PRONOUNCEMENTS ON HEZBOLLAH

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Burning issue of the day for radio people: How, exactly, do you pronounce “Hezbollah”? On NPR and PRI programs I’ve heard HEZ-bo-lah, hez-BOH-lah (from a Lebanese-American) and hez-bo-LAH, which covers all the bases. Here’s the official position of the BBC: hez-buul-AA. (Note not just the final-syllable stress, but also the vowel quality in the middle syllable.)
    One observer, though, insists that’s wrong: “It is certainly not the anglicized Hez-buul-AA but hezb-ULLL-ah with the stress on the double consonant L. Lebanese dont speak Farsi, and they pronounce Arabic words pretty much like modern standard Arabic.” So much for appealing to authority. In any case, remember that the Brits are responsible for such pronunciation abominations as the five-syllable “aluminium” and the Cervantes title “don quicks-oat.”

SCHWARZKOPF

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf died Thursday; news services assiduously tell us that “no cause of death was reported,” but she was 90, for crying out loud. What’s more important than the cause of death was the career, which was thoroughly documented via recordings, which you should hear without delay, particularly her performances of Strauss and Mahler.
    Not everyone appreciates her art; here’s Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times setting out the matter even-handedly:

    For a singer of such unquestionable stature, Miss Schwarzkopf’s work was controversial. In her prime, she possessed a radiant lyric soprano voice, impressive technical agility and exceptional understanding of style. From the 1950’s until the 1970’s, she was for many listeners the high priestess of the lieder recital, a sublime artist who brought textual nuance, interpretive subtlety and elegant musicianship to her work.
    But others found her interpretations calculated, mannered and arch (the “Prussian perfectionist,” one critic called her), and complained that in trying to add textual vitality, Miss Schwarzkopf resorted to crooning and half-spoken dramatic effects.

    Such arguments are fair enough, but Terry Teachout dislikes her work for the wrong reasons:

As for her private life, suffice it for now to say that she was a Nazi, that she lied about it for as long as she could get away with it, and that she admitted her youthful affiliation with the Nazi Party grudgingly, evasively, and only when confronted with incontrovertible documentary evidence. … Such things may not matter to you, but they do to me, all the more so in light of the fact that Schwarzkopf was so gifted and admired an artist.

    This from a man who in the same post praises recordings by Herbert von Karajan, who joined the Nazi part twice, and, like Schwarzkopf, chronically lied about it. Evaluating an artist on the basis of his or her political activities is foolish. Consider the case of Dmitri Shostakovich, who inserted passages of utter banality into even his finest works. He was roundly criticized for this in the West back when he was thought to be a Soviet lackey. But once somebody floated the theory that Shostakovich’s banality was actually satirical, intended to mock Stalin and his cronies, Westerners began hailing the claptrap passages as daring acts of secret dissidence. The music itself never changed; only its reception did, and that tells us more about the audience and critics than about the composer.
    This is aesthetic hypocrisy. Either the music is good or it isn’t, whether the composer or performer was a good person or not, and plenty of people realize that. Isn’t it time for somebody to form a club called Jews for Wagner? There’s a remarkably large potential membership.

THEATER DOLDRUMS

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    This being Thursday, I don’t have to come up with something original to blog about; I need only point you to my latest opus in the Tucson Weekly, which this time is about the pesky little money troubles of local theater groups:

Some of Tucson's best-established theater companies are in financial trouble. They're striving mightily not to make this a public issue—disaster is not yet looming—but you can figure out what's going on just by looking at their 2006-2007 season schedules.

    You can find the full article here.

RESALE

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Patty Mitchell finds a “new” (not archived) article online that looks like something she read months ago, and wonders how this sort of thing happens. Here’s how it works.
    One of the best ways for a freelance writer to make money is to sell essentially the same story to more than one publication. This is not the source of unlimited bounty, of course, because publications that cover the same subject or have the same readership don’t want to print each other’s articles. If I write something for Strings, I’m not going to pitch the same idea to Strad. A feature or review I write for Fanfare will no way, nohow show up in American Record Guide. If I sold something to the New Yorker (as if), I’d be a fool to pitch it to The Atlantic, too. But if the publications cover different areas of interest, they’re fair game. You see this a lot in newspaper travel sections. Newspapers pay very little for freelance work, on the few occasions they’ll buy freelance work, but they don’t compete with one another (except in a few remaining two-paper markets, like Tucson). So a freelance travel writer is free to crank out an account of her latest vacation in Mexico and pitch it to a hundred papers around the country. Maybe a dozen will bite. That probably adds up to about $1,000 toward the writer’s bar tab.
    Sometimes a magazine will authorize reprints of articles, and some magazines even pay writers for those reprints. Strings, for example, has been doing a lot of this lately. A piece I’ve done for Strings may be condensed and re-used in the magazine’s Teen Strings spinoff, and I’ll get a whopping $25 added to the $300 to $600 I’ve already been paid for the story. Occasionally the magazine will authorize re-use in an unrelated publication. A couple of weeks ago I interviewed someone who said he’d just seen my profile of somebody or other in a Suzuki magazine. This was news to me, but apparently the fine print says “Reprinted with permission of Strings magazine.”
    Money doesn’t always change hands. In the past few months I’ve been contacted by the organizers of music festivals in England and Boston who saw something I wrote and wanted to use it in their program booklets, and I gave the go-ahead without charge. Also, once a publication buys an article, that publication rather than the author owns all rights to the work (unless there are contractural stipulations to the contrary). Strings didn’t need my permission to hand off my article to the Suzuki publication, and I’m not sure that the last contract I signed required the magazine to pay me for such extra uses. (Web rights are a completely different, contentious issue I won’t go into here.)
    But a smart writer will do the recycling himself. Different elements of interviews I conducted with border activists found their way into separately crafted articles in the Tucson Weekly, the National Catholic Reporter, Sojourners and Salon. I’ve reworked program notes I wrote 15 years ago for Arthur Weisberg’s Ensemble 21 into magazine material, and revamped stuff I did for the Arizona Daily Star in the 1990s for liner notes for a couple of CD labels and then entries for the All Music Guide. All that material, plus blurbs I wrote around 1999-2000 for Musical Heritage Society, literary essays I concocted around that time for the e-zine The Whole Wired World, and all sorts of other stuff will regularly go into the blender and come out in some new form. It sure beats original thinking.

REVIVAL

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    It looks like former blogger Rich Russell broke his silence a couple of weeks ago. If he keeps posting, I’ll have to return him to the blogroll.

OUR FAIR CITY

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    A Wikipedia parody called “Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” includes an entry on Tucson that is most assuredly not endorsed by the City Fathers and Their Girlfriends. In the Culture section one finds this reference to a certain organization with which we are all familiar:
    “The only decent broadcast entertainment is on the university classical music station, hosted by affable, erudite annoucers who believe public obfuscation is a requirement, not a privilege.”
    Hmm. I wonder if whoever wrote that saw the Tucson Weekly column in which Tom Danehy described my delivery as “erudite and pimpish at the same time.”
    The best observation from this article: “Tucson has an Arroyo Chico but no Arroyo Harpo or Groucho.”
    Uncyclopedia also includes an entry on classical music written by someone who was obviously traumatized by old music-history texts:

The development of western classical music has been evolutionary, constantly building on the technical triumphs of the past; it has improved consistently through the work of such major figures as Johann Sebastian Bach, Mozart and Beethoven (da-da-da dum), each work being an improvement over previous compositions, until the final apotheosis demonstrated by film music such as that written for Star Wars (daaaaa da, da-da-da-daaaaa da, da-da-da-daaaaaa da, da-da-da-dum).