Just in time for the annual holiday orgy of rampant consumerism, Strauss and Mahler (previously: 1, 2, 3) have gone into business selling t-shirts. Click on this link, and you’ll find the pair in all their countercultural glory on a variety of apparel, suitable for kids from 2 to however many years one can expect to pile up with an uncompromising artistic vision and a difficult wife. Makes a great albeit potentially nonplussing gift! (Any and all profits, by the way, will benefit this place, which, as causes go, is one of the good ones.)

The great French choreographer Maurice Béjart died yesterday. I blogged about Béjart a few months back; his work has a combination of rigor, joy, and charm that any medium could claim as its holy grail.

More copyright hilarity: a decade-old squabble over the rights to the songs of Jerome Kern has a new lease on life:

The granddaughter of the late composer Jerome Kern won the latest round in a long-standing legal dispute with the manager of a trust that oversees royalties from hits like Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and The Way You Look Tonight.

The nearly 10-year-old conflict made its way to the Kentucky Supreme Court, which on Wednesday reversed a lower court ruling that could have put the case to rest.

The wheels of justice grind exceeedingly fine: this decision only sets forth whether the Kentucky courts are the proper venue to hear the case or not. You can read the overturned Court of Appeals verdict here: basically, Linda Kern Cummings claims that R. Andrew Boose, the attorney who manages the trust that controls Kern’s copyrights, improperly took advantage of the “diminished capacity” of Betty Kern-Miller, Jerome’s daughter, to alter the terms of her will back in the 90s. I haven’t found a whole lot of background on the case, but it bears some hallmarks of a family feud—one of the defendants is Steven Kern Shaw, Cummings’ half-brother, and also the son of clarinetist and bandleader Artie Shaw: as of this 2005 New York Times story, the younger Shaw was nowhere to be found, and when one finds his own notoriously blunt father calling him “a very weird kid” in public (scroll down), you start to get an inkling why.

Nevertheless, I will remind everyone that Jerome Kern died in 1945; the fact that people are still hiring attorneys to tangle over his royalties 60-plus years later tells you something about the strange state of our current intellectual property regime. And some of those royalties are apparently earmarked as charitable bequests, as Cummings is also suing the Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind. After hearing that, critic-at-large Moe, not surprisingly, showed teeth.

Julia Margaret Cameron: Saint Cecilia after the manner of Raphael, c.1865
Albumen print from a collodion-on-glass negative
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

The Royals: “Shrine of St. Cecilia,” 1953 (MP3, 1.6 MB)

A cover of a minor Andrews Sisters hit, coming shortly after Hank Ballard joined the group, and shortly before they recorded their breakout hit, “Work With Me Annie,” and changed their name to the Midnighters.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day here in the U.S., which, notwithstanding its official rationale of some business involving Puritan immigrants, is pretty much our national eating holiday. All the usual holiday stress aside, a higher-than-normal proportion of that food is home-cooked, which kind of makes the day a musical occasion, once removed: cooking, when you think about it, is basically composing for the tone-deaf. It’s all there—the balance between planning and spontaneity, between creativity and craft, between repertoire and improvisation, the need for an audience, the way you can cover up less-than-ideal raw materials with copious amounts of MSG, &c., &c.

Of course, not everybody is plugged in to a network that includes that kind of food, so, just like last year (mmmm… stuffing—whoops, got distracted there for a second), I’ll remind everyone that now is as good a time as any to send a few bucks to organizations that do home-cooking for complete strangers. Here in Boston, you can take your pick from The Greater Boston Food Bank, the Boston Rescue Mission, The Pine Street Inn, the Boston Living Center—those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. There’s Share Our Strength if you want to go national, or you can search at America’s Second Harvest for a local food bank. And there’s always The Salvation Army, who deserve a kettle full of change just for their motto: “Blood and Fire.” Blood and Fire! It’s like a three-word Black Sabbath show. Five, ten bucks—admit it, they’ll do more with it than you would.

Thus endeth the sermon. Enjoy your holiday—and if you’re hitting the mall on Friday, I’d recommend body armor. (Wow, that’s one of the craziest home-page index menus I’ve seen in a while.)

I’ve been busier than usual as of late, and I realized that I’d been slacking off on my solemn duty as a blogger, that of promulgating crackpot theories. Without the constant nourishment of entertainingly improbable hypotheses, this whole Internet thing would beach itself like a disoriented right whale—there, I’ve met my quota for not-quite-pertinent similes at the same time! Anyway, try this one on for size:

Ludwig van Beethoven was a steroid abuser.

Wouldn’t that explain an awful lot? The notoriously difficult personality? The megalomanaical fury of the middle period? The wild mood swings of the late period? The rather remarkable growth of his head? Dude’s head went from normal to huge. Not to put too fine a point on it:

Barry Bonds in 1986; Barry Bonds in 2007.

Beethoven in 1801; Beethoven in 1818.

How’s that for circumstantial evidence? I will also point out the original words to the finale of the Ninth Symphony (NOTE: not actual original words to the finale of the Ninth Symphony):

Deine Zauber binden wieder, Alle Sachen das Erhell’n; Alle Menschen werden Brüder, Mit ihren großen Muskeln.

Your magic frees all others, The brightening of all things; All men become brothers, With their huge muscles.

Let’s review, shall we?

BEFORE	AFTER
Little head	Enormous head
Awkwardly friendly	Cranky and temperamental
Symphony no. 1	Symphony no. 5

Some literalist is probably at this moment self-inflicting a herniated disc with head-shaking and complaining that anabolic steroids weren’t synthesized until around the 1930s. Well, the British novelist and critic Angus Wilson has my back (OK, OK, he’s talking about Dickens and Dostoevsky—same difference, I say!):

I think this refutation of evidence of direct influence is not all that important, for the relation… is much more exciting than a matter of provable evidence of somebody being influenced by this particular thing or that particular thing.

Next time: Liszt and crystal meth—of course, you all knew that one already.