GENIUS OR GENUS?

posted by James Reel

    This is the big Mozart Day, the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, which we are officially marking during my six-hour shift here at KUAT-FM with exactly one work lasting six minutes and 50 seconds. Don’t tell the music director, but I have taken the liberty of jettisoning from the schedule two or three not-especially-distinctive yet overplayed pieces by other composers that you’ll never miss (trust me) and replacing them with more substantial Mozart works (so far, the bassoon concerto and one of the late piano sonatas). I didn’t want you to think we’d forgotten.
    This is a fine day to become reaquainted with Mozart’s music, which, ubiquitous as it is, too often gets relegated to the background. In many cases that’s OK; Mozart wrote pages and pages of serendades specifically designed to grace the room unobtrusively during dinners and parties. But his mature works almost (almost) always bear close listening. My friend Lisa Stark, who procures underwriting for KUAT, told me several years ago when she was taking piano lessons that she’d found Mozart to be a little dull until she had to play some of his keyboard music; she discovered that, despite all the repeats and structural conventions, Mozart rarely did exactly the same thing twice; he left many little traps for the inattentive amateur (or even professional) pianist.
    I’m perfectly happy to listen to lots of Mozart’s music today, but I’ve had zero interest in reading all the Mozart “appreciations” that have been published during the past few weeks. I got sick of the whole Mozart-appreciation industry during the death anniversary back in 1991, and the sight of an article either extolling the virtues of or debunking Mozart still makes me a bit queasy.
    I’m especially annoyed by the veneration of Mozart as some sort of heaven-sent genius, music’s equivalent of the Jesus depicted in sentimental Christian portraiture, Jesus the Goy with his remarkably clean hair and placid disposition, a grown-up but still innocent version of the baby Jesus we get at Christmastime, that infant who never, ever would poop in his swaddling clothes. Well, as anyone who has read an unbowdlerized edition of Mozart’s letters or seen Amadeus knows, Mozart was obsessed with poop jokes. This aspect of his character has been over-emphasized in our post-Amadeus world; I seriously doubt that he made fart noises with his mouth in polite company. However he may have behaved around his family and friends doesn’t mean he was a virtual Tourette case in the presence of the archbishop of Salzburg.
    What the idolators and debunkers alike fail to understand is how normal Mozart really was. Provincial Austrian humor was crude; Mozart was raised in it, and even his father, who took great pains to present himself and his family in a dignified manner, appreciated some of his countrymen’s coarser proverbs and practices, as you can hear in the suites he wrote that were inspired by peasant weddings and children’s toys.
    And Mozart as genius? I don’t quite buy it. First, remember that his father was the foremost violin pedagog north of Italy in the mid-18th century; his famous and influential treatise on violin playing was published the year of Mozart’s birth, and he provided his son (and daughter) with a first-rate music education from the very beginning. So, the first thing Mozart developed was a great facility for the keyboard (and secondarily the violin) through practice, practice, practice. Then there’s all that hoopla over Mozart starting to write his own music just before he turned five. Well, again, father Leopold was a solid composer himself, and he gave his son a tremendous amount of help, “editing” the music as Wolfgang scribbled it out. And frankly, Mozart’s childhood works are quite conventional, imitating the music of his father and J.C. Bach and the Italian models at hand. It’s not original, it’s not genius, it’s the result of early training and hard work and help from daddy.
    What boy Mozart did develop a huge talent for was improvising at the keyboard. This was a basic skill expected at the time, just as young jazz pianists today aren’t going to get anywhere if they can’t improvise—that’s the basis of the art form. Mozart gained a great facility for ornamenting and varying melodies. And this is the key to his later individuality as a composer.
    People swoon over Mozart’s ability to write music “in his head” and then jot it down with few second thoughts. Just a few days ago, University of Arizona piano prof Paula Fan was talking to me about how clean Mozart’s manuscripts are, compared to the messy blotches that Beethoven generated. But composing in one’s head is what many of us who write words for a living do all the time; we roll thoughts around, try out turns of phrase while walking the dog or taking a shower, and often we can type out the results with minimal fuss. This is what Mozart did with music, and he was able to do it because he was working within predictible, formulaic structures. He knew, for example, how a sonata-form movement was supposed to go; you have a sequence of themes, a sequence of harmonic modulations that follow a standard pattern, and all you have to do is choose a key to start in and plug in the tunes.
    At least, that’s all you have to do if you’re one of the many hack composers active during Mozart’s time. Mozart was able to transcend the formulas because since childhood he’d been improvising melodic ornaments at the keyboard. He knew exactly how to concoct elegant little surprises in a melodic turn of phrase, and how to get from one key to another through several fascinating harmonic byways. Mozart wrote some of the most deeply moving (and unpredictable!) piano-concerto movements in the history of music, and he did it because he’d been immersed in music for 25 years, paid attention to what he heard, learned from his and others’ mistakes, and developed a keen ear for effect and an ability to bring his own personality—or at least a personality he wished to present—into what otherwise could be paint-by-numbers composition.
    Ultimately, whether Mozart was a genius or just a hard worker with lots of experience and individuality makes no difference. All that counts is the music itself.

THREE STAGES

posted by James Reel

    This being Thursday, I’m off the hook in terms of original blogging while I point you to my contributions in the latest Tucson Weekly. Three items this week. First, a review of Crowns at Arizona Theatre Company. Here’s a taste:

    First it was shoes; now it's hats.
    Last fall, Arizona Theatre Company presented Bad Dates, in which our heroine tries on a closetful of shoes. This month, it's Crowns, in which six women (and a man) bring us a milliner's dream, a musical play about the hats that African-American women wear to church.
    No doubt purses will be next. Crowns is the latest offering in what seems more and more like a season of accessories, a lot of attractive but light plays with no real couture at the center. Crowns is a rousing show, at least, with strong performances that distract you from the script's stray weaknesses.

    Next in line, a surpsingly effective, even-keeled treatment of Christopher Durang at Beowulf Alley Theatre Company. For openers:

    The beautiful thing about Beowulf Alley's production of Christopher Durang's Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You is that the nun in question seems quite reasonable--dogmatic, but reasonable--right up until she starts shooting at former students who have strayed from the tenets of Catholicism.
    If you know much about Christopher Durang, you know that his plays usually veer madly in and out of various levels of absurdity. All right, a play in which a nun sets out the core beliefs of the Catholic faith is already flirting with theater of the absurd. But you just know that Durang is sooner or later going to push the proceedings into absolute lunacy.
    In Beowulf Alley's production, which opened last weekend, the absurdity comes later. Actress Lesley Abrams and director Jonathan Northoven introduce Sister Mary Ignatius as a hard-core traditionalist who goes along with the reforms of Vatican II with the greatest reluctance, but she's no nut. Even when she's pulling the trigger near the end, she seems entirely cool and reasonable.

    And finally, just in time for Mozart Week, a preview of the latest staged-reading-with-music masterminded by my friend and cello teacher, Harry Clark. The teaser:

    For the latest play with music presented by Chamber Music Plus Southwest, writer-cellist Harry Clark is counting on the animal magnetism of an actor in his 80s.
    In Clark's Mesmeric Mozart, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., best known as the star of the 1960s-'70s TV show The FBI, will take the part of Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th-century faith healer of sorts who theorized that sickness was caused by an interruption in the natural flow of the "psychic ether" that pervades everything. Magnets, he claimed, could help correct the ether's flow in patients. Because the human body has its own magnetic properties--this is the origin of the term "animal magnetism"--Mesmer himself could adjust the flow of the ether by fondling the bodies of his patients, who tended to be attractive young women. (He is also credited with early use of hypnosis, hence our word "mesmerism.")
    One of Mesmer's patients was an attractive young Viennese pianist named Maria Theresa von Paradis. She'd been blind since early childhood; her blindness may have been psychosomatic, or it may have been caused by a detached retina; at any rate, Mesmer's treatment seemed to allow Paradis to regain her sight--though not with the happiest of results.

PITTSBURGH BLOG

posted by James Reel

    Today I’ve added to the blogroll on the right the Pittsburgh Symphony’s site, which is a sort of gang blog with contributions from orchestra players, audience members, guest artists (including Jennifer Higdon, who during the past couple of years has become the “hot” American composer) and innocent bystanders. Because the blogs are an official part of the Pittsburgh Symphony site, it’ll be interesting to see how free the flow of opinion will be if the musicians ever go on strike. But for now it’s a good behind-the-scenes peek, a project that other orchestras should emulate. One recent item comes to the defense of Pinchas Zukerman; extensive coverage elsewhere this month of his high-handed behavior with his National Arts Centre Orchestra in Canada makes him out to be a high-handed jerk of distressingly limited musical interests, but at least he has a fan in the Pittsburgh Symphony.

THE INNER LIFE OF MUSICIANS

posted by James Reel

    At her blog Twang Twang Twang, British harpist Helen Radice tells the cold truth about the supposedly glamorous life of a professional musician, and explains why musicians are such grumblers:

Many people, not just musicians, don't like work. That's why it's called 'work', as opposed to 'play', 'fun' or 'holiday in the sun'. But musicians, or artists generally, are dreamers. I want to work on Bach's partitas, but today I have to teach 15 ten-year-olds the recorder 6 times over, and I'm an artist, goddamit. Before you know it  you are not practicing, and drinking too much (not me, of course, although today I've not practiced because I taught for six hours and then went to the pub).

    So why go through with the career at all? Find out here.

PACIFICA OVERTURES

posted by James Reel

    At the beginning of last night’s Arizona Friends of Chamber Music concert, I did an onstage interview with Dmitri Tymoczko, whose brand new Eggman Variations for piano and strings would be premiered a few minutes later. Then I jogged back to the green room to alert the Pacifica Quartet that it was showtime. Before they’d go out, though, first violinist Simin Ganatra asked if I could follow them on and close the piano lid; she didn’t want it reflecting the group’s sound in strange ways while they played the concert’s opening work, a Mendelssohn quartet.
    That’s the first time in years a woman has had to ask me to put the lid down.
    Because I help run the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, anything positive I say about the concert will be suspect. Despite my vested interest in the organization, though, I must tell you that the Pacifica’s performance of Mendelssohn’s Op. 12 quartet was superb, the best-balanced, most emotive yet not overdone performance I’ve ever heard. It even surpassed their excellent recording, released last year and reviewed by me in an issue of Fanfare that for some reason doesn’t have its feature articles online. (Yeah, I know, I’m also Fanfare’s webmaster, but I have no control over the archive part of the site.)
    The group’s performance with pianist Ursula Oppens of Tymoczko’s Eggman Variations (it’s a reference to the Beatles song “I Am the Walrus”) was also good and focused, although I think there were a couple of brief moments of imprecision in what sounds to be a very tricky score. The work went over surprisingly well; surprising, because the writing is quite pointillistic, and in new music our audience tends to prefer pieces with interesting, strong rhythm rather than complex texture. But the folks always respond enthusiastically to any performance with the requisite commitment and intensity, and those qualities certainly came across last night. I regret missing the Pacifica’s performance of Beethoven’s Op. 132 after intermission, but … early to bed and early to rise.

IN PRINT, OUT OF MIND

posted by James Reel

    At last night’s concert, people buttonholed me and wanted to chat about an article I have in the current issue of Fanfare about a microtonal composer, and a review I wrote for the Tucson Weekly last November of the UA’s production of Henry IV. It’s hard enough for me to remember what I wrote last week, let alone last quarter, so all I could do was smile and nod and pretend I knew what they were talking about.
    On the subject of what I wrote last week, today’s Tucson Weekly carries my review of a well-performed, disturbing play at Invisible Theatre:

    At the beginning of The Exonerated, which opened last week at Invisible Theatre, 10 actors file in and take their seats, most behind a long desk on either side of the stage, one in the middle, two on stools behind. It's so tidy, so symmetrical, so orderly. But without ever moving from their seats, these actors produce 90 minutes of absolute wreckage.
    The destruction is personal, emotional, psychological. The Exonerated is a documentary play by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, who interviewed men and women who were wrongly convicted of murder and spent years on death row until they were cleared by the extraordinary efforts of, primarily, public-interest groups.

    You can read the rest here.