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.

CULTURAL PROVOCATEUR

posted by James Reel

    Oops! I forgot to post a link yesterday to my contribution to the latest Tucson Weekly:

    Performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña has been billed as a cultural provocateur and as a radical.
    Gómez-Peña is in Tucson right now, stirring up artistic trouble courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art. He and members of his troupe, La Pocha Nostra, are conducting workshops for 15 like-minded artists, the results of which will be displayed and performed on Saturday, Aug. 11, at MOCA.
    Gómez-Peña is a smart guy (in the early 1990s, he received a MacArthur "genius" grant) and a quick thinker, so he didn't seem taken aback when I called last week with a rude question: What good is a radical artist in contemporary America, where even the supposedly liberal media are pretty conservative, and ideas that are even remotely progressive aren't taken seriously or given any real coverage in the mainstream culture?

    Discover his answer here.

WHAT'S COOKING?

posted by James Reel

    Courtesy of Sound and Fury’s AC Douglas, here’s a recipe I’m sure many of my musician friends would love to try, although they might choke on the result: How to Cook a Conductor.