REUNION

posted by James Reel

    My cello has come home! It’s been in the shop for what seems like three but is probably only two weeks. Zoran, the cellist/luthier from whom I bought the instrument, had promised to fix up the many scratches on the old thing when I wrote him the check last spring, but only recently did his schedule and mine allow time for my cello to go to the spa. The instrument is nothing really special, a German factory job from the first third of the 20th century, but Zoran and my teacher, Harry, and for that matter I, found it to have a lovely, even tone and not likely to compound my own inadequacies as a beginner.
    Zoran functions in some out-of-joint Croatian time zone, even though he’s lived in Tucson for something like a decade and a half, so his work usually takes a bit longer than one might prefer. But the wait was worth it. I won’t say the instrument looks like new, which I wouldn’t like anyway—the deeper color and darker grain of aged wood give any instrument visual as well as timbral character—but it no longer looks like some frustrated previous owner believed that scraping the bow frog against the cello’s body was a valid performance technique. Zoran noticed that some of the seams were separating, so he tightened those up while he was at it, and the cello now sounds better than ever.
    Or at least I think it does, judging from playing one C-major scale in first position, which is all I had time to do last night. Zoran had quickly tuned the cello when I arrived to pick it up, but then I had to stash the instrument in the back seat of my car (I’d forgotten to bring the case) and let it rest there while I met some friends for a preprandial drink. Yes, I know it’s unwise for many reasons to leave a cello in a car parked near a bar, but the vehicle was quite visible in the lot next to the Rincon Market, so the cello was in no real danger unless some Sam Hughes aging-yuppie passerby decided just then to launch a life of crime.
    Anyway, after I’d gotten home and cooked and eaten dinner, I picked up the cello and found that Zoran had apparently used some bizarre scordatura tuning on it; the tones coming from the open strings had no relation whatsoever to the standard C, G, D and A. The pegs were apparently a bit loose, and by the time I got everything set aright I had time merely to play a scale to recheck the tuning and take delight in my ability to draw a lovely sound from the instrument—an ability that I cannot, to put it mildly, take for granted. The question remains: Will I get anything decent out of it once I start practicing actual music this afternoon? The hiatus has been so long that I’m afraid I’ve forgotten most of what little I’ve learned during the past six months. Initially it was a bit of a relief not to have to carve an hour each day out of my insane November schedule to accommodate practice, but soon I began to miss my cello, and now I know I have some hard work ahead if I’m not going to make a complete fool of myself at my next lesson.

THE TIPPLING POINT

posted by James Reel

    Via ArtsJournal.com, here’s a short article in The Guardian about a report declaring that “London’s museums and art galleries should open until 10 p.m. at weekends so people have an alternative to binge drinking in pubs and clubs.” This is something we should keep in mind in Tucson. The last big local push toward downtown revitalization, after a few exciting years in the 1990s, fizzled out. Most of the art galleries and little businesses closed or moved away as rent became too expensive, leaving the district to a scattering of bars and tattoo parlors. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with bars and tattoo parlors, but when they constitute the total of an area’s night life, you wind up with a place that’s more Skid Row than arts district. Maybe as those magic beans known as Rio Nuevo begin to sprout, things will change for the better. Please, could we have something to do downtown besides drink, listen to loud music and get dragons tattooed onto our butts?

IN LIEU OF REVIEW

posted by James Reel

    I’d planned to write a review of the Joyce Yang/Tucson Symphony concert this morning, but that would be unwise because I wound up not attending the concert. (Not that attendance necessarily affects the content of some reviews elsewhere.) I won’t be able to make it to the further performances in the cycle; tonight we’re joining friends for our monthly theme dinner (this time: mushrooms), and Sunday afternoon I’ll be reviewing a play whose Saturday-night opening I’ll have to miss because I’ll be the emcee at a benefit for the Arizona Blind and Deaf Children's Foundation at Skyline Country Club. So you’ll just have to go to the TSO concert and form your own opinion.
    I skipped the concert last night because my wife came back from a conference in Egypt a few days ago feeling crummy; last night, after we attended a PRO Neighborhoods dinner meeting involving our neighborhood group and four others, she felt like packing it in for the evening. I handed the concert tickets to the mastermind of our group without the slightest regret, went home, flipped through a nine-month-old magazine (that’s how far behind I am), listened to half of a new SACD reissue of the old Antal Dorati/London Symphony recording of The Nutcracker, and got to bed on time for once. I’ve had way too much to do recently; last weekend alone I had to review three plays and an opera, and help plan a tribute to a deceased colleague. (The latter came off quite well Wednesday night; I even contrived to work a canister containing the ashes of my recently cremated dog into my portion of the procedings.) I’ve let some writing assignments slip to the bottom of the to-do list, even as more assignments come in. With luck, I’ll catch up (though not with the magazines) by the end of Thanksgiving weekend.
    Meanwhile, since I’m not providing any valuable blog content of my own, allow me to call your attention to an exciting project by Greg Sandow, who covers classical music for the Wall Street Journal. He’s working on a book about the future, such as it is, of classical music, and he’s posting chapters online as he goes, soliciting input from readers. Greg is smart and perceptive, although his contention that classical presenters should not hold themselves above popular culture, and indeed could learn something from it, rubs some people the wrong way. Here’s how Greg’s first chapter begins:

Classical music is in trouble, and the trouble can be measured, by (among other things) the decline in ticket sales, the aging of the audience, and the increasing trouble classical music organizations have when they try to raise money. But I’ll save the full details for later, since it’s dull to start a book with dry statistics. And in any case, classical music has deeper troubles—artistic troubles (because it’s locked in repetition of the past) and cultural troubles (because it’s lost its meaning outside its little ghetto).

    I honestly haven’t had time to read his first two chapters yet, but I urge you to do so, and post your comments at his site.

THEATER BIG AND SMALL

posted by James Reel

    Two—well, technically, three—theatrical productions opened here last week, and they’re both worth your while. They could hardly be more dissimilar, though. One, a Shakespeare classic, employs a huge cast and sprawls through nearly six hours spread across two nights; the other, a recent work, is concentrated into the figure of one unprepossessing man holding forth for less than an hour and a half.
    The University of Arizona is presenting Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2:

The two roles hardest for young thespians to put across are taken by actors with experience that shows, both of whom teach in the UA theater department. Kevin Black is a truly regal, centered, often mournful Henry IV, relishing his every word and investing each line with meaning. D. Lance Marsh is superb as Sir John Falstaff, the play's fat, drunk, scheming force of relatively benign disorder.

    You’ll find the rest of my Tucson Weekly review here. Meanwhile, I recommend in the strongest possible terms that you get yourself pronto to the little Beowulf Alley Theatre downtown to see Underneath the Lintel. Here’s how the play, featuring a marvelous performance by Roberto Guajardo, and my review begin:

A tattered man shambles into a shabby rented theater. He is disappointed that so few people have come for what he has advertised as an "Impressive Presentation of Lovely Evidences," but, undaunted, he begins. He is a librarian from the Dutch town of Hoofddorp, and he wants to tell us about an overdue book. A book returned after 113 years. Possibly by the same man who checked it out.

    Intrigued? Check it out for yourself.

WHY ARE WE NOT SURPRISED?

posted by James Reel

    From the New York Times:

Investigators at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting concluded today that its former chairman repeatedly broke federal law and its own regulations in a campaign to combat what he saw as liberal bias. A scathing report by the corporation's inspector general described a dysfunctional organization that violated the Public Broadcasting Act, which created the corporation and was written to insulate programming decisions from politics.

    Read the rest here. You can download the full CPB report here, and learn what the CPB is doing to clean up its act here.

STRANGLEHOLD

posted by James Reel

    Ah, don’t you love the American “free market”? That’s a euphemism for our obsessive anti-regulatory philosophy, whereby the failure to set national standards actually inhibits technological development, and the failure to get serious about antitrust laws allows a few dominant corporations to dig in and resist change at the expense of the American public.
    Why did quadraphonic sound fail in the 1970s? Because the recording industry couldn’t be made to settle on a single technical standard, and the supposedly healthy competition between quad technologies caused those technologies to cancel each other out in the marketplace. How many consumers were going to invest in two completely different playback systems that accomplished the same thing?
    Why did stereo AM radio fail in the 1980s? Because the Federal Communications Commission refused to sanction a single AM-stereo technology, preferring to let five competing and incompatible systems to duke it out in the marketplace. Again, consumers didn’t want to take a chance on equipment that could be obsolete in a couple of years (remember Betamax vs. VHS?), and had completely lost interest by the time the FCC got around to approving a single system in 1993.
    Then there are the cases in which industry professionals actually do everything they can to hinder change. I’m not just talking about big corporations. At the beginning of World War II, the musicians’ union was so irrationally terrified by the rise of the jukebox—which would supposedly kill live music in bars and nightclubs—that it tried to abort the technology by declaring a complete moratorium on making recordings of any kind.
    Fifty years ago, Hollywood bean counters were certain that television would kill the movies; twenty years ago, the threat came from home video. Then it was the video manufacturers who tried, unsuccessfully, to sue video rental stores out of existence. If consumers could rent from a second party, why would they buy from the source?
    Well, consumers continue to go to the source for quality goods. People still see movies in theaters, and stay home only when they tire of the crud that Hollywood has been spewing onto postage-stamp screens (which, rather than DVDs and cable TV, is what caused this past summer's box-office slump). People can rent all sorts of movies from places like Casa Video, but they still buy their own DVDs. (In fact, the remarkably strong sales of the DVD version of an obscure, 13-episode TV series called Firefly persuaded Hollywood moguls to turn the show into the very good film Serenity.)
    The Recording Industry Association of America is dedicated to protecting the special interests of the nation’s fattest record companies. In the 1960s the RIAA howled that the introduction of blank, record-at-home audio cassettes would lead to rampant piracy, killing off legitimate record labels. The sky didn’t fall then, but the RIAA continues to challenge any technological and social change it regards as a threat to its hegemony. For the past couple of years it’s been bullying—with lawsuits—teenagers who dare to share music files on the Internet, a practice not much different from sharing cassette copies of favorite songs. Now the RIAA is yelping about the peril of downloading from high-quality digital radio:

With the digital radio marketplace experiencing a convergence across all platforms—a convergence creating arbitrary advantages for certain services over others at the expense of creators—the music community is making the case to Congress for balance and fair competition.

    Balance? Fair compeition? Now, there are a couple of novel ideas. Here’s another one: Why don’t the RIAA members focus on producing content that people would actually pay a fair price for? And distributing it in a way that’s attractive to consumers, not merely convenient for the luddite troglodytes monopolizing the recording industry?
    As a member of one file-sharing portal has said, “5 corporations selling 95% of what people see, think and hear is not good for a democracy.”