Alex Ross posted a playlist last week that made me feel lazy for not blogging more; I mean, come on, just write down what you’re listening to, how hard is that? Now, I think I’ve said it here before, but I am a pretty obsessive listener; items are listened to constantly and repetitively for a few days/weeks, only to then drop completely off my radar. So it might be fun to see what’s in heavy rotation right now:

• “All Cried Out” (Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam) (see above). You know how some pop songs have isolated moments that you listen to the song over and over again just to sample? (For example, I once spent a month playing Blur’s “Country House” to death solely for the transition into the second chorus.) “All Cried Out” is like two dozen of those moments strung together—and yet feels weirdly ephemeral when considered as an actual song. As if you can only measure it in parallax or something.
  
  
• Strauss/Godowsky: Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes from “Die Fledermaus” (Katherine Chi, piano). An excellent live performance I downloaded from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s website. Is there any composer who ever brought more technique, polish, and sheer elbow grease to self-indulgence than Godowsky? The wildly-overpriced-yet-insanely-good gourmet burger of Romantic pianism.
  
  
• Andy Williams’ Greatest Hits (Andy Williams). Andy Williams: a man whose cool is predicated on how much he simply doesn’t care whether you think he’s cool or not. An inspiration for us all. (Seriously, I had totally forgotten just how smooth Andy Williams is; if there’s even a dull edge on this record, I haven’t found it.)
  
  
• George Antheil: Sonatas for Violin and Piano (Mark Fewer, violin; John Novacek, piano). This has been the go-to driving music for about five weeks now. Antheil’s Second Sonata might be the most sardonically literate cartoon music ever; the First manages to both cheerfully plunder Stravinsky and Bartók while sassing them at the same time. The performance is some of the most committedly stylish 1920s provocation you’re likely to hear. High-minded snotty punk music. I love it.
  
  
• 9 (Public Image Ltd). Speaking of high-minded snotty punk music—or post-punk, anyway…. I was cleaning the den a couple months ago when I found a cassette of this that poet and cultured, sophisticated man about town Jack Miller had dubbed off for me back in high school. Upon said finding, played it straight through and then played it straight through again, and have been going back to that well every couple of days ever since. 9 has the reputation of being too clean and polished for a PiL album, but something about John Lydon sneering over all those shiny, happy grooves at least partially redeems the late 80s for me.
  
  
• Charles Wuorinen: The Haroun Songbook. Here’s what happened: I was throwing together a CD mix for a longish car ride, wanted a nice blast of atonal cheer to shift gears after Billy Joel’s “Summer, Highland Falls,” and somewhat impulsively settled on “It’s a Princess Rescue Story,” and then started to remember just how oddly catchy a lot of these songs are, and now they’re all stuck in my craw. Especially “It’s a Princess Rescue Story.”
  
  
• “Summer, Highland Falls” (Billy Joel). Haters gonna hate, but, deep down, they wish they could come up with a melody this good.
  
  
• Bach: BWV 911, 826, 807 (Martha Argerich, piano). This one has been drifting in and out of the obsessive playlist for a few months. It’s a great clear-out-the-muck aural reset album: it’s like one of those really good understated 1970s thrillers where everything’s in sharp focus and it’s smart enough to assume you’ll think for yourself and it’s tricky enough to keep you on your toes, and when it’s over, everything around you seems to have just a touch more clarity. I actually bought this album for a dollar at a library sale; I would have shed a tear for the declining cultural standards of civic institutions, but, on the other hand, that’s a dollar well-spent.

From Dwight’s Journal of Music, vol. III, no. 10 (June 11, 1853), pp. 75-76:

Music as a branch of Commerce.

The N.Y. Musical World and Times is informed that the music trade of this country, for 1852, amounted to twenty-seven millions of dollars.

The same journal says:

“The Piano-forte trade of this country amounted last year to upwards of twelve millions of dollars: and should it increase in as great a ratio for twenty years to come as it has for twenty years past, the Piano-forte crop of the North will exceed the Cotton crop of the South. Then, political economists will have a less discordant subject upon which to expend their learning and eloquence, and perhaps our national counsels will present the pleasing spectacle of “honorable gentlemen,” from all parts of the country, engaged in acoustical, melodic, and harmonious discussions and experiments. When these tuneful days shall arrive, it is to be hoped that many of, if not all the discords which now rack the public tympanum, will be so “prepared” and “resolved” that they will no longer mar the harmony of our Federal organization, and sectional strifes be superseded by national concord—results which could probably be achieved by a proper distribution of the “flats” and “sharps” of the nation, or better, perhaps, by dispensing with them altogether.”

Justin Davidson has an article in the latest New York taking a look at what he calls “the new New York School,” those Gotham-based twenty- and (barely) thirty-something composers of fairly entrepreneurial bent dedicated to digital life, stylistic liberty, and the pursuit of a kind of grand, thoughtful eclecticism. (It’s a little bit indicative of the atmosphere Davidson is sampling that most of the composers he mentions have first-name recognition: Judd, Nico, Missy, Timo, Tyondai.) Anyway, here’s the money quote:

We idolize the radical who shreds the previous generation’s conventions, but every aesthetic revolution begets an ardent rigor of its own. The new New York School has a healthy distaste for tired conflicts and old campaigns. Despite their gifts and alertness to the moment, its composers seem muffled, bereft of zeal. What they badly need is a machine to rage against and a set of bracing creative constraints.

Chalk up another datum of proof of the ubiquity of the materialist conception of history! When I first read that, my left-Hegelian happy place lit up like a Christmas tree. I tend to regard music history as pretty Hegelian, not in the constant-historical-progress way, but in that it tends to shift about dialectically; and I certainly have more sympathy towards left-Hegelian interpretation—as troublesome as his philosophy can be, I tend to think that Marx got closer to the Way Things Are than Hegel ever did. But I confess that I found this article to be a little cognitively dissonant. That benchmark of a revolutionary shredding of previous conventions, of a necessity for conflict and constraint, is, itself, a leftover convention, and one that the new eclecticists haven’t needed to shred. They’ve just moved beyond it.

When we think dialectic, we tend to think of the old thesis-antithesis-synthesis model (which was Fichte’s, not Hegel’s). Marx equated the historical dialectic with struggle, and, politically and economically, anyways, history bears him out. But the dialectic is not necessarily a conflict. Hegel’s conception was that the dialectic expands understanding in such a way that what once seemed like conflicting information is revealed as just too limited a perspective. A few years back, I tried applying this idea to big-picture music history—one of my better meanderings, I think. Apply it to the new New York School, and what’s the conflict they’re rendering moot? I think you could make a plausible case that it’s the very idea that aesthetic conflict is a necessary flag for generations to rally around.

This is not to say that constraint and/or rage can’t produce great music. An awful lot of the music I love seems to be coming from that place—a sort of punk-ish, in-your-face energy—and it can sometimes buzz the mind to the extent that calmer music fades. (Here’s an example of that happening to my critical self—to my ears, you put “Kontakte” on a program, most everything else is going to sound a little bit wan.) But, then again, I’ve heard plenty of music in which having something to prove was a curse, not a charge—all kinds of barely-warmed-over fake Copland that seemed to regard the mere act of having a tonal center as some sort of artistic triumph. Rage and constraint are aesthetic choices, not aesthetic necessities, and, like any aesthetic choice, it’s what you make of the choice, not the choice alone. Anger is not the only kind of zeal there is—and it seems to me that the music Davidson is talking about has plenty of zeal, be it blinding cheer (Tyondai Braxton’s Carl-Stalling-on-a-Skittles-bender Central Market) or quiet certainty (the scratched-negative vistas of Missy Mazzoli’s Death Valley Junction). It’s generous, not defiant. Maybe that seems a little weird nowadays.

Why am I going on and on about this? Well, it touched a nerve. Thinking about that article got me thinking about my own fairly unglorious career as a composer. It was about five years ago that I gave up trying to be a professional composer. I mean, I still compose—there’s always something I’m tinkering with—and I still tend to engage music with a composer’s brain. But I was pretty lousy at making a living at it, for two reasons. The first: you might not know it from my online persona, but I am very shy. If you ever see me having an extended conversation with anyone up to the level of casual acquaintance—listening, eye contact, the whole megilla—I am either a) enjoying at least my second drink, or b) working very, very hard. At the time I was trying to get some career traction, I was my own worst enemy. I remember going to new-music concerts and spending the entire first half in stomach-knot dread of intermission, when I would either screw up my courage and go network with all the other new-music types in the audience and then feel miserable because I was so graceless and awful at it, or I would stay safely in my seat and then feel miserable for not doing my job.

But the second reason is a little more interesting. I’m starting to think that I was, inadvertently, part of a kind of compositional lost generation. I didn’t notice this until I was out at Tanglewood last summer, reviewing the Festival of Contemporary Music. This one was intended as a complete survey of Tanglewood’s 70-year history. There was not a single composer born—like I was—in the 1970s. And I realized—of course there wouldn’t be. We were all trained to be the next generation of academics and gatekeepers, but the previous generation of academics and gatekeepers were still around, holding ever tighter to those positions. That sense of aesthetic conflict—always dubious to begin with—was now, even worse, just going-through-the-motions office politics. And I found myself casting about for scraps. I was constantly second-guessing my own eclecticism (every call for scores I responded to, I always felt like Paul Newman trying to bribe his way into the poker game in The Sting: “That will get you first alternate, sir”). I began to resent when contemporaries had success (a truly squalid experience). I began to see opportunities as more important than the actual music. Finally, an opportunity came along, a last-minute concert for an ensemble I didn’t have a piece for, so I threw something together. It was far too difficult, and a pretty terrible piece to boot, and it was cancelled on the eve of the concert. I was pissed and depressed—I mean even more so—for several weeks, until I finally wondered just why I was doing this to myself. So I quit. I was immediately a happier person. I have never regretted it.

Maybe I could have figured it all out, but I didn’t, and I found other things to figure out that were better suited to me anyway. But I guess that’s why, when I look at this new New York School, whether I like the musical output or not (though most of it I do), I don’t see a group of composers who are lost, or tentative, or in need of a good old-school chip on their shoulder. I see a bunch of composers writing exactly what they want to write, building their own community of support, and making a go of it. In other words, in at least some partial way, they figured something out that I never did. I’m old enough that I can be happy about that. Because, both dialectically and practically, that’s progress.

I lost track of days this week, so it wasn’t until I saw the third passer-by done up in neon green that I remembered that, yes, it’s today that’s St. Patrick’s Day. I’m one-quarter Irish, which is probably just the right amount to enjoy an American St. Patrick’s Day with some equanimity—not inclined to full-blown plastic leprechaun hat embarrassment, but not so Irish that I can’t get behind the idea. Kind of like Christmas, I tend to embrace the sheer unmoored weirdness of St. Patrick’s Day: a religious observance gone brazenly secular, a national celebration that thrives an ocean away from the nation it celebrates. (I remember once, a long time ago, spending St. Patrick’s Day in a bar that marked the occasion by hiring a Highland bagpiper, kilt and all—even the Irish-Americans seemed to take it in the sort of “eh, why not” spirit in which it was intended.)

Driving around this morning, I got to thinking about who would qualify as the most “Irish” composer there is. Now, there are plenty of composers who are actually Irish (my go-to is always Charles Villiers Stanford, on the grounds that Elgar hated him; if you’re annoying the English, then, as an Irishman, you’re doing something right), but I’m talking about a composer whose personality and/or music fits the crazy American stereotype of Irishness that gets a lot of play every March. You know the image: a charming rogue, a garrulous spinner of tall tales, blasphemous yet sentimental, irresponsible yet lovable, &c., &c. There’s not many. Wagner, maybe—nobody spins a tall tale like Wagner—but, then again, his irresponsibility isn’t so much “lovable” as “obnoxiously self-centered and anti-Semitic.” For a while, I toyed with the idea of Poulenc—the puckishness fits—but his Catholicism is more St. Teresa than Father Ted.

So I’m going to throw my one-quarter-Irish weight behind Hector Berlioz. Tall tales? In spades. More charming the more delusional his grandeur? Absolutely. And really, throwing a brass band into a Requiem mass is a pretty Irish move. Plus, he was Irish by marriage, at least for a little while. So there you go: Hector Berlioz, stereotypical Irishman. Strange? Sure, but not really any stranger than the holiday itself. Slainté!

Geoff Edgers, in today’s Globe, reporting on the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s search for a replacement for James Levine, interviews Jonathan Menkis, head of the BSO’s players’ committee:

Whom would he prefer? Menkis mentioned Bernard Haitink, the BSO’s principal guest conductor from 1995 to 2004, and “Lenny.”

As in Leonard Bernstein. When life imitates comedy, that’s a little scary, but when life imitates my attempts at comedy, a fallout shelter is probably your best bet.

Because it was a good day to play it: Percy Grainger’s arrangement of “Love Walked In”:

Reviewing the Radius Ensemble.
Boston Globe, March 8, 2011.

In Li Hao-ku’s 13th-century, Yuan Dynasty drama Chang Boils the Sea, Chang, a wandering scholar, benefits from divine assistance in his wooing of Ch’iung-Lien, the daughter of the Divine Dragon King of the Eastern Sea. As the title promises, Chang eventually triumphs by magically boiling away the sea, eliminating the watery barrier that protects the Dragon King’s palace. A happy ending—except that, as the audience has known all along, neither Chang nor Ch’iung-Lien are who they seem, but rather, former immortals, exiled from heaven for the crime of falling in love. Just as wedding bells seem about to ring, the pair instead abruptly cast off their temporal identities and leave the mortal world.

I thought of Chang and his travails after the announcement yesterday that James Levine was, indeed, resigning as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Interestingly, no one is quite sure just what this means yet: there was already much talk of Levine reducing his role, so a continued presence as some sort of principal-guest-conductor-type doesn’t seem out of the question—and the September 1st resignation date at least hints at the possibility that Levine will have another summer to put a stamp on Tanglewood. (Or, maybe, it was just the most administratively convenient date.) But irregardless, some sort of end is here, and the odd, long-anticipated precipitousness with which it happened would have resonated with those Yuan Dynasty audiences. Levine and the BSO were both made for each other and, somehow, ill-starred. They could repeatedly summon divine magic—a fierce Moses und Aron, stunningly impeccable Wagner, a Les Troyens for the ages—but, just as repeatedly, their romance ran into near-melodramatic complications, of both health and schedule.

Levine’s leave-taking thus seems a little anxious and inconclusive, reflecting the uncertainty that the possibilities opened up by his departure can outbalance the possibilities lost. Or maybe it’s just the way the story fits all too well in what increasingly feels like the advent of a protracted mean season. In that regard, Chang Boils the Sea really did have the happier ending; as the again-immortal Ch’iung-Lien puts it:

Idly we shall watch the Peaches of Immortality redden on the trees,
For we have cast off this World of Dust and its Boundless Bitter Sea.

Cross-posted at The Faster Times.

In 1914 young Frances Glessner fabricated a model of the famed Swiss quartette, the Flonzaley Quartette. Her handiwork was presented to the musicians at dinner one evening, an event remembered by her son: “It was covered with a large floral piece in the center of the table, which gave no hint as to what was underneath…. After dinner, the floral piece was removed with a flourish, and there, two feet from their noses, was this model of themselves playing!… For a moment nobody spoke, and then all four members of the quartette burst out in voluble language…. Each one of them pointed with delight to the eccentricities of the other three. I still remember Mr. Betti, with a magnifying glass peering over the shoulder of his own miniature, trying to read the music on the music rack. It had been specially written by Frederick Stock, the conductor of the Chicago Symphony, in the style of Schoenberg, but was impossible to play—a fact which Mr. Betti soon appreciated.”

—Carol Callahan, Prairie Avenue Cookbook:
Recipes and Recollections from Prominent
19th-Century Chicago Families, p. 54

Prairie Avenue, on Chicago’s South Side, was the address of choice for the city’s Gilded Age industrial barons; the Glessner family—John Jacob Glessner was a vice-president of International Harvester—fit the profile in style, living in a mansion designed by H. H. Richardson and dispensing largesse as major supporters of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Due to family pressure, however, Frances Glessner Lee would have to wait until her 50s before she was able to pursue her true calling: forensic pathology. With George Magrath, the chief medical examiner in Boston, she founded Harvard’s department of legal medicine. One can surmise that her model of the Flonzaley Quartet was impressive indeed; she later produced her famous “Nutshell Series of Unexplained Death” (example pictured above, via), intricately detailed one-inch-to-one-foot dioramas of crime scenes, designed as case studies for prospective investigators. Now located at the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Office, the Nutshell Studies still serve their purpose, training the forensic eye to notice their crucial, grisly eccentricities.

To be honest, there aren’t as many perks as you might think to being a freelance classical-music critic, but one of them came in the mail yesterday: this new transfer of one of the great performances of Verdi’s La Traviata: live, from Covent Garden in 1958, with Maria Callas as Violetta. Now, while, if forced to name my favorite soprano, I would probably pick Callas, I am hardly a Callas expert, but even I have long been aware of the run of Violettas she sang in the late 1950s—the La Scala performance in 1956, the famous Lisbon Traviata from 1958, and this Covent Garden version. (Callas also sang Violetta at the Met around the same time, before she was “fired” by Rudolf Bing; after Covent Garden, she took on the role one more time, in Dallas.) Callas in La Traviata is kind of like Citizen Kane—not everyone will agree that she was the best Violetta of all time, but the suggestion is more universally plausible than any other. And I’m not sure anyone has ever single-handedly raised the bar on a role the way Callas did; Violetta is, today, a much more challenging role, much more of a career benchmark, because Maria Callas sang it the way she did.

I am probably in a minority in that I prefer the Covent Garden Traviata to the Lisbon Traviata, but my rationale is pretty simple: for me, the heart of the opera is “Ah! Dite alla giovine,” the duet that Violetta sings with Germont in Act II, and Callas’s Covent Garden “Dite alla giovine” surpasses all others. With this new release, I thought I would try and figure out just why that is. It’s tricky: by this point, Callas’s general conception was pretty consistent. Compare the 1958 Lisbon with the 1958 Covent Garden, and they’re pretty similar: the pared-down sound, the implacable rhythm. But there are differences—and, in the Covent Garden version, by design or accident, they pivot the duet from operatic drama to a traumatic critique of operatic drama.

“Dite alla giovine” is one of opera’s great frozen moments. Germont has convinced Violetta to leave Alfredo, Germont’s son, on the grounds that it will remove the scandal that would impair the marriage prospects of Germont’s daughter. “Say to your daughter, so pure and fair,” she sings, “that there is a victim of misfortune whose one ray of happiness before she dies is a sacrifice made for her.” Germont expresses, rather effusively, his sadness at this turn of events. In the Lisbon Traviata, Germont was sung by Mario Sereni in booming fashion (to be fair, he’s only following directions—Verdi writes the part up to a double-forte). This actually made for a neat dramatic moment: when Violetta returns to her opening phrases in duet with Germont, Callas’s insistent quietness actually brings Sereni down from his heroic ring, and the effect is rather of the older man being jolted from public sympathy into a truer, private commiseration. But, perhaps anticipating the gap to be bridged, Callas has already opted for a stronger, bigger dynamic arch than she would use in London. By contrast, Mario Zanasi, the Covent Garden Germont, sings with a much leaner tone—almost tenor-like—and, as a result, the duet maintains a cooler, less roiled profile.

I think that coolness, that emptiness, is the key. You can hear it in the very start of the duet, the fermata “Ah!”:


As always in 19th-century opera, the fermata is an implicit invitation to ornamentation. In the Lisbon Traviata, Callas does an elegant little portamento from the B-flat to the G. At Covent Garden, though, she did a stripped-down ornament: just the B-flat, then an A-flat, then a break before the next downbeat. And that’s why I prefer the Covent Garden Traviata, because it’s where Callas’s conception of the character comes through with the most clarity. Her Violetta is not just a woman who has been forced by society into a corner. She is a woman who has, almost in a loophole way, leveraged the artifice of a projected personal image into a kind of defiant prominence. And, in punishment, she has that very artifice taken from her.

We sometimes compliment a performance or a work of art by calling it “artless”; it’s an illusion, usually the result of an art so finely honed that it disappears from the artistic surface. Callas’s “Dite alla giovine” is something more complex: it’s the illusion of a loss of art. It’s all the more shattering since her Act I singing, in both versions, is so vibrantly artful, a performance shot through with a confidence in its own performing flair. But Traviata is an opera all about pretense, and image, and how societal standing becomes more precarious as society gets more shallow. Like I’ve said before, the heartbreak is that Violetta is trapped in a world where Germont’s argument actually makes sense to her. But then the ultimate emptiness of her own carefully-constructed artifice is laid bare.

Opera is, of course, one of the most artificial art forms there is, in a glorious way. It revels in its artifice; it posits it as more real than real, and sweeps you up in its amplification. Callas’s Violetta plays off that, in a way that, perhaps, she knew would only work within the oppressive artificiality of La Traviata‘s world. For those few minutes of “Dite alla giovine,” Callas rips down the curtain—the artifice is gone, the trappings are gone, the opera-ness of the opera is gone, and we’re left with a palpably empty void. It is as if—to reference another opera—Salome were nothing but veils, her dance a dance of disintegration. Not many singers would dare to open up a glimpse of the abyss like that. Callas would, and it was, at least for me, quite possibly the most beautiful thing she ever did.