Photo of the day from Reuters. That’s Brian Wilson, looking pretty much as I’d look if I found myself trapped between Diana Ross and Condolezza Rice. Wilson was fêted at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors with, among other things, a medley of his songs performed by Hootie and the Blowfish. Hootie and the Blowfish, huh? Can you excuse me for a moment? (sound of head banging against wall)

Elsewhere, Lord Goldsmith is recommending that some lyrics to “God Save the Queen” be changed. I’d start with the second verse, which has long spread the pernicious idea that “cause” and “voice” somehow rhyme. (Critic-at-large Moe suggests working in something about paws.) Or just scrap the whole thing and start over.

And film critic Jim Emerson has a good time comparing Bob Dylan to Beethoven’s Ninth. (If you’ve never seen director Todd Haynes’ infamous all-Barbie-doll Karen Carpenter biopic, you really should.)

Hanukkah starts at sundown tonight. I should come up with a celebratory post, but honestly, am I going to top last year’s? Not bloody likely. So think of it as one of those endlessly repeated holiday specials. Shalom!

Via The Concert and Deceptively Simple, a fine meme/questionnaire/procrastination aid.

The rules:

1. Put your iTunes/ music player on Shuffle
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER WHAT

CAPITAL LETTERS! I MUST OBEY!

1. If someone says ‘Is this OK?’ you say?
“America” (Van Dyke Parks’ arrangement from Tokyo Rose).
There’s a bright future for me in politics, apparently.

2. What would best describe your personality?
“Wonderful” (Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers).
Thanks, Sam! I left the money in your dressing room.

3. What do you like in a girl?
“Pu Pu Pa Doo” (The Gaynotes).
No way I’m touching that one.

4. How do you feel today?
Berg: “Im Zimmer” from Sieben frühe Lieder (Anne Sofie von Otter/Bengt Forsberg).
“When my eye rests so in yours, as quietly the minutes pass.” I love you, too, computer!

5. What is your life’s purpose?
Britten: “The Death of Nicholas” from Saint Nicholas (the old Decca Britten/Pears recording).
Revenge shall be mine.

6. What is your motto?
“I Can’t Go On (Rosalie)” (Fats Domino).
That’s me—Samuel Beckett without the follow-through.

7. What do your friends think of you?
Poulenc: “Toréador” (Michel Sénéchal/Dalton Baldwin).
Scoff all you want, but bolero jackets are making a comeback.

8. What do you think of your parents?
Brahms: Symphony no. 2: III. Allegretto grazioso (quasi andantino)—Presto ma non assai—Tempo I (Wiener Philharmoniker/Bernstein).
Coincidentally, the tempo marking of pretty much every report card review of my childhood.

9. What do you think about very often?
Schumann: “O wie Lieblich,” op. 138, no. 3 (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau/Jörg Demus).
My wife is distractingly cute, OK?

10. What does 2+2=?
“C’est Si Bon” (Don Byron, from Don Byron Plays the Music of Mickey Katz).
Two plus two? It’s all good! L’chaim!

11. What do you think of your best friend?
Adams: “Landing of the Spirit of ’76” from Nixon in China.
Well, every time I go to his house, I do have to shake the hands of all his ministers.

12. What do you think of the person you like?
Donizetti: “Voglio dire, lo stupendo elisir” from L’elisir d’amore (Battle/Pavarotti/Levine).
It sure is.

13. What is your life story?
Wolf: “Das Köhlerweib is trunken” (Elisabeth Schwarzkopf/Gerald Moore).
I was tricked by red wine. Is that an accepted legal defense plea?

14. What do you want to be when you grow up?
Tallis: The Lamentations of Jeremiah: Ghimel. Migravit Juda propter afflictionem (Pro Cantione Antiqua).
Judah is gone into captivity because of affliction, and because of great servitude: she dwelleth among the heathen, she findeth no rest: all her persecutors overtook her between the straits. A restless, cranky old man. I’m well on my way.

15. What do you think when you see the person you like?
Bach: “Ich folge dir Gleichfalls” from St. John Passion (Elly Ameling).
I likewise follow you with eager steps and will not forsake you, my Light and my Life. Let it not be said that I don’t know what’s good for me.

16. What do your parents think of you?
“I Know You Got Soul” (Eric B. and Rakim).
Thanks, Mom and Dad! I left the money in your dressing room.

17. What will you dance to at your wedding?
Bernstein: “A Boy Like That,” from West Side Story (original Broadway cast).
Not actually what I danced to at my wedding, and truth be told, I’m kind of kicking myself.

18. What will they play at your funeral?
“Que Sera, Sera” (Sly and the Family Stone).
How do you sum up a man’s life? Meh.

19. What is your hobby/interest?
“Keep Your Hand on the Plow” (Mahalia Jackson).
Wait, I have to get something to pull the plow, too? No wonder nothing’s growing.

20. What is your biggest secret?
“I Don’t Like Mondays” (The Boomtown Rats).
That’s no secret! Well, the shooting part, maybe.

21. What do you think of your friends?
“Heard It Through the Grapevine” (The Slits).
As soon as they read this post, they’ll find out on the sly.

22. What should you post this as?
“Last Fair Deal Gone Down” (Robert Johnson).

In my ADD way, I rarely revisit topics once I’ve posted on them—I say what I have to say, and them I’m done. (Of course, some topics always pique my interest, usually for strange reasons: the gilt Art Nouveau rotary hotline has been silent as of late—hello?) So I wasn’t planning on further deconstruction of the whole Gustavo Dudamel-Hugo Chávez-Venezuela thing, but it’s been flaring up again (Although, as Darcy points out, we’ve probably been focusing on the wrong demagogue).

The opposition to El Sistema is basically this: Chávez is awful, El Sistema has connections with Chávez, therefore it’s tainted, no matter how much good it does. Patrick at The Penitent Wagnerite (linked above) put it this way:

You cannot assert that Chávez is bad, but part of his regime (no matter when it was founded) is good, without contradicting yourself and implying that Chávez is good. It’s just that simple.

Here’s my question (which goes well beyond the ostensible topic at hand): why is this whole evil-tainting-good idea invariably a one-way street? Patrick paints himself into a corner because his definitions of “evil” and “good” are so acid-and-base exclusive. (A professor I know would have diagnosed this as “hardening of the categories.”) But even those of us who take a more pragmatic (or, from a pejorative standpoint, “morally relative”) standpoint still have a tendency to default to the same direction of moral flow. Evil taints good, but good doesn’t, as it were, taint evil.

I wonder how far back in human history that lopsided equation goes. Pandora’s Box, maybe? Adam’s fall? Unusually for this infidel, I thought of a biblical passage, from Mark’s Gospel:

And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.

My suspicion is that the modern iteration of the unwashable stain is a hangover from the rise of Nazi Germany. Many decent people chose to take a charitable view of Hitler for too long, with disastrous results—as a result, our reflex is to believe the worst of any even mildly evil figure, and morally quarantine ourselves.

But take a look at that passage from Mark again: the point isn’t that evil needs to be violently amputated from our souls, the point is that even flawed souls can, on balance, be saved. The morally maimed can still enter into eternal life. Your hand is evil? Your foot? Your eye? That’s OK—it’s not like you’re all evil.

Jesus, in other words, was optimistic about the human soul. If you’re afraid of being infected by the evil you see in Chávez and his ilk, you’re too late: it’s been there all along. That’s the pessimistic reality of the human condition that we’re all-too-familiar with after the last couple of centuries—the darkness that resides in all of us, periodically, sometimes catastrophically erupting into the world. But we miss the optimism: sure, there’s evil in everyone’s soul, but most of us don’t let it erupt. It manifests itself as petty selfishness or occasional intolerance, but not authoritarian megalomania. We try our best to be good people, and that good taints our evil. Is it enough? Not always—sometimes not even often. So what do we do? We keep trying. It’s foolishly optimistic. And foolishness is the most universal human trait there is.

Chávez, by the way, lost his bid to alter the constitution and make himself permanently re-electable. Did he call in the army? Declare the election invalid? Throw it into the courts? Nope—he sucked it up and gave a concession speech. At least in this instance, he did the right thing. Did some of El Sistema’s good taint his soul? Probably not—but considering the possibility is a nice workout for an intellectual muscle that, it seems, we may have forgotten how to use.

This year has been a pretty good one for Stravinsky—Stravinsky the horse, that is. The 11-year-old stallion, son of the legendary Nureyev (take a second to properly categorize that nugget of information) now spends his days shuttling between stud farms in New Zealand and Australia, and the track success of his progeny has him currently ranked as the season’s 11th-most-valuable sire in Australo-Asian thoroughbred racing.

His European ranking—51st—reflects more quality than quantity, being based in large part on one horse, the aptly named Soldier’s Tale (other Stravinsky offspring include Korsakoff, Balmont, and Pulcinella). Back in June, Soldier’s Tale won the Golden Jubilee Stakes at Royal Ascot with a furious close in the final furlongs—which made for quite the storybook ending:

When [Soldier’s Tale] was 2, he was unable to race because he had bad knees. He managed to run two races as a 3-year-old and win one of them, but then broke a leg, requiring surgery and six screws. A year later, the horse came back to win two more races, but then had another fracture. Then there was the colic.

“We were within five minutes of putting him down, but he just showed such a will to live,” [trainer Jeremy] Noseda said. “I know it sounds sappy and all that, but he’s like a personal friend now. I come out and see him every night – I stick my head out of the door and call ‘Spam’ and he answers back.”

Yes, the horse’s nickname is “Spam,” which is so simultaneously inappropriate and endearing that it pretty much made my day.

News from here and there while I wait for Gruppen to finish downloading….

The British seem to be in a mood for marathons: first Vexations, then Scarlatti: the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester organized a performance of all 555 of Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas last Sunday, in six overlapping recitals, packing a day-and-a-half’s worth of music into a comparatively breezy twelve hours. Here’s my favorite detail:

Punters will be able to hear 449 of the sonatas for nothing (the other six will be played by Aleksandar Madzar in the final pay-to-get-in recital) and can make their selections with the help of a giant screen listing which piece is being played where and when.

I had an image of a Departure/Arrival screen in an airport. L. 263 is now boarding… L. 397 is delayed….

From around the blogosphere: Jeremy Denk revolutionizes music theory (and manages to avoid a “snap, crackle, pop” reference—you’re a stronger man than I am); ANABlog looks into the future (Utopia? Dystopia? Depends on how well she plays it, I guess); Brian Sacawa (via Darcy) unearths the subliminal seed for an entire generation of avant-garde composers (I heard that soundtrack on a regular basis from age 5 on up, now I’m listening to Gruppen—coincidence?). And I’m a little late on this one, but Andy at The Black Torrent Guard is taking nominations in possible anticipation of this year’s Most Annoying Song contest.

Finally, Chevy Chase reveals just how crazy “Saturday Night Live” nearly got:

But meantime, did you know that “West Side Story” composer Leonard Bernstein almost guest-hosted “SNL” in its first season? “The idea of John [Belushi] and Danny [Aykroyd] coming out doing a number from that show cracked us up,” Chevy recalls.

He and writer Tom Schiller were invited by Bernstein to the New York Philharmonic to discuss the idea. After the show they went to see the famous virtuoso with a penchant for young men backstage.

“He put his hand on my knee. When we were leaving, he kissed me full-on, on the lips. I wagged my finger at him and said, ‘No, no, no.’ And that was the last we ever heard from him.”

A hell of a town.

Practicing has been less of a chore lately due to a larger-than-usual concentration of songs by Francis Poulenc in the to-do pile. Poulenc has an unshakeable spot in the top bracket of my all-time favorite composers, but it’s hard to explain exactly why. I usually fall back on turning the most common Poulenc criticism inside-out: yes, I say, he just wrote the same song over and over again, but it’s a song I happen to like. A joke, but in a way, it starts to get at just what it is about his music I find so endlessly bewitching.

Two of the songs I’m practicing this week—the “Air champêtre” from the 1931 Airs chantés, and “Il vole” from the 1939 cycle Fiançailles pour rire—both end with nearly identical passages. The “Air champêtre”:

And “Il vole”:

That figure—the repeated open-voiced roulade outlining V7-I—sounds an awful lot like a stock gesture, but I’ve only ever run across it in Poulenc. And I think that’s one of the keys to what makes Poulenc’s music tick: his ability to come up with patterns and phrases that sound like clichés, but are completely idiosyncratic and original.

More than that, though—it’s not just his facility for melodic invention, but the fact that he uses such passages as if they were pre-existing clichés. Neither the “Air champêtre” nor “Il vole” foreshadow or set up the closing figure in any way; it’s just dropped in, tacked on, like a trill over V-I in Mozart or a 4-3 suspension in a Lutheran chorale. Poulenc is, I think, having some fun with the semiotics of musical endings. We’re used to pieces ending with a predictable plugged-in cadential module; Poulenc plugs in a module, but it’s not the predicted one, and our musical expectations are yanked in two directions at once.

Poulenc’s fondness for these kinds of endings—a sudden, brief introduction of new material—owes something to Schumann lieder, and both composers exploit an ability to make such endings feel like the product of unconscious intuition rather than deliberate calculation. But where Schumann’s often extensive postludes serve to bring to the fore the emotions that have been simmering under the surface, Poulenc’s have the effect of hinting at an unfamiliar vernacular just out of earshot. To compare with another composer: if Webern’s music sounds like it comes from a planet where nobody composes like earthlings do, Poulenc’s music sounds like it comes from a planet where everybody composes like Poulenc. It has both the satisfaction of tradition and the frisson of originality. It feels like common practice music, but the practice itself is completely individual.

Poulenc’s illusion of an established rhetoric creates a similar combination of intimacy and disorientation as literary experiments with invented languages—compare the fictional Russlish of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, for example. For Poulenc, though, it’s also crucial to his sense of musical structure, which is surprisingly disjunct. Perhaps some of this is due to his fondness for setting Surrealist and proto-Surrealist poetry, but I think that, even more, it reflects the influence of cinema, which, after all, was the most avant-garde medium of the young composer’s day. (That “Il vole” cadence, implacably winding around itself, sounds like nothing so much as the last few frames of film lapping against the take-up reel.) Poulenc almost completely eschews a Romantic sense of development in favor of cinematic montage—but it doesn’t seem random or scattershot, because his musical materials always feel like they’re serving some pre-existing symbolic or rhetorical purpose, even if it’s a completely invented one.

In other words, I think Poulenc knew exactly what he was doing: taking the raw materials of tonal music and finding a way to make them behave in a radical way. He figured out how to take his ear for sensuous tonal beauty and his avant-garde aesthetic and, not just cleverly patch them together, but actually have the two reinforce each other. It’s a long way from the insouciance of Les Biches or “Toréador” to the devastating power of Dialogues des Carmélites, even though the basic musical language, amazingly, has hardly changed.

Darcy James Argue had this to say this week about one of his favorite composers: “I can’t help but feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with people who would dismiss music of such astounding vitality and artistry because it happens also to be very pretty.” I would say the same thing about Poulenc—in fact, the more years I spend with his music, the more I realize that its sheer prettiness is, in fact, one of the least interesting things about it, and, given how damned pretty it is, that’s saying something. The real beauty of Poulenc’s music goes very deep indeed.

Just in time for the annual holiday orgy of rampant consumerism, Strauss and Mahler (previously: 1, 2, 3) have gone into business selling t-shirts. Click on this link, and you’ll find the pair in all their countercultural glory on a variety of apparel, suitable for kids from 2 to however many years one can expect to pile up with an uncompromising artistic vision and a difficult wife. Makes a great albeit potentially nonplussing gift! (Any and all profits, by the way, will benefit this place, which, as causes go, is one of the good ones.)

The great French choreographer Maurice Béjart died yesterday. I blogged about Béjart a few months back; his work has a combination of rigor, joy, and charm that any medium could claim as its holy grail.

More copyright hilarity: a decade-old squabble over the rights to the songs of Jerome Kern has a new lease on life:

The granddaughter of the late composer Jerome Kern won the latest round in a long-standing legal dispute with the manager of a trust that oversees royalties from hits like Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and The Way You Look Tonight.

The nearly 10-year-old conflict made its way to the Kentucky Supreme Court, which on Wednesday reversed a lower court ruling that could have put the case to rest.

The wheels of justice grind exceeedingly fine: this decision only sets forth whether the Kentucky courts are the proper venue to hear the case or not. You can read the overturned Court of Appeals verdict here: basically, Linda Kern Cummings claims that R. Andrew Boose, the attorney who manages the trust that controls Kern’s copyrights, improperly took advantage of the “diminished capacity” of Betty Kern-Miller, Jerome’s daughter, to alter the terms of her will back in the 90s. I haven’t found a whole lot of background on the case, but it bears some hallmarks of a family feud—one of the defendants is Steven Kern Shaw, Cummings’ half-brother, and also the son of clarinetist and bandleader Artie Shaw: as of this 2005 New York Times story, the younger Shaw was nowhere to be found, and when one finds his own notoriously blunt father calling him “a very weird kid” in public (scroll down), you start to get an inkling why.

Nevertheless, I will remind everyone that Jerome Kern died in 1945; the fact that people are still hiring attorneys to tangle over his royalties 60-plus years later tells you something about the strange state of our current intellectual property regime. And some of those royalties are apparently earmarked as charitable bequests, as Cummings is also suing the Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind. After hearing that, critic-at-large Moe, not surprisingly, showed teeth.

Julia Margaret Cameron: Saint Cecilia after the manner of Raphael, c.1865
Albumen print from a collodion-on-glass negative
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

The Royals: “Shrine of St. Cecilia,” 1953 (MP3, 1.6 MB)

A cover of a minor Andrews Sisters hit, coming shortly after Hank Ballard joined the group, and shortly before they recorded their breakout hit, “Work With Me Annie,” and changed their name to the Midnighters.