Greg Stepanich

Book brings Kansas City back to jazz pantheon

Next month, Oxford University Press brings out a new history of Kansas City jazz that I've just started reading. If ever there were a topic that's overdue for a reassessment, it's the jazz scene in the western Missouri city where Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Bennie Moten, Mary Lou Williams and numerous others made their own special brand of this music.

The volume is called Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop — a History, and it's by Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddiix. I've read about 100 pages so far, and I'm sorry to report that the writing is pretty bad. Someone must have suggested that describing how a person looks when they're introduced in the text would help add literary merit, because you can't go too many sentences without reading things like: "Utterback, who was trim with a thin face and pointed chin," and "Gangly with large eyes nestled under a protruding forehead, Taylor moved easily across the full array of saxophones . . . "

And yet, this book will be required reading for me, because I'm not aware of any other comprehensive histories of Kansas City jazz, and it's one of those things that's been forgotten by the public at large, it seems to me. Jazz fans know about Kaycee, but if the book helps restore the city's rightful place as a jazz homeland, it's worth getting through the awkward storytelling (I'm holding out hope the book gets better as I go along).

Back in the early 1980s, I lived in Wichita, Kan., where I worked as a lounge pianist for a local singer. I'd get back to Illinois now and then, and when I had to back to Kansas for another stint at a club on Kellogg, I'd drive through St. Louis, Columbia and then Kansas City. There were two things I knew about Kansas City at the time: It was a great place to have a steak, and it once was a wonderful place to hear some jazz.

I'd always meant to go up to Kansas City and see what was going on when I lived out that way, but somehow I never got around to it. Laziness was a constant companion of mine back then, and it was always much easier to sleep in when I had a free day.

One passage in the book about the roots of Kansas City jazz cites the importance of the concert band as the training ground for the standout instrumentalists, inlcluding this evocative piece of contemporary newspaper coverage of the local Municipal Band, from the Kansas City Call of July 29, 1932:

Whole families grouped themselves together and chatted while the music played. Men in overalls rubbed elbows with other men who were nattily turned out in white linen suits or white shirts and flannel trousers. The band played 'Dangerous Blues' and the crowd swayed in sympathetic rhythm. Miss Randall sang 'Humming to Myself' and her audience tapped an appreciative collective foot and hummed to itself. Cares were forgotten. Worries were put away.

Right now, I'm listening to Charlie Parker do K.C. Blues, recorded in New York in 1951 (with Miles Davis, Walter Bishop Jr., Teddy Kotick and Max Roach). I like its feeling of relaxed swing, and it's a sound that would have worked as well with that summer evening crowd as it would in a New York nightspot. It's a fitting backdrop for getting reacquainted with the contribution Kansas City made to jazz.

Beauty sells young violinists, and the music's fine

It's one of the things about the way we're wired that we tend to give good-looking people more of a break than we do others. It's not fair, but that's the way it is.

Writing in the Financial Times this week, Andrew Clark reviewed a performance by the 17-year-old Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti, who's been quite the story overseas because of her signing of a record contract last year for 1 million pounds ($1.8 million) after she won the BBC's Young Musician of the Year competition.

Noting that Benedetti "looked gorgeous — sort of a classical Britney Spears" he also went on to say that while Benedetti played well (the Chausson Poème), her sudden rise to fame might spell trouble for her art in the long run:

It looks to me as if the Benedetti family has fallen into a trap laid by big record companies desperately trying to save themselves from meltdown. Out-manoeuvred by cheaper, slim-line rivals, and dominated by executives who have no interest in classical music, they have given up making recordings as a long-term investment. The only way they can justify their gargantuan overheads is by selling classical artists like pop singers, focusing on a handful and subjecting them to intensive promotion.

If so, she's not the only one. It's indisputable that the classical music industry has capitalized on the pulchritudinous appeal of its players, as often as possible. This has been going on as long as there have been musicians, but these days technology has intensified the power and the reach of this part of the business.

Almost at random, I can cite three young women violinists whose names and careers I've read about in the last two or three weeks. I took a look at their Websites and listened to their sound clips:

Nicola Benedetti: As you open this slickly designed site, Benedetti opens her eyes, which is a fun touch. In the background, the Saint-Saens Havanaise is playing, and it's a nice performance. I also downloaded the Chausson on a sound clip, and Benedetti plays this very French music with a touch of evanescence, which suits it well.

The photo gallery is mostly candid shots, one in which she's sticking out her tongue at the photographer. There's a strong sense of teen pop star caught backstage, and that strikes me as appropriate. I note also that she played the First Concerto of Karol Szymanowski for the BBC competition, a brave and unusual choice that bodes well for her sense of adventure. I didn't see any upcoming American appearances on her schedule.

Julia Fischer: This 21-year-old German violinist has been pursuing a lower-profile path than Benedetti, which Clark notes in his review. There are substantial sections of music on this site, including a fine 10-minute first movement of the first Prokoviev concerto, and a big, dark-toned rendition of the Sarabande from the D minor Partita of Bach.

The photo gallery is straightforward and rather demure, and her Hello from Julia note is charming, with a funny reference to a Russian ice skater she's apparently interested in: "Since the Olympic Winter Games in 1994 I am a very big fan of figure skating, admiring especially Alexei Yagudin for his — musicality.� She's got some challenging pieces in her repertoire (Berg and Respighi) and she comes off in this site as serious player with a lot of potential. Fischer will be at the Aspen Music Festival in August playing the first Bartok concerto.

Janine Jansen: This 27-year-old Dutchwoman has a great deal of work lined up well into next year, most of it in Europe. She'll be in Sarasota and Orlando in January with the touring Cleveland Orchestra; she'll play the Tchaikovsky concerto with Vladimir Ashkenazy on the podium.

Jansen is the artistic director of a chamber music festival she founded a couple years ago in Utrecht, and her recordings include a rendition of Vivaldi's Four Seasons that's gotten good reviews. Her repertoire list includes pieces by Arvo Part and the Swiss composer Frank Martin, and she's giving a premiere next month of a new work by Paul Moravec.

The photo gallery is the most provocative of the sites, and you get the idea that this is a highly confident person who enjoys her sexuality and good looks. I couldn't get the audio clips on the site to play, but read the Guestbook for some fawning reviews by smitten concertgoers.

Without doing any independent research of my own into how these women are marketed, it's hard to say how much of what we see on these sites is the work of sophisticated promotions people encouraging impressionable young people to take risks they might one day regret, or the work of very adult, savvy young people who know perfectly well that beauty sells, and have no qualms about capitalizing on their fortunate genetic inheritances if it will get more people interested in parting with their cash (This is maybe more applicable to the Benedetti and Jansen sites; Fischer's is less glam.)

Still, the evidence indicates that these are talented women who can really play the violin. That they are also nice to look at (and those of who are not attractive are more interested in this) probably helps the music rather than hurts it. That their publicity arms capitalize on this certainly doesn't advance the cause of those who are tired of the constant objectification of attractive women and men by our theater-soaked society.

That is unlikely ever to change. And the technology now at our disposal puts that day even further away. But in these cases, at least, the music appears to be flourishing.

Cheering WLRN's plan for digital all-classical station

There are a certain number of us here in South Florida who cannot hear the opening bars of the Jupiter movement from Gustav Holst's The Planets without thinking we're going to hear a news briefing right after that.

Miami's WTMI used to use that music as its news intro, back when it was a respected classical-music radio station. Those were the days when my wife and I would sit on a Sunday reading the papers in our Broward County apartment, fighting over Tropic, eating a little brunch and listening to Jonathan Mandel's new releases program on WTMI. We were happy and content, secure in the knowledge that we lived in a part of the country sophisticated enough to have a decent classical-music station.

And it was good.

But it was ruined a couple years back when the people who ran it decided they didn't really like classical music and so they dumbed the station down, doing dreadful things like running single movements from works — and always things like the slow movement from Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto — clowning around in the morning (when the Sousa Alarm used to be enough) and mocking the music as boring.

Fortunately for the sanity of those who cared and still care about this music, WTMI dropped the pretense, got sold, and became a dance music station. We may have lost the outlet, but at least WTMI's new identity was honest, and not a classical half-effort.

But aside from WXEL-90.7 FM in Boynton Beach, it's hard to find any classical on the dial in Palm Beach County — drive north, though, and you can catch WQCS at 88.9 FM in Fort Pierce, which is a fine station. The good folks at both stations do yeoman's work satisfying the classical jones of area listeners, but it's not enough, at least for me.

The word this week, though, is that Miami's WLRN-FM, a very good public radio station, has gotten a temporary license from the FCC to broadcast a 24-hour classical station on digital radio, using the same frequency (91.3 FM). You'll need a digital receiver to hear it, but still, this is progress.

I'm eager to hear what the station will offer, even if it costs me a little bit of cash to get it. At some point, the station, which should launch in late summer, will offer local programming, and that could be very interesting indeed. WXEL's Joanna Marie interviews musicmakers who are coming to town on her show, and that's a valuable service.

But there should be more. I'd like to hear programs devoted to contemporary music and local composers, themed segments devoted to opera, chamber music, music from specific eras such as the Baroque, and news items telling us what's going on in the global and local worlds of classical music.

Most of all, though, it'd just be good to hear a station that plays it straight and programs great music. I grew up with WFMT in Chicago, and I've always loved the understated but thorough way their announcers presented the programs. The best part about it was that it didn't make you feel like a geek for listening to classical music; it was grown-up, and professional. As was WTMI in its best days.

And so best wishes to our friends at WLRN, and best of luck with the new station. I'm already excited about hearing it.

In the meantime: One more plug for Pliable at On an Overgrown Path, who's found some wild Net radio stations offering just about any kind of classical you want. All-Schoenberg radio! Check out the May 24 entry.

Shostakovich again: Article examines who's winning 'the wars'

In a provocative piece published earlier this month by the Times Literary Supplement, the Reed College professor and composer David Schiff argues that the point of view expressed by the musicologist Solomon Volkov is the one that is winning the "Shostakovich wars": That the bulk of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich's work is a coded protest against the brutality of the Soviet system.

Wading into the Shostakovich controversy is something I've done a little of in this blog already (March 6), and I've written a review for The Post of Volkov's recent book, Shostakovich and Stalin. I don't agree with Schiff's negative view of the book, but I do agree with his larger point about the significance of Shostakovich's music (and we'll be hearing a lot more about this in 2006, the centenary of the composer's birth). In truth, it's one of the few places I've found where a critic puts him in perspective with other major composers of his time — Hindemith, Stravinsky, Berg, Bartok, Weill — and finds them wanting in comparison.

"Where the music of Berg and Bartok, however intense, still sounds constructed, Shostakovich's music speaks," Schiff writes. And he points to something essentially phony about Stravinsky, referring to the Dumbarton Oaks concerto, which "pays mysterious homage to Bach, Verdi and Tchaikovsky: what is that Tchaikovskian gypsy song doing in the middle of a chugging march in the last movement? These references seem erudite, witty and weightless. The echoes and allusions in Shostakovich's music, by contrast, are always expressive . . . "

Well put, and accurate, it seems to me, as much as I enjoy the music by the other composers.

The fight here is over the view advanced by Volkov, whom eminent scholars such as Richard Taruskin (here's a debate in the letters pages of Commentary) argue committed nothing less than fraud when he published Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, in 1979. Volkov's opponents contend, among other things, that the idea of Shostakovich as a secret dissident was invented by Volkov and achieved currency because the West wanted it to be true.

Volkov's defenders say that while he ghosted the book, it largely reflects Shostakovich's negative views about the government under which he lived, and that he was in fact an opponent of the Party.

I have the same problem everyone with no knowledge of Russian does: I can't go to the primary sources without a guide, so everything I know about this issue is based on works read in translation and the evidence of my own ears. I did ask a Russian musician about the controversy once, and he said that he had asked Shostakovich's son, Maxim, about whether he thought the book was accurate or not, and Maxim said: "It sounds like my father."

That doesn't tell me a lot, but it's interesting. Certainly for the casual purposes of this blog, I can say this:

1. That the bulk of testimony from other people who knew Shostakovich, at least as reflected in Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, is that the composer was highly critical of the Soviet system. He also was a famous composer from a young age, and Stalin, a micromanager who was a devotee of music and the theater, made sure he exploited that celebrity for positive press outside the USSR.

2. That we in the West who never lived under such a system can't have a complete idea of how it was to live there day after day, year after year. Unquestionably great literature arose from this terrible set of circumstances, and those works are incredibly important to trying to understand what went on there. But if you don't have to live it every single day you can't really know what it's like in your bones. If you were a sensitive person who hated what the government stood for and what it did, it would be an exceptional form of agony, to say the least, when it wasn't literally deadly.

3. That in such circumstances, what constitutes collaboration and what on the other hand is dissidence lives in the land of the gray. It's easy for me, weaned on the black-and-white moralism of American television and cinema, to say that right is right, and wrong is wrong. But part of the misery of the Soviet system was that it made compliance possible through compromise: Yes, you must write a cantata praising the Great Leader, but you'll be happy to do that because we're going to give you a nice house in the country. Not a choice I'd want to have to make, and I'm fortunate so far in not having had to make it.

I don't want to go on too long here, but I did want to mention the Schiff piece (and here's a Taruskin letter in rebuttal), and say that it reinforces the view I came to of the composer after reading Shostakovich and Stalin, which at its heart is an inside-baseball view of Soviet musical life, with all the gossip and scandalous stories intact.

I still believe, whatever the ultimate truth of the compostion of Testimony, that Shostakovich was a classic product of the Russian intelligentsia, and that while he had opportunities to defect, he did not take them because he felt he owed it to his country and culture to serve as a witness of horrible times, and because he felt by staying in the Soviet Union he was doing his best to keep the tradition of Russian musical creation alive even while the Kremlin was trying to warp it.

It's probably time for me to actually learn Russian and try to come to a conclusion without the mediation of other writers, musicians and scholars. It might be that I'm trying to explain away contradictory evidence because of a deep need for a composer I admire to be ideologically admirable, too.

Shostakovich's stature will only grow in the years to come. Very substantial portions of his life's work are performed all the time around the world, and it's likely that he will be on top when it comes time to rank the greatest of all 20th-century composers. He built on tradition but he forged an individual voice, and no matter how uncompromising his idiom could be at times, he reaches people, and he has something profound to say.

That he could do that and still conceivably be a willing tool of the Soviets (though I don't believe he was) is a particularly grim illustration of the complexity of human affairs.

Celebrating Fischer-Dieskau at 80

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau turns 80 next Saturday, and that's a good reason to look back with admiration at the work of this wonderful German singer (here's a good interview from the Guardian).

As I type, I'm listening to Fischer-Dieskau's 1990 recording of a dozen songs from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn, recorded with Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Philharmonic. The tempi are a bit on the slow side in some cases, but overall I love this rendition of these great songs, as well as the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen that's also on the disc.

For me, this performance captures Mahler's aesthetic perfectly. The composer's precisely judged orchestrations come across with superb clarity, and there's something supremely intelligent about Fischer-Dieskau's singing that's hard to put into words. His baritone has strength and lightness at the same time, his diction is flawless — but I also get the sense that here is an artist who has committed himself to as faithful and committed a performance of this music as he can.

I think I feel that way because there's something human about his voice that I find easy to warm to: With some other singers there's something overwhelming about their instrument that dominates the discussion to the exclusion of the music. But with Fischer-Dieskau, the voice, and the masterful way he uses it, not only allows the discussion to be about the music itself, it encourages it.

That's probably a good way of saying he seems every time to give a definitive performance; certainly my appreciation of Mahler grew after I listened to this disc.

His recordings of the Schubert lieder with Gerald Moore were staples of most of the singers I knew when I was a kid, and I'm quite fond of his performances in other literature. A compilation of arias and excerpts I have somewhere here in my study has him doing marvelous things with the music of Puccini (Tosca) and Verdi (Don Carlo) as well as the War Requiem of Benjamin Britten, in which he demonstrates his excellent command of English.

I've also kept a Gramophone magazine promo disc from last April that has Fischer-Dieskau singing the most exquisite rendition of Mache dich, mein Herze, rein, from the very end of Bach's St. Matthew Passion. It's a 1958 recording with Karl Richter leading the Munich Bach Choir and Orchestra, and here again, something about Fischer-Dieskau's voice and his approach to the aria allows us to indentify with the passion of the supplicant as he pleads with his heart to cast out the world and invite Jesus in.

Many much finer words and apter critiques have been offered in respect to Fischer-Dieskau's art, but I wanted to mention his coming birthday and the press coverage that's being generated to mark that anniversary. Artists like him — always an advocate for the music, and willing to perform huge amounts of repertoire, much of it underappreciated — define a sort of classical music best practices; it's the kind of example that all classical musicians, not just singers, would do well to follow.

Food, memory and music: Complementary tastes

Proust's madeleine might be the most often trotted-out literary example of food triggering memory, but I can think of several instances in my life in which the twin memories of food and music are tied together.

One in particular I'm thinking about now has to do with a night at the Yellow Brick Bank restaurant in Shepherdstown, W.Va., more than a decade ago. It was a cold, cold evening, but inside all was lovely, and the music was an Ella Fitzgerald record; I've forgotten precisely what she was singing (though it was all one composer, from one of the Songbooks), but I remember thinking how tasteful and lovely her renditions were, and how they seemed to sound even better bouncing lightly off the thick walls of the restaurant.

Which brings me to an interesting Web site done by Bob Shingleton in the United Kingdom: On an Overgrown Path (I'm assuming that's a reference to the Janacek piano pieces). Lots of worthy, tasteful stuff on this blog, and in particular, Shingleton (who calls himself Pliable) has taken to writing about concerts and doing a diary of his whole experience, including what he ate while going to these events. Here's what he says about this:

I'm not trying to impress everyone with my refined gastronomic tastes. As everyone else seems to be listing the CD's they are listening to, or the books they are reading, I just thought I'd start a new trend by listing the meal that accompanied the concert.

This is a nice idea, it seems to me. While on the one hand it underlines the often-erroneous idea that classical music has to be accompanied by refined experiences of other kinds in order to make its full effect, listing the food and the wine augments the picture of the person who's attending, and also gives the reader a larger sense of what it was like to go to the concert.

In my case, there would be lots of lists like this: Coffee (black); M&Ms (one bag). That's about it, when you're just there to listen and offer a critical opinion, and not do the whole concertgoing shebang.

It also occurs to me that you could really get yourself in for some appalling visual pictures if you find out what a lot of critics ate before and during a show, at least judging by the things I see people bring back into the newsroom, most of which is fast food, and most of that is either subs or hamburgers. There you have the difference between going to a concert as an event, and going just because it's part of your job.

I think this idea has encouraged me to want to attend some of these concerts as part of a larger experience. It probably would be good to slow down a little bit and make sure I have a taste of something good to eat and drink before taking in that late-night Bach partita.

Of such things are memories made deeper and more resonant.

The music, not the money, will matter for '1984'

I guess I'm weighing a little late on this, but there's been some critical outrage over Lorin Maazel's new opera, 1984, and not because of its subject matter or its radical music. Maazel, director of the New York Philharmonic, is an occasional composer who has paid to have his opera mounted at London's Covent Garden.

The critics haven't been kind (here's an example), and much angst has been expressed over the idea that Maazel's piece is getting top-drawer treatment while more worthy operas, and composers, languish in obscurity because they are lacking in coin of the realm (Alex Ross of The New Yorker has a blog entry on this).

This reminds me of an incident Artur Rubinstein recounted in his memoirs of attending a performance of an opera by a barely talented musical amateur who had paid to have his opera performed. The results were pretty lamentable, and after all concerned had gotten over their embarrassment, they moved on to frothier Belle Epoque concerns.

They might not have, though, had the opera been any good. What if the struggling Italian musician Giacomo Puccini had inherited a large pile of lire after the untimely death of his father and used it to blandish Giulio Ricordi into mounting a confection of his called La Bohème? After a while, who'd remember how it got to the stage?

Puccini became wealthy later, but Poulenc and Chausson started life wealthy and stayed that way all the way through, and what matters now is their music, not their bankbooks. And what of Charles Ives, who made a fortune selling insurance? He paid to have his 114 Songs privately printed, and while he prefaced it with a sort of I-don't-care introduction, he did send it to media outlets everywhere, thereby funding his own PR blitz.

What matters now is a song like Tom Sails Away, not the indifference the songbook engendered from most of its recipients, or how it got to them.

That's not to say Covent Garden's time wouldn't be better spent reviving a good score from a better composer (assuming all the critics are right about the quality of Maazel's opera), but if it had been a great opera, wildly cheered and saluted, we would be praising Maazel's entrepreneurial ingenuity, not blasting him for his use of a prominent opera company.

I'll be interested to hear this score and judge for myself (cute Web site: Telescreen loading, please wait. A bit camp, but it made me laugh). Whether it's any good or not will be the only thing that matters in the long run, though there really should be a way for more worthy projects to get not just a performance in the abscence of money, but a first-class performance.

I once played piano for a performance of Carlisle Floyd's Susannah given with two pianos and some singers, and no set of any kind, in a community meeting room in a shopping mall. The opera came off very well indeed, even in that unpromising setting. It's a worthy piece of theater with a compelling score, and it proved to be a powerful draw.

If 1984 can carry an audience in a bare-bones performance, with just a piano and a few singers in a boxy, unglamorous room, we'll know whether it's any good or not.

Odds and ends: A comment on a blog I did in January about the Welsh pop singer Jem and her use of a Bach keyboard prelude identifies the sample as being from a Swingle Singers record. I should have thought of that, and I thank my correspondent.....Abram Kreeger writes to say that the Venezuelan pianist Vanessa Perez has rescheduled her postponed concert at the Steinway Piano Gallery in Boca Raton for Sunday, June 5, at 4 p.m. Music by Beethoven (the Moonlight sonata) and Brahms are on the program. Call 561-929-6633.

John Williams a critical part of 'Star Wars' success

I don't suppose I'll be the only person to bring this up, but since the sixth and final installment of the Star Wars saga (here's the trailer) is opening tomorrow, it's fitting that we spare a minute for composer John Williams.

The Star Wars films have been credited with many things: Advancements in computer technology; the revival of the Saturday morning movie serial; the career of Harrison Ford; the addition to the American vernacular of "the Force," and "the dark side." But it should also be noted that the scores for these shows, while deliberately evocative of the movie scores of an older era, are also much grittier, more powerful, and far more memorable than most of them.

It's not just having seen the movies when they first came out that instills good memories when the music comes sweeping through the theater. These scores work, and they work surpassingly well.

In the first place, they do the primary thing they're supposed to do beautifully: Illustrate the movies without overpowering them. And secondly, they provide strong, durable melodies that are instantly recognizable whenever they're heard, not only in the theater but outside it.

I well remember listening to Williams lead the Boston Pops one July 4 many years ago in this music, and the effect on the audience was electric. You don't see that too often in general audiences when you're talking about classical music, which is what the Star Wars scores largely are (no, not the cantina band in Episode IV).

And thirdly, I think Williams has also provided a distillation of the Wagnerian compositional ethic in a far more subtle, moving way than some Golden Age scores, in which the leitmotifs are hammered mercilessly, so that you get the point. Williams does more tasteful things like have a solo horn play a somber version of one of his themes as the moon hangs over a distant planet. You hear it, and you experience pleasure at the beauty of the melody, orientation at knowing which movie you're in, and anticipation because of the music's unsettled quality.

That's superior movie music. Hollywood has always been something of a retrograde kind of place when it comes to music, where the traditions of late 19th-century Austro-German culture still are hanging in there, but the movies grew up with this kind of writing, and there's a certain brand of it that suits the cinema like nothing else.

I would also like to point out that these scores also are recorded by a real symphony orchestra and chorus, not with MIDI files and some very adept keyboardists. It's remarkable that a show that has so much groundbreaking technology, and takes place in a future with droids, gets so much of its emotional oomph from so many flesh-and-blood humans deciphering tiny marks on stave paper.

The last couple Star Wars movies haven't been too good overall (George Lucas didn't bother to do anything but perfunctory directing in Episodes I and II: that laughably bad scene with Ewan McGregor and Liam Neeson clutching 23rd-century styrofoam coffee cups at the beginning of Episode I, for example, or all of Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman's acting, or that Lucas' way of advancing plots is to sit people down at a table and have them eat), but I still enjoyed watching them, and there has been something truly fun about each of the last five episodes.

But I'd wager a guess that after much of the formerly gee-whiz pizazz of the movies has been passed by, the Williams scores will still have some punch and fire left in them, and that we'll be listening to them for a long time to come. You couldn't ask for a better tribute to a man who, after all, is one of the best-known composers of his time.

An orchestral Rx: Podcasts, shorter concerts

At ArtsJournal.com, the noted critic and composer Greg Sandow has a good post (and blog in general) dated a couple weeks ago, and there are two ideas here that intrigue me.

He writes that he's been taking part in a blog with creative types about the future of orchestras and how they can reach new audiences. One of those ideas from this Mellon Foundation exercise calls for a marketing scheme in which orchestras would use iPods to reach season subscribers and would-be devotees. They'd be loaded with classical music, and they could pick up a new version of the podcast by hooking up to their computers.

Another idea related to this is to have an MP3 version of a recent orchestra concert available not long after it's played.

As I noted in his blog a month or so ago, Lynn University has started its own podcast of college performances, and that looks to me to be part of the future for this music. While classical music is not ever going to be everyone's favorite listening, classical musicians have to make the entry points for listeners as welcoming as possible. I don't mean that everything has to be dumbed down or packaged as mood music, just that more of what goes on in our concert halls — and there really is quite a bit — could be made more available for educational purposes.

Today's musicians (as another Sandow post notes on this same page) are players who like all kinds of music, and play all kinds. They're not focused on one discipline or another, and the benefit to all of us as listeners is that each genre, classical, jazz, rap, etc., is going to be cross-pollinated.

That will create a different kind of established crossover music in the long run, but when you want to hear Schubert straight, without the rockabilly-meets-Texas-swing admixture, there should be a more accessible way to hear it, and this iPod idea might create a sort of bootleg of good, non-mainstream performances that would not only demonstrate how much classical music activity there is in this country, but also give us first shot at hearing some exciting new talent.

Our future in general is going to be terribly niche-y on the one hand — you won't have to read or hear anything you don't already know you like — and possibly very lateral on the other, with ideas coming from all over the place, and small communities such as chamber music fans in Palm Beach County using those for their own edification without worrying about whether it measures up against the old hierarchies of the performance culture that has dominated our nation's classical music industry for most of the past century.

Another idea on this post that caught my attention is the one that concerts might be too long in general, and that multiple shorter concerts might be the way to go, and he suggests that perhaps an orchestra could give two short concerts in an evening, with a discount for anyone who wanted to hear both (a long evening, but at times it might be what you want). I could see this as part of an orchestra season: a series of one-hour evenings for the time-pressed at particularly busy times of the year. You could get more casual listeners that way, I think, and it's worth considering.

Live music has a lot to offer people, and live classical music in particular, and if the players and thinkers make it easier to get more ears out in front of this art form, more lives in both directions would be enriched.

I always have faith in this music, and in music of all kinds, to reach people, and our technological future offers more opportunities to spread the good word.

It's time for the summer music festivals

This week I played the piano at my house with the windows open for probably the last time before we have to turn on the A/C round the clock. This is one of the depressing things about living in South Florida: Entering the cooling box, and not coming out until around Thanksgiving.

But for a few more days this superannuated spring we've been having might hold out, and it's possible I'll be able to give one more Concert for the Snails, Snakes and Cuban Tree Frogs in my mini-music festival. There's something wonderful about hearing music, even bad music like the stuff I'm writing, go out into the open air and mingle there with the sounds of the outdoors.

All of which reminds me that it's that time of year when classical music fans seek out the big summer festivals, usually somewhere a little more temperate. When the Florida Philharmonic was around, there was the Beethoven on the Beach series, which was ambitious and much needed, especially for people trying to keep the art-music life going after the snowbirds depart. But it's not here that we normally look for classical music festivals, which have been established elsewhere for decades.

Here's a list of classical music festivals and Web links as compiled by Yahoo! Some interesting things pop up right away, including some London Symphony Orchestra performances in July in Daytona Beach, where the LSO has given summer concerts for nearly 40 years. Violinist Sarah Chang is doing the Shostakovich First Concerto with the LSO and Marin Alsop on July 22, and that would be worth checking out if I happen to be in town.

I've been to the Ravinia Festival, the Chicago Symphony's summer home in Highland Park, Ill., multiple times, and over the years I've also taken in concerts at Wolf Trap outside D.C. and bits and pieces of other festivals, and summer opera out in the high desert near Santa Fe, N.M.

But down here, the festival I've always wanted to see is the Spoleto Festival, modeled on an Italian festival and presented in Charleston, S.C. This year's concerts, as well as dance and theater activities, look quite compelling. There are rare operas by Walter Braunfels and Ottorino Respighi, new pieces by Kennedy, van der Aa and Yanov-Yanovsky, plus works by Xenakis and Schreker, just to point to the unusual offerings.

There is the unflappable Charles Wadsworth (who wrapped the local Kravis season) hosting 33 chamber music concerts featuring an impressive lineup of first-class chamber musicians, and some fascinating theater offerings, including a production of Ibsen's A Doll's House featuring an actual dollhouse set in which little male actors take their parts opposite regular-sized females. That's only a little bit of what sounds intriguing about this festival, which begins May 27 and lasts through June 12.

I'm going to see whether or not I can get away for a couple days to take in the Spoleto atmosphere and enjoy some of their offerings. It sounds like a good place to get into the whole feel of summer festivals, when you're in an especially beautiful place and the pleasure that brings to your mind and heart make the concentration on the music easier (if you don't quaff too much wine beforehand, that is). Some of my most intense discoveries of music happened in the sylvan surroundings of Ravinia or the spare loveliness of the countryside outside Santa Fe.

Something about nature or elegant buildings helping you listen, I suppose is what it comes down to. Maybe I'll get a chance to find out how that works at Spoleto.

Rorem bows out: I'm disappointed to learn that Ned Rorem won't be making his concert tonight at the Rinker Playhouse at Kravis. He's ill, and his doctor has advised him not to come. It's unfortunate that this major American art music figure won't be here for what promises to be an intriguing evening; I'm looking forward to hearing the other music on the program, particularly the Liebermann and Bolcom songs, but it would have been extra nice to have seen Ned Rorem.

The Kravis was eager to see how many people would turn out for this concert, given that it's taking place at an unfashionable time of year. I hope Rorem's absence won't keep concertgoers away from hearing his music, and that of some other fine contemporary American composers.

Tonys offer orchestrators a moment in the sun

There can't be too many of us, but I'm one of those people who can't help watching the Tony Awards and saying: Let's hear it for the orchestrators.

As I said, there aren't too many of us.

But if you're interested in what the theater season was like over the past year, it's worth paying attention not just to the new music that gets the honors, but to the folks who recreate that music for different instrumental combinations. The work of the orchestrator is not often appreciated by the public at large, but it's a special and important art.

It's not often realized that many of the composers who have written musicals have been in many cases natural tunesmiths — Irving Berlin comes to mind — but their contribution to the sound of a musical vanished after they played the songs for the first time to the backers of the show. After that, the responsibility for the way the show hits that first-night audience, and the audiences thereafter, lies with the professionals who dress up the music in orchestral garb.

Now, good songs can be played on a bad upright and it doesn't matter: It's durable material. The score for Oklahoma!, for example, which I once conducted in a particularly memorable theatre experience, contains one classic American song after another; it doesn'tneed the orchestral instruments to work.

But it's so pleasurable to hear the extra dimension of the strings at the beginning of Oh, What a Beautiful Morning. The orchestrator was Robert Russell Bennett (whose autobiography is rather interesting, if you run across it), and at the hold that comes at the end of "an elephant's eye," the chord's a suspension that gently resolves. On the piano, it's calm and cool; scored for strings in intimate quartet style, it's sleepily langorous, just like the world opening up under the beneficent ministrations of Old Sol.

The orchestrator adds something very much his own to the scores, and the sound pictures we have in our heads owe a lot to these people. Having orchestrated music for an original school musical or two in my younger days, I remember feeling that in some cases I had to try to do something heroic to make the song work — adding countermelodies, choosing unusual instrumental combinations — and in other cases, I just had to figure out how best to stay out of the way.

One of the veteran orchestrators nominated this week for a Tony is Jonathan Tunick, who is almost as responsible for defining the sound of Stephen Sondheim's scores as the composer himself, who after all had magnificent training under no less an eminento than Milton Babbitt. Tunick undoubtedly works closely with Sondheim to craft the sound of the scores, but at some point, it's just him, just his taste and his experience, that leads him to that moment in the second act when he says: Yes, a celesta here, that will make this work.

The Tonys ( here's a list of the nominees; the orchestrators are way down at the end) ceremony is one of the only times the general public is made aware of what these writers do, and it would be instructive for this year's show if we could get five minutes of explanation. Show us how the song sounded for the composer, let's hear him or her play it, then let's hear how the song sounds transmuted through the medium of a whole additional library of sonic color.

It's not by any means an easy job, and it's good that there is at least a brief moment in the spotlight for these important craftspeople, who are without any doubt creators in their own right.

A great play might not make a great opera

In talking with Ned Rorem and Lowell Liebermann about their operatic projects, I'm thinking about the difficulties of setting the material they've chosen for their new works, which will premiere early next year.

In the first place, it seems to me that a number of recent American operas — and there have been a good number of them recently — are set to theatrical or literary works that are well-known and come to operatic life dragging the chains of their previous connotations. We've had operas recently based on Little Women, A Streetcar Named Desire, and A View From the Bridge. I would probably shy away from doing anything on those topics, because the originals are too well known, and there are prominent movie adapatations as well.

Rorem's doing Our Town, which on the one hand would make a good opera, and on the other, has a lot of music in it already. Aaron Copland did the film score for Sam Wood's 1940 movie of the Thornton Wilder play; in Howard Pollack's biography of Copland, he points out that Wilder himself wanted Virgil Thomson first, and George Antheil, he of the Ballet Mécanique, second. But it was Copland who got the call, he and Wilder worked well together, and the music has an understated feel that works well for the movie (which I haven't seen in years and years).

An opera on this play could be very difficult to do. Much of the power of Emily's final lines has to do with its plain-spokenness, as truth comes to the mind of a common-sense, young, small-town woman. It has a poignancy we can all relate to because it's so plain. Should a composer write a big melody here in which the soprano rises to a climax on the words: "Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you"?

Or would the best way to get that across be to drop the music to near-silence and have her speak it? It's the age-old question of how to make something work as theater and also work as music, and in this case, it's not an enviable choice.

Liebermann's opera is based on Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, a deeply depressing story about a male newspaper columnist who writes the Miss Lonelyhearts advice column and soon finds himself absorbed by the real-life tragedies on which he's dispensing advice. I haven't read that novel in many years, either, but what I remember about it would certainly make for gripping drama on stage.

But how do you set it to music? Would the nature of the story overwhelm any music you might write for it? How much of Wozzeck, say, or Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, gets its impact from the violent story more than the music that helps illustrate that story?

My inclination is to say that you need good, but not great literature for the best opera libretti — La Boheme comes to mind — so that the music can fill in the gaps where the librettist went out for lunch or a smoke break. In those cases, the composer is telling the story along with the librettist, rather than getting crushed under the weight of a literary vehicle that already has a substantial weight of its own.

I don't envy these two composers the task that's before them. I also think it's fascinating to consider the literary merit of the stories of some of the great operas, and determine whether it helped or hindered the writer of the music.

Upcoming Rorem concert a must-see

Talked to composer Ned Rorem earlier this week briefly for a piece previewing his Rinker Playhouse concert May 14 with soprano Carole Farley, composer Lowell Liebermann and pianist William Hobbs. I wish I'd had more time to talk to him, or that he'd had more time, but it was a pleasure to chat with a man who is one of the leading lights of American classical music, as well as a distinguished literary man.

I've been listening to the Naxos disc of Rorem's songs recorded by the composer and Farley in Nantucket back in 2000, and playing through his Third Sonata for piano on my trusty old George Steck upright. This is a labor of much affection, and I find my enjoyment of the pieces growing as I get more familiar with them. Overall, Rorem has compiled a sophisticated and subtle body of music, beautifully and idiomatically crafted.

At this point in my study of the songs on this disc, I'm partial to the older pieces, in particular the ones from the late 1940s and early 1950s: Little Elegy, to a poem by Elinor Wylie; The Nightingale, to an anonymous 16th-century text; Lullaby of the Woman of the Mountain, to words by Pahdraic Pearse; What if some little pain … , to a text by Edmund Spenser; and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, to the famous poem by Robert Frost. All these songs date from 1947 to 1951.

I'm also fond of a 1958 song, Early in the Morning, to a poem by Robert Hillyer. In these songs, and indeed in most of his music with which I'm familiar, he reminds me most of Francis Poulenc (a Rorem friend); both composers speak the same kind of rich, elegant harmonic language, and both have absorbed the popular music of their times and made something rarified of it.

Poulenc was on of the finest writers of art songs in the 20th century, and the spirit of the song is evident in much of his music. He also is a composer of intense Catholic piety, but even in a work like the Quatre Motets Pour un Temps de Pénitence, there is something ravishing and worldly about the way the suffering of Jesus is depicted.

Rorem, younger by a generation (he was born in 1923), is an even subtler writer. If the melodies he writes aren't always as direct as Poulenc's, in a song like Night Crow, written in 1959 to a Theodore Roethke poem, distinctive melodic lines are everywhere you look in the fabric of the song. This gives the piece, which is only 2 minutes long, weight and depth, and is indicative of the concentrated compositional power Rorem brings to his writing. That's one of the reasons listening to these songs is so rewarding: You hear these background melodies come to the fore as you revisit them.

Rorem told me he's about a third of the way through his orchestrations for an opera based on Thornton Wilder's Our Town. The opera is scheduled to premiere next year at Indiana University, a standout music school renowned for its opera program. "I'm feeling very exposed," he said, referring to the familiarity of the play he's subjected to an operatic treatment.

That's a premiere I just might have to be in the audience for. I'm eager to see what Rorem makes of Wilder's durable theater piece, and the more I think about it, the more I think he might be an ideal composer for it. Emily's description of the mundanities she loves and misses can easily become overwhelmingly sentimental; a composer of deep emotion but high restraint such as Rorem might be precisely what you need to make that moment tell, but not become cloying.

The May 14 performance, called Songs of the Americas, is a premiere of a program Farley, Rorem and Liebermann are taking to London's Wigmore Hall in June, and then to other concert halls around the world. It's a rare chance for area audiences to hear an evening of important American music and poetry (songs by William Bolcom as well as by Cuba's Ernesto Lecuona also are on the program), and listeners who want to hear what our country's creative artists are up to shouldn't miss it.

A gourmet cupcake store is icing on Seattle trip

Here comes another nifty Seattle idea that we can steal here and with which we can have some fun.

In the Seattle suburb of Ballard sits one of my sister's favorite stores: Cupcake Royale.

This is a fabulous idea: Gourmet cupcakes (check out the Web site for a photo selection), $2 a pop, accompanied by some excellent coffee of many varieties (I like mine very strong and black). I had the Triple Threat, I think, my mother had a Vanilla Bunny, and I don't remember what my sister and brother-in-law had.

But it was great fun. These were delicious, rather large cupcakes (with a top that hung over like a mushroom), with a generous amount of frosting. We stood in line for some time before getting up to get the cakes, too. It's in a boho sort of neighborhood of coffee shops, a cool record store, bookstores, and so forth. Somehow, that made the cupcakes taste even better.

Anyone interested in starting a nifty sort of food business that hasn't been tried too often might want to found their own version of Cupcake Royale. Bake some scrumptious cakes in a variety of interesting flavors, add some high-end coffee, and please: Make sure there's wi-fi access, preferably in exchange for buying something rather than forcing someone to sign up with a major carrier.

There's my gourmet recipe for entrepreneurial success. Give me a shout out if you decide to do it. I bet it works, and works well.

Eliot Spitzer at PBIA, and Bill Gates the blogger?

Eliot Spitzer was only trying to send out thank-you notes.

But he got stuck in one of those please-don't-recognize-me moments familiar to celebrities.

It seems the attorney general of New York, after a day of business in South Florida, was headed back to New York on a JetBlue flight out of PBIA and seated next to an older man and woman he said "looked like a Florida couple." Spitzer, who told this story at the beginning of a speech Monday night to the Society of American Business Editors and Writers in Seattle, said the woman kept looking at him, wondering where she'd seen him before.

"Aren't you the president of JetBlue?" she said.

No, said Spitzer, who earlier noted that the two best things about David Neeleman's budget airline are the TVs in the back of the seats and the biscotti they serve on board. But Spitzer's identity crisis wasn't over: The man unfolded a copy of USA Today, in which there was a story "about an insurance company beginning with A" that prominently featured a picture of Spitzer.

"He looks like you," the man told Spitzer.

"That's unlucky for him," Spitzer countered.

"Wasn't he just sent to jail for 15 years?" the woman said.

All this time, Spitzer was trying to write out formal thank-you notes on official stationery, which of course prominently feature his name. So there he was, trying to cover his stationery with his hands like a kid trying to shield his test from prying eyes, fighting off a second recognition in print as well as the lightbulb over two nearby heads.

Eventually, the man did recognize who his famous seatmate was, and the two talked for the two hours back to New York.

Spitzer, who in person is high-energy, funny and passionate, had much to say about his career, his upcoming run for governor of New York, the idea that he is serving as a Teddy Roosevelt-like agent of reform for Corporate America, andm other things that you can read about here. I didn't take elaborate notes, but I did want to share that West Palm Beach story.

Microsoft's Bill Gates also spoke to the conference, and in person he, like Spitzer, is high-energy, funny and passionate. He made some news, and also talked briefly about blogging during a question-and-answer session.

"The amount of stuff out there is unbelievable," he said, and added that the company has debated whether a Gates blog is a good idea or not, given how busy he is generally and how many shares he could move up or down with something he writes about.

But he told the conference that he's already written three test blogs, and that he and his team have talked about him writing twice a month.

"They'll let me know if they'll put me on line or not," he said to much laughter.

Again, a vignette, and what he had to say on other topics was much more important. But it's not everyday when the man whose software runs so much of the world's computing network offers his thoughts on the blogosphere.

Seattle Symphony's American festival should be emulated

This week, the Seattle Symphony launches a monthlong look at American classical music, featuring works by 15 composers written in the years 1925-1960.

Had I come to this city starting with the upcoming weekend, I could have gone to two concerts back to back at Benaroya Hall and heard works by Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem (who's coming to the Kravis later this month), Charles Ives, William Bergsma, Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions (here's a piece from The Seattle Times that lays it all out).

Music director Gerard Schwarz plans to follow this month's Made in America festival next spring with music by a newer generation of American composers, which is a wonderful notion.

This effort shows a couple important things: First, that it's still necessary to do these programs because so many Americans don't know their fellow countrymen wrote these things, nor that they were once on the cutting edge of the world's avant-garde with a sound all their own.

And second, that it's a shame these kinds of programs are still necessary because pieces such as the William Schuman Third Symphony (on a May 19 program here) should be on American symphonic concerts as a matter of course.

There's a poisonous, uninformed school of thought out there that considers American classical music as somehow inauthentic, less grassroots than mountain ballads, the Delta blues, big-city jazz, or even Northwestern grunge. But that's nonsense.

Classical music is simply another form of artistic expression, and if the instruments and formats of that expression were originally European, we've long since created a strong corpus of art on our own. Nobody thinks of the saxophone as anything but a quintessentially American instrument, but Adolphe Sax was from Belgium, and his instruments were created for wind bands over there, not invented to lie neglected until a Dixieland band came along.

There's really no reason we can't have a compelling American classical music festival in South Florida. There are legions of fine players and good ensembles that could put together instructive, rewarding programs that would introduce this body of music to listeners who have no knowledge of it, and I think they'd be impressed.

You wouldn't even need to do any symphonic concerts at all, if you couldn't get the players together. You could do dozens of programs of American string quartets, brass quintets and other chamber pieces, art songs, choral works and piano pieces. You could do wind band pieces and one-act chamber operas. There's a giant body of composition there, much of it in smaller forms, and it deserves to be heard.

Seattle's orchestra and music director Schwarz have distinguished themselves for years as advocates of American music (the David Diamond symphonies in particular come to mind), and it's splendid to see that they're still at it. But it's long past time for American music to be regularly included on classical music programs in its native country, and since dozens of concerts could be assembled with small forces, there's not much to prevent it happening except fear of audience rejection.

But I think audiences would take many of these pieces to heart, if given the chance, and I'd like to see it happen. If no one else out there wants to get behind a Seattle-style American classical music festival, I might just have to organize one myself.