’m more or less a moderate on the Israeli-Palestinian question: I think anyone who denies Israel’s right to exist is a fool, but equally foolish is anyone who thinks that its existence can long persist in any worthwhile fashion without finding a peaceful co-existence with the Palestinians. And I have to admit that often, my view of human nature isn’t sanguine enough to believe that the conflict between good and evil within the human soul is anything like a fair fight. At times like that, Barenboim’s idealism can seem like naiveté or simplistic grandstanding. But Barenboim’s whole point is that your reaction is a choice—even if you don’t choose to believe that most people will do the right thing, at the very least, you yourself can choose to do the right thing. You can look at the awful ways in which even the most beautiful of human endeavors have been put to use, and decide that, even if it was that way in the past, it doesn’t have to be that way in the future.

One of [Virgil Thomson’s] peccadilloes was dozing during concerts. When I was reviewing for the Sun we quite often were at the same concert, and I could observe him in this condition and occasionally hear a snore or two. What amazed everyone was the fact that when he came out in the intermission his remarks indicated that he hadn’t missed a thing. When I moved over to the Tribune Thomson and I would go out to dinner together from time to time before covering our respective assignments. Once Thomson cautioned me against having coffee (the decaf vogue had not started yet) and to be sure to have enough wine so that I would be able to sleep at the concert. There were times when I wished I could sleep but I lacked the talent—though I recall falling asleep at the Metropolitan during one ear-shattering passage in a Wagner opera, drowned in the sound and luxuriating in the red plush interior of the old opera house.

—Arthur Berger,
Reflections of an American Composer

Berger also quotes the funniest sentence I read all day, a Bernard Holland description of George Rochberg’s neo-Romanticism: “Mr. Rochberg’s quintet does remind us of the frontiersman who, having fought his way arduously through badlands and hostile Indians to the promised West, abruptly decides to resettle in Philadelphia.”

Sasha Frere-Jones has an article in the latest New Yorker that’s been getting a fair amount of attention, in which he complains that indie rock has pretty much abandoned a long-standing rock tradition of more-or-less stealing from African-American musical styles. I don’t know nearly enough about current indie rock to critique that, but he did say a couple of things that set my gears turning. First off, he seems to regard the African-American influence as an almost purely rhythmic one.

If there is a trace of soul, blues, reggae, or funk in Arcade Fire, it must be philosophical; it certainly isn’t audible. And what I really wanted to hear, after a stretch of raucous sing-alongs, was a bit of swing, some empty space, and palpable bass frequencies—in other words, attributes of African-American popular music.

But African-American music has its own distinct harmonic features as well. And I hear a fair amount of African-American harmonic influence, particularly from gospel, across the pop landscape. But, more interestingly, I hear even more of it in a lot of music by a guy Frere-Jones correctly points up as an inspiration to a lot of the indie crowd:

Several groups that experienced commercial success, such as the Flaming Lips and Wilco, drew on the whiter genres of the sixties—respectively, psychedelic music and country rock—and gradually Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys, a tremendously gifted musician who had at best a tenuous link to American black music, became indie rock’s muse.

Now, I would say that the link is more than tenuous—the initial Beach Boys sound was heavily indebted to Chuck Berry. “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” after all, is just “Sweet Little Sixteen” with different lyrics. But the sound was soon transformed into a new genre: “Fun, Fun, Fun” lifts its opening guitar riff from “Johnny B. Goode,” but after that, it’s essentially a Chuck Berry song that Chuck Berry would never be able to sing. And some atypical later Beach Boys albums (such as Wild Honey or Carl and the Passions) make explicit a debt to R&B and soul that was percolating under the surface of all those bright surf anthems.

But the harmonic influence is a far trickier matter, and points up the difficulty of tracing musical influence in general. The sound I’m thinking of is gospel’s subdominant-dominant mash-up. The subdominant, which we all know and love from plagal “Amen” cadences, colors much of gospel harmony. It’s a common ornament to the tonic chord:


At some point, that neighborly rocking was combined with a stronger V-I bass movement:


That subdominant-over-dominant IV-over-V sound (in chord symbols, either G11(add9) or F/G) is one of the touchstones of gospel. The presence of the first and fourth scale degrees push it past the basic V-I found in hymns, but its resolute diatonicism keeps it from sounding like straight-up jazz. Here’s the conundrum: I hear a lot of that sound in Brian Wilson’s later, more critically-revered output, but did he really get it from gospel? Or did he come up with it on his own, as a natural evolution of his musical voice? Part of the problem is that he uses such sounds in a fairly idiosyncratic way.

The quasi-gospel harmonies stay pretty much in the background in those early Beach Boys songs; everything is arranged for the standard rock instruments of guitar and bass, which doesn’t highlight the vertical thinking as much, and while something like that first progression forms the basis of much of the rhythm guitar, it sounds more like rockabilly than gospel. The gospel sounds only come to the fore around the time of Pet Sounds, when Brian’s focus turns from the bass to the piano (and, by extension, other keyboard instruments) as he eschews live performance for the studio. The textural model is the repeated right-hand quarter-note chord, something Brian probably picked up from listening to Phil Spector records. You can hear it clearly in the organ part that opens “Good Vibrations”:


This is still very much in the Phil Spector mode, solidly triadic. But by the time of “Surf’s Up,” written for the ill-fated Smile album, things have gotten a little more complicated:

The third and fourth bars are close to the typical IV-over-V gospel dominant. But the first two bars are something else entirely. In essence, he’s flipped the V-I movement in the bass, making the second chord of the pair the dominant. And he obscures the movement towards resolution by harmonizing the first bass note as a chord in second inversion, a particularly unstable sonority. The unexpected inversions are something Brian turns to again and again in this period, layering on a question where the bass line would seem to give an answer.

Are the fact that these sorts of chords are also found in gospel a sign of influence or coincidence? On the one hand, Brian has said in interviews that it was actually Burt Bacharach songs that opened up his ears to extra-triadic harmonies, major and minor seventh chords and the like. On the other hand, in the America of the 1950s and 60s, it would have been hard for Brian not to be influenced by gospel—I’ve written before about how the Civil Rights movement infused American vernacular music with a healthy dose of the African-American church.

But the most fascinating possibility is that Brian’s gospel chords evolved separately, but from a common source. If you consider the music he grew up with—Protestant hymns, Four Freshman pop, early blues-based rock-and-roll—it’s not that different from the stew out of which Thomas Dorsey first synthesized gospel in the 20s and 30s. Maybe it’s a musical version of the Miller-Urey experiment: if the right elements are present, the necessary combinations form no matter what. It’s like trying to trace the cross-pollination between the Beach Boys and the Beatles: “Surf’s Up,” for example, wasn’t commercially released until 1971, but had been famously featured in the 1967 Leonard Bernstein-hosted CBS documentary Inside Pop. And put side by side, the Beatles’ “Let It Be” and “The Long and Winding Road” sure do seem to be in debt to it. But maybe they were just all drawing on the same zeitgeist.

For comparison, here’s one more Brian Wilson similarity, one that most certainly represents a parallel development, and not a direct influence. “God Only Knows” is, on one level, a celebration of the subdominant. It starts on IV (A major); the tonic E-major harmony never appears in root position. Here’s the main progression of the song:


The tonic-related harmonies, in the center of the phrase, are second- and third-inversion instabilities that need to be resolved. That point of tension is surrounded by chords all related to either subdominant IV (including the F-sharp minor triads, which are, after all, the relative minor of IV) or the subdominant substitution ii. The tinta of the song is perennially stuck in the middle of an “Amen” cadence.

You know who else used to stack his harmonies heavily towards the plagal, the flat side of the circle of fifths? Edward Elgar. And for precisely the same reason that Brian Wilson does—to give the music a sense of melancholy grandeur, a sense that bright, sturdy perfect cadences would flood with too much sonic light. Now I know that Brian Wilson wasn’t consciously trying to imitate Sir Edward. But they both heard the bittersweet longing within the plagal cadence, and chose their vocabularies accordingly. Tracing influences is fascinating, but for me, just as fulfilling is the realization that even total musical strangers are sometimes, in the same way, chasing the same star.

More composer beer: Frank Zappa ale, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the release of Absolutely Free.


(The same brewery has also released an ale in honor of Freak Out!) I keep waiting for this to be a trend. Composer/beer puns abound: Quincy Porter, Alan Stout, C.P.E. Bock—but for my money, nothing would beat a Virgil Thomson Unfiltered Wheat.

So did legendary Italian film composer Ennio Morricone get dissed in Korea or not? Morricone was in the country last week to be honored at the Pusan International Film Festival this week, but left early—depending on who you read, this was either all according to plan, due to an unprecedented mid-festival typhoon, or because of an unforgivable breach of etiquette. From the Seoul Times:

As part of opening night, Ennio Morricone was supposed have been honored with a ceremonial hand printing, but the inclement weather kept the legendary composer indoors and the presenting ceremony private.

But the Korea Times first reported this:

Afterward, the private opening party at the garden of Paradise Hotel greeted the stars and celebrities. Morricone, who was planning on topping the late-night event with the festival’s first hand-printing ceremony, was unable to do so due to fatigue.

(The “hand-printing” ceremony is a festival honoree tradition, kind of like the way stars have left their imprint in the sidewalk outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater.) The same paper later expanded on that report:

Ennio Morricone, the 79-year-old legendary Italian composer and conductor, was one of the important guests at Thursday’s opening ceremony. But the maestro of film music and his wife were left unattended and unescorted at Thursday’s opening ceremony.

Rumors went even further:

The most contested talk of the town was the alleged mistreatment and early departure of Ennio Morricone, the world-renowned maker of timeless scores from “Cinema Paradiso.” With the sudden arrival of three contending presidential candidates, Morricone’s red carpet entrance was pushed back during the opening ceremony. The 79-year-old composer had to remain standing for a very long time, and local media reports suggest that the festival staff did not treat him with respect.

Morricone did not show up for the hand-printing ceremony later on that evening. PIFF organizers, on the other hand, maintain that he left the country according to plan.

But the Hollywood Reporter says it’s tabloid exaggeration:

However, the Korean press, especially the mercurial online variety, turned on PIFF this year, showering the festival with a barrage of complaints: Guest Ennio Morricone left the festival in an angry huff (false), a press conference for Lee Myung-se’s “M” was far too crowded (true), a beachfront pavilion leaked (true, but there was a typhoon at the time).

The Reporter‘s reporter, Mark Russell, went into more detail on his blog:

Okay, the truth about Morricone, as far as I know. Morricone led a concert in Seoul on Wednesday (Oct. 3) night. He flew down to Busan on Thursday and, despite feeling ill (the dude is 80), he agreed to show up to the opening ceremonies, at least briefly. Morricone was picked up at the airport by one of PIFF’s programmers (sadly, without a translator) and driven to his hotel.

Then he was taken to the opening ceremonies. There was a little disorganization backstage for a few minutes because of the politicians who wanted to attend (particularly Lee Myung-bak, who was quite late). PIFF organizers said it was about 5 minutes, while another person I talked to estimated it was longer. Morricone and his wife were then introduced and led to their seats.

After a few minutes, because he was feeling ill, Morricone went back to his hotel and skipped the opening party. He left early the next day, as scheduled.

No idea where the rumor started that he felt mistreated by PIFF. After all, he did the hand printing. If he was so angry, why would he have done that? There is absolutely no proof that anything bad happened (besides the delay at the opening ceremonies). Just a lot of silly gossip.

My guess is that Morricone would be too classy a guy to confirm whether he was disrespected or not. PIFF is one of the biggest film festivals in Asia, by the way, and swarming with journalists. Backlash? Spin? Or did the organizers really abandon their guest of honor?