I returned home from my usual Thursday hike in the woods with critic-at-large Moe (who has new reviews coming, he swears) to find it’s now more-or-less official that the Democrats have retaken both houses of Congress, which, in historical terms, is a fairly significant pasting. Tough luck, Republicans! But, like the song says, it’s all in the game.

You don’t know that song? You should—it’s composition is but one unlikely highlight of one of the more spectacularly adventurous résumés to ever come out of the Republican party. I refer to the career of Vice-President, bureaucrat, banker, Nobel laureate, and, yes, unexpected hitmaker Charles Gates “Hell and Maria” Dawes. (His vice-presidential bust, by sculptor Jo Davidson, is at right.)

Born in Ohio into an illustrious family (look up “William Dawes” in a history of the Revolutionary War sometime), Dawes picked up a law degree before being sent to Nebraska to watch over the real estate holdings of Ohio’s ex-governor. There, he became friends with his political opposite, William Jennings Bryan; Dawes wrote his first book to argue against Bryan’s free-silver monetary policies. (Bryan wanted to move off the gold standard to boost prices for farmers; Dawes, as we’ll see, tried to do right by farmers in his own way later on.) Dawes had the misfortune to invest in a local bank just before the Panic of 1893, but had enough money to land on his feet, buying some utility companies and moving to Illinois.

In Chicago, Dawes caught the political bug, becoming an influential behind-the-scenes man in Mark Hanna’s political machine, which would soon elect William McKinley president. His patronage reward was an appointment as Comptroller of the Currency, in charge of regulating national banks. In Washington, Dawes was a favorite guest of the President; a self-taught pianist, he often entertained McKinley and his wife at the White House. Dawes ran for the Senate, having been promised a McKinley endorsement, but after McKinley’s assassination, new president Theodore Roosevelt threw his support behind his friend Albert Hopkins, and Dawes was defeated.

Dawes returned home and founded the Central Trust Company of Illinois. He retired from public service and concentrated on his family and the banking business. His son Rufus accidentally drowned in 1912; in his memory, Dawes founded the Rufus Dawes Hotel for Destitute Men in Chicago and Boston (the Boston branch still exists as the Pine Street Inn). He also worked at his music: a “Melodie in A” written in 1911 so impressed a violinist friend that he secretly had the piece published. Dawes was soon surprised to see his photo peering out from the window of a Chicago music store. “I know that I will be the target of my punster friends,” Dawes quipped. “They will say that if all the notes in my bank are as bad as my musical ones, they are not worth the paper they were written on.” The “Melodie” became a favorite of violinist Fritz Kreisler.

World War I made Dawes a national figure. At 52, he was seemingly too old to serve in uniform, but he had an old Nebraska acquaintance in the army: “Black Jack” Pershing, soon to be commander of the Allied forces in Europe. Dawes became the chief of supply procurement for the Americans, and later, the American representative on the Military Board of Allied Supply. Such was the origin of his nickname: after the war, a Republican House committee called Dawes to testify in an investigation into war spending, attempting to tarnish the policies of former Democratic president Woodrow Wilson. Asked how much he paid for French horses, Dawes, as was his habit, snapped. “Hell’n Maria!” he said. “I will tell you this, that we would have paid horse prices for sheep, if they could have hauled artillery!” “Hell and Maria” Dawes became a celebrity. (Dawes would insist that the expression was actually “Helen Maria,” but nobody really believed him.)

In 1921, Dawes became the first head of what is now the Office of Management and Budget, and when Germany defaulted on payment of war reparations in 1923, Dawes was called in as the head of a committee to try and fix the mess. The Dawes Plan got Allied troops out of the coal-rich Ruhr valley, adjusted Germany’s payment schedule, and financed it with an arrangement of foreign loans and various taxes. For his efforts, Dawes was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925. While the plan temporarily curbed German hyperinflation, its reliance on foreign money proved excessive as the bloom wore off the economy of the 1920’s, and it was superseded by the Young Plan in the 1930’s. Given the eventual disintegration of German society and the rise of the National Socialists, Dawes’ Nobel seems, in retrospect, more an expression of hope in the effort than success in the implementation (though, as Peace prizes go, it’s nowhere near as absurd as Henry Kissinger’s).

Drafted (as a third choice) as Calvin Coolidge’s running mate, Dawes was vice-presidential trouble from the get-go. Addressing the Senate at his inaugural, Dawes blasted the senators for their secrecy and over-reliance on filibustering. The surprisingly harsh speech overshadowed Coolidge’s own inaugural address later the same day. The relationship had already been strained when Dawes informed Coolidge that he didn’t think his vice-presidential duties included cabinet meetings; it further deteriorated when an ill-timed Dawes nap resulted in the Senate voting not to confirm Coolidge’s nominee for Attorney General. Dawes didn’t back off, continuing to press his case against the filibuster and working behind the scenes to advance his own agenda. He employed considerable diplomacy to get a major farm relief bill through the Senate; Coolidge vetoed it twice. (Dawes had some history of mildly bucking his own party—he supported the League of Nations, and had convinced McKinley to keep Theodore Roosevelt as his running mate when the rest of the Republican machinery was against him.)

Dawes was unceremoniously dropped from the ticket when Coolidge opted not to seek re-election; a short and unsatisfactory stint as Ambassador to Great Britain ended when President Hoover convinced Dawes to run the newly-formed Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a bank bailout program. Dawes soon had to resign the position, when his own bank, now the Central Republic Bank & Trust, itself needed a loan from the RFC. The Central Republic Bank was soon liquidated; Dawes reorganized under another name and paid back the loan. (The bank was eventually bought by the Chicago giant Continental.)

Dawes died in 1951. That year, lyricist Carl Sigman, previously responsible for “Arrivederci Roma” and “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” wrote words to Dawes’ old “Melodie in A.”

Many a tear has to fall
But it’s all in the game
All in the wonderful game
That we know as love

The song became a #1 hit for Tommy Edwards, and has subsequently been covered by the Four Tops, Van Morrison, Barry Manilow, Elton John, and others. Ironically, Dawes himself had grown to loathe the tune—as vice-president, brass bands and restaurant violinists had serenaded him with it everywhere he went. As he put it, “General Sherman, with justifiable profanity once expressed his detestation of the tune ‘Marching Through Georgia,’ to which he was compelled to listen whenever he appeared anywhere. I sympathize with his feeling when I listen to this piece of mine over and over.”

Acknowledgments to Senate historian Mark Hatfield’s biography of Dawes, and Bill Kauffman’s article “The Melodious Veep,” which provided much of this information.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned a bunch of Klimt paintings that had been looted by the Nazis during World War II and then, recently, had been returned to the descendants of their original owners. This week, some of those Klimts are being auctioned off. Which ended up being the second biggest art story of the week, after another painting came under similar suspicion.


You’re looking at Picasso’s “Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto,” a masterpiece from the artist’s Blue Period. A federal judge temporarily blocked (and then allowed) the painting’s sale this week, responding to a lawsuit by Julius Schoeps, who claimed that the Nazis had improperly pressured his great-uncle to sell the work below market value back in the 1930’s. That is, his great-uncle Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, as in Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (Paul was his nephew). In addition to heading the Moses Mendelssohn Center at the University of Potsdam, Schoeps has been pursuing the divested remnants of the Mendelssohn family’s rather impressive art collection; he similarly challenged the 2004 sale of Picasso’s “Boy With a Pipe.”

Oh, and the current owner of the Fernandez de Soto portrait? That would be Andrew Lloyd Webber’s charitable foundation. Mendelssohn suing Andrew Lloyd Webber! Schoeps’ attorneys say they will refile their suit in state court. Can we somehow get Randol Schoenberg involved with this? Because that would be awesome.

Update: the catalog for the auction is online. (There’s a couple of Mondrians. I’m a big fan. Christmas is coming up….)

Update, the sequel: Christie’s and Lloyd Webber pulled the painting off the block themselves, citing the pending state suit. Christie’s president Marc Porter warns: “We reserve the right to seek damages.” Imagine a British accent for the proper menace.

Alderman Doolin’s Campaign Speech.

A 1913 classic from vaudeville comedian and early recording star Steve Porter, via UC-Santa Barbara’s Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project.

I do my best not to talk politics here. I’m fascinated by political history, and no doubt anyone who reads this stuff on a regular basis can probably figure out which way I vote. But in this forum, it usually only comes up if a) it’s something music-related, and b) I can get an easy laugh out of it. Political discourse on the Web tends to devolve into ad hoc nastiness way too quickly for my taste, and besides, I’ve always thought that, as important as it is, politics is a lousy way to pick your friends.

Now, unless sometime in the past month your piano teacher told you to go practice Vexations thirty times in a row, you’re probably aware that tomorrow is Election Day here in the US. I was going to do an election-related post on how economic issues affect the arts (executive summary: direct governmental arts funding is a political red herring; income inequality/middle-class wage stagnation and loose enforcement of anti-trust laws are bad for classical music in ways you probably hadn’t considered), but I haven’t had a whole lot of time for research lately, and while I never hesitate to write about music off the top of my head, I’d rather not delve into economics with half-baked data. And besides, like I said before, I do my best not to talk politics here.

So instead, here’s a little coincidence. I tend to leave my music listening choices to chance: either I stumble upon something and then I’m obsessed with it for a time, or I suddenly remember a bit of music from somewhere, and I go home, dig it out of my pile of records, and give it a spin. Anyway, over the weekend, I took stock of what I’ve been listening to a lot lately:

The weird thing: here’s the release/composition dates for all of the above: 1970-72 (Mayfield), 1970 (Godfather Brown), 1967 (Foss), 1969 (Williams), 1969 (spirit medium Brown), 1968 (Parks). So for whatever reason, and by a number of circuitous paths, I’ve gravitated towards a bunch of otherwise unrelated music dating from a particularly tumultuous five years of American history.

Last week, Jerry over at Sequenza21 called this election the most important in the last 250 years. He may have been exaggerating for comic effect. If he was serious, who knows? Maybe he’s right. The last few election cycles have seen both sides ratchet up the pressure so high that it’s kind of hard to tell anymore. And it’s probably just a random fold of my own history that’s brought all this music to the surface now. Still, regardless of your political persuasion, it’s been hard to escape that Yeatsian “things falling apart” feeling over the last couple of years, hasn’t it? Maybe it’s not a coincidence.

P.S. Am I the only one who finds it Dada-funny that Election Day is always right around Guy Fawkes Night? No wonder the British think we’re loopy.

It’s Friday! Stop working and watch TV!

And of course, there’ll be sport: Blair McMillen plays Annie Gosfield’s “Brooklyn, October 5, 1941” for baseballs, mitt and piano.

My keyboard harmony students have reached the score-reading section of their assignment packet. It starts off with an exercise in reading alto clef: Beethoven’s duet “with two eyeglasses obbligato,” for viola and cello, WoO 32. Which means I’ve spent the week listening to WoO 32 being played very slowly. It’s fun, actually: substituting molto largo for allegro turns the piece into a nice little bit of post-serial conceptual sound art. That is, until measure 9, when it turns into an Abba song.


The downward sequence, the downbeat suspensions, the passage through the relative minor on the way to the subdominant—it’s straight out of Benny and Bjorn’s toolbox. Great minds think alike! I’m not claiming they consciously lifted from Beethoven; in fact, this little progression was probably already something of a cliché when Ludwig used it. The point is, for Beethoven, it’s just a starting point. He goes on to juxtapose it with other themes, and then develop it, and vary it, and transpose it, etc., etc. Whereas, for Abba, such a progression would be the entire song.

That’s an exaggeration, of course, but not much of one. When I think of the differences between pop and classical, the main one for me is that the actual music of pop music is non-developing. Once you’re presented with the main material of the song, not much happens to it: maybe a modulation, maybe some vocal embellishment, probably a gradual building-up of the orchestration. But try and think of a pop song that does something as simple as reharmonizing the melody, for example. Or a pop song with a bridge that’s a conscious manipulation of the melody of the chorus. It doesn’t happen very often; and, more importantly, it’s not expected to happen.

Not all classical music is developing—there’s plenty of pop-like examples in pre-Romantic song and opera repertoire, for example. But I think it’s significant that the bulk of the “canonic” repertoire at least nods in a developing direction. Most Schumann songs are ABA (or even AA) form, but the second A section almost always has a significant (if small) variation of phrase structure or melody or harmony. Brahms opted for exact recapitulations in a lot of his shorter piano works, but you can skim through the songs for a master class in all the ways to backload harmonic surprises. Even Ravel’s “Bolero,” the epitome of monomania, has that kick-ass modulation and coda.

Do I wish pop music were more like classical music in this regard? Absolutely not—I think it’s one of the main sources of pop’s appeal. A great pop song starts with a terrific melodic hook, or a great harmonic change, and then just fills your ear with it. It takes a catchy cliché, like the Beethoven example, and lets you wallow in it for a minute or three. Wallow in a good way, it should be noted; it’s like calorie-free candy. It’s not much of a journey—it’s more like a little objet d’art: you experience it all at once, and it’s pretty much the same at the beginning and the end. There it is, it’s lovely, and then it’s over.

This isn’t a criticism—it’s actually the way I like pop music to be: a perfectly crafted crystallization of a single emotion or idea. And yes, again, it is something of an overgeneralization. I mean, there is pop-esque music out there that does try to take you from point A to point B. Teenage memories of Pink Floyd spring to mind; I suppose some of the Beatles’ more experimental efforts might fit this mold. But even a lot of that only tricks out pop-song structure to give the illusion of development. Take one of the all-time great songs, “Good Vibrations,” by the Beach Boys. It has to be one of the least well-behaved pop songs ever. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus—and then there’s this wild contrapuntal bridge that leads to a completely new mini-refrain that finishes up on a totally open-ended chord, and then you’re back into the refrain, only it’s not, it’s another transition into an instrumental refrain that repeats and fades. I think “Good Vibrations” is a masterpiece of 20th-century music, but for all its variety, it’s not really developing the material so much as looking at it from all sides. If there’s demonic or sardonic or somber implications in any of those melodies, they remain untapped.

That’s why I always keep turning to non-pop, old and new. For all the joy of pop, a lot of the time, it doesn’t feel like life feels: constantly changing, sometimes uncertain, frequently frustrating, but always driven by the quieter but equally vital excitement of discovery. Sometimes your experience of the world coalesces into a single beautiful moment—that’s pop music. Those moments are rare; it’s why we go back to our favorite pop songs over and over, a little reminder of what those moments are like. Most of the time, though, there’s just a glimmer of something, something that may seem commonplace, but might just might end up somewhere wonderful, and you follow that thread with equal parts apprehension and hope. And for whatever reason—temperamental, psychological, aesthetic—that’s the music I keep trying to write.

Or: adapt, improvise, overcome.

It seems the great-nephew of John Hughes, the composer of the great Welsh hymn “Cwm Rhondda,” isn’t a fan of a new recording of the tune in the style of the band Queen. Apparently, he doesn’t feel the revision rocks hard enough:

“John Hughes’ square-cut, driving harmonies are replaced with slushy Victorian chords and sloppy rhythms—the very things he was trying to avoid.”

Damn straight—what passes for rock and roll today is lame, lame, lame. Back before the Great War, they knew how to thrash.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Clawdd Offa, Carnival Messiah is returning to England. In the words of its creator, “It is like a multicultural presentation that takes George Fredrick Handel’s oratorio from the concert hall and places it in the middle of a Caribbean street parade.” Hilarious consequences ensue! No, actually, the piece is a “true embodiment of the West Indian culture and Carnival, as it relates to the slave trade and colonialism.” (In other words, don’t you dare stand during the “Hallelujah” chorus.)

I feel pretty sedated: sometime Ramones drummer Richie Ramone is coming to a pops concert near you, pounding his way through a drum-solo version of West Side Story by arranger Ron Abel. Don’t remember Richie? A commenter on the above article sums it up: “He was in the band for a short amount of time, played all of the songs about three times faster than they were supposed to be played.” Keep coolly cool, boy.

Not to be outdone by Trevor Nunn, Berkeley-area composer and performer Aaron Blumenfeld has written a sequel to Porgy and Bess. Well, kind of. It’s actually called Paigel and Bathsheva, and it takes place in… oh, let’s just let him explain.

Says the Richmond composer, “I thought it would be great to write a sequel showing how [Porgy] goes up north, and on the way he runs into jazz, rag, barrelhouse, jug band, gospel, all the early black folk music styles. Then I realized I’m not black.”

Blumenfeld, an observant Jew and the son of a rabbi, pondered changing his main character to a Jew starting out in Europe then shifting the scene to America.

There are parallels with the Heywood/Gershwin classic: Bathsheva, a rabbi’s daughter, is Blumenfeld’s Bess, courted by Pagiel, a young Jewish mystic. The original villain, Sportin’ Life, has a counterpart in Zishe, a rival suitor for Bathsheva’s hand. Zishe kidnaps Bathsheva and steals her off to America, with Pagiel hot on their trail.

Once Pagiel arrives, he is rescued from anti-Semitic thugs by a friendly black musician, who introduces the immigrant to a strange new kind of music: the blues.

OK, OK, it’s pretty goofy. But doesn’t this sound like fun the more you think about it? And what wouldn’t you give to have this sentence in your bio?

His publications include a 101-song collection of Chassidic melodies and “How to Play Blues and Boogie Piano Styles.”

One last revision: the Bank of England is giving Edward Elgar the hook, replacing his portrait on the 20-pound note with that of the Scottish economist Adam Smith.


I’ve been telling you for years that the free market doesn’t value classical music! Now do you believe me?

J. S. Bach’s skull.

Originally published in Johann Sebastian Bach, Forschungen über dessen Grabstätte, Gebeine und Antlitz, by Wilhelm His (Leipzig, 1895). Image from Teri Noel Towe’s “The Face of Bach: the Search for the Portrait that Belonged to Kittel” (2001).

Schoenberg: Moses und Aron
Boston Symphony Orchestra / Levine
October 28, 2006

I think Moses und Aron might be one of those rare pieces of music that absolutely has to be experienced live. It hasn’t been well-served by recordings; the few extant examples, for all their skill and conviction, come off like interesting experiments, spare-no-expense 12-tone concept albums that inspire, at best, polite admiration. But to hear it in person, as a near-capacity crowd did last Saturday, with James Levine conducting the Boston Symphony and an accompanying mob, is to be swept up in its inexorable force. It’s the operatic equivalent of a David Lean movie: a thrilling intellectual drama played out on the grandest possible stage. And like David Lean movies, you need to see it on the big screen.

Here’s an example. In the opening scene, Schoenberg’s orchestration of the voice of God has been much remarked upon: six solo voices, spread throughout and doubled by the orchestra, and a chorus of men and boys, speaking against the voices’ singing, declaim God’s words in counterpoint with each other. On paper, it’s studiedly unconventional; on record, funneled into two-channel stereo, it’s a diverting babble. In performance, it so arrestingly puts the listener into Moses’ shoes that it’s uncanny. Words drift into perception like wind gusts, from every direction at once, a swirl of command on the edge of comprehension. And when the scene shifts to the wasteland, where Moses enlists his brother Aron in his mission, Schoenberg suddenly drops the instrumentation to a solo flute, a solo violin, and a couple of horns, in quiet but uneasy counterpoint: an empty landscape, crackling with tension. The microphone flattens it into merely an interesting choice. But to physically experience the sudden stage distance between the component sounds is magical.

The Sunday school version of the relationship between Moses, the lawgiver, and Aron, the communicator, is one of fortuitous complementarity, a Hebrew Bobby and Jack Kennedy. Schoenberg’s dramatic masterstroke was to make them antagonists. Moses understands the “idea” but can’t express it; Aron tries to express what he can’t understand. And each resents their dependence on the other. As Moses, John Tomlinson was as a man possessed, an implacable pillar gripped by a deathly fear of cracks. His Sprechstimme veered closer to singing than most, giving the impression of someone whose voice has been appropriated by another, racked by thunderous words that suddenly, haltingly spill out.

Philip Langridge’s performance as Aron was so finely shaded and paced that he inadvertently pointed up the one dramatic flaw I sense in Schoenberg’s design: the ease with which the crowd intimidates Aron at the opening of Act II. In the first half, Langridge carefully and slyly traced the degrees by which Aron’s confidence (and pleasure) grows as his oratorical sway over the crowd takes hold. In scene 4, the way his voice dropped to a stage whisper on the words “Schließet die Augen, verstopfet die Ohren” (“close your eyes, and stop your ears”) was seductive and sinister, not inappropriately reminiscent of the emcee in Cabaret. By the end of the act, he had Israel eating out of his hand, which made all the more jarring his sudden Act II acquiescence to the crowd’s demands for an idol. Maybe it’s supposed to be that way: one of the recurring themes of the opera is the frightening unpredictability of the mob.

The mob took a while to come into focus. The biggest casualty of a concert, as opposed to a staged, performance of Moses is the protean character of the chorus. In their first big scene, rumors of possible liberation race through the people, factions form and dissolve, and conventional wisdoms are settled upon and then cast aside. With the chorus a massed block at the back of the stage, Schoenberg’s careful delineation of the desperation and fickleness of each requisite group was largely a wash. Hearing the Tanglewood Festival Chorus this past summer in Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, my sense was that they were struggling to adjust to Levine’s minimalist, undemonstrative conducting style. That uncertainty seemed evident in the first act of Moses as well; thrilling sounds (particularly from the women) were in abundance, but so were lagging tempi and blurry rhythms. But a few minutes into Act II, everything clicked into place, and the chorus suddenly began to peal forth. Their cry of “Juble, Israel” (“Rejoice, Israel”) at the initial appearance of the Golden Calf was filled with a sure beauty as well as a chilling fanaticism.

Schoenberg’s portrayal of public opinion in Moses und Aron walks a fine line between spontaneous joy and calculated agitation. This performance tended toward the latter, creating unmistakable echoes of Schoenberg’s own experience in Nazi Germany, not to mention nervously contemporary accents. When one of the Israelites (Sanford Sylvan, deftly handling multiple supporting roles) exhorted the crowd, “Alles für die Freiheit!… Erschlagt die Fronvögte!” (“All for freedom! Kill the taskmasters!”), the tone was less hope for the future than the clipped certainty of an experienced demagogue; it gave the immediate agreement of the old priest (the magisterial Sergei Koptchak) an uneasy air of self-preservation. The projected translations made the most of the political overtones. When Aron changes Moses’ staff into a serpent, the crowd is suddenly in its power, and they sing what they’re commanded to do. “Kommt hierher, geht dorthin,” they cry. “Come here; go there.” This was wittily rendered as “move to the left” and “move to the right,” making explicit the ideological promiscuity of the mob.

One common way to hear Moses is in the light of Schoenberg’s own aesthetics. In this interpretation, Aron represents “accessible” art while Moses remains uncompromisingly focused on the “idea.” There’s undoubtedly something to this: when Aron tries to explain to the crowd, “Erwartet die Form nicht vor dem Gedanken” (“You cannot have form before idea”) it’s almost as if he’s giving them a masterclass in composition. But Schoenberg complicates the issue by not picking sides; both Moses and Aron are equally flawed and stubborn. When Moses comes down off the mountain to find the orgy around the Golden Calf, the expectation of a righteous, old-testament smackdown is palpable. But the speed with which Schoenberg has Aron turn on his brother, unleashing a full arsenal of guilt, rationalization, and lethal reasonableness, catches both Moses and the listener off guard. Moses is maddening and impractical; if Aron compromises in the short term, what’s the harm, as long as the ultimate goal remains the same? Schoenberg never pretends to have the answer—that thorny uncertainty is the dramatic engine of the piece.

At the end of Act II, Moses is a defeated man; Schoenberg never finished Act III, in which Moses would have brought Aron to justice for his idolatrous transgressions. It makes for a more pessimistic ending, but a more human one. Most commentators think that Schoenberg ultimately decided that Act III was beyond music, but it’s just as possible that the ending we have had more resonance for Schoenberg, exiled in a populist wasteland, struggling to write, a lost and confused prophet. Schoenberg died having heard the bulk of Moses und Aron only in his head. I haven’t mentioned the Boston Symphony itself yet; after Saturday night’s performance, the best compliment I can give the players is that, no doubt, the orchestra Schoenberg must have heard probably sounded a lot like them.

It’s the weekend. You’re going out. You’re going to see people. You’ll be expected to make small talk. If only there were a goofy little factual nugget out there that you could use to enliven the conversation. If only.

On a totally unrelated topic, the word on the street is that Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s next musical will be an adaptation of Anna Karenina. Just thought you might like to know.

When you speak of me, speak well.