LESSONS, ANYONE?

posted by James Reel

    My latest contribution to the Tucson Weekly begins like this:

    The Uzbekistan music-education system has established an outpost in Oro Valley.
    This weekend, the Oro Valley Music and Dance Academy will celebrate its grand opening with an instrument petting zoo, dance and music demonstrations, balloon art and the customary ribbon-cutting and speechifying.
    It's a branch of the Music and Dance Academy, which was established in Tucson 12 years ago by Nina Tishkevich. She moved with her family to Tucson in the early 1990s, leaving behind the anti-Semitism and political instability of their native Tashkent, Uzbekistan. There, Tishkevich had directed the music department at the Tashkent Music Pedagogy Center, overseeing 3,000 teachers and 14,500 students in 32 music schools.
    Between its two locations, the Music and Dance Academy employs 35 faculty members; at the end of the last academic year, about 475 students were on its rolls. It's not as grand as the music-education empire Tishkevich oversaw in Tashkent, but still impressive considering that she got her local start, after a stint teaching at a Montessori school, by renting a single studio at the Tucson Jewish Community Center.
    Impressive, and necessary. Schools like this, and private teachers, are increasingly important in the Tucson area. From the 1950s into the early 1970s, Tucson schools enjoyed a golden age of music education, but since then, tighter budgets and changing priorities have taken a toll on school-arts programs. More than ever, students need private arts academies and individual teachers to supplement or personalize what they get in school, or even to replace school programs that have vanished over the years.

    You’ll find the rest here.

OFF BROADWAY

posted by James Reel

    This terse e-mail just arrived from the PR guy at Broadway in Tucson:   

    As of August 20, 2007, Mark Rasdorf is no longer with Broadway in Tucson.
   We are excited to announce that our new General Manager is Lendre Kearns, formerly of the La Jolla Playhouse in Southern California.

    That's it, aside from an amiable opening and closing sentence. Looks mighty precipitous, and should be interesting to check out.

CUBBY-HOLES

posted by James Reel

    Via On an Overgrown Path, here’s an interesting remark by former BBC Proms director and BBC Radio 3 controller John Drummond: “There's no such thing as ‘the music audience.’ They like the organ, or they like chamber music, or they like symphony concerts, or they like opera, or the nineteenth century, or new music. But they don't like each other. There is a mass of different audiences. So any (radio) schedule you put together is going to displease more people than it pleases.”
    There’s a certain amount of truth here, although Drummond is of course grossly oversimplifying. I see some of the same people in the audience for the Tucson Symphony as I do for the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, Arizona Opera, the Arizona Early Music Society, and so on. These are musical omnivores. But I’ve also observed a significant compartmentalization of audiences, which can be most easily judged by how many people drop away—it’s much less crowded at early-music or new music organ concerts than at the symphony.
    Opera, I think, has the highest percentage of attendees who shun other kinds of music performance. I’m not just referring to the “opera queens” who, between swoons, can dissect every performance Maria Callas gave from her debut to her career’s wretched end. I also mean those people who don’t really know much about music, but who attend opera for the spectacle—the singing, the acting (such as it is), the scenery, the costumes, the live orchestra in the pit, the whole impressive package. Some of them, I think, have absolutely no curiosity about music; otherwise, they’d show up at non-operatic concerts from time to time. Perhaps it’s rather like people who watch a lot of television, but would never think of going to see Shakespeare or Ibsen or even Tony Kushner in an actual theater.

ROTTEN TOMATOES

posted by James Reel

    A friend alerts me that Connie Tuttle has besmirched my culinary reputation in her latest contribution to the Tucson Weekly:

    James Reel inspired this column. I recently ran into the Weekly arts editor at Trader Joe's. We exchanged the usual social chatter and then went on our separate shopping ways until I spotted him reach for a can (gasp!) of marinara sauce and place it in his cart.
    People ... I know it's summer, and the heat is not conducive to cooking, but making a sauce from scratch takes approximately three minutes more than opening a can (not counting cooking time).

    You can find the entire column here, but first allow me to defend myself. First, I bought the marinara (organic, by the way, and in a jar, not in a can) under orders from my wife, who likes to keep the stuff on hand for use when we’re short of time or ingredients. (Note Connie's caveat: scratch takes only thee minutes longer than opening a can, "not including cooking time"!) Me, I generally use fresh tomatoes in my sauces. And by the way, what, exactly, was Connie doing in that aisle, which holds only canned goods? Why, buying canned tomatoes, it turns out. Read the first recipe she offers, and there they are: canned tomatoes—in the summer, for crying out loud! If Connie were serious, she’d be using her own home-grown tomatoes, or at least driving down to Willcox to buy some fresh off the vine. Oh, the hypocrisy!

BLUE LEAVES

posted by James Reel

    Maybe I’m an absent blogger these days, but I do still drag myself out to review plays. Here’s the beginning of the latest effort in the Tucson Weekly:

    The older John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves gets, the less funny it seems.
    Around 1970, it started out as a black comedy, emphasis on the comedy, about a dysfunctional Queens household on the day the pope came to New York in 1965. When the Arizona Theatre Company mounted it in the 1980s, as part of its challenging (and, the fearful claimed, alienating) 21st-anniversary season, the emphasis fell a bit more upon the black than the comedy, although it still provided its share of laughs.
    Right now, in the Catalina Players' production, The House of Blue Leaves is seeming less like a comedy than like a bitter fantasy bordering on the surreal, populated by characters who are every bit as troubling as they are amusing.

    You can find the entire review here.

WORDS OF WISDOM

posted by James Reel

    Oboist Patricia Mitchell has this to say about performing with an ensemble that’s hovering below her own ability:

The important thing for a serious musician to remember is that lowering one’s standards when playing in a less-than-stellar group is only a reflection on that musician, not on the group. It’s also a bad habit that can seep into one’s playing when in a better group. So I try to play my best. Every time I play. That’s all.

    Those are words we should all live by, whether we’re musicians or radio personalities or teachers or salesmen or anyone working as part of a group. Get the original context here.