California Klezmer, featuring Gerry Tenney:
“Schvereh Togedikeh Nakht” (mp3, 3.6 MB)

“Are You Working Every Day?” (J.F. Wyman, 1884) via the Library of Congress.

Today’s opera news:

The Metropolitan Opera is infested with mice.

During an April 9 restaurant inspection at the Met, the department found “evidence of mice or live mice present in facility’s food and/or nonfood areas,” according to reports on the department’s Web site…. The nation’s largest musical organization also was cited for “food not protected from potential source of contamination during storage, preparation, transportation, display or service.”

La Scala has commissioned an operatic adaptation of An Inconvenient Truth. (Hasn’t this been done before?)

Why is opera so effective, anyway? Turns out that, on some level, we think it’s trying to kill us.

According to musicologist David Huron, … opera singers produce the bulk of their sound energy in the 3- to 4-kilohertz range. Humans are quite sensitive to this range, probably because it is also the range of a human scream.
…
According to Huron, researchers have discovered that several of the frisson’s acoustic correlates—things that seem to induce the sensation in listeners—are fear-related. These correlates include rapidly large increases in the loudness of music, abrupt changes in tempo and rhythm, a broadening of frequencies and an increase in the number of sound sources, among other factors.

These are all “low-probability musical events” that surprise and startle us, Huron said. The factors that evoke a frisson are, in his mind, “suspiciously similar” to those that evoke fear.

To be fair, more often than not, the lady’s got a knife.

The gilt Art Nouveau rotary hotline here at Soho the Dog HQ lit up this morning with Geoff Edgers providing detailed background on the continuing dispute over Oskar Kokoschka’s 1913 painting “Two Nudes.” Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts has filed suit in US District Court to establish ownership of the work over the claims of Claudia Seger-Thomschitz, the Austrian heir of Jewish art collector Oskar Reichel, whose 1939 sale of the painting may or may not have been the result of Nazi pressure.

An intriguing story, both for considering the problematic nature of drawing a nuanced line between personal exigency and external duress in situations of organized cruelty, and, it must be said, for how fast any nuance whatsoever flies out the window once attorneys start talking to the press. But what’s the classical music angle? Naked pictures of Alma Mahler.


That’s her on the right, with Oskar next to her, displaying just the sort of wistful apprehension I imagine most of her lovers displayed when she would insist on going “off the trail” during their walks through the woods. The historians Geoff interviewed are of the opinion that the MFA doth protest too much, but regardless of the outcome, there’s a certain ad rem poetry in Alma’s affairs necessitating a legal untangling. (Incidentally: does every single piece of Nazi-looted art have some connection with Alma Mahler? It is not outside the realm of possibility.)

Update (5/28): Geoff passes along further adventures of Alma and Oskar. John Waters should totally get his hands on this story.

It’s been a week for awards—you probably heard about this year’s Polar Music Prize going to Renee Fleming and Pink Floyd; or perhaps Amy Winehouse showing up late to pick up an Ivor Novello Award, a situation Ivor Novello probably would have turned into a wry, bittersweet song; or perhaps my own favorite, Jazzie B, OBE.

But have any of them been “examining the historical background and long-term implications of important public policy issues”? Andrew Lloyd Webber (don’t make any jokes until you listen to Evita again—OK, go ahead and make jokes, but do listen to Evita again, it’s better than you remember) is the latest recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service. Presented by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (named for the most insufferable academic snob we ever stuck in the White House), the award is given “to individuals who have served with distinction in public life and have shown a special commitment to seeking out informed opinions and thoughtful views.” (Although they did give the award to Dick Cheney a couple years ago—there’s obviously some wiggle room in the criteria.) Musical types are rare on the honor roll, which is dominated by politicians and world leaders, but Lloyd Webber does follow in the footsteps of Wayne Newton (huh?—hey, he works like a dog for the USO) and Dolly Parton (no explanation necessary, really.)

Economists Nauro Campos and Renata Leite have been analyzing seven years worth of data from the Latin American art market.

Our results suggest that: (i) the reputation of an artist and the provenance of the artwork, often omitted variables in previous studies, seem to be more important determinants of the sale price of a painting than more standard factors, such as medium and size, (ii) the opinion of art experts seems to be of limited use in predicting whether or not an artwork sells at auction, (iii) there is little supporting evidence for the widespread notion that the best or more expensive artworks tend to generate above average returns (the “masterpiece effect”), although (iv) there is strong evidence in our data for the declining price anomaly or “afternoon effect” (that is, when heterogeneous products sold sequentially follow a decreasing pattern of prices.)

(Summary here; working paper here; via.) Today’s assignment: consider the implications, if any, for the business of classical music presentation, in currencies both real and curious.

Done with Ethan’s Wagnerian Tristano epic yet? Here’s more reads that caught my eye this week.

• Nico Muhly on the rest of the iceberg.
• Lisa Hirsch on composing from the distaff side.
• Joel Brown interviewing Keith Lockhart on pop and the Pops.
• Daniel Wolf lamenting, it occurs to me, the context of no context.