Monday Musical Offering Bah! Humbug! Edition

So it’s mid-December, Hanukkah has been and gone, and the radio is playing a lot of Christmas music.  It gets tiresome.  To explain why, let me try an analogy, which is not meant to be offensive to anyone of any Christian confession, but to illustrate how someone who is decidedly not Christian can feel at this time of year.

Christmas music is a deep catalog of advertising jingles for hair spray.

Music has been associated with religion, pretty much all religion, since the get-go, and for good reason.  If nothing else, it helps you remember words; if well done, music makes the words more appealing; better, words and music can act synergetically to poke at the parts of your brain that generate strong emotional responses.  There’s large chunks of the Jewish liturgy that I remember only with music, and that the music and words together can make me feel the presence of the ineffable.  Music sells religion like nothing else.

If you want to sell anything, whether Jesus or Jeeps, you’re going to want to hire the best tunesmiths, and you are going to want to really make a strong association between your product and the jingle.  And really, in the case of religion, that’s been done.  I can’t think of the words of the Kyrie without thinking of Bach, the Dies Irae without Verdi, and so on.  Similarly, I can’t think of the music of Mozart’s Requiem without thinking of the words, and then thinking, at least on some level, of confutatis maledictis and other bits of Catholic dogma.  Mostly, though, the music is good enough that I can tune out the dogma and focus on the music—it’s good enough to cast shade on the dogma.

Christmas music, though, is more like pop—catchy, sometimes very good, but by no means great or profound.  Which means that it’s harder to ignore the words, and thus harder to ignore the message.  Go ahead, try to think about “I’d like to teach the world to sing...” without having Coke come fizzing up in your head.  I’m not a big fan of Coke, but it’s not irrelevant to me.  I drink it, rarely, and in small amounts, and actually derive some pleasure from it.  And that jingle is a perfect catchy pop song.

What drives me batty about Christmas music is that there are scores and scores of nearly perfect pop song-jingles; they have been played more relentlessly than any advertising jingle ever; and, they are all selling a product that is irrelevant to me and that I kind of don’t even like and think may be doing some harm in how it is used—let’s say, hairspray.

Both for philosophical and historical reasons, I have problems with Christianity (and I really don’t care for the artifice of beehive hairdos, and how historically half of humanity has been taught that it needs to value itself for its appearance).  I find the concept of the Trinity kind of absurd (not to mention the idea of hair glued into weird shapes).  True, it may work and provide meaning for some people (and the right hairdo may be instrumental in finding Mr. Right), not me.  I can’t damn all of Christianity, but in the present the rise of fundamentalism is doing serious social and environmental harm (And aerosols contributed to the hole in the ozone layer, not to mention how spray cans contribute to pollution).

So this is why I am frustrated by the flood of Christmas carols.  By living in this society, these incredibly catchy songs are burned into my brain.  I don’t like their message, but I can’t help but have it playing in my head when I hear them.  They are perfect jingles.  I would really be OK never hearing them ever again.

Monday Musical Offering Odds and Ends

100th anniversary of Leonard Bernstein’s birth—Huzzah!  Bernstein is somebody I have come to appreciate more and more, the older I get.  My first exposure was in high school, where I was supposed to play the piano part in the pit band of West Side Story.  I had been in the pit band for a couple of other high school musicals, and they were nothing but oom-pah reductions of pretty un-challenging music.  I approached WSS the same way, which was a grave error which I have come to regret terribly.  Every time I listen to the music now, I hear those piano cues—those critical, essential cues that I completely missed because I didn’t take it seriously—and I feel bad for Mr. Lish, the director, and for the music.  And every time I listen to the music now, I get weepy.

Bernstein wasn’t on my radar in particular for a long time after that, as what musical energy I had tended to be focused in other places than the orchestral canon.  I did hear, and really loved, Candide.  I played a little bit more Bernstein during my first teaching gig, when I accompanied a student playing the early clarinet sonata at a talent show.  Good stuff, and I was wishing there was more like it.

Now I am listening more closely to the canon, and listening more to Bernstein the composer.  There’s still stuff I have a hard time with—sometimes just a little too freshman-earnest or didactic or studiously pop—but most of the time, wow.

———————————————————————

Not naming names, but you may need to rethink your approach to composition if the radio announcer says something like “despite being written in his characteristic 12-tone style, parts of the piece are quite listenable and almost melodic.”

———————————————————————-

Trying to play the piano a bit more as the year winds down.  It’s hard to find the energy and time, but it is good to do.  I’m working on memorizing, which is a new thing.  It’s rough going.

Play, memory

I am good at sight-reading music.  You can plop a relatively simple piece of sheet music in front of me, and I can stumble through it at the piano.  (Mind, I am not great at sight-reading; I can’t do like Saint-Saens, and sit down and play from the score of a Wagner opera that I’ve never heard before).  This ability has stood me in good stead for most of my life, allowing me to fake my way through lessons I should have practiced harder for, and letting me accompany far more worthy musicians than myself.  But, I have found that it has shaped my musical abilities in ways that I don’t entirely like.

When I was a youth, my piano teachers didn’t particularly press me to memorize music.  I made a few efforts, because it was a thing people did, but I found it to be far more work than I was willing to put in.  When I did try to memorize, it was largely kinetic; my memory was a series of motions, and it would have to be uninterrupted.  If I were derailed, I would have to go back to the beginning and start over.  Perhaps “kinetic” isn’t the word—perhaps “ballistic” is more accurate, in that I would launch and from that point on the trajectory of things was set.  At any rate, my ability to memorize was never developed.

Now, in my 50’s, I am trying to learn to memorize music.  Partly it is a desire to keep stretching out my brain, maybe spurred by watching my parents succumb to Alzheimer’s disease.  Partly, it’s that I have a harder time reading music without my glasses on.  But there I am, struggling with memory.

My approach is somewhat different from what I formerly tried.  I am trying to pay more attention to the music, and why this note follows that note.  I try to shake myself out of a kinetic memory, by playing the same notes using different fingering, and by starting at different points in the music.  I try to pay greater attention to the landmarks, and how the composer gets from one place to another.  I see myself, as if I am walking through a landscape.  At the first, I can only see the most obvious features—a pass, a huge tree, a river—and I can’t see the trails from one to the other.  Learning the music is learning the trail from one landmark to another.  At first, I stumble around, sometimes on the trail, sometimes lost in the weeds, but as I get better, I can stay on the trail; as I learn and memorize the trail, I find myself paying less attention to the trail, and more attention to the landscape as a whole and the beautiful flowers and features that fill it.  Now, while I play far less music than I used to, I feel that I am playing far more musically than I did while reading music.  

The experience is similar to a mindfulness practice.  I have become much more aware of what’s going on inside of the music; I am able to pay attention to the things that need attention, and more critically see what I need to work on.  I am seeing longer lines, rather than isolated notes.  While I am nowhere near a great musician, I think I am better—and while I don’t feel that regret is a useful emotion, I do wish that I had spent more of my time properly memorizing music back when I could move my fingers to play Chopin etudes and such.  But, I won’t complain.  I am learning the Bach Partitas.  Learning and memorizing and polishing a page of music takes me a month, and it’s good.  

Monday Musical Offering, Spring edition

OK, a day late...

Kidding and lambing has started here at the farm, both scheduled and otherwise.  We have a kidding parlor, which took months of work (almost all by Duva's brother & his family), and which was actually ready within hours of the first kids being born.  The other five does scheduled for this weekend waited to pop until their appointed times.  It went fairly well--relatively little assistance was needed by the does, and of the 13 kids, only one didn't make it (which sucks, but it happens--their on-board systems just don't fire up, they lose body heat, which shuts down appetite, and so on.  We have saved some like this, with warm baths, tube feeding, vitamin shots, and so on, and we did all that and more for this little kid, but nobody bats 100% on these cases).  The score so far:

Boadicea--buck and doe
Opera--three bucks
Mocha--two does, one died
Zephyr--single buck
Karuna--single doe
Cavatina--two bucks, two does

The weather for the entire show was grand and glorious and springy.  The fact that the kidding parlor worked so well and that the deliveries were mostly textbook made me feel better.  This was the music running through my head--the first movement of Rachmaninov's symphony/cantata The Bells, based on a translation of Poe's poem.

(Performance by Kiril Kondrashin, Moscow Symphony Orchestra, RSFR chorus, soloists.  Meh sound quality but the performance is like burning magnesium.)

         Hear the sledges with the bells--
             Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
       How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
           In the icy air of night!
       While the stars that oversprinkle
       All the heavens, seem to twinkle
           With a crystalline delight;
         Keeping time, time, time,
         In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
    From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
               Bells, bells, bells--
  From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Tuesday Monday Musical Offering

Ok, a day late.  But--here is a radio program that I have found that I like very much:  The Piano Matters, hosted by David Dubal. (Link) Oregon's classical radio station, KWAX, plays it Tuesdays at 5 PM and Saturdays at, I think, 6.  It's on other stations too.  It's an hour of piano lover's delights.

So much of radio programming, not to mention concert programming and CD producing, is geared towards completism and Big Statements:  all the preludes of so and so, the complete scherzi of X, the entire Opus 42 of Y.  This show is mostly miniatures, morceaux de salon, obscurities by one-hit-wonders, or obscurities by big names who just aren't known for little snippets that can be played by talented amateurs.  A space is carved out for one big thing per hour, usually a concerto movement, but the rest is a big box of bijoux that few have heard.

Not only that, but the host is content to play recordings that have sound quality that is...well, the suck.    But if you want to hear Godowski or somebody who studied with Liszt, that's what you're going to get.  And you'll like it.

The host is also worth listening to, because, as is rare these days, he has opinions about what he plays and he freely shares them*.  To be sure, he comes by those opinions honestly, as a piano teacher at Juilliard.  "That was pretty good...Maybe a little lacking in a certain majesty, but stylish in its own way."  "Well played, a charming but negligible piece that is worth hearing, once."  He name-drops, but he's entitled to do so by his own works.  He throws in a few mottoes as spacers, which are sometimes worth thinking over and sometimes merely annoying.  But, all in all, this is one of my absolute favorite shows.  Give it a listen.

*Sean Bianco, of Sacramento's Capitol Public Radio's At the Opera on Saturdays at 8:00 is especially worthy in this regard.

Monday Musical Offering Manual Mauling edition

Farm work is physically taxing, and there are many, many ways to get injured.  I have so far managed to escape anything serious (frantically knocking on wood), but I do ding myself up pretty regularly--a mashed thumb from a misdirected screwdriver, a glorious bruise from a dropped piece of wood, and so on.  I especially worry about my eyes (I wear safety glasses a lot) and my hands (I wear leather gloves a lot).  I think of this cartoon very often:

(Note that Schulz always used real music in his cartoons.  That's Beethoven's Fur Elise.)

Monday Musical Offering Not Instant Dislike Edition

I am always glad to discover music with which I was unfamiliar, and that gives me new pleasure.  Last week's new thing was not disappointing, inasmuch as I fully expected to hate it just as much as I did.  A few weeks ago, though, I heard something that I wouldn't have even suspected existed, and I liked it.

Every year, on or about Yom Kippur, every classical music radio station will play Bruch's Kol Nidrei. Our local station, KWAX, played Kol Nidrei by...

...Arnold Schoenberg.  No, really.  And it's from well after his embrace of the 12-tone system.  And I really liked it.  I liked a piece by 1930's Arnold Schoenberg.

Here's a linky-thing with lots more about it. Check it out, if you feel like you need a clean slate to face up to a new year.

Monday Musical offering Instant Dislike edition

I was reminded of this:

By this:

I don't much care for Glass' "pure" music (his film scores/operas are sometimes OK), and I don't much care for the harpsichord (I still hold with Sir Thomas Beecham's impression that it sounds like skeletons copulating on a tin roof), but I tried listening to it.  I did not like it.  

Monday Musical Exhortation

Get it right!

In some parallel universe, I am a radio announcer for a classical music station.  In this universe, I'm not, for several reasons:  insufficient breadth of musical knowledge due to an education based primarily on the liner notes from LP's, an inability to correctly pronounce umlauts, and I would probably quit on-air rather than play Pachelbel's Canon or Ravel's Bolero are among these.  But, perhaps because of that parallel-universe Appleman, I get irked when announcers screw up something that they really should get.

So, the other day the announcer queued up some music, and told us it came from Richard Strauss' opera about the question of which is more important in an opera--the words or the music.  He went on about some of the details of the opera, Capriccio, and how it elides the question, and then played the music: selections from Ariadne auf Naxos, which if it is about anything, is about the difficulties of creativity in the real world and just how pelvic new love is.  I had a bit of whiplash, as it was kind of like hearing somebody talking about a good friend of yours, and then pointing them out--and it's somebody else entirely.

Oh well, not really a big deal.  But, since he didn't play it, here is some of the best music ever--the opening sextet from Capriccio.  Enjoy.

Monday Musical Offering Mahler Edition

We are lucky to have a transmitter for KWAX radio nearby; they have very good, 24/7 classical programming, and are commercial free/publicly supported but not NPR or OPB.  This gives their programmers a bit more latitude than most, so recently they've been going through the Mahler symphonies during the early afternoon.  

So, last week I was happily shifting fences in the goat pasture and getting a genuine frisson from the 3rd in a stirring performance led by Leonard Bernstein.  The symphony reached its triumphant conclusion.  As the last chord was still barely ringing, but before the announcer could speak, Aileen--one of our louder sheep, who had been watching me from the other side of the fence and looking longingly at the fresh new pasture I had opened up--let out a jarring BAAAAAAWWWW.  But you know, Mahler was fond of juxtapositions of the the goofy and the serious (I mean, look at all those klezmer bands sprinkled throughout the symphonies) and also loved the pastoral.  So, it kind of worked.

Today I was shifting fences, again (for the sheep, this time) and listening to the 7th with Jimmy Levine and the CSO.  I think I was a freshman at college when I realized that the opening notes of the original "Star Trek" theme are the same as the opening notes of the Mahler 1st.  Well, just then I realized that the horn call that introduces the second theme of the first movement of the 7th is the prototype of the horn theme in the original "Star Trek" theme.  Interesting, at least to me.  I have to wonder if it was a conscious choice by the TV show's composer.  

Monday Musical Offering out of sorts edition

It's been a busy couple of weeks here on the farm; kidding season has started, and with it milking season.  Until a couple of weeks ago, morning and evening chores meant nothing more than making sure that everybody had hay and water, and not even too much hay, since the pastures are so lush.  If I was feeling relaxed, I could do the rounds in twenty minutes.  Now, a minority of the animals only get hay and pasture; the mother sheep get a silage and grain mix, the orphan lamb needs her bottle, the senior mother does need their grain while they're on the milk stand, the milking does need to be let in for their nightly alfalfa, then need their grain/silage on the milk stand while I milk them and clean up, and the kiddies need their bottles.  A couple of the moms who had difficult deliveries need shots and vitamins, and all the animals who have kidded or lambed in the last three days need their individual servings of feed, hay, and a fresh bucket of water.  So at a baseline, chores take almost three hours.  On top of this, we can add the occasional overly-dramatic delivery--we've had to take animals to town for a C-section twice this year--or sheep who have figured out how to push their way into the goat pasture and vice versa or any of the myriad mini-crises that crop up on the farm, and the result is dinner at 11:30 PM on a fairly routine basis.

All this makes me tired.  Things can get kind of hazy and dream-like.  I can't say I've had hallucinations yet, but a couple of strange things happened.  I was milking last night and listening to the radio and the station was playing one of the Bruckner symphonies--I can't remember which one, and I'd say it makes no difference because they all sound the same: dum dum da-da-da, dum dum da-da-da, dum dum da-da-da, dum...for twenty five minutes.  Then,  dum-da-dum dum dum dum dum, dum-da-dum dum dum dum dum,  for fifteen minutes, then the same thing only faster with horns for twenty minutes...Ordinarily, if I'm in my right mind, I find it to be the musical bastard child of Philip Glass and Richard Wagner.  But oddly enough, I found myself liking it, and finding beauty and structure in its expansiveness.

Worse, speaking of Richard Wagner, I was obligated to drive to Eugene, and as usual I was listening to the Met Opera on the satellite radio, which I was disappointed to hear was playing Wagner's Flying Dutchman.  Ordinarily, if I'm in my right mind, I can't stand Wagner.  Tedious, tendentious, hours of meandering declamation, weird plots, and moments of glory that you have to slog through hours of mud to get to.  And the plots!  Dutchman is one of the worst.  I mean, Senta, the heroine, is a human being who exists completely and entirely for the sole purpose of redeeming one man with her pure love.  The title character is a sinner, cursed to sail his ghostly ship forever, only touching land every seven years; he lands, meets a guy for the first time, and the guy says sure, I will give you my daughter.  Senta, the daughter who seems content to have no independent existence as a human being, agrees, but somebody says something that gets misinterpreted, and the cursed guy sails off.  Senta throws herself off a cliff to demonstrate the purity of her pure love.  The guy is redeemed.  Fin.  I find the plot wholly objectionable, verging on disgusting.  And normally, I can't stand the music--but there I was, in my sleeplessly addled state, actually enjoying it.  I felt kind of unclean afterwords.

Well, we are nowhere near done kidding season.  As I type, I am baby-sitting a doe that should be giving birth any moment now, but has spent the last two hours just grumbling, a complainy wheeze on every breath.  By the time kidding season is over I will probably start liking disco or 90's country.

Monday Musical Offering Running Flat Edition

I love me some Schubert.  Pleasant, lyrical, often sight-readable...until you stumble onto a section in A-flat minor.  I mean, come on!  Seven flats!

Monday Musical Offering Post-flu edition

Coming off of a bout of the 'flu.  Could go with "poi a poi di nuovo vivente," which is descriptive but does not adequately convey the sentiment.  Having spent almost two days pretty much abed, and another day where I was able to be up and about for a half an hour followed by an hour of recovering,  I was just grateful to be able to do stuff for an entire afternoon (to say nothing of being able to eat).  So, a heiliger dankgesang is appropriate.  

Monday Musical Offering Alla Breve

Not so much about music as the uses thereof; when I started milking the goats, a couple of years ago now, I thought it would be nice to have some music playing.  I started an album, and by the time I had dealt with an inefficient barn set up, a bunch of naive and recalcitrant first-fresheners (and my own inexperience with milking), a not-very-ergonomic milking set-up, and a kludgy cleaning system, I had played two full CD's worth of music and started on a third.  Today, I started a CD, fed all the animals in the barn, milked a dozen goats, cleaned the milking equipment and swept the barn, hanging up the last thing to dry as the last track ended.

So, progress is possible.  I will have to remember this in a couple of months, when I have over 24 goats to milk, and about half of them will be first fresheners.

CD was Bach, transcriptions for piano by Russian composers, played by Hamish Milne.

Monday Musical Offering, Mikado edition

Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado, or the Town of Titi-Pu is still one of my favorite things in all the world--for pure, human joy, it's hard to think of anything that comes close to the end of Act I.  That said, there are moments that make me, child of the late 20th century, really very uncomfortable.  

So, as you should know, Mikado is obviously about England, not Japan, but all the same, it is set in Japan and keeps making crude, stereotyped reminders of its setting, as seen from the haughty position of Victorian England.  The racist caricatures are genuinely offensive, and the cringes they induce do detract from the modern listener's enjoyment.  There's a fair bit of that in G&S--just about all of Princess Ida, which mocks the idea of educating women, for example.  So what to do?

Some say, don't perform it.   That's a non-starter.  The music and words, when not tainted by offensive antique attitudes, are priceless.

Some take the approach of ignoring it; you can go to you tube and watch a production by the English National Opera, with Eric Idle as the Lord High Executioner, which sets the events in a 1920's English seaside resort.  Fine as far as it goes, but the lyrics are still there, and it's kind of disorienting to have people singing that they are "gentlemen of Japan" when they are clearly gentlemen of Brixton or Leicester.

I would be interested to see this, New production. It keeps things as G&S intended; but, it frames it by Gilbert getting bonked into delirium, and having the whole production be his personal dream.  A nice way to insulate the audience, and make it clear that the racism really truly belongs to Gilbert, not us.

Perhaps the way is what opera buffs call "regietheater," where the director takes a stiff dose of LSD before deciding on the staging.  So, set it in an insane asylum in Nazi Germany, or make the characters all rats in a behavioral scientist's laboratory.  I don't know what's best, or how to dissolve away the stuff that really is offensive.  I do know that the music and almost all of the words give me so much joy, and that the world would be a much darker place without them.  Oh willow, tit-willow, tit-willow!

Monday Musical Opinion

I'll just say that I'd really like to retire Bach's Toccata and Fugue in d minor as a "spooky" piece.  It has no more to do with spooky than Mozart's Piano Concerto #21 has to do with tragic Danish circus performers.

That is all.

Monday Musical Offering--post-recital detox edition

Classical music is pretty thin on the ground here in Mayberry-on-Umpqua.  There is a youth orchestra, which symbolizes a parental investment in something that is not felt to be worth attention continued into adulthood; the same organization will occasionally sponsor a concert at the community college.  There's a community concert series, which brings in a lot of pop/classical crossover stuff that I don't really care for.  There's a concert chorale, which brings Handel's Messiah around every year, plus one other concert, which needs to include some pop.  There's a local winery that brings in some very good musicians from Eugene every now and then for some chamber music.  That's pretty much it.

The Real Doctor and I went to a recital last weekend at the winery: a graduate piano student at the U of O, from Russia, playing some standards--Beethoven's 1st sonata, Chopin's 2nd sonata, and the first set of Impromptus by Schubert.  I don't like to slag on people, so I'll say that it was the best piano recital I'd been to in years, and there were one or two interesting ideas.  I will note that the guy played like he was trying to fill a concert hall rather than a tasting room, and that there was very little in the way of tenderness.  It was a highly testosterone-driven bit of music making, and it left me feeling, in sympathy with the poor piano, a bit pummeled.  There were also more than a few memory lapses, one quite severe, that left me feeling terribly anxious.  And the piano itself isn't wonderful--a Pearl River upright, with a tone that left the Real Doctor and me feeling a bit on edge.  

I was sort of hoping for a concert experience that would provide a nice break from the frenzy of the last few months.  Instead, I've spent what music-time I've had in the last week listening to Radu Lupu and Mitsuko Uchida and others, trying to re-find a musical center.  

Oh well.  I can look forward to August, when the Douglas County Fair will be hosting Cheap Trick.  

Monday Musical Offering: the demise of a good product edition

Ten years ago...

Me:  Hey, you know that album, the LP from Argentina that my parents bought back in the sixties, that I uploaded...could you play the b-side of that?

iTunes:  Sure.  Here ya go.



Five years ago...

Me:  Hey, I feel like some Beethoven, a piano sonata...I forget what I have.  Can you give me a list?

iTunes:  Sure.  Here ya go.

Me:  Swell.  Could you put the Arrau album on my iPod, and play the Barenboim Op. 10 No. 2 on the speakers?

iTunes:  Sure.  Done and...WHOA DUDE LOOK AT THE COLORS WHOA DOUBLE RAINBOW ALL THE WAYYYY

(Me:  Turns off "visualizer")

(Later) Me:  Hey, could you play that Arrau album?

iPod:  Sure.  Here ya go!

Me:  Wait, what?  The rondo is the last movement, not the second!

iPod:  I just thought you might like to hear it shuffled around, y'know, mix it up, keep it loose...

Me:  Pretty sure Beethoven had some strong ideas about that.


Today...

Me: Hey, I'm just in the mood for some Chopin, but I don't know what.  Can you give me a list of what I have?

iTunes:  Uh, no.  Nope.

Me:  What?!?

iTunes.  Hey, easy piano-boy.  Here's pictures of all the albums.  No list, sorry.

Me:  But I don't remember what's on all these albums.  Now I have to click on each one to see.

iTunes:  A good opportunity to refresh your memory!

Me:  Feh.  Could you play the Rubinstein Mazurkas, and put that Davidovich LP that I got years ago on my iPod?

iTunes:  Rightyroonie!  Done and done!

Me (some time later, out in the middle of the field):  Hey iPod, let's have some music.  That Davidovich LP would be swell.

iPod:  What?  I don't have such a thing.  Could I interest you in the Apple Radio?

Me:  ?!?!?!  iTunes said you have it.

iPod:  There's a place for it, but it's not there...say, you couldn't happen to move to a place with better phone reception?

Me:  I put it on there!  I saw it!  Wait...what's all this other stuff here...U frickin' 2?!?!  I didn't put any of this on!

iPod:  Can I interest you in anything that you bought from the iTunes store?  Lots of good stuff from the iTunes store.  Yessir, that iTunes store stuff is goooood, even the stuff you didn't buy, the free downloads from no-name bands that we tease you with.

Me:  What do you have on here, for real, not just a place for...is there any of that Chopin I loaded?

iPod:  Well, can't tell you if there's any Chopin here, no way to list by composer.  But, um,  Apple Radio is really good too!  And you can listen to our Classical station, which might play Chopin.  Apple Radio, good.

Me:  Gagh, I just want to play my LP of Bella Davidovich that I bought in 1982!

iPod:  Gee, did you mean "Bella and the Bulldogs," the teen TV series?  I can stream some videos, you know.  Just sign in...

Me: #@^%!!!

(Later, having forced iTunes to put my album on the iPod)  Me:  OK, it's there, and I know it and you know it.  Please, please play Bella Davidovich's recording of the Chopin Preludes.

iPod:  Please sign in using your Apple ID.

Me, grumbling:  OK, but for what, this is my damn album!

iPod:  OK, ok,  cool...hey, by the way, do you "like" this track?  Care to rate it?

Me:  Yes, I like it, which is why I asked you to play it.  However, I don't "like" it.  I don't like-in-quotes anything.  And what's it to you?

iPod:  Well, I have a lot of music I can sell you, and if you let me know what you like, I can sell you more?  I'm on commission here.  Let me just switch you over to the iTunes store here...

Me:  Just play the Chopin!  Chopin!  Want!  Not!  Buy!  Play! MY! Chopin!

iPod.  OK, just a sec...Oh, you've signed in, but you'll need to enter the code I've sent to another device.

Me (after calling the Real Doctor, who got a text):  943733

iPod:  And your credit card?

Me: (Primal scream)

Monday Musical Offering, Found in Translation

Translation is treason.  That is what we're told, at any rate, when it comes to the art of opera these days.  There's so much concern about purity, and not just in the early music camp, that performers and audiences seem obligated to experience exactly what the composer experienced.  In opera, composers and librettists worked together to make words that flowed with the pulse of the music, to make assonance and cadence work together.  Opera in translation belittles the work of both musician and scribe, and crudely misrepresents art.

To which I say, what a load of horse poop.

Set aside that "purity" and "what the composer heard" are imaginary and belief in these goals is a road to fundamentalism.  Set aside that until the middle of this century, it was common practice to hear opera performed in the vernacular, so one can hear recordings of Boris Gudonov in German or Siegfried in French.  Hell, set aside the existence of Otello and Falstaff and Romeo et Juliette and Faust.  Rigidity about original language performance puts a fence around opera, and says "you don't get to enjoy this until you fully understand Italian (or German or French or Czech or...)"

Supertitles are the most common way to try to satisfy the purity police and provide some degree of comprehensibility, but I don't feel like they are adequate.  If composer's intent is important, then I'm pretty sure that the composer did not intend for us to be reading during their works.  Reading supertitles, the voices on stage are forced to compete with the much less mellifluous voice in your head.  If supertitles are the best solution to the problem of language in opera, then the best way for me to enjoy the poem "Eugene Onegin" is to listen to somebody reciting it in Russian while I read a linear translation.

Translation is necessarily inexact; translation changes the sound of the piece; translation interpolates one more artist between the artist and the audience.  All true, and all trivial compared to experiencing an opera as it should be experienced, through sound and spectacle.  Opera isn't about words, but music (this is sometimes used as the dividing line between opera and musicals).  It's true that the sound of English is very different from Czech, but if you're not Czech, then the Czech language sounds like noise (and if you do speak Czech, then listening to an Australian singing Makropolous in the original language probably also sounds like noise).  And hopefully, just like the conductor, orchestra, and singers, our translator is an artist.  And fortunately, such artists are not rare.  I'm pretty sure that the politicians who claim the Bible as their favorite book know very little Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek.  One of my favorite books of all, The Cyberiad by Lem, I know only in translation by Kandel; one of my favorite guilty pleasures, the French Asterix comics, are well enough translated by Bell and Hockridge that some of the puns are actually improved in English.

What spurs this rant is a recent purchase: CD's of  Don Carlos and Ariadne on Naxos.  These are from Chandos' thoroughly excellent "Opera in English" series, of which I own several and I want to get them all, eventually.  The translations are extremely good (there are occasional clunkers, but they're not bad enough to disrupt the flow of things), and having the meaning of the words intelligible as they are sung increases the impact of the music to an astonishing degree.  Opera, at its best, gives me the chills or puts a major lump in my throat.  Well, I've listened to Don Carlos' Auto-da-fe scene a bunch of times, and Rodrigo and Carlos swearing their friendship, but listening to them and finally understanding the words made them hit me like a ton of bricks.  Same for Zerbinetta's big number and the meeting of Ariadne and Bacchus in Ariadne.

It may be, years hence, that I'll have studied enough Italian and German to fully understand these in their original tongues; but until that time, I will probably be listening to these recordings a lot.  I have recordings of Falstaff both in English by middle-of-the-road performers and in a powerhouse performance conducted by Toscanini, and I listen to the English version a lot more.  Pure or not, I derive a lot more enjoyment and feeling from hearing these operas in a language that speaks to me.  Which, when you get to it, is most likely the author's original intent.

Authenticity and chance

What's not to like about a classical music riot?  Such disturbances have a long and rich history--warring claques in the world of opera, the legendary reception of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps, audience members begging the performers for mercy at a performance of Reich's Four Organs, and more.  The classical music riot is an appealing conceit, the topsy turned turvy, the highbrow descending to fisticuffs, the longhair resorting to hair-pulling.  And, I had the pleasure of attending one last week as a spectator.

It wasn't a big riot, for it wasn't a big concert.  Such fame as it receives will come only through this blog, and perhaps the pages of the Miskatonic University Herald.  I had been invited to that august institution by my friend, D. Avril Poisson, who has graced this blog before both in her capacity as microbiologist and as a musician.  I had recently discussed with her how, as an amateur, chance affects even my most intentional music-making, and not in a good way: I simply don't have the control over my digits that a professional does.  I expressed my displeasure with this, but she suggested that I take a broader view, and reminded me of the stimulation that chance provides the prepared ear--and invited the Real Doctor and myself to a concert by the Miskatonic Pro Musica Nova, contrasting the hyper-defined pianola music of Conlon Nancarrow and chance-driven aleatory music of John Cage.

Nobody riots for something they don't care about, so it's not that surprising that there have been so many classical music riots.  Classical music, serious music, whatever you may call it, is deeply cared about.  The music is the fruit of much effort and intention, and is meant to be treated as such.  Audiences know this, and don't want to be insulted by shoddiness.  On the other hand, when you are dealing with aleatory music of John Cage, it is hard to define what exactly is shoddiness and what is chance.  Cage wrote music guided by the chance and the i ching, and at the same time regarded these works as completely determinate.

At any rate, the concert opened with a set of pieces by Conlon Nancarrow.  The stage was empty of performers, save for a music student who started and stopped a player piano.  Hard to get less chancy than that.

Fittingly, the second half of the concert started with the famous 4' 33"  by John Cage, allowing us a space to open our ears.  Next on the program was Cage's Imaginary Landscape No. 4 from 1951*.  The piano for 4' 33"  was rolled off the stage, and a long table, 24 chairs, and extension cords were positioned at center stage.  Having surrendered to chance for the proceeding piece, I was preparing to enjoy what the universe served up next, as, per Cage's instructions, the student performers would adjust the volume and tuning knobs of radios according to the dictates of the conductor, the score and the i ching.  

The student members of the Miskatonic Pro Musica Nova marched on stage in pairs, holding their radios.  They were initially greeted with polite applause (and over-enthusiastic applause from one helicopter parent, embarrassing a blushing and cringing daughter), but there was also some murmuring and grumbling from one corner of the recital hall.  This built into hissing, and when the conductor strode onstage, he was greeted by a snake-pit of hissing and loud catcalls.

Someone once commented that the disputes in academe are so bitter because the stakes are so small.  So it may have been here--the Miskatonic music department is not large, and half of the music majors were on stage, nervously plugging in their radios as the front rows of the audience seethed with rage.  A group of the younger professors were yelling abuse at the conductor, accusing him of trampling over the intentions of Cage and dishonoring his spirit.  Clapping loudly and whistling and pounding on the stage, making as much noise as they could, they and their graduate students--who comprised the core of the Miskatonic Pro Musica Antiqua--were doing their best to stop the concert from going forward.  The rest of the faculty present (several of whom had heard John Cage and his students performing) were yelling at the others to sit down and shut up.

I couldn't really understand what the ruckus was about.  The words that boiled to the surface of the shouting were a jumble:  vacuum tubes, WFAN, transistors, living score, authenticity, Philco, kilohertz, Rush Limbaugh, and so on.  The Musica Antiqua crowd, led by a young visiting professor from Holland, seemed agitated by the very radios that were being used, while the Musica Nova crowd waved their scores with Cage's instructions at them.  Dr. Poisson, having had her share of brushes with the original-instruments crowd, watched the proceedings with a wry smile; the Real Doctor, who had visibly suffered during the Nancarrow and who does not care for Cage, seemed pleased that the concert had ground to a halt.  The students of the Miskatonic Pro Musica Nova squirmed uncomfortably in the chairs, radios at the ready.  The parents who had come to see their children perform screamed at all of the rioters to let things go on.  An elderly professor of viola whacked a theorbo specialist with a bundle of i ching sticks.  A young harpsichordist yelled loudly that the sound of John Cage must be protected at all costs, leapt onstage from the audience, ran into the wings and unplugged the radios.  Moments later, all the lights in the hall went out, and more screaming ensued.

The riot, such as it was, lasted five or ten minutes, and the lights were back on in short order.  The rioters agreed to let the concert continue, provided that they were permitted to read a statement from the stage.  Hastily written by agitated musicologists, committed to the ideals of musical authenticity, the statement insisted that the following piece was not by John Cage, but only derived from his ideas; that to hear the music of John Cage properly, radios using vacuum tubes playing 1950's pop music would need to be employed, and that nothing less would do.  Having finished reading this statement, the theorboist left the stage, exchanging the hairiest eyeball I've ever seen with the conductor, who gave as good as he got.  It was a satisfying riot, and also, a satisfying performance.  Was it music by John Cage?  I'll defer to Dr. Poisson, who opined, "whatever."

So I passed some time today by playing some of the most inauthentic music possible: an organ chorale prelude by Bach, transcribed for piano by Walter Rummel.  I wasn't even playing it on Rummel's preferred Hamburg Steinway, but instead on an even more inauthentic Japanese Kawai spinet.  So much for authenticity; what of chance?  As I noted to Dr. Poisson, I am an amateur, and don't have the control of my hands that I'd like.  The i ching is unnecessary to introduce random inputs from the universe into my playing; instead, a slight hesitation before the final phrase of the chorale was caused by a slight memory lapse.  The effect was esthetically pleasing, leading to a nice sense of conclusion.


*From the John Cage Website:  For this work, 2 performers are stationed at each radio, one dialing the radio-stations, the other controlling amplitude and timbre. Durations are written in conventional notation, relating to notes placed on a 5-line staff. The rhythmic structure of the work is 2-1-3, and is expressed in changing tempi. Cage uses proportional notation where 1/2” equals a quarter note. However, the notation is not entirely proportional, since accelerandos and ritardandos are still present in the score. The score provides indications for tuning (controlled by player 1), as well as for volume and tone color (controlled by the player 2). When listening to this work, one can’t predict what will be heard, which is exactly what Cage had in mind. In addition, the composition also functioned as a kind of exercise in abandoning preferences (Cage wasn't very fond of radios). As he put it in For the Birds: "I had a goal, that of erasing all will and the very idea of success." His method of composing here is basically the same as used in Music of Changes. Cage employed the I Ching to create charts, which were used to refer to superimpositions, tempi, durations, sounds, and dynamics. In these sound charts, 32 out of 64 fields are silences. In the charts for dynamics, only 16 produce changes, while the others maintain the previous situation. Similar charts were produced and employed for the other parameters. Cage gives an extensive description of his composing means for this work in his “To Describe the Process of Composition Used in Music of Changes and Imaginary Landscape No. 4” (Silence, pp. 57-60).