DENK DONE IT

posted by James Reel

    Film noir meets OJ pseudo-confession in pianist Jeremy Denk’s latest post, wherin he relates his role in the death of Classical Music. It all starts with Denk mulling over the past in a seedy bar:

You see, Classical Music was my childhood sweetheart. Even in the sixth grade, when I was King of the Nerds, we would dine on cafeteria pizza and tater tots and talk of Opus Numbers. We would go to the Multiplex and sniff at John Williams and hold hands across dimly lit tables at 2 am at the Village Inn and stay up all night inventing Developments and Recapping with green chile and eggs in the morning. Classical Music was more than love. She was a sea in which my life was drowned. But: not even a glance. Classical brushed right by. I got up to say hello, but... Jazz grabbed my shoulder. "Don't do it man." His voice was a gravelly flatted seventh. "It's gone, just let it go. I hear Classical's got somethin' goin' with World Music, and it's pretty intense."

    Follow the story to its conclusion, and you’ll learn the one think Schenkerian analysis is good for. Read the whole thing here.

LONG DIVISION

posted by James Reel

    At this temporal distance from last week’s Tucson Symphony concerts, there’s no reason for me to finally get around to writing a full review. Not much to say, anyway. Guzheng soloist Li Ma was superb, although the concerto she played, Zhanhao He’s Regret of a Hero, was initially too widescreen and Technicolor for its own good. As for the rest of the program, George Hanson led the orchestra in performances of Strauss’ Don Juan and Dvorák’s “New World” Symphony that were very well prepared but interpretively anonymous. (The Strauss got off to a fabulous start, but soon settled into complacency.)
    I think this was Hanson’s third go at the “New World” with the TSO. I don’t remember the first try, which would have been about 10 years ago; the second was full of interesting detail, some of which wasn’t to my personal taste, but at least it kept me involved with the music all the way through. This time, though, it was just a solid, middle-of-the-road performance. If Hanson has run out of things to say about this symphony, it’s time for him to pack it away permanently and explore some different repertory that engages him more deeply. Writing anything further about this concert would be as pointless as the performance itself.
    One related subject is worth mentioning, though. Hanson is still dividing the first and second violins, stage right and stage left. I think this is a worthy experiment that should be pursued through the rest of the season, to find out how it works in a variety of music. So far, though, it isn’t working at all, at least not from my perspective in the lower balcony, which is one of the few places in the Tucson Convention Center Music Hall where the sonic blend is almost satisfactory. As I’ve mentioned before, the second violins’ sound just evaporates as it leaves the instruments. And with the violins spread clear across the stage, they couldn’t muster the lushness that Don Juan requires. Those second violinists are going to have to start playing their hearts out if this stage arrangement is going to work.

TWO MUSICALS

posted by James Reel

    Thursday is the day I rest on my laurels, duck out of original blogging, and simply point you toward material I’ve written for the Tucson Weekly. This time, two items. First, a review of the University of Arizona production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying:

Now, before you start to complain that UA drama students ought to be addressing contemporary material that they might identify with more easily, keep in mind that How to Succeed is a satire. It's full of short, slick hair and dark suits and secretaries who dream of moving up in the world by becoming housewives, but every character and every single societal attitude here is an object of sport. If you try to deconstruct How to Succeed in Business as a reification of women who are subjugated by the semiotic signifying modality of the male gaze and the patriarchal binary of helpmeet/whore, you obviously have no idea what this show is about.

    Lest you take that last bit too seriously, bear in mind this is a review that also includes the sentence “This gives me hope for the play I intend to write based on the inspection tagwords in my pants.” Read the rest here.
    And after that, a review of something far more serious musical presentation:

    When Arizona Onstage Productions presents a William Finn show, you should know by now that you're not in for a feel-good musical. Yet neither is it an evening of cynicism and angst. Finn tends to write about extremely ordinary people, just like you and me, who struggle through very real problems of life and death; those who survive emerge battered but, in many ways, stronger. And so does Finn's audience.
    Last weekend, Arizona Onstage Productions opened Finn's Elegies—Looking Up. You might expect this to be the most emotionally distant of Finn's efforts, because it isn't really a show with a plot and a stable cast of characters. Rather, it's a song cycle performed by five singers and a pianist. Yet this is perhaps the most moving example of Finn's work the company has yet produced (in past seasons, it did smashing versions of Falsettoland and A New Brain); although, more explicitly than ever, these songs are about Finn and his circle. Because there's no overall storyline, it's easier to bring these people into our own lives.

    You can find the rest here.

SONGLINES

posted by James Reel

    I really should visit the American Music Center’s NewMusicBox more often, not just when I find a link elsewhere. Here’s editor Frank Oteri grousing about a subject dear to my heart:

    Once upon a time, songs referred exclusively to single-movement musical compositions involving a singer or singers. They typically employed sung language which was more poetic than narrative, and most required a relatively short duration (typically three minutes). When composers of instrumental music wanted to make reference to song-like qualities in other types of compositions—such as short, lyrical, solo piano pieces—they woulcall them "songs without words," as Mendelssohn once famously did. …
    But now everything is a song in popular parlance, whether it has words or not and no matter how long it is. As a result, the song paradigm—which still assumes a normative status of vocal, short, and in one movement—determines how all music is listened to. When's the last time an "instrumental" got on the Billboard charts? The song paradigm also frequently proscribes how music gets parsed out in digital databases. In a world where sound files are downloaded individually rather than bunched together onto recordings, these databases threaten to become our prime distribution model. Although some headway has been made with classical music in the age of the iPod, there are still appications where the only fields open to music files are artist and song title. This is a total mess if your "song" happens to be called Symphony No. 7 plus it is in four movements and therefore requires more than one sound file.
    By calling everything a song, we've also paralyzed our ability to make musical distinctions. How can you make sense of a musical landscape where a continuous 45-minute sitar improvisation, a Roger Sessions concerto, and a rap by Chuck D are all called songs?

    You can read the whole thing here. Frank is complaining about a specific instance of a larger problem: Americans’ insensitivity to the useful distinctions between words. English, with its huge vocabulary, is a language both colorful and precise, but too many people fail to use the right word at the right time. If you look at Frank’s article and scroll down through the comments section, you’ll find one respondent saying, “I could care less what someone calls a piece of mine.” Actually, he couldn’t care less. If he could care less, then he would seem to care too much.
    I just finished proofreading a book about arthritis, and the physician who wrote it kept referring to a treatment “regime.” The word he should have used, of course, is “regimen.” (Don’t know the difference? Find out here.) Now, if you look this up in a descriptive dictionary rather than a prescriptive style manual, or visit a site like this maintained by an apologist for lazy language, you’ll see it claimed that “regime” is OK usage in this case because people have been misapplying the word for centuries. Well, just because it’s done doesn’t mean it’s right. People steal, rape and murder, but those are not approved actions in our society, and neither should be the use of “regime” instead of “regimen.” (Not that lazy usage is equivalent to murder, but someday it could drive me to murder.)
    We have a rich language that’s being diluted by people who can’t maintain a good-sized, active vocabulary. It’s our language, folks. Use it or lose it.

ONE STEP FORWARD...

posted by James Reel

    A couple of weeks ago, the KUAT engineers installed some new digital transmitter equipment. Very nice, except that now, for technical reasons I won’t go into here, we’re operating on a delay. In other words, what you hear through your speakers is something I did a full eight seconds ago. That shouldn’t make any difference to you, but it can sure foul things up here at the radio-station end.
    This morning, at 06:15:00, I gave the cue to our station manager in one of the studios downstairs to begin the first break in our fall membership campaign. This has always worked in the past, but not this time. The people down in Membership Central are listening to the air signal, not a direct audio feed from my control room. That means John didn’t hear my cue until eight seconds after I actually gave it. Which means we had eight seconds of dead air. Then John started talking, but didn’t hear himself, and figured, perhaps, that I hadn’t brought up his microphone on my control board, or that there was some other problem. So he paused. And then when he heard himself eight seconds after he'd first opened his mouth, he figured out what the problem was and got the break started.
    David Close, the local Morning Edition host next door at KUAZ, was monitoring the snafu, made a couple of phone calls and got a couple of engineers out of bed. We’d be running through several more breaks before anybody could get to our studios, so we needed a quick if temporary fix.
    First idea: I’d use the intercom and tell John when I’d be throwing to him, down to the second. Well, I guess that’s the professional way to do it, adhere to a schedule. But the music doesn’t always precisely fit its confines, so the next idea was for John to use one of the phones in Membership Central, call me here in the studio, and have me put the receiver down on the counter in front of me so he could hear over the phone what I was doing live. Which would’ve been a swell idea had he not kept getting a busy signal when he tried to call me. (I wasn’t using the phone, honest!)
    During the third break, I got a call from an engineer who, without leaving the comfort of his Poet’s Corner home, had by remote control switched some gizmo at the transmitter high atop Mt. Bigelow and eliminated the eight-second delay. Now things are back to normal. Who says classical radio is boring? (Of course, you may think that if this passes for excitement around here, classical radio really is boring.)

FOLLOW THE MONEY

posted by James Reel

    The Washington Post informs us:

    A new report from the National Endowment for the Arts blasts public radio, saying it fails to fulfill its obligation to provide music that commercial stations won't touch. The NEA says public radio—once dominated by classical, jazz and other minority forms of music—is retreating ever further from that mission, choosing to focus on news and talk.
    National Public Radio pleads guilty to using its new resources to build a stronger news operation, but rejects the NEA's notion that public radio is abandoning its cultural mission. Rather, NPR maintains, it plans to use the Web and other emerging technologies to introduce a new generation of listeners to music you can't hear on the radio.

    Well, NPR is simply following the money, in more ways than one. The widow of the founder of McDonald’s bequeathed it a huge chunk of change—200 million served—specifically for news programming. Had some benefactor ponied up a similar amount for music, no doubt NPR’s priorities would be different.
    KUAT-FM dropped its NPR affiliation back in the 1980s, and it’s hardly been missed. The most interesting classical-music programs have for years come from other sources, especially American Public Media. Whatever NPR is planning to do with new technology will be playing catch-up with APR, the BBC and several other content providers around the world.
    If you read down into the Washington Post article, you’ll find this:

    The report says there's no shortage of listeners for classical programming. Classical listeners tend to spend more time listening to their public stations than news listeners devote to their stations, according to a public radio study quoted in the NEA report. But because news listeners tend to give stations larger gifts, many stations have dumped the classics.

    Aha. This is hardly a secret, but it’s something that few public-radio managers care to talk about within earshot of their listeners. Now you know, in case you hadn’t already guessed the truth. You can read the full Washington Post article here. I haven’t been able to find the NEA report itself online.