SOUSA MEMORY

posted by James Reel

    Listener Robert E. Harris, a retired chemist, offers this thought after the past weekend's Tucson Symphony Sousa concerts:

    My late father-in-law, Jerry A. Harn, was as teetotal as could be. He was city attorney for Galesburg, Illinois in the 1930's.   When Sousa and his band came to town, naturally, Mr. Harn got the job of buying some whiskey so Sousa could have a drink (or maybe two.)
    Mr. Harn was a reserve officer in the US Army, and ended up as a Col. in the US Air Force reserve.  He and his family stayed in Claremont, CA after WW II, which is where I met my future wife.
    I like Sousa, as I played a lot of clarinet parts in Sousa marches when I was in high school band in the late 1940's.
    The pops programming I hate is overamplified (so much so that my ears hurt) and consists of reprises of pop tunes that I mostly did not like at all 50 or 60 years ago. Give me Sousa, or well done Beetles, or Leroy Anderson, or Spike Jones or Elvis (but not Hound Dog) or show tunes from musicals, but not so loud!

WHOSE SIDE?

posted by James Reel

    One thing that has long bugged me about the Arizona Daily Star, one of my ex-employers, is the Sunday “Reader Advocate” column. The Star just doesn’t understand what the person in that position is supposed to do.
    Consider this key sentence from Debbie Kornmiller’s most recent column, concerning the dozen guiding principles recently set forth by the paper’s publisher: “I will write each month, starting in November, about a different principle and how we are serving our community.” If Debbie were truly the reader advocate, she’d be writing about how the paper is not serving its community. She’s supposed to be the newsroom watchdog, catching errors in judgment and fact and writing on behalf of the paper’s subscribers. Debbie does sometimes write about newsroom errors, but the column almost always winds up being a defense of what was done, or maybe a summary of the noble steps the staff took to correct the situation. I can understand why she prints reader comments only occasionally—the public comments appended to online stories are shamefully unintelligent, so she obviously doesn’t have much to work with—but that doesn’t excuse her from generating her own objections to what the Star does, and offering more than an account of how the chain of command occasionally breaks down. She merely explains; she doesn’t act. And, really, how often do we need her to explain how the weather page is being revamped, or how the crossword puzzle got put in the wrong place, or why the TV listings are inaccurate? These are about the least important elements of the newspaper, yet they dominate her column.
    Debbie, whom I like personally, isn’t functioning as a reader advocate. She’s a newsroom apologist. I miss crusty old Leo Della Betta, who had the job back in the pre-gender-neutral days when it was called “ombudsman.”

SOUSA ON PARADE

posted by James Reel

    The serious-minded among us assail orchestral pops concerts, when we condescend to think about them at all, as showcases of superannuated pop stars cynically programmed to pander to a crowd that will in the end have no reason to support the orchestra’s performances of its core classical repertory. Perhaps I have made such a comment once or twice in the past. But this weekend I am actually participating in a pops concert that showcases a superannuated pop star: John Philip Sousa.
    Every couple of years the Tucson Symphony Orchestra hires Keith Brion to lead a cycle of pops shows. Brion has conducted a great variety of wind ensemble music over his long career, and has strong opinions about serious matters in his field (feed him enough ice cream, and he might tell you what he really thinks about Frederick Fennell). But his greatest love is the music and career of Sousa. Brion doesn’t just conduct Sousa’s music; he re-creates Sousa’s concerts, mixes of marches and theater suites of the day, complete with “encores” after every two or three programmed items. Furthermore, Brion dresses in a 1920s Sousa-style bandmaster’s uniform, imitates Sousa’s stage manner (including his quick shuffle across the stage onto the podium), and does his best to follow Sousa’s own performance style (something of a challenge, since many of the old Sousa 78 r.p.m. records weren’t actually conducted by Sousa himself). It’s a lot of fun—good light music that’s well prepared and played with integrity. If only all pops concerts could rise to this level.
    And what role do I play? Brion likes to have a local come out and narrate the first half of the concert, and I’ve been asked to do the honors Saturday night. At the very least, it gives me a chance to wear my tux, and such opportunities are few and far between in our casual desert pueblo. Tonight’s narrator will be my KUAT colleague Sooeyon Lee, arts reporter for Arizona Illustrated on channel 6. She tells me she’s probably going to wear a “not too revealing” formal dress she got from her sister, an opera singer in Korea. On Sunday the narrator will be my token right-wing gun-nut talk-radio-host friend Emil Franzi, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure classical music of the 19th and 20th centuries, and is actually a much more cultured person than his cultivated redneck persona would lead you to believe. I’d expect Emil to take Brion up on a loan of a bandmaster’s jacket, given his militaristic tendencies.
    Ticket info is available at 882-8585.

DEATH BY TOILET SEAT

posted by James Reel

    I’ve got two theater stories in the current Tucson Weekly, and the editorial staff manged to put the word “edgy” into both subheds.
    First, an approving review of the latest at Live Theatre Workshop:

    OK, so you sit down at Paula Vogel's The Baltimore Waltz knowing only that it's a play about a brother and sister rampaging through Europe while one of them dies from a mysterious disease.
    In the second scene, you find out that the brother is gay (he's a San Francisco children's librarian just given the pink slip, so he's maliciously having his little innocents cut out and wear pink triangles, just like he does). "Oh, no," you think, "not another AIDS play." But then it turns out that it's his straight sister who's been diagnosed with the disease. "Thank god," you think, "not another AIDS play." And then you find out that she's succumbing to Acquired Toilet Disease, which afflicts a very small segment of the population—unmarried elementary-school teachers—and is transmitted via toilet seats. "All right," you think, "at least it's not another damned earnest AIDS play."

    Read the rest here. Then move on to a preview of the doings of a new company—or, I should say, an old company that’s been elsewhere for a decade:

    Ken Tesoriere calls his theater company Coyote Ramblers, which makes perfect sense. Tesoriere has been a rambler all his life—a teenage racecar driver, a freelance journalist roaming the United States and Europe, a painter, a novelist, a playwright and director. The Manhattan native launched Coyote Ramblers in Tucson in 1993, ran it for three years, got fed up with the local scene, moved his operation to Los Angeles, won some nominations and awards, got fed up with the L.A. scene and came back to Tucson last year.
    "For good," he says. And maybe that's true.
    But reviving Coyote Ramblers in Tucson hasn't been easy. Health trouble slowed Tesoriere down, but more critical was his difficulty finding a space where he could operate Coyote Ramblers as a part of Lyric Arts, an organization that at full force will present visual art as well as theater, offer acting and art classes, and put on staged productions and readings.
    The company's first staged offerings in Tucson in nearly a decade are coming up Nov. 3-19 in a cozy space at ArtFare. Tesoriere is presenting three short works of his own under the group title American Album, Volume One (Women on the Verge).

    You can get the full scoop here.

THE CELLO TYPE

posted by James Reel

    Oboeinsight points the way to a blog I’ve managed to overlook: Daily Observations, the musings of Charles Noble, the Oregon Symphony’s assistant principal violist. According to his profile, “Charles enjoys cooking, hiking, cycling, reading, and blogging.” Sounds like my kind of guy, except for his adherence to the serial comma. (I’m AP; he’s apparently Chicago 15.) I’m adding his site to my blogroll today.
    Anyway, what caught my eye, thanks to Patty, were a couple of tongue-in-cheek posts describing the characters of various types of instumentalists. First, Charles repeated someone else’s description of the various sections of the orchestra. Here’s the bit about cellists:

People who play the cello are simply not good looking. They have generally chosen their instrument because, while in use, the cello hides 80% of its player's considerable bulk. Most cellists are in analysis which won't end until they can play a scale in tune or, in other words, never. Cellists wear sensible shoes and always bring their own lunch.

    Now, wait a minute. I wear expensive shoes, by guy standards. You can read the rest of the aspersions here. But then our blogger makes amends with his own more temperate observations. Here’s what he has to say about cellists:

The cellos are an almost schizophrenic bunch. Since they have a comparable body of solo literature to the violin, they have a soloistic impulse almost from the get go. There can often be the element of the mysogenistic cello jock amongst the males, the inverse of which is almost unheard of in the females. On the other hand, they have a great love for the symphonic repertoire and are often very much into the historically informed peformance practice movement. They always seem to make each other birthday cakes, too. They have severe (and sometimes even legitimate) concerns about personal space for themselves and their instruments, which are often met with knowing looks and winks and smiles by the other string players, who wish that they could also just set their instruments on the floor rather than hold them up for several hours at a time.

    Here’s the full post.

INVISIBLE CULTURE

posted by James Reel

    Veteran San Francisco music critic Robert P. Commanday offers a pointed criticism of the state of classical music coverage in American newspapers:

    Pick any city, look at its newspaper, and you'll find attention to classical music diminished to the basic minimum. It will focus on the "big ticket" events — which, in the Bay Area, means the San Francisco Symphony, Opera, and Ballet, plus the most celebrated visiting artists. As is well-known to any person interested in classical music, such coverage just skims the surface.
    Who's responsible? Newspaper publishers and their editors who have a hand in setting policy and then executing it. ….
    [The] "think piece" has taken the biggest hit. You likely will look in vain for a music essay in the weekend paper. If a Sunday music article is to be found, it will be an exception and probably an advance or "puff piece," meaning a celebrity interview or, at best, a column of CD reviews. The think piece, in contrast, can be on any musical subject—a significant composition, composer, or performing group; an issue or controversy; an unusual or provocative upcoming event or a notable musician involved in it—so long as it is a thoughtful discussion involving interpretation, history, or analysis. It is not an article that is essentially a recycling of publicity material.
    Then there's the decline of investigative music journalism, the hard news that music critics should be responsible for. It was the first to go, and it has all but disappeared. When you read the obituary of a symphony and learn about its bankruptcy, that is usually when you first discover that the orchestra had been in trouble for a long time. The reporting on those facts should have occurred long before, but in fact the coverage of the ineptness of the manager and the incompetence and inattention of the board never appeared.

    In our fair town, the Tucson Citizen doesn’t even recognize the existence of classical music, and the Arizona Daily Star’s coverage is so naïve that local musicians merely smirk and roll their eyes—at least those are the polite responses—when the subject comes up. And this is the response to reviews that are unfailingly rapturous. When musicians don’t take positive coverage seriously, you know there’s trouble.
    Read the rest of Commanday’s commentary here.