As a boxing fan, I’ve been following the burgeoning myth of Philippine fighter Manny Pacquiao, and after last weekend’s second-round knockout of Ricky Hatton—giving Pacquiao a world title in his fifth weight class—it seems the myth may actually be justified. I mean, we knew he was good, but this good? Dang. (Of course, even though Pacquiao’s style is one of speed and precision, boxing being what it is, the sport’s essential brutality was also on view.)

Now, boxing is no stranger to scandal, but a musical scandal is something new. Philippine pop star Martin Nievera was on hand to sing “Lupang Hinirang,” the Philippine national anthem. (For comparison, Tom Jones sang “God Save the Queen.”) And now Nievera is in trouble for it.

A lawmaker on Wednesday said he intends to file criminal charges against Martin Nievera over the singer’s rendition of the Philippine national anthem during the Pacquiao-Hatton fight in Las Vegas last Sunday.

In a weekly press conference, Cavite Rep. Elpidio Barzaga Jr. said the “test case” would determine if Nievera indeed violated Republic Act 8491, or the Flag and Heraldic Code of the Philippines, which states that the national anthem should be played or sung in accordance with the musical arrangement of its composer, Julian Felipe.

At issue is Nievera’s slow introduction and sustained final note, which the National Historical Institute of the Philippines claimed was, well, below the belt:

The NHI, the government agency tasked to ensure that national symbols are given the reverence and respect they deserve, said Martin should not have slowed down the song’s opening and ending. The NHI added the singer should have sung the song in accordance with composer Julian Felipe’s “march-type” tempo.

Good heavens, they probably would have dropped Marvin Gaye into a volcano or something. Anyway, there might be a less exalted political angle to this as well—Pacquiao’s political ambitions are no secret—though trying to untangle the alliances is a little dizzying. (The lawmaker planning to file charges is a member of the KAMPI party, which last year merged with President Gloria Arroyo’s Lakas-Christian Muslim Democratic Party; Pacquiao was floated as a Lakas-CMD candidate, but instead joined the Liberal Party, which nonetheless supported Arroyo in coalition; in Pacquiao’s only campaign thus far, he was soundly defeated by Darlene Antonino-Custodio, a prominent member of the one-half of the Nationalist People’s Coalition that didn’t support Arroyo, &c., &c.) For his part, Nievera claims no disrespect, and in fact just the opposite: “I will not apologize for giving my all just to sing that song in front of the world,” he said. Come on, even his in-ear monitor had a Philippine flag on it.

One of the more true truisms of music history is that the most recognizably American style of classical music, the neo-Classical tonal populism invented by Aaron Copland, was a reaction to the economic crisis of the Great Depression, that Copland wanted to write music that would be more simply perceived by a mass audience. This is not to pick at the scab of the Complexity Wars (which is simpler—Appalachian Spring or Webern’s op. 24? Conduct through the Copland before you answer) but to note that the idea of simplicity as a solution to societal problems is, I think, a particularly American thing, one no doubt ingrained in each of our psyches by a steady flow of subtle agrarian, back-to-the-land mythology in American culture. Think of it this way: in reporting about the current economic crisis, the number of stories I’ve read implicitly based around this narrative—

Due to technology, financial instruments became too complicated for investors to truly understand what they were investing in

—have far outnumbered those based on this narrative—

Due to deregulation, greedy bastards acquired the legal cover to be even greedier bastards

—a narrative that, on one level, implies that the problem was too much simplicity.

In fact, you might be able to make the case that all societies react to crisis by attempting to simplify, but that the peculiarly American quirk is that the perception of simplicity is more important that the substance. To use another musical example, the 12-tone method, historically contemporary with post-WWI European crises, can be read as a conceptual simplification of the late-Romantic dissolution of tonality that was already underway before the war.

I was thinking about this today because at the historical moment, that penchant for a movement towards simplicity in the face of crisis seems to be on a collision course with that other sure-fire historical pattern, artists tending to react against whatever style is prevalent during their formative years. In other words, the current lets-pretend-its-not-a-Depression would predict a musical shift towards more simply-perceived populist styles, but those styles have been ascendant for some years now (consider Steve Reich’s Pulitzer in light of that prize’s stylistically slow reflexes). Since the generation of composers that were in rebellion against modernist complexity are now The Establishment, one might expect their disrespectful youngers, crisis or no crisis, to swing the pendulum in a different direction.

It’s fun to try and decide if a faster musical evolution has lapped a historical cycle, or the other way around—or if artistic and societal patterns are really on parallel tracks, and we only perceive a connection between them because, well, as human beings, that’s what we like to do. Maybe we’re due for a resurgence of chance music and aleatoricism—not bringing order out of chaos, but getting used to the idea that chaos is the only order we’ve got.

I haven’t written anything about the possible impending shuttering of my sometime employer, the Boston Globe—I doubt that anyone has been breathlessly waiting for the point of view of a non-union freelancer—but, in honor of May Day, this is just too perfect.

The Boston Globe’s largest union last night called on The New York Times Co. to extend today’s deadline for reaching agreement on millions of dollars in concessions after revealing that an accounting mistake by management has suddenly removed $4.5 million in possible givebacks from the table.

A spectre is haunting The New York Times Company—the spectre of arithmetic.

Speaking of May Day:

Alexander Feodorovitch Kerensky will not stay put. I have a feeling as I write this that whatever I say will be ancient history in the light of new, violent developments in the career of this remarkable character. Perhaps he will star in the movies, perhaps… but no… he can never be a drawing-room favourite; he is not as cultured as Lenine or Trotsky; he speaks only Russian and a few words of French, while they speak any number of languages, are well up on the classics and even chatter of music. Trotsky looks like Paderevski and Lenine like Beethoven. What chance has he against them? Still—Kerensky is playful, ministers in the Winter Palace claimed that he kept them awake all hours of the night, singing grand opera airs….

Louise Bryant, Six Red Months in Russia (1918)
(ellipses in original)

—because singing opera is so lowbrow. But Louise is always good for a slightly off-course comparison—this one probably derived from the fact that Lenin did like Beethoven. In Gorky’s famous anecdote:

One evening in Moscow, in E.P. Pyeskovskaya’s flat, Lenin was listening to a sonata by Beethoven being played by Isaiah Dobrowein, and said: “I know nothing which is greater than the Appassionata; I would like to listen to it every day. It is marvelous superhuman music. I always think with pride—perhaps it is naive of me—what marvelous things human beings can do!”

Then screwing up his eyes and smiling, he added rather sadly: “But I can’t listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid, nice things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you mustn’t stroke anyone’s head—you might get your hand bitten off. You have to hit them on the head, without any mercy, although our ideal is not to use force against anyone. H’m, h’m, our duty is infernally hard!”

Now there’s a marketing angle: “Classical music: insidiously distracting you from amoral dictatorial ruthlessness!”

On Sunday, as you might have read, pianist Krystian Zimerman announced from the stage of the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles that he would no longer perform in the United States, as a protest against American foreign policy.

Before playing the final work on his recital, Karol Szymanowski’s “Variations on a Polish Folk Theme,” Zimerman sat silently at the piano for a moment, almost began to play, but then turned to the audience. In a quiet but angry voice that did not project well, he indicated that he could no longer play in a country whose military wants to control the whole world.

On the surface, it was a rather startling breach of concert decorum, although I think that’s mostly a tribute to how good casual classical music lovers are at willfully ignoring the complicated overtones of an art form that, more often than not, is more politically charged than almost any other. And Zimerman has always been—well, maybe eccentric isn’t the right word in this post-Gouldian age—but certainly an artist who has doggedly followed his own path. And I’ll give him this: he picked a pretty good break-up song.

Most break-up songs in the classical repertoire tend to be of the fairly wistful, regretful variety. But there’s another kind of break-up song that I’ve always liked better, one more prevalent in pop music, that, for want of a less profane term, I think of as “cheerful f***-you” songs. (Sometimes literally, like in Green Day’s “F.O.D.”) They tend to be bright, agreeably driving, with no small amount of bravado—reveling in that liberating, you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit sort of energy. In operatic terms, it’s a song for Marcello and Musetta, not Rodolfo and Mimì.

I’ve been racking my brains trying to come up with a really early example of this type of song—either from, say, Baroque opera (there has to be one in there somewhere) or Tin Pan Alley—but my brain is pretty fried today. Most modern entries, I think, can trace their lineage to either the stripped-down engine of Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road, Jack” or the laconic indictment of Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” (Cover versions often blur the categories—on his big-band album Soul on Top, James Brown turned “Your Cheatin’ Heart” into, basically, a Ray Charles break-up song.) For a time, the easygoing style reigned—Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” or one of the genre’s touchstones, Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice (It’s Alright),” the sharpness of the knife the song’s laid-back equanimity—but in the post-punk era, the shinier, happier catharsis has prevailed. For some musicians, it’s at the core of their output—the aforementioned Green Day is a good example. A couple days ago, I had occasion to play a fine recent entry in the category, Miller and Tysen‘s very funny “Spring Cleaning,” which has this tempo indication:

in a Ben Folds-ish bangy rocky showtune way

Indeed, Folds’ “Song for the Dumped” makes explicit what seems to be percolating just beneath the surface of a lot of his other songs. In recent years, the category seems to have been increasingly usurped by screechy girl-power anthems—think Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” without the sassy sarcasm or the pipes—though I am completely aware that my own apathy to this latest evolutionary turn can be entirely attributed to the fact that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a teenaged girl.

I think part of the reason that classical repertoire has so little of this kind of thing is that those pieces that use such energy tend to be perceived as commenting on much bigger, march-of-history topics than the domestic snark of a break-up. The Toccata finale to Prokofiev’s 7th Piano Sonata, for example, would make a great break-up song, except that the timing and historical wherewithal of its composition would make that either wildly inappropriate or delusionally self-aggrandizing. Beethoven finales also tend towards the mood, but tradition is that such outbursts have been interpreted optimistically—still, I could imagine that, with different lyrics, the “Ode to Joy” could be a pretty good break-up song.

Szymanowski’s “Variations” don’t completely fit, either, but, under the circumstances, it’s notable how the end of the piece suddenly turns towards what, in pop music, is fertile defiant break-up territory. The Polish theme Szymanowski uses is a brooding, b-minor Andantino, and the variations maintain that dark cast, albeit sometimes with great force:


When Szymanowski shifts into the parallel major, the mood is Chopin-esque and bittersweet:


But the final variation, for the first time in the piece, marries virtuosic power with major-key brightness:


Then, a bit of fugue (marked “Mit Humor”):


… before a high-octane finish:


In a normal context, this is standard virtuoso stuff—flair and inventiveness. But, in light of Zimerman’s pronouncement, the music shows no small number of “cheerful f***-you” attributes: blazing triumph, hurtling energy, poker-faced humor, show-off defiance. If Zimerman really does mean to hit the road, and wanted to make sure we missed him when he was gone, then, from a pop standpoint, he programmed one of the better goodbyes—or, if that’s too good a bye, one of the better fare-thee-wells—in the classical playbook.

Posting in this space has been pretty spotty as of late, due to the annual Spring Singularity of Practicing Obligations. But those of you in the Boston area can sample some of the fruits of that labor tomorrow, Tuesday, April 28, when I’ll be joining soprano Rebekah Alexander and a handful of other worthies for a Marian-themed program. The action-packed evening—including music by Haydn, Mozart, Wolf, and Messiaen—will culminate with the 1923 version of Paul Hindemith’s Das Marienleben, one of the truly great song cycles, and one of my favorite rebuttals to the old generalization that dissonance is only good for portraying angst and violence. The show starts at 7:30 PM at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Brookline; scrounge the cushions for a suggested $10 donation—all proceeds benefit the Hope Initiative.

Photo source. Skateboarding Mary? Awesome.

Atonality isn’t exactly setting the world on fire these days, what with all these whippersnappers and their feel-good postminimalism. Maybe it needs a new marketing hook. Hmmm… how about “possible cure for cancer”?

Our genetic evidence from Drosophila and previous in vitro studies of mammalian Atonal homolog 1 (Atoh1, also called Math1 or Hath1) suggest an anti-oncogenic function for the Atonal group of proneural basic helix-loop-helix transcription factors. We asked whether mouse Atoh1 and human ATOH1 act as tumor suppressor genes in vivo. Genetic knockouts in mouse and molecular analyses in the mouse and in human cancer cell lines support a tumor suppressor function for ATOH1.

From W. Bossuyt et al., “Atonal homolog 1 Is a Tumor Suppressor Gene,” published February 24 in the journal PLoS Biology. OK, they’re not talking about music. What are they talking about?

The atonal gene was first isolated in fruit flies in 1993 by a team led by Andrew P. Jarman. It’s a proneural gene, which means it activates some part of the embryonic development of the nervous system—in this case, chordotonal organs, cell structures designed to pick up vibrations (think eardrums and the like). The name comes from the fact that an atonal mutation will disrupt the development of chordotonal organs.

As it turns out, a very similar gene, Atonal homolog 1, controls the development secretory cells in the lining of the colon in both humans and mice—and, as Bossyut and his team discovered, inactivating Atoh1 in mice triggers the onset of colon cancer. What’s more, the majority of human cases of colon cancer the team studied were found to correspond with an inactive ATOH1 gene as well.

The obvious implication of the results is that an ATOH1 screening could provide an early-warning system for colon cancers. But more interestingly, atonal genes can be chemically reactivated:

[T]reatment of [colon cancer] patients whose tumors show epigenetic silencing of ATOH1 with DNA methyltransferase inhibitors might prove a powerful avenue for therapy, because it appears to be sufficient to restore ATOH1 expression and induce cancer cell death.

That’s the most dissonant good news I’ve heard all day.

Renée Fleming, soprano; Hartmut Höll, piano
Presented by Celebrity Series of Boston
Symphony Hall, Boston, April 19, 2009

Renée Fleming is now 50 (in related news, we’re all older than we realized) but, based on her Symphony Hall recital this weekend, she’s singing as well as ever—or as poorly as ever, depending on one’s entrenched opinion of her. Fleming’s popularity (her program bio gives her the vaguely Maoist title of “the people’s diva”) has, inevitably, resulted in polarization, and Sunday’s performance probably won’t alter that calculus. The mannerisms that drive some people crazy were all there—vaults into notes from initial consonants a floor or two below; sudden shifts into near-Sprechstimme stage whisper; slide-whistle floating in high, soft phrases; a certain slipperiness of vowel (“uh” became “eh” fairly consistently). But her usual virtues abounded as well: the casually regal stage presence, the impossibly glamorous tone, the uncanny breath control.

What was noteworthy about this appearance, though, was Fleming’s leveraging of her diva celebrity to present notably non-diva repertoire—even given a couple of duds, this was one of the most intelligently constructed and emotionally interesting vocal programs I’d heard in a long time. It helps that, at least for me, Fleming is at her interpretive best in a recital setting (without the perpetual sustain of an orchestra, she’s less likely to stretch a phrase to the breaking point just because she can). It also may have helped that this was the final stop on the tour—Fleming and Höll left it all on the field, by turns playful, daring, and sometimes startlingly immediate. And yet the overall effect was distinctly ambiguous and bittersweet: grown-up complexity, in saturated color.

The centerpiece of the first half was four songs from Olivier Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi, the composer amplifying the liminal boundary between the individual and the collective in marriage to halogen brightness. Höll’s accompaniment was sustained, restrained intensity, breathless and quietly insistent; Fleming put the focus on Messiaen’s texts. It shifted one’s attention from the exotic beauty of the music to the near-manic drama of the poetry—the torrential prayers of “Action de grâces,” the painterly glimpse of the beloved in “Paysage.” Fleming managed a convincing attacca downshift from the “éternellement lumineux” young bodies of “La maison” to an intoxicated, drill-sergeant bark for “Les deux guerriers.” I wished she had programmed the whole cycle.

Surrounding the Messiaen were two extended monologues of pointedly darker cast. André Previn’s “The Giraffes Go To Hamburg” sets a rueful Isak Dinesen portrait of two giraffes, trapped on a steamer, leaving Africa forever for a German zoo. Previn’s music (with alto flutist Linda Toote joining Fleming and Höll) doesn’t do much more than illustrate the text’s surface, but does so with consistent flexibility and resourcefulness; the performance attained the tricky balance between journalistic observation and lush sadness. After the Messiaen was John Kander’s “A Letter from Sullivan Ballou,” the Civil War major writing to his wife shortly before being killed at Bull Run. Kander’s music is pretty light stuff—nostalgic, meandering sentimentality—but the juxtaposition with Messiaen’s warriors of love was provocative, and the programmatic sequence, the bright triumph of the “Poèmes” both set up and tempered by the bookends, made an intriguing psychological arc out of the half’s disparate parts.

The second half repeated the same pattern, a substantial burst of joy protectively encased in renunciation and loss. The center here was Richard Strauss, five songs exploring the various stages, and ages, of love. Fleming and Höll made a nearly convincing case for the over-the-top volubility of “Verführung,” though the shaggy-dog episodic nature of both poem and music never quite coalesces. “Freundliche Vision” and “Winterweihe” both explore the deeper, less fraught emotional world of mature love, and both songs received readings of warm, placid richness. The giddy, rippling “Ständchen” was a standout, Fleming and Höll in absolute ensemble in a rendition of extreme, pinball rubato: a fulsome surrender to the emo, manic-depressive exhilaration of youthful infatuation. Höll’s sensitivity came to the fore in this set; at the close of “Zueignung,” he pulled the piano back from its double-forte climax to let Fleming’s stentorian ring complete the final crescendo, a creative, nice-work-if-you-can-get-it touch.

The equivocal cushion to Strauss’s happiness was two arias by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the comparatively obscure “Ich soll ihn niemals, niemals mehr sehn” from Die Katharin, and the more familiar “Marietta’s Lied” from Die tote Stadt. Congruent not just thematically (both characters sing of love fated to die) but musically—Fleming admitted that placing them on opposite sides of the Strauss was, in part, to ameliorate their self-plagiaristic similarity—the arias, and the performances, exemplified the Romantic happy-sad conundrum of reveling in the fullness of sorrowful emotion. (“Marietta’s Lied” was breathtakingly slow, in the Fleming manner, but Korngold can take it.)

Even a long string of encores (“it’s the end of the tour,” Fleming announced, “we’re going to do everything we know”) offset glee with wistfulness. A sassy aria from Zandonai’s Carmen-esque Conchita led into Fleming’s oft-encored “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess, more restrained than I’ve heard her do in the past, with Höll giving limpid account of Gershwin’s shifting counterpoint. Strauss’ “Cäcilie” played off a clever-melancholic mash-up of “My Funny Valentine” with Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. An audience-karaoke “I Could Have Danced All Night” would have sent everyone off with cheesy cheer, but Fleming and Höll returned for a bracingly beautiful performance of Strauss’s “Morgen.” Both poem and song lend themselves to interpretations of simple loveliness, but there’s a curious indefiniteness to the proceedings—why the focus on tomorrow and not today? Why the need for hopeful reassurance? What exactly is at the end of that walk on the beach? Happiness? Death? Both? It was as if the whole program had been designed to tease out the ambiguity of the song—and both Fleming’s serene ardor and Höll’s impeccable control, hushed to the edge of eerieness, left quiet, luminous space for that uncertainty. At the end of an afternoon notedly light on greatest hits, in “Morgen,” one of the soprano repertoire’s greatest hits of all, both singer and song were transported well beyond mere celebrity.