Sounds & Fury

This Ought To Prove Interesting

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 4:18 PM Eastern on 30 Jan. See below.]

Bet you can’t guess who will be making an appearance on Comedy Central's “The Colbert Report” tonight (11:30 PM EST). None other than Alex Ross. Yes, that Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise, the blog and the book. This is what comes of bona fide intellectuals flirting with and dabbling in the world of popular culture. Well, if nothing else, this little foray tonight ought to prove interesting — at least.

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Update (2:50 PM Eastern on 30 Jan): If you missed the “interview”, you can watch it here. Alex pretty much held his own, we’re not surprised to report, and perhaps the “interview” did what it was supposed to do book-promotion-wise, but, really, was it absolutely necessary?

We think not.

Update 2 (4:18 PM Eastern on 30 Jan): Wherein we’re accused of “manifest envy of Ross' success” (see Comments section).

Mr. Holland's Risk

How does a genuine music critic, that rapidly disappearing breed, report that a concert with big-name talent was a resounding, same-old-same-old bore, even a bit silly, while at the same time remain gentlemanly and not unduly nasty about it, and fulfill a genuine critic’s obligation to make his review interesting, informative, and educational reading for his readers? One writes a review like this review by Bernard Holland for The New York Times reporting on a Schubert song recital at Carnegie Hall.

But in our contemporary American culture — a culture grown coarse due the ravages of popular culture and as a consequence rendered largely insensitive to nuance and subtlety — one runs a risk in writing such a review which, by its very nature, is dependent on its readers’ sensitivity to both nuance and subtlety to make its point. One need only read these two responses to Mr. Holland’s review, here and here, to see just how great that risk.

O tempora! O mores!

Recommendation Request

We would appreciate reader recommendations for a relatively complete text on standard (tonal) music theory (harmony and counterpoint) suitable for a college-age student whose total music-theory knowledge is how to read the F and G clefs (he took piano lessons as a kid). For this purpose, we’ll open the comments section of this post. Those who, for whatever reason, would rather not make their recommendation publicly are encouraged to forward it via eMail. All recommendations gratefully received.

Thanks.

Bobby Fischer Is Dead

One of the world’s all-time greatest chess players, Bobby Fischer, is dead at 64. He died on Thursday in a hospital in Reykjavík, Iceland. No cause of death was given officially, but one report says the cause of death was kidney failure. Harold C. Schonberg — who reported for The New York Times on the famous 1972 Reykjavik championship match between Fischer and the reigning World Chess Champion, the Russian chess grandmaster Boris Spassky, a match in which Fischer won the title from Spassky and became the first (and still only) American to hold that title — had this to say about Fischer in his 1973 book, Grandmasters of Chess:

It was Bobby Fischer who...single-handedly, made the world recognize that chess on its highest level was as competitive as football, as thrilling as a duel to the death, as esthetically satisfying as a fine work of art, as intellectually demanding as any form of human activity.

Indeed. And for that we overlook the out-of-control lunacy of Fischer's later years.

The New York Times obituary can be read here.

Another Idiot Sounds Off With An Old And Idiot Solution

In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, another idiot (American, of course) sounds off with his “solution” for forestalling the imminent death of classical music:

Jonathan Stockhammer, regarded as a dynamic member of the younger generation of conductors, believes classical music is dying and needs a good jolt to get its heart beating again.

[...]

“[C]lassical music, for too long, has segregated itself off in terms of the audiences, in terms of the expectations the others have of other audience members, in terms of the way the presenters look at the finished product,” [says Stockhammer].

[...]

The irony, Stockhammer believes, is that audiences in Australia, Britain and America demand the highest level of technical proficiency from their orchestras, but also scare orchestras out of trying fresh content and taking risks.

Hence the need for that substantial jolt - anything to get the blood pumping again.

"That includes all kinds of interesting collaborations, experiments, working with multimedia, working with art, working with rock artists, working with film: things that draw in the interesting audience," Stockhammer says.

Idiot.

We Know Just How He Feels

Richard Morrison, chief music critic of The Times (London), filed his review of the Royal Opera House’s production of Verdi’s La traviata, and had this to say about the Violetta:

Until last night sheer bad luck had shielded me from the full-on Anna Netrebko experience. But now that I’ve seen, heard, and inwardly drooled over the sensational 36-year-old Russian soprano at first hand, there’s no going back.

Shaken, stirred, and still quivering at the knees, I’m an altered man.

The odd thing is that Richard Eyre’s 13-year-old Royal Opera staging — hot on period detail, and flaunting surely the largest lampshade in London, but a little tepid in the debauchery department — doesn’t even give Netrebko the chance to display her famed visual divertissements.

When she played Violetta in a modern-dress Salzburg production of Verdi’s opera recently, her little red frock was widely considered the most exciting thing to happen in Austria since the war.

In Covent Garden’s crinolines, by contrast, she has to do it all with charisma and voice. But boy, does she do it! This is a Violetta whose every passing feeling — of hope and hopelessness, regret and resignation, passion and pain — is writ large not just in her face and gesture but in her singing as well.

I expected effortlessly commanding top notes and peachy tone, but not the wonderfully subtle variations in colour and phrasing. And the way she turns her final aria from deathbed murmur to fierce, fatalistic cry of pride and defiance is mesmerising.

If you like your fallen women wan and limpid, look elsewhere. Netrebko’s Violetta — glowing with inner fervour, even at the end — doesn’t have an ounce of self-pity. But she is utterly convincing and utterly natural. She seems to be concocting her thoughts, her words, even the very notes she sings, as she goes.

Compare with the following from this February 2007 post of ours:

So I tuned in the PBS telecast of the Met's Puritani last night. Why, you may ask, did I subject myself willingly to this risible piece of typical bel canto trash? To ogle Anna Netrebko, of course. Curious thing is, while I came to ogle, I left involved. With the opera, that is, so dramatically convincing was Netrebko's performance. No mean trick that, in this static Sicilian soap opera in which the music is pure organ grinder kitsch, and the drama, nonexistent.

Does Netrebko have a beautiful voice? Indeed she does: velvety plush, quite beautiful, and up to handling the vocal requirements of the role. Is she vocally on a par technically with a Sutherland or a Sills in this rep? She most decidedly is not. But, then, few are.

My point is that Netrebko was riveting in a role which is anything but riveting, and that, boys and girls, requires a native genius impossible to acquire. Anna Netrebko. Not just a drop-dead gorgeous babe with a gorgeous voice, but an opera phenomenon.

We know just how Mr. Morrison feels.

Update

Update to “Heads-Up”.

Heads-Up

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 8:33 AM Eastern on 15 Jan. See below.]

Undoubtedly due the huge (and justified) success of his book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Alex Ross, long passed over by the show’s producers, will at last be interviewed tonight on PBS’s The Charlie Rose Show.

Be there or be square!

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Update (8:33 AM Eastern on 15 Jan): Might we also suggest to Alex that in addition to taking to heart The Standing Room’s excellent suggestion to “please, please bitchslap him when he tries to talk over you,” that before answering any of Mr. Rose’s epic-length questions, he first pause a beat or two to make certain Mr. Rose's mini-disquisition-posing-as-a-question is done, then, in a benign tone of voice, innocently reply, “I'm sorry, is there a question buried somewhere in all that?”

Just a suggestion.

Doing What Needs To Be Done

In October of last year, I wrote a post titled “Dead In The Water” which gave a brief account of the end of my brief POD self-publishing adventure involving my “cozy” mystery novel, A Deed of Dreadful Note. What it said, in short, was that I was unwilling to do what I finally saw needs to be done in order to give the novel even a chance of commercial success.

In today’s Boston Globe there’s a story about one, Brunonia Barry, an author who took a similar POD self-publishing route for her first mystery novel, The Lace Reader, who was willing to do what needs to be done in order to give her novel a chance of commercial success, and ended up by having her self-published novel sold to a mainstream publisher, William Morrow, in a literary auction which netted Ms. Barry a $2M advance for the novel and for an additional one in future.

And what had to be done by Ms. Barry in order to achieve this admittedly singular result? Here’s a sampling:

Barry and [Gary] Ward [Barry’s husband] were willing to do all [that needed to be done], and spen[t] freely in the process — more than $50,000 before they were finished....

[...]

By early last year, they were ready to test the market. The manager of The Spirit of '76 Bookstore in Marblehead put them in touch with store-based book clubs, whose members said they would be willing to test-read the manuscript.

"I would go to the meetings and take notes," Barry said. "I asked them to be brutally honest: 'Where did you stop reading? Did you identify with this character? What did you think of the mother?'" With the feedback, she made some minor changes.

They incorporated their company as Flap Jacket Press and planned to release The Lace Reader last September. They set up a website and hired a copy editor, jacket designer, and book publicist, Kelley & Hall of Marblehead. They attended bookseller conventions, handing out advance copies and buttonholing booksellers. Kelley & Hall sent copies to book bloggers and trade magazines such as Publishers Weekly and promotional announcements to 700 independent bookstores.

Then last summer came two big breaks: First, Kelley & Hall helped lan[d] a deal with a Tennessee distributor, Blu Sky Media Group; second, a rave review appeared in Publishers Weekly. The Lace Reader was hailed as "a captivating debut."

Still, the couple had to close the deal with booksellers. They ordered a first printing of 2,500, then began to visit stores, trying to get them to stock the book. Among the first was Salem's Cornerstone Books.

"Sandy [Ms. Barry’s nickname] dropped her book off," said Beth Simpson, events coordinator of Cornerstone Books in Salem. "I didn't know her. I like to do an author appearance to generate interest; otherwise the book will just sit on the shelf." She arranged to have Barry do a reading, then called Salem and Marblehead newspapers, which ran stories about the reading.

"That generated incredible interest," Simpson said. "We had a handful of people a day coming in, asking if we had the book. At the appearance, we had about 40 people, which was a big crowd for an unknown author. We sold out in a blink — probably 80 to 100 books. We don't sell 80 to 100 books of Stephen King or Dennis Lehane."

Word spread. Several teachers read the book, and both Swampscott and Marblehead high schools added it to the literature curriculum.

That’s what needs to be done, all right, not to mention that the novel itself has to be worth the time, effort, and money involved.

In writing this post I don’t for an instant mean to even imply that had I done the same for my novel that it would have achieved even a small fraction of the success now enjoyed by Ms. Barry’s novel. She’s apparently a genuine writer who wrote a genuine novel, not some dilettante who turned out a tiny-niche-market genre novel on a whim; a genre novel that was more manufactured to formula than written. In writing this post it’s my intention to point out that in today’s world self-publishing need no longer be a mere exercise in vanity as it has been since forever, but is today a commercially viable publishing route for an author to follow in order to get his work out to the public and make money from the enterprise into the bargain. Perhaps not the kind of money made by Ms. Barry — in that respect, her case is quite exceptional — but enough for a genuine writer to make writing and marketing his own work a profitable fulltime occupation.

It’s a brave new publishing world out there.

Featured Past Post #54 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("The Trouble With Götterdämmerung”) is now up on the right sidebar.

Sweeney The Movie

Early this past December, before the release of Tim Burton’s film of Sweeney Todd, I wrote the following in an online forum thread concerning the forthcoming film:

Having little affection for American musical comedy, and even less for cinematic adaptations of same, I came very late to Sweeney Todd (some quarter-century late, actually), and was overwhelmed by it — most particularly by its musical treatment. I, too, wondered how so much of that music being cut in a cinematic adaptation of the musical could result in the film being anything but a resounding failure. But I trust Tim Burton implicitly. His cinematic sense is all but infallible, and according to all I’ve read, he clearly understands the work as envisioned for the stage. Cut music or not, I look forward to seeing how he re-envisioned the work for the cinema. Unhappily, as I refuse to attend a movie theater (three occasions excepted, I’ve not stepped foot in a movie theater since 1973), I won’t be able to see the film for some months to come when it makes its appearance in DVD release.

I can hardly wait.

Since the film’s release, it’s received almost unanimous praise from the critical press which pretty much lauded it to the skies, as the saying goes, including this latest from Ol’ Stormin’ Norman:

After the screening [of Burton’s film], cup of tea in hand, [Stephen] Sondheim himself made a claim so extravagant I had to ask him to repeat it. ‘This,’ he declared, ‘is the first musical that has ever transferred successfully to the screen.’

[...]

Is [Sweeney Todd] then, as the composer claims, the first stage musical ever to make a successful switch to the movies? After several weeks' reflection, I’d go one further: I cannot recall any modern theatre play — Pinter, Miller, O'Neill, Albee, Neil Simon, whoever — that has made the leap to screen carrying so little of its stage baggage while its character remains intact. Sweeney Todd is a gripping, skilful, troubling, ineradicable masterpiece of a 21st century movie. All that came before is gaslight.

Even given the source, it all sounds just as I expected it to be, and I’ll almost certainly weigh in here again after I’ve screened it on DVD for myself. And as I’ve already said, I can hardly wait.

Sonofagun!

Despite an almost total lack of promotion and publicity, my adventure in POD publishing — the “cozy” mystery novel, A Deed of Dreadful Note — is now listed by and available for purchase from booksellers Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Borders.

Sonofagun! Makes one feel like a real author, it does, even though the listings do need some corrections (being handled now by the publisher, Lulupress).

Perhaps He Should Stick To Dance

In a review of Lorin Maazel’s return to the Met podium for its production of Die Walküre this past Monday, Clive Barnes, noted dance and drama critic for the New York Post, had this to say:

It took him 45 years, but Lorin Maazel finally re turned to the Metropolitan Opera Monday night, conducting a magnificent performance of Wagner's "Die Walkure."

That's a long intermission, even by operatic standards. But the 79-year-old Maazel — now in his sixth season as music director of the New York Philharmonic — looked trim and happy, and, from Wagner's silkily ponderous opening onward to the closing Fire Music, got gorgeous playing from the Met orchestra.

[...]

[Also] outstanding were Stephanie Blythe, superlative in both voice and Wagnerian bitchery as the righteous Erda [sic!], wife to Wotan, King [sic] of the Gods, and James Morris as Wotan himself.

[...]

Another young American [sic], Adrianne Pieczonka, showed much the same promise as a strong-voiced Sieglinde, Siegmund's sister and incestuous wife.

How's that again? “Silkily ponderous opening”? “Another young American [sic], Adrianne Pieczonka, showed much the same promise as a strong-voiced Sieglinde”? And best of all, “Wagnerian bitchery as the righteous Erda [sic!], wife to Wotan, King [sic] of the Gods”(!)?

Lord preserve us.

Instructive Reading

Almost as if in answer to the article on concert hall etiquette by Bernard Holland in today’s New York Times is our February 2005 post on the same subject, “Another Voice”, which by sheer coincidence went up as our Featured Past Post last Wednesday (accessible from the right sidebar).

Especially instructive reading after first reading Mr. Holland’s piece.

And The Beat Goes On

As an exemplar of the colossal ignorance of current-day thinking, both lay and scientific, whenever it concerns Freudian psychoanalytic theory, this article that appeared several days ago in the Brit Telegraph describing the findings of a Harvard Medical School Centre for Sleep and Cognition study on dreams sponsored by the Telegraph would be hard to beat. Reports the article’s author, the Telegraph’s science editor, Roger Highfield,

Freud called our dreams the "royal road to the unconscious". His seductive idea was that their content is shaped by experiences early in life, creating the hope that psychoanalysis could use our dreams to reveal our childhood miseries, and thereby cure our inner torment.

Today, however, a study of dreams conducted for The Daily Telegraph by Harvard University has come to the inescapable conclusion that Freud put too much emphasis on our formative years.

Although dreams are bizarre and otherworldly, they are as likely to be moulded by mundane, humdrum and everyday activities as by life-changing events.

[...]

As part of this [study], we invited visitors to our website, telegraph.co.uk, to provide details of dreams that were fresh in their mind, so that they could be analysed by Dr Erin Wamsley, a colleague of Dr Stickgold.

Almost 300 people were prepared to fill in a detailed online questionnaire and the responses were described as "of good quality" she says. The overall findings, she reveals, "do not fit neatly with the psychoanalytic/Freudian presumption that early life experiences are a primary source of dream content".

In fact, they are much more likely to be shaped by events of the past week than a childhood trauma. "Overall, mundane, unimportant events were as likely to be identified as more significant life events – a TV commercial they had seen, or something boring that a friend said to them," says Dr Wamsley.

Indeed, even among these recent events, we failed to dwell on the most interesting in our dreams. "Contrary to the folk-psychological belief that we dream only of the most important events in our lives, the memory sources identified by participants were not necessarily events of any significance to the dreamer," explains Dr Wamsley.

"One fifth of all memory sources were described as 'not at all important' to the dreamer, while approximately half, 47 per cent, were described as being less important than an average waking event."

A classic example of a hundrum experience invading our sleep was the participant who dreamt of being at a school music lesson in which Art Garfunkel was a guest teacher, addressing his class with an Irish accent.

"He asked the class (who were all females whom I remember from years ago) to each individually sing Sound of Silence, but to make it as original and individual as possible. Though nervous, I also felt very giggly, too, mainly owing to the fact that Art Garfunkel was wearing loose white shorts (which he had borrowed from his wife), and every time he bent over, or uncrossed his legs, he exposed a mass of pubic hair."

While Freud would not doubt have seized on this as signalling a repressed childhood memory, the more prosaic explanation was that the dreamer had, earlier in the day, watched a Simon and Garfunkel video.

But this is precisely what Freud established in his landmark seminal work; viz., that the material of the manifest dream content — i.e., that part of a dream that makes itself immediately perceptible to our consciousness — is always presented in terms of an innocuous experience or experiences of the past 24-48 hours, but that that material is itself never the psychologically significant content of the dream which is contained in what Freud termed the latent dream content, but is always the product of what Freud called the "dream work", the complex and intricate cloaking (distorting) mechanism that prevents the dream’s raw, “dangerous” latent content from reaching our conscious mind directly.

Neither Mr. Highfield nor, apparently, Harvard’s researcher, Dr. Wamsley, made any distinction whatsoever between a dream’s manifest and latent content which is tantamount to a fundamental rewriting of what Freud wrote — a rewriting that ignores entirely a central pillar of Freud’s argument — and then proceeded to disagree with and criticize the substance of that rewriting as if that rewriting was what Freud himself actually wrote.

Why are we not surprised.

Dismaying But Not Surprising

In our blog-hopping this morning we came across this breathtakingly dismaying statement:

When I came into our department 25 years ago, we were requiring Freshmen in their 3rd quarter to write counterpoint in the style of Bach (fugal exposition). Sheesh, most of them don’t even know the music of Bach, much less being able to write like him.

Why dismaying? The writer of the above quote is no uninformed, carping outsider, but Roger Bourland, professor (and now Chair) of the Composition program at the Department of Music at UCLA so he knows whereof he speaks, and the freshmen he speaks of are that program's first-year students.

Goes a long way toward explaining why so much of today’s so-called New Music is so utterly and airheadedly empty, doesn’t it.

RTWT here.

An Epitome Of The iPod Sensibility

In response to a thoughtful, 30 December article by New York Times chief music critic Anthony Tommasini, a commenter in a lengthy comments thread to a post in an online publication devoted to so-called “New Music” (a thread, by the way, in which Yours Truly was indignantly declared a racist and a sexist for defending the right of a private organization — in this case, the Wiener Philharmoniker — to be as discriminatory as it sees fit in granting membership in its organization no matter how stupid the decision, and for refusing to prima facie condemn such organizations as racist and sexist) had this to say (we leave the commenter nameless and the thread unlinked as we don’t want our comments here misconstrued as a personal attack):

Tomassini [sic] makes a compelling argument that classical music demands extended and concentrated listening. So, why are so many contemporary pieces getting shorter? If concert goers are ultimately supposed to cultivate the concentration to take in an entire Mahler symphony or Prokofiev piano concerto, what are they being asked to learn to hear in ten or fifteen-minute seemingly obligatory contemporary pieces? More importantly, what is the abbreviated average length of the contemporary concert offering forcing composers to learn how to do? Like it or not, there's a difference between spinning out a theme over thirty minutes versus condensing a three section piece down to ten minutes.

So far, so sane. There then followed this which we at first thought an ironic riff, but soon discovered was written in dead earnest:

Part of my solution to this conundrum involves selective listening. What if concert halls provided a more casual space in some other part of the building in which the concert were transmitted via video projectors and speakers? People opting for this sort of indirect listening could dress casually, bring or buy food and drink, even talk with their companions about what they were hearing. There have been times when I would have much preferred to comment on a piece as it was being performed without worrying about disturbing the silence in the hall. This permissive commentary would obviously have to be checked at some decibel level, else folks would find it difficult to hear the music intently. Which brings me to my next, more radical listening option.

The standard concert involves a collective audience sitting silently for the duration of a performance. My second option involves a smaller group of people who could come and go, talk quietly during the projected performance and make it a more personalized event. My third listening option is the most private of all; it involves the construction of cubicals meant for individual listeners who would be given headphones and some sort of video screen with which to take in the performance. Unlike the realtime [sic] concert experience and the equally realtime casual listening experience I propose, this solitary listening option would allow the individual listener to rewind, fast forward, skip and repeat portions of movements, movements or entire pieces. This would encourage score perusal while listening, quite humming to track melodic and contrapuntal developments and other beloved introverted activities usually frowned upon at concerts.

[...]

In the past, concerts fulfilled an absolutely practical need, that of getting pieces heard by the largest possible audiences that could be crammed into a given physical space. With the advent of recordings, the physical space could be at once intimate and mobile, as long as the clunky phonograph could be moved from house to house. The obvious sacrifices with early recordings involved audio fidelity and length. But now, I'd likely prefer pristinely recorded audio to the acoustical limits of a concert hall.

If people can take home a chef's realtime creation to be enjoyed in bed with DVD movies or cell phone conversations, why shouldn't they be able to choose how to take in realtime performances? If newspapers can now be read online and in print, why must concerts still be taken in according to outmoded practices? Let the concert be streamed into people's homes for a fee. Let friends get together at the concert hall, rent a room upstairs, have food brought in and dig the sounds on a state-of-the-art audio/video transmission. If that's too collective, let them take in the performance in a cubical with headphones, monitor and open score. And, for those who still like sitting in silence for interminably long pieces, there will always be the traditional concert.

The above was written not by some Gen Y prole airhead but by someone who is himself a composer of concert music. What he wrote is a veritable epitome of what we’ve previously called the iPod Sensibility, and coming from a composer of concert music as it does could not be sadder or more dismaying.

What hope for the classical music concert when composers themselves are thinking in these terms?

The question is rhetorical, but all concerned ought to be thinking about the answer.

Featured Past Post #53 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("Another Voice”) is now up on the right sidebar.