Over at the Denver Post, Kyle MacMillan embarks on The Death of Classical Music 5: Assignment Miami Beach. Evocation of a lost Golden Age of American classical music? Check. Passing citation of NEA participation statistics? Check. List of gripes from Greg Sandow? Check. I’m just being a curmudgeon because, to be honest, I’m burned out on this whole discussion. To his credit, MacMillan spends at least as much time focusing on those subsets of the overly-general “classical music” category that are not dying as those that are. And I’ve pretty much said my piece on this (this post and this post hold up passably well after a few years).

Still, a list of tips from the rock and pop world by Ronen Givony, one of the music directors at Le Poisson Rouge, had this amusing counterpoint:

4. Promotion. Unlike rock bands… classical performers have traditionally relied on managers, publicists or presenters to market their appearances.

5. Entrepreneurialism. Rather than waiting for a grant or somebody else to initiate change, artists need to take things into their own hands. “What if the Beatles had said, ‘We’re going to wait until we get some funding and then we’re going to go on the road’?” Givony said. “What if the Sex Pistols had said that? Nothing would have changed in music history.”

The ghosts of Brian Epstein and Malcolm McLaren would like a word….

Over the weekend, Kyle Gann was complaining about the tradition of kittenish obscurantism in serialist analysis:

In European writings on the subject, and certain American academic writings as well,… it seems to be almost bad taste to state flatly how the rows are derived, what the rhythmic processes are, how the music is actually written. One is expected to know such matters but be coy in expressing them, and to talk more about the implications of the process than the process itself.

On a related note, I was at Harvard last night for the last of the public lectures given as part of the School of Engineering’s “Science and Cooking” class, with guest lecturer David Chang, of Momofuku fame. There was some science content: Chang did neat stuff with methyl cellulose and eggs, and there was a wildly entertaining exposition on the microbiology of Chang’s attempt to make a pork version of katsuobushi. But what was most interesting was the framework of Chang’s talk—constantly coming back to the idea of the role of limitations and mistakes in creativity. A big theme was the effect of restrictions: restrictions on physical space, restrictions on the availability of ingredients, restrictions imposed by the need to make money, &c., and how the staff came to embrace and use those restrictions as spurs to innovative thinking. (Chang passed around samples of what he called Momofuku’s “ingredient of the year,” a dried shiitake mushroom chip that came about as a byproduct of pulverizing dried shiitakes into powder, so that they would take up less storage space.)

What the restrictions originally meant was that Chang and his staff were constantly forced to go off-recipe in order to get the food out of the kitchen, but now that combination of self-imposed limitations and non-stop tinkering is ingrained in the restaurants’ culture, to the point where success and newly expanded resources actually seem to scare Chang a little bit. “If we’re given the full color palette to work with,” he joked, “we’re just going to make something disgusting and nasty.” Chang recounted numerous instances of setting up seemingly arbitrary challenges in order to provide, essentially, opportunities for controlled screw-ups. He described his creative process thus: “Make a mistake; make a calculated mistake; make another mistake.” In other words, give yourself permission to get every step of the process wrong, in order to really know what’s going on at every step of the process—and that’s where the creativity starts, not where it ends.

What both Gann and Chang were talking about was the difference between information and understanding, and how you get from one to the other—and where in the transfer creativity originates. Gann wants to “take away the mystery” of compositional processes: “Mystery exalts the composer, and raises him above mere mortals, who are left to their own creative devices.” But for Chang, it’s the exercise of those creative devices that’s empowering, coming up with a way to solve the mystery, rather than having the mystery solved for you.

There was a time when I would have sided with Gann on this one. When I was getting my education, even information that was out there was still hard to come by; I remember having to go across town to find a copy of Ligeti’s Die Reihe article on Boulez’s Structures, and Koblyakov’s code-cracking of the pitch multiplication in Le marteau sans maître was a tantalizing rumor for a year or two before the book finally turned up in the library. There was still enough effort in acquiring the information that one felt some responsibility to understand the information rather than just acknowledge and repeat it. But now, I think, information is simply too cheap—and, as a result, the focus has shifted from understanding why you’re wrong to confirming whether you’re right.

This is a constant dilemma in musical training (or at least I hope it is): you have to give a student enough tools and information to get started, but you also have to, at some point, ensure that they go in and get their own hands dirty, wrestling with the material—contemplating the mysteries, as it were. (I learned a lot having a professor explain Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel to me; I learned a lot more—about Stockhausen’s musical proclivities, and my own—trying to get to the bottom of his Klavierstück IX by myself.) This is particularly crucial for atonal and serialist music, music that for far too long was taught as if the row forms were the music, that calculating the row derivations was equivalent to plumbing its depths. (Gann mentions David Osmond-Smith’s book on Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, which he lauds for having “charts that explain everything that happens in that wonderful piece”—a perhaps inadvertent but interesting equating of description with explanation.) What’s closer to my experience is that, like all technical analysis, row analysis explains everything and nothing about a serialist piece, in a way that it’s impossible to get a feel for unless you actually get into a piece and explore it yourself, trying to decide which row form is prime, trying to keep track of all the segmentation, running up blind alleys, figuring out whether an anomaly is a deliberate interpolation, a quirk of serialist technique that you hadn’t considered, or an oversight—or none of the above. Reading an analysis tells you how; doing an analysis forces you to think about why.

I think Schoenberg, who was never shy about talking about his technical processes, nevertheless knew the paradoxical worth of the row—of any technical explanation. At the very beginning of his masterpiece, Moses und Aron, six solo singers—representing the voice of God—wordlessly intone a series of chords:


It’s only after you sort through another couple of pages’ worth of pitches that you realize that what you hear at the beginning is, in fact, only the trichord outlines of the row, the first three and last three pitches of P-0 (the women) and RI-3 (the men). They’re combinatorial row forms (that is to say, P-0 and I-3 are), but Schoenberg, right at the start, partitions them such that the combinatoriality is frustrated. Instead, he gets a near-echo: the outer voice-leading, the parallel 7ths, is repeated in both groups.

It’s like an inexact translation—which is fitting, since Moses und Aron is an opera about just that, about incomplete explanations, about the distance between information (Aron) and understanding (Moses). And the further you dig into analysis of the opera, the more you find Schoenberg manipulating the vocabulary in order to produce that effect, over and over again, rows layered and juxtaposed and reassembled into almost-but-not-quite repetitions, the musical equivalent of the philosophical gap between what something is and what we can say about it. Even when the information seems clear, Schoenberg undercuts it. One of my favorite of these moments is when Moses and Aron make their entrance in Act I, Scene 3. Moses preaches; Aron interprets. “He has chosen you above all peoples,” Aron sings, on a straight 12-tone row (P-2, with the first trichord moved to the end):


But that’s not what Moses is saying at all. While Aron sings, Moses, in sprechstimme, is offering a variation on his very first line in the opera, addressing God:

Der einzige, Ewige, Allmächtige, Allgegenwärtige, Unsichtbare, Unvorstellbare…
The only, infinite, all-powerful, omnipresent, invisible, inconceivable…

When he gets to “invisible” and “inconceivable,” Schoenberg instructs: The speaker will take a ritard here in order to heighten the significance of the words. The row tells you everything; but in this case, the row is also telling you nothing. The meaning is still invisible.

And it’s also somehow appropriate that this is Moses und Aron, Schoenberg’s greatest mistake, great in all senses of the word—a David-Chang-style reconsideration of operatic form and serialist construction that was simultaneously Schoenberg’s most magnificent failure and his most magnificent achievement. As Chang noted: “It takes discipline to write down your mistakes.”

The weekend’s best juxtaposition: Joseph Horowitz calls on orchestral musicians to accept part-time orchestra jobs, citing as an example the old days in Minneapolis, when players “had ample spare time to earn money in other ways,” on the same day the Daniel Wakin reports on how those other ways are drying up.

It also strikes me that Horowitz’s description of “service conversion”—basically, switching out orchestral players’ paid rehearsals and performances for paid outreach and education—is just a privatizing shell game. Orchestral outreach is a substitute for public education, filling the gap left when schools and districts, squeezed because people don’t want to pony up the necessary tax revenue and boxed in by funding agencies’ ridiculous love affair with math and science and high-stakes testing, toss the arts overboard—and, with it, the ecosystem of school and private teaching that supports it. In other words, “service conversion” means that orchestral players will be, in essence, using their own part-time salaries to subsidize those jobs that would supposedly supplement their part-time salaries. Fantastic.

This weekend marks the third, fourth, and fifth nights of Hanukkah. Spin that dreidel! And then listen to the great Chazan Johnny Gluck singing “A Dudele,” originally composed by the 18th-century Rabbi Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev.



This particular arrangement is by the polish-born conductor Leo Low, and was (I would guess) originally done for the Hazomir Chorus in Warsaw. Low—a veteran conductor of synagogue choirs, including the Grand Synagogue in Vilna, where he met and began a long association with the legendary cantor Gershon Sirota—had become director of the Hazomir chorus in 1908; singing Low’s arrangements of Yiddish folk songs, the chorus became a model for similar groups around the world.

Low’s arrangement has (as best I can tell) passed into the public domain, so here’s a scan from the Yiddish wing of Soho the Dog HQ’s palatial music library:

A Dudele (arr. Leo Low) (6.3 Mb PDF)

I don’t remember where I picked this copy up, but, thanks to retailer stamping, I know the original owner picked it up from here—


—which, thanks to Google Street View, I know is now a Thai restaurant:


Low himself emigrated to America in 1920, directing a chorus in the immigrant-labor hotbed of Paterson, New Jersey, as well as the National Workers Farband Choir in New York, associated with the socialist-Zionist Yiddish Natzionaler Arbeiter Farband. Low spent time in (then) Palestine in the 1930s, then returned to the United States. He died in 1960.

Harold Camping, an evangelical radio host who previously predicted the end times would happen in 1994 (well, Korn did release their debut album in 1994, so he gets half-credit), has, as you might have seen, updated his calendar. Now Camping is spreading the word—via the website WeCanKnow.com—that the Rapture will come on May 21, 2011.


Wait a minute—the Rapture is happening on Fats Waller’s birthday?



(The movie is 1936’s King of Burlesque.)

I’m not much for this particular brand of Christian eschatology, but I must confess—Camping is my kind of conspiratorial numerologist.

In reading up on yesterday’s news about Louis Andriessen and his Grawemeyer Award, I missed Norman Lebrecht’s very Norman-Lebrecht-ish post on the award, especially this sentence:

Andriessen does not rank high among composers who will dominate the future.

That is awesome. I finally have a universally applicable aesthetic criterion that can bump me from a humble classical-music stringer to the critical equivalent of a melodramatic, over-the-top science-fiction villain.

“Hmmmm… it’s a nice piece, clever instrumentation, elegant use of post-serialist vocabularies. But wait—will this piece…”
	“…DOMINATE THE FUTURE?“

Time to start growing that goatee out to a menacing point.

Hey, Kim Jong-Il—your isolated, repressive, and dangerously unstable regime has just precipitated yet another military standoff with your neighbors to the south. What are you going to do next?

“I’m going to a concert!”

Apparently having run out of provocations for the weekend, Kim Jong-Il, his designated heir, Kim Jong-Un, and a host of North Korean political grandees took in a little music last night (well, one assumes it was last night, though the report doesn’t specify), attending a concert by the State Symphony Orchestra of the DPRK. According to the North Korean news agency:

Put on the stage were serial symphonies “Song Dedicated to the Party,” piano concerto “Do Prosper, My Country,” orchestras “A Bumper Harvest in the Chongsan Plain” and “A Soldier Hears Rice Ears Sway” and other colorful numbers.

(I don’t think “serial” means what the translator thinks it means, but my Korean is nowhere near good enough to tell what’s trying to be said. If you’re curious, the orchestra has recorded Choe Jong Yun’s piano concerto on “Do Prosper, My Country.”) North Korean concerts inevitably come with a healthy dose of propaganda (this particular concert, for instance, comes on the heels of an annual concert dedicated to Isang Yun, whose stature in the North is equal parts musical accomplishment and his kidnapping by the South Korean security forces in 1967). Maybe that old story about Bismarck listening to Beethoven’s Fifth before declaring war on France is still current in Pyongyang.

In other news:

Louis Andriessen wins this year’s Grawemeyer Award.

Meanwhile, the Louisville Orchestra (like its Honolulu counterpart) mulls bankruptcy options.

Next year’s royal wedding could feature Peter Maxwell Davies and Andrew Lloyd Webber on the same program—if the latter is asked.

Tomorrow, the town of Dumfries unveils a memorial cairn for Angus MacKay, first to hold the post of Queen’s Piper.

In closing: the neurology of Satie’s Vexations.

Here in the United States, tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day, a fine idea for a holiday that is nevertheless in perpetual danger of being swamped by the 600-pound-gorilla that is Christmas. (That’s right, I just compared the birthday of the Son of God to a gorilla. Take that, creationists!) In other words, Thanksgiving might just be the most American holiday there is, a kind of calendrical Lagrange point between sentimental gratitude for the stuff we have and mania for acquiring more stuff. And thus it’s always been—witness the years 1939 to 1941, when Franklin D. Roosevelt bumped Thanksgiving from the fourth Thursday in November to the third, at the presumed sales-boosting behest of Lew Hahn, president of both the Retail Dry Goods Association and the era’s largest department-store holding company. (Since it wasn’t yet a national holiday, states could follow FDR’s lead or not, and when one celebrated Thanksgiving became a barometer of political opinion.)

Back then, it was actually considered in poor taste for stores to put up Christmas decorations and have Christmas sales prio to Thanksgiving, a bit of social pressure that seems downright quaint nowadays; I saw places this year putting out their Christmas merchandise prior to Hallowe’en. I am, myself, a purist—nothing remotely yuletide-ish goes up until after Thanksgiving, my own small Maginot Line against the day when the Christmas retail season colonizes so much of the calendar that Thanksgiving becomes a kind of cult holiday. It’s kind of like ostentatiously ignoring round-number anniversaries of Mozart’s death (1791) in favor of Prokofiev’s birth (1891).

Every year, I do two things on Thanksgiving: eat enormous quantities of my mom’s stuffing, and harangue everybody reading this space to cough up a few bucks to the anti-hunger charity of your choice. (Here at Soho the Dog HQ, it’s The Greater Boston Food Bank—you can search for your local equivalent here.) Why should this year be any different? No good reason I can think of. Traditions are so heartwarming, after all.

Of this Cecilia thus it is written in the Martyrologe by Ado, that Cecilie the Virgine after she brought Valerian her husband espoused, and Tiburtius his brother to the knowledge and fayth of Christ, and with her exhortacions had made them constant vnto martyrdome: after the suffering of them she was also apprehended by Almachius the ruler, and brought to the Idoles to do sacrifice: which thing when she abhorred to do, she should be presēted before the iudge to haue the condemnation of death. In the meane time the Sergeants and officers which were about her, beholding her comelye beuty, and the prudent behauiour in her conuersation, began with many persuasions of words to sollicite her mynde, to fauour her selfe, and that so excellent beutye, and not to cast her selfe away. &c. But she agayne so replyed to them with reasons and godly exhortatiōs, that by the grace of almighty God their harts began to kindle, and at length to yeld to that religion, whych before they did persecute. Which thing she perceiuing, desired of the iudge Almachius a little respite. Whych being graunted, she sendeth for Vrbanus the bishop home to her house, to stablish and grounde them in the fayth of Christ. And so were they, with diuers other at the same tyme baptised, both men and wemen, to the number (as the story saith) of. 400. persons, among whom was one Gordianus a noble mā. This done, this blessed martyr was brought before the iudge, wher she was condēned: then after was brought to þe house of þe Iudge, wher she was inclosed in a whote bathe, but she remainyng ther a whole daie and night without any hurt, as in a colde place, was broughte out agayne, and commaundement geuen that in the bath she should be beheaded: The executour is sayde to haue iiii. strokes at her necke, as yet her heade beynge not cut of, she (as the storye geueth) liued iii. dayes after. And so dyed thys holy virgyn martyre, whose bodye in the night season Vrbanus the Byshop tooke and buryed amonge the other byshops.

—John Foxe, Acts and Monuments
(Foxe’s Book of Martyrs) (1570 edition)

From the online variorum edition (in progress) produced by the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield. (Previously: 1, 2.)

Somehow, I missed this, which makes me wonder what else I’ve been missing, but James Kibbie, organist and University of Michigan professor, recorded all of J. S. Bach’s organ works on a variety of German baroque organs, and then posted all the recordings online, for free. Extra nerd nourishment: for each piece, he’s also listed the organ registration. That’s about a week’s worth of procrastination fodder, right there. Fantastic.

I immediately went to my two favorites: the “St. Anne” prelude and fugue, and BWV 679, a sly little show-off fughetta on “Dies sind die heiligen zehen Gebot” (“These are the holy ten commandments”), in which Bach states the fugue subject, yes, ten times, and at the point where the commandments shift from “thou shalt” to “thou shalt not,” inverts the subject. I always imagine Johann pouring himself an extra, self-congratulatory glass of beer after dashing off that one.