A skeptical leftist's, or post-capitalist's, or eco-socialist's blog, including skepticism about leftism (and related things under other labels), but even more about other issues of politics. Free of duopoly and minor party ties. Also, a skeptical look at Gnu Atheism, religion, social sciences, more.
Note: Labels can help describe people but should never be used to pin them to an anthill.
As seen at Washington Babylon and other fine establishments
Dallas', and Texas', oldest radio station, WRR,
is one I listened to regularly when I lived in the Metromess in the
2000-oughts, but now that I'm close enough to get it on a lucky day on
car radio, I'm more likely to want a CD.
Per D Magazine,
as the station gears up for the approaching centennial, it is a
"unicorn." I knew that it was one of the few commercial classical
stations, or one of the few non-NPR classical stations, period. The old
one in St. Louis, the FM side of the dial of the paired stations at
least formerly owned by the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod is now
contemporary Christian; a non-commercial non-NPR station of some sort has filled the void there.
More here from NBC-5,
which notes it moved to the FM dial in 1948 and became all-classical in
1964. As the second-oldest federally licensed radio station in the
country, one that precedes the FCC, ti's one of the few west of the
Mississippi to keep a "W" rather than a "K" call sign.
And,
I knew it is the almost the only, if not the only, municipally owned
radio station, any format, in the US. That said, that almost wasn't the
case 15 or so years ago. As I tweeted to D Mag:
.@DMagazine
Nice piece about WRR and the approaching centennial. Now, go through
the archives and find a story or 6 about how former D Magazine hotshot
columnist Laura Miller damn near killed the station when Dallas mayor.
https://t.co/EMIsccWUEo
As mayor, Laura Miller made noises about selling the station on more than one occasion. Laura Miller the mayor was a bit diff than Laura Miller the D Mag columnist and a LOT different than the Dallas Observer muckraker.
Speaking of, Jim Schutze roasted her (and her "connections") over this. (This was also when Jim Schutze was a real curmudgeon, not one who gave bad cops a pass and other things.) In a second piece, Schutze noted Miller was trying to have her cake and eat it too on the original deal, backing away from half of it. Surprisingly, Schutze didn't note that WRR also broadcast Dallas City Council meetings and the tower swap idea would have meant Dallas south of the Trinity couldn't have heard Laura Miller's mayoral shenanigans in live time.
That said, per a great long piece by Texas Monthly that covers the history of the now-nonexistent AM station as well, the council meetings (a coverage requirement added in 1982) are "ratings suicide."
Now,
classical stations may not have huge listenership. On the other hand,
they are parties of one in their fields, unlike rock, country, easy
listening, rap, etc., where there's half a dozen or more of each in a
city the size of Dallas.
And, generalizing but not
stereotyping, they have older, wealthier audiences that will spend for
certain things, like luxury cars, Persian rugs, etc. And well-off Miller
and well-off hubby Steve Wolens should have known this. (Schutze noted the station was in the black.)
And, speaking of demographics? The station's listenership is one-third under 35, Texas Monthly said.
Anyway, the station survived.
But
the programming, and even more the announcers, have gone downhill since
Scott Cantrell, classical music freelance critic and formerly of the
Morning News, decried some issues there, with which I totally agreed, 15
years ago. Still plays "blue haired lady" music even more than the DSO,
though I did hear Schnittke on there once relatively recently. (Back in
the 2000-oughts, when Sundays were listener requests in the afternoon, I
phoned in and got one of his "tamer" pieces played.)
Classical
is being hollowed out less by syndication and web broadcasting than
other genres of FM radio, but it is being hollowed out somewhat. The
station has one less announcer and more canned music than before. What its long-term future holds, I don't know.
Scare quote on "race" in the header because what many people claim as "race" is basically a sociological construct. If we want to speak about a level above ethnicity in terms of biology, in other words, rather than the difference within different "whites," different "blacks," etc., my suggested term, harking back to the classical Greek, is "ethnos."
That said, a couple of stipulations.
1. People of any "race," or ethnos, can be racist. "Reverse racism" is racism.
2. People of any ethnos can commit double standards. A "reverse double standard" is a double standard.
That note aside, let's get to the meat.
In a blog comment thread, I heard someone respond to a comment I made about being "hot" for female classical violinists, after others had been posting about various female rock stars. I noted it would be out in left field, and just let it go at that.
One commenter, a woman, then responded, "That's so white."
If she meant literally, I mentioned Midori, then moved from violinists to opera and Denyce Graves. (I could also have mentioned Kiri Te Kanawa.)
If she meant figuratively, then we're into double standards. "That's so white," or similar? If I said "that's so black" about hip-hop, I'd get flamed by a lot of liberals, even ones not stereotypically PC.
If she meant "white" because of the relative lack of minorities? True, but it's improving. And, the "that's so white" stereotype is already used by black kids in school to hold each other back intellectually. It's only worse for whites to offer it up as a tool to hold blacks back artistically, or claim classical music is part of the dead white males canon, or whatever.
Claiming that classical music (or, say, national parks, which suffer from a similar perception, and fairly deservedly) are "oh so white," in a structural and not just sociological sense, perpetuates double standards, and stereotypes.
Of course, white people, every one of them individually as well as an ethnos, are believed by some to be endowed with privilege and thus can't be stereotyped.
I'm not saying this person was coming from that point. But, are some people with similar ideas?
Many lovers of poetry as well as Civil War and other history buffs know that Walt Whitman wrote two poems of tribute and elegy to President Abraham Lincoln after his assassination.
Walt Whitman, America’s first native poetic genius, wrote
two poems about Abraham Lincoln’s death. The first, and shorter is:
Oh Captain, My Captain
O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! My Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
This is a lovely piece of musical art too.
Yes.
Kurt Weill has this as one of four "Walt Whitman Songs."
That "Captain" had just delivered his Second Inaugural Address. Speaking of that, I have no idea who Walter Trumbull is, and didn't find much on Googling, but he, while having done this half a century ago, has captured well the Second Inaugural:
If you want something a bit more modern, in recording quality, and, a bit more professional than that, perhaps, especially if you think Lincoln's voice may not have been that high-pitched or border-Southern (I do think it was both, myself), here's a presentation of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, his other transcendent speech:
From there, with those interludes, we head back to Whitman.
The second, and far longer, of his Lincoln elegy poems is:
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the
night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
2
O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the
star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.
3
In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the
white-wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves
of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the
perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the
dooryard,
With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of
rich green,
A sprig with its flower I break.
4
In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat,
Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)
5
Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets
peep’d from the ground, spotting the gray debris,
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing
the endless grass,
Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its
shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen,
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the
orchards,
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.
6
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the
land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped
in black,
With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d
women standing,
With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the
night,
With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces
and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre
faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices
rising strong and solemn,
With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the
coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—where amid
these you journey,
With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang,
Here, coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.
7
(Nor for you, for one alone,
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring,
For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you
O sane and sacred death.
All over bouquets of roses,
O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies,
But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes,
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
For you and the coffins all of you O death.)
8
O western orb sailing the heaven,
Now I know what you must have meant as a month since I
walk’d,
As I walk’d in silence the transparent shadowy night,
As I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me night
after night,
As you droop’d from the sky low down as if to my side,
(while the other stars all look’d on,)
As we wander’d together the solemn night, (for something I
know not what kept me from sleep,)
As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west how
full you were of woe,
As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool
transparent night,
As I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost in the netherward
black of the night,
As my soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank, as where you
sad orb,
Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.
9
Sing on there in the swamp,
O singer bashful and tender, I hear your notes, I hear your
call,
I hear, I come presently, I understand you,
But a moment I linger, for the lustrous star has detain’d
me,
The star my departing comrade holds and detains me.
10
O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that
has gone?
And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?
Sea-winds blown from east and west,
Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea,
till there on the prairies meeting,
These and with these and the breath of my chant,
I’ll perfume the grave of him I love.
11
O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?
And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,
To adorn the burial-house of him I love?
Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes,
With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke
lucid and bright,
With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent,
sinking sun, burning, expanding the air,
With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green
leaves of the trees prolific,
In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river,
with a wind-dapple here and there,
With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against
the sky, and shadows,
And the city at hand with dwellings so dense, and stacks of
chimneys,
And all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the
workmen homeward returning.
12
Lo, body and soul—this land,
My own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying
tides, and the ships,
The varied and ample land, the South and the North in the
light, Ohio’s shores and flashing Missouri,
And ever the far-spreading prairies cover’d with grass and
corn.
Lo, the most excellent sun so calm and haughty,
The violet and purple morn with just-felt breezes,
The gentle soft-born measureless light,
The miracle spreading bathing all, the fulfill’d noon,
The coming eve delicious, the welcome night and the stars,
Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.
13
Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird,
Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the
bushes,
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.
Sing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song,
Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.
O liquid and free and tender!
O wild and loose to my soul—O wondrous singer!
You only I hear—yet the star holds me, (but will soon
depart,)
Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds me.
14
Now while I sat in the day and look’d forth,
In the close of the day with its light and the fields of
spring, and the farmers preparing their crops,
In the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes
and forests,
In the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb’d winds
and the storms,)
Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing,
and the voices of children and women,
The many-moving sea-tides, and I saw the ships how they
sail’d,
And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all
busy with labor,
And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each
with its meals and minutia of daily usages,
And the streets how their throbbings throbb’d, and the
cities pent—lo, then and there,
Falling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me with
the rest,
Appear’d the cloud, appear’d the long black trail,
And I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of
death.
Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the
hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in
the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.
And the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me,
The gray-brown bird I know receiv’d us comrades three,
And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.
From deep secluded recesses,
From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still,
Came the carol of the bird.
And the charm of the carol rapt me,
As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.
Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.
Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.
Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come
unfalteringly.
Approach strong deliveress,
When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the
dead,
Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.
From me to thee glad serenades,
Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and
feastings for thee,
And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky
are fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.
The night in silence under many a star,
The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I
know,
And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil’d death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.
Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields
and the prairies wide,
Over the dense-pack’d cities all and the teeming wharves and
ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.
15
To the tally of my soul,
Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,
With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.
Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume,
And I with my comrades there in the night.
While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,
As to long panoramas of visions.
And I saw askant the armies,
I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc’d with
missiles I saw them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody,
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in
silence,)
And the staffs all splinter’d and broken.
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the
war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not,
The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.
16
Passing the visions, passing the night,
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands,
Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of
my soul,
Even more than the showdown between the Seattle Seahawks and Denver Broncos, even more than the showdown between Peyton Manning and what a win would mean for his legacy, there was one other thing that piqued my attention (even if a late afternoon nap had me miss it and much of the first half).
That was glorious-voiced, and lovely looking, if I may, Renee Fleming, singing the National Anthem.
"Finally!" I thought. "We'll get it sung right at a major sporting event."
Er, not zackly.
Fleming didn't fully butcher "The Star Spangled Banner," unlike
the typical big-time sports event singer, tis true, but she did about one-third
maul it. I had hoped that she would just, you know, sing
it like it's written.
If you can't clock it in under 2 minutes flat, on
the time, you blew it. That's my baseline for doing it right, like a pitcher having a 110 ERA+ or a batter a 110 OPS+ to get real consideration for the Hall of Fame. If you can't sing it straight up (if you're sober, since it was originally a drinking song tune) without all sorts of hitches and adornments, you blew it. Fleming didn't have as much of that as your typical rock, rap, rhythm and blues, country, pop, or imitation Slim Whitman star, but she had enough of that to have blown it. When I heard the first syllables on YouTube, I knew my hopes had been sadly crushed. And, I didn't care for the "reverb" chorus behind her, either. That hurt the clock time a bit. She might have completed the 2-minute drill correctly as far as flat time, if not for that, but it would have had enough issues otherwise to be a one-fifth mauling. And, if the military chorus reverb was her idea, she gets a ding for that, too.
She chose the octave jump at the end. I assume she chose the "soulifying" in the opening phrase. Just like someone from the pop world, I'm sure she had at least some degree of control over presentation. I do salute her for not lip-synching, even if it seems that the cold sapped her lungs, and tone, both a bit. And, I do salute the idea. I don't salute ... Well, I don't salute the "dumbing down," or equivalent thereof.
A recent blog post at Scientific American talked about the "sad" feeling of minor keys vs. the "happy" feeling of major keys, and how the author wanted to do some more specific investigation of this issue.
Several historically or culturally relevant items were missing from the piece, though.
That includes, but is not limited to:
1. The major and minor scales of modern Western music (more on that below) did not become the only two regularly used scales until the Renaissance, and even then, not really so until the later part of the Renaissance.
2. They evolved from two of the several church modes of the medieval modal system, which in turn had involved from older classical Greek modal scales.
3. Even when the Western musical world focused on the major and minor scales, they didn't all sound the same until the adoption of even or mean tuning in the 1700s, pushed by people like Johann Sebastian Bach in his two volumes of the Well-Tempered Clavier.
Before then, instruments generally had to be tuned to sound best in one or two major or minor keys. Keys that were harmonically "distant" from them had certain intervals that basically sounded ... bad at least. Perfect fourths and fifths, in the most distant keys, might instead sound halfway like the infamous "devil's tritone," the augmented fourth or diminished fifth.
4. Since Debussy's work with whole-tone scales in the late 19th century, followed by Arnold Schoenberg's serialism, Western classical music has become more loosely connected to the major-minor system.
5. Much non-Western traditional music is based on non-12 tone scales. These include India's classical 22-tone scale, the pentatonic scale of stereotypical East Asian music and more.
6. Some modern Western music has also rejected 12-tone scales, not just the major/minor system within 12-tone scales. Harry Partch is known for his work with microtonal music.
7. The author doesn't ask whether cultural beliefs about happy/sad and major/minor influence our perceptions, nor about how our mental states at the moment might fuse with these cultural beliefs.
Basically, the post (I'm not going to bother hunting up the link) came off sounding like someone halfway through grad school in science program but without a single class in music theory or history spouting forth personal ideas on happy/sad and major/minor, plus tapping into modern pop Western musical preconceptions.
Pianist Van Cliburn performs for a packed house in the Great Hall of the
Moscow Coservatory in April 1958 during
the first International
Tchaikovsky Competition. Associated Press file photo via Dallas Morning News
The man who put Fort Worth in particular and Texas in general on the fine arts map of the world has died at the age of 78.
Van Cliburn's talent alone might have earned him a place among the
20th-century giants of his instrument, alongside classical pianists like
Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz. But after a magical Moscow
spring in 1958, Mr. Cliburn's fame eclipsed even those musical
contemporaries, rivaling that of another young superstar of his time,
Elvis Presley.
Mr. Cliburn was "The Texan Who Conquered Russia," according to a Time
magazine cover. At the height of the Cold War, the lanky 23-year-old
from East Texas traveled to Moscow and won the first Tchaikovsky
International Competition, an event created to showcase Soviet cultural
superiority. Mr. Cliburn's unlikely triumph was thus said to bring a
thaw in tensions between the rival superpowers and created a mythic
parable about the power of art to unite mankind.
It was an iconic moment. Not just in the Cold War, but in American classical music, demonstrating that American home-grown talent in the highly competitive world of the piano did exist.
Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/02/27/4647640/van-cliburn-dies.html#storylink=cpy
At the time, America had produced an exceptional generation of pianists
besides Mr. Cliburn who were all in promising stages of their own
careers, among them Leon Fleisher, Byron Janis, Gary Graffman and Eugene
Istomin.
Like Rachmaninoff, one of the Russians he played in Moscow, he could span 12 white notes with his hands, allowing his technique, described like this:
He developed a commanding technique, cultivated an exceptionally warm
tone and manifested solid musical instincts. At its best, his playing
had a surging Romantic fervor, but leavened by an unsentimental
restraint that seemed peculiarly American.
That said, I also agree with this portion of the Times' assessment:
But if the Tchaikovsky competition represented Mr. Cliburn’s
breakthrough, it also turned out to be his undoing. Relying inordinately
on his keen musical instincts, he was not an especially probing artist,
and his growth was stalled by his early success. Audiences everywhere
wanted to hear him in his prizewinning pieces, the Tchaikovsky First
Concerto and the Rachmaninoff Third.
His subsequent explorations of wider repertory grew increasingly
insecure. During the 1960s he played less and less. By 1978 he had
retired from the concert stage; he returned in 1989, but performed
rarely. Ultimately, his promise and potential were never fulfilled.
Van Cliburn himself said he felt like he "had been at this thing for 20 years already" by 1958, and that in part explains why he didn't develop further.
It's a shame. Prokofiev and other moderns could have well stood the attention of a more mature Van Cliburn.
He did, per the NYT, sound OK on Prokofiev, but earlier composers?
Yet as early as 1959, his attempts to broaden his repertory were not
well received. That year, for a New York Philharmonic pension fund
benefit concert at Carnegie Hall conducted by Leonard Bernstein, Mr.
Cliburn played the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 25, the Schumann Concerto
and the Prokofiev Third Concerto. Howard Taubman, reviewing the program
in The Times, called the Mozart performance “almost a total
disappointment.” Of the Schumann he wrote that Mr. Cliburn provided
“sentimentality rather than Romantic sentiment.” Only the Prokofiev was
successful, he wrote, praising the brashness, exuberance and crispness
of the playing.
Reviewing a 1961 performance of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto by Mr.
Cliburn with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, Mr.
Schonberg wrote, “It was the playing of an old-young man, but without
the spirit of youth or the mellowness of age.” ...
Despite the criticism, Mr. Cliburn tried to expand his repertory,
playing concertos by MacDowell and Prokofiev and solo works by Samuel
Barber (the demanding Piano Sonata), Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and
Liszt. But the artistic growth and maturity that were expected of him
never fully came.
In short, Van Cliburn early on showed that he wasn't going to be Glenn Gould.
However, he did, through starting the Van Cliburn Competition, give another gift to American classical music -- its further development. For that alone, we should all be very grateful.
Scott Cantrell at the Dallas Morning News, an email acquaintance of mine from my days in Dallas describes the start of that, as well as his life in Fort Worth:
He already had many friends in Fort Worth, where in 1962 the
quadrennial Van Cliburn International Piano Competition was inaugurated
in his honor. He served as an artistic adviser to the competition, to be
held again in May and June 2013, and he took a keen interest in its
winners’ careers.
With the aura of an old-school Southern
gentleman, with a velvety baritone voice, Mr. Cliburn became Fort Worth
royalty. He was as warmly gracious to the youngest piano student as to
the city’s movers and shakers.
“He was a true, true gentleman,” (Richard Rodzinski, former executive director of the Van Cliburn Foundation) said, “genuinely modest, self effacing, always surprised at
people remembering him, appreciating him. Generosity, modesty,
gentleness, incredibly loyalty as a friend, great, great kindness —
these were the attributes that made people so terribly fond [of] him.”
That said, Cantrell reflects what the Times said about his later career:
In 1989, Mr. Cliburn started to revive his concert career, and he
performed that September at the opening of Dallas’ Meyerson Symphony
Center. He again appeared with major orchestras and continued to draw
rapturous audiences, but the old magic appeared only intermittently. The
rich tone of his earlier years had hardened, his memory and technique
had become less reliable and his interpretations had become fussy,
mannered. A couple of onstage fainting spells made headlines.
“Something
died there,” Bryce Morrison, a British critic specializing in piano
performance, said in a 2004 interview. “I do think he was a victim of
his own success, a victim of a commercial thing that can make you and
destroy you at the same time. It wasn’t a very long career before things
started to crack.”
No matter. He continued to grace the Cliburn Competition with his presence, his self.
And, I may just look at going to this year's competition, in part for the tributes that will be sure to flow.
At the same time, the Times reminds us he was a person ... not just a performer. That included discreetly slipping out of the gay closet in the 1960s, then being forcefully shoved out the rest of the way by a 1995 palimony suit. Beyond that, his mother lived with him in Fort Worth until she died at the age of 97 and was his only childhood piano teacher before he went to Julliard.
I get the feeling that Van Cliburn was indeed an "old soul" in some ways. But, somehow, that did NOT transfer to his music-making ability. Had it, he might not only have been better at Beethoven, but, albeit in a different way than Gould, he might have become a great Bach interpreter.
Perhaps that's because he was, in part, smothered by his mother, too. I just get the feeling that for both better AND worse, she made him what he is.
And so, as a result, he wasn't good with Beethoven, and never really tackled Bach.. So, like many others, I've only heard his Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff myself.
And so, back to what got him started.
Here's a performance, from 1962, of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto that won him fame in Moscow in 1958:
Remember him at his best. Just as we'll remember Gould doing Bach or Beethoven, and not Rachmaninoff. Remember him as an incubator for American pianists. Remember him as a booster for Fort Worth.
I have been thinking more and more about Tom Flynn of the Center for Inquiry and his Gnu Atheist Grinch post. In a nutshell, Flynn says atheists should not celebrate Christmas, no way, no how, not even in its secularized form in modern America. Flynn
could see this as a great way to write about science, as I did, from
astronomy and celestial mechanics down to human evolutionary biology, as
well as celebrating someone who was some sort of humanist. But, nooo ... we get another Gnu Atheist proving himself to be a village idiot atheist. The
man sounds like a Gnu Atheist Scrooge! And, it got me wondering just what else he might want to forgo because it has a religious connotation. So, Tom, will you refuse to eat kosher food, simply because it's been killed in a certain style for religious reasons? Will you stop eating Easter eggs, because of their Christian background which in turn came from pagan fertility thoughts? Likewise, will you stop eating the chocolate Easter bunny? Do you refuse to say Gesundheit because it derives from superstition? Even worse? He's so pedantic to dislike the current calendar because of its pagan-god names for days and months. No, really:
As I’ve written elsewhere, I got kind of psyched for the French
Republican calendar when Madalyn O’Hair tried to bring it back in
American Atheist magazine some years ago. (Happy first of Ventose, by
the way.) But it would be seriously deficient for adoption today. For
one thing, it has the same problem as a calendar that the Winter
Solstice has as a holiday: it’s not applicable to today’s global
society. The month names are tied to the climate in the northern
temperate zones. For example, the current month, Ventose, means “snowy.”
One of the summer months is Fructidor, which means “fruitful.” Good
luck getting the folks in Rio to embrace that!
Wow. (He got his Revolutionary French months screwed up, but later corrected that.) Anyway, even the godless Communists, in their Russky incarnation, still kept religious names for days of the week when they made a new calendar. More seriously, and tying to ideas I often go into in more depth at my other blog, will you stop listening not only to "Silent Night," but also the "Messiah," or Mozart's "Requiem"? What about Alfred Schnittke's "Requiem," written by an apparent unbeliever in the Soviet Union? The first time I heard "Messiah" live was when I was either a junior or senior in high school, and it was also my intro to a major symphonic group, as the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, under principal guest conductor Raymond Leppard, was playing it. Well, I think the night before the performance I went to, he was interviewed on St. Louis' classical radio station. And the announcer asked him a question along the lines of, "How can/do you, a secularist, perform this piece?" And Leppard said something about "the human spirit." And, in hindsight (which I certainly didn't have at the time) that epitomizes the secular humanist vs. the stereotypical Gnu Atheist. At the time, I didn't get it. The son of a minister who had just gone back to seminary for his doctorate of theology, in the main conservative denomination within Lutheranism, I just didn't get it. It took a bit after I made my journey to atheism more than a decade later, in fact, to get it. While I wasn't a GnuAtheist type, nonetheless, I couldn't see how one could appreciate the "human spirit" of a clearly religious work, from a secularist angle. But, even before reading the likes of a Scott Atran or a Pascal Boyer on the evolutionary biology of religious belief, eventually my atheist thinking matured and I did "get it." So, whether it's "Messiah," Bach's "Magnificat," or a requiem, either by Mozart, Schnittke or Brahms, I can appreciate the human spirit which dealt with serious matters of life and death through magnificent musical works, or also works of art. And, to the degree I feel these creators had the wrong answers, I can nonetheless sympathize with their drive, even empathize, and also feel a bit ... pensive? poignant? about that all.
There's an interactive poll on a New York Times page right now, where you can vote for your top 10 classical musicians.
That said, it's sadly lacking at both endpoints of the time scale. No Palestrina? Or Monteverdi? Guess pre-Bach doesn't exist. And while it's not bad on modernist times, no Penderecki? No Schnittke?
At the end of George's extended vision, when he goes back to the bridge and discovers he's still alive? I believe the music at that point is a major-key variation on the medieval Dies Irae melody. (Doubt the average watcher would even pick up on that.)
The occurrence is just before Bert pulls up and says, "Where have you been, George"?" It just caught my ear. [That said, that's part of why I love Rachmaninoff, and I will hear the Dies Irae wherever it pops up.] Given that Dmitri Tiomkin, who wrote the score, was born in Old Russia 21 years after Rachmaninoff, and studies there under Alexander Glazunov and later, in Berlin, under Ferruccio Busoni, it adds to the possibility.
Apparently, it was his idea, and part of a darker original score, too, which got prettied up when the movie's Christmas sections were seen as the thematic core. See here for more on the score.
That said, what if Capra had ended the movie with George jumping? Or, had run it out another 30 minutes after the tear-jerker ending?
If you want to get more thought on that line, go here; is it "the most terrifying movie ever"?
Per the link, which talks about George's "resurrection," I think that IS a Dies Irae riff. That said, to riff on some of the ideas in the link ... it would have been interesting if, in the "salvation by friends" scene at the end, the actual Dies Irae had been playing, sotto voce.
Merging the city’s cultural arts and library systems, under city of Dallas consideration, sounds like a short-sited reaction to what should be a short-term budget concern. END.
That said, contrary to WRR-FM blogger and former Fort Worth Star-Telegram classical critic Matt Erickson, Dallas Morning News classical critic Scott Cantrell has, for the first time ever, “lost” me, claiming co-winner Nobuyuki Tsujii might not have won if he weren’t blind.
But, the Cliburn is about potential, too, as the judges see that, and Scott knows that. And, novelty, as Scott put it, may play to the good in the long run.
That all said, co-winner Haochen Zhang of China is clearly the real deal.
In the middle of a U.S. tour, Polish classical pianist Krystian Zimerman said he would no longer tour the U.S. until President Barack Obama stopped following in President Bush’s footsteps on a U.S. missile defense shield in Poland.
Read the full story for more about his past and present political stances and more.
Turns out sub-Saharan Africans can pick out the likely emotional state reflected by particular items of Western music, even people who may never have heard such music on a radio before.
That said: 1. The study is small; 2. I’m not sure of the p-value; 3. I’m pretty sure that they weren’t asked to listen to Schoenberg or even more avant-garde items.
The grande dame of the nation’s symphonies has said “ the emperor has no clothes” on amateur orchestra conductor Gilbert Kaplan, who conducts only the Mahler 2nd and has parlayed himself into an expert, or self-alleged expert, on interpreting the symphony.
NY Phil musicians are doubly pissed, because Kaplan got the gig to conduct the “Resurrection” on the 100th anniversary of Mahler debuting it in America, with the same orchestra.
I want to add that I heard Kaplan with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra back in the early 1990s. I thought it was good, not necessarily great, but I didn't have as critical of an ear then as I do today. (Contra Mr. Finlayson, some of us out in the seats know what to listen for; that is how I know Andrew Litton largely sucked here in Dallas many times.)
That was the stance of Champaign County (Ohio) Municipal Court Judge Susan Fornof-Lippencott, when she offered a lower fine amount to Andrew Vactor, convicted of playing rap music too loud on his car stereo, in exchange for him listening to classical music for 20 hours.
We need more judges like this, with creative sentencing to fit the offense.
I was at the second concert of the Basically Beethoven festival here in Dallas Sunday. Most of the music was piano-cello duo, starting with the cello version of Rachmaninov's Vocalise.
Boy, "mush" and all as some people may say about it, I can never not be romantic about it.
First, even among “warhorse” composers, the DSO had neglected a number of them for years if not decades.
When is the last time it played a Chopin piano concerto? A Schubert symphony besides the Unfinished? Much by von Weber or Franck? A Verdi overture or two?
Amongst modern Americans, but of the no-longer-living, there’s PLENTY of folks besides Barber. That includes Roger Sessions, William Schumann, Walter Piston and Alan Hovhaness off the top of my head.
As for 20th-century composers, besides my beloved Alfred Schnittke, the DSO is out of the loop on Nikolai Myaskovsky, Ernst Krenek, Paul Hindemith, and at least a snippet of Stockhausen, among others.
As for stuff to retire for at least five years?
Rachmaninov’s Paganini Variations. If you must hear some variations on the Paganini Caprice, try Szymanowski’s.
Pictures at an Exhibition. If you most play it, use somebody’s orchestration besides Ravel’s. Try Stokowski’s for the lush Romantic sound. Or Sarasate for a more modern version than Ravel.
Brahms First Symphony. If you need Brahms, when was the last time his Second, not first, Piano Concerto was done here.
And, ticket prices continue to go up faster than at least the nominal rate of inflation. The Pick Four deal from this year didn’t get offered for 2008-09 or I might have sprung. Unfortunately, the Fort Worth Symphony doesn’t offer a smaller package than the full-season 10-concert deal.
They could stand to add two performances, as their rep continues to grow, and make it a 12-concert season with two split packages.
Oh, beyond that, though, and back to Dallas.
Audience behavior, such as coughing (by people who apparently think the cough drops in the lobby aren’t for them), shuffling of feet, etc., is getting worse, I think. How about adding this to the “turn off your cell phone” announcements?
Oh, and I love that you had Evelyn Glennie CDs for sale Sunday, but HOW can you have a cash-only setup? Talk about disorganized.
Having just gotten home from my final concert of this year’s Dallas Symphony Orchestra season, where Enigma was on the program, I offer these thoughts.
It’s a homage to, or reflection upon, rather than calling it a variation on, the Dies Irae opening.
Of course, in addition to some differences in note intervals, it’s in a major key.
That’s why each individual variation is named after a friend of Elgar’s. Rather than a reflection on their deaths, or last judgments, though, it’s a reflection on their lives, with the “positive” angle of the major key.
