Sounds & Fury

Visitor Advisory (Administrative Note)

For those of you visiting here looking for an explanation or clarification of my laconic, quasi-cryptic remark, re, the Zambello-WNO "American" Das Rheingold in the comments section of this post on Wellsung ("Not a bad idea. A promising idea badly -- moronically -- imagined."), you'll find what you're looking for here.

Updated Post (Administrative Note)

There's more on the Zambello-WNO production of Das Rheingold here (See Update #3).

Note: More links have been added to Update #3 as of 8:32 PM Eastern.
Note 2 @ 11:31 AM Eastern on 29 Mar: Footnote added to main post.

Yum!

Sometimes the simplest of dishes hits the spot so perfectly that one would be loath to trade it for even a seven-course classic French banquet.

Dinner tonight:

Steamed fresh cabbage and little round white potatoes, quartered, both tossed in a lemon-butter sauce just before service as accompaniment to thin-sliced, top-cut, fatty corned beef (lightly steamed just before service so that it reaches full flavor), the dish served with a pint of Guinness Draught. And for dessert, a slice of Sara Lee Original Cream Classic Cheesecake, and a cup of freshly ground and brewed Columbian coffee.

Yum!

Proposal For An Aesthetic Unified Field Theory

Einstein spent the last three decades of his life trying to derive what he called a Unified Field Theory: a series of mutually consistent equations that would seamlessly unify the laws of general relativity and electromagnetism, and in the process perhaps even bring an end to or make irrelevant the irreconcilable incompatibilities between the two principal theoretical pillars of modern physics, general relativity and quantum mechanics. Einstein failed in his attempt, but the search for such a theory — called today, a Theory Of Everything (TOE) — has, for the past two decades or so, been taken up with renewed vigor.

Might an analogous theory exist in the domain of aesthetics? Denis Dutton — Professor of the philosophy of art, University of Canterbury, New Zealand; editor of the journal, Philosophy and Literature; and the founder and editor of that indispensable Web tip sheet for intellectuals, Arts & Letters Daily — thinks it just might — by way of Darwin:

The humanities have gone through the rise of Theory in the 1960s, its firm hold on English and literature departments through the 1970s and 80s, followed most recently by its much-touted decline and death.

Of course, Theory (capitalization is an English department affectation) never operated as a proper research program in any scientific sense — with hypotheses validated (or falsified) by experiment or accrued evidence. Theory was a series of intellectual fashion statements, clever slogans and postures, imported from France in the 60s, then developed out of Yale and other Theory hot spots. The academic work Theory spawned was noted more for its chosen jargons, which functioned like secret codes, than for any concern to establish truth or advance knowledge. It was all about careers and prestige.

Truth and knowledge, in fact, were ruled out as quaint illusions. This cleared the way, naturally, for an "anything-goes" atmosphere of academic criticism. In reality, it was anything but anything goes, since the political demands of the period included a long list of stereotyped villains (the West, the Enlightenment, dead whites males, even clear writing) to be pitted against mandatory heroines and heroes (indigenous peoples, the working class, the oppressed, and so forth).

Though the politics remains as strong as ever in academe, Theory has atrophied not because it was refuted, but because everyone got bored with it. Add to that the absurdly bad writing of academic humanists of the period and episodes like the Sokal Hoax, and the decline was inevitable. Theory academics could with high seriousness ignore rational counter-arguments, but for them ridicule and laughter were like water thrown at the Wicked Witch. Theory withered and died.

But wait. Here is exactly where my most dangerous idea comes in. What if it turned out that the academic humanities — art criticism, music and literary history, aesthetic theory, and the philosophy of art — actually had available to them a true, and therefore permanently valuable, theory to organize their speculations and interpretations? What if there really existed a hitherto unrecognized "grand narrative" that could explain the entire history of creation and experience of the arts worldwide?

Aesthetic experience, as well as the context of artistic creation, is a phenomenon both social and psychological. From the standpoint of inner experience, it can be addressed by evolutionary psychology: the idea that our thinking and values are conditioned by the 2.6 million years of natural and sexual selection in the Pleistocene.

This Darwinian theory has much to say about the abiding, cross-culturally ascertainable values human beings find in art.

RTWT here.

Uh-oh Confirmed

[Note: This post has been updated (3) as of 7:21 AM Eastern on 27 Mar. See below.]

It would appear that what we feared in our tentative Uh-oh expressed here has, unhappily, now been confirmed here as a fait accompli by an eyewitness to the actual stagework of Francesca Zambello's new production of Das Rheingold, the first music-drama of Wagner's cosmic tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, for the Washington National Opera.

Despite this eyewitness's, um, curious response to it ("[W]e saw every thing [sic] that she [the director, Francesca Zambello] had made, and, behold, it is very good."), and his approvingly likening it to the Patrice Chéreau 1976 Bayreuth Ring — the mother of all Eurotrash productions of the Ring — as if, somehow, that were a mark of praise, what this eyewitness describes* would strike disgust, and not a little despair, into the heart of anyone who has any real understanding of Das Rheingold, and of the great tetralogy of which it's prelude.

Score another victory for the ludicrous horror that is Regietheater, and for the self-indulgent, self-involved vandals who are its practitioners.

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*Parts of that description seem to be missing from the article as presently posted; most particularly the earlier included description of the "quilting" or "sewing" by the Colorado-nixies (i.e., the Rheintöchter) of a golden fabric somethingorother that Alberich steals from them in lieu of the Wagner-specified gold from the river. (Footnote added: 3/29)

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Update (3:15 PM Eastern on 25 Mar): Oh dear. What have we here?

Have a look at this:

No, that's not a party of 1920's-style Ugly Americans carousing up the gangplank of a transatlantic steamer headed off for Europe, but apparently — wait for it! — the "gods" in Francesca Zambello's "American" Das Rheingold for the WNO doing their Zambello-American version of crossing the Rainbow Bridge to Walhall.

If you're curious what kind of mind it takes to concoct this sort of thing, take a listen to this interview (click on the "Listen" icon at the top left of the page) of Ms. Zambello (a native New Yorker) by NPR's All Things Considered host, Robert Siegel. We especially liked the part near the end of the eight-minute interview where Ms. Zambello declares we ought to stop treating as sacred every note an opera composer wrote, and in order to appeal to and attract a younger, even a teenage, audience (where have we heard this idiot reasoning before?), rearrange or cut out all those too-many notes ("Like we do with musicals"), and pare the opera down to ninety minutes or an hour so that people can see the opera, and "then go out to dinner."

Lord preserve us all!

(Our thousand-thanks to George M. Wallace of A Fool In The Forest for the eMail heads-up.)

Update 2 (11:38 PM Eastern on 25 Mar): More from the mind of Francesca Zambello (this from a posting on an opera forum):

In an interview in the WNO's Season Book, Zambello remarks:

"Das Rheingold is, on a practical level, a short opera. It is a tight story and only two hours [[author's] sic] long. In a way, each of its four scenes is an episode unto itself. Each part is thus not any different than a TV installment of a drama. It also doesn't hurt that the work deals with magic and reality, family and their place in society, and has very realistic characters who happen to be gods, and incredibly sublime music that touches us on a primal level."

No comment as none is needed.

Update 3 (7:21 AM Eastern on 27 Mar): Maury D'annato of My Favorite Intermissions attended opening night, and files this eyewitness report from the abattoir.

(Added 3:01 PM Eastern) Links to other reviews of the production can be found here.

(Added 8:32 PM Eastern) Alex of Wellsung weighs in with his verdict.

We Fulfill An Obligation

Jack-of-all-arts culture journalist Terry Teachout of About Last Night writes in this post:

I rarely go to classical concerts. It’s not that I love the music any less, but over time I’ve become increasingly alienated from the experience of concertgoing: the noisy audiences, the unimaginative programs, the feeling that not nearly enough is at stake. Now that I’m spending less time out on the town, I find that few classical-music events in New York City are capable of inspiring me to surrender a precious evening I could spend doing something else.

[...]

I had a good time [at a classical music concert attended] — and yet I can't help but wonder whether a program less precisely suited to my tastes could have lured me into a concert hall, least of all one whose indifferent acoustics are blighted by the near-constant rumble of the New York subway. The trains roared by, the cell phones twittered, my neighbors coughed at regular intervals ... but you know how it is. It’s been a long time since I attended a classical-music concert given in the presence of a silent, fully attentive audience.

[...]

I still love going to ballet and opera and plays and jazz clubs, mainly because they offer me something I can’t get at home. Hearing late Beethoven in my friend’s living room was a different kind of experience, to be sure, but it, too, was unique and irreplaceable. Hearing a decently played program of oft-recorded standard repertoire in the company of noisy strangers is not. Why should I come hear you play Op. 111 in Alice Tully Hall when I can stay home and listen to Artur Schnabel playing it?

[...]

I have a sneaking feeling that the institution of the classical-music concert as we know it has just about run its course — and I won’t be sorry to see it go. It’s way past time for a change.

And in this follow-up post:

What I care about is the piece itself, far more than the way any one particular artist happens to play it, and now that each and every piece of standard-rep music has been recorded in multiple versions of very high quality, I find I have very little motivation to go out and hear Op. 111 done in yet another way, however “different” or “original” it might happen to be. Yes, the experience of hearing classical music in live performance is in and of itself worthwhile, but when the environment in which one consumes it has been degraded, I'm not so sure it's cost-effective (speaking from an aesthetic point of view) to put up with the distractions.

This, by the way, is an unintended consequence of the invention of recording that nobody foresaw a century ago: that it might eventually make public performance obsolete, or at least moribund.

All the above are, of course, the very personal feelings of a single individual, and as such cannot be gainsaid. We in fact even agree with Mr. Teachout concerning the aesthetic "cost-effective[ness]" of attending live performances in the "degraded" audience environment of today's classical music concert. But for the rest of it, even if we did agree with Mr. Teachout (which we most emphatically do not; see our detailed post of August 2004 wherein the cultural critic quoted "whose name [we] here withhold because [we] don't mean what follows to be a personal challenge" is none other than Mr. Teachout himself), there's a difference — a huge and meaningful difference — between Mr. Teachout saying such things publicly and someone such as ourself saying them even though we daresay we're at least as competent and qualified musically (as opposed to being as culturally savvy) as Mr. Teachout. One could with complete justice and without penalty ignore or dismiss any such negative remarks made publicly by us by saying simply, as we have above of Mr. Teachout's remarks, that they're the very personal feelings of a single individual, and therefore cannot be gainsaid.

One, however, cannot in the same way ignore or dismiss such negative remarks made publicly when made by someone such as Mr. Teachout as he's not only a popular and widely read print media commentator on the arts, but a presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts, and as such doesn't have the luxury of being able to express publicly such merely personal negative feelings on a matter having to do with the arts and expect them to be granted the same sort of immunity from argument and naysaying granted mere civilians such as ourself. One could — in fact one ought to feel obligated to — go even further by taking to task someone in Mr. Teachout's position for making such remarks by reminding him that he has an obligation and responsibility to not express publicly such merely personal negative feelings as the undue negative impact they might have on the thinking of the arts-patronizing public could do meaningful harm to the very arts such a person is presumptively dedicated to supporting.

Regarding the classical music concert specifically, in our above linked August 2004 post we had this to say concerning Mr. Teachout's publicly expressed feelings:

This critic [i.e., Terry Teachout] declared he "no longer feel[s] any compelling need to regularly experience [classical music] in the form of routine live performances of the standard classical repertoire, any more than [he] feel[s] the need to own another recording of Beethoven's late quartets, no matter how good it may be."

If one were inclined to be unkind in the matter, one might suggest this critic has grown a bit jaded musically concerning the standard classical repertoire; a not uncommon condition of concertgoers in our great metropolitan cultural centers.

But, for the nonce at least, [we're] not inclined to be unkind, and so [we'll] suggest more gently that [we] think this critic has become a bit myopic in this matter. Relatively few persons in this country outside our metropolitan cultural centers have ready or frequent access to classical music concerts of any kind, much less classical music concerts performed by first-rate ensembles in a first-rate concert hall, and therefore will rarely have the opportunity to experience what this critic takes for every-day granted. And it's for those persons most particularly — the overwhelming majority of Americans, not to even speak of those not yet born — that live performances of classical music — even "routine live performances of the standard classical repertoire" — must remain an alive and vital enterprise.

Consider all our above as our fulfilling our obligation as a patron of and civilian commentator on the arts to take Mr. Teachout to task for his ill-advised public expression of his merely personal negative feelings concerning the classical music concert.

Sounds About Right

Music journalist, critic, and radio personality James Reel of KUAT-FM (Arizona) Blog writes:

Never, ever trust British critics writing about British music, for they are boosters all. Every blip and squeak of music from their quaint little island is promoted as a work of utmost profundity and heightened expression. This is quite a claim from a nation that has in 350 years produced only three and a half composers equal to any in the world: Henry Purcell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten and, when he’s “on,” Peter Maxwell Davies. (Handel, remember, was an import.) Britain has generated many perfectly solid if not particularly exportable composers, but they are not nearly the masters the Brits announce them to be, and exaggerated claims for their ability set me against them (Elgar above all, but also the likes of Parry, Birtwistle and Adès).

Apart from Mr. Reel's assessment of composer Edward Elgar (Correction 3 Mar @ 4:01 AM EST: Sir Edward Elgar. Sorry about that) earlier in the piece that characterizes him as "a provincial composer of severely flawed scores that fervent little fan clubs have bullied us into accepting as masterpieces" — an assessment with which I'm in complete agreement — and which is contra British music journalist and pianist Jessica Duchen of Jessica Duchen's Classical Music Blog, I've not enough exposure to the writings of British music critics of the past 20 years or so to declare an informed yea or nay to what Mr. Reel has to say about them. However, my experience of the breed from earlier decades tends to incline me toward tentative agreement with Mr. Reel's remarks concerning them.

It's a little surprising to read those remarks, actually. I would have thought that in this postmodern age Brit music critics as a group would have outgrown that genuinely annoying clubby / chauvinistic tendency of theirs regarding home-grown composers and their music.

Apparently not.

RTWT here.

On Conducting

These thoughts on conducting by one of its greatest practitioners are as apposite today as the day they were written, and could be read with profit by armchair music-lovers and practicing professionals alike.

The whole duty of a conductor is comprised in his ability always to indicate the right TEMPO. His choice of tempi will show whether he understands the piece or not. With good players, again, the true tempo induces correct phrasing and expression, and conversely, with a conductor, the idea of appropriate phrasing and expression will induce the conception of the true tempo.

[...]

I am persistently returning to the question of tempo because, as I said above, this is the point at which it becomes evident whether a conductor understands his business or not.

[...]

If I try to sum up my experiences, regarding performances of my own operas, I am at a loss to distinguish with which of the qualities of our conductors I am concerned. Is it the spirit in which they treat German music in the concert rooms, or the spirit in which they deal with the opera at the theatres? I believe it to be my particular and personal misfortune that the two spirits meet in my operas, and mutually encourage one another in a rather dubious kind of way. Whenever the former spirit, which practices upon our classical concert music, gets a chance — as in the instrumental introductions to my operas — I have invariably discovered the disastrous consequences of the bad habits already described at such length [on prior pages]. I need only speak of the tempo, which is either absurdly hurried (as, for instance, under Mendelssohn, who, once upon a time, at a Leipzig Gewandhaus concert, produced the overture to Tannhäuser as an example and a warning), or muddled (like the introduction to Lohengrin at Berlin, and almost everywhere else), or both dragged and muddled (like the introduction to Die Meistersinger, lately, at Dresden and at other places), yet never with those well-considered [unnotated] modifications of the [main] tempo upon which I must count as much as upon the correct intonation of the notes themselves if an intelligible rendering is to be obtained.

[...]

If any conductor wishes to prove to his audience or to his directors, etc., what an ambiguous risk they will run with Die Meistersinger, he need take no further trouble than to beat time to the overture after the fashion in which he is wont to beat it to the works of Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach (which fashion suits the works of R. Schumann fairly well); it will then be sufficiently obvious that he is dealing with a very unpleasant kind of music. Let anyone imagine so animated yet so sensitive a thing as the tempo which governs this overture, let this delicately constituted thing suddenly be forced into the Procrustus-bed of such a classical time-beater, what will become of it? The doom is: "Herein shalt thou lie! Whatsoever is too long with thee shall be chopped off, and whatsoever is too short shall be stretched!," whereupon the band strikes up and overpowers the cries of the victim. Safely bedded in this wise, not only the overture, but, as will appear in the sequel, the entire opera of Die Meistersinger — or as much of it as was left after the Capellmeister's cuts — was presented to the public of Dresden.

[...]

I know of no-one to whom I would confidently entrust a single tempo in one of my operas.

—Richard Wagner,* from, Über das Dirigieren (On Conducting), 1869, Translation: Edward Dannreuther

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* For those unaware of the fact, Wagner was considered as perhaps the greatest conductor of his time, and is in large measure responsible for the conductor's role as we know it today.

Uh-oh

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 8:38 AM Eastern on 25 Mar. See below.]

Read this, then read this.

If La Cieca's Top Secret Mole is even half right, it would appear that Ms. Zambello really blew it.

Not a surprise, but a disappointment.

What else is new.

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Update (8:38 AM Eastern on 25 Mar): Uh-oh confirmed.

New Addition (Administrative Note)

A beautifully designed new blog on all things Sherlockian has just come to our attention: A Study in Sherlock, maintained by Sherlockian, Douglas Johnston. Despite its non-qualifying subject matter, we've added this blog to our exclusive list of Culture Blogs on the sidebar. Take a look and a read even if you're no Sherlockian. It's well worth your time.

Interesting If Entirely Predictable

The controversy over the cancellation or postponement by the New York Theater Workshop of the mounting of the play, My Name is Rachel Corrie (whether cancellation or postponement has not as yet been made entirely clear), has finally heated up to the point where the print press is jumping into the fray with both feet rather than merely dipping in with its toes, and this piece by Philip Weiss for the magazine, The Nation, is the latest and most comprehensive to date. Like previous pieces in other publications, and by theater bloggers in the theatrical blogosphere (but unlike this piece by non-theater blogger, Yours Truly), the piece comes down hard on the NYTW and its artistic director, James C. Nicola, for backing out of their prior commitment to mount the play, and, also like those previous pieces, hurls lofty-sounding charges of censorship, cowardice, insensitivity, betrayal of theater and the theatrical art, etc., etc., in Mr. Nicola's and NYTW's direction.

Not that Mr. Nicola and NYTW are blameless in the matter. Mr. Nicola's explanations (there were several, not completely consistent) of why the play was not being mounted at this time were something less than thoroughly ingenuous and forthcoming, not to speak of containing several lame and ill-advised excuses and justifications, and for all that Mr. Nicola and NYTW have been rightly chastised and taken to task.

What's most interesting if entirely predictable about this whole business, however, is that, almost to a man, the critics and publications — theater bloggers and their blogs very much included — are all staunchly, some even rabidly, leftist in political and social orientation and sympathies, and one wonders whether such a stink would have been raised, if stink were raised at all, had the play not been a deeply sympathetic treatment of a naïve, misguided, emotionally fragile, radical leftist idealist and martyr — a "useful idiot," to use Stalin's clear-eyed characterization of the type — but a deeply sympathetic treatment of an idealist idiot of a different stripe altogether; say, the radical right-wing idealist and idiot, Rabbi Meir Kahane, for pertinent example (and, yes, the personal parallel, if not in its details, is at its essential core perfectly on-target).

Actually, there's nothing at all to wonder about. If ruckus were raised at all, those very same critics, publications, bloggers, and blogs, instead of castigating Mr. Nicola and NYTW for their decision, would be lauding them to the skies for their outstanding honesty, courage, sensitivity, commitment to theater and the theatrical art, etc., etc., and for their just plain good sense.

Bet on it — giving odds.

How To Put A Stop To It

Composer and teacher Marcus Maroney of Sounds Like New writes a lovely review of a Spring, Texas recital by violinist Joshua Bell and by pianist Jeremy Denk of Think Denk (scroll down a bit). Mr. Maroney closes his review with these comments on the audience for this recital:

The big drawback ... was the audience. Between the two movements of the concert's opener, a group with front-row seats moseyed in late. Bell and Denk began the second movement, after which a female member of this group preceded to stand up, get an usher, and shuffle the denizens of the front row, talking audibly, while the music was proceeding. Now, this was a concert in a church auditorium, where the audience is not [hidden in the] dark. Surely Bell and Denk could see what was going on. The bad behavior didn't stop there: unwrapping, chewing, tapping, program book dropping, audible conversations, and clapping at inappropriate times made me embarrassed that this was the suburban Texas concert-going scene. Thank god for that fortissimo A major piano chord that kicks off the Kreutzer's finale - I saw hands coming together after the riveting performance of the variations and that gorgeous major triadic slap was pure magic.

That sort of outrageous, rock-show-audience behavior — an egregious breach of concert-hall audience etiquette — is one of the reasons I no longer attend live concerts (there are more practical reasons for my current non-attendance, but they're inapposite to the matter at hand). As Mr. Maroney hints at (or rather, I suspect it's what he was hinting at by his noting that surely Mr. Bell and Mr. Denk could see what was going on), there's but one effective way to put a stop to that sort of audience behavior when it occurs: by the performers halting the music in mid-phrase, humiliating the offenders by simply staring at them quietly until they get the message and cease whatever inappropriate behavior they were engaging in, and then starting the music over again right from the top; either of the piece or the movement, as the case may be.

The late conductor Leopold Stokowski was a master of this tactic, and during his tenure as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and for decades after under his assistant and successor, Eugene Ormandy, you can bet the audiences at Philadelphia's Academy Of Music (the orchestra's home venue during that era) were among the best behaved, most attentive, and most responsive in the world.

Love Thy Neighbor

For even the most devout Christian, might be harder than even you imagine.

Two Updates (Administrative Note)

Here, and here.

And Speaking Of Cool And Bitchin'

When it comes to physics, people seem to need to kid themselves. There is a presumption, Dr. [of philosophy and physics at Columbia University, David] Albert said, that if you look deeply enough you will find "some reaffirmation of your own centrality to the world, a reaffirmation of your ability to take control of your own destiny." We want to know that God loves us, that we are the pinnacle of evolution.

But one of the most valuable aspects of science, he said, is precisely the way it resists that temptation to find the answer we want. That is the test that quantum mysticism flunks, and on some level we all flunk.

I'd like to believe that like Galileo, I would have the courage to see the world clearly, in all its cruelty and beauty, "without hope or fear," as the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis put it. Take free will. Everything I know about physics and neuroscience tells me it's a myth. But I need that illusion to get out of bed in the morning. Of all the durable and necessary creations of atoms, the evolution of the illusion of the self and of free will are perhaps the most miraculous. That belief is necessary to my survival.

But I wouldn't call it good physics.

—Dennis Overbye, from the essay, Far Out, Man. But Is It Quantum Physics?

Give Me A Break!

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 5:49 AM Eastern on 16 Mar. See below.]

My cup seemingly runneth over this morning.

Music journalist and composer (yes, another one of those triple-threat guys) Steve Hicken of Listen writes:

It's important for concert music to expand its audience (given the pay for play world we inhabit) and using language that is understood by the public-at-large is a perfectly legitimate way to communicate. I don't see how it cheapens our [classical music] art in the least.

I'm working on a review of two recent Elliott Carter discs for Sequenza 21, and I'm happy to say that, while my personal jury is still out on a couple of the pieces / performances, the Boston Concerto is actually very cool, and Dialogues (piano and orchestra) is bitchin'.

Jeez! Give me a break, Mr. Hicken. What the hell are cool and bitchin' supposed to mean? When translated into critically meaningful and discerning English, that is. Mimicking the illiterate, airheaded, and language-challenged hardly qualifies as "a perfectly legitimate way to communicate." Not outside the mosh pit or similar environs, that is.

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Update (5:49 AM Eastern on 16 Mar): Steve Hicken clarifies his comments, assuring us that his definitive critical response to the Boston Concerto and Dialogues will, in the review he's preparing for Sequenza 21, be expressed in considerably more substantial and meaningful critical language than that the former is very cool and the latter, totally bitchin'. We're gratified to hear it, and trust that Mr. Hicken will in that review resist the temptation to make use of mosh-pit language of any sort which language can in no way serve to make the review more substantial critically or read more gracefully.

Distinction Without A Difference

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 10:19 PM Eastern on 16 Mar. See below.]

Music journalist and composer Greg Sandow of Sandow writes:

As I studied various Brahms scores, I was forcefully hit by something I'd thought about before, but never noticed this clearly. You can gush about great composers all you like -- their magical inspiration, their matchless flights of musical creativitiy [sic] -- but it's hard to keep doing that when you study details of their orchestration, especially if you've ever orchestrated yourself. Yes, there are times when some orchestration idea strikes like a ray of light out of nowhere (that final chord in Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, the famous flute and trombone chords in the Berlioz Requiem, the amazing passage in the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth [Symphony] when the big tune gets flowingly played by low strings and contrapuntal bassoons). But often the details of orchestration take you into the composer's workshop. You see the great names of the pantheon solving practical problems. You see them making choices -- and you can see what the choices are, because the alternatives[,] the choices they didn't make -- are often plainly obvious.

This even applies to Mozart, often worshipped as the most magical of magical composers. But try tihinking [sic] of magic when you look at the trumpets in the first movement of the Jupiter Symphony [sic], hammering out very basic rhythms on mostly just two notes. Inspiration isn't striking here; instead, Mozart is making practical decisions about how to best use the trumpets to reinforce loud parts of the music. You can see him, in measures 9 through 14, choosing to use the trumpets in not quite the way he uses the horns. The horns play on all the beats; the trumpets only play on some of them. It's easy to imagine how the music would sound if the trumpets played on all the beats, and you can see why Mozart made the choice he did.

What's Mr. Sandow's point? He seems to want to say, and in fact all but does, "There's nothing special about these DWEM composers. Nothing magical or inspired about their composition. They were simply practical craftsmen solving practical problems and making practical choices just like composers today. Nothing to gush about or worship."

Mr. Sandow works hard to make a distinction between the practical and the magical and inspired, but his very own examples quoted above give lie to that distinction in the cases of the composers whom he singles out, and shows his distinction to be a distinction without a difference in those cases.

All composers — all creative artists — then as now, have to, in their work, make practical decisions and choices among a number of technical alternatives. It comes with the territory; part of the game, so to speak while mixing metaphors. The real distinction to be made is between those composers of prior eras singled out by Mr. Sandow and the visible composers of today. And the distinction is that the practical technical decisions and choices made by those particular prior-era composers produced — wait for it! — the magical and inspired, while the practical technical decisions and choices made by the overwhelming number (I was sorely tempted to say all, but resisted it) of today's visible composers more often than not (and I was sorely tempted to say invariably, but resisted it) produce the merely well-crafted, or the merely clever, or the merely interesting, or, worst of all, the merely complex, singly or in combination.

And that's a distinction with a difference; one that music journalists like Mr. Sandow (and others I could name) would do well and better to acknowledge and accept.

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Update (5:50 AM Eastern on 16 Mar): Steve Hicken of Listen lodges objection against the above, declaring we've misread the thrust of Mr. Sandow's post. We would ask Mr. Hicken to again read the opening grafs of that post quoted above by us. We misread nothing. The thrust of Mr. Sandow's post — the nub of which thrust is reiterated for emphasis later in his post — is perfectly clear. And perfectly typical. Mr. Hicken also declares Mr. Sandow's analysis of Brahms's orchestration that follows those opening grafs (no portion of which we quoted, and about which we made no comment) to be "fine." We, on the other hand, found it to be simpleminded at best, not to say approached from the wrong direction.

Update (10:19 PM Eastern on 16 Mar): Steve Hicken responds.

At The Final Accounting, The Play's The Thing

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 7:06 PM Eastern on 14 Mar. See below.]

For the past couple weeks the theatrical blogosphere and, to some degree, the theatrical print press, have been humming — seething would perhaps be a better choice of word — with controversy concerning the New York Theater Workshop's decision to not, at least for the time being, mount a previously scheduled production of a play entitled, My Name Is Rachel Corrie; a play written jointly by a leftist actor by the name of Alan Rickman (who also directed the play at its premier at London's Royal Court theater last year) and a leftist editor for the leftist Brit newspaper, The Guardian, named Katharine Viner.

Rachel Corrie was the 23-year-old leftist idealist — of the type that no less than Stalin himself characterized as "useful idiots" — who in 2003, as a member of a pro-Palestinian international activist group calling itself the International Solidarity Movement, took it upon herself to step between an Israeli bulldozer and a Palestinian house to prevent the house from being demolished by said bulldozer, and in the process was crushed to death. The play, based on Ms. Corrie's diaries and scattered other documents written when she was much younger, and on her eMail messages sent home from the Gaza Strip, is intended to be, in the words of Mr. Rickman, "a balanced portrait" of Ms. Corrie. "We were never going to paint Rachel as a golden saint or sentimentalise her," he said in 2005 in advance of the play's premier, "but we also needed to face the fact that she'd been demonised." And in the words of Ms. Viner at that same time, "We've tried to do justice to the whole of Rachel: neither saint nor traitor, both serious and funny, messy and talented, devastatingly prescient and human and whole."

I'm quite certain that both Mr. Rickman and Ms. Viner are sincere, and earnestly believe the play they jointly wrote reflects honestly those intentions. However, the very fact that their self-confessed intention was to write a play about a specific leftist heroine and martyr — a literal leftist poster girl — in a specific politically charged circumstance and context, who, as revealed by her own writings, was besotted by leftist social and political ideals, makes the declaration of those high-minded intentions by the leftist playwrights ironically and unwittingly reek of an advance apologia for the hagiographic, and makes the work they produced — text unread and sight unseen, and intended "balanced portrait" or not — instantly suspect as a genuine work of dramatic art.

I've stayed out of the blogospheric controversy over the NYTW's decision to not mount the play only because I've, of course, not seen the play, nor have I access to the play's book, and therefore can't make informed comment on that decision; a lack of firsthand knowledge that apparently has not given pause to others in the blogosphere making comment on this business. As an uninformed conjecture, however — one I'd be willing to bet my last bippy is spot-on the money — I suspect the play is almost certainly something the NYTW should never have accepted for production in the first place because it's nothing other than an outright leftist hagiography masquerading as a work of dramatic art. And I also suspect that only later, brought to its senses by the dire and catastrophic recent turn of events in the Mideast that brought into searing focus the true political context prevailing there at the time Rachel Corrie was fighting for the Palestinians, did the NYTW finally realize the ethically intolerable implications of its acceptance of the play, and desperately sought a way out of something in which it never to begin with should have involved itself.

As I say, that's merely uninformed conjecture on my part, and ought to be afforded the weight of all such conjecture. Rest assured, however, that should I in future ever have an opportunity to see the play or read the play's book, and discover it's no leftist hagiography at all but a genuine work of dramatic art, I shall be among the very first in the blogosphere to proclaim it so; freely repent of my woefully misguided and uninformed conjecture; and declare forthrightly and passionately, as has been declared many times over in the blogosphere and print media alike, that the NYTW's decision to not produce the play was an act of appalling cowardice, and an egregious betrayal and abdication of its obligation and responsibility to the art of the theater.

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Update (7:06 PM Eastern on 14 Mar): On the NYTW's website there appeared today a statement by James C. Nicola, the NYTW's Artistic Director, concerning this business. Of particular interest were these illuminating sentences:

In researching My Name is Rachel Corrie, we found many distorted accounts of the actual circumstances of Rachel’s death that had resulted in a highly charged, vituperative, and passionate controversy. While our commitment to the play did not waver, our responsibility was not just to produce it, but to produce it in such a way as to prevent false and tangential back-and-forth arguments from interfering with Rachel’s voice.

[...]

I also regret any pain or confusion we have caused in trying to fulfill our responsibility to the art itself and to the community we serve. I can only say we were trying to do whatever we could to help Rachel’s voice be heard.

And that comes about as close to stating what I above conjectured was the NYTW's reason for not mounting a production of this play as is publicly possible for a non-mainstream theater company such as NYTW without its being declared an outcast by the theater community.

For another view of Mr. Nicola's statement, see this by playwright and theater blogger George Hunka of Superfluities which blog is Link Central for blogospheric commentary on the My Name is Rachel Corrie affair. I've also just discovered there's an ongoing discussion of this affair on The New York Times Theater Forum (I'm not a participant there) that begins here (free registration required if you're not already a registered member of the NYT website).

(NOTE: This post was posted originally on 12 Mar 2006.)

Oh Dear

That the Oscars awarded at the Academy Awards each year are more often than is seemly awarded for reasons other than excellence or merit will come as news to just about no-one. It's a veritable given, but the annual bitching and moaning of the fact by movie reviewers, both professional and amateur, is nevertheless a dependable post-Oscars staple. Such as this, for instance:

The people connected with Brokeback Mountain ... hoped that, having been nominated for eight Academy awards, it would get Best Picture as it had at the funny, lively Independent Spirit awards the day before. (If you are looking for smart judging based on merit, skip the Academy Awards next year and pay attention to the Independent Spirit choices.) We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash — excuse me — Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver.

What makes this particular bit of bitching and moaning of special — and especially embarrassing — interest is that it was written not by a movie reviewer, either professional or amateur, but by none other than distinguished author Annie Proulx on whose short story of the same name the film Brokeback Mountain was based.

No-one has greater respect or admiration for Ms. Proulx's gifts as a writer than I, but this bit of sniping, its impulse justified though it may have been, is adolescent, and quite sad coming from her; something which I would have expected someone of Ms. Proulx's stature to be above engaging in. I daresay Ms. Proulx was herself aware that the piece from which the above excerpt has been drawn was somehow beneath her and her gifts as she tellingly closed the piece with this preemptive defense against critical comment such as mine:

For those who call this little piece a Sour Grapes Rant, play it as it lays.

Yes, well, as ever, we aim to not disappoint.

RTWT here.

Not Good News

James Levine, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera, needs shoulder surgery and has been forced to pull out of the rest of the season, the Met said yesterday, a sharp blow that sent it scrambling for replacements.

Mr. Levine, who also leads the Boston Symphony Orchestra, fell onstage at Symphony Hall in Boston on March 1 and tore the rotator cuff of his right shoulder. He is expected to have surgery to repair it on March 20.

Not good news. Not good news at all.

RTWT here.