Kudos to Naxos

for finding new reasons for children to hate classical music!

P.S. “Rococo” is a word that belongs in a song about as much as “inter-uteran”.

[Update: From the imdb episode descriptions for “Little Amadeus” (which is apparently German in origin):

Season 1, Episode 1: Solo für Amadeus

Amadeus is scheduled to sing in the choir on the Archbishop’s name day. Yet Amadeus must help his friend Kajetan with the problem of the robbed coach that was loaded down with cookies and chocolate for the event. Can Amadeus help his friend and be at Bishop’s celebration on time?

Season 1, Episode 9: Gift im Trunk

Ahoy! The Mozarts are on the way to Vienna by boat. Leopold and Anna Maria are there but where are their children? They are on the wrong ship! Will Amadeus and Nannerl ever see their parents again?

Season 2, Episode 7: Sternschnuppen

The children of Salzburg are playing in the snow. Pumperl joins in the fun and jumps on some ice in the river yet starts to float away. Can the children save the dog? And what has this got to do with the big telescope?

And what the hell does any of this have to do with Mozart????]

Tamino, ach mein Gott!


Dorothea Röschmann, soprano; Gustav Mahler CO / Abbado
Crystalline beauty, like floating atop the clouds.


Hilde Gueden, soprano; Wiener Phil / Böhm
Heavier, but with a full mode of expression, every note a deep moment.


Irmgard Seefried, soprano; Wiener Phil / Karajan
Would somebody please call the Humane Society to put this creature out of its misery?

Polystylism and the State: A case study

axelrod

Not that I’m trying to get all political in this space, but I want to single out certain people in positions of power around the world for their recent displays of musical acumen.  First is senior White House advisor David Axelrod (above), who took a “musical leave of absence” from his duties in Washington to hear the Chicago Symphony play Lennyz “Serenade after Plato’s Symposium” simply because it is so rarely played.  Well done, Mr. Axelrod.

PD*28690375

Next, even greater honors go to one Vladimir Putin, “Prime Minister” of Russia, who recently held a forum for Russia’s literary leaders, during which he said, and I am totally not making this up:

Humanity has entered a new development stage, and cannot turn back. It should be taken for granted. There is no way to reverse progress.

You know no worse than I do, and possibly better than I do that new means of expression appear every now and then in music and pictorial arts. Take our compatriot Alfred Schnittke. His music appeared sophisticated to the extreme. One did not think more complicated music could have been written-but contemporary composers write music of which experts say that no unprepared listener can hear out a piece from beginning to end. But some people enjoy such music and say that is the only way music should be today.

Say what??  Did the PM and general éminence grise of Russia seriously just name check Al Schnittke?  Damn straight.  But Putin has distinguished himself in matters musical before: in 2007, at the death of Mstislav Rostropovitch, the then premier issued a statement of public grief and attended the cellist’s funeral.  I remember that this seemed somehow natural to me at the time, but my good friend and insightful commentator El Bensón (who is apparently an opera blogger at this point) was duly startled, and contextualized the event with the following question: “Do you think George Bush would make a public announcement about the death of Yo Yo Ma?”

Um…

george-bush conducts

Unfortunately, just when things were looking up in the public sphere with regard to music, there’s This which basically cancels out everything that was ever good or right with humanity.  Pity.

On the flip side, if you want to read one of the finest pieces of writing about politics in music (not the other way around), I would direct you to our good friend Slavoj Žižek’s article “Shostakovitch in Casablanca“.

What a difference a year and a half made…

I had a really interesting and largely satisfying concert experience this weekend, so I’d like to pause for a short rumination on the life of a composer/conductor.

This weekend, for an Ad Hoc concert at Indiana U., I performed a piece of mine called “3 Waltz Scenes”. As the name “Ad Hoc” would suggest, this sort of concert is thrown together however possible — the conductor lures players to the few allotted rehearsals with junk food and hopes that the opportunity to play decent repertoire with friends will be enough to keep them there. These things are a grudging part of student life and somehow they usually come off decently.

I had been wanting to put some of my own music on an Ad Hoc for a while (this is my second year as a master’s student at IU) and had thought about writing something new for one of these concerts. That’s my usual M.O. — I’m very much an “occasional” composer, i.e. one who writes music for particular occasions (admittedly, I’m also one who only composes occasionally, these days).

I decided, however, to trot out an older piece of mine, which I composed in the spring of ’08, and which had only been played once. The second performance of a piece has so many advantages: the music is already written, the parts are already fixed, and it affords a chance to make any corrections or improvements to the original. It’s also a right of passage for the music itself — the piece has survived its infancy and is moving on to the next phase of its life (even if it’s me who has to drag it kicking and screaming to it’s birthday party).

The performance this weekend was a major improvement on the first one in many ways, partially because of the above reasons, partially because I was working with higher-level musicians, but also because of my own development as a performer and musician. Let’s take a brief glance into history, shall we? Here’s a clip from the première:

and here’s the same segment from the concert two days ago:

So, obviously, there are a lot of differences, the main one being Tempo.  Isn’t a composer supposed to know his own tempo?  In the earlier performance, the tempo is 100 to the dotted quarter.  A year and a half later, I conducted the same music at 116.  That’s four clicks of the metronome faster — not an inconsequential difference.  Interestingly, the tempo indication that I wrote in the score is dotted quarter = 100.  So, should I go back and change the score?  I’m not sure… because I frankly think my more recent tempo is about a click too fast.  So, it seems like I’ll need another shot at this piece to really get it right.

For me, this kind of point raises a lot of philosophical questions about notated music.  Do I have more authority as the composer of the piece when I’m conducting it than somebody else would?  Especially if my interpretative decisions are so erratic?  If I as a composer am subject to the same human foibles as any other musician, why should I deny other interpreters the leeway that I would grant myself?

I’m reminded of a particular paradox in the music of Bartòk, namely that he would often write timings in his scores, not just timings of the whole piece, but even of the individual sections and phrases.  The paradox is that, if you do the math yourself and multiply the tempo by the number of beats in one of his pieces, you get one timing, if you listen to his own recordings of his music, you get another timing, and 9 times out of 10, both of those will be different than what he’s written on the page!

So what’s a boy to do?  I don’t know.  And probably I can’t know until I’ve gone deeper into my life as an artist.  And who knows, maybe when I get there, I still won’t have any idea.

What I do know is that that gold necktie that I wore back on May 17, 2008 is so gorgeous, and I remember that I drove all the way out to Woodfield Mall to by it specially from Nordstrom’s, and that it cost about 1/4 of my monthly paycheck as a Youth Orchestra Director, and I still think it was totally worth it.  But for whatever reason, I didn’t even think about wearing it for this concert the other day, and can I just say, thank God I didn’t, because how embarrassing would it have been to be wearing the same tie in two videos of the same piece?  I mean, that’s just a little too cutesy, even for me.