Former singer and current opera marketer Rich Russell offers a nice metaphor linking orchestral programming to the beer selection at his local bar. I’m a wine guy myself, but what he says is right on. Of course, this is where I link to my recent article on the same subject—orchestral programming, not beer—which has generated more reader comments (most of them positive) than anything I’ve written in years.
I’m teaching a four-session course on the history of the American musical theater for the Arizona Senior Academy this month, and boy, did I get lucky with my content this past Wednesday. This week’s session was about shows before the development of the “integrated musical” in the early 1940s. From Oklahoma! on, all of a show’s elements—the book, the lyrics, the music, the dance numbers—ostensibly worked together to define the characters and propel the story. During the period I was talking about this week, though, any old song could be dropped into a show, whether it was relevant or not.
Well, on Wednesday morning I watched online the first episode of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, the latest project from Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel and Firefly/Serenity. Whedon produced Dr. Horrible on the fly and has posted it free online (until July 20, at which point you’ll have to pay to download it from iTunes). As I was driving out to Academy Village, I impulsively resolved to work Dr. Horrible into my presentation. The subject is a geeky young man who aspires to be a supercriminal. (Remember the trio of nerd villains in Season 6 of Buffy? This guy, who goes by the name Dr. Horrible, is cut from the same cloth as Jonathan and Andrew, but he’s not as malevolent as Warren.) Trouble is, Dr. Horrible has a crush on a girl he sees every week at the laundromat, and his first opportunity to have a real conversation with her comes when he’s in the middle of committing a crime. Said crime is foiled by Dr. Horrible’s arch-nemesis, Captain Hammer, who thereupon starts making googly eyes with the bad doctor’s love interest. That’s the gist of Episode 1, which you can watch here, except I forgot to mention that every couple of minutes the characters break out into song.
My audience on Wednesday had no familiarity with the Whedon oeuvre, and I doubt that they had any interest in Dr. Horrible’s subject matter, but I forced them to watch a few bits and pieces of the first episode because I think it’s a splendid, compact example of the craft of the integrated musical. Every single song reveals what the characters want, and follows them as they resolve to set the next course of action. Oh, and the whole thing is very, very funny.
So then I contrasted that with the hodge-podge approach of the creators of American musicals from the 1850s through the 1930s, and I ended the class with a clip from the movie version of Cole Porter’s Gay Divorce (retitled The Gay Divorcee for cinematic release). Honestly, I hadn’t really watched the cllip all the way through before I plugged it into PowerPoint, but as I stood there watching the whole thing with the class, I realized that it perfectly brought the session full circle. Here was the great transition to the integrated musical: In the song “Night and Day,” Fred Astaire lays out to Ginger Rogers exactly what his character wants and tries to persuade her to succumb to his blandishments; this doesn’t work, so Astaire resorts to dance, and in the dance sequence the relationship between the two characters develops further. The whole clip really moves the specific characters and the show’s plot along, and I was able to tie this in with the Joss Whedon material I’d shown at the beginning of class. Symmetry is a lovely thing. Here are Fred and Ginger, courtesy of YouTube:
Two plays and a restaurant fall under my critical scrutiny in this week’s Tucson Weekly. Unfortunately, “fall” is the operative word in the restaurant review:
Last year's most appalling local restaurant news: Alan Zeman, one of the founders of Tucson Originals, was closing his excellent restaurant, Fuego, and selling out to a Canadian chain. The word "traitor" was bandied about in some quarters, but it seemed only fair to wait and see how things turned out. Yes, one should, as much as possible, patronize locally owned restaurants with unique menus attuned to the region, but restaurant chains are not necessarily evil, and you can get a decent meal at many of them, and besides, the Canadian company, Firkin, is a franchise operation; technically, the spot on Tanque Verde is locally owned. We gave Firkin and Friar--completely unrelated to Frog and Firkin, near the UA--a full year to get itself together and develop a following before deciding whether or not we should forgive Zeman.
I’m afraid that Zeman must remain unforgiven, and you can learn why I think so here. I’m more favorably disposed toward the plays:
Two people building a relationship, counselors have told us for years, have to compromise; each must try to look at things from the perspective of the other person. That idea is fundamental to two plays that opened here last week, and it's what leads Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park to its obligatory happy ending--but it's disastrous for the couple at the center of Tracy Letts' Bug, the late show in Live Theatre Workshop's Etcetera series.
Details abound here.
Via the Face of the Future photo transformer, here’s what I’d look like as painted by Modigliani:
And this is me in the style of El Greco:
And now I have to write some radio scripts, unless Spider Solitaire proves more interesting.
A very short review I wrote for Strings magazine:
Handel: Concerti Grossi, Op. 6 Nos. 7-12. Martin Pearlman conducting Boston Baroque (Telarc 80688)
Handel dashed off his dozen concerti grossi published as Op. 6 in barely a month, but it’s been a full 15 years since Martin Pearlman and Boston Baroque recorded the first half of the set. Now, at last, here’s the rest of the group, and it was well worth the wait.
In 1739, Handel’s publisher, John Walsh, was eager to cash in on the popularity of the concerti grossi of Corelli and Geminiani, so he asked Handel for something in the same manner. Handel quickly complied, and made his work a bit easier by dropping in quotes from his just-completed Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, not to mention pieces by Scarlatti and Muffat. Despite the borrowings, the whole set sounds like vintage Handel, and Pearlman and his little band of string players know exactly what to do with it.
As in their recording of the first half of the collection, and their more recent treatment of the Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music, the playing is quite suave. The period-instrument group easily meets Handel’s greatest challenge: conveying stateliness without stiffening up. Beyond that, the musicians can also sound light, playful, even Italianate, as in the final concerto. Throughout, there’s a suppleness that stops well short of affectation, even while Pearlman devotes great attention to such details as attacking musical paragraphs differently from the way of attacking individual phrases within them. The only complaint: Telarc shouldn’t have taken a decade and a half to complete this fine cycle.
Greg Sandow is re-opening a conversation about why pop-music criticism can seem more engaging, and more engaged, than classical criticism:
Imagine a pop show and a classical concert, both equally serious. Suppose they're reviewed by pop and classical critics of equal ability. The pop review, as a rule, will be more compelling for general readers, because the music will be connected to the world outside, and the review will show that.
In the course of this, he brings in and then dismisses some possible objections, including:
_Classical reviews aren't likely to talk about connections to the outside world, because many classical pieces are instrumental, and thus don't have lyrics that can make these connections. Or because pop musicians mostly write their own songs, while classical musicians play music written by others. Or because so much of the music played at classical concerts comes from the past._ This excuses the problem I'm defining here, but doesn't solve it. That is, we can say, if we like, that classical music reviews shouldn't be expected to do what pop reviews do. But still pop reviews will (if I'm right about this) be more interesting to general readers. And at a time when we want more attention for classical music, this doesn't seem helpful. This objection to my point, then, actually raises a challenge for people writing about classical music. If we can't expect classical music to connect readily to the outside world, what exactly does it do? What, exactly, is valuable about it? I'm not—repeat not—saying it relating to the outside world is the most important value classical music might have, but what is classical music doing for us when we listen to it? Of course it's doing something very powerful. But how would we define that—and, most important for the point I'm making in these posts, do reviews convey what the power and meaning of classical music might be?
Well, here’s an idea that I think is central to what makes classical music (or, for that matter, pop standards) “classic”: The music survives its own time and place by making a strong connection with individual performers and listeners for generations to come. Beyond the time of their origin, classics aren’t about connecting to the outside world so much as connecting to inner worlds, and it’s the personal response of generations of individuals that keeps certain songs and symphonies alive. The music that is too bound up with its zeitgeist holds little interest even a quarter-century later, except academically. And oddly enough, I think a lot of pop-music criticism, although on the surface it may document a visceral response, is really zeitgeist criticism, pondering the nature of contemporary society and how well a performer reflects its issues.
To do what Greg thinks classical criticism ought to do, if I understand him correctly, a review should reveal the critic’s personal response to the music and its performance. And yet, paradoxically, I think that’s a poor approach. Some of the worst criticism ever written is by amateurs who rhapsodize over the transcendent concert they’ve just attended, without really conveying anything meaningful to readers. So the reviewer was blown away; so what? It’s still necessary to dig into a piece and figure out exactly what in the music and its performance makes those personal connections with other listeners. Greg, if I’m interpreting some of his past posts accurately, is afraid that this leads to dry, excessively technical reviews that alienate lay readers. That’s certainly possible, but not necessary. I’d advocate more colorful nuts-and-bolts criticism, an artful blend of the objective and subjective, exploring the intersection of technique and expression, of the universal and the personal, at the heart of any classic.
James Reel's cranky consideration of the fine arts and public radio in Tucson and beyond.
