BLOGGING FRANKLY

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Opera singer turned opera marketer Rich Russell has left the blogosphere, citing “a bit of a conflict of interest and the inability to speak freely or usefully.” He hasn’t posted regularly since becoming Sarasota Opera’s marketing director last fall; I assumed he was devoting most of his time to learning the ropes and settling in and contending with all those other new-job clichés. I have no idea whether he was being reticent of his own accord or his boss warned him that blogging could be hazardous to his continuing employment, but I’m more concerned about the possibility of self-censorship. Rich Russell has every right to express his opinions on his own blog, and he could have told lots of juicy backstage stories and made plenty of interesting observations about the production and marketing of opera in contemporary America, all without embarrassing his employer. As long as he didn’t do anything stupid and defamatory—which is apparently beyond the ability of a lot of work bloggers in tech fields—he shouldn’t have had to worry about compromising his company or offending the boss. (Not that this was necessarily his problem; I’m using Rich’s example as a springboard for discussion of a more general concern.)
    My position is rather different from his. This blog is hosted on the KUAT server and is part of KUAT-FM’s Web presence, and I contribute to it on company time. Opinions are most decidedly my own, but given the quasi-official nature of the blog, I’m sure readers suspect I’m some sort of mouthpiece for KUAT. True, the few times I mention station policies they tend to be practices I agree with, and if I fiercely object to some new directive I might hold my tongue. Then again, I might not. It would be idiotic for me to write that my co-workers smell bad and my boss is a vicious moron, because that’s the sort of thing that would rightly get the plug pulled on the blog, and perhaps even my employment. (Calling the boss a moron on a company Web site would be equivalent to insubordination, and would be a lot like coming into the office at 9 a.m., writing “This place sucks” on company letterhead, and mailing copies to all the company’s clients.) On the other hand, if I were to write that all my co-workers are experts and the boss is the most brilliant manager in his field, readers would probably regard this as an act of sycophancy, no matter how sincere I might be. So my practice has been to remark only sparingly on KUAT specifics. Still, I do feel free to comment, often critically, on trends in public radio (the worst of which, thankfully, are not followed here), and on any number of other cultural subjects. It shouldn’t be a matter of all or nothing, and I’m sorry Rich Russell felt it necessary to retire from blogging.

TRANSGRESSIONS

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    So I’m sitting here playing a recording of the Symphonic Scherzo by Arnold Bax, and the Infamous Bax Quote comes to mind: "You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing." I wanted to check the precise wording, so I Googled “incest and folk dancing.” Many of the hits Google returned attributed the quote not to Bax but to Sir Thomas Beecham, and one even credited Oscar Wilde with the remark. Well, it certainly sounds like something Beecham or Wilde would have said, and that makes it far too easy to credit them with the quip without looking it up. (I suspect Beecham never actually uttered many of the witticisms for which he is known; they merely accreted to his reputation over the years. As Yogi Berra reputedly remarked, “I didn't really say everything I said.”)
    I first heard the quote attributed to Bax by one of my professors in library school around 1980, in a class on fine-arts reference materials. Somehow, I’m more inclined to trust the authority of my old library professor than the preponderance of opinion on the Internet. Call me old-fashioned.
    (For the record, in his 1943 book Farewell My Youth, Bax himself attributed the incest quote to “A sympathetic Scot,” which may be a fabrication, may allude to a Bax acquaintance, or may suggest that it’s some folkish proverb. Perhaps someday I’ll pursue this … in the library.)

DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    In all the blogging about how to save classical music from extinction, this is the most sensible comment I’ve seen so far:

I think we are what we are. I think it's a good idea to try new things, but it's a bad idea to try new things that are silly, cheap, or make us the laughing stock of the younger generation because we are trying so hard to be hip with a non-hip product. There's a reason popular music is called popular. We aren't pop music. There's pop fiction. There's pop culture. Fine. Let them be. They are popular now. They will not be popular later. Eventually they'll either be gone all together, or move into the "classic" realm.

QUALITY VERSUS QUANTITY

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Only now have I caught up with an article from last February in Current, public broadcasting’s trade journal. It tells us that “weak audience and income [are] blamed in classical fade” from public radio. As I’ve pointed out before, if we want to attract lots of listeners and make lots of money, we ought to give up this whole silly notion of public broadcasting and switch to mass-market formats and sell commercial time. But if we actually want to provide a good service, not just a popular and lucrative one, we need to focus on the quality of what we’re doing, not the quantity of listeners. Here are some intelligent comments from one of the article’s sources:

    "I’m very concerned that a generation moving into public radio management and staffing is tossing away something of durable value—I wouldn’t say casually, but a little bit more cold-heartedly than I think is justified," says John Montanari, music director at WFCR-FM in Amherst, Mass. "I might in my darker moments even refer to it as baby-boomer triumphalism at work." …
    WFCR’s Montanari recommends that faltering classical stations review their musical selections. When he surveys other stations’ playlists online, he says, "I’m sometimes puzzled as to why I see programming that’s filled with sort of inconsequential and second-rank performances—not timely, not fresh, not focusing on … what’s happening in their market."
    "Before a station should depart from the format, it should consider improving what they do," he says.

DREAMING OFF KEY

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Concert pianist Jeremy Denk, Joshua Bell’s frequent recital partner, hates it when his friends narrate their not-so-fascinating dreams, but he can’t help recounting one he just had, a colorful performer’s nightmare. Denk is particularly well read; I wonder if he’s ever encountered Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, a nightmare novel about a quasi-amnesiac pianist who finds himself in a strange city, facing the prospect of a concert for which he’s totally unprepared. Fans of Ishiguro’s British character study The Remains of the Day were mystified by the the later book’s surreal chronicle of Kafka-esque frustrations, but I think The Unconsoled is the superior novel—if you have the patience to hear about somebody else’s bad dreams. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

The Unconsoled is at once a gripping psychological mystery, a wicked satire of the cult of art, and a poignant character study of a man whose public life has accelerated beyond his control. The setting is a nameless Central European city where Ryder, a renowned pianist, has come to give the most important performance of his life. Instead, he finds himself diverted on a series of cryptic and infuriating errands that nevertheless provide him with vital clues to his own past. In The Unconsoled Ishiguro creates a work that is itself a virtuoso performance, strange, haunting, and resonant with humanity and wit.

DESIRE

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    All the local critics seem to like the bilingual play at Borderlands Theater very much, including me:

    The stage is a large, white circle, perhaps of fabric, like a bedsheet. Across it stretches a long, red, rectangular cloth. A man takes up one end of it, a woman the other, and the cloth becomes their connection in a slow dance, the man and woman winding toward and away from each other.
    This is the first image in Victor Hugo Rascón Banda's El Deseo/Desire, a play directed with intense physicality by Eva Tessler for Borderlands Theater. It is also a recurring image, as through the play the two characters circle each other, tangled in that vibrant red connecting fabric that never truly binds them together.