Sounds & Fury

We Have A Little List

We've just finished watching the tape of this Sunday's edition of CBS's long-running and award-winning Sunday morning magazine show, Sunday Morning. This year-end edition included a segment marking those whom we lost in 2006. The list was quite extensive, and the show devoted an astonishing 15-plus minutes of air time to the segment noting those we lost in every conceivable field of public human endeavor from Iditarod contestants to 1930's baseball figures and golf pros to politicians to TV and print journalists to pop-music superstars to U.S. presidents.

Absent from the list, however, was any mention of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Armin Jordan, Milton Katims, Anna Moffo, Roy Tobias, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Malcolm Arnold, Astrid Varnay, Anna Russell, Moira Shearer, Joyce Hatto, Thomas Stewart, Leonid Hambro, or Ralph Gomberg. In short, absent from the list of noted deaths was even so much as a single mention of anyone involved in the world of classical music.

Bravo!, Sunday Morning. Way t'go.

Idiots.

New York Times Copyeditors Begin Holiday Vacation Early

A front-page lede in the online edition of today's New York Times:

After his execution, Saddam Hussein was buried early today in Awja, Iraq, near Tikrit, his hometown.

Good thing, too. It would have been most inconvenient had it been done before rather than after (although before would not have been at all a bad idea).

Not Today, Not Ever

In the opening few paragraphs of what she titles an "Open Letter to Music Professionals" (first published in June on her website, but first seen by me only yesterday), percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, OBE, writes:

I was rehearsing in the wonderful Disney Hall in Los Angeles – the new building designed by Frank Geary – and looked up and counted approximately 200 fixed lighting features and about 20 moving light fixtures - I walked past far more backstage. There is also a fantastic sound system built into and especially for the space. I was banned from using all of it and was told that, “This is a concert Hall and not a theatre” and that the logistics of the event in which I was involved excluded even the modest audio reinforcement that I and the composer had requested. We have all the ingredients right in front of our faces to consistently put on great events but at this point I see this part of the music business and many of our performances like the ingredients of a cocktail sitting in a glass and needing to be shaken or stirred. Let's face it, we aren't going to repeat a bad cocktail experience by choice.

So what is the difference? Is it only the monotone costumes which are worn, a throwback to 19th century waiter’s attire? Or is it that an orchestral concert is ‘culture’ and therefore above the crude wrappings of theatre and entertainment?

The answer to the first question is, No, and to the second, a resounding, Yes! The postmodern notion that classical music and the classical music concert need to compete with, say, the rock "concert" and other mass-culture entertainments to be "relevant" and thereby survive the judgment of the mass marketplace is so thoroughly and perversely wrongheaded and destructive that it's both astonishing and dismaying to me that such a view could be held by anyone within the classical music performing establishment. Why can't well-intentioned people get it through their equalitarian, pop-culture infected heads that as a matter of manifest and demonstrable fact classical music and the classical music concert are and have forever been elite enterprises by their very nature, and by that nature will forever inhabit a world separate and apart from the world of mass culture, and never the twain shall meet. Not today, not ever.

Jeez!

A Bad Mistake (Caution! Way Off-Topic)

Making the execution a private affair, and hanging the method, that is. Sends the wrong message. Should have been a beheading with the severed head stuck on a pike in a public square and left for the vultures to dispatch, all of it televised to the entire Arab Islamist world. It's what they understand best. No, make that: it's the only thing they understand. The private hanging just reinforces their conviction that we're pussies; old women against whom they can with absolute assurance achieve ultimate victory if they just stay the course.

A "Passionate Debate"

Anne Midgette, a music critic writing for the New York Times, and concerning whose critical faculties we've in the past been less than kind, has a piece in today's Times the subject of which is making generalized judgments about an opera singer's capabilities based on a single live performance (not a good thing to do, says Ms. Midgette, and we agree). In her piece, Ms. Midgette remarks, "After I began writing this article, a passionate debate on the same subject erupted in an online discussion forum: how can you presume to judge a singer after a single hearing?"

How indeed.

We strongly suspect that the "passionate debate" referred to by Ms. Midgette is one that erupted on one of the New York Times's very own forums: the New York Times Opera Forum, which "passionate debate" concerning Ms. Netrebko's performance in last Wednesday's Puritani (see our post here) is, at the time of this writing, some 215-messages long and counting. If we're right about her reference, Ms. Midgette is being far too gentle and far too kind calling that imbecile TOF food-fight a "passionate debate." Of passion there's surely an overabundance. Of debate..., well, to call that 215-message, risibly adolescent free-for-all a debate is tantamount to calling the murderous sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia in Iraq today a sorting out of theological differences.

But TOFs will be TOFs, and being risibly adolescent in all matters operatic is, after all, what being a TOF is all about. TOF food-fights, however, do make for perversely entertaining reading, and so if you're feeling just a bit perverse at the moment, the "passionate debate" can be read beginning here.

Have fun, and don't blame us if you come away shaking your head. After all, we did caution you well in advance.

Two Questions Sans Answers

As regular readers of this blog are abundantly aware, I've little admiration for Italian opera generally, and even less for the bel canto portion of the rep as it's most egregiously everything genuine opera ought not to be; viz., a mere pretext and platform for showcasing canaries and other assorted songbirds, and a clear joke as dramma per musica.

That notwithstanding, I did tune in to the Met webcast of Bellini's I Puritani this past Wednesday as my brief first and only exposure to soprano Anna Netrebko really blew me away (as witness this squib) — another anomaly here as my less than admiring view of opera singers generally is also well known to regular readers of this blog — and I wanted to hear how well Netrebko acquitted herself in this quintessentially bel canto showpiece. I managed to hang in there for most of Act I, but then had to switch it off so unmitigatedly dreadful was the performance by all concerned, Netrebko very much included.

I now read, courtesy of La Cieca, a rundown of the MSM critical response to Netrebko's performance, and was astonished by the generally positive if not over-the-top glowing reviews of that performance filed by almost all the MSM critics. Unless one is cynical enough to believe those critics are all nothing other than paid Met flacks, and their reviews little more than thinly-veiled PR pieces (I'm not), one has to wonder what it is those critics heard in the house that was entirely absent in the webcast.

Or is it not a matter of what they heard, but of what they saw that's responsible for those generally positive reviews, and what does that say about Netrebko as an opera singer, and about opera itself?

I have no definitive answers to those questions — or rather, no answers which I'm willing to put on record. I pose the questions merely to provoke thought as I suspect informed answers to those questions are central to an informed understanding of opera as an artform.*

* Yes, I know that respectable dictionaries insist that artform should be two words, but I'm here officially declaring war against the practice. Artform is clearly deserving of its own main-entry identity.

What It's All About

I've adduced on this blog more times than I care to count, and in the strongest possible terms, the ought-to-be-self-evident-but-strangely-isn't keystone idea that,

...genuine architecture is art first, and building second. No art, no architecture, which is to say that any building in whose design aesthetic considerations were not treated as primary is an example of mere building, and not architecture. And so for critical purposes a distinction must be made between mere building and architecture. "Bumping your head...the rising damp...whether you're going to have to put out buckets in the middle of the living room to catch the leaking rainwater" are all valid primary critical criteria in judging the worth of a mere building. They are in no way valid primary critical criteria in judging the worth of a work of architecture. As I've hammered home ad nauseam here and elsewhere, concern with aesthetics — art — is always and forever architecture's primary defining characteristic. It's that alone which separates architecture from mere building, and is alone architecture's — and the architect's — sine qua non, and very raison d'être..

[The above taken from this September 2004 post]

In a marvelous interview with the great architect Frank Gehry for The Wall Street Journal by novelist Akhil Sharma, there's this:

"I don't know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do," Mr. Gehry says. "Architects have to become parental. They have to learn to be parental." By this he means that an architect has to listen to his client but also remain firm about what the architect knows best, the aesthetics of a building. This, Mr. Gehry says, is what makes an architect relevant in the process that leads to a completed building. "I think a lot of my colleagues lose it, lose that relevance in the spirit of serving their client, so that no matter what, they are serving the client. Even if the building they produce, that they think serves the client, doesn't really serve the client because it's not very good."

Somehow the argument becomes infinitely more persuasive when adduced by Mr. Gehry no matter how elliptically stated.

A Neat Summing Up

Published in a most unlikely journal, here's a neat if fairly conventional summing up at the close of this Mozart Year of Mozart as man and composer by Jon Pott for the Christian review, Books & Culture. I especially liked this quote from Catholic theologian, Hans Küng:

I think that music which speaks the truth is not just limited, say, to vocal music or explicitly religious music; it also includes purely instrumental music—and especially the intimacy of many second movements. An abstract masterpiece can speak the truth in the pure language of sound… . And though music cannot become a religion of art, the art of music is the most spiritual of all symbols for that "mystical sanctuary of our religion," the divine itself. In other words, for me Mozart's music has relevance for religion not only where religious and church themes or forms emerge, but precisely through the compositional technique of the non-vocal, purely instrumental music, through the way in which this music interprets the world, a way which transcends extra-musical conceptuality… . With keen ears [one] may perceive in the pure, utterly internalized sound, for example, of the adagio of the Clarinet Concerto, which embraces us without using any words, something wholly other… . So here are ciphers, traces of transcendence.

And this, from the inimitable George Bernard Shaw:

In the ardent regions where all the rest are excited and vehement, Mozart alone is completely self-possessed: where they are clutching their bars with a grip of iron and forging them with Cyclopean blows, his gentleness of touch never deserts him: he is considerate, economical, practical under the same pressure of inspiration that throws your Titan into convulsions. This is the secret of his unpopularity with Titan fanciers. We all in our native barbarism have a relish for the strenuous: your tenor whose B flat is like the bursting of a boiler always brings down the house, even when the note brutally effaces the song: and the composer who can artistically express in music a transport of vigor and passion of a more muscular kind … is always a hero with the intemperate in music. [...] Give me the artist who breathes it like a native, and goes about his work in it as quietly as a common man goes about his ordinary business. Mozart did so; and that is why I like him.

A worthwhile read.

(Our thanks to the always indispensable Arts & Letters Daily for the link.)

Featured Past Post #24 (Administrative Note)

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I Wish I'd Written That

In a brief, year-end article, New York Times music critic Bernard Holland wrote:

{Morton] Feldman’s music is more talked about than performed, but what a pleasure to hear once again its paradox of brief, quiet strokes laid over huge temporal spaces. That night [in a concert by pianist Aki Takahashi] Mr. Feldman seemed to me the Anton Bruckner of silence.

I wish I'd written that.

A Critic After Our Own Heart

In a post on this blog of July 2005 (a reprint of a 2003 post from a predecessor blog) entitled, "Lack Of Critical Mass", we wrote concerning today's mainstream classical music critics:

Today what we have in the mainstream media for the most part are either critical incompetents, or critics who think as does this culture commentator who, speaking of capital-A art generally, opines that

...the old freshman-in-college quarrels of "Is it art?" "Is it great art?" [are] to my mind, at least these days, Who cares? Or rather: I prefer to see [discussions] about art not get hung up on such questions. [...] [There are] people who, bizarrely enough, like these discussions, and there are also people who like to come out gunning for a fight. Snooze-ola. Spare me. Puh-leeze. I'm outta here. [...] [What's of interest are] such topics as, How did you respond? What moved or touched you? What did you notice about the work, about how it's put together, how it works, and what it reflects?

How very progressive. How very postmodern. How very today.

Such attitudes, by and large, seem to be typical of our current crop of mainstream classical music critics as well, and are reflective of the degree of effeteness to which they've largely degenerated. When genuine performing artists and composers argue among themselves about classical music (as opposed to the poseurs, who are legion and no better than the present-day mainstream critical crowd), they argue about things such as music and non-music, great music and trash, and meticulously detail their cases and state their claims in terms as hard-nosed and absolute as if they were so many propositions of Euclid. And, if it comes to it, as it on rare occasion does, they're ready to defend those cases and claims with fisticuffs if need be.

The generally debased, PC-contaminated, ultra-"civilized" crowd which today constitutes the mainstream classical music critical fraternity relishes nothing so much as engaging in discussion of classical music in ways more appropriate to genteel luncheon and dinner parties where it's considered the height of gauche to argue in any manner that might upset the digestion of those seated at table. Arguing in that "civilized," genteel way makes members of this critical crowd feel they've been winning, intellectually probing, stimulating, and "with it," when all they've managed to be is glib; nattering on about nothing of real substance or pertinence while at the same time keeping hands clean, hair un-mussed, and digestion undisturbed — theirs and their readers'.

We've just finished reading this piece in The New York Observer by Matthew Price concerning the (apparently) notorious culture critic, Lee Siegel, with whose writings we are not familiar. Mr. Price writes:

Feeling pretty gloomy about the cultural scene, [Lee Siegel] mounts [in his new book, Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination] a sweeping indictment of his contemporaries, dismissing along the way a generation or two of artists, writers and critics. Though he doesn’t name names — which weakens his case — the charges are as follows: an art world obsessed with money; business-savvy cultural producers out for a buck and little else; and a complacent review corps backing the whole thing up by issuing bland, rubber-stamped judgments. Bohemia is just another subsidiary of the Very Big Corporation, Inc.; its motto: “Get your own, and get it fast, and do it behind a virtuous appearance and with an optimistic air.”

[...]

“It seems harder and harder to make a work of art that does not conform to the dictates of the trivializing media,” [Mr. Siegel] fumes, “or that does not follow the lead of marketing experts in direct consultation with gallery owners and book and magazine editors.” Enough of that, he declares: “The critic’s passion should be to expose the shams, the false consciousness, the cleverly accommodating patter that are turning expedience into culture …. [The critic] interprets the work under scrutiny almost as if it were a lesson in freedom, or in some of the ways of being, or not being, free.”

[...]

For all of Mr. Siegel’s love of great writers — D.H. Lawrence, Dante and Jane Austen, subject of a tender and original piece of criticism — he’s hardly a Harold Bloom bloviating about the canon. Mr. Siegel is a zigzagging cultural omnivore: He takes on Harry Potter (a hearty thumbs-up), The Sopranos (ditto), and Sex and The City (not buying it). He’s what you might call a confrontational enthusiast. Ever skeptical when a unanimous round of yays [sic] or nays goes up, he’s an expert demolisher of critical group-think.

Yes indeed. Most decidedly a critic after our own heart.

Notice To Users Of The Firefox Browser (Administrative Note)

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 5:23 PM Eastern on 22 Dec. See below.]

For reasons known only to the design team at Mozilla, the Windows Firefox browser can't quite read our new header properly. It gets most of it right, but screws up the spacing between the title and the subtitle. To see what our new header really looks like (i.e., what it looks like in our recommended browser, the Windows industry standard, Internet Explorer 6 or Internet Explorer 7) see this screenshot (make sure to enlarge the image to full screen size). To users of other Windows browsers, you're on your own. Ditto for Mac users.

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Update (5:23 PM Eastern on 22 Dec): This problem is now fixed for all browsers (the header, instead of being implemented in code, is now an image file).

In Your Face, Mr. Jorden!

No words from me at this point. Just this:

I dare you, La Cieca, my TOF friend, to muster anything bitchy to say about that (and, yes, I know the break before the da capo was a bit too long, but so what?).

Satire?

Music journalist, critic, and blogger James Reel of KUAT-FM posts a somewhat fantastical item concerning a marketing type who has been engaged as a consultant by the Oregon Symphony to advise them on how best to put more and younger butts in seats at their concerts. Mr. Reel closes his post by writing,

I can’t wait to see what A.C. Douglas has to say about this.

What A.C. Douglas has to say is that he's thoroughly convinced Mr. Reel is having all of us on by posting a very clever if a smidge over the top piece of satire. I mean, I bow to no man in my utter contempt for the mindset, thinking, and advice of marketing types who mess about in the domains of the arts, and most particularly in the domain of classical music. The domains of soap, beer, cars, and the like are their proper purview, and it's to those domains they ought to restrict their activities and proffer their advice.

But that utter contempt notwithstanding, no marketing type could, in actual, real life, possibly be as imbecile and clueless as the marketing type who is the subject of Mr. Reel's piece; ergo, my conviction that Mr. Reel is in fact engaging in a clever bit of satire.

If, on the other hand, Mr. Reel is in fact not doing anything of the sort, then A.C. Douglas can say nothing at all, for in that case he would be struck utterly dumb by what's recounted in Mr. Reel's post.

O tempora! O mores!

On Requiems

Here's a gem from New York Times music critic Bernard Holland.

No other kind of music boasts such ignorance of its subject matter. Composers can only stand on their side of the grave and address the guessing games shared by those around them.

—Bernard Holland, speaking of composed Requiems in a piece for The New York Times

An Embarrassment Of Riches

Not only is she the most phenomenally gifted fiddler to appear on the solo concert scene since Heifetz and Milstein, she's intelligent, charming, beautiful, and a first-rate and knowledgeable musician. We're speaking, of course, of Anne-Sophie Mutter whose fiddle playing is a whole order of magnitude beyond her formidably gifted fellow concert fiddlers of which there's perhaps more in number today than at any time in the past century, and most of them female (What's up with that?).

The above remarks are occasioned by our stumbling upon a recording of an excellent half-hour interview with Ms. Mutter by WQXR's Jeff Spurgeon this past March which can be heard here (Windows Media Player or RealPlayer required).

Well worth your time.

Featured Past Post #23 (Administrative Note)

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Tritter Must Die!

If the pig cop's persecution of the good doctor forces him off Vicodin, or the pig cop isn't dealt an ignominious and humiliating defeat at the good doctor's hands, then the ol' Uzi is coming out of the closet again, and I'm heading out to Los Angeles and the show's shooting set to do some shooting of my own. Ditto if the good doctor goes off Vicodin by virtue of the tough-love machinations of his colleagues.

(If you've no idea what I'm talking about, then you're missing the best series on commercial broadcast TV in the last two decades.)

Diva Doings

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 9:31 AM Eastern on 13 Dec. See below.]

We typically pay no attention whatsoever to the gossip and public accounts of the private lives, antics, and hissy fits of divas, male and female, so beloved of the opera world's TOFs* as we find them (divas and their antics) either annoying, comical, or both, and not worth so much as a moment's notice.

The recent grotesque business at Milan's La Scala, however, involving Italian-opera (natch) tenor Roberto Alagna is so very grotesque we confess it's captured our interest — at least as reported in (and in part, exclusive) detail by the delightful, Milan-based Opera Chic (now added to our exclusive Culture Blogs listing on the left sidebar) in a continuing series of juicy posts on her eponymous blog. Simply bookmark the above link, start reading from the top, and check back frequently for updates.

Great — if mildly obscene — fun.

*True Opera Fan — a bit like a teenage movie fan, only worse, much worse.

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Update (9:31 AM Eastern on 13 Dec): I'm going to take Opera Chic at her word on this because... well, because it 1) is fittingly grotesque, and 2) sounds like something an Italian-opera tenor would do.

Only Communists Do That

Blogger Alex of Wellsung enters the perennial clapping- / no-clapping-between-movements fray.

[D]espite the opinion of some that clapping between movements is a sort of trick the sand/head[-]bound classical elite uses to keep the potential prole Beethoven lovers in the dark, I feel I must reaffirm that inter-movement silence should be seen as progress in concert protocol, not some snobby t[r]ick to be eliminated.

Precisely. Just as we declared in this post of not quite two years ago.

And as Alex reminds us, referencing a billboard poster proclaiming the sinister truth: "Only communists clap between movements."