Sounds & Fury

Netflix's New Drama Series, House Of Cards: Some Brief Remarks

We take a momentary break from our hiatus from blogging to note briefly Netflix's small revolution in the delivery of original TV-type series drama to audiences worldwide.

We've just finished viewing Friday's premiere of all 13 hour-long episodes of Season 1 of the new Netflix original drama series House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright, and Kate Mara, an American remake of the brilliant 1990 BBC series of the same name starring Ian Richardson, Diane Fletcher, and Susannah Harker, and it's a splendid effort both substantively and in its revolutionary method of delivery (all 13 episodes of Season 1 available at the same time on the Internet for instant streaming directly to your properly equipped viewing device of choice). The drama's production is visually gorgeous and the performances largely first-rate throughout. The writing, however, is only occasionally so, we're sorry to have to report, and is fairly uneven both within and across episodes (all told, there were some six writers involved) and around Episode 8 the drama begins going badly off the rails and thereafter quickly degenerates into a series drama of the typical American TV network sort for the most part. But even at the series's best, Kevin Spacey's bluntly brutal Francis (Frank) Underwood is no match in Machiavellian machination for Ian Richardson's deliciously wicked Francis Urquhart, and Robin Wright's barbed, athletically coarse Claire Underwood is no match in seductive Lady Macbeth-ness for Diane Fletcher's coolly smooth patrician Elizabeth Urquhart, nor is Kate Mara's Zoe Barnes a match for Susannah Harker's Mattie Storin in quietly inviting beauty. You may think we're being biased in our assessment by our often evident Anglophilia. You might very well think that. We couldn't possibly comment.

That is all. We now resume our interrupted hiatus.

A Great Idea Gone Horribly Wrong From The Get-Go

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is arguably the very incarnation of that mythical entity, The Great American Novel. Someone had the splendid idea of having the novel read aloud serially on the Web a chapter at a time in downloadable segments. Here's the result so far.

What's wrong with this picture (apart from the misspelling of the novel's title we mean)?

Time To Rethink Our Tactics?

One day this past week, lacking anything of sufficient interest to write about and feeling a bit bored, we looked in on a Wagner discussion taking place on perhaps the most populous online classical music forum on the Web — an online forum where just the mention of the name A.C. Douglas is anathema (we've on several prior occasions referred publicly to this online forum as "a sandbox for mindless belligerent morons and kiddies of all ages") — and couldn't resist posting a response to the following baiting, thoroughly disingenuous pleading made by a regular forum member who in the past has shown himself to be a textbook case of the classic Wagner-ignorant, crypto-Wagner-hater:

I keep trying to understand why so many heap so much praise on Wagner. Examples that illustrate the claim would help a slow learner like me.

To which we responded:

You will never understand no matter how many examples are supplied as you are a textbook case of the classic Wagner-hater; a hatred grounded in ignorance which ignorant state causes you no discomfort whatsoever.

Almost immediately began a fusillade of insults from various members, such as: "the notoriously pompous and fatuous [Wagner] fanboy", "overinflated buffoon", "One's heart sinks at seeing AC Douglas back in these precincts ... perhaps this time he will be banned", "Ah, thank God for the 'ignore user' button", and, "Stop responding to it [i.e., A.C. Douglas] for Chrissake. Ignoring it [i.e., A.C. Douglas] works better than complaining", the first of which insults came from the above noted classic crypto-Wagner-hater, and the last two from a totally surprising and unexpected source which two insults we suspect are, at least in part, belated payback for this 2007 S&F entry.

We're fairly used to being attacked or excoriated on online classical music forums and, to be perfectly candid, calculatedly invite such response by provocatively ridiculing or exposing the ignorant thinking that so commonly pervades such venues, but rarely have we ever encountered such raw insult from so many on a single occasion. Perhaps it's time we rethought our online forum tactics and found another way to achieve our intent of setting straight the, um, less than informed reasoning and thinking that's so large a part of online classical music forum discourse.

Nah.

God Bless The Internet

Considering our love affair with Mozart, even we find it a bit strange that we've not spent much time with his chamber works; his string quartets in particular. Intent on correcting that situation, we began listening in earnest to the six string quartets known collectively as the "Haydn quartets", so named because of their inspiration by and dedication to Joseph Haydn.

On listening to the first of these (the G Major, K 387) we were struck instantly by how hugely well developed and advanced it was in both structure and expression; nothing like what one would expect from a regulation 18th-century Classical-period string quartet, and almost Beethoven-like in its depth of structure and its freedom of expression. We never before read the score for this work, but now felt the absolute need to do so.

Well, our finances are such that we can't just go throwing around even minor bucks on such luxuries, and besides, we wanted that score now; right this very minute.

No problem. We just hied ourself over to the IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library, opened the appropriate page, downloaded the PDF file (785KB, download time about 2 seconds), printed it out (45 pages, printing time about 10 minutes), and bound it using heavy-duty staples.

Voila! A full 8 1/2 x 11 score of K 387 beautifully printed. Total cost: about $0.50.

God bless the Internet, and God bless the Petrucci Music Library!

Ave Atque Vale, Denis

Denis Dutton, professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, author of the book, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, and founder and editor of the indispensible website Arts & Letters Daily, ("The website for smart people," as one wag nicely christened it) has died at age 66 of prostate cancer.

Ever since our first acquaintance with the Web, A&LD (for which Dutton chose the articles to list, and wrote all the snappy teaser blurbs) has been among our very first stops as we made our daily rounds of the Web, and it was one of S&F's proudest moments when we received eMail from Denis a few years ago informing us we'd been added to A&LD's selective blogroll.

Atque in perpetuum, Denis, ave atque vale. You will be sorely missed.

Bah Humbug! — Wagner, not Christmas

It's fairly common and not at all surprising to read, even from the pen of professional culture critics who ought to know better, outrageous and more or less Wagner-ignorant attacks against Wagner and his stageworks, but rarely have we read an attack as mindless and Wagner-ignorant as this mindless screed from the pen of the Brit culture critic Igor Toronyi-Lalic (a critic of whose writings we've no previous experience) titled, "Bah Humbug: Richard Wagner — banish him from the stage" which begins thus:

Discouraging people from getting into Wagner isn't, to be honest, very hard. Just three little words will scare away all but the hardiest. Here's. The. Libretto. No one — not even the great Bryan Magee, who plays a very fun game of Schopenhauerian snap in Wagner and Philosophy — has ever managed to give a decent defence of Wagner's operas without adding a thousand qualifications.

Everyone admits that the plots are, of course, very silly. And dramatically deficient. And virtually impossible to stage. And that there's no realism to any of it. And that the jokes aren't worthy of the Chuckle Brothers. And that the inclusion of potions to further psychological development is hugely primitive. And that Siegfried is a bit of a twat - as is Parsifal. And that the characters of Mime ... and Beckmesser are both nasty Jewish caricatures. And that the music can be a bit suffocating. And that no one's ever seen a decent production of any of them.

Any Wagnerian worth their [sic] salt would then counter with the argument that these defects are merely dramaturgical. Wagner's genius is primarily as a breathtakingly original composer, not as a playwright. His music eclipses the faults of his librettos. And yet if this was true, if his genius lay mostly in the music, and this same genius almost completely, embarrassingly, fails him on stage, why do we continue to fritter away millions of pounds attempting to fix his faulty theatrics?

And Mr. Toronyi-Lalic's answer?

We do it because we believe Wagner to be an exceptional artist with exceptional things to say about the human condition. Wagner was no doubt an exceptional artist. But he was an even more exceptional anti-Semite. His thoughts on the human condition are, therefore, exceptional only in their monstrosity. And nowhere is this misanthropic, monstrous world view more fully or clearly formulated than in his operas. In every character, in every plot line, in every philosophical postulation in every verse, Wagner's own fundamental inhumanity reveals itself.

As we've covered all this ground and addressed all these questions a number of times before on S&F over the years in a number of various entries, we trust all this manifestly mindless and ignorant, even libelous, rubbish needs no point-by-point demolishing by us in the instant case, especially as it concerns Wagner's libretti and his dramatic gifts or, according to Mr. Toronyi-Lalic, Wagner's lack of same.

Not content with his Wagner-ignorant remarks so far, Mr. Toronyi-Lalic then goes on to hold Wagner in large part culpable for the phenomenon of Hitler and the Third Reich, concluding that,

Hitler ... wasn't a Nazi who happened to enjoy Wagner. Hitler was a Nazi because he enjoyed Wagner.

In his remarks on the Wagner-Hitler connection, Mr. Toronyi-Lalic compounds his manifest Wagner ignorance by his ignorance of German history as it relates to both Hitler and the Third Reich choosing to depend on the popular writings on both by the late, popular German journalist Joachim Fest who, to lend more weight and authority to his case in his response to critics of his ignorant article, Mr. Toronyi-Lalic identifies as a "revered historian and Hitler biographer." He bypasses altogether (surprise!) even so much as a mention of the minutely detailed, authoritative, all but definitive, 2000-page, two-volume study of Hitler and the Third Reich — Hitler (Norton, 2000) — by the eminent historian and Hitler and Nazi-era authority, Ian Kershaw, (Volume 1 - Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris, Volume 2 - Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis) in which 2000 pages there are but a mere 30 or so references to Wagner, almost all merely noted en passant, all having to do with Hitler's attachment to and love of Wagner's operas, and none even so much as suggesting that Wagner had any actual or credible seminal political or ideological influence — theoretical or practical — on Hitler or on the formation and ideology of the Third Reich through the vehicles of his (Wagner's) prose writings or stageworks. The fact of the matter is, of course, that Hitler, like all such tyrants, merely took from Wagner what suited his (Hitler's) already formed ideology and decided-upon purpose, and used Wagner's name, stageworks, and writings (what little of them he read) to lend credibility and weight to his own murderously obscene ideas.

On first reading Mr. Toronyi-Lalic's article, we decided that the article's title (which title may or may not have been written by Mr. Toronyi-Lalic) and the season offered a clue as to Mr. Toronyi-Lalic's intent in writing the article, and so giving him the benefit of the doubt, commented in the article's comment section:

Excellent! Absolutely hilarious. Good Christmas cheer.

My compliments. You're a comic genius.

However, Mr. Toronyi-Lalic's response to that comment:

Those who are assuming that anyone who dislikes Wagner and his racism must be joking are revealing a remarkable poverty of imagination. Das is kein Spaß [this is no joke], folks! Sorry!

immediately set us straight, and so we further commented:

It was NOT your "dislik[e] [of] Wagner and his racism" that provoked my remark, but my giving you the benefit of the doubt.

Your piece could have been written only by someone whose comic intention was to play Scrooge vis-à-vis Wagner's stageworks as Dickens's Scrooge was vis-à-vis the celebration of Christmas, or by someone who is a manifest Wagner ignoramus and an opera simpleton into the bargain. Your ... response makes clear which of the two you are, and makes clear as well how unworthy you were to receive my charitable benefit of the doubt.

Mr. Toronyi-Lalic's CV on The Arts Desk ("Britain's first professional arts critical website") reads:

Igor Toronyi-Lalic writes on opera, classical music and the arts for The [London] Times, Sunday Telegraph, Spectator, Opera and Opera Now. He is the Classical Music Editor at [The Arts Desk] ... as well [as] being one of the site’s founding members.

Oh dear. So much for professional classical music criticism on the Web and in much of the mainstream press and periodicals in today's postmodern era. Is it any wonder classical music is in trouble today?

A Questionable Immortality

It's been said as a caution to all who write for publication on the Internet that nothing ever dies on the Internet, but remains in perpetuity even after one has deleted the original from one's own data store of documents.

There's much to be said for that only slightly exaggerated caution. Imagine that you're a classical music critic and wrote this critical assessment of Bach's Die Kunst der Fuge (The Art of Fugue) — an assessment written originally by a writer for the Manchester Guardian on 4 October 1932 — and then published it on the Internet with your name attached.

It was immensely interesting to hear to-night's performance, if only to assure ourselves that we will not miss anything essential to the art of fugue if we never hear the work performed again. The B.B.C. must be congratulated for their boldness in broadcasting so complex and abstract a stretch of music. But I cannot resist saying this — if anybody who listened in to-night felt he was being scared from Bach for ever, let him run out and buy a gramophone record of the Aria on the G string. There is more great music in it than in all The Art of Fugue put together.

'Nuff said.

Classical Music Criticism Today

Concomitant with the ubiquitous and pernicious ascendance of pop-cultural and populist thinking in our culture that began in the mid- to late-Sixties and today is in full sway is the appalling decline in the quality and character of critical writing in the arts in the English language mainstream media (we omit from consideration all academic and specialist publications as they constitute a separate realm altogether; one which we're incompetent to consider). It's always been taken as a given by us that worthwhile critical writing in the arts follows the precepts neatly and succinctly put forward by the great John Dewey in this remarkable paragraph from his 1934 treatise, Art as Experience (our thanks to The Reading Experience for jogging our latent memory of the paragraph):

The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art; it is an auxiliary in the process, a difficult process, of learning to see and hear. The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task. The moral office of criticism is performed indirectly. The individual who has an enlarged and quickened experience is one who should make for himself his own appraisal. The way to help him is through the expansion of his own experience by the work of art to which criticism is subsidiary. The moral function of art itself is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive. The critic's office is to further this work, performed by the object of art. Obtrusion of his own approvals and condemnations, appraisals and ratings, is sign of failure to apprehend and perform the function of becoming a factor in the development of sincere personal experience. We lay hold of the full import of a work of art only as we go through in our own vital processes the processes the artist went through in producing the work. It is the critic's privilege to share in the promotion of this active process. His condemnation is that he so often arrests it.

Think now of the classical music critics writing today in the English language mainstream media worldwide (and on blogs and other online publications, too, for that matter) who meet these criteria (and by the term classical music we mean to include opera as well).

Have you managed to come up with more names than can be counted on the fingers of one hand?

Bet not. We surely can't, and woe to us and the future of classical music as an artform in our culture for the deficit. Part of the problem, of course, is that most classical music critics today aren't given enough column inches per review to do the job properly. But that's a symptom of the same disorder, not a cause.

For Whom The Bell Tolls

The Wall Street Journal today published an article entitled, "'Vanity' Press Goes Digital". Although the article focuses on eBooks (The New Big Thing — finally!), everything it says can be applied to self-published, Print On Demand (POD), ink-on-paper traditional books as well, as we outlined in some detail several years ago in these two 2007 S&F posts titled, "It's A Whole New Publishing World Out There — Maybe", and "It's A Whole New Publishing World Out There — Maybe, Pt. 2". The material stigma attached to self-published books (a stigma made explicit by labeling such books "vanity published") is fast disappearing as the quotes around the word "Vanity" in the title of the WSJ piece subtly acknowledges. It's perfectly clear to us, as it was three years ago, that the traditional book publisher is today not only mostly unnecessary for any book author who doesn't mind taking matters into his own hands entirely (or into his own hands with the additional help of expert hired hands in the fields of editing, PR, marketing, and advertising a whole new service industry for which will develop as self-publishing itself develops) thereby reaping the maximum profits from his writing, but is a veritable impediment — a remnant of a bygone era, which remnant is on the verge of having outlived its usefulness except for the most specialized of book publishing projects.

Some months ago, we sent an eMail to a prominent literary agent who maintains a blog whereon she answers candidly and without pulling any punches even the most basic or most touchy questions eMailed to her by her readers about literary agents and about the publishing biz generally. That eMail read:

Given the absolute ease today of self-publishing a POD book the physical product of which is absolutely indistinguishable from the physical product put out by any major house, and given the amount of non-writing work commercial publishers today expect an author to perform in the peddling of a published book, what irreplaceable service does a commercial publisher provide an ordinary (i.e., non-celebrity) author today for its 85%-90% cut of the book's sales price beyond the stroking of the author's ego and vanity by the prestige of being published by a commercial house? I've of course asked myself the same question, and no matter how I twist it, the answer I come up with is none. Nada. Zero. Zip. Bupkiss. I guarantee you that anything you come back at me with, I'll be able to come up with an alternate way to accomplish the same end, and just as effectively, even when economies of scale are taken into consideration.

Your thoughts, please, as I suspect I must be missing something.

That eMail never made it onto that agent's blog, nor was it even so much as acknowledged.

Surprise! — or, rather, no surprise at all.

It's time the commercial book publishing industry stopped asking itself for whom the bell tolls. Manifestly, my dear dinosaur, it tolls for thee.

Google Doodle

As Guardian classical music reviewer Tom Service nicely put it, "Google doodle shows music matters more than politics" (the "politics" referring to the Brit parliamentary elections which took place yesterday, and the results of which were announced today).

See for yourself.

A New Classical Music Website

Lawrence A. Johnson, "the recently jettisoned former classical music critic of the Miami Herald, and, prior to that, classical music writer at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel for six years," to quote his brief bio in his own words, has just put online his third (count 'em!) classical music website, The Classical Review, (the other two are the regional Chicago Classical Review and South Florida Classical Review), a website "establish[ed] [as] a single, one-stop, online source for classical music coverage" nationwide. Its full mission statement can be read here. Like Mr. Johnson's other two websites, The Classical Review is handsomely designed and easy to navigate, and should prove to be a valuable source of information for classical music aficionados everywhere. We've now added the link to The Classical Review to our Culture Sites listing on our left sidebar where it will join the already existing entries for Mr. Johnson's other two websites.

Our congratulations (and admiration) to Mr. Johnson on his enterprise, and our best wishes to him for success with his new venture.

The New QXR

When The New York Times Company divested itself of its long-held classical music station WQXR by selling it to NPR's WNYC this past September, we were deprived of our area's only classical music station as the puny 600 watts at which WNYC operates the station at its new location on the FM dial (105.9) is a far cry from the 6000 watts at which it was operated at its previous FM dial location which permitted us to receive the station's signal quite well albeit not in stereo as even at 6000 watts we're located just barely within the signal's fringe reach. And so now, when we want to listen to QXR, we have to listen via our computer and the Web.

Not exactly the best of all possible worlds.

The above notwithstanding, the transfer of QXR into the hands of WNYC is perhaps the best thing that could have happened for QXR. For the past five years at least, the Times has considered the station a sort of problematic stepchild, and this was reflected in its presence on the Web which in the Times's hands was a decidedly, let us say, slapdash affair.

Not so in the hands of WNYC. Now QXR's website and Web presence are veritable paragons of the type, and the station's programming just what it ought to be for a general interest classical music radio station. One could quibble with some of WNYC's decisions in bringing over staff from the old station (we've, however, more than a quibble with WNYC's decision to bypass Clayelle Dalferes in favor of Midge Woolsey whose bourgeois sensibilities are on display front and center in both her playlists and her commentary on the new QXR just as they were on the old), but, by and large, the new QXR's host lineup is more than satisfactory as is its general-interest classical music programming, and as is the host lineup and less-often-played- and new-classical-music programming on the newly created, 24/7, online-only WQXR Q2 radio stream which we lately find ourself listening to far more often than to QXR itself despite such stuff as Terry Riley's for-some-reason-famous In C, a performance of which we've been listening to determinedly for the past gazillion hours or so — or, rather, so it seems — and which is perhaps the most tedious, mindless piece of music it's ever been our displeasure to hear.

Now if we could only convince WNYC to petition the FCC to permit it to boost QXR's wattage just a teensy-weensy, piddling, ten-times bit....

The Future Of The Symphony Concert?

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 7:45 PM Eastern on 25 Nov. See below.]

We're somewhat embarrassed admitting this, longtime concertgoer that we are, but after clicking-over fifteen minutes before concert start to the free Brahms concert by the Berlin Philharmoniker last night (Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4), webcast via their Digital Concert Hall, we felt the same sense of heightened anticipation and exhilarating social interaction we feel when attending an actual live concert, that sense of being there persisting throughout the entire concert. And that feeling was due almost entirely the superbly photographed, miked, choreographed, and flawlessly reproduced high-def presentation, both visual and audio, which we watched and listened to in full-screen-display mode from beginning to end using a high-bandwidth transmission (low- and medium-bandwidth transmission were also available). Even though the program was a bit too much Brahms for us at one sitting (OK, a lot too much Brahms), we watched and listened through the entire webcast precisely for the purpose of assessing the totality of the experience of a digital presentation of a symphony concert, and found it remarkably (and unexpectedly) satisfying even though our 17" CRT display is ancient technology, and our computer's speakers nothing but three-inch-paper-cone wonders.

Is this the future of the symphony concert? We have to say we're afraid it is notwithstanding that in our estimation no reproduction, no matter how superbly presented, reproduced, and received, can equal or replace the in-hall experience of a live performance.

But, then, perhaps that's just us. You know, a diehard, old fogey reactionary, as we've been called, right down to the bone.

---

Update (7:45 PM Eastern on 25 Nov): If you balked at our use of the phrase, Berlin Philharmoniker, read this before firing off an eMail of objection.

The Berlin Philharmoniker's Digital Concert Hall

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 7:45 PM Eastern on 25 Nov. See below.]

For those of you not already acquainted with it, we'd like to direct your attention to what is almost certainly the Web's most beautiful and beautifully conceived, designed, and organized classical music website: the Berlin Philharmoniker's Digital Concert Hall. It's a largely pay-to-view operation that presents the Berlin Philharmoniker in live concert in high definition video and audio, and, considering what's on offer, ticket prices are cheap, cheap, cheap (about $15 USD per concert). Monthly passes and season subscriptions are available as well, also cheap, cheap, cheap. Registration is for free. Our U.S. symphony orchestras should all take their cue from this website, and put up websites of their own of the same type and quality. In our estimation, no single marketing tactic can equal it in promoting both the orchestra and classical music.

Do click over and take a look/listen.

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Update (7:45 PM Eastern on 25 Nov): If you balked at our use of the phrase, Berlin Philharmoniker, read this before firing off an eMail of objection.

Of Some Possible Interest To Wagnerians — Present And Future

Having purchased one of the very first IBM PCs produced (c. 1981), and equipping it with a modem as soon as that device and the software necessary to run it became available for home-user use, we've had a long experience of online discussion groups (called in those pre-Internet, pre-Web days, a Bulletin Board System, or, more familiarly, a BBS), and, generally speaking, found participation in such groups to be enormously satisfying as long as we were careful in our selection of which BBSes to join.

Well, BBSes have long gone the way of the dodo, and so-called eMail "lists" and Usenet — a kind of internationally organized and distributed BBS which actually predates the BBS format and was the first of its kind — are fast going the same way as they're relatively clumsy to use, and limited to posts employing text only, and plaintext at that. The online forum is today the de facto standard online discussion group, and there are gazillions of them out there, most of them cluttered intolerably with whiz-bang "features" and a plethora of sub-forums, and therefore the haunts of kiddies of all ages, and so to be scrupulously avoided (unless you're a kiddie, that is).

Given their in-gazillions presence, one would expect that one could find a worthwhile, non-cluttered, non-kiddie-populated online forum devoted solely to discussions centering on one's special interests whatever those special interests might be. Turns out, that's sometimes a lot harder to do than it might appear. We've, for instance, searched for years for such an online forum devoted solely to discussion of the works of Richard Wagner, and found none. The best we could find was, ironically enough, not an online forum, but a Usenet newsgroup (newsgroup is the Usenet term for forum of which Usenet has thousands). But as we above noted, Usenet is relatively clumsy to use and limited in expression. We wanted something better, but it didn't seem to be out there.

Until now, that is.

All the above has been merely a long-winded way of introducing a spanking new online forum (it went online just yesterday) called, The Wagner Group. It has no user posts as of this writing, and but a single member: our good self. TWG is an online forum that's absent every kiddie magnet the software permitted us to remove, has an absolute minimum of online-forum clutter, is powerful but simple and intuitive to use, and is devoted solely to discussion of the works of Richard Wagner.

So, if the works of Richard Wagner are your thing, or you think they might have the potential to be, stop by TWG, register (it's absolutely free, and "guests" — i.e., the non-registered — have only read-only access on TWG), and contribute a post or four to start the discussion going.

Tweeting And The Live Classical Music Concert

It will come as no news to regular readers of S&F that we've an abiding contempt for the type of opera-lover whom we've derisively labeled a TOF (True Opera Fan — a bit like a teenage movie fan only worse; much worse). Because the TOF sees opera mainly, even exclusively, in terms of the singers, he's all but entirely disregardful of the central characteristic of all genuine opera: opera as music-drama, as dramma per musica, which is to say (as did the brilliant musicologist Joseph Kerman in his seminal book, Opera as Drama), as drama through the agency of music. It's no wonder, then, that TOFs are the biggest fans of the operas of the Italian bel canto rep as those operas are little more than showcases for songbirds, the rest of it being merely pretext and platform as we've often remarked, such drama as does exist being of the sort that finds its natural home on TV afternoon soaps.

One consequence of the TOF's approach to opera is his propensity to engage in reading and/or writing running commentary — in Web forums, blog comments sections, and/or in specially set up chat rooms — on the singers' performances while a live broadcast or streaming audio of the opera is in progress, much like the running commentary on the athletes' performances provided by sports announcers during the live broadcast of, say, a baseball or football game. It's of course quite impossible to get involved with or become immersed in the drama of an opera, even the mostly risible soap-opera melodrama of much Italian opera, while one is busy reading and/or writing such running commentary.

Which brings us to the subject of this brief commentary: reading and/or typing during a live classical music concert Twitter Tweets concerning the concert while the music is actually in progress.

Anne Midgette, the savvy chief classical music critic of The Washington Post, is

bothered by adherence to ... the [hard-line] idea that Twitter is inherently bad [when used during a live classical music concert] because nobody’s attention ought to be distracted from the music even for a moment. [...] I don’t think ... [instructive] Tweets [during the ongoing music at live classical music concerts] are meant for those who listen with total concentration; they’re meant for people who aren’t concentrating and would like some help getting in to the music.

The gifted concert violinist Hilary Hahn, on the other hand, while "all for Tweeting and spreading the word," cautions against doing so

during performances [at live classical music concerts]. [...] Your listening is part of our interpretive process. If you're not really listening, we're not getting the feedback of energy from the hall, and then we might as well be practicing for a bunch of people peering in the window.

And where do we come down on this Tweeting matter (as if you already didn't know)? We think it an even more damaging prole-pandering device than that erstwhile prole-pandering horror called The Concert Companion (happily, now safely dead). One quite simply cannot get involved with or become immersed in the ongoing music while one is busy reading and/or writing Tweets to get "some help getting in to the music." If one is in need of such help the time for getting it is before the concert or, alternatively, after, but never during, which last defeats the purpose of attending a live classical music concert in the first place which is (or ought to be) to experience the music in the best of all possible ways as best one can. And that, unlike what's largely true of the music at rock, country, or pop "concerts", requires close, undistracted, attentive listening. The inherent nature of the very music itself demands it.

But we don't wish to belabor this already talked to death point. All the above is merely to get our position on the matter on the record here on S&F; something we thought we did previously, but to our dismay discovered we'd only somewhat snarkily glossed the matter almost en passant.

The Role Of The Arts Critic In A Wired, Postmodern World

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 2:00 PM Eastern on 1 Aug. See below.]

Blogger, lawyer, and freelance writer Zach Carstensen of The Gathering Note — a fine classical music blog heretofore unknown to us but called to our attention via a post by Scott Spiegelberg of Musical Perceptions, and now added to our exclusive Culture Blogs listing on our left sidebar — has this to say about arts critics and arts criticism:

I am not a journalist by training but I have freelanced. I am a lawyer. I didn’t go to J school and I have never been a staff critic. What I know is arts journalism is changing and I think it is changing for the better. Arbiters of taste are becoming a thing of the past when the Internet and recorded music can help anyone become an expert on Brahms, Beethoven, or even someone like Conlon Nancarrow. There are more tools than ever for people to form opinions about the music they are hearing and the events they are going to and just as many ways to express an opinion about what they are hearing. Facebook and Twitter let Average Joes pan a performance or tout its virtues.

These changes might seem unsettling. For people who run magazines and newspapers it is probably as unsettling as the emergence of Napster was to the recorded music industry. I think these changes bother people because they diminish the power of the print media as an opinion maker.

[...]

Arts organizations are nervous for completely different reasons. As magazines, newspapers, and critics disappear there are fewer mainstream publications telling them their performances are good. Ironically this hand wringing is occurring at the same time the explosion of social networking and other platforms has made it easier for their audience to comment on what they are hearing. This new type of commentary isn’t always good, but some of it is very good especially when compared to the Mad Lib concert reviews we have become accustomed to. Ultimately, shouldn’t the opinion of the audience matter more than someone who brands himself a critic?

In the world of the arts (as opposed to the world of popular culture), the answer to that question is, of course, a resounding No — that is, assuming the one who "brands himself a critic" has the education, training, experience, and expertise that would bestow upon him a right to that title. For arts organizations to look to and take in earnest the opinions of the arts world equivalent of the Common Man to assess how well they're doing artistically is a perfect prescription for artistic suicide. The arts world's Common Man may be entitled to an opinion, but it's entirely worthless to anyone but himself and his kind. To say the thing less generously, the arts world's Common Man is not entitled to an opinion beyond expressing that he liked or disliked whatever it is he heard and/or saw, and, given the source, we all know just how worthless that sort of judgment is except to the one declaring it.

Mr. Carstensen then muses,

I don’t believe critics will disappear, but their role will change. Someone has to shape the discourse. Maybe the role of the critic is one of a moderator; someone who might expound on a subject but never pretend to be the final word on a subject. Maybe a critic is someone who is interested in what other people have to say and is willing to provide a forum for them to express themselves. Maybe the critic is the conduit between the media that remain, the audience, and the musicians. What do you think the role of the critic should be?

And the answer to that question is that the role of a genuine arts critic (i.e., someone who has the education, training, experience, and expertise that would bestow upon him a right to that title) should and ought to be what it's been since Day One: to provide illumination for, and educate and generally enlighten the arts world's Common Man, and to provide aesthetically, technically, and historically well-informed critical feedback to arts organizations who have forever looked to well-informed critics to help them (the arts organizations) make clear-eyed assessments of their own artistic performance notwithstanding their perennial and de rigueur bitching and moaning about the uselessness of critics and what they have to say.

We fervently hope Mr. Carstensen is right in his expectation that arts critics (genuine arts critics, of course) will not disappear. They're a necessary element in and component of a culturally healthy and flourishing arts scene, for in their absence yawns the mosh pit.

---

Update (2:00 PM Eastern on 1 Aug): Zach Carstensen responds by selectively quoting from and commenting on our above (he omits quoting or making any comment on or mention of what we had to say regarding the central issue to hand: the role of the arts critic), and in the process thoroughly misunderstands our point while unwittingly confirming it; viz., that the arts world's Common Man isn't qualified or competent to hold an opinion beyond expressing what they liked or didn't like about what they heard and/or saw (or will hear and/or see). None but a properly educated, trained, experienced, and expert arts critic is qualified and competent to express opinions beyond that and have those opinions worth something other than their worth to the one expressing them.

What's that we hear you saying? That's an outright elitist position to take?

You betcherass it is. It's also an ineluctable truth of the real world.

A Twittery Idea Whose Time Has Come

The #operaplot contest which ends midnight (EDT) tonight, and which was conceived, organized, and executed by Miss Mussel of The Omniscient Mussel wherein one must summarize an entire opera plot in the 140 alpha-numeric characters permitted by a Twitter tweet, has been phenomenally (and we use the term advisedly) successful. Miss Mussel secured the services of opera singer Danielle De Niese to act as judge, and the participation of some 20 opera companies to offer tickets as prizes for the winners. As of last count, there have been close to 500 #operaplot entries among which are four by us. We tried to be a good sport about it, and opened a Twitter account expressly for the purpose of making our entries, but Twitter turned out to be such a PITA to use that we deleted our account, and posted our four entries to Miss Mussel's #Operaplot Non-Twitter Entry Form instead.

Is the whole #operaplot contest idea really silly? We thought so at first, but the totally unexpected (by us) widespread and laudatory interest it's generated in the cyber world, an interest that's extended even to the MSM, caused us to change our mind as it can only be a good thing for classical music generally and for opera in particular; ergo, our participation.

Herewith, our four #operaplot entries:

1: #operaplot: Three flirts, a lovesick dwarf, two big dummies & a double-dealing control freak learn it's not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

2: #operaplot: Notorious rake kills old guy, then laughingly invites old guy's ghost to dinner. Bad idea. Ghost accepts. Rake gets burned.

3: #operaplot: Young simpleton shoots swan. Old windbag appalled. Half-crazed woman enlightens Simpleton. Simpleton declared redeemer and king.

4: #operaplot: Evil queen sends flute-playing prince on bogus mission. Prince toots on flute, wins princess, foils queen. Queen left bereft.

Our warm congratulations to Miss Mussel on the astonishing success of her imaginative venture, and our advance congratulations to the contest's eventual winners.

Time To Stop Moaning And Groaning

We just don't get it. We tonight watched a report by PBS's first-rate NewsHour on the growing tanking of the ink-on-paper editions of major and not-so-major daily newspapers nationwide, and the pervasive moaning and groaning over that turn of events among news people is quite beyond our understanding. At this point in time we're frankly surprised that any ink-on-paper newspapers are still in business. They shouldn't be. They ought to have been out of business several years ago — all of them — and their publications migrated to the Web entirely, just where they ought to be. There's simply no justification — or need — for ink-on-paper newspapers today. None. They all can do more — much more — and do it better — much better — digitally on the Web than they ever could in print, and do it without cutting so much as an iota of editorial or reportorial staff. By discarding the ink-on-paper model completely they eliminate a huge overhead that's economically crippling and totally unnecessary and unjustifiable today. As for ad revenue, no problem. Current advertisers, and new ones besides, will have no choice but to follow them all to the Web because, to paraphrase what the notorious bank robber Willie Sutton once famously said, that's where the money is as that's where the readers are — or, rather, will be once the changeover is made.

We freely confess we're an unreconstructed romantic and understand fully the nostalgia and romance of newspapers, and quietly mourn the ineluctable passing of a venerable, centuries-old tradition. But we’re also a realist, and nostalgia and romance are no excuse for willfully committing economic suicide. So stop your moaning and groaning news people, get those Web sites up and running efficiently online, and start doing what you do best and can do better there than you ever could in print.

A Man After Our Own Heart

His name is Matt Labash. He writes for The Weekly Standard and we've never heard of him before much less read any of his work his recently discovered (by us) sterling reputation among journalists notwithstanding. Mr. Labash doesn't much like Facebook, the Internet's premier "social networking" site. Neither do we, and mostly for the same reasons. Writes Mr. Labash:

Look at the outer shell — the parachute pants, the piano-key tie, the fake tuxedo T-shirt — and you might mistake me for a slave to fashion. Do not be deceived. Early adoption isn't my thing. I much prefer late adoption, that moment when the trend-worshipping sheeple [sic] who have early-adopted drive the unsustainable way of life I so stubbornly cling to ever so close to the edge of obsolescence, that I've no choice but to follow. This explains why I bought cassette tapes until 1999, why I wouldn't purchase a DVD player until Blockbuster cashiered their VHS stock. Toothpaste? I use it now that it's clear it's here to stay.

So I'm not inflexible. But there is one promise I've made to myself. And that is that no matter how long I live, no matter how much pressure is exerted, no matter how socially isolated I become, I will never, ever join Facebook, the omnipresent online social-networking site that like so many things that have menaced our country (the Unabomber, Love Story, David Gergen) came to us from Harvard but has now worked its insidious hooks into every crevice of society.

[...]

Time magazine recently declared Facebook more popular than porn. But who are they kidding? Facebook is porn. With porn, you watch other people take off their clothes and abase themselves in public. On Facebook, where there's technically an anti-nudity policy (thus defeating the whole purpose of the Internet), you get to figuratively do the same.

[...]

[T]he reason to hate Facebook is because of the stultifying mind-numbing inanity of it all, the sheer boredom. If Facebook helps put together streakers with voyeurs, the streakers, for the most part, after shedding their trench coats, seem to be running around not with taut and tanned hard-bodies, but in stained granny panties with dark socks. They have a reality-show star's unquenchable thirst for broadcasting all the details of their lives, no matter how unexceptional those details are. They do so in the steady, Chinese-water-torture drip of status updates. The very fact that they are on the air (or rather, on Facebook) has convinced them that every facet of their life must be inherently interesting enough to alert everyone to its importance.

Need we say much the same can be said about Twitter and MySpace, et al., yet other stultifying, mindless, and inane Internet excrescences.

RTWT here.

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