DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY

posted 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 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 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 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.

AMBUSH SHUSH

posted by James Reel

    Timothy Mangan of the Orange County Register has devised a way to deal with noisy concert patrons: sneak up on them from behind.

LEFTOVERS

posted by James Reel

    In yesterday’s post about the Mariachi Cobre/Tucson Symphony concerts, I didn’t find an appropriate opportunity to praise two particular elements.
    First, nine members of the mariachi group opened the concert with an a cappella performance of the national anthem (yes, in English); with its combination of near-barbershop harmony and mariachi heart, not to mention excellent vocal technique and musicality, it was by far the most beautiful and stirring rendition I’ve ever heard of that song, which I absolutely detest.
    Second, whatever you may think of Ernesto Portillo Jr.’s skills as a columnist in the Arizona Daily Star, there’s no denying that he was an excellent master of ceremonies for the concerts. He was funny, personable, yet to-the-point. Somebody should make this guy the host of a TV variety show.
    Nevertheless, I can’t resist sending you to this wicked, wicked parody of Neto’s column that Renée Downing wrote for the Tucson Weekly a few years ago. One Star staffer told me at the time that half the newsroom personnel thought it was terribly cruel, and the other half deemed it brilliant.