The Boston Symphony Orchestra has announced their 2008-09 season. I’ll leave you in the able hands of Jeremy Eichler for the details (of which some remain state secrets—which version of Simon Boccanegra is that going to be, maestro?), but it’s interesting to see the inevitable Mozart crammed into the sort of three-concert marathon dumping-ground normally reserved for new music. (World premieres by Carter, Schuller, Kirchner, and André Previn, who must be the designated driver.)

My mother-in-law came over last night with a big bag of videos so she and Critic-at-Large Moe could catch up on Korean soap operas. My own current favorite, “First Wives’ Club” (조강지처 클럽, Jogangjicheo Keulleob), is especially operatic fun, not only in that it turns on a dime from comedy to drama, but in the way that both acting styles—serious drama and broad comedy—happily co-exist, often in the same scene. (It’s also—very important—the sort of show that’s pretty easy to follow even if your Korean language skills are, for all practical purposes, nonexistent.)

Anyway, there’s something curious about the music in the show. Most of it is standard dramatic cuing, but whenever there’s a setting that would realistically have its own piped-in music—a store, or a restaurant (lots of scenes in restaurants)—that music is always a bit of American popular music, sung in English, with lyrics that only coincidentally have anything to do with the plot at hand. I’ve never been to Korea, but my guess is that such English-language ubiquity is not all that accurate. But it’s clever as incidental music: for a non-English-speaker, the unintelligibility of the lyrics causes the mind to automatically relegate it to the background.

Even more interesting is that the choice of music seems to be genre-neutral. Adult contemporary, 50’s rock, country—it all shows up with equal frequency, in a way that would never happen in an American setting. Part of this may be cultural—Korean variety shows certainly display a pleasantly anything-goes aesthetic—but my sense is that merely singing in English semiotically signals a certain kind of Muzak quality within a dramatic context.

Of course, my own perspective on this is probably skewed, since my ear is inclined to gravitate towards the music anyways. (Every time I have occasion to visit Super 88, I end up wandering the aisles, hypnotized to the point of madness by the ruthlessly chirpy Chinese and Taiwanese pop background.) So maybe we should get back to the real question: will the fish-selling housewife finally dump her unfaithful husband in favor of the long-suffering contractor who loves her?

Four students from my alma mater have at least temporarily stuck it to the RIAA. I’ve never been much for school spirit, but: go Terriers!

In light of the drumbeat of news that the U.S. economy continues to underachieve more than a surly teenager, a little quiz: here’s two quotes, with certain terms in bold. In one quote, the boldface words are what was actually said, in the other, they’re words that have been changed. Which one is the actual economic analysis?

[T]he structural characteristics of a given financial instrument are less representative of a general class of investments than they are unique to the individual financial institution itself. Particularly, principles of relatedness… are more likely to evolve in the course of market actions than to be derived from generalized assumptions. Here again greater and new demands are made upon the perceptual and conceptual abilities of the regulator.

Our current regulatory structure was not built to address the modern financial system with its diversity of market participants, innovation, complexity of financial instruments, global integration and interconnectedness…. Moreover, our financial services companies are becoming larger, more complex and more difficult to manage.

If you’re a C-SPAN junkie, you’ll know it’s the second one—it’s from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s recent remarks introducing a proposed new federal financial regulatory regimen. But if you’re a new-music junkie, you’ll recognize the ringer. Here’s the original:

[T]he structural characteristics of a given work are less representative of a general class of characteristics than they are unique to the individual work itself. Particularly, principles of relatedness, upon which depends immediate coherence of continuity, are more likely to evolve in the course of the work than to be derived from generalized assumptions. Here again greater and new demands are made upon the perceptual and conceptual abilities of the listener.

That’s Uncle Milton—Babbitt, not Friedman—from his (in)famous 1958 article “Who Cares If You Listen?” Indeed, watching such figures as Paulson or Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke try and stay on top of the current financial turmoil has been rather like watching a casual audience try and bend their ears around a particularly uncompromising bit of total serialism. They’re trying, but goshdarnit, it’s complicated.

But the point of the comparison isn’t just to analyze the economy—it is complicated, and that’s part of the problem—but also to look at how Babbitt’s article has been and continues to be misunderstood, mostly by people who can’t get past the title (which wasn’t even Babbitt’s to begin with). Babbitt’s position is as hardcore as you’d expect, but he’s explicitly realistic about where his position fits into the musical world as a whole. The article is less a manifesto in support of a particular musical vocabulary than a philosophical justification for the cultivation of a niche audience. He actually puts it in economic terms:

I am concerned with stating an attitude towards the indisputable facts of the status and condition of the composer of what we will, for the moment, designate as “serious,” “advanced,” contemporary music. This composer expends an enormous amount of time and energy—and, usually, considerable money—on the creation of a commodity which has little, no, or negative commodity value….

Nowadays, that last sentence is hardly limited to composers of “serious,” “advanced,” contemporary music. I think that Babbitt doesn’t always get credit for noticing that this was the tendency of music—all music—in the second half of the 20th century: away from universality, towards stylistic fragmentation, thousands of ministers, each preaching to their own choir. The composer no longer comes out of a unified tradition, but picks, chooses, and combines from a plethora of traditions: the composer “lives no longer in a unitary musical universe of ‘common practice,’ but in a variety of universes of diverse practice.”

Paulson’s proposed regulatory plan has been criticized for assuming that the markets can still be regulated in a comparatively unitary way. From NPR this morning:

“Remember, we have seen in the last eight months repeated instances of CEOs of large, complex financial institutions being fired because they didn’t understand their balance-sheet risk at their institution,” [economist Vince] Reinhart says.

How likely is it, he asks, that Fed staff members making far less money will be able to understand them any better? In other words, Paulson may want the Fed to anticipate potential meltdowns, but in an ever-more-complex securities market that’s not always so easy to do. And critics note that the Fed has had a spotty record detecting excessive risk-taking in the housing and stock markets.

But that complexity puts any regulatory agency in a bind. Regulation is necessary to avoid turmoil in the markets, but the markets are getting too advanced to regulate. Here’s Fed chair Ben Bernanke, also this morning, defending the Fed’s bailout of investment bank Bear Stearns in Senate testimony:

Our financial system is extremely complex and interconnected, and Bear Stearns participated extensively in a range of critical markets. With financial conditions fragile, the sudden failure of Bear Stearns likely would have led to a chaotic unwinding of positions in those markets and could have severely shaken confidence. The company’s failure could also have cast doubt on the financial positions of some of Bear Stearns’ thousands of counterparties and perhaps of companies with similar businesses. Given the current exceptional pressures on the global economy and financial system, the damage caused by a default by Bear Stearns could have been severe and extremely difficult to contain. Moreover, the adverse effects would not have been confined to the financial system but would have been felt broadly in the real economy through its effects on asset values and credit availability.

I would have personally preferred not to see yet more corporate incompetence bailed out with tax dollars, but the problem is, as Benanke explains, that the economy has become such an intricate network that there’s no way for me, as an individual, to opt out of a portion of the economy that’s too Rube Goldberg for my taste. The difference between the musical world that Babbitt predicted and the economy is that, if you find a certain music too complicated and cerebral, you can listen to something else. “Why should the layman be other than bored and puzzled by what he is unable to understand, music or anything else?” Babbitt asks. “It is only the translation of this boredom and puzzlement into resentment and denunciation that seems to me indefensible. After all, the public does have its own music, its ubiquitous music: music to eat by, to read by, to dance by, and to be impressed by.” In other words: listen to what you like. And he’s not saying that composers shouldn’t write for a potentially large audience, he’s saying that composers that don’t should still have some opportunity to pursue their craft, because you never know where musical taste is going. I agree with Kyle that countercritic put it particularly well: “Post-war atonality made today’s taste for oblique tonality possible.” I don’t know what Babbitt makes of that oblique tonality—probably not much—but the evolution of such taste and variety is entirely in line with his argument.

Alas, no such choice in economic life—you may have stellar credit, and may have never come near a subprime mortgage in your life, but you’re still feeling the resultant pinch. I’d never use it myself—I love the crazy modernist noise—but here’s a line to try out on an aesthetically reactionary investment banker: how bad is the economy these days? It’s worse than atonality.

I’m not much for April Fool’s Day jokes—I’d much rather pull a hoax when everybody’s not expecting one—but Pliable passes along a fine example of the genre from today’s Guardian. (Carla should be glad that Damon Albarn doesn’t have a daughter.*)

*Update (4/1): Actually, he does. (Note to self: always fact-check jokes.)

Update II (4/1): Even better—it’s a meta-joke (see comments). Well played, sir!

Today’s nominee is Komitas, the pioneering Armenian composer and musicologist. I’ve run across his music before, but I had never seen this particular photo of him until today. It’s not just the monk’s hood—it’s the look of bemused disdain, as if someone in the room has just asked an incredibly tactless question.

Komitas had an undeserved end—he died in a Paris psychiatric hospital, mentally crushed by his experience during the Armenian nightmare of 1915—but his music shows equal parts austerity and humor, and he had a particularly searching ear for rich and unusual sonorities. (Lots of good listening here.)

Major League Baseball has been having this rolling series of opening days this year—games in Japan and Washington—which is silly, since everybody knows that the capital-letter Opening Day only happens when your team gets going, so they might as well do them all at the same time. Which is why it’s today (2:20 PM EST, Zambrano vs. Sheets) that we’ll do an Opening Day post.

My loyalties lie elsewhere than here in Massachusetts, but here’s a little something for the hometown crowd—M. J. Messer’s “Una Schottische,” published in 1874, and “Dedicated to the Una Base Ball Club of Charlestown—Junior Champions 1870-72-73.” In 1960, the late Robert Cantwell offered an appreciation:

The amateur clubs were still in existence, and the junior champions were a club from a Boston suburb, called the Una Base Ball Club. When the Una nine won the championship again in 1873 it electrified a Boston dance music composer named M. J. Messer, of whom nothing is known except that he wrote the “Una Schottische” in honor of the victory. With this piece of music, baseball came very near winning a timeless composition in its honor. Perhaps the only barrier to its lasting popularity was its title. The “Una Schottische” was as vivid and lighthearted as the tunes of Oklahoma! almost a century later, and like that music possessed a charming country-dance or outdoor air; it was a work of happy enthusiasm that made it ideally suited for the band concerts that once accompanied ball games.

And here it is: just the sort of music to wax your handlebar mustache and beat up an Irish immigrant by.



I think I’ll go get a hot dog.

Sports Illustrated is the latest publication to put its archives online, which means I can link to this 1979 article by Sean Kellogg about the athleticism of singing opera. Includes interviews with Sherrill Milnes and Luciano Pavarotti, who compliments some leading ladies: “For a big voice you need incredible muscular power to go to the top. Birgit Nilsson is very strong. The same with Joan Sutherland. She’s a very athletic girl.” And Kellogg anticipates Morris Robinson:

The strength required to sing is the reason you find so many mesomorphs in opera—the same body type usually found in football or weight lifting. Mesomorphs are bulky and muscular and tend to gain weight easily. A number of opera singers are obviously no exception.

Consider four of the top male singers in the world. Placido Domingo stands 6’2″ and weighs 225 pounds; Milnes is 6’2″, 212 pounds; Martti Talvela 6’7″, 250 pounds; and Pavarotti 6’1″, about 240 pounds. That’s a front four Bear Bryant would covet.

(I’ll let Opera Chic photoshop that one.) Nothing a fan doesn’t already know, but still a fun read.

BONUS! From September 29, 1969, Seiji Ozawa falls on his butt:

Seiji Ozawa is a guest conductor with the New York Philharmonic and a second baseman for the Penguins, the orchestra’s softball team. Earlier this month, while the Philharmonic was performing at Iowa State, the Penguins took on a fraternity team. The Penguins won the game 9-8 but almost lost a conductor. Ozawa was knocked down by a determined base runner and suffered a fractured coccyx. It’s nice that conducting is something you do standing up.

I’m playing a recital this weekend (for which I’m behind on practicing; hence the lack of posts) that includes a set of Brahms’ folksong arrangements, which I’ve heard, but somehow never performed. They’re fascinating: Brahms adopts a fairly light touch, compositionally—one or two accompanimental ideas per song—but going through them, you can clearly hear how much of, say, Ein Deutsches Requiem was intended to be deliberately reminiscent of folksong.

Every time I play a classical folksong arrangement, I think of something I once heard baritone Sanford Sylvan say in a masterclass. He was coaching a singer on a Britten arrangement, trying to get her to do all the things that classical singers do—inventing a subtext, imagining a dramatic situation with personal resonance—in order to communicate the emotional content of the song. And then, as an aside, he pointed out that this is pretty much the opposite of what real folksingers do. Folksingers don’t create the illusion of emotion; they just tell the story.

This isn’t to say that folksingers don’t worry about the emotion of the song, but that they trust the lyrics to carry that emotion. Here’s Joan Baez singing the old labor anthem “Joe Hill” at Woodstock in 1969:



If I was going to do an arrangement of “Joe Hill,” I would be inclined to try and musically portray the emotional content—shift the harmony, or dynamics, or texture to capture the mystery of Joe Hill’s appearance, the violence of his downfall, the defiant hope of his legacy. Baez doesn’t do any of that; the verses are musically indistinguishable from each other. She’s just telling the story. It’s brilliantly effective on its own.

There’s an interesting historical divide in the difference between folk music and classical music. Most classical music does tell a story of a sort—even “absolute” music can be thought of as a series of emotional evocations onto which the listener can project an imaginary narrative. But the emotional arc is what matters. Nevertheless, there’s a smaller group of classical works that, in a curious way, have a sensibility closer to that of folk music, and those are pieces that tell the story of their own construction, that act out their own assembly. Now, a few weeks ago in this space, there was quite the to-do over the relationship between, and primacy of, compositional “process” and emotional effect, so I’m going to try to avoid the loaded word “process” here as much as I can. Let’s just say that such pieces fall under a general category of what I’ll call construction narratives. You can find them in just about every period of music history.

Construction narratives in general are pretty common. Basic examples range from the rather cut-and-dry—cable standbys like the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel are full of programs like “How It’s Made”—to the downright sublime, as in the books of David Macauley. (If you’re my age, you remember this precursor.) But variations abound. The Food Network is nothing but construction narratives: the dramatic arc of every program goes from raw ingredients to a finished meal, with close-ups of each successive transformation along the way. Heist movies are basically construction narratives. So, in fact, are a lot of backstage musicals. Over the weekend, my lovely wife and I caught a broadcast of the Fred Astaire-Judy Garland vehicle Easter Parade, which is built around a theatrical construction: build the dance, build the act, build the show—fall in love along the way. (Skip to the 5:00 mark of this clip and you can see the scandalously underrated Jules Munshin satirize the Food Network, still a half-century in the future.)

Even high-concept self-referential construction narratives aren’t all that unusual anymore. Pirandello and Ionesco spring to mind in theater, not to mention James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George (the bulk of whose second act, after all, consists of a song called “Putting It Together”). There are movies about movies—Singin’ In the Rain, 8½. There’s the visual arts—here’s Richard Dorment talking about Jasper Johns’ early paintings in the current issue of The New York Review of Books:

Whereas Rothko’s floating expanses of dark color seemed to offer the possibility that art can provide transcendental spiritual experience, Johns’s work was down to earth. A flag or target by Johns is a real object occupying a real space, which the artist made by using certain procedures in a certain order. In his paintings you don’t find anything that Johns didn’t deliberately put into them—and that the viewer can’t see that he put into them. This is the moral center of his art. It doesn’t lie, it doesn’t deceive, and it doesn’t signify anything other than what the viewer can see in front of his eyes.

That’s a description that could easily apply to a lot of non-programmatic serial music, or more austere examples of minimalism—or, indeed, a traditional fugue. (William Walton made the fugue-construction connection explicit with his musical accompaniment to the manufacture of Spitfires in the WWII film The First of the Few.)

I can’t vouch for all those other media, but I’ve always had the sense that construction narratives in music are definitely a minority taste. Now, I could make the case that all music necessarily communicates aural information about its own construction—you need to be able to hear at least some of how a piece is put together in order to make any sense of the form. But pieces that put such information front-and-center generally get tagged with such criticisms as “arid,” “academic,” “intellectual,” &c. I myself tend to like such works—maybe since I fancy myself a composer, I have no trouble imagining the emotional aspects of creation, and superimposing that emotional narrative on the unfolding construction I’m presented with. But I have a sneaking suspicion this is yet another hangover of that that ultimate emotional-cultural bender, 19th-century Romanticism.

I’ve written before about one of the main differences between Classicism and Romanticism, the knowable process vs. the unknowable leap. There’s a certain amount of that dichotomy in the devaluing of musical construction narratives—Romantics thought that rational artistic forms and processes obscured the sort of emotional effects they were after—but really, it’s far more complex and interesting a situation. Particularly in music, Romantic freedom never completely eclipsed Classical order, and ever since, the two have been circling each other like dogs. One could write a fairly deep history of art since 1900 based around tracing the tension between formal propriety and emotional promiscuity.

That’s from a creator’s standpoint, though. What about the audience? I wonder if a steady erosion of musical literacy has taken its toll on the viability of construction narratives. If you’ve never played an instrument, never translated musical ideas into notation, never worked through the coordination of a piece of chamber music, you can certainly still end up a music lover—it’s strong stuff—but the emotional experience of working with the building blocks might remain foreign, unavailable for reference. Such music has the most traction when an emotional narrative is layered on top of it, as in opera—minimalism proved well-suited to the genre, and Wozzeck, for example, never seems to fall victim to the alleged serialist box-office curse.

Musical construction narratives will still be created—composers, after all, have a built-in emotional connection to the act of creation. In a way, pieces that revel in their own process are like folksongs for composers, the vernacular music of a land inhabited exclusively by pitch and rhythm. It’s kind of ironic that the Romantics seized on folk culture as a lifeline, a balm for Classical formality—such “untrained” art was a more direct pathway to emotional communication. But the result, in “high” art, was a premium on emotional expression that relegated a big part of folksong’s sensibility to the background. Of course, in order to do that, music still needs to be built—even Wagner’s operas are intricate clockwork, their leitmotif construction guiding the listener across the carefully delineated landscape. Unnoticed servants, nevertheless setting the table in plain view. Reversing the upstairs and downstairs of the musical house on occasion is not, on the face of it, an invalid narrative strategy.

Art has gotten so mixed up in the past century that even trying to separate out each impulse is tricky. Sondheim’s George is an artist, and a musical, concerned with (as the character says) order, composition, and balance, yet the core of that show is the inchoate, inarticulate nature of creativity, and the difficulty of integrating that into everyday life. Serialism reimposed classical order on musical expressionism with a result that, to many listeners, uncannily evoked violent chaos. The mechanical, repetitive discipline of minimalism can carry waves of emotional power.

In 1950, Jean Cocteau released quite possibily the most perfect depiction of the Romantic ethos, his film Orphée. The poet Orphée thinks he has found his artistic salvation when he finds a car radio broadcasting a narrated stream of seemingly random numbers. For him, it is a Romantic ideal, a creative source completely unmediated by process or model. But numbers imply order and instruction, and Orphée’s new creative routine—in the front seat, diligently taking dictation—is a model of monastic discipline compared with his brawling colleagues. It’s also a movie explicitly about creation and the mechanism of the artistic method. Orphée has discovered a new process he thinks will be his salvation. He ends up crossing between the upper world and the underworld, a passage marked by ritual and rules, a bureaucratic tribunal, and the consequences of violating order are too terrible to mention. The philosophy is Romantic—the movie is not only Classical, but almost folk-like in its everyday realism. Everything is matter-of-fact: the ban on Orphée looking at his wife bursts into the real world with sitcom absurdity, and the logistics of death are translated into mid-century plausibility, with motorcycle delivery and a checking of the files. Towards the beginning, a critic tells Orphée—and, implicitly, the movie—to “amaze us.” Cocteau does so, it turns out, by just telling the story.

Needless to say, critic-at-large Moe is licking his chops after reading this story.

[A proposed] bill submitted to the Tuscan regional parliament… would allow pet owners in Tuscany to take their cats, dogs and other animals to any sort of public place—including museums, cinemas and even theatres.

(Via.) Even theatres—Opera Chic may have herself some canine competition. Talk about real-time criticism: if Moe likes my practicing, he curls up under the piano. If he doesn’t, he drops a drool-laden ball in my lap and barks at me. Is that really all that different from the La Scala loggione?

On the other hand, I don’t know if we’re ready to pack up for Europe, and domestically, I fear that Moe won’t be sitting in that Met box anytime soon. (They’ll let ’em onstage but not in the seats.) Still, a dog can dream. (Though, on a sad note, and all his theatrical anti-feline bluster aside, Moe is truly sorry that he won’t have the chance to chase Bert up the Grand Tier on the way into that 2010-11 Nixon in China. Condolences and—no mean feat for a terrier—a moment of silence.)