Best academic overreach of the day:

[Billy] Joel’s treatment of the same Beethoven material [the slow movement of the “Pathétique” sonata, in the song “This Night”] is even more literal than that of [Kiss’s] “Great Expectations,” although he withholds the melodic quotation until the refrain. But the song is shot through with wordplay linking Beethoven’s nineteenth-century practice to that of the self-described “piano man” Joel and to the expressive registers of historical doo-wop ballads that the song references. Indeed, the love lyrics at times seem to suggest the solo pianist’s relationship with the keyboard; distortions of musical time and imaginitive space are effected through the utterance of words that possess meaningful implications outside the conventional subject matter of the song. These include “ready for romance” (code word for nineteenth-century repertoire), “only a slow dance” (the slow movement, outside the context of the full sonata), and the notion of an expressive historical musical continuum delivered at the end of the Beethovenian refrain music (“this night can last forever”). Joel sets up the first citation of the theme when his doo-wop rocker persona admits at the end of the verse that he can no longer “remember the rules,” launching the song into a different registral collection from which the melody and harmony of the refrain are borrowed to create an effectively expressive hybrid.

—Michael Long, Beautiful Monsters
(University of California Press, 2008)

Given that he’s just name-dropped Barthes, I was disappointed Long didn’t hit for the textual-analysis cycle with a “Piano/Man” reference.

We can probably thank producer Bob Ezrin for the Beethoven quote in “Great Expectations,” by the way—the demo has no quotation, and in fact reveals that the melody of the chorus was tweaked to more closely echo Beethoven.

We’re back from Paris, where I ate bread, offal, and macarons; indulged in hero worship (above); walked until it hurt every day; and improved my French accent to the point where people would at least reply to me in French out of politeness, if not out of ignorance of my obviously American state. (As the headline notes, there was also a brief sojourn in the source of my giant head and pasty complexion.)

We even took in a couple of concerts, which I’ll write up in due course, but the big cultural news in Paris was the opening of Vengeance, directed by the impossibly prolific Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To, and starring the ageless French rock-and-roll legend Johnny Hallyday. Celebrity images in Paris tend to be the usual international crowd—George Clooney had an advertising banner hanging in the Opéra Bastille, and Vengeance was swamped in its opening weekend by the Ben Stiller vehicle A Night at the Museum 2—but Johnny’s fame trumped all, his weathered visage gracing seemingly every press kiosk, tabac, and Métro station in town.

It’s slightly amazing how big a contrast there is between Hallyday’s fame in France and his obscurity everywhere else. My lovely wife had never even heard of him, so we indulged in a crash course via YouTube. Given my own preference for proto-punk 1950s rock—if I were the pope, I would canonize Eddie Cochran—it’s not surprising that I liked the early stuff best. Here he is in a mellow mood in 1962, singing to Catherine Deneuve. Bon travail, si vous pouvez l’obtenir.

See you in a couple of weeks.

I was reading John Capouya’s biography of the great wrestler Gorgeous George, and I had a sudden bout of déjà vu—the appetite, the shameless show-biz sensibility, the clothes… where had I seen this before? Oh, yeah:


I am pretty tempted to put that on a t-shirt.

I was thinking over the weekend about the latest Internet hoax, the one where an Irish college student inserted a fake quote into Maurice Jarre‘s Wikipedia page just after Jarre’s death, and the quote was duly featured in a number of newspaper obituaries. Though I was disappointed in the student’s attempt to explain the hoax as some sort of sociological experiment—it was a prank, enjoy it and stop trying to puff yourself up—kudos nevertheless for coming up with material that would irresistibly play into the persistently Romantic impression of composing among the laity:

“When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear.”

How much traction would this particular hoax have gotten with a more realistic quote? Something like—

“When I die, I’ll be busy re-voicing the harmonies in the accompaniment so the clarinets aren’t arpeggiating across their break.”

The hoax has predictably engendered another round of hemming and hawing about Wikipedia, which I suppose is useful for dispelling any lingering impression that Wikipedia is a court of last intellectual resort. (To me, it’s rather like taking a subway map to task for not being a topographical atlas.) Then again, the alternative has its own issues. Surfing the edges of this story, I learned a nice bit of trivia: the first article to make it through the peer-review process of Nupedia, Wikipedia’s expert-only ancestor, was musicologist Christoph Hust’s entry for “Atonality.” You can still read that first entry at the Internet Archive. Here’s how it starts:

Atonality in a general sense describes music that departs from the system of tonal hierarchies that characterized the sound of classical European music from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries (please see the longer article “tonality” for further explanation). Currently, the term is used primarily to describe compositions written approximately 1900 to 1930, in which tonal centers that had been fundamental to most European music since about 1600 are abandoned.

1930? Really? What would that make the technical term for, say, Jean Barraqué’s musical vocabulary? Très piquant? Skepticism is a 24/7 job.

DON. Don and his wife, Susan, are attending a performance of The Marriage of Figaro by the touring Metropolitan Opera company at the Masonic Temple Auditorium in Detroit. They are both very fond of the theater, and they go to a play or an opera whenever they can manage it. As usual, Don has bought seats near the back of the balcony, where he knows the radio reception is better. The two of them are following the opera attentively, but Don is also holding a small transistor radio up to his left ear. (He is left-eared all the way.) Through long training, he is able to hear both the opera and (because of the good reception) the voice of Ernie Harwell, the sports broadcaster for Station WJR, who is at this moment describing the action at Tiger Stadium, where the Brewers are leading the Tigers 1-0 in the top of the fourth. A woman sitting directly behind Don and Susan is unable to restrain her curiosity, and during a recitative she leans forward and taps Don on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” she whispers. “I was just wondering what you’re listening to on that little radio.”

Don half turns in his seat. “Simultaneous translation,” he whispers.

—Roger Angell, “Three For the Tigers,”
The New Yorker, September 17, 1973