What’s it going to take to get you people out there to respect musicians? World records or something?

How about an ensemble of 8,000 drummers?
(Not impressed? How about 11,000?)

What about 105 consecutive hours of deejaying?

How about putting on a concert 994 feet below the surface of the North Sea?

230 banjos, anyone?

Alas, the 2,500 harmonicas didn’t quite pan out. But I’m guessing that Bad Brad Wheeler doesn’t give up that easily.

I’m no journalism critic, but this morning’s Globe has a classical review by freelancer David Perkins that reads the way I wish all classical reviews read. The lede is particularly sparkling:

Brünnhilde made a guest appearance Friday night in the middle of J.S. Bach’s joyous Cantata No. 51 (“Jauchzet Gott!”), a piece usually sung by lyric sopranos of the Kathleen Battle mold. On the word “Alleluja,” a remarkable high C came out of the mouth of Barbara Quintiliani and, parting audience members’ hair on the way, blazed out of Faneuil Hall into the night sky.

That might have just made my day.

A few days ago, while thinking over the latest chapter of Greg Sandow’s book-in-progress in performance, I remembered a great comic riff on avant-garde music. It’s from the 1964 movie of “The World of Henry Orient,” featuring Peter Sellers in one of his early Hollywood roles. He portrays a lecherous concert pianist who’s a) having an affair with a married woman, and b) being stalked by two teenage girls who have engineered a rather unlikely crush on him. (It’s actually a pretty innocent and sweet movie—it’s 1964, after all.) The film establishes Henry Orient’s musical bona fides with a set piece in Carnegie Hall: he performs a “modern” piano concerto (during which he gets lost, and only gets through the cadenza with hints from the conductor). If I recall it correctly, the climax of the piece involves an on-stage steam whistle.

Shockingly enough, YouTube, normally reliable for flagrant copyright infringement, was no help in finding this scene online, and nobody else seems to have uploaded it. (A DVD is available, but I’m cheap; you can watch the trailer here.) But you can at least listen to a portion of the concerto on the website of its composer, Ken Lauber. Elmer Bernstein scored the movie, but only after David Raskin was fired from the project, which left the concerto uncomposed at the time of filming. Lauber, a 23-year-old assistant in United Artists’ publishing division, got the nod. As he puts it:

The dialogue went something like this…

Mike Stewart [Lauber’s boss at UA]: “Hey kid. Can you write a 7 min. piano concerto and record it in three days? We need it for playback for a shoot with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall.”

KL: “How much do I get paid and do I get credit?”

Mike Stewart: “You’re already getting paid so forget the money. If they use it, I’ll see what I can do to get you credit at the end of the film somewhere.”

I’ll go out on a limb and say that this is the best 3-day, 7-minute avant-garde piano concerto ever written. It’s quite entertaining, and, at least musically, a pretty knowing and affectionate pastiche/parody of “modern music” as it was in the 60’s (visually, I remember the orchestra members being portrayed as rather eye-rollingly jaded about the piece).

Lauber has gone on to have the kind of career I would probably enjoy, never quite breaking through to wide recognition, but keeping busy on an unusually wide range of projects as a composer, arranger, orchestrator, producer, etc. (He also just started a blog.) Any CV that includes studies with Gene Krupa and Vincent Persichetti, arranging backup choirs for Lieber and Stoller, and scoring everything from avant-garde independent films to TV mini-series to Playboy videos is my kind of résumé.

In which musicians do their part in contributing to the climate of fear.

It seems one of the Vercotti brothers has joined the Seattle Symphony. (Via ArtsJournal.) See, my standmate is a little clumsy. It’d be a shame if he were to break something. (I’m happy to see that Seattle is so quiet and peaceful that would-be terrorists can’t find a better cause than Gerard Schwarz. That’s like going after a bakery because their bread isn’t white enough.)

Update (7/22/09): There used to be a link to a story about George Spicka here. However, per this statement from the Maryland Transportation Authority (MdTA):

“The MdTA advises the public that it has no information connecting George F. Spicka with any illegal activity including an alleged event of October 11, 2006, at Thurgood Marshall Baltimore Washington International Airport (“BWI”). MdTA sincerely regrets any damage to Mr. Spicka of Baltimore County, Maryland, which may have been caused by any prior MdTA statement or press release inconsistent with this present statement.

We are requesting that after making this posting, any prior information or records in regard to this specific event about George F. Spicka be removed from your web site and/or search results.”

OK. Anybody actually still reading back this far?

Yeah, those airports can be scary places. Good thing the national no-fly list is on top of noted terrorists like Robert Johnson and John Williams. I suppose Robert Johnson’s alleged dealings with the devil might freak out the current administration, but I really don’t think you can hold John Williams responsible for “Stepmom” just because he wrote the music. (My favorite part of the story? They keep the names of actual terrorists off the no-fly list so terrorists won’t find out that they’re on the no-fly list. Our government has been infiltrated by a secret cabal of Oulipians!)

Of course, any activity can be turned to nefarious purposes. From an article in the USAF’s Air University Review, March-April 1972:

[T]here may be uses of music that might have military applications. To cite a rather grim example, certain frequencies can kill. Specifically, a sound wave at 7 Hz (much too low to hear) can penetrate the soft tissues of the body, cause them to vibrate sympathetically, and if it lasts long enough the result can be death. Another example: a 37-Hz tone, roughly D in the bottom octave of a piano keyboard, can crack a wall if it is loud enough. The military implications of these examples need not be mentioned.

Put your hands in the air, and back away from the accordion.

By a random coincidence, two explorations of language and semitonal pitch crossed my path this week. First, Mark Liberman over at Language Log had a long post on pitch analysis of everyday speech. A team of Dutch linguists analyzed recordings of volunteers reading excerpts from Winnie-the-Pooh—first, some dialogue of Tigger (the happy, hyperactive tiger), and then Eeyore (the pessimistic donkey). Their conclusion: the readers tended to use major intervals for Tigger and minor intervals for Eeyore. The results, needless to say, are highly sketchy; it’s a small sample and a rather suggestive methodology. But it’s a neat concept, the idea that people associate major and minor with happy and sad even in speech. (Go ahead and open up another can of nature-vs.-nurture over this one.) Liberman then took the next step and did pitch analyses of various other types of recorded speech, finding that most examples did tend to revolve around two or three approximate pitches. (I think that just might be a matter of the natural range of non-trained speakers. I’d be curious to see more results for really well-modulated voices.)

And then, by way of gracious commenter Valdemar Jordan’s long-dormant blog, I found Joe Monzo’s microtonal analysis of Robert Johnson’s “Drunken-Hearted Man.” Fascinating, especially his efforts to pin down the exact nature of the “blue” flatted third:

After analyzing this song, I believe I have found a possible reason for hearing the “halfway between” 3rd. Johnson sings a common blues figure in

in the second half of the first two lines. It gives an interval of 11/10 [= (2^(2/12) – 35 cents) = 1.65 semitones] between G+ 11¹ [= 5.51 semitones] and F# 5¹ [= 3.86 semitones]. If G+ 11¹ is interpreted casually as the 12-equal G 2^(5/12), it makes the F# 5¹ sound like it could be either F 2^(3/12) or F# 2^(4/12), or somewhere between.

Short version: the equal-tempered scale makes for a pretty clunky approximation of speech and vernacular singing.

But since my ears are more accustomed to music than speech, I think I actually tend to hear things the other way around. Here’s an example. Most American and British speakers tend to end their sentences on the lowest pitch of the sentence. You can hear this in newscasters: there’s a baseline “tonic” pitch; most of the sentence is pitched higher than that, but the full-stop punctuation is signaled by a return to that low tonic. (Peter Jennings, in particular, used to do a neat gloss on this: he’d deliberately undersell the final punch line of a story by putting the whole thing on the baseline pitch, like a closing tonic pedal point.)

My current favorite news voice, though, is a gentleman who’s been filing reports from India and Pakistan for the NPR morning news roundup. (I haven’t been able to catch his name, and the NPR website is useless in this regard. He was on two or three days in a row last week. Can anybody help me out?) His voice, which sits in a tenor-ish range, is very well-modulated: he uses a huge range of pitches, and, like a lot of Anglo-Indian and Anglo-Pakistani accents, the sound is quite melodic. What’s interesting, though, is that he finishes his sentences in what, to my ears at least, is a typically subcontinental way—his final one or two syllables are higher than the “tonic” pitch of the sentence, which instead comes on the penultimate or antepenultimate syllable. If I had to put it in equal temperament, it might look like this:


I don’t know if this is a feature of Indian or Pakistani languages, or if it’s something that might have been picked up from indigenous musical style. To me, though, it sounds rather elegantly sly, and infectiously charming, regardless of context. Why? Probably because it reminds me of a jazz inflection—an ornamental blue note after the final tonic chord. It’s completely unfounded judgment—my favorable opinion of this man’s speech patterns is due to a totally unrelated and culturally irrelevant coincidence derived from my own idiosyncratic musical tastes. But we all form our impressions of people, at least in part, on the basis of the way they talk, and until now, I, for one, never thought very carefully about what that impression might be based on. I wonder how many other intuitive, snap judgments I’m making on the basis of my mental record collection?

Your latest composer casting round-up:

Ed Harris as Beethoven.

Joseph Fiennes as Vivaldi.

Morgan Freeman as Duke Ellington.

Jeff Bridges as Moondog.

I spent last week looking forward to my usual Saturday night fake concert date, where the lovely wife and I sit around the house and listen to the BSO on the radio. Last Saturday’s concert had Daniel Barenboim, one of my favorite pianists, playing my favorite Beethoven piece (4th Piano Concerto) and my favorite Schoenberg piece (only Piano Concerto). Levine also programmed Verklärte Nacht, apparently because he likes to lengthen programs solely to annoy the union. (I kid because I love.)

I listen to WGBH for my classical fix, but, in the mornings, the missus and I have the clock-radio set to the other classical station in town, WCRB. WCRB is awfully conservative with their programming, but WGBH chooses to put on “Morning Edition” instead of music, and we’ve decided that waking up to yet another damn Baroque oboe concerto is marginally preferable to waking up to presidential soundbites. Anyway, the WCRB announcers will periodically throw in one-line teasers for that week’s BSO concert. So all last week I was hearing this: “This weekend, James Levine and the Boston Symphony welcome Daniel Barenboim for a concert of Beethoven… and more!“

Don’t get me wrong: it’s fun to wake up laughing my head off. And I’ve decided that one of my career goals is to have WCRB announcers refer to me as “and more.” But it got me wondering again about something I’ve always wondered about: why do classical-music organizations devote so much of their advertising to the specific repertoire that’s going to be played? Talk about preaching to the choir. Obviously, the marketing types think that Schoenberg’s name is going to scare people, but really, the mention of any composer’s name is going to drive some portion of your audience away. (Tchaikovsky-haters may be vastly outnumbered by Schoenberg-haters, but trust me, they’re out there.) And there’s a huge segment of the population for which the mention of any composer is an instant eye-glazer. How do you square this circle? Easy: don’t tell the people what you’re going to play.

Every time I walk by Symphony Hall here in Boston, I’m met with a phalanx of posters, identical in every way, except for a listing of each concert’s repertoire. Instead of a marketing dart aimed at the emotions, I find myself reading fine print. Is this really the best way to get people inside? Sure, there will always be a schedule—I don’t think an orchestra could get away with not telling what’s going to happen on, say, a subscription series; rich people like to know what they’re paying for, right? But that doesn’t mean you need to advertise to the non-subscribing public in the same way. If the bulk of your prospective audience doesn’t know any classical music (or, more likely, has heard some of the big hits but doesn’t know what they’re called), telling them what you’re playing isn’t going to do much. So focus your energies on making it easy for them to take the risk.

Here’s one possible scenario: set up another series of concerts. Schedule them on Friday nights, on the late side—9 pm, maybe. Cheap admission: five or six bucks, paid at the door (yeah, it’s a loss leader of sorts). And don’t advertise the repertoire. Announce everything from the stage. (Better yet, have a beautiful girl in a skimpy outfit put big placards on an easel. It worked for vaudville.)

Yes, it’s an extra burden on the orchestra in terms of rehearsals and performances, but not having to plan the repertoire months in advance means flexible programming: you could reprise a piece from a previous subscription concert, preview a piece from an upcoming concert, do a pops piece or two, some contemporary music, throw on a warhorse… change it at the last minute? Sure. You could tailor the concerts to the orchestra’s workload, and not the other way around. Your local assistant conductor (quick, name that guy/gal) can get extra podium time and exposure. There’s even a possible benefit with your existing audience base: all those snobs who think they’re tired of Beethoven? All those stick-in-the-muds who stay away from new music? Can’t avoid it if they don’t know it’s coming, can they?

I sometimes daydream that I’m at a concert like this: the orchestra dives into “Rite of Spring” or “Bolero” or (hey, it’s a daydream) “Symphony of Three Orchestras” and the audience applauds at the recognition of the piece, like they do at rock concerts. How cool would that be?

I am astonished at the foolish music written in these times. It is false and wrong and no longer does anyone pay attention to what our beloved old masters wrote about composition. It certainly must be a remarkably elevated art when a pile of consonances are thrown together any which way.

I remain faithful to the pure old composition and pure rules. I have often walked out of the church since I could no longer listen to that mountain yodelling. I hope this worthless modern coinage will fall into disuse and that new coins will be forged according to the fine old stamp and standard.

Samuel Scheidt, writing to Heinrich Baryphonus,
January 26, 1651

(From Volume 51 of The German Library. Ach! Du Kinder gehen von meinem Rasen weg!)

Mystery solved! Not “atonal” at all, but At-tunal, which means “Water-Sun” in Nawat, the language of the Pipil, who are indigenous to El Salvador. It’s supposedly the name of a Pipil prince who helped another Pipil, Atlacatl, repel an attempt in 1524 by Cortes henchman Pedro de Alvorado to bring present-day El Salvador under Spanish control. (Alvarado was successful a few years later.)

If you don’t know Salvadoran history, the Quick Response Infantry units (“Atlacatl” was the first) were formed in the early 1980’s to go after leftist guerillas. After plowing through all the human rights reports that mention the Atonal division, I’m glad to find the name has nothing to do with music.

For my wife: in gratitude for another year, and in hopes of many, many more.