Courtesy of Kyle Gann, four minutes of Oscar Peterson playing an eight-bar blues of Lisztian transcendence. Jesus mercy.

Two of my heroes when I was a kid were Peterson, for reasons obvious to anyone who remembers what it’s like to be a beginning pianist, and my dad, for (among other things) looking the other way when I essentially appropriated all of his Oscar Peterson records and played the hell out of them. He and my mom saw the man himself a few times when he would make periodic appearances at the London House in Chicago. I’m jealous.

It’s that time of year again—the shopping, the malls, the conspicuous consumption—you know, gift time. And you’re completely stymied as to what to get the composer in your life. CDs? Pens? A paying job? Here’s a few suggestions to help cross those remaining names off your list.

Is it baby’s first Christmas / Hanukkah / Kwanzaa / Dies Natalis Solis Invicti? Soothe the little prodigy to sleep in the new year with a brand-new music box—a Stockhausen music box, that is! Yes, the tinkling sounds of one of the foremost avant-garde composers of our fractured modern world can inspire your infant to dream of being an angel made completely of light accompanying the vibrations of space and time themselves on a cosmic trumpet. Once they get to Kindergarten, imagine how quotidian the other children will seem! (Actually, when I was a toddler, I had a beloved music box that played the theme from “Camelot,” and look how I turned out. Imagine if I had been winding up one of these.)

If all you want for Christmas is to escape your humdrum existence, you’re in luck—now you can be Pulitzer-prize-winning composer Michael Colgrass for a day! Heck, you can be Michael Colgrass for the rest of your life once you find his entire archive of manuscripts and correspondence in your stocking. For a mere $135,000, you can fill your files with actual honored works commissioned by major ensembles, and leave a stack of mail from the likes of Sessions, Stravinsky, Cage, Copland, Persichetti, and Harold Pinter on your kitchen counter. Identity theft has never been so classy. Extra fun: go to town with a pencil and an eraser and hopelessly confuse generations of future musicologists!

Know somebody who turns every backyard cookout into an immolation scene? Someone who sends every steak and chop to a charred, kerosene-scented Valhalla? Let them tend that magic fire in style with this Richard Wagner BBQ apron. Now your Saturday-afternoon Siegfried can grill those burgers until they’re tougher than Nothung itself, and remain unmolested by the Fafner and Fasolt of spills and splatters—so that once your meal is plunged into a river of inedibility, he’ll still be clean enough to take you out. (OK, OK, I’ll stop now.)


The female (or cross-dressing) scribbler on your list will love these “Composer” pumps by designer Richard Tyler. The shoe “features corset-style lacing” over a leopard-print insert—nothing says “music of the future” like faux-leopard bondage gear! Besides, it’s “flirty”—and we all know how composers need to attract new audiences. (What? You want them to like you for your music? Good luck with that.)

And finally, for the person who has everything, and thus is in desperate need of sabotage from jealous colleagues, head over to eBay for this copy of Pietro Deiro and Alfred d’Auberge’s Atonal Studies for Accordion. After your successful composer tastes the forbidden fruit of the 12-tone squeezebox, everything else will seem bland and pointless—and the resulting string of Schoenbergian polkas will send that once-promising career further south than Roald Amundsen. (Honestly? I want this one bad. And the music box, too. I love that music box. And I’ve been pretty good this year! I mean, for me.)

All was happy-go-lucky joy; and, at two o’clock, as Branton Hills’ Municipal Band, (a part of Gadsby’s Organization of Youth’s work, you know) struck up a bright march, not a glum physiognomy was found in all that big park.

Gadsby and Lucy had much curiosity in watching what such crashing music would do to various animals. At first a spirit akin to worry had baboons, gorillas, and such, staring about, as still as so many posts; until, finding that no harm was coming from such sounds, soon took to climbing and swinging again. Stags, yaks and llamas did a bit of high-kicking at first; Gadsby figuring that drums, and not actual music, did it. But a lilting waltzing aria did not worry any part of this big zoo family; in fact, a fox, wolf and jackal, in a quandary at first actually lay down, as though music truly “hath charms to calm a wild bosom.”

—Ernest Vincent Wright,
Gadsby, 1939

IGOR STRAVINSKY was such a firebird that he loved going to the zoo “to watch the wild animals at feeding time, when they devoured the raw meat.”

“Shadows From a Lunarium,”
Time Magazine, February 24, 1958
(review of First Person Plural by Dagmar Godowsky)

Some say that music hath charms
To soothe the savage beast
I’ve also heard some people say
That enough is as good as a feast
Now I once paid court to a maid
I’d have stuck to her too, like gum
But she went music mad, alas
Thro’ her violent taste for the drum

G.W. Hunt, “Music Hath Charms”

It’s the time of year when people show up at your house and you have to feed them, so I’ve been using my brief snatches of spare time to browse through cookbooks. One of my favorites (partially because it tends toward the impractical) is the venerable Larousse Gastronomique. One of the fun things about it, at least the old edition: it’s got a fair amount of food named after composers.

Most chef wannabes know about dishes named for Rossini: take just about any foodstuff, cover it with a Madiera sauce, and garnish it with truffles and sautéed foie gras, and voila! you’ve got [foodstuff] Rossini. But there’s more where that came from, and, oddly, most of them seem to be egg dishes. Here’s a few:

Oeufs Auber: Stuffed halved tomatoes with a chicken forcemeat mixed with chopped truffles. Top each tomato with a soft-boiled or poached egg. Make a velouté sauce (white sauce) flavored with tomato paste; at the last minute, add a julienne of truffles that have been cooked in sherry. Cover the eggs with the sauce.

Oeufs Berlioz: Make some oval croustades from Duchesse potato mixture, and brown them in the oven. Fill the croustades with a salpiçon of truffles and mushrooms blended with a thick Madiera sauce. Top each croustade with a soft-boiled or poached egg. Lightly cover the eggs with a sauce Suprême (velouté enriched with cream). Fill the middle of the dish with fried cock’s combs à la Villeroi (poached in court-boullion and dredged in breadcrumbs).

Oeufs Bizet: Butter individual molds and line them with finely chopped pickled tongue and truffles. Break an egg into each mold and poach them in a bain-marie. Cook some artichoke hearts in butter. Unmold the eggs and place one on each artichoke heart. Cover with a Périgueux sauce (demi-glace with chopped truffles). Garnish each egg with a slice of truffle.

Oeufs Meyerbeer: Garnish shirred eggs with grilled lamb kidney. Surround the eggs with a ring of Périgueux sauce.

I love offal, so that last one actually sounds pretty good to me. And the eggs Berlioz might make a fun weekend project the next time I’m in an Asian grocery that carries cock’s combs. But notice: every one of these composers has been dead for a century or more. All the composers who came after—what are they? Chopped liver? Literally? No, we have to fix this.

Eggs Carter: Break an egg into a pan with a multitude of other ingredients, and place on the stove. Continually and simultaneously vary both the temperature and the cooking time. The dish is done when the aggregate intervals of the other ingredients allegorically crush the individuality of the egg.

Eggs Ives: Cook the egg in water, clear water from a mountain lake that a dilettante might try to write a song about. Boil it—hard-boil it—until the yolk is a firm yellow globe—a sun shining on manly hearts with cleaned-out ears. Sissies like a runny yolk, but real beauty—natural beauty—is not to be found in liquidy prettiness—the pale imitations of the passing spectacle must give way to the hard truths of the soul. Emerson once said, “Yonder masterful cuckoo / Crowds every egg out of the nest.”

Eggs Feldman: Extremely soft-boiled. Durations are free.

Eggs Nancarrow: That’s huevos Nancarrow, you stupid gringo!

Eggs Partch: Build your own oven. Calibrate both the thermostat and the timer to non-Western scales of your own invention. Then bake the eggs at 943 degrees for 17,000 minutes, or until the yolks are set. Top each egg with a slice of peyote.

Eggs Rorem: January 23—Dinner at Lenny and Felicia’s with Judy Collins, Edward Albee, the Carters, Virgil, Gore, and Mayor Lindsay, who seemed to have wandered into the wrong apartment. Every course made from eggs, a typical Bernstein obsession that will burn bright and then fade by next week. At the end of dessert, Lenny pulls out a chafing dish and, with Hollywood flair, announces that he will make eggs in the true Parisian style, which he then attempts with American ingredients. When the Vicomtesse showed me how to make eggs, she only used Parisian ingredients. I know these ingredients exist, because I saw them when I was in Paris. I leave early, fleeing into the gray city snow. I must send an apologetic card to Felicia tomorrow. The snow makes one sad; the whole world looks fragile, like an eggshell.

Eggs Schwantner: Crack an egg into a crystal goblet. Run a moistened finger around the rim of the goblet until the egg is vibrating at the same frequency as background radiation from the Big Bang. Serve on a bed of maj7(#11) chords.

Eggs Strauss: Give an egg to a singer. Cover with the orchestra.

Eggs Zorn: Cook as many eggs as you like in as many different ways as you can think of. Serve them all on the same plate. Garnish with matzo.

Eggs Soho the Dog: Do a Google search for “egg recipes.” Pick the funniest one. Link to it. Repeat five times a week.

Who have I forgotten? Leave ’em in the comments, and I’ll post the most appetizing ones.

I told you not to mess with the Freemasons! Booing drives Alagna out of the La Scala Aida in a fit of petulance: Opera Chic has the marvelous details here, here, here, here, and here. (My, that is silly of me: just go here and scroll down.) I like applause as much as anyone, but I have to say my two favorite audience reactions are booing and dead silence: with the latter, you know you’ve got them, and with the former, well, better sincere booing than polite applause anyday.

Now, if you’re going to cause an operatic scandal with offensive props, it might help to actually hang onto them. The Deutsche Oper Berlin has somehow lost the fake severed heads of Jesus, Buddha, Poseidon, and, most crucially, the prophet Mohammed from that off-again, on-again production of Idomeneo that got everyone into a frenzy. If those heads aren’t up on eBay within the fortnight, the terrorists have won.

And in a break from silliness, Jeremy Eichler previews the upcoming CD release of the Lieberson Neruda Songs, and includes a sound clip, so you can see if it’s really as special (Yes. Yes, it is) as everyone keeps telling you. (One of the borrowed studios I accompany in at Boston Conservatory still has a poster for a student recital by Victoria Livengood and Lorraine Hunt, which I always find an unusually touching artifact.)

Geoff Edgers passes along news and photos of Mother Nature having her revenge on Tanglewood, no doubt for all the global warming caused by those post-concert backups of BMWs and Lexuses extending from West Street all the way to the Pike. The bulk of the damage seems to be to Seranak, the old Koussevitsky estate (named for Serge and Natalie Koussevitsky—it strikes me that if the missus and I were to do the same thing, our house would be called “Chummagoo”).

Full disclosure: I was a Tanglewood fellow the first year that they decided to house the composers at Miss Hall’s School, rather than the comparatively swankier confines of Seranak, so I can’t help feeling a little sense of karmic realignment. Ha! No, seriously, I have great memories of a couple of dinners up there—and the balcony is a breathtaking place to watch a storm roll in.

Geoff Pullum at Language Log wishes a happy birthday to Noam Chomsky—and explains why singing the appropriate song is more appropriate than you might think.

Meanwhile, Tears of a Clownsilly embarks on an unusually long slide into senility and decrepitude. Now that it’s all downhill from here, just think what you’ll save on gas!

I have no secret Romantic desire to die young. Some artistic types do, at least in a half-hearted way, but not me—and it’s not just that I’m greatly looking forward to being old and crotchety. The problem is, if you die young, then initial historical judgement is passed on you by your contemporaries, and often they can’t get past their initial impression of you, no matter how misleading.

I was thinking about this after playwright George Hunka posted a link to this page, where the Canadian Broadcasting Company has streamed a bunch of excerpts from Glenn Gould’s radio documentaries. If you’ve never heard these before, you’re in for a treat—Gould’s programs (on mostly non-musical subjects) are still ahead of their time, and entertaining as all get out.

Now, Gould (who died at the age of 50) is primarily remembered as a pianist and an eccentric, and often the latter more than the former. That’s because his posthumous reputation was shaped by people whose opinions were no doubt colored by memories of his first major public appearances in the 1950’s. Gould must have seemed like an alien—he came more or less out of nowhere, with a fully formed style that owed little to any existing school, and a collection of physical mannerisms that no doubt nearly upstaged his music-making. But his astonishing radio work (not to mention his engaging writings, as well as his film and television work) is a reminder that Gould was the real thing, a genius and a conscientious workaholic whose eccentricities were really the least interesting thing about him. Gould would have turned 75 this year, an age at which many musicians are still fully active; no doubt he would have had the opportunity to enjoy being a hero or a villian to at least a couple of subsequent generations. (And here’s one to think about: you know he would have had a blog.)

Here’s another example. My church choir just started rehearsing one of our Christmas favorites, “There shall a star come out of Jacob,” by Felix Mendelssohn. I’ve mentioned my love for Mendelssohn’s music here before, and this is no exception. I could talk volumes about this chorus, but I’ll just point out this short passage at measure 73, which might be one of the most perfectly realized tonal cadences of all time.


The D that the tenors linger over in 77 is an absolutely masterful stroke, coloring an otherwise textbook cadence with a lovely string of rich dissonances.


It’s remarkable enough out of context, but in context, it’s a catharsis of subtle but unmistakable power; Mendelssohn has spent the entire chorus preparing us for this moment. We’ve had fully-formed contrasting A and B sections, including a development where the melodies of both are ingeniously combined and played off of each other. The A material is soaring and lyrical, the B material darker and more violent, and it’s only at measure 79 that the lyricism wins out. And we know it, because it’s the first full V-I cadence in tonic since measure 10, and only the second one of the entire piece. (That’s long-range planning.) But that’s not even the true genius of this moment. The true genius is that it’s not the end of the piece. Mendelssohn has engineered this cadence to be but an exquisite curtain-raising for the coda: a simple but luminous harmonization of the old chorale tune “Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern.”

In other words, this is the work of a composer at the absolute top of his or anybody else’s game, writing music that unfolds its considerable glories with an effortless sure-footedness. This chorus, of course, is all that we have of Mendelssohn’s planned oratorio Christus, left unfinished at his ridiculously premature death. Every time I hear that cadence, hear Mendelssohn at the point where his craft will finally let him do whatever he wants to do, I can’t help thinking about the fact that it was, unwittingly, the end of his career. And you know what? I don’t feel sadness, or regret, or wistfulness: I’m downright pissed, pissed that he didn’t live to produce a normal life expectancy’s allotment of music, pissed that he didn’t get to let his imagination fly on the wings of his technical mastery, and pissed that he came to be remembered as simply a prodigy who had a certain flair for melody but somehow lacked the mettle and inner strength (you know, because he was a Jew) to excel in the “larger forms” that seemed to be the only criterion anybody knew how to apply in those days.

Which is why I fully intend to move heaven and earth in order to maintain my grip on this mortal coil. On the off chance that I actually get to the point Mendelssohn did, I want to be able to enjoy it for a while, and stick around long enough to supersede anyone’s indelible memory of me as a callow youth. And if I never reach that point? You can call me a failure, but you’ll have to do it to my wrinkled face.

Most Dances Properly Conducted until Liquor begins to take Effect
All the investigators report that up to about eleven p.m., generally speaking, the dances are well conducted; the crowd then begins to show the effect of too much liquor. Men and women become intoxicated and dance indecently such dances as “Walkin’ the Dog,” “On the Puppy’s Tail,” “Shaking the Shimmy,” “The Dip,” “The Stationary Wiggle,” etc. In some instances, little children—of whom there are often large numbers present—are given liquor and become intoxicated, much to the amusement of their elders. Many of them are forgotten by their parents in the excitement of the dance, and play upon the filthy floor, witnesses of all kinds of degradation.

—Louise de Koven Bowen,
The Public Dance Halls of Chicago
(Chicago, 1917)

All I can say is, if I ever write an homage to the Bach suites, I know what each movement will be called.

I was poking around the National Archives the other day, and I came across this:


If you ever needed proof of federal indifference to the musical arts, there you have it; that is the most overcooked canned lima bean of a propaganda poster I’ve ever seen. Music inspires… what, exactly? Gazing into the sky? Greek revival fashions? And is that woman having a hallucination of a marching band? Good heavens.

Frankly, I expect more from our government fearmongers. For the taxes we’re paying, they ought to be able to scare a few composers:


And singers:


And audience members:


Ahhhh… being frightened into conformity is so comforting, isn’t it?