(Click to enlarge.)



(Photos from here and here.)

Also this year you talked of Elgar, and the newspapers said that he was ill.

If you see him will you present my constant pleasure in his music, whether human rendered or from my box? Nobody who makes sounds gets so inside my defences as he does, with his 2nd Symphony and Violin Concerto. Say that if the 3rd Symphony has gone forward from those, it will be a thrill to ever so many of us. He was inclined to grumble that the rewards of making music were not big, in the bank-book sense; but by now he should be seeing that bank-books will not interest him much longer. I feel more and more, as I grow older, the inclination to throw everything away and live on air. We all allow ourselves to need too much.

—T.E. Lawrence to Mrs Charlotte Shaw, August 23, 1933

I read your [Beethoven’s] 9th Symphony score very often, trying to keep pace with the records. Music, alas, is very difficult. So are all the decencies of life.

—T.E. Lawrence to H.A. Ford, April 18, 1929

Lawrence carved the lintel above the door of his Clouds Hill cottage to read οὐ φροντὶς (“does not care”), referring to the story of Hippocleides as told by Herodotus. Elgar did not live to complete his 3rd Symphony, the commission of which had been partially arranged by Bernard Shaw. “We were too late for that Third Symphony after all,” Lawrence wrote Charlotte Shaw.

It seems odd that the first Cambodian rock opera should have its premiere in Lowell, Massachusetts, but that’s what happened: composer Sophy Him and librettist Catherine Filloux brought their fascinating hybrid Where Elephants Weep to the former mill town/birthplace of Jack Kerouac in the spring of 2007 for three workshop/preview performances.

Amid much publicity, Where Elephants Weep finally had its Cambodian premiere last November, and was subsequently shown on Cambodian TV on Christmas. However, a second planned broadcast was postponed after the country’s Buddhist monks complained.

“Some scenes in the story insult Buddhism,” said a letter sent to the Ministry of Cults and Religion by the Supreme Sangha Council of Buddhist Monks. The letter—also sent to the media— went on to ask that the ministry “ban the performance and airing of the opera”, and demanded an apology from the show’s director, writer and actors.

When did Buddhist monks get so touchy? I thought the source of suffering was birth, not rock and roll. Still, as a connoisseur, I think irritating an entire nation’s Buddhist monks has to be the kickflip McTwist of shocking the bourgeoisie. Sophy Him and Catherine Filloux, we salute you.

Fun fact, courtesy of my lovely wife: did you know that the Catholic Church once unwittingly canonized the Buddha? If you want to join the Sangha, just say so.

Christmas just finally ended yesterday, at least according to the ecclesiastical calendar; today is Epiphany, officially marking the arrival of the Three Wise Men to deliver history’s first Christmas loot. Our choir’s pre-Epiphany anthem last Sunday was, appropriately, “Epiphany,” an 1864 hymn-tune by the great Victorian composer/organist Samuel Sebastian Wesley, setting a venerable old Reginald Heber text. Here’s a score:


“Epiphany” is pretty extravagantly lovely for a hymn; check out those strong-beat double non-harmonic tones in the third bar, like cheese melting onto the sirloin burger of subdominant substitutions. (Do you think Wesley knew his Mendelssohn? Yeah, me too.) Nevertheless, “Epiphany” appears in none of the hymnals I have, mainly because people don’t know how to sing anymore.

Here’s what I mean: in spite of being well within reasonable range for a decent SATB choir, “Epiphany” is simultaneously too high and too low to get into hymnals. The problem is that the soprano line, with its frequent ascension to high F, is too high for unison singing—the altos and basses in the congregation can’t comfortably get up that high, which would be OK if congregations read parts, but they don’t. You could take the whole thing down, but then the written alto and bass lines get too low. So if you want to get it in the hymnal, you’d have to rearrange it—or you could just use James Harding’s comparatively bland “Morning Star,” which is what most hymnals do.

Hymnals have, in fact, been getting progressively lower. In the 1955 Presbyterian Hymnbook, most soprano lines top out around E-flat or E, with a few occasionally getting up to F. In its 1990 replacement, The Presbyterian Hymnal, the tunes top out around D, with about one in five getting up to E. Only one goes to F: James Ellor’s seemingly endless “Diadem,” which probably needs a Mormon Tabernacle-sized choir to really work anyway. Several tunes that appear in both editions have been transposed down for 1990, “Sicilian Mariners” and “Lasst uns erfreuen” being two particularly familiar examples.

Leaving aside the whole lack of part-reading-sufficient musical literacy, it’s interesting to note that the upper range of the newer hymnal coincidentally corresponds to the ceiling of pop-style belting rather than higher classical/choral-style singing. If you’re not doing a whole lot of unamplified choral singing as a matter of childhood educational course, it’s that much harder, later on, to get your breath and muscle memory working in such a way to really get a substantial head voice. Those high F’s would probably cause a flip-and-crack transition in more young female voices than, say, forty years ago—even fairly accomplished teenaged singers I’ve worked with have often, under the influence of pop and contemporary R&B, only ever spent time in their middle and belt ranges. (Even musical theatre songs, traditionally lower than classical repertoire, have probably, on average, dropped at least a step or two since the days of Rodgers and Hammerstein.)

So, thanks in part to the steady deterioration of arts education to its currently lousy state, Wesley’s little gem, which, in a universe with better breath control, would be a standard, is now a rarity. A few more generations of this, and your Sunday morning singing might well be a chanted drone. I can’t help thinking of all those great soul singers who started out as kids in church choirs—is it too late to ask the Wise Men to throw in Aretha’s gospel album?

Critic-at-Large Moe offers his painterly image to wish everyone a happy holiday season. It’s the most wonderful deadweight loss of the year! We’ll be back in the new year. (Maybe sooner if more stories like this try to slip under the holiday radar.) In the meantime, enjoy a batch of baked goodness from Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery, first published in 1796:

Another Chriſtmas Cookey.

To three pound flour, ſprinkle a tea cup of fine powdered coriander ſeed, rub in one pound butter, and one and half pound ſugar, diſſolve three tea ſpoonfuls of pearl aſh in a tea cup of milk, kneed all together well, roll three quarters of an inch thick, and cut or ſtamp into ſhape and ſize you pleaſe, bake ſlowly fifteen or twenty minutes; tho’ hard and dry at firſt, if put into an earthern pot, and dry cellar, or damp room, they will be finer, ſofter and better when ſix months old.

I am proudly and incurably a Puccini addict. There’s not many other composers that combine such a lush surface with so many arresting, idiosyncratic details of harmony and orchestration—Messiaen, maybe, at least among this year’s anniversary composers. It’s sometimes startling to pick apart a Puccini score and realize just how many completely left-field things are going on beneath that gleaming hood. This is a guy who made parallel octaves a viable harmonic resource, after all.

For Puccini’s 150th birthday, three versions of “In questa reggia” from Turandot. FIrst: Dame Eva Turner, who heard the premiere, first sang the role less than a year later, and recorded the aria in 1928.



Buon compleanno!

Hanukkah started tonight at sundown. Spin that dreidel! Here’s a recipe I was absolutely going to test and photograph—gefilte fish as prepared by Richard Tucker‘s mom—before Boston got hit with three days of snowstorms and shoveling, which I’m sure is some sort of payback for all the bad driving. Anyway, I’ll get on the gefilte as soon as I can feel my back again.

This is from Peter Gravina’s 1964 collection The Bel Canto Cookbook, which I picked up at this place, which is definitely a mekhaye.

Sara Tucker’s Gefilte Fish

3 pounds whitefish
2 pounds pike
1 pound carp
4 onions
2 raw eggs
½ teaspoon sugar
Salt and pepper
2 teaspoons cracker meal
3 quarts fish stock
2 carrots

Have fish dealer filet fish but retain the heads and vertebrae. Salt the fish and refrigerate while you make the stock. Combine the fish heads and vertebrae with 2 chopped onions, a little salt and pepper, and cover with water. Bring the stock to a boil and simmer gently for 15 to 20 minutes. Put the fish and two additional onions through a food chopper and grind them finely. To this mixture add the eggs, sugar, and salt and pepper to taste. Add the cracker meal and chop until the mixture is thoroughly blended. Shape the mixture into balls 3 inches in diameter. Immerse the fish in the boiling stock (add water to cover if necessary) and cook covered for about 2½ hours, until the fish balls turn white and double in size. Cut the carrots into ½-inch slices and add to the pot ½ hour before the fish balls are finished. Yields approximately 2 dozen.

The significance of language struck [Richard] Wrangham most forcefully on an occasion when a group of [Mbuti] hunters had killed an elephant…. Excitement was intense, and appeared dangerously volatile as the animal was skinned and dismembered. In terms of activity and noise, the scene matched anything of a comparable nature that Wrangham had observed among chimpanzees…. THe noise was cacophonous, but amid the din patterns of negotiation became discernible. The hunters and those with immediate rights to a share of the carcass were told to honour the obligations of kinship and give meat to their relatives. Old debts and favours were settled in exchange for meat; new pledges were contracted. The talking went on for hours, doubtless reinforcing a long-standing web of reciprocal obligations that was fundamental to the social order of the region. Wrangham says:

Chimpanzees in a comparable situation would have gone berserk. They would have screamed and squabbled and physical strength ultimately would have determined the distribution of the meat, and there probably would have been some violence between competing individuals. There may have been some bad feeling among the Mbuti too, but aggressive tendencies were constrained by the intervention of other individuals. They could talk about their differences, and bring in the issues of what happened in the past and what might happen in the future. In short—they could negotiate. Talking reduced the fighting.

—John Reader, Africa: A Biography of the Continent

I wonder if this is why the dream of bringing disparate human communities together through music—Schopenhauer’s “universal language”—simultaneously seems to be so tantalizingly reasonable and wishful thinking: it re-enacts the process of negotiation, but without the specificity to make anyone feel satisfied. (For every instance of music peacefully bridging a divide, it’s not hard to find an example of music being used to foment division and/or violence.)

Big thanks to Mark Meyer for alerting Soho the Dog HQ to the procrastinatory potential of the Bundesarchiv.

Don Rosenberg, the Cleveland Plain Dealer critic who, a few months ago, was rather infamously reassigned for being allegedly too hard on the Cleveland Orchestra and its music director, Franz Welser-Möst, has now sued both the paper and the orchestra for a legion of offenses, including defamation, age discrimination and (I love this phrase) “tortious interference.”

Most of the reaction to Rosenberg’s plight has taken up familiar themes: freedom of speech, journalistic independence, the value of an experienced observer, &c. (All eminently valid.) But there’s one angle that I haven’t really seen, which is this: from a circulation standpoint, what are the powers-that-be at the Plain Dealer thinking? A pre-packaged feud between one of the biggest cultural institutions in town and your own on-staff critic drops into your lap, and your initial instinct is to somehow make it go away? I’m not familiar enough with the specifics of Rosenberg’s suit to know whether he has a legal leg to stand on or not, but I think the Newhouse family (who own the Plain Dealer via their holding company Advance Publications) might want to take a second look at a management team that seems averse to exploiting opportunities to, you know, sell newspapers.

I mean, come on, the Plain Dealer’s the paper getting sued, and they themselves get scooped by The New York Times. Daniel Wakin gets hilariously impolitic quotes from the orchestra’s lawyer; the Plain Dealer gets this:

The Plain Dealer declined to comment, and a spokeswoman for the Musical Arts Association could not be reached.

Declined to comment? Why would they not play this story for all it’s worth? (At least their online editor can see the appeal.)

I’m not saying that critics should get out their knives solely in order to boost circulation, but newspaper criticism is equal parts information and entertainment, and I would hope that papers would still know how to parlay a little controversy into beneficial entertainment. Critic-at-Large Moe and I spent a couple of lunch hours this week reveling in the glorious pre-Code cynicism of Lewis Milestone’s 1931 film version of The Front Page (mainly to enjoy how little things have changed in my old hometown); can you imagine how one of those papers would have reacted if the local orchestra had hired a PR firm to lobby for a friendlier critic? They would have laughed them out the door—and then bragged about it in print. (And, if it was a two-paper town, God help them if they didn’t.) Journalism is a long way from the callous unscrupulousness that Hecht and MacArthur romanticized—even some contemporary reporters found The Front Page to be defamatory caricature—but objective doesn’t have to mean cautious and boring. Rosenberg’s reassignment, apart from being journalistically suspect, is, to me at least, symptomatic of the creeping corporate blandness leaving a lot of papers high and dry while digital content blooms around them. Milestone’s film opens with a great joke, a title card proclaiming that

This story is laid in a mythical kingdom.

Keep playing it safe, and the newspaper industry is going to end up as its own Neverland.