CHAMBER FEST

posted by James Reel

    In case you haven’t heard the underwriting spots that air every two or three hours, the Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival gets rolling again this Sunday. I have a vested interest in its success, because I’m the vice-president of the organization that presents it. Lots of interesting elements this year, including the first Tucson appearances in some time of the Tokyo String Quartet, a brand-new work by the suddenly prominent composer Jennifer Higdon, a pipa player, recent music by Philip Glass (if the publisher, G.Schirmer, ever gets around to sending the score, which is six weeks late), and the delightful Mendelssohn Octet as the grand finale. I’ll be giving a talk in the hall 30 minutes before the start of each performance. I hope to see you there!

SACD REVIEWS

posted by James Reel

    Failing to have contributed anything to the latest Tucson Weekly, I point you instead to some Super Audio Compact Disc reviews of mine in the current issue of Fanfare. Poke around in the online archive now, before access becomes restricted to subscribers around the end of the month.
    In this issue, I find favor with an SACD reissue of Paul Paray’s old Detroit Symphony recording of the Symphonie fantastique. It’s characteristic of the conductor: “Paray’s readings were usually a little breathless but unfailingly exciting, and speed did not come at the expense of phrasing, articulation, or pointed rhythm.” Also superb is Colin Davis’s new LSO Má Vlast, which “flows forward in a well paced, carefully balanced, beautifully played, pointedly phrased, altogether first-rate performance.”
    Rather less to my liking are a surround-sound version of one of the big Shostakovich symphonies, and several audiophile organ discs. I say of Mark Wigglesworth’s Shostakovich Eighth, “This is a good performance, if rather English in certain respects not to the score’s best advantage.” Then there’s a Franck organ disc: “Roberta Gary plays Franck like a church organist rather than a concert artist. I don’t intend this to suggest any feebleness or lack of imagination; Franck himself, of course, was a church organist. What I mean is that this veteran organ professor at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music favors rather broad tempos, the better to emphasize the music’s harmonic atmosphere.” It’s perfectly fine, if you like that approach. I’m not so sure about Robert Clark’s two-disc Bach survey: “Robert Clark, organ professor at the University of Michigan 1964–1981 and then director of the organ program at Arizona State University until his retirement in 1998, is certainly no stranger to Bach. ...  He is clearly capable of blending scholarship with musicality, yet on these two discs ... he often seems unduly cautious.” And given the competition, I think Christian Schmitt’s selection of Handel organ concertos is beside the point: “I wish Schmitt would cut loose a bit more; although his playing is up-to-date in terms of performance practice, it’s old-fashioned in its hushed respect for the score.”
    Follow the links to read the complete reviews.

POD PEOPLE

posted by James Reel

    According to a little blurb in the Boston Globe (which I found via ArtsJournal.com), National Public Radio’s central directory of podcast versions of its programs has station managers quaking in their tasseled loafers: “Local [public radio] stations worry that contributions from listeners will dry up if their programming is distributed through NPR's uber-guide, NPR Podcast Directory.”
    The managers fret that if NPR or individual producers put their programs online for you to download, free, whenever you want, you won't have any reason to tune in to the radio stations. And they’re right, if their stations are merely conduits for network and syndicated shows.
    Radio consultant Paul Marszalek, in an article for the public broadcasting trade magazine Current, has done a good job of beginning to sort through the many issues related to offering on-demand podcasts of broadcast programs. Rather than repeat his work, I urge you to read what he has to say. His most provocative idea: “Stations could drive membership and revenue by making podcasts available as a free benefit to members while requiring small on-demand payments or subscription fees from nonmembers.”
    He may be right, but my initial reaction is negative. Public broadcasting has always been dedicated to providing open access, to everyone, of high-quality programming. I’d think that access should remain open (meaning free) as new technologies evolve, including podcasting. Marszalek might point out that the programming will remain free on the broadcast stations; only the ultra-convenient podcast versions would be offered as premiums. It might not be too difficult to persuade me that this is a good idea.
    Ultimately, of course, the only thing that will keep local stations on the air is local programming, geared specifically to the local audience. That includes music programming selected especially for community tastes and lifestyles, and news and talk shows that focus on community issues.
    The KUAT and KUAZ stations are gradually getting into podcasting, although you have to go digging through our Web sites to figure that out. I’ll make it easy for you: Go here to find a year’s worth of KUAZ’s local public affairs program, Arizona Spotlight, hosted by Julie Bierach.

CALLERS

posted by James Reel

    Being a classical radio announcer—a “Bach jock,” as astronomer Bill Hartmann calls me—is physically solitary, but it’s not exactly a lonely job. We get phone calls.
    Most calls come from listeners who half-caught the title of something they liked and want more information … a spelling of a tricky foreign name, or specifics on the CD and where to buy it.
    Some calls come from “regulars,” listeners who ring us up from time to time with a question or comment and want to chat for a couple of minutes. They become the telephone equivalent of pen pals, people we almost never meet but who become familiar to us through brief but repeated contact. Some “regulars” call all the announcers; others are more selective, avoiding announcers who’ve been curt if the call came at a bad time. (The worst time being during a short piece, or just before we’re about to go on the air.)
    A couple of our “regulars” are predictible. One guy calls, usually on the weekend, to gripe about the obscure music. There’s a woman who used to ring us up to correct the pronunciation of languages from an obscure corner of Europe; she doesn’t mess with me, but I gather that she became so pesky that she drove one of our weekend announcers to, shall we say, strong words.
    Speaking of “strong words,” we get surprisingly few obscene phone calls. I say “surprisingly few” not because I desperately wish there were more, but media people are easy targets for anonymous hostility and we seem not to get our fair share. The exceptions come as little shocks. One morning in the 1980s, announcer Nancy Fahringer shuffled into my office looking a little dazed, reporting that a man with a Southern accent had just growled into the phone, “F you, b*.” Except he didn’t speak in asterisks. Early one evening a few years earlier, a woman called me with some detailed physiological questions. I hope I answered to her satisfaction. Not obscene but still falling into the crank category was a call I got on my very first shift, Christmas Eve 1976. At about 10:45 that night, a young-sounding woman rang me up with great concern: “My father just lit a fire in the fireplace. Don’t you think that will keep Santa Claus from coming down the chimney?” I assured her, “Don’t worry. Santa wears an asbestos suit.”
    The advent of Caller ID has probably caused most ordinary cranks to think twice about making calls that can be traced back to them. Some people, though, are too unbalanced to care. A few are troublesome only insofar as they take up our time. Many years ago, there was a woman who would call and chat on and on about family gossip that wasn’t actually very interesting. She was obviously lonely, so most of us would listen to her patiently, at least for a few minutes. Others, though, are simply looney. Twenty to 25 years ago we’d hear periodically from a woman who ended every call with the plea, “If you see my son, please tell him to come home.” Rumor had it that the son, an adult, had simply broken off contact with his mother, but then someone heard that he’d committed suicide, which increased our sympathy for the woman, even when she called after a news report on solar energy and declared, “I want equal time—I am the moon!” For a while we were broadcasting concerts by the U.S. Coast Guard Band, and something about that set her off; we heard that Coast Guard Intelligence was investigating her for sending what was interpreted as a threatening telegram to the bandmaster.
    We try to be nice even to the lunatics, but there are limits. Yesterday, one person with a persecution complex called me four times in close succession, always within seconds of the end of a piece of music, and became incensed when I had to break away from her harangue to do my job on the air. At the end of her third call I suggested that she take her medication and call back when she felt better. She called back right away to declare that she didn’t take medication because it didn’t do any good and how dare I etc. Finally I told her not to call anymore and hung up on her. Whereupon she called our unfortunate station manager with an even longer harangue, after which said station manager came into the studio and gently suggested that I terminate such calls with more “values-neutral” language. He then returned to his office, muttering something about swallowing live frogs first thing in the morning.
    Ah, radio … if only it were a one-way communication medium.

READING WITH MY LIPS MOVING

posted by James Reel

    During this past weekend’s Arizona Cultural Forum, actress Lesley Abrams and I read excerpts from a haunting book I won’t name here because we didn’t bother to get permission from the publisher. (In the non-profit world, it’s easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.) I enjoy reading in public, which is perhaps hypocritical because I dislike being read to. Here’s what I wrote about that a few years ago in a now-defunct literary e-zine:

Logolingus Is A Private Pleasure

THESE ARE THE SOUNDS OF A BOOK: A gentle scrape as you remove the volume from the shelf. A minute creak as you open the cover and bend back the old binding. A scratch-rustle-plop as you riffle the pages. A remote breaking of miniature waves as you turn a single page. A sharp thop as you slam the book against a desktop mosquito.
A book does not speak. Though crammed with words, a book can be no more than vaguely susurrant. The words find their sounds only in the reader's head.
A "talking book" may be a valuable compromise for people with impaired vision, but for the rest of us it is a brain-rotting malignancy. It imposes the imagination of some other reader--often a poor reader--on our own. It cuts us off from the important clues and contexts of the printed page, leaving us to drift gently in a stream of poorly distinguished words.
Yet talking books assault readers at every turn. Most bookstores stock them in shelves near the entrance, so tape-zombies may find them without having to be distracted by any demanding printed matter. Talking books have infiltrated video stores. And the 18-branch library system in my city owns nearly 3,300 book-on-tape titles, fully half of which are in circulation at any given time. Librarians report that the average talking book circulates twice as much as the average print book.
What is the appeal? People making long automobile commutes, or taking cross-country trips, feel that they're making better use of what would otherwise be intellectual down time. But how well do they attend to the tapes while contending with traffic and gawking at scenery? And what about people who put on a spoken-word recording at home, then go about their household routines? Do they really stop scrubbing the toilet long enough to follow Ian McKellen through one of the serpentine similes in The Odyssey?
I admit that part of my antagonism toward talking books is my own dislike of being read to. Surely at some point in my slobbery toddlerhood somebody narrated to me the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. But I don't remember such a thing. My earliest literary memory is of reading Little Golden Books myself as a pre-schooler, being traumatized by the way the jungle animals mocked the Saggy Baggy Elephant, and thereby learning at a tender age never to put myself at the mercy of my peers. I could weep over these stories without embarrassment, because I was reading them myself, in privacy, forming my own understanding of the narrative, hearing the characters' voices in my head.
I never developed a tolerance for readers who brought less color to a sentence than I could without opening my mouth. And face it: most people are poor readers. They go too fast. They adopt a sing-song rhythm. They gloss over periods and get lost in dependent clauses. Or, most commonly, they simply drone. Consider the somewhat twangy but otherwise uninflected delivery of public radio's Dick Estell. Or the monotone of professional news readers, which is supposed to convey impartiality but really only implies that anchors never glance at a script before going on air.
People don't seem to care, and I think it's because these people themselves don't read aloud with any skill. In college, I once took a course in the oral interpretation of literature. I did so well that the instructor tried to recruit me as a major. Not because I was a budding Olivier, but because I instinctively knew how to read with the oral equivalent of a cocked eyebrow, and my classmates couldn't get beyond spluttering out phonemes.
Poets are no better. In 1996 Rhino Records issued a four-CD set titled In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry. It gets off to a promising start, with Walt Whitman offering a measured, confident reading of America -- exactly the presentation you'd expect from Whitman, unless you feared he would indulge in 19th-century melodrama. But then comes the incantatory monotony of William Butler Yeats, the merely dull monotony of Robert Frost, the nerdy nasalism of Steven Vincent Benet, Ezra Pound menacingly intoning his own words with no concession to meaning. Things improve somewhat with the living poets, although they are still too often subject to affectation or indifference.
The brightest track in the set is Allen Ginsberg riffing his way carelessly through a bit of his own America. Somehow this reminded me of a book I once saw in the Charles Dickens House in London; it was one of the texts from which Dickens did his celebrated public readings, and it was full of underlinings, cross-outs, and such stage directions as "slap the table!" Today's readers must by comparison be bland, inoffensive, uninvolving.
Even good readers fail to engage me. I sampled a bit of the New Testament delivered by the late Alexander Scourby, my favorite narrator of TV documentaries; he was the bearded fellow who introduced art films on the Bravo channel in the 1980s. But on the Bible tape, Scourby's voice made gentle bedtime stories of everything -- parables and scenes of temptation alike.
Why should I listen to someone else read when my own sub-vocalization is so much richer? Yours may be, too, even if you speak with the finesse of a fan belt about to snap. For as you read silently, you absorb not only the author's words, but the punctuation and layout. Roddy McDowall does a fine job with Graham Greene's Stamboul Train, except that he loses us in passages of dialogue involving insufficiently differentiated minor characters -- passages we could sort out simply by looking at the arrangement of quotation marks. And there's no way McDowall can smoothly convey the paragraph breaks that guide us into and out of interior monologues or quick changes of scene. Without seeing the text, we cannot grasp its full substance or its nuance.
It's true that some passages insist on being read aloud. Whisper to yourself the following line from Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven: "And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain..." The early succession of four gently rocking sibilants -- the Ss -- perfectly conveys the very sound Poe describes. But then intrudes the affricate ch in each, followed ballistically by the four rapid aspirated stops in purple curtain. Poe jerks us awake with these little explosions, setting us up neatly for the mood of the following line: "Thrilled me -- filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before..."
Yet we've seen that neither poets nor actors can be relied upon to linger over such sounds to produce their full effect. Perhaps wrapping one's lips and tongue with sufficient decadence around a word seems too sexual an act, a sort of logolingus, inappropriate for public display. So we are best off practicing this ourselves in private moments, alone with a book we love, a book representing an author with whom we develop understandings that remain unspoken.

STROKES OF GENIUS

posted by James Reel

    In public radio, we’re not allowed to give prices for events—too commercial. We can’t even say that something is free, because “free” is, essentially, a price. Our code term for “free” is “open to the public.” So now I would like to invite you to an “open to the public” event I’m helping to run during these next three days.
    It’s the Arizona Cultural Forum, an annual gathering of thinkers, talkers and doers who take under consideration the works of leading figures in different fields. Last year our subjects were Ives and Thoreau; this time, we’re putting our minds to Mozart and Einstein. We have a few panel discussions about music and physics and time, and several performances, too. Joel Revzen, the boss at Arizona Opera, will bring a singer down from Phoenix to present some Mozart songs and arias. Cellist-writer Harry Clark, my co-conspirator in this endeavor and its true mastermind, has penned a little play in which Albert Einstein (portrayed by William Killian) tries to get a violin lesson from Mozart’s father (Paul Fisher).
    Actress Lesley Abrams and I will read selections from Alan Lightman's bestseller, Einstein's Dreams, imagining what the world would be like if time worked in strange, different ways. Between readings, pianist Sanda Schuldmann will play music by Mozart, and afterward UA physics professor William Bickel will explain what it all means. We’ll also have some Mozart organ music played by UA prof Pamela Decker, and pieces for glass harmonica performed by Lynn Drye.
    You can read a little more about it in the Tucson Weekly, and in the Arizona Daily Star, but note that the Star gets the Saturday location wrong. Today (Friday) and Sunday we’re holding forth at Academy Village, at 13701 E. Spanish Trail, out near Colossal Cave, but if you prefer to stay closer to home, come to the Saturday shindig at St. Philip’s in the Hills Episcopal Church, 4440 N. Campbell Ave.
    And remember, it’s “open to the public.”