I don’t normally stoop to highlighting contemporary-music-hurts-my-ears ridiculousness, but this lazy, ill-informed screed from one Michael Fedo (Contemporary music sounds like bus crashes! Supporting evidence: three vague anecdotes and a Terry Gross interview with Paul McCartney) commits the compounding sin of attempting a joke at the expense of tripe, which, as anyone with a modicum of culture knows, is at the pinnacle of the culinary pantheon. Begone, Michael Fedo! We’re just fine with our bus crashes.

One of these days, I am actually going to write an article about how right now is a golden age for tripe eating in Boston. (Exhibit A: Jacky Robert’s Tripes à la Provençale. Exhibits B, C, D….) Of course, the classic statement of Bostonian tripe was the eponymous staple of the old Parker House hotel; you can still recreate it at home.

Apropos of nothing, or maybe something—you never know with the way my brainstorms play out—I got side-tracked yesterday digging up dirt on Boston Symphony Orchestra trustees from the 1950s. That’s a lot of Ivy League WASP rectitude right there! But I did find a good story about N. Penrose Hallowell. Hallowell was a brahmin banker (his BSO trusteeship was an outgrowth of his partnership at Lee, Higginson & Co., BSO founder Henry Lee Higginson’s firm), whose propriety was such that he wouldn’t support his mistress until, after many years, they were properly married. But maybe the experience contributed to this instance of magnificent equanimity:

When Mr. and Mrs. N. Penrose Hallowell were selling their home to Mr. Howard Johnson of eatery fame, Mrs. Hallowell expressed the hope that Mr. and Mrs. Johnson would have a happy future in the house. There was a perceptible silence. Then Master Johnson, age nine, piped up, “There isn’t any Mrs. Johnson. One’s dead and one’s divorced,” adding hopefully, “but Daddy’s got a girl friend.” As the silence turned glacial, Mr. Hallowell rose from his fireside, smote the roadside restaurateur smartly on the back, and speaking for the first time said, “Bully for you, Johnson.”

Kansas is the latest state to take financial aim at the arts, with their governor, Sam Brownback (yes, he’s a Republican—how’d you guess?), issuing an executive order abolishing the Kansas Arts Commission, though the abolishing is via some sort of gradual-privatization-through-the-auspices-of-the-Historical-Society smokescreen convoluted enough to make Freudian analysts rub their hands with glee. At least there’s some nominal outcry. But this is par for the course—political point-scoring over economic impact. It is, in other words, the result of playing nice. And I was musing this morning: maybe part of that playing nice is something that arts advocates normally tout as an advantage, namely, institutions’ deep ties to their communities.

You know why states never pull this kind of crap on corporations? Because corporations don’t care about their communities beyond PR necessity, and governments know it. Go on, Kansas—rescind all the tax breaks on Koch Industries and see how long they stick around. Companies, factories, sports teams—they all know how to work this sort of blackmail. Arts organizations? Not so much. Now, I’m not saying that theaters and opera companies should go to war with their communities. But I, at least, would be curious to see what a little mercenary action could accomplish. Say this Kansas thing holds up—what if the Topeka Symphony could broker a little sweetheart deal with Nebraska to move it and its 100 jobs north of the border? How would that play in Wichita?

Realistic? Probably not. But arts advocates are now forced to deal with an entire generation of free-market fundamentalists that would never risk having their fragile faith tested by something as dangerous as the carrot of an economic impact statement—so why not consider the stick?

Previewing Opera Boston’s production of Hindemith’s Cardillac.
Boston Globe, February 6, 2011.

Everyone’s starting to have fun with the New York Philharmonic’s new digital archive, so in honor of the other big event in New York this week, here’s a real rarity: Leonard Bernstein and Richard Nixon being civil to one another.


This was less than a decade after Bernstein had been called a fellow traveler by Life magazine, and just over a decade before Nixon recorded himself calling Bernstein a “son of a bitch.” (Ironically, Life‘s accusation came on the heels of the infamous Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, which probably indirectly led to the above encounter. The Conference, organized by the Soviet Union, prodded the CIA to focus attention and money on pro-American cultural diplomacy; the Institute of International Education award to Bernstein was largely based on such diplomacy, in the form of Bernstein’s international tours with the Philharmonic.)

These kinds of archives tend to be fertile ground for reading between the lines, but one figure whose personality comes through largely unfiltered is my old teacher, Lukas Foss. A folder of documents surrounding Foss’s guest conducting stints in the mid-1960s is chock-full of Foss’s scattered, exuberant graciousness and Carlos Moseley’s good-natured exasperation in trying to pin him down. There’s also this glimpse of Foss’s typically cheerful pragmatism, in this case regarding Bach’s St. John Passion:

Regarding St. John Passion text, I feel very strongly that we should have no translation. Main reason: leaf rustling, but also important that we don’t get all that dated anti-Semitism into print. Whenever it is done…, it produces a flurry of letters. Why not have a little harmless synopsis for each number, and on a single page or an adjoining page so there is no turn.

A while back, I decided (and I quote):

I don’t have a Twitter account, and I probably never will

As you can see on the right side of the page, I changed my mind on that one. What happened? Well, Emerson, after all. And flattery will get you everywhere. And I’ve been doing so much following on Twitter that my own account became a matter of efficiency.

But mostly, I became curious as to what a Twitter version of me would look like. I have a blog persona, a critic persona, a composer persona, a book-author persona—sure, they’re all kind of like me, but they’re also not really me (or they’re only distilled portions of me) in a way that I find kind of fascinating. So I wondered what part of my personality would come to the fore when forced into a 140-character suit.

(Though I still think that tweeting during concerts is a bad, bad idea.)

From time to time until the book comes out, this space will feature bits and pieces that were too esoteric, tangential, or just plain odd to make it into the final version.

One of the casualties of the latest draft of the book was the 18th-century philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, reduced to a passing reference: even by my liberal standards, his connection to Beethoven is pretty indirect. But Herder is, I think, one of the most fascinating thinkers of the pre-Hegelian era, someone who, at times, seems to have wandered into the 18th century from some modern or even post-modern time. For Herder was a man fascinated by language.

Herder was a scrupulous thinker whose posthumous reputation was somewhat hijacked by his advocacy of the particular and all-to-easily simplified idea of German nationalism. But that was only a by-product of his overall philosophical goal, which was to put to bed the age-old problem of whether the mind was an understandable machine or a fundamentally mysterious thing, dualistically separate from rational analysis. Herder had the distinction of studying with both the über-rationalist Immanuel Kant and the loopy proto-Romantic Johann Georg Hamann; each held him in high enough regard to later feel betrayed whenever Herder tried to philosophically mediate between their two extremes.

Herder’s early career efficiently followed a best-and-brightest establishment path, aided by his own skill at wooing the power elite. He was so successful as a teacher that the city of Riga gave him two Lutheran churches to pastor in order to counter an offer from St. Petersburg. At the same time, his writings on German-language literature gave him a burgeoning regional reputation. Herder moved in the right circles, saying the right things. And then, in 1769, in his mid-twenties, he threw it all aside and took a six-month sojourn in France.

Herder’s reasons for going were not unlike those that drew a flood of expatriates to Paris in the 1920s and 30s—he had grown suspicious of his own respectability, and besides, French thinking enjoyed a continent-wide reputation for being on the cutting edge. But if Herder dreamed of becoming a philosophe, he was soon disillusioned, and the source of that disillusionment became the hub of Herder’s thinking: language. In Herder’s ear, the seeming universal appeal of French thought was, in reality, simply the appeal of the French language, its civility and polish and air of objectivity. From the diary Herder kept on his French journey (but which was only published over forty years after his death, in 1846, when the wave of German nationalism was once again cresting):

The question is not what a word can mean according to a few dictionaries, but what it means in the consciousness of living people—here, now, in all its capriciousness…

Languages, no less than governments, depend in this on the spirit of the age: this becomes striking to the point of being obvious, if one makes comparisons. The same spirit of monarchic manners which Montesquieu so strikingly portrays in his own person dominates his language also. Like the French nation, it has little real virtue, little inner strength; it makes as much as it can out of little, as a machine is moved by a small driving wheel.

French thought acquired its cosmopolitan reputation, Herder says, because the French language that such thought is beholden to is geared towards cosmopolitan niceties; but the demands of politesse and intellectual substance forms a zero-sum game. As scholar Harold Mah puts it, “In a society constituted by the requirements of civility, every linguistic act is a social performance, and every performance displaces the intellectual content of the linguistic act.” That, for Herder, marks the difference between the potential in French-language and German-language reasoning. In Mah’s summarization: “The French language suspends the mind above sense experience and therefore refers to nothing but itself; German goes all the way down to brute sense perception and, through it, goes all the way up to higher reason.”

Herder himself could indulge in less refined pro-German, anti-French rhetoric—“Spew out the ugly slime of the Seine!” read one poem, “Speak German, O you German!” But behind this linguistic chauvinism lies strikingly modern ideas, not only that the way we think is inseparably dependent on the language we are thinking in, but that the structures of languages themselves result less from human universality and more from particular cultural circumstances. (Contrasting the self-referentiality of French with the sensual omnivorousness of German, Herder not only anticipated the peel-back-the-surface approach of critical theory and cultural studies by nearly two centuries, he also offered an explanation why the German strains of such theory would focus on sociology, while the French strains would be more concerned with textual analysis.) Language became Herder’s philosophical touchstone. His theory of mind, which sidestepped the whole materialist-dualist question by positing the mind as a living organism, one with the body it inhabited (drawing on the latest biological research showing how muscles contracted when the attached nerve was irritated), was first delivered in the form of a theory of language acquisition: language evolved from man’s need to communicate survival techniques from generation to generation, reason growing out of the body’s needs. His view of philosophical discourse was bound up in the inescapability of language, leading him to elevate analogical argument to the point where he considers literature a better source of knowledge than philosophy:

[F]or the most part it was a single new image, a single analogy, a single striking metaphor that gave birth to the greatest and boldest theories. The philosophers who declaim against figurative language and themselves serve nothing but old, often uncomprehended, figurative idols are at least in great contradiction with themselves.

For Herder, “Homer and Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare and Klopstock have supplied psychology and knowledge of humankind with more material than even the Aristotles and Leibnizes of all peoples and times.” (It was this position that partially spurred Kant, a veteran declaimer against “figurative language,” to finish the third of his Critiques, the Critique of Judgement.) Herder’s pro-literature stance reveals Herder’s nationalism as more qualified than the following generation of German patriots. Herder’s nationalism was not based around geography or misty conceptions of the medieval Teutonic soul, but around language—his conception of German unity was a unification of everyone who spoke German.

Such a conception could introduce complications into an otherwise straightforward nationalistic spirit; any argument for national exceptionalism was actually an argument for linguistic exceptionalism, and, what’s more, an argument necessarily expressed within the language one wished to promote, and so on down the philosophical rabbit-hole. The way the German Romantics glommed onto instrumental music—that persistent claim that music picks up where language leaves off—can be read in part as a way to side-step the qualifications of Herder’s nationalism. That such instrumental music was so celebrated a product of German culture was an argument that there was something exceptional about the German soul that likewise went beyond language.

If [Milton Babbitt] had not opted to be a teacher and a composer, he would have been a great big league manager.

—Joseph Polisi, The Artist as Citizen

R.I.P.—nah, scratch that, rest in cheerfully generous, irascible opinions and good beer. I am forever indebted to Babbitt for instilling in me an admirable mistrust of authority—having heard that all his music was thorny and difficult and incomprehensible, it was a kick to discover how much fun those anthologized Semi-Simple Variations and All Set and Phonemena* and My Ends Are My Beginnings were.

This thing I wrote about Babbitt is something I rather liked, which is always a dubious sign. But here’s something pithier: a lot of American history—and the history of the American relationship with American history—makes a lot more sense when you realize that Milton Babbitt was, actually, a quintessentially American composer.

*And Philomel, which I conflated with it in an earlier version of this post—Philomena would probably be a pretty fun piece, too.

Soho the Dog HQ has seen its online wherewithal this week preempted by those infernal twins, Work and Life, which means that, among other things, I missed Mozart’s birthday yesterday. Except that I didn’t, because last weekend, I celebrated in agreeable company and high style by hearing Goli, Box Five, and Molly Zenobia play a Mozart’s Birthday concert in Cambridge. The occasion was declared by Mary Bichner, Box Five’s whirlwind driving force, and as obsessively committed a fangirl as a 255-year-old wunderkind could hope for. (Bichner was even game to sing an indie-rockish Count Almaviva to Evangelia Leontis’s Susanna. La donna ognora tempo ha dir di sì.)

Appropriate costume was encouraged; here’s what I came up with:


If you want one, you can get one; all of my royalties will go to the Greater Boston Food Bank. For cake, I hope.

Reviewing the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
Boston Globe, January 24, 2011.