Sounds & Fury

Featured Past Post #26 (Administrative Note)

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And Now For Something Completely Different: A Review

When it was first announced about a year and a half ago that the Met would produce a ninety-minute version of Die Zauberflöte, opera maven extraordinaire and blogger La Cieca (James Jorden) of Parterre Box wrote:

Now, about the Met's plans for a tab version of Magic Flute in the Julie Taymor production. La Cieca says, "Oh, why the hell not?" Somehow La Cieca feels that a 90-minute, fast-moving entertainment is a lot closer to Mozart's original intention than the three-hour plus behemoth the Met delivers when they do the Gesamt version.

To which I replied on this blog:

I suggest that if Mozart's original intention for Zauberflöte was to write a "90-minute, fast-moving entertainment," he would have written a 90-minute, fast-moving entertainment rather than what he did write: a transcendent, two-act, three-hour, Singspiel that's among the most sublime works of art in all of music.

In answer to an eMail from La Cieca in response to that comment, I replied further (_Z_ is, of course, Zauberflöte):

My points are several.

First, it's the *Met* we're here talking about. I could, for instance, understand, and perhaps excuse, a "tab" _Z_ produced by some provincial house or off-mainstream venue for any number of practical reasons, but never by the Met. The Met's an "Opera House Of Record", so to speak, and such a gross disfigurement of any work, much less of a masterpiece such as _Z_, is simply unacceptable and inexcusable. For the Met to justify such a production on the grounds that "a 90-minute, fast-moving entertainment is a lot closer to Mozart's original intention," or that it helps build young audiences, are both, and at best, rationalizations; ones that are, to not put too fine a point on it, simply absurd; the former for reasons that ought to be perfectly clear and inarguable; the latter because it's simply untrue.

The notion that a full version of _Z_ is incapable of holding the attention of a young audience, most especially in this new Taymor production, flies in the face of one of the things that makes _Z_ the transcendent masterpiece it is: its ability to capture the imagination of all manner of audiences, naïve and erudite, childlike and sophisticated equally. The only change that would be required for a young, naïve, and unsophisticated audience in this country is that the *spoken* parts be done in English rather than German. Any young audience that can sit through and be riveted by, say, one of the _Lord of The Rings_ movies, which dramatically, at its most naïve level, is way more complex and difficult than _Z_ at that same level, can handle and be engrossed by a well-done, full _Z_ with no difficulty whatsoever.

And the argument that no one loses by a cut _Z_ in addition to, rather than as a replacement for, the full version, is, I think, way shortsighted if not outright wrongheaded. The primary loser in such an arrangement is the very audience the cut _Z_ was intended to benefit, as what it gets is a fundamentally false idea of Mozart's masterpiece; one that's difficult to displace or rid oneself of later on as are first impressions of just about anything.

So, in short, I can think of no adequate or legitimate justification for a cut Met production of _Z_ in any circumstance, or for any reason whatsoever.

I've just now finished watching the tape of Wednesday's PBS telecast of the filmed Met Zauberflöte, er, Magic Flute, and my worst fears were ... not realized. I still stand by everything I said above, but this English-language "pocket" version of Magic Flute was not the unmitigated train wreck I imagined it would be.

First, the work was cut in length from just under three hours to just ten minutes shy of two, not to ninety minutes. Second — and with the brutal truncation of the overture, and the egregious omission of the second-act choruses, "O Isis und Osiris" and "Triumph, Triumph, Triumph" excepted — the cuts were done with intelligence and sensitivity, and the dramatic flow of the work left seamlessly intact.

Surprisingly, the new English-language text for this version (by J.D. McClatchy who created an entirely new text, not a translation of the original German) was absolutely first-rate, and after a quick recovery from the initial jolt of hearing English spoken and sung rather than German, the words came across as a quite natural part of the musical and dramatic fabric of the piece. A most impressive accomplishment, indeed.

As for the Julie Taymor staging, it was, well, magical. As I haven't seen her staging of the uncut Zauberflöte I can't make a comparison with this staging, but on its own this staging was often breathtaking and breathtakingly beautiful, and exactly the right kind of staging for a work like Flute. Especially breathtaking and breathtakingly beautiful was the staging of the Act I entrance and exit of the Queen of The Night, and impressive and eloquent if derivative (think, "I'm melting, I'm melting!") was the staging of the Act II dissolution of the up-to-no-good Queen and her entourage.

Was this a pristine Flute musically? It was not, but it wasn't chopped liver either thanks to solid if unremarkable performances from all the principal singers, especially from Erika Miklósa as the Queen, René Pape as Sarastro, and David Pittsinger as the Speaker. Delightful, too, was Nathan Gunn's Papageno which dramatically was the best realized role of this entire production. Most of all, however, this Flute was not chopped liver musically due to the Met orchestra, easily the best pit band in the business and the equal of many a top symphony orchestra, and to James Levine — the astonishing James Levine — who in his mature years has not only developed into a first-rate Wagner conductor, but a conductor of Mozart without peer today, and fully the equal of any of his legendary Mozartian predecessors.

Finally, the filming. I guess hugely frustrating is the best way to describe this filming by director Gary Halvorson. He apparently hasn't learned that one can't, generally speaking, freely employ without penalty the normal vocabulary of film when it's a live staged opera one is filming. Most particularly, one can't all but abandon the so-called establishing shot (i.e., the overall stage picture) and freely employ one of film's greatest strengths and biggest guns: the closeup. For one thing, and for the most part, opera singers are not meant to be seen that close up when working, and, Anna Netrebko notwithstanding, are far better appreciated seen from a respectful distance. For another, and singers aside, freely employing closeups and medium closeups with a work staged like Julie Taymor's Flute is positively destructive as it makes explicit, and draws out-of-context attention to, what's meant to be ambiguous, even enigmatic, in the overall stage picture, thereby destroying utterly the carefully staged and crafted illusion.

The Met, I think, needs to hire a top-notch and opera-experienced filmmaker for these filmed live productions as anything less serves to blunt — or, worse, sabotage — their very purpose.

Sounds & Fury Classical Music & Opera Forum

In addition to its alternative-to-blog-comments forum (Sounds & Fury Blog Forum), Sounds & Fury now has a regular, non-blog-connected classical music and opera forum as well: the Sounds & Fury Classical Music & Opera Forum. All are welcome to post there whenever they feel moved to do so (registration — which is totally software controlled and takes but minutes — required, of course).

Stop on over and have a say.

Et Tu, Beeb?

When the venerable Beeb goes this way — and other considerations notwithstanding, we trust we can trust that music journalist Norman Lebrecht has at least got his facts straight, for we bloggers all know just how devoted journalist Lebrecht is to the facts — we can all be fairly confident we're all in the deepest sort of trouble:

Music does not come more supermarket than Tchaikovsky and the notion of introducing it as a new line to MTV and YouTube viewers is wholly in line with the BBC’s mission and can be justified as good strategy. The television season includes Sleeping Beauty from the Royal Ballet and Swan Lake from St Petersburg, both furnished with how-to master classes. BBC4 has an opera, Queen of Spades, from Valery Gergiev’s White Nights Festival and there are analytical documentaries on the Pathetique Symphony and Romeo and Juliet by the all-purpose Charles Hazlewood who conducts orchestras as he talks, simultaneously and fluently, achieving neither the elevation of penetrative performance nor the erudition of original thought. Somehow the BBC has got it into its rulebook that all TV presenters must show that they can, at the very least, both walk and chew gum at the same time.

The centrepiece of the season is a two-part drama-documentary this weekend, narrated by the pop-up Hazlewood, in which the composer, played by actor Ed Stoppard in a bowler hat, is shown fellating a guardsman, snogging a violinist and dying of undetermined cholera or suicide while writing his finest works with whichever hand he had free at the time – just like a good presenter, in fact.

Neither verified fact nor fantasy fiction, the drama-doc is what the BBC does these days to evade the capital charge of seriousness, the risk of being seen to be educating an audience in something that might add cultural value to its perspective The drama-doc is defended by executives as the application of television ‘values’ to the presentation of history. What it shows is that television, and the BBC at its heart, has lost the human values of truth, ethics and reality by which most folk conduct their lives. If the BBC worries about audience alienation, it should first examine its own blurring of fact and make-believe, its self-enclosed virtual cocoon of drama-docs

[...]

Measured against Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky becomes meaningful in various ways — as a technical wizard, perhaps a closet modernist. But BBC television has no means of testing its Tchaikovsky against any other measure because culture has been eradicated from its schedules. So Tchaikovsky stands alone on screen — chosen by the corporation’s panjandrums for the wrong political reasons, at the wrong moment, with the wrong production values and without any kind of check or balance to suggest why public money and hours of viewing time are being expended on this particular composer, and no other. The Tchaikovsky Experience is wrong, wrong and wrong again. It tells you, in microcosm, everything that has gone wrong this past decade at the summits of the BBC....

RTW Depressing T here.

A Cover's Life

Professional singer and blogger Anne-Carolyn Bird (ACB) of The Concert has been running a series of delightful and fascinating reports on her new experience as cover for the soprano singing the role of Jano the shepherd boy in the Met's production of Janácek's Jenufa.

ACB's adventure is chronicled in this archive (scroll to the bottom, and read up), and the real excitement begins with this post in that archive.

Caution! Off-topic Rant Ahead

As good citizens I trust you'll all be watching or listening to our President tonight. I won't. My blood pressure won't take it. It won't take being witness to yet another confirmation of his and his neocon gang's criminal stupidity; a stupidity fueled and informed by a lunatic ideology and blind faith that somehow God's on their side. That shipping to Iraq a pathetically inadequate additional 21000 troops hasn't a prayer of a chance of accomplishing what needs to be accomplished, and will in fact accomplish nothing other than provide more meat for the grinder, seems not to have occurred to them. After all, they need to do something — anything — because they need a way out of having to admit before the next election the full extent of the appalling catastrophe they created by their lunatic ideological thinking and gross criminal ineptitude, and this plan is the best plan they could come up with that won't cause them more political damage than would the admission of their catastrophic failure and defeat, or the implementation of a plan that would really work, unthinkably bloody and ugly as that would be. That this plan, even as a pathetic and panic-induced stopgap measure, is lame — lethally lame — seems not to have given them pause.

No, I won't be watching or listening to our President tonight. I'll be listening to some Bach keyboard music instead.

What Could They Have Been Thinking?

What could they have been thinking, the producers of the new Jane Eyre for PBS's Masterpiece Theater (which so far — despite certain lapses, several of which are fairly egregious — is quite yummy and blessedly absent any "relevant," postmodern "inspired reinterpretation," to use The New York Times's TV reviewer Alessandra Stanley's wistfully if moronically regretful phrase)?

First, they had the unmitigated effrontery to cast as Jane an actor (Ruth Wilson) whose physiognomic resemblance to my real-life first love is so uncanny as to have caused me to do a startled double take that almost unseated me from my armchair, and which guarantees that throughout the production I'll have to work overtime to separate the character she's portraying (and portrays quite well) from the real-life person whom she so startlingly resembles.

Second, they had the unmitigated stupidity to cast as Edward Rochester an actor (Toby Stephens) who's so young-looking and matinee-idol pretty that it's difficult to believe his Edward Rochester is other than a too-rich-for-his-own-good, devil-may-care playboy only recently out of his aristocratic parents' pampered custody much less believe he's a deeply wounded man of experience and substance; a world-traveler who's gotten himself into some genuinely deep shit along the way.

Ah, but we'll persevere, for we love Jane Eyre to distraction, and if we can't have a young, strong-willed but vulnerable Joan Fontaine as Jane, and a masterful, masterfully brooding and deeply wounded Orson Welles as Edward Rochester, well, we can at least have the rich, forbidding, and frisson-inducing gothic settings which this production has so far captured most wonderfully (we've seen only Part 1 of this two-part production). As the clichéd (and mindless) sayings go, one can't have everything, and we ought to give thanks even for small favors.

The Composer As Physicist

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 2:52 AM Eastern on 22 Jan. See below.]

If you want to understand why such a large measure of postmodern classical music is so dreadfully wrong — so anti-music, as I've elsewhere called it — you've only to read the following from French (surprise!) composer Tristan Murail:

Only now have I begun to feel as if I have obtained the technical means to achieve my dreams of adolescence: I imagined certain ambitious works, but lacked the capacity to realize them. With a piece like L'Esprit des dunes (1994), for ensemble and electronics, I feel that I have succeeded in doing something that I could have easily dreamed of doing when I was twenty or even younger. In a piece like that, there is a clear research on the level of pure technology but there is also a musical research into the combination of sounds; this may not be immediately apparent, but so much the better. And while the "poetic" side of the piece probably has an even greater impact than the spectral contents,* the "poetry" depends utterly on their careful construction. Creating this sense of research, newness and "avant-garde" while still maintaining a coherent and comprehensible musical discourse is my real goal. [Quote taken from a post on the theater blog, Superfluities.]

No further comment required.

* See here for an explanation of so-called Spectral Music.

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Update (2:52 AM Eastern on 22 Jan): I remarked above that no further comment by me was required. Apparently, however, it is if the discussion of this post on Sequenza21 is any measure. And so let me here merely add that beyond my objection to the ill-considered reductionism contained in Murail's above quoted quasi-apologia-cum-manifesto, his words betray his unconscious addiction to perhaps the most musically damaging concern and conspicuous trait of a goodly number of postmodern classical music composers and the music they produce: a preoccupation — an almost obsession — with process; a preoccupation that results ineluctably in process becoming a thing unto itself; process not as means, but as end. It's this even more than Murail's reductionism to which I most strongly object, and which I most heartily loathe.

I trust the above will make clear what I thought would be prima facie clear, and was therefore in no need of my having to resort to this superfluous and tautologic spelling out.

Neatly, In A Nutshell

A veritable idée fixe on this blog since its inception (and, indeed, on the two blogs that preceded it) are the idiocies of this postmodern age; idiocies whose intent and leveling impulse is to destroy the distinction between the exceptional and the commonplace; between art and kitsch; between art and trash; between genius and simpleton; between informed, intellectual rigor and the so-called Wisdom of The Common Man. In short, the relentless devaluation of all values.

In today's Independent is an article by columnist Howard Jacobson that neatly puts the whole matter in a nutshell some 1000 words in length. Talking about the run-away Brit hit TV reality show, Big Brother, Mr. Jacobson writes:

After the Revolution, the Terror. This — the invariable consequence of filling the heads of the uneducated with grandiosity — is what we are seeing on Celebrity Big Brother. In the days when she sweetly knew herself to be pig ignorant, Jade Goody [one of the show's star contestants] had neither the reason nor the confidence to launch the sort of terrifying tirades to which poor little rich girl Shilpa Shetty has been subjected — never mind with what provocation — this last week.

But then television made Jade a star. Television rewarded her with renown for all the things she didn't know. Television set her up as a sort of Ugly Betty of the reason and the intellect, an example and a promise to everyone who had hitherto felt damned in their own fatuity. You, too, said television, can be rich and famous for being an airhead. Indeed, if we have our way, you won't be rich and famous for being anything else. And now the airhead is a swollen head, and won't be spoken down to by a mistress of Indian subcontinent hauteur. Jade has rights now, whether or not she can spell them, and will shake the planet to its foundations before she forgoes a single one.

[...]

There is a vindictiveness in dumbing down. It aims to dethrone not only intelligence but the means by which we rate one thing above another. Dumbing down is an assault upon the very concept of value. Thus Jade, though she wouldn't know what I am talking about, is the child of that nihilism which gave us postmodernism and the Turner prize. A celebrity for being nobody, a belcher and a farter with her own perfume, she is an ironic reference to the unmeaningness of meaning.

RTWT here.

I'm Bloody Brilliant, I Am

About three months ago a young acquaintance of mine who knew that during my conservatory days I studied fiddle with a couple famous teachers, asked me whether I would make an assessment of her youngster's potential as a fiddler. The kid is 14, crazy for the fiddle, and studies with a member of the first fiddle section of a major orchestra who says the kid's a real talent but has some problems that need to be worked out before she can make the progress he feels her capable of making. In particular, said the teacher, she seems to have a problem with her bow arm that's keeping her back, and that's what he's mainly working on with her.

I tried getting out of getting involved, but the mother was gently insistent, and I got the impression she didn't quite trust her kid's teacher's capabilities as a teacher, major-orchestra member though he is, and so, with more than a little reluctance, I agreed to give the kid a listen.

Turns out the kid really is a talent — not prodigy-type talent, certainly, but a talent nevertheless — and she did indeed seem to have a problem with her bow arm. It seemed on first listen to be "weak and ill-disciplined" (her teacher's description of the problem), and therefore incapable of expressing the music the way the kid felt it and knew it should go. Her teacher had given her exercises to both strengthen and discipline her bow arm which she followed assiduously, but this had been going on for more than a year now with no meaningful improvement in terms of her problem.

But as I watched and listened, and the more the kid played, the more I became convinced that the problem was something other than what her teacher had diagnosed it to be. Structurally, her grasp of the bow was, if not ideal, just fine: well-controlled and well-behaved, as was her bow stroke, no doubt products of the excellent and intense exercises assigned her by her teacher. Yet she couldn't quite get the music to sound as it should, and as she knew it should. Clearly, something was getting in the way, but what that something might be eluded her and, as I became more and more convinced, her teacher as well.

And then, after almost a half-hour and a number of examples played through, I saw it. The problem was exquisitely subtle, but its consequences technically (as in technique) and musically crippling. The kid was, in effect, attempting to make music with the fingers of her left hand(!).

Well, with the fiddle, as with the other instruments of the same family, one can't make music with the fingers of the left hand. Essentially, and special effects such as vibrato excepted, their only job is to stop the strings at the precise location and at the correct time intervals to produce notes of the correct pitch as called for by the score. It's, of course, the bow and the right hand and arm that control the bow that produce the music. The left hand is but a mechanic, the right hand and arm, the poet, as one of my teachers so eloquently put it.

Once diagnosed, the problem would seem a relatively easy one to correct. No such thing with this particular problem as it has its roots in normal right-brain/left-brain function itself, and in order to correct it, one would have to, in effect, "retrain" the brain's circuitry to work as it should for this particular purpose. I of course had no idea how to go about doing that, the only thing I could offer being my diagnosis of the problem, and the suggestion that even when practicing scales the kid be constantly aware of the problem's cause and of its consequences.

Last night I got a call from the mother. Seems the kid told her teacher of my diagnosis, and after a while he saw it too. He devised some new exercises for her, and devised some "thought exercises" as well, and in just a few months, and little by little, the problem was brought under control to the point where the kid not only was now able to make music the way she felt it, but was able to do so effortlessly.

I'm bloody brilliant, I am.

Featured Past Post #25 (Administrative Note)

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Is It, Or Is It Not?

Last night's Charlie Rose show (PBS) gave its full hour over to a conversation with the now 75-year-old but still-working actor Peter O'Toole, one of the very few actors I would spend more than five minutes listening to expound on anything. As charming, sharp-minded, witty, and candid as ever, O'Toole was there to hawk a new movie (Venus) in which he plays the leading male role. Happily, the promo talk for the movie was mercifully brief, and the bulk of the hour was spent in drawing out O'Toole's thoughts on his profession, most particularly as it concerns the theater, the artform to which he's devoted the greatest part of his professional life.

Early on in the conversation, as a segue into talking about acting in general, Rose asked O'Toole how he prepared for the role in the new movie "other than just learning your lines," on hearing which O'Toole turned his eyes heavenward, waited a beat, repeated the question as if to himself, then, with eyes directed pointedly at Rose, said, "Now just think of what you said," upon hearing which, Rose knew immediately he'd said something genuinely stupid, and was about to be given a lesson. And lesson he was indeed given as O'Toole proceeded to explain to him, as to a child, how lines to an actor are as a brush is to a painter, and further, that the playwright's words contain everything that is the play, and it's the actors job "to make [those] words flesh."

This was but the first of O'Toole's several comments during the hour in which he made it clear, directly or by implication, that the text of a play is primary, always.

It was especially gratifying to me to hear this coming from an actor of O'Toole's genius as a year or so ago I became embroiled in a contentious cross-blog, um, conversation with several bloggers in the theatrical blogosphere (which conversation was played out in the comments section of several theater blogs, and by several posts on Sounds & Fury, but the nub of which can be gotten here, and by following the links in the updates) wherein one blogger — an off-off-Broadway director — declared that the text of a play was "just words" that constituted merely "the foundation, or the stem cell" of the play, and that the notion of a director serving the text is a "bullshit" notion. The job of the director, according to this director, is to take that "stem cell" and make a play of it. My contention, of course, was that the text IS the play, and that it's the job of the director to take that text, and "[as] faithfully and as free from distortion as possible translate the [playwright's] work from its form on the printed page into its truest, most effective concrete physical form [O'Toole's, "make the words flesh"] so that the work becomes apprehensible to an audience in a theater as [the playwright] envisioned it, which vision is embodied fully in the text [itself]."

My insistence on this resulted in my being declared a know-nothing "civilian" interloper — explicitly by one theater blogger — and I was promptly run out of the theatrical blogosphere on a virtual rail.

As regular readers of this blog are aware, I've little interest in the theater as I think it today artistically and aesthetically superfluous as an artform as anything that can be realized on the stage can be realized more effectively through the medium of film except in those cases where the stage actors physically breach the so-called Fourth Wall (which none of them had better do if I'm in the audience — not, that is, unless they pay me union scale as a member of the cast). I've never, of course, claimed any measure of expertise or authority in matters theatrical even though I'm not wholly ignorant of such matters, but the matter of the primacy of the text is, to my way of thinking, so fundamental as to brook no argument against; as fundamental a matter as that the score of, say, a symphony is primary — IS the symphony — the job of the conductor being to take what's there written, and as faithfully and as free from distortion as possible translate the composer's notation from its form on the printed page, etc., etc.

After the conversation with O'Toole was over, it struck me that although O'Toole and I are not of the same generation, we're close enough that in cultural terms it makes no nevermind. Is it possible, I mused, that our common view concerning the primacy of the text is merely a generational thing, and not something fundamental to the artform itself? I immediately rejected the idea as absurd even though I freely acknowledged that it's not at all unimaginable that a playwright could by design produce a text meant to be merely "the stem cell" of the play. But that's something that would be understood from the outset, and so is not really pertinent here. In all other cases, the more I contemplated the possibility of the text not being primary, the more absurd the notion seemed to me.

But then, what do I know.

Mazel Tov!

Alex Ross has finally sent off the finished manuscript of The Rest Is Noise to his publisher today. About bloody time, too. Now I have to start husbanding my always-in-too-short-supply discretionary funds 'cause when it comes out, it'll be the first hardcover I've bought in the last 15 years or so, and at 214,000 words it's going to be one hefty and tres high-priced volume.

Mazel tov! to Alex.

Advice For Budding Composers

Composer, teacher, music journalist, and blogger Kyle Gann of PostClassic has up a long but interesting post dealing with the academic musical education of budding composers and the dangers they face in the academy once out of undergraduate school, attendance at which is presumably for the primary purpose of being exposed to and engaging in the study of things other than music and composition. Dr. Gann gives a number of persuasive reasons why budding composers should stay away from graduate schools and other higher schools of music in pursuing the development of their craft, but, unless I somehow missed it, he neglected to mention the one overarching reason why any serious budding composer should avoid such schools: they have nothing whatsoever to teach a genuinely gifted budding composer, no matter how great or meager his gift. Once such a one has studied thoroughly and learned well the fundamentals of the vocabulary and grammar of music, to use the metaphor of language, there's nothing else in music that can be taught him in a classroom or laboratory. All his musical learning beyond those fundamentals must — can only — be acquired by him by listening to and studying the works of other composers — both those who've preceded him, and those contemporary with him — and most importantly and most essentially, by listening and giving voice to his own internalized muse. The rest is silence.

Whoa!

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 5:56 AM Eastern on 11 Jan. See below.]

Ain't this a kick in the ass.

The world's biggest record label yesterday unveiled a download store devoted to classical and jazz music, hoping to tap into a booming market for digital sales and promising to unlock a treasure trove of thousands of recordings that have sat in the vaults for decades.

The attention given to soaring rock and pop downloads has masked the shot in the arm that downloads have given to sales of classical and jazz music. According to Universal, sales of classical music downloads have soared by 1,000% in the last year and jazz sales have grown by 900%.

The new site will offer all of Universal's classical and jazz releases, including classic imprints such as Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, Verve and Impulse, running to 125,000 tracks taken from nearly 8,000 CDs. The repertoire available at launch will include every note written by Mozart, 265 albums of Beethoven compositions and jazz artists from recent crossover successes such as Jamie Cullum to legends such as John Coltrane.

And best of all, the site labels a track a track, not a "song", and bloody iPods need not apply as the downloads can't be played on an iPod but are encoded at 320kps in Windows Media Audio format; more than double the bit-rate of iTunes iPod encoding.

A proper digital classical music store has finally arrived on the Web.

Download site is here. (Note: The site seems to be set up for Brits only. Emailed them a query. Stay tuned.)

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Update (5:56 AM Eastern on 11 Jan): This just received from the powers that be at the Universal site:

Hello - thank you for your enquiry. Unfortunately at the moment you can't register with a US address and credit card - you have to [be] based in the UK. There are plans in the future to expand the site internationally.

Whadarday, nuts?

Jeez!

Caution! Off-Topic Mini-Rant Ahead

I swore I would post nothing about this, but I can't help saying merely, Our President and his gang of neocon ideologues are not only criminally incompetent imbeciles, but mendacious weasels into the bargain. Last night's speech made me positively ill, and ashamed to be an American.

New Addition

We don't quite know how we missed this fine blog by professional classical singer and blogger ACB as according to its archives it's been around since 2004, but we did. Oversight corrected, and The Concert is now included in our exclusive Culture Blogs listing on the left sidebar.

Do click over and give The Concert a read. Worth your time.

Schubert's Grace

In an article on Franz Schubert for The Telegraph, Michael Henderson writes:

What you hear in Schubert['s music] is what you hear in Chekhov's plays and stories: the unfathomable mystery of existence, treated with the pitch-perfect ear of one who understands the fragility of life, and the vulnerability and yearning of each human soul. It is also important to note what you don't hear. There is no bombast, no vanity, no "leading on". The music springs naturally, fountain-like, from an open heart.

[...]

And, my, how we need his grace today! Schubert, who has no peer in expressing the ambivalence of human urges, had no truck with sentimentality, that gushing of bogus "feeling" defined by James Joyce as "unearned emotion".

[...]

We live in a world that doesn't just tolerate the bogus. It showers the frauds and sharpies with gifts, in the form of book deals, recording contracts and films, and then relies on the PR industry to do its worst.

Newspapers are complicit in these acts of deception. Television couldn't exist without them. The "best" of this, the "worst" of that, highlights, lowlights, no lights; every day brings a torrent of slush. Ah, the tyranny of popular taste!

When you see pop stars in leather pants and sunglasses trying to save the world by banging guitars (or running newspapers for a day, to earn the editor brownie points at the Groucho Club), then you realise that it might not be such a bad idea to bring back the stocks. Round up the lot of them, at once, so we can pelt them with tomatoes, and have a good laugh while we're about it.

Compassion à la mode is the blight of our age. Hardly a week goes by without some ninny in the public eye offering the world a crash course in belligerent pity. This is not real compassion, of course, merely an exercise in vanity: "Look at me, admire my virtue – and see my film."

The stocks indeed. Capital idea.

RTWT here.

Updated Link To The Sounds & Fury Blog Forum (Administrative Note)

We've just finished installing the newest version of the software that powers the Sounds & Fury Blog Forum. Unfortunately, we were forced to make a fresh installation of this software rather than the more typical upgrade, and the existing database is incompatible and so could not be transferred. Consequently, the bad news is that all previously registered users will have to reregister. The good news is that the new registration process is quick and self-contained (i.e., it's all done in software). The new link to the forum is up on our left sidebar and on our About & Contact page as before. Please change your bookmarks accordingly.

Why Am I Not Surprised II

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 5:42 PM Eastern on 6 Jan. See below.]

This non-music repercussion of the prevailing and pervasive iPod Sensibility was only to be expected sooner or later:

"For Whom the Bell Tolls" may be one of Ernest Hemingway's best-known books, but it isn't exactly flying off the shelves in northern Virginia these days. Precisely nobody has checked out a copy from the Fairfax County Public Library system in the past two years, according to a front-page story in yesterday's Washington Post.

And now the bell may toll for Hemingway. A software program developed by SirsiDynix, an Alabama-based library-technology company, informs librarians of which books are circulating and which ones aren't. If titles remain untouched for two years, they may be discarded — permanently. "We're being very ruthless," boasts library director Sam Clay.

As it happens, the ruthlessness may not ultimately extend to Hemingway's classic. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" could win a special reprieve, and, in the future, copies might remain available at certain branches. Yet lots of other volumes may not fare as well. Books by Charlotte Brontë, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have recently been pulled.

Library officials explain, not unreasonably, that their shelf space is limited and that they want to satisfy the demands of the public. Every unpopular book that's removed from circulation, after all, creates room for a new page-turner by John Grisham, David Baldacci, or James Patterson--the authors of the three most checked-out books in Fairfax County last month.

Yes indeed. Vox populi, vox Dei, the First Principle of a populist, equalitarian age.

As for the iPod Sensibility "songs" by Beethoven (i.e., "shuffled" movements of, say, the symphonies, for instance) listened to on the go as background to routine daily life are taken as experiencing the real thing, so the stocking of library shelves with such as John Grisham potboilers in place of the works of, say, Hemingway and Brontë and the like, are taken as the fulfilling of a public library's obligation to satisfy the needs of its users who, in this case, take the reading of Grisham potboilers and the like to be the experiencing of genuine literature.

Why am I not surprised.

O tempora! O mores!

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Update (7:14 AM Eastern on 4 Jan): And another.

Update 2 (5:42 PM Eastern on 6 Jan): Here's a hilarious take on this business (we take it that the hilarity was purposeful, but can't be quite sure of that) by a self-described "reasonable conservative who ... get[s] all [his] news from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Jay Leno monologues," and who eMailed us the link.