Greg Stepanich

Classical music is MIA on PBS

Caught a little bit of a PBS pledge drive on WXEL the other night, which featured a 1975 concert given by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at England's Hammersmith Odeon.

What I caught of the concert was fun, and interesting, especially because much of the band is wearing Superfly regalia, which reminded me that the mid-1970s were a very different time in American culture, and much of it seems at this juncture to be quite remote. Other things about the 1970s are not remote at all, particularly when it comes to the current energy crisis, but that's a topic for a different time.

What struck me about this late-night pledge drive was what one of the hosts said when they came back from a set. I didn't write down the exact words, but it was something to the effect of: Hey, you're tuning in to PBS, and guess what? It's not classical music! It's Bruce Springsteen!

Now his point was that PBS wants to serve as wide an audience as it can, and that means less of the old Masterpiece Theatre crowd. We have PBS on in the house fairly frequently, and we enjoy it, but it's been a while since anything like classical music was on. A few months ago, it showed one of the Van Cliburn competition segments, I think, and there might also have been a New York Phil opening night on Great Performances.

But the rest? John Denver, doo-wop and folk nostalgia, André Rieu. All of these varieties of music have fans, but you can't really call them classical. (And I like all kinds of music, but I don't have a real warm spot in my heart for any of these.)

The impression I got from the pledge drive was this: We're PBS, and we're not boring and elitist anymore. In fact, we're the Boomer nostalgia outlet! Perhaps much of this change has to do with politics, and therefore what I was seeing was the effect of years of powerful forces trying to marginalize and discredit PBS (as well as force it to have pledge drives). I'm sure there are many people who would say: Yes, that's it exactly, and others who will say: Yes, and high time, too.

But without a steady supply of classical on PBS, there's something special missing.

I've got nothing at all against Bruce Springsteen. I saw him back in the early '80s, and I had a terrific time — a long concert, full of energy and fresh rearrangements of familiar material. My favorite was his reworking of No Surrender, which in its original incarnation is big and anthemic, but in this version was a gentle, quiet meditation. It was far more compelling than the original, and I loved that he was mixing it up like that.

A great entertainer, without doubt, and a compelling songwriter (we used to love to play Adam Raised a Cain in an ad hoc garage band I was in). No complaints there, and the Hammersmith concert is a good one for fans who prefer his earlier material or newcomers to his work who want to acquaint themselves with it.

But as I've said before, PBS is one of the only places you can see any kind of classical music on a regular basis if you don't have cable TV. And there's nothing wrong with devoting public money to the presentation of this kind of music: It is alive and vibrant as it can be, and yet it is also history. It is the work of phenomenally talented fellow humans who trod this earth centuries before we did, and they still have something to say to us.

At its best, it is the sonic embodiment of the best of civilization, and if tax dollars can't be spent for that — well, then you might as well just park the pork van in the town square, hand out big menus to everyone and just have them check whatever boxes they want.

Bruce Springsteen can take care of himself. He doesn't PBS to sell DVDs of his old concerts, though I'm glad he was offering an extra DVD or something like that for PBS pledgers, which shows his heart's in the right place.

I guess I'm succumbing to a bit of Boomer nostalgia myself. I miss the days when Masterpiece Theatre played the full excerpt of the Jean-Joseph Mouret theme music instead of interrupting it. I miss the times when I could see full orchestral concerts, operas and song recitals. I miss feeling that PBS was a place I could reliably turn to if I wanted to see a certain part of our musical universe treated like it was a normal part of the culture.

Classical music has many more outlets now thanks to the Web. And many more musicians will be heard, especially if they work hard to disseminate what they have. This is a great time for classical in general because you can find it in so many places.

But there's a downside, and it's the same downside that reveals itself when a bookstore closes under pressure from online sales, or libraries take forever to get rebuilt. Our culture still needs to be a single place in which the citizen can bump into something special, something rare, something ennobling, he or she might not find another way.

You can pay for anything you want, which is what happens on cable, and there's classical music to be found there. But we still need a shared space — a public common — where the focus is brought to bear on this glorious body of music.

And that's why we still need to have PBS bring it to us.

Carlson on 'Anna'

Composer David Carlson wrote to me over the weekend in response to my May 19 blog entry about his new opera, Anna Karenina, which will have its world premiere at the new Miami Performing Arts Center on April 28 of next year.

I'm going to quote a big chunk of Mr. Carlson's e-mail (with his consent) because it sheds some interesting light on the progress of this opera, how it's been structured, and the overall focus of the piece. I don't know how many other opera world premieres we've had recently here in South Florida, and that makes what Carlson has to say important.

First off, he says that the mockup of Anna that librettist Colin Graham did for Benjamin Britten back in the 1960s isn't what he's using for the new work:

...(Librettist) Colin Graham and I would be grateful if you'd help us fend off one misconception which seems to follow this opera everywhere: Colin did write a draft libretto, more of a treatment, for Britten — who was actually asked by the foreign service not to compose it for the Bolshoi after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia (although Britten the pacifist probably wouldn't have done the piece anyway, of his own accord) — but the libretto Colin wrote for me is not THAT libretto. It is a new one, tailor-made to our new vision of the piece.

. . . If I were to say anything about the style of music I've written for Anna Karenina, it is something like Rosenkavalier is to Strauss's previous works. There's a bit of grittiness to portray the downward spiral of the plot, but most of the music (is) quite Romantic, with modulating melodies, tonal (but no key signatures), highly chromatic and, I feel, bittersweet. It is an intimate piece as well, with very few flashy numbers or dances.

There is a half-hour orchestral suite from Anna being done on August 7 with Alasdair Neale and the Sun Valley Summer Symphony (in Idaho, no less), so there will be available a good representation of what the music will be, albeit with no singers....

As I said earlier, I think Anna makes a wonderful subject for an opera, and I'm eager to see this treatment of the novel. It's interesting that Graham and Carlson want to present the whole tapestry of the book, when it would surely be easier to focus only on the melodrama of Anna's tragic arc. But they're going after the contrast, which, if it's successful, should read theatrically like one of those PBS blockbusters drawn from enormous works of fiction.

As you watch, you follow some stories more intently than others, perhaps, but at the end you're left with an astonished, overwhelmed impression of life's great variety. That will be a serious challenge for Carlson and Graham, and it only increases my interest in seeing how this work comes out.

'Muso' targets younger classical set

Here’s a Web site for a British classical music magazine called Muso, which I’ve not been able to find in print hereabouts, but it’s billed as “the magazine for the younger, more open-minded generation of classical music fans.�

I’m not certain I know exactly what they mean by “more open-minded generation,� but I’ll chalk that up to the youthful vigor that looks askance at out-of-it older dweebs like me.

Muso also is geared to young orchestral musicians who are looking for advice and inside information about careers in music, and I love the idea that journalists are writing about this aspect of the musical life in a way that makes it normal.

There are plenty of links to interesting sites here, and I’ve been happily linking away for the better part of an hour, clicking on things at random in the links list.

One such journey took me to the site of the Canadian violinist Lara St. John, which includes a debate from the pages of The Strad between St. John and the cellist Janos Starker about the propriety of using physical beauty – which she possesses, and knows it — to sell music.

St. John has no problem with it, saying she added 20,000 copies of her Bach solo disc because of its provocative cover, and I’m sure she’s right. It seems to me that the St. John approach, as I’ve indicated in a previous post, is more and more likely to be the norm for classical marketing, and if it brings in the listeners — well, on the one hand, there’s reason to deplore the influence of the celebrity culture on the music, and on the other, it is part of the entertainment industry and you have to bring in the audience somehow.

I’ve addressed that issue before in this blog, and I am a little worried that too many young musicians will be thinking too much about their glam quotient or lack of it, to the detriment of the music. We’re well in the grip of a much more aggressively marketed generation of musician, without a doubt.

Anyway, I can’t see too much of Muso on the Web, so I’m thinking of signing up for this magazine for a year or so and see what it can tell me about the younger classical crowd. The Web site alone demonstrates that there’s a youthful interest in this form of music that has yet to be properly and fully measured by society at large.

An arts manifesto from Sellars

How serious can you be about your life? is what a symphony concert is about. It has not one thing to do with leisure time. Not related. America’s obsession with leisure is exactly the crisis, and we don’t want to be part of that. We actually are part of something, which if I could say, is about being part of the next America.

— Peter Sellars, in a keynote address June 1 to the
American Symphony Orchestra League at Disney Hall, Los Angeles

Take a moment or two and listen, if you will, to this speech by Peter Sellars, the eternal enfant terrible of the American stage, and one of the most vital and important people of culture working in the United States today.

This address is nothing less than a manifesto for a recommitment to the arts, a call for a revitalization of musical institutions (and by extension, other cultural redoubts) that emphasizes inclusion and education and thereby rescues a country he deeply loves and believes to be in dire peril.

I don’t agree with everything he says in this speech, but overall I found it to be one of the most exciting, provocative addresses on this critical subject I’ve heard in years. And the primary reason for that is that when you are listening to Sellars you are listening to a man of arts who also happens to be a man of action. Music, as well as the arts in general, are for him an absolutely essential part of society in general, and of a just society in particular.

It is wonderful to hear someone talk about music and the arts as though they really do matter (and they do), and matter in a way that requires its performers and audiences to be engaged. What he does basically here is make the case for the arts as critically important to the American experiment, and to democracy and connectedness as a whole, and he also calls on orchestras to reach out to underserved communities and musical styles they might otherwise ignore.

I do have two objections that I’ll cite here. One is to the suggestion at the very beginning of the speech that somehow classical music has been kept alive on an artificial support system, and that the only thing that keeps it going is particular personalities who are doing fresh things, and by this he means the podium style and new-music enthusiasm of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and an important composer.

He’s making an argument for a recommitted kind of performance he doesn’t think we have much these days, apparently, but he’s completely wrong -— it’s the everyday commitment of classical musicians he’ll never hear of everywhere in this country, giving of themselves and this music in multitudinous settings, many of them one-on-one in the teaching environment, that keep not just this music but all music alive and kicking as long as there is breath in the body of humanity.

It’s simply not true to say that the paradigm for classical music these days is what it was in the heyday of Arturo Toscanini and David Sarnoff, and it’s unfortunate that Sellars doesn’t appear to realize this.

And in another over-the-top moment, he says that the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven is “a program for radical social inclusion. And unless we mean it, we should not be playing Beethoven.� It’s a very quotable thing to say, and in large part, he’s right. Beethoven was inspired by a Masonic-cum-Enlightenment vision of all humanity as one brother-and-sisterhood under the supervision of a benevolent Godhead, and he really meant it. It’s not for nothing that he wrote down quotes from Indian philosophy in his Tagebuch.

Whether this means that the performers have to have the same political commitment he did in order to present the piece authentically is another question entirely. It’s an inspiring thing to recommend when the politics of a piece are cousins to the thinking (which after all was contemporary with Beethoven) that crafted the instruments of our own government. But when the politics are repulsive — the anti-Semitic caricatures to be found in Wagner’s Beckmesser and Mime, for instance — it’s better that we concentrate on the music as music, and consign the non-musical thinking of that composer to a dark chapter of human history that should permanently be left unopened.

I’m not going to examine the specifically political aspects of Sellars’ speech; I’ll simply applaud him for making such a strong case for arts engagement. As you hear him speak, you can hear what an intense person he must be — indeed, he’s intense to the point of fragility, and at one point toward the end he’s briefly overcome by emotion as he relates a powerful story about a gang funeral in East L.A. and how it was reflected in Beethoven’s Egmont Overture (“Those opening chords, in that grief-stricken community, were overwhelming�).

Now that’s not a comparison you’re going to hear every day — and it’s a beautiful one — and that’s one of the reasons I found this speech to be so laudable, so worthwhile, so urgent. You might find his left-wing politics not to your liking, and his vision of inclusion politically correct in an almost gooey way, but if you’re at all interested in what music and the arts are all about, and how important they are to society in general, you’ll find this speech an utterance that can’t be ignored.

Writing music, the old-fashioned way

Over the last week or two I wrote a piece of music to accompany one of our slideshows here at The Post.

This one featured young area sports all-stars, and it was compiled to accompany a print version that ran in Sunday’s paper. The folks who asked me to write the music wanted something martial and noble, and so I tried to compose something that would sound sort of like a cross between a John Williams Star Wars score and Elgar, and I think it came off reasonably well. You can hear for yourself what it sounded like by clicking here.

It took me about a day to write the piece, and then another day to orchestrate it in short score — two staves for winds, two for brass, two for strings, one for percussion. I took the score to the estimable musician and producer Matt Corey, and the two of us worked through the score for about four hours to get the 6-minute piece into reasonable shape.

That’s really all there was to it, but as I’ve asked friends here what they thought of the piece — not so much its quality, which is deliberately derivative, but whether it works with the picture — I’ve gotten one question several times: What program, i.e., software, do you use to write your music?

While I could answer that question if it meant: what software did you use to record the music?, my answer for how it came to be written is, as I now realize, as old-fashioned as it can be.

I wrote it on paper, with a pencil, and I used the musical thoughts in my head to write it, as well as a battered upright piano.

So my question is this: When did it become the common conception that composers writing a certain kind of music sit at computers to write it?

I’m certainly aware that a lot of composers do in fact write this way, essentially noodling around until they find something good, and then capturing it on tape. I’ve done a couple things like that for some other projects, but only because we’d rented a very cool synthesizer for the afternoon and we needed to get everything we could out of it.

But that was an aberration. Most of the time, I try to write my stuff in my head. I find it a lot easier that way, because if I sit too long at the piano trying out things, I end up with my attention wandering, doodling around and wasting time playing any old thing that pops into my brain. It’s better for the music and for my fulfilling assignments to step away from the piano and try to write down the things as I hear them in my head.

I don’t have perfect pitch, so I have to test the things I write, and often I’ll play through something and realize it needs to be changed. Aaron Copland used to say that the methods of composition didn’t matter, only the results. So if someone comes up with something fabulous by sitting around with all the software ready to help him or her out, then I guess that’s good. The listener won’t know the difference, and doesn’t need to.

I just find myself in the unpleasant situation once again of discovering that the world has moved on from where I am, and that people tend to think that a composer is a person who works a computer, not sits at a table and scribbles notes on a piece of paper. Here I am, still doing things the way music writers did it centuries ago, and who’s to say the technologically underserved composers of the 18th century, say, wouldn’t have welcomed a primitive version of a MIDI to crank out the pieces for the Esterhazys and their ilk?

But there’s something important for me about forcing myself to write it the old way: I think it concentrates the intellect for the task at hand, and I think the music probably comes out better for it. And I realize it will get harder and harder in the very near future to hold onto that way of creating, because anyone who wants your music these days wants to hear a MIDI realization and see the score in nicely printed form (as I can do with my Sibelius software, which I did not use this time because it was going to be only me who had to read it).

Still, I’ll hold on for a while to dreaming up things and then trying to write them down without the aid of computers. Maybe in a way it’s a form of resistance to the technology that is probably redefining us too fast for us to get a proper handle on it.

Review: Music for two pianos at PBAU

The local two-piano husband-and-wife team of Marcio Bezerra and Estibaliz Gastesi gave a concert back in late March at Palm Beach Atlantic University that featured contemporary American music for duo pianos, including three pieces written for them.

I mentioned the concert in passing back then, and Bezerra (who does occasional music reviews for our sister paper, the Palm Beach Daily News) sent me a disc of the evening. I’ve not been able to give it a close listen until now, so my apologies for writing such a late review.

The special guest for the concert was the New York-based composer Terry Winter Owens. She’s a devotee of G.I. Gurdjieff, the 20th-century mystic and teacher, and the three large pieces by Owens on the program had much the same kind of sound: Melancholy and deliberate, with frequent half-step ostinatos and a general feeling of dark, suspended animation.

What’s interesting is how much the rest of the program also reflected this same sound world. With minor exceptions here and there, the seven works on the recital shared a common mood, much of it seemingly derived from Debussy and Ravel, though with more dissonant harmonies.

Bezerra and Gastesi certainly played well, and doubtless gave scrupulous attention to realizing the composers’ visions. It’s just that so many of the visions were pretty much the same, and what was absent for most of the music was a piece that was driven by themes or narrative line rather than mood or texture, which appeared to me to dominate the selections.

The three Owens compositions — Ariadne’s Crown (1995), Pianophoria 3 (1994), and Ancient Fire (2004) — gave us a composer enamored of somber tone colors and a love of slowly murmuring accompaniment figures. The tension in Owens’ music is tightly controlled; after several minutes of near motionlessness, themes return with more force and insistence.

Repeated listening reveals subtle differences of harmony and shade that add up to a lot because the surrounding music is so static. In the final minutes of Ancient Fire, for instance — which opened with a pretentious narration about synapses and energy and light — the secondary theme, a six-note motif that rotated around a minor third, became a good deal warmer harmonically, making it more effective in contrast when strident chords intervened moments later to crush it.

But overall, Owens’ music, while it provides an ideal sonic counterpoint to quiet contemplation, offers too little in the way of structural or thematic interest to stand alone. It’s more interesting as scene setting than drama.

Justin Rubin’s three-part suite, A Rebours (2005), one of the commissioned works, nicely reflected the decadence of Huysmans' novel in the first movement (marked Sognando con rubato), a sad waltz with a fractured, distant melody. The other two movements devoted much of their time to ostinato patterns shot through with thematic fragments, though with greater energy than Owens, particularly in the second movement (Leggeramente).

PBAU professor Marlene Woodward-Cooper’s Deceptions, also written last year for the duo, featured many repeated patterns in its five movements. The third (Allegretto) owed a heavy debt to Debussy, and to the Pagodes movement of Estampes in particular.

But Woodward-Cooper also offered the liveliest music of the evening in the fifth movement (Moderato), which had a catchy, danceable ostinato and a bluesy, brash theme above it. It ended a little prematurely; it’s the kind of music that could have generated quite a bit more heat had Woodward-Cooper let it go on further.

Thomas J. Wegren’s Fantasy and Fugue drew a good deal of spiky power from its Russian-flavored theme, which was stated in full octave glory toward the end of the six-minute piece. Wegren, like Rubin a professor at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, made much more imaginative use of the full range of the piano than did the other composers, and while this piece, also written last year, doesn’t hang together too well, it was gratifying to hear some examples of the other sounds the instrument can make.

Tim Thompson’s Seven Fleeting Moments, the third commissioned piece, demonstrated the widest variety in his seven-part suite, four of whose movements were less than a minute long. His third and sixth movements joined the slow-and-steady bandwagon that the recital largely rode, while the other movements sounded more like fragments of ideas than realized miniatures.

Yet there was something very moving and personal about the third movement, which presented a very soft, gentle landscape cut once or twice by a gamelan-style cluster, and an insistent, sad scrap of a melody whose hushed yearning came very near to poetry. (Thompson’s Web site has recordings from this concert that you can listen to here.)

The Duo Gastesi-Bezerra is to be congratulated for devoting an entire evening to fresh American composition for two pianos. These are fine musicians with a dedication to new work, and that’s how our musical culture advances.

It’s to be hoped, though, that they are able to find pieces in the future that give listeners a far wider sound palette than the works on this program. The two-piano format isn’t the most congenial for sound variety — two pianos sound much more percussive than one — but much more can be done than was in evidence here.

Will CDs last another 10 years?

Here’s a piece from Gramophone online about a conference held June 1 that took a look at the way the Internet is changing the future of classical music.

As I’ve said, I agree with the view that classical listeners have more choice than they ever had for performances and repertoire, and that bodes well for the music in general, if not necessarily for the institutions that present it (but I’m all for subsidies for groups that can’t find enough juice in the market).

What struck me about this piece was the idea that the compact disc itself might be headed out the door. One of the participants in the conference, violist Robert Levine, says it will be gone in 10 years:

At the end of the panel, moderator McLennan asked each member whether CDs would still be around in 10 years. The answers were yes, don’t know and, from Levine, a very positive no (‘bandwidth trumps plastic’).

On the surface, he could very well be right. If the majority of us by then have adapted to the digital downloading of music as the primary source of our listening, it’s hard to see how stores will want to keep devoting bricks and mortar to the housing of little sound discs shrinkwrapped in jewel boxes. There’s not much doubt that the computer itself will soon take on a centrality we’ve only just started to witness.

In about 10 years, we’ll be relying on some sort of CPU to run all our entertainment: One provider will be offering everything from phone service to broadband (or something even faster) plus links to everything we want, such as live or recorded concerts, favorite selections from the past, audio magazines of the newest and latest.

Scene, 2018: You come home, make a quick call to your spouse or friends. Their faces pop up on virtually invisible screens on the wall as you address them, and they see you, too. You do your audio hang-up, then press buttons or tell the CPU that you want to see the news or call up your favorite Web sites, or find that recording of John McCormack doing Champs paternels, from Méhul’s Joseph.
You like to listen to it as you exercise…..

That kind of future isn’t far off, and once it becomes cheaper in general, the mass of people will no doubt adopt it. We’re going to be bathed in entertainment if we want, and I think most people will be perfectly happy to be so.

But I hope there always will be a small part of our society that will allow for the retrograde and for yesterday’s news. Perhaps I’ve gotten too used to the way music has traditionally been delivered to me, but I like the idea every once in a while of someone presenting something to me. You should listen to this, the unseen promoter says, you’re really going to love it.

We’re always going to need mediators of the culture, be they critics or publicists. There’s simply too much stuff out there for any one person to do it all himself or herself (and here’s a Web site that’s getting a lot of buzz for its work in contemporary pop music). One way that culture is mediated is by presentations of music via marketed collections, with the artwork and the notes to accompany it.

As I mentioned in my last post, there’s something serendipitous that I really like about bumping into something I didn’t know I wanted to hear. Go too far the other way, and you saturate yourself in one style to the exclusion of other influences. One shouldn’t underestimate the beauty of chance, or its power.

So I don’t know whether the CD will be around, but vinyl has managed to hold on a little, and I think it might last a bit longer than some think. Just because one part of the old culture gets dumped by the new doesn’t mean everyone will get rid of it.

Another booknote: Had my collections been at hand when I wrote my Borders piece, I would have quoted the final paragraph of the British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1978 novel, The Bookshop. I’m quoting this because even the loss of chain outlet says something sad about the vigor of the book-buying and book-reading public:

In the winter of 1960, therefore, having sent her heavy luggage on ahead, Florence Green took the bus into Flintmarket via Saxford Tye and Kingsgrave. Wally carried her suitcases to the bus stop. Once again the floods were out, and the fields stood all the way, on both sides of the road, under shining water. At Flintmarket she took the 10.46 to Liverpool Street. As the train drew out of the station she sat with her head bowed in shame, because the town in which she had lived for nearly 10 years had not wanted a bookshop.

I'll miss Boynton Borders

Over the past two months, Inc. Magazine ran a two-part series on the fight out in Northern California to save a bookstore called Kepler’s, which had been an institution in Menlo Park, not least because of its serious countercultural cred garnered during the wild-and-woollies of the 1960s.

That’s usually the kind of bookstore-death story that makes good press: A modest but beloved business finds itself crushed by the majors and the indifferent, illiterate public, and shutters after 60 careworn years to make way for a trendy restaurant or the wrecker’s ball.

But this past weekend, a branch of a major chain bookstore closed near my house, and though it might not be fashionable to do so, I’d like to mourn it for a moment.

If you lived around here back in the early 1990s, you remember that when it came to bookstores, this area had practically nothing. You could travel down the road to Lauderdale for a wallow in a great used-book collection at Hittel’s, and there were the odd, small Waldenbook and Bookstop outlets here and there.

But if you wanted to go to a store that featured plenty of new books as well as a coffee shop and a big selection of music, such as were appearing steadily in the nation’s major cities, you were out of luck. I remember searching far and wide for a Borders Books nearby back around 1994, and finding there was one, after all, but it was in Aventura or Kendall (can’t recall which at the moment).

Such was my desperation for one of these places — I’d been to others in Chicago and Washington and missed them here — that I planned a trip to Miami to check it out (and also make a stop at the legendary Books & Books, which was pretty wonderful the last time I stopped in). Before I did that, though, word came that Borders Books and Music was going to open soon in Coral Springs.

For people like me, a Borders isn't just a bookstore. It's a place not only to see all that retail space devoted to books and commune with all the knowledge they contain, it's also a place to buy music. Without a record store that catered to someone who loves classical and jazz, you've got to head for one of the superstores in order to find what you want.

Admittedly, you can find anything you need online, which is one of the reasons this form of music is doing as well as it is today. But there's something exceptional and beautiful about browsing in a bookstore bumping into things serendipitously, and sharing the moment of discovery along with other people in the room who are doing the same thing.

I know it's not politically correct to applaud the superstores; it's hard for independent booksellers to compete against companies such as Barnes & Noble and Borders, whose size gives them a real advantage. But customers like me patronize all kinds of bookstores, and we love them all.

The Borders outlet in Boynton Beach closed Saturday. I've spent a lot of time and money there, and I will miss it. The Barnes & Noble nearby has also been a frequent recipient of my hours and cash, and it's a nice place. But I went to the Borders when I wanted a deeper selection; I found that a more esoteric title would be at the Borders if it wasn't at the B&N.

And the same goes for the music selection. Some of the harder-to-find things would be at the Borders, and it was always worth going there to see whether they had it. And I liked the atmosphere in there, too. It wasn't super-large, and it was homey and friendly.

I guess I also really liked having two book superstores within shouting distance of each other, but now that's gone.

Borders Group Inc. racked up sales in its most current fiscal year of $4.1 billion, and it's got more than 1,240 stores in every state and four other countries. So the loss of a store for them means they tried something in a market that didn't quite support it.

But for me, it's the loss of a place where I could feel like myself, frankly: A geeky man, obsessed with books and music, the kind of person who rather pursue those two interests almost above anything else. I'll miss the Boynton Borders, and the people who worked there, and especially miss the extra outpost of culture it brought to the place I call home.

Even a multibillion-dollar chain bookstore needs friends.

On the death of Ligeti

With the death Monday of the Hungarian composer György Ligeti, the world loses an eminent creator who had the good fortune late in life to be widely recorded and celebrated by the classical world at large.

But the death of the 83-year-old Ligeti also marks the loss of a composer of the old school, a writer who was prominent in the days when serialism was dominant. We are currently in a time of far greater eclecticism, in which classical writers have essentially opened the door to the influences of the vast world of popular music around them, among other things; it’s safe to say that absolutely anything goes if you’ve got a strong enough message and you can reach an audience.

I’ve been listening to some Ligeti for the past few hours, and what I like about it is that even amid a sometimes-fearsome tonal fabric and an organizational approach that defies ancient expectations, there’s a distinctive personality in there. In a couple student pieces for string quartet, for instance, the hand of Bartok lies heavy on the proceedings, but there’s something gentler about it than the older composer would have counseled.

The Violin Concerto has this absolutely wacky chorale of ocarinas and brass in the middle of the second movement that sounds like the Haunted Nymphs Chorus has wandered into the wrong recital hall, and in the Piano Concerto, the second movements features a slide whistle playing along with a piccolo and bassoon. That, too, makes a deliciously weird effect.

We’re told that Ligeti relished the sound of hard-to-tune instruments, and what’s remarkable to me about their presence as fascinating bits of tone color amid a very different kind of music is what that says about the personality of the man who wrote it. All of the music I’ve listened to since last night (the piano, violin and cello concerti, the two string quartets and a couple string duets) has a kind of urbane impishness that moderates what some ears would find too hard to listen to.

The opening of the piano concerto, for instance, starts with a very jazzy, danceable kind of riffing in the solo instrument, and throughout there’s a geniality that is entirely missing in some of the composers that have followed him. In the first and second string quartets I hear (besides more Bartok) the kind of style now evident in the ongoing Naxos Quartet series of Peter Maxwell Davies. But while Davies is all intensity and seriousness, there’s something much lighter and delicate about Ligeti’s work that invites further listening.

Another thing that we lose with the death of Ligeti is the connection to a time not long ago when substantial portions of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Russia, had micromanaged the work of their artists in a bid to make it serve the wishes of the state. As Ligeti put it in the notes to a 1996 Arditti Quartet recording of those quartets, the situation in Hungary was such that like-minded artists who weren’t crazy about the idea of being dictated to by the state wrote for themselves, and hopefully, for future performances in friendlier times:

…The fact that everything “modern� was banned (just as it had once been banned in Nazi Germany) merely served to increase the attractiveness of the concept of modernity for non-conformist artists. Books were written, music was composed and pictures were painted in secret, and this in what little free time they had available to them. To work for one’s bottom drawer was regarded as an honor.

It’s easy for us to lightly regard the kind of courage it took to do that. It was no laughing matter to be an artist and defy the tenets of socialist realism, but it’s tough at this distance to think of writing a poem that the Soviets wouldn’t like and filing it away as an act of bravery. But it was, and the composers, writers and painters who continued on when it would have been safer to bend their talents to politics deserve credit for insisting on humanity’s right to be — well, human.

Ligeti isn’t one of my favorite composers, and there’s a lot of his music I should know better, but don’t. I’ll endeavor to do that in the near future, but in the meantime, it’s useful to reflect on his example, which is the example of the artist who wants to pursue an independent path and finds a way to do it.

Celebrating Zwickau's favorite son

Yesterday was the anniversary of the birth of Robert Schumann, born in 1810 in the German city of Zwickau.

Schumann lived only 46 years and much of it was troubled; he has been the subject of several studies into his mental problems, and it seems likely that he was one of the few major composers who was literally mentally ill much of the time.

Peter Ostwald, an American psychiatrist, wrote the best-known one (Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius). Ostwald believed Schumann was bipolar, and that seems logical to me, given the incredible bouts of creativity he had, cranking out piece after piece and then falling into periods of near-immobility in his down states. He must have suffered terribly from not only the times when he couldn't write, but the times he could. He must have felt overwhelmed by his assiduity when he was in a manic creative phase, and probably he felt drained when he was done.

The question for me is whether or not it was worth it to be Schumann, to know that there was something slightly wrong with you, but that it was that wrong thing that was putting out all that music. It had to be terrifying and exciting at the same time.

Schumann's case also raises interesting questions about the nature of creativity: Is creativity to be admired when it is more or less the byproduct of cerebral irritation? In some ways, these creators who literally suffered for their art are like exceptional plants in hostile land, putting out flower after flower but scarcely knowing why.

I'm one of those who believes that our country in general falls well short of dealing adequately with the incidence of mental illness in society. I think we could do a lot more for people than we do, but it would take a radical rethinking of how we do health care in the USA, and that's not going to happen soon.

I'd be willing to give up some Schumann works that never would have gotten written had he been of sounder mind. It'd be worth the absence of some pieces to know that in place of them their would-be creator got to sleep night after night without having to worry about the terrors of his
imagination.

Here's a posting by Pliable of On an Overgrown Path, who visited Zwickau earlier this year and did a tour of Schumann sites. (You've got to love that billboard.)

I'm a fan of some of Schumann's lesser-known vocal music — Das Paradies un die Peri, for example — and it's a mystery to me why we don't hear pieces like this more often. To mark his birthday, I'll listen to a recording of that work, if I can find it, plus a string quartet or two and some of his songs (Du bist wie eine Blume is one of my favorites).

Current obsessions II

I’ve been listening time and again over the past week or two to an older King’s Singers recording of a beautiful four-part canzone published in Antwerp in 1563 by the South Netherlands composer Séverin Cornet (1530-1582).

The song, called Parmi di star, is, I gather from Webbish research, is probably Cornet’s best-known piece; it’s a Neapolitan-style song, and the old Grove article I’m looking at says Cornet, who was a choirmaster in Malines and Antwerp for most of his professional life, might have spent some time in Italy as a young man.

Knowing he made his living as a choir director helps me understand something about the piece. The King’s Singers, in this 1991 recording of music from Renaissance Naples (La Dolce Vita), sing this work voluptuously, and I have to believe Cornet probably loved intimate music for voices, having spent his professional career listening to sonic glory unfold from a motley crew of throats assembled in front of him.

Parmi di star is a lovely, slow-moving melody harmonized with relatively simple chords, but minor-key ones at first, which give the words a special kind of ache. I’ll quote the first stanza (no idea where the words come from):

Parmi di star la nott’in Paradiso
Mentre ch’in sonno, mi tien abbracciato.
Deh, dolce sonno, tu mi fai beato.

(It seems as if I spent the night in Paradise
In sleep you embraced me.
Ah, sweet sleep, you make me happy.)

In the next stanza, the lovelorn swain kisses the face of his amour a thousand times (Baciote mille volte in sonn’il viso), but it’s clear that he’s doing this in his dreams. I love the directness of these passionate lyrics, and the gentle beauty of the song. There’s something glorious about this poor guy’s frustration, his obsession, which we feel even more strongly because of the way Cornet has set it.

I’ve been looking for a sound link for it, but can’t find one. If anyone out there knows of one that would let other people hear the song, let me know. I’m sure you can find it on iTunes otherwise.

I don’t know anything else by Séverin Cornet, but I’m grateful to him for taking some time in Antwerp back in the 1560s to write this song down, and preserve this little sliver of beauty for all of us many centuries later. Astounding, again, how music and sentiment so old can blossom anew, and sound as fresh as it did on a day impossibly long ago when the piece first was heard.

When musicians do politics, or don't

I've finished reading (twice) the second volume of Stephen Walsh's biography of Igor Stravinsky, and I greatly enjoyed it. I've completed a review of the book that I'll submit this week, and hope it appears in print soon.

I'll expand on the book's finer points in the review, but there was one thing that struck me in particular: How essentially apolitical the composer was, at least in his American years. There were times when he poke politically (most famously about not wanting to return to Russia, then the Soviet Union, because people there weren't free), but his life was mostly about music, society and family relationships, and that's where he expended most of his effort.

For instance, one his last attempts at composition came in two arrangements of songs by Hugo Wolf, written in the tumultuous year of 1968:

In one other respect these arrangements share an attribute that has run through Stravinsky's work like a vein of crystal: the quality of detachment from daily life and current affairs . . . (1968 was) one of the most politically momentous years since the war. Insofar as Stravinsky's work or correspondence reflect any view on them, it is, if anything, a liberal one. But it is the passive liberalism of an old man whose mind is turning away from the Third World and toward the Next World.

So is it important for a composer or a performer to be politically engaged? Should they be heard when they feel like speaking out, and should we judge their art differently because of what they said — or didn't say?

The program notes at the New World Symphony concert I attended that featured the Webern Op. 6 pieces pointed out that the composer might not have been as innocent of Nazi complicity as first believed (and that the U.S. soldier's gunshot that killed him was less accidental than has been said).

Richard Strauss was compliant with the Hitler regime — he was president of the Reichmusikkammer — but basically, as Harold Schonberg once wrote, he was "opportunistic, amoral and apolitical, and all he wanted was to be left alone to write his music and make money.�

Russian music in the 20th century was full of compromises with a brutal regime, and those who spoke out, especially when Stalin was alive, found themselves in difficult circumstances. It's impossible for me, no matter how many times I read about it and talk to people who lived through it, to understand completely what it must have been like to try to be a creative artist in a political system that utterly dominated every aspect of your life.

Of course, there is positive political engagement as well. We're in the middle of a new wave of attention being paid to artist involvement in big causes — Bono pursuing a worldwide campaign to urge wealthy nations to forgive poor countries' debt, for example — and this is taking place across the creative spectrum.

The current president, too, has his supporters and detractors from the arts world, and both sides feel strongly about their respective positions. Those positions will one day be judged by history, and we'll probably reassess their work accordingly.

It seems to me that a life in music is most often a life spent in the grip of a passion, and most of the musicians I know do indeed have big opinions about the world around them, partly because they live those lives for much of the time in the public eye. I would lean toward giving a politically engaged artist — whether I happen to agree with him or her or not — a little more of my attention, and I think that's because if you have the ear of the public at some time and you bring up something political, you may be the only person a listener encounters who raises uncomfortable or important questions.

And so insofar as their system allows them to, I think it's good for musicians and other artists to speak up if the spirit moves them to do so. I don't have anything against those who disengage themselves, but there's something more exciting, more vital, about those who make a political gesture. I should clarify that point a bit and say that it's admirable to see this as long as the ideas are within the spectrum of normal political debate (I can't admire the politics of people like Richard Wagner, merchant of odium, though his music is often wonderful).

I guess I'm with Yevgeny Yevtushenko on this one. This is from a poem he wrote for Shostakovich, when they were talking about writing a piece about "conscience":

And if in this wide world where no one,
No one is guiltless, someone has heard
Within himself the cry "What have I done?"
Then something can be done with this world.

Even cheesy novelty tunes have a parent

What do the sex lives of Swedes, Italian film music and the Muppets have in common?

Four words, or more precisely, four syllables: Mah Nà, Mah Nà.

A friend sent this link of the Muppets doing the 1968 novelty hit Mah Nà Mah Nà to me, and after laughing a while on my trip down Boomer memory lane, I had to find out: Where does the music come from?

It's easy enough to discover, given the vast resources of the Web. But in order to save everyone the trouble, I'll reveal that Mah Nà Mah Nà is the work of an Italian composer named Piero Umiliani (1926-2001), who wrote it for a semi-documentary about sex in Sweden.

No, really! You can read about it in this Wiki entry, on which someone has spent a good deal of time.

What was most interesting to me was the interview I linked to from an Italian magazine called Jaguar, in which Umiliani was interviewed about his career. You can read that here; the English translation isn't very idiomatic, but what comes across is appealing.

Umiliani showed musical talent as a young man, but ended up earning a law degree. A friend urged him to keep pursuing music, which he did, but wasn't enamored of classical music. He preferred jazz, in particular Duke Ellington.

He got his foot in the door in the Italian film industry, cranked out a bunch of work, and then toward the end of his life he enjoyed something of a renaissance of interest in his music, which he says he found gratifying.

He's pretty sanguine about the success of Mah Nà, Mah Nà, calling it just an excuse to mess around with a three-note sequence. But what he came up with was something catchy — very cheesy, in the lite-jazz-with-flutes style of the late 1960s, but catchy. It's not surprising it went on to be a hit everywhere, not just on radio but as accompaniment to sketches on The Benny Hill Show and, of course, as a recurring Muppet bit.

I bring this up not just to have an excuse to watch a couple minutes of The Muppet Show, but to point out that music like this, though it seems like it was sort of created by a bunch of rogue instruments who were left unsupervised for a half-hour in a Muzak studio, really was actually composed by someone.

There aren't too many pieces of commercial music like this that are still hanging around as part of the Zeitgeist, even if they've faded a bit. The only other piece I can think of in this category outside Leo Arnaud's Olympics theme, which I've mentioned before, is The Stripper, written in 1958 by David Rose, and I guarantee you know how that one goes.

Anyway, it's a curious kind of fame, to go to bed each night knowing you wrote something most of the people in the world probably know, and that it sets most of them to whistling.

Practice: My neglected musical art

A friend writes:

....I was hired by a church shortly after moving here to play piano for the choir. It was a bit of a panic at first, as I'm not a very good sight-reader. But I had time while my student base was growing, and I actually spend about an hour a day practicing. To my amazement I have made remarkable progress ... The piano is SO FUN!

I read this note with the shame and anguish known so intimately to those of who don't practice our instruments enough. In my case, it's the piano: If I don't go to the 88s as often as I think I should, the keyboard looks like a large, snarling mouth that's ready to rebuke me should I be so foolish as to approach it, having neglected it so long.

I don't know how many times I've crafted new practice schedules, vowed to myself that I would really do it this time, and while I might get it done for a little while, before too long I've let it slide all over again.

Most of what I do at my instrument these days is hack through some of the things I once practiced, or hack through scores of things I'm going to hear at a concert. The other thing I do at the piano is write music though I like to write away from the instrument as much as I can; if I start writing at the piano, I find myself noodling away on all kinds of ephemeral stuff and basically ignoring the task at hand.

This wouldn't bother me so much if I didn't know, like my friend now does, how much more fun it is to play when you can play decently. I've never been a wonderful player, but when I've practiced a little bit, I can achieve a fluency that makes me pretty happy.

I'm well aware that not all that long ago, most composers were also proficient instrumentalists, and that the music they were writing was something they were crafting in order to bring home the daily bread. As Mozart wrote to his father back in 1784:

The concerto Herr Richter praised to her so warmly is the one in B-flat, the first one I composed and which he praised so highly to me at the time. I really cannot choose between the two of them, but I regard them both as concertos which are bound to make the performer perspire ... Only today I could have gotten 24 ducats for one of them, but I think it will be more profitable to me to keep them by me for a few years more and then have them engraved and published.

(Aside: According to some guesstimates from scholars I'm looking through, that 24 ducats works out to somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,200, which wasn't a bad sum in those days, either.)

But as the musical spheres have widened over the last 100 years or so, composers have gotten further away from being able to play well. In one sense, that leaves the imagination free to cook up whatever impossible stuff you want — heck, you don't have to play the thing — but on the other, it gets us away from being part of the joy of music.

Then, too, it's also a separate thing: Being a re-creator of someone else's music gives you a different sense of responsibility, like the expert professional called in to fix the plumbing, or the surgeon calmly presiding over another open-heart surgery: I'll take care of this, and everything will be fine.

My friend's e-mail letter has sparked in me once again the desire to be a better player, and I think I'm going to try it once again. Over the next day or two, I'm going to figure out how to practice regularly, even if it's for just a few moments every day.

There's something maddening about never having had the patience to clear up that annoying ornament you don't quite play correctly in the Bach-Busoni chorale prelude (Ich rufï' zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ), and maybe it's mounting thoughts of mortality as I age, but I just don't want to go into the cold, cold ground without giving myself the chance to be better at something I love.

So I'll take suggestions from players out there, and sometime players, and new players— whomever. If you've got only a little time to practice each day, when's the best time for you? I'd love to get some ideas; I could use the advice and the inspiration.

Time to get back to the woodshed.