Back to Cleveland: The Plot Thickens

It had been posted yesterday, but I hadn’t found it because normally I don’t trawl through media and advertising sections: I look for music news sifting through “music” or “arts/entertainment.” Plus yesterday, I was also pretty much focused on one thing: the birthday celebration for Elliott Carter and 100 years of his music.

Laurence Vittes had e-mailed me a copy of the article he’d written for the December issue of the British magazine Gramophone, about the situation in Cleveland with the Plain Dealer’s critic, Donald Rosenberg (who also has written for the magazine in the past) and his having been “reassigned” by his editor, now no longer reviewing the Cleveland Orchestra. In his e-mail, Laurence casually mentioned “The latest, as you may know, is that Don is suing the Plain Dealer and the Orchestra!”

Actually, I hadn’t, but it would come as no surprise: from the beginning, this situation – whether it became a cause or a case – had litigation written all over it. It was close to midnight when I read his e-mail, too late for me, morning person that I have become, to go looking for news reports about it, but this morning I found these:

Here is a report from WCPN – and here is the New York Times article with more details.

For those of you who may need some back-story, you can read my earlier posts here and here, though the links to past reviews in the Plain Dealer no longer work.

As Vittes writes near the end of his article, commenting on the fact that Zachary Lewis who had now been assigned to cover the orchestra wasn’t exactly writing reviews-as-marketing-tools:

- - - - - - -

“In fact, for the first three weeks of the season, Lewis has not been playing dead at all,” Rosenberg pointed out. “He’s confirming what I said, so they didn’t have to reassign me.” If anything, the fact that Lewis has been so negative lends credence to the newspaper’s claims that they had reasons other than orchestra pressure for replacing Rosenberg.

- - - - - - - -

Regardless, it looks like Laurence may have a follow-up article for a later issue.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

UPDATE 12/14/08: Thanks to Alex Ross for posting this link over at the New Yorker Blog where you can find the entire complaint filed against the Plain Dealer & the Cleveland Orchestra...

Happy 100th, Elliott Carter!

Starting off the morning listening to his jubilant Holiday Overture – written to celebrate the liberation of Paris at the end of World War II – seemed to be a specially festive way to ring in this holiday. That’s how I feel about it. I’ve been more excited about Elliott Carter’s 100th Birthday than about many holidays and celebrations over the past several years and I suppose if there were ways of decorating the house for this like many other people do for Christmas, I would have done that... Yes, I could see it now, a twinkling image of Elliott Carter outlined in colored lights on my rooftop, his music playing continuously from speakers hidden discretely in the shrubs out front. And in my living room, not a pine tree but a lilac bush – syringa – in honor of one of his compositions – Syringa – which I’d heard at its world premiere on his 70th birthday. Mmmm, no – that doesn’t seem to be the way to celebrate anything, frankly, so I just have a photo set up on my desk and I’ve been playing a lot of his music on my CD player.

Officially the Centennial Year begins NOW – but everybody (well, almost everybody) has been observing Carter’s 100th Year while he’s only 99, because... uhm, because as Justin Case might observe, there’s always the chance, ya know... But not only did Carter make it into the three-figure range, he’s been busily composing a ton of new pieces as if to celebrate his own birthday, rather than just leaving us with the usual retrospective of past glories.

By the way, Leo Ornstein may have lived to be 108 or so (there’s some discrepancy about the year of his birth) but his last work was composed when he was only 97. So, Elliott Carter has managed to establish something of a record by becoming the oldest living composer who’s still writing at the age of 100. Just last week, he announced he had finished the Pisan Cantos, setting of poems by Ezra Pound. There are more recently completed songs being premiered at Lincoln Center on Saturday.

If you go to the official Carter100 website and click on Happening, you can find out how many pieces by Elliott Carter have been or are being performed around the world this past year and next – most of them, not surprisingly, in Europe where he has been more frequently performed if not more highly regarded than he is in the United States. You have to click through 20 pages of the works published by Boosey & Hawkes before getting to those listed for December 11th, 2008, his actual 100th Birthday (today!).

What is curious, as Frank Oteri points out at The New Music Box, there is no world premiere on his birthday itself! The major focus in New York is the guest appearance by the Boston Symphony at Carnegie Hall with James Levine conducting a program that features a new work that was premiered last week in Boston (well, they commissioned it) - Interventions for piano and orchestra, written for and performed by Daniel Barenboim - so when it comes to Carter’s home town turf, it’s no longer a world premiere, but still one of the newest pieces, hot off the press. That the rest of the program includes standards like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring – the piece that proved to have such an impact on a teenaged Carter – and Barenboim playing Beethoven’s 3rd Piano Concerto was designed more to bring Carter into a mainstream audience rather than segregate his music into an all-Carter Concert.

Still, ON his birthday, it might have been nice to do the retrospective thing, if not just the more recent works, something like the not-quite-all-Carter program Pierre Boulez is conducting in London – certainly, as Frank suggests, the Holiday Overture (1944) and maybe another one of his concertos (he wrote a knock-out Cello Concerto in 2000 and a Flute Concerto that was premiered in Jerusalem this past September). And if Barenboim and Levine could play Schubert’s beautiful Fantasy in F Minor for piano duet to open this concert, why not some of Carter’s chamber music, like the 3rd String Quartet (1971)? And for the “major standard rep” piece, I suppose, my favorite choice would probably be the Variations for Orchestra (1955). There’s certainly a lot of variety there, and an excellent sampling of all the stylistic periods that Mr. Carter has presented to us over the past century – from his Early, Middle, Late and Post-Late periods.

Another appropriate piece for a 100th Birthday concert would be a short work to follow the Holiday Overture: it’s one of a set of pieces written for the Boston Symphony and James Levine, a leading advocate of Carter’s music, a piece entitled Fons Juventatis – Fountain of Youth – written in 2004 when the composer was only 95!

Unfortunately, I missed Charlie Rose who had Elliott Carter as well as Levine and Barenboim on his PBS show last night – drat – but it’s now posted on-line. WNYC will be airing some special programs tonight which you can listen to on-line. Tomorrow, Elliott Carter’s birthday will be mentioned by Willard Scott on NBC’s Today Show.

The important thing is, of course, the music – not just the fact he’s still writing it – but if the 100th Birthday is a way to bring him into a wider public awareness, I’m all for getting out the lilac bush and decking the halls with different strands of lights flashing, of course, in simultaneously different tempos...

Happy Birthday, Mr. Carter – and many happy returns!

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Previous Carter-related posts:
Steve Gregoropoulos reminisces about college master-classes with both Messiaen and Carter
Duo Centennials
Only 5 Shopping Days till Carter’s 100th Birthday
Listening to All 5 of Carter’s Quartets with Pacifica Quartet in January
Hearing the World Premiere of Carter’s Clarinet Quintet

- Dr. Dick

A Sampling of Spirit - Sharing Messiaen & Carter

For most of us, we never get closer to composers than listening to the music they compose. Most of them, after all, have been dead, some for a longer period of time than others. The chance to meet a live composer is a rare opportunity and often brings with it different insights to the music we may hear, before or afterward.

On Monday, when I was posting about how amazing that two of the most significant composers of the 20th Century were born a century ago one day apart, a former student of mine whom I’d not been in touch with since the mid-70s until earlier this year and who has resurfaced as a friend on Facebook, mentioned he had been lucky enough to have had masterclasses with both of them and attended a cocktail party with one of them. Immediately, I asked him to write up something for my blog, something about the experience and his thoughts on what he learned from meeting these two incredible composers, Olivier Messiaen and Elliott Carter.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

ONE OF THE FEW BENEFITS OF A SECONDARY EDUCATION
by Steve Gregoropoulos

For a brief period of my life, when I was about 20, I left the world to join what we call a "University" which is a place I've long regarded as "where the powers-that-be reverse-winnow the gene pool". In other words, it's a place where any threatening ideas are given somewhere to germinate, in order to prevent them from infecting everyone else. Kinda like smallpox in the museum.

However, while I was there, my particular university, which was called the Oberlin Conservatory, and was better than most, substituting geographical isolation for the intellectual isolation preferred by the rest of college-world, managed to attract a couple of composers who had thicker skin than the rest of their lot to be "composers-in-residence". By whom I mean two gentlemen who have spent their entire lives outside of the frathouse circuit.

Anyone who doubts that there is such a thing as a world spirit and a collective unconscious should ponder the fact that Elliott Carter and Olivier Messiaen were born a day apart. Together they have cast long shadows, with Elliott's increasing daily, that have somewhat dominated the last century and the existant portion of this one. It would not be putting too fine a point on it to compare them to the coexistence of Beethoven and Schubert in the century prior.

I was amazingly lucky in that they both came to my school and I was able to attend master classes with each of them.

A master class can be as dismal as a book signing or as enlightening as an ashram; with these dudes at the helm I can sincerely say that I walked out with more than I walked in with, and that it wouldn't have happened anyplace else.

To start with Messiaen: it sounds almost surreal after so many years to say that I sat in a room with him and listened to his hands bring sounds out of a Steinway piano. But this is the case. And that is the essence of what he taught me. Olivier didn't appear to speak a word of English and sort of went on in French about his journey through the aether, taking questions from Oberlin students along the unbeaten path.

But he illustrated all his points on the piano, and did so with the offhand muscular vigor of a rocker banging out Belle & Sebastian in the common area of a dormitory. What I learned is that a real composer writes music that is natural to him. When Messiaen ran two-handed scales across his color modes, I did not see any colors, but I did hear how complete absorption of a particular modal language is a precondition of fluency.

Almost no interpreters of his music (the chief offender being Peter Serkin) had, in my experience to that point, presented his work as robust and natural. It was always precious and orientalist. But that wasn't how Messiaen himself experienced it - or his wife either. When I heard Yvonne Loriod play his Vingt Regards from memory, banging intervals like F#-G#-A# with the knuckles of a clenched fist, I felt about like I imagine the people who heard Clara Wieck play must have felt.

He taught me about knowing your own music - not the way a professor knows Goedel, but the way a kid knows Of Montreal or Devendra Banhardt. Not so much meticulously but vibrantly.

Which brings us to Elliott Carter, the second delectable mountain.

Elliott didn't seem to want to talk about music at all. I've always felt that Carter was sort of like Prokofiev: a composer not susceptible to any kind of collegiate analysis, either of the CalArts John Cage/Lou Harrison sort or the Princetonian Second Viennese sort. And like Prokofiev, he is the last man standing, figuratively in terms of being more and more frequently represented on programmes and literally at 100 years of age.

Speaking of programs.... Carter gave a lecture, frequently punctuated by his almost cubist stutter, about how virtually all of his music is programmatic. He sees all the voices as having characteristics, and he lets them have little conversations with one another. Some form into groups while others wander off on their own. You see, what Elliott really likes is the English language. Go back and read some of his liner notes and see what he's thinking about.

His instruments are characters at a cocktail party or a comedy of manners. So it was somewhat fitting that, at the end of his residency, I actually attended a cocktail party with Elliott. We huddled in the corner by a fishtank together, and for a while talked about Samuel Johnson; about Rasselas and the Journey to the Western Islands. And here is the remarkable part. With a glass in hand, and talking about the language he loves, he did not stutter once.

What I learned from Carter was the importance of respecting the wholeness of musical entities. I had previously lived in a vague compositional sea, where voices popped in and out of existence and the harmonic and melodic functions of notes were perpetually triangulating with one another. To Elliott, they had personalities, and even if you didn't see where they were ultimately going, they were going there.

Many years have passed, but the sound of a dozen little electric pipe organs variously rehearsing Messiaen's pieces is still in my ears, and concert goers still hear the orientalism, missing the fact that he's probably the only composer ever to try to make serialism audible. Meanwhile Carter, while suffering the scorn of critics and teachers who can't own him, is nonetheless making is way into the standard repertoire during his own lifetime. Living a hundred years helps, but so does letting your music live. He may build a landscape out of atoms, but at the end of the day he sits back and watches a coyote run up the side of a mountain.

-s

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

To describe Steve as “a student of mine” is not entirely accurate: when I was teaching at the University of Connecticut (UConn), there were two seniors at the Storrs High School next door to the Fine Arts Building who had gone beyond anything the high school could challenge them with, especially in music, so somehow they asked me if I could come over and... well, I’m not sure do what, because I really had no idea how to challenge them, not that I could hope to offer them anything equal to the challenges they deserved. So it’s no surprise, running into Steve some thirty years later, to discover there is still much of that mistrust of “traditional education” with its bell-curve focus toward the median range, given how stodgy it has always been in the face of those who are so far beyond it, they would otherwise be lost by the wayside. Steve’s insights, being in the presence of two minds like Messiaen’s and Carter’s, capture something about both these composers any number of renowned musicologists or theorists might not notice.

And this week, the world observes the Centennial of both of those composers, one of whom is celebrating his 100th Birthday today by attending a concert at Carnegie Hall tonight in his honor. It seemed a fine excuse to go back and relive some memories – thanks, Steve, for taking the time to write them down!

- Dr. Dick

Two Centennials: Celebrating Olivier Messiaen & Elliott Carter

How ironic is it that two of the leading composers of the 20th Century were born a day apart in the same year and that they both are celebrating their Centennials this year? How special is it to have one of them not only still alive but still actively composing!?! That in itself is amazing!

The following is not intended to be exhaustive, by any means, more a list of parallel highlights in two extraordinarily creative lives.

Olivier Messiaen was born in Avignon, France, on December 10th, 1908. When his father, a poet and translator of Shakespeare, enlisted in the army at the start of World War I, the family moved to Grenoble where Messiaen would later return to build his own house and write most of his music there. When he was 10 or so, a piano teacher gave him a score to Debussy’s “Pelleas et Melisande” which struck him “like a thunderbolt” and proved a major influence on him. At the age of 11, he entered the Paris Conservatoire where he quickly moved to the top of his class, earning 2nd Prize in Harmony when he was 15 and 1st Prize in Counterpoint two years later. His improvisatory skills at the piano led him to study organ with Marcel Dupré, winning 1st prize in Organ & Improvisation at the age of 20. He began studying composition with Charles Marie Widor, another famous organist and composer, when he was 17 and then took orchestration with Paul Dukas, most famous today for having written “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” In 1930, he won 1st Prize in Composition.

Elliott Carter was born in New York City on December 11th, 1908. His father was a businessman, making his fortune from importing lace from France. In a recent interview, he mentioned remembering when the United States entered World War I – actually, he got in trouble for knocking over a goldfish bowl, but it happened the same day. He became interested in writing music after hearing Pierre Monteux conduct Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” at Carnegie Hall in New York when he was 15 or 16 - "half the people walked out," he said, "but I liked it, partly for that reason." It would become a major influence on his life: this was his thunderbolt. He was also encouraged by his family’s insurance agent, a fellow named Charles Ives who also happened to be one of the most original of all American composers, though little-known and rarely played at the time. Whatever music Carter may have been composing at the time, it was enough to inspire Ives to write a letter of recommendation for him to study at Harvard (which is amazing in itself, considering Ives was a Yale Man). Carter found the music department a bit stodgy – geared primarily to organists “and that wasn’t my style,” he said – when a teacher gave the class a tune to harmonize, he said he harmonized it like Schoenberg and everybody laughed. That’s when he decided English might be a safer degree program. He’d chosen Harvard mainly because of the proximity of the Boston Symphony whose conductor, Serge Koussevitsky, programmed a lot of new music. In the early-‘30s, he went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger.

In 1931, Olivier Messiaen, supported by Widor and Dupré, was appointed the organist at Église de la Sainte-Trinité, the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, where he remained for some 60 years. In 1932, Messiaen married Claire Delbos, a composer and violinist. They had one son, Pascal, born in 1937. The previous year, Serge Koussevitsky had performed Messiaen’s Les Offrandes oubliées with the Boston Symphony, the first performance of his music in the United States. In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and World War II began – and Messiaen enlisted in the army’s medical corps. Shortly after the German invasion, he was taken prisoner by the Nazis. In the prisoner-of-war camp, he composed his most famous work, the “Quartet for the End of Time” (you can read my earlier post prior to a recent performance of the quartet by Antares with Market Square Concerts here in Harrisburg). After the war, he began to teach in Paris, where his students would include composers like Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen and the pianist Yvonne Loriod for whom he began writing several piano pieces. In the midst of composing his Turangalila Symphony, a vast mystical work about love commissioned by the Boston Symphony (to honor the memory of Koussevitsky’s wife), Messiaen’s wife was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Though she survived the operation, it destroyed her memory and she spent the rest of her life in a nursing home. She died in 1959 and in 1961, Messiaen married his former student, Yvonne Loriod, who would continue as one of the foremost performers and advocates of his music.

In 1935, Carter earned his doctorate from l’Ecole normale in Paris and returned to the United States where he began working with Ballet Caravan for whom he composed his first large-scale work, the ballet Pocahontas, in 1939, the same year he married Helen Frost-Jones, a sculptor. They moved into an apartment in Greenwich Village where he still lives. They had one son, David. She died in 2003 after 64 years of marriage. When World War II started, Carter tried to enlist in the army but was rejected for health reasons (“allergies,” he complained) and instead worked for the Office of War Information. He also taught math, physics and Greek as well as music at St. John’s College, in Annapolis MD.

Messiaen’s musical style, rhythmically complex, was influenced by studies of ancient Greek rhythms and eventually the rhythms of Indian music as well. He developed his own system of scales and rhythmic structures which he described in his book, “My Musical Language.” In the ‘40s, though he never really adopted serial methods, he explored expanding Schoenberg’s systematic approach to pitches to other parameters of music like rhythm and register, writing what was called (incorrectly) the first “total serial” piece in which every aspect of the music was determined by serial principals. In 1952, he became absorbed by bird-song and traveled around the world annotating the songs of hundreds of birds which he them employed in his music though in far more complex ways that simple imitation. His mystical approach to faith, never far from much of his music, was most profoundly part of his only opera, St. Francis of Assisi which he composed between 1975 and 1983. His last works included another vast orchestral work for the New York Philharmonic, Éclairs sur l'au-delà… and he left unfinished a concerto for four musicians (including Yvonne Loriod and Mstislav Rostropovich) which was later completed and orchestrated by his widow. Messiaen died on April 27, 1992, at the age of 83.

Carter’s musical style, also very complex, began however in a more populist vein influenced by Copland, Roy Harris and Charles Ives. After World War II, his style took on more Neoclassical textures associated with Stravinsky at the same time. Curiously, when Stravinsky was getting ready to leave neoclassicism behind in favor of serialism, Elliott Carter was beginning to feel dissatisfaction with his own musical voice, and so he went off to the desert outside Tucson, AZ, and in 1951 wrote what would become the first major work in his “new” style, the String Quartet No. 1. His music became atonal but never serial, and rhythmically complex but in a way adapted from jazz which he used to love listening to in New York City, especially the flexibility of its rhythms and often playing against the beat, the improvisatory way in which very often strands would go off in various directions as if in no relation whatsoever to the original established tempo the others would be playing. In his String Quartet No. 3, he separates the quartet into two duos, one of which plays six movements and the other, four, very often with contrapuntal tempos written out in complex ratios. He catalogued his harmonic language in what he calls his Harmony Book, even though it’s not so much about how he composes or uses these chords, rather a reference collection of all possible chord combinations from 2 to 12 pitches. Writing large-scale concerts and orchestral works in the ‘60s and ‘70s – originally dispirited by the poor (or inadequate) performances they received until he realized that, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, no matter how badly it’s performed, you still have this masterpiece called Hamlet – he wrote primarily chamber music or works for chamber orchestra. For his 90th birthday year, he composed his first opera, What Next?

The following decade has proven to be one of the most fertile in Carter’s career but as someone suggested, “by now, he’s got it down.” I was joking that if people were calling the music he wrote in the ‘80s his Late Style, they would now have to call his most recent music his Post-Late Style. On his 100th birthday, he will attend the performance of “Interventions,” a 15-minute concerto-like work for piano and orchestra written specifically for his Centennial Birthday for pianist Daniel Barenboim and conductor James Levine, two of his leading advocates today: the work was premiered last week in Boston and will be given its first New York performance Thursday, the actual 100th birthday of its composer. You can read my previous post about it here (with links to a few interviews and reviews).

Carter will also be present for another all-Carter program on Saturday as the official Centennial Celebration really begins (this past year has presumably just been the warm-up) when members of the New York Philharmonic will perform his recent Clarinet Quintet – I heard the world-premiere of it at Juilliard in April: you can read that post here – with yet another world premiere, the recently completed Songs of Louis Zukovsky for soprano and clarinet, the first premiere of the New Century of Music! As busy as he has been between performances and interviews, it's amazing the man has had time to compose at all. He just finished this past week a setting of poems by Ezra Pound, the Pisan Cantos, for voice and an ensemble “with five percussion instruments, a horn, a couple strings, clarinet, just a few pitched instruments,” as he described it in a recent interview.

And so, one can only ask, “What next?”

Carter100 - Five Days & Counting

With only five shopping days left till Elliott Carter’s 100th Birthday, the festivities have already begun. Actually, they’ve been going on all year. When you’re that close to 100, nobody wants to take a chance so even at 99, there was much going on in celebration of his “100th Year.” During that time, I had a chance to take in a couple of events – the Pacifica Quartet’s performance of all five of his string quartets in January and the world premiere in April of his Clarinet Quintet with Charles Neidich and the Juilliard Quartet.

Last year, the Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival had been dedicated solely to the music of living composers who were turning 70 that year, like John Harbison, Philip Glass, Joan Tower, John Corigliano and Ellen Taafe Zwillich. This summer, it was dedicated solely to the music of living composers who were turning 100 that year. Not surprisingly, the only composer on the program was Elliott Carter. New York Times critic Allan Kozinn blogged about it here. And Boston critic and bloggeteer Matthew Guerrieri wrote extensively about the concerts and Carter’s music that week at his blog, Soho the Dog: this link should get you started - at the end of each post are links for all of the subsequent posts.

I hadn’t planned on making any of the concerts in New York, myself, much less Boston, and I certainly don’t expect any of them to be carried live on American radio or television, but here are a few articles already appearing to get things started:

Matthew Guerreri at the Boston Globe interviews Carter who talks about being a student at Harvard 70-80 years ago. There’s more material from the interview that didn’t make it into the paper which he posted at his blog (especially wonderful are his reminiscences of winning the National Medal of Arts 1985 and having dinner at the Reagan White House - priceless!).

Keith Powers at the Boston Herald also talks with Carter in a Q&A with another article about the piece that was given its world premiere last night in Boston. (I saw no reviews at post-time.) They will perform it again at Carnegie Hall the night of his birthday. It's a work for piano and orchestra entitled “Interventions,” written for Daniel Barenboim, who'll be the pianist, and James Levine, who'll be conducting the Boston Symphony.

- - -
Update: here's Jeremy Eichler's review of "Interventions" from the Boston Globe.

And here's a review, also by Eichler posted Dec. 6th, about an all-Carter Concert at the New England Conservatory which ends with the line, "This music has long suffered for its reputation as extremely difficult to play; these young musicians don't seem to have received that memo."

Keith Powers' review of "Interventions" was posted Dec. 6th at the Boston Herald.
- - -

By the way, my thanks to John Clare, GBexW, who set up a Carter Birthday Countdown Clock at his blog, Classically Hip, which I, Luddite that I am, immediately stole since I couldn’t figure out how to make one myself. It appears to be set up for Greenwich Mean Time so it won’t switch over at 12:00:01am EST on December 11th, but at 5:00:01am instead. But hey, if you’re sitting up just to watch that, then you have even less of a life than I have...

Meanwhile, I plan on listening to a lot of Carter’s music this week by way of recordings, perhaps in chronological order. Maybe I’ll even get around to blogging about it...

Stravinsky's Tavern: A Collection of Short Stories

Years ago when I was still an undergraduate in college, a friend had been driving through one of the mining towns in Eastern Pennsylvania - I don't remember which one, but St. Clair sticks in my mind - when he drove past this bar on one of the side streets. Seeing its sign, Stravinsky's Tavern, he had to stop and take a picture of it. This was long before the days of cell phones and digital cameras. I still have the original photo on my desk.

We wondered what it would be like walking through these rather unassuming doors to see a small, bald-headed man with a big grin ready to take our drink orders.

And so that is how the first story came about, how Igor Stravinsky gave up his cosmopolitan life-style to live in a small Pennsylvania coal town, run a bar and write music on an old upright in the back room. Curiously enough, other composers and cultural figures appear to have done the same and before long, the bar was inhabited by such regulars as Darius Milhaud, Sir Edward Elgar, Sibelius, Mussorgsky, Schubert and Mozart, even the author Thomas Mann, all engaging in so much Bar Talk.

Remembering those childhood days when you'd go to the grocery store and run into your 2nd grade teacher, surprised to find that people like this actually existed outside the classroom (and eat food!), I started wondering what it would be like to have composers like Beethoven or Bach show up in our every day lives. Like having a classical music radio station run by the composers themselves or, given the turmoil in today's stock market, following Beethoven to his appointment with his financial and spiritual adviser, Brother Ken Yasperidyme. As the CEOs of America's Big 3 Automakers beg for bail-outs on Capitol Hill, they might learn something from Johann Sebastian Bach's tinkering with technology, trying to develop a more fugue-efficient car.

And so I put all of these into a collection called, simply, Stravinsky's Tavern.

Here are links to the individual stories:

* Stravinsky's Tavern
* Beethoven's Christmas Carol (a parody in four installments of Charles Dicken's holiday classic)
* Schumann and Brahms at Stravinsky's Tavern (stand-up comedy team with their take on Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?")
* The Election Heats Things up at Stravinsky's Tavern
* Hallowe'en Comes to Stravinsky's Tavern

* WLVB Looks for an Evening Announcer
* Beethoven Writes a Gut-Wrenching Chord
* Toward a More Fugue-Efficient Car (with Johann Sebastian Bach)
* Beethoven Listens to His Financial Adviser

Stravinsky's Tavern also plays a significant role in the music appreciation thriller, The Doomsday Symphony.

Cheers!
Dr. Dick

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

The Classical Grammy Nominees

Speaking of lists – the 2009 Grammy Nominees are out. Usually, if I can find them, I only look at the Classical Division because basically I’m an elitist pig. No longer working for a radio station, it’s of less importance to me, professionally, but even then I was only “into” the concept because, however they’re treated by the general press, the Classical Grammys are the closest thing the Classical Music World has to the Oscars, the Tonys or any other Entertainment Award Show you can watch on TV. Still, there are some here I am excited to see!

So here goes.

The BEST CLASSICAL ALBUM nominees are

* Maria - Cecilia Bartoli; Christopher Raeburn, producer; Wolf-Dieter Karwatky & Philip Siney, engineers/mixers (Adam Fischer; Orchestra La Scintilla) [Decca Records]

* Tarik O'Regan: Threshold Of Night - Craig Hella Johnson, conductor; Blanton Alspaugh, producer; John Newton, engineer/mixer; Mark Donahue, mastering engineer (Company Of Strings; Company Of Voices & Conspirare) [Harmonia Mundi]

* Schoenberg/Sibelius: Violin Concertos - Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor; Hilary Hahn; Sid McLauchlan & Arend Prohmann, producers; Stephan Flock, engineer/mixer (Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra) [Deutsche Grammophon]

* Spotless Rose: Hymns To The Virgin Mary - Charles Bruffy, conductor; Phoenix Chorale; Blanton Alspaugh, producer; John Newton, engineer/mixer; Jonathan Cooper, mastering engineer [Chandos]

* Kurt Weill: Rise And Fall Of The City Of Mahagonny - James Conlon, conductor; Anthony Dean Griffey, Patti LuPone & Audra McDonald; Fred Vogler, producer (Donnie Ray Albert, John Easterlin, Steven Humes, Mel Ulrich & Robert Wörle; Los Angeles Opera Chorus; Los Angeles Opera Orchestra) [EuroArts]

For me, the only possibility is Hilary Hahn's amazing recording of the Schoenberg Violin Concerto.

* * * * * * * * *

For BEST ORCHESTRAL PERFORMANCE, the nominees are

* Vincent D'Indy: Orchestral Works, Vol. 1 - Rumon Gamba, conductor (Iceland Symphony Orchestra) [Chandos] Wow, I didn't even know this one was out -- can't say there are too many D'Indy recordings available! This one includes the "Summer Day in the Mountains (Op.61)" not to be confused with the delightful and more popular "Symphony on a French Mountain Air (Op.25)," plus The Enchanted Forest and Souvenirs. Looking forward to seeing if his Symphony No. 2 in B-flat will be on the next installment.

* Alexander Glazunov: Symphony No. 6, La Mer, Introduction And Dance From Salome - José Serebrier, conductor (Royal Scottish National Orchestra) [Warner Classics & Jazz]

* Prokofiev: Scythian Suite - Alan Gilbert, conductor (Chicago Symphony Orchestra) Track from: Traditions And Transformations: Sounds Of Silk Road Chicago [CSO Resound]

* Shostakovich: Symphony No. 4 - Bernard Haitink, conductor (Chicago Symphony Orchestra) [CSO Resound] (also available for MP3 download)

* Chris Walden: Symphony No. 1, The Four Elements - Chris Walden, conductor (Hollywood Studio Symphony Orchestra) [Origin Classical]

* * * * * * * * *

The BEST OPERA RECORDING nominees are

* Tan Dun: The First Emperor - Tan Dun, conductor; Michelle DeYoung, Plácido Domingo, Elizabeth Futral, Paul Groves, Wu Hsing-Kuo & Hao Jiang Tian; Jay David Saks, producer (The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; The Metropolitan Opera Chorus) [EMI Classics] The world premiere production from the Met than had been seen 'round the world on their HD Transmissions

* Jean-Baptiste Lully: Psyché - Paul ÓDette & Stephen Stubbs, conductors; Colin Balzer, Karina Gauvin, Carolyn Sampson & Aaron Sheehan; Renate Wolter-Seevers, producer (Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra; Boston Early Music Festival Chorus) [CPO]

* Monteverdi: L'Orfeo - Rinaldo Alessandrini, conductor; Sara Mingardo, Monica Piccinini, Anna Simboli & Furio Zanasi; Jean-Pierre Loisil, producer (Concerto Italiano) [Naive Classique]

* Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin - Valery Gergiev, conductor; Renée Fleming, Dmitri Hvorostovsky & Ramón Vargas; Jay David Saks, producer (The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; The Metropolitan Opera Chorus) [Decca] had also been seen on the Met's HD Transmissions

* Kurt Weill: Rise And Fall Of The City Of Mahagonny - James Conlon, conductor; Anthony Dean Griffey, Patti LuPone & Audra McDonald; Fred Vogler, producer (Donnie Ray Albert, John Easterlin, Steven Humes, Mel Ulrich & Robert Wörle; Los Angeles Opera Orchestra; Los Angeles Opera Chorus) [EuroArts]

* * * * * * * * *

The BEST CHORAL PERFORMANCE Nominees are

* Tarik O'Regan: Threshold Of Night - Craig Hella Johnson, conductor (Company Of Strings; Company Of Voices & Conspirare) [Harmonia Mundi]

* Rheinberger: Sacred Choral Works - Charles Bruffy, conductor (Kansas City Chorale & Phoenix Bach Choir) [Chandos]

* Stravinsky: Symphony Of Psalms - Sir Simon Rattle, conductor; Simon Halsey, chorus master (Berliner Philharmoniker; Rundfunkchor Berlin) Track from: Stravinsky: Symphonies [EMI Classics]

* Karol Szymanowski: Stabat Mater - Antoni Wit, conductor; Henryk Wojnarowski, chorus master (Jaroslaw Brek, Iwona Hossa & Ewa Marciniec; Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra; Warsaw Philharmonic Choir) [Naxos]

* Michael Tippett: A Child Of Our Time - Colin Davis, conductor; Joseph Cullen, chorus master (Steve Davislim, Mihoko Fujimura, Matthew Rose & Indra Thomas; London Symphony Orchestra; London Symphony Chorus) [LSO Live]

* * * * * * * * *

The BEST INSTRUMENTAL SOLOIST(s) PERFORMANCE (WITH ORCHESTRA) nominees are

* Ernest Bloch/Benjamin Lees:Violin Concertos - John McLaughlin Williams, conductor; Elmar Oliveira (National Symphony Orchestra Of Ukraine) [Artek]

* Lou Harrison: Pipa Concerto - Miguel Harth-Bedoya, conductor; Wu Man (Chicago Symphony Orchestra) Track from: Traditions And Transformations: Sounds Of Silk Road Chicago [CSO Resound]

* Mozart: Piano Concertos 17 & 20 - Leif Ove Andsnes (Norwegian Chamber Orchestra) [EMI Classics] A nice grouping, possibly the lightest and certainly the darkest of Mozart's piano concertos.

* Saint-Saëns: Piano Concertos 2 & 5 - Charles Dutoit, conductor; Jean-Yves Thibaudet (L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande) [Decca Records]

* Schoenberg/Sibelius: Violin Concertos - Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor; Hilary Hahn (Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra) [Deutsche Grammophon]

* * * * * * * * *

The BEST INSTRUMENTAL SOLOIST PERFORMANCE (WITHOUT ORCHESTRA) nominees are

* In A State Of Jazz - Marc-André Hamelin, pianist [Hyperion]

* Piano Music Of Salonen, Stucky, & Lutoslawski - Gloria Cheng, pianist [Telarc]

* Red Cliff Capriccio - Wei Li, guzheng [First Impression Music] Here are two firsts -- a guzheng soloist on a Grammy list and a single CD selling for $40...

* Revolutionary - Cameron Carpenter, organist [Telarc]

* Strange Toys - Joan Jeanrenaud, cellist [Talking House Records]

* * * * * * * * *

The BEST CHAMBER MUSIC PERFORMANCE nominees are

* Brahms: String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 51/2, Piano Quintet in F Minor - Stephen Hough; Takács Quartet [Hyperion]

* Elliott Carter: String Quartets Nos. 1 & 5 - Pacifica Quartet [Naxos] Just in time for Carter's 100th Birthday on December 11th

* Folk Songs - Trio Mediaeval [ECM New Series]

* Julius Röntgen - Right Through The Bone - ARC Ensemble [RCA Red Seal] Nice title, but the piece is called Piano Quintet in A Minor, Op.100 -- cool, the composer is related to the guy who discovered X-Rays... by the way, whatever happened to all those great new recordings that used to come out of RCA? And where, by the way, on this list is anything new and nominated by Sony?

* Jennifer Higdon: String Poetic - Jennifer Koh, violinist & Reiko Uchida, pianist [Cedille Records] -- so happy to see another work by Jennifer Higdon on the list this year!

* * * * * * * * *

The BEST SMALL ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE nominees are

* Divertimenti - Øyvind Gimse, conductor; Trondheim Solistene [2L (Lindberg Lyd)]

* Tan Dun: Pipa Concerto; Hayashi: Viola Concerto; Takemitsu: Nostalgia - Roman Balashov, conductor; Yuri Bashmet; Moscow Soloists (Wu Man) [Onyx Classics] Amazingly, this year there are TWO pipa concertos available! Lou Harrison's is on the CSO Silk Road disc (see above).

* Im Wunderschoenen Monat Mai - Reinbert De Leeuw, conductor; Barbara Sukowa; Schoenberg Ensemble [Winter & Winter] This is a work by the Dutch composer de Leeuw based on the Schubert and Schumann settings of Heinrich Heine's romantic poem.

* Meredith Monk: Impermanence - Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble [ECM New Series]

* Spotless Rose: Hymns To The Virgin Mary - Charles Bruffy, conductor; Phoenix Chorale [Chandos]

* * * * * * * * *

The BEST CLASSICAL VOCAL PERFORMANCE nominees are

* John Corigliano: Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan - Hila Plitmann, soprano (JoAnn Falletta; Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra) [Naxos]

* Charles Fussell: Wilde - Sanford Sylvan, baritone (Gil Rose; Boston Modern Orchestra Project) [BMOP/sound]

* Gomidas Songs - Isabel Bayrakdarian, soprano (Eduard Topchjan; Serouj Kradjian; Chamber Players Of The Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra) [Nonesuch Records]

* Maria - Cecilia Bartoli, mezzo soprano (Adam Fischer; Orchestra La Scintilla) [Decca Records]

* Terezín: Theresienstadt - Anne Sofie von Otter, mezzo soprano (Christian Gerhaher & Daniel Hope; Bengt Forsberg & Gerold Huber) [Deutsche Grammophon]

* * * * * * * * *

The BEST CLASSICAL CONTEMPORARY COMPOSITION nominees are

* Marc-André Dalbavie: Concerto for Flute - (Peter Eötvös, conductor) Track from: Dalbavie/Jarrell/Pintscher: Flute Concertos [EMI Classics]

* Michael Gandolfi: The Garden Of Cosmic Speculation - (Robert Spano, conductor) [Telarc]

* John Corigliano: Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems Of Bob Dylan - (JoAnn Falletta, conductor) [Naxos]

* George Tsontakis: Violin Concerto No. 2 (Douglas Boyd, conductor) [Koch Int'l Classics]

* Chris Walden: Symphony No. 1, The Four Elements - (Chris Walden, conductor) [Origin Classical]

I've heard the Dalbavie (I was not as happy with the Flute Concerto as I was with the far better Violin Concerto); the Tsontakis Concerto, winner of the Graumeyer Prize in 2005, which I liked very much on first hearing; and part of the Gandolfi which I found very uneven, but I think I should wait till I hear the Corigliano before I'd make a comment here. But with all the recent recordings of so many recent works of Elliott Carter, certainly something of the works he'd composed since he turned 90 should qualify?

* * * * * * * * *

And least but not last, the BEST CLASSICAL CROSSOVER ALBUM nominees are

* Baroque - Gabriela Montero [EMI Classics]

* Indigo Road - Ronn McFarlane [Dorian Sono Luminus]

* Olde School - East Village Opera Company [Decca Records]

* The Othello Syndrome - Uri Caine Ensemble [Winter & Winter]

* Simple Gifts - The King's Singers [Signum Records]

yeah well, these labels need to make their money somehow...

* * * * * * * * *

Other categories include the Best Engingeered Recording, where the nominees are

* Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique - Fred Vogler, engineer (Gustavo Dudamel & Los Angeles Philharmonic) [Deutsche Grammophon]

* Divertimenti - Morten Lindberg & Hans Peter L'Orange, engineers (Øyvind Gimse & Trondheim Solistene) [2L (Lindberg Lyd)]

* Puccini: La Bohème - Michael Bishop, engineer (Robert Spano & Atlanta Symphony Orchestra & Chorus) [Telarc]

* Respighi: Church Windows, Brazilian Impressions, Rossiniana - John Newton, engineer (JoAnn Falletta & Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra) [Naxos]

* Traditions And Transformations: Sounds Of Silk Road Chicago - David Frost, Tom Lazarus & Christopher Willis, engineers (Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Alan Gilbert, Silk Road Ensemble, Wu Man, Yo-Yo Ma & Chicago Symphony Orchestra) [CSO Resound]

* * * * * * * * *

The Nominees for Producer Of The Year, Classical, the usual suspects are

* David Frost
o Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique (Gustavo Dudamel & Los Angeles Philharmonic)
o Right Through The Bone — Julius Röntgen Chamber Music (ARC Ensemble)
o Schubert: Sonata In D Maj.; Liszt: Don Juan Fantasy (Min Kwon)
o Traditions And Transformations: Sounds Of Silk Road Chicago (Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Alan Gilbert, Yo-Yo Ma, Silk Road Ensemble, Wu Man & Chicago Symphony Orchestra)

* David Groves
o Baroque (Gabriela Montero)
o Beethoven: Piano Sonatas (Jonathan Biss)
o Polish Spirit (Nigel Kennedy & Jacek Kaspszyk)
o Respighi: Roman Trilogy, Il Tramonto (Antonio Pappano)
o Shostakovich: Piano Concerto No. 1 (Martha Argerich)

* Judith Sherman
o Carter, Elliott: String Quartets Nos. 1 And 5 (Pacifica Quartet)
o Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky And Lutoslawski (Gloria Cheng)
o Reich: Daniel Variations (Grant Gershon, Alan Pierson, Los Angeles Master Chorale & London Sinfonietta)
o Riley, Terry: The Cusp Of Magic (Kronos Quartet & Wu Man)
o String Poetic (Jennifer Koh & Reiko Uchida)

* Robert Woods
o Mussorgsky: Pictures At An Exhibition, Night On Bald Mountain, Prelude To Khovanshchina (Paavo Järvi & Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra)
o Prokofiev: Symphony No. 5, Lieutenant Kijé Suite (Paavo Järvi & Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra)
o Puccini: La Bohème (Robert Spano & Atlanta Symphony Orchestra & Chorus)
o Ravel: Boléro (Erich Kunzel & Cincinnati Pops Orchestra)
o Revolutionary (Cameron Carpenter)

* Robina G. Young
o Beethoven: String Quartets Op. 18, Nos 1-6 (Tokyo String Quartet)
o Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 'Eroica' (Andrew Manze & Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra)
o Birds On Fire (Fretwork)
o Heavenly Harmonies (Stile Antico)
o Scattered Rhymes (Paul Hillier, Orlando Consort & The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir)

* * * * * * * * *

Good luck to all -- congratulations on being nominated, wherever you end up when the winners are announced -- and tune in February 8th, 2009, when the rest of the Grammy Winners will be announced and maybe some token mention of the Classical Winners will be made...

Dr. Dick

A Long, Hard Schlog

Over the past several months – since May, actually – I had been working on what would seem to be a short piece for violin and piano. But that was not the “first stage” of the process: there are what I call pre-compositional sketches that started in late-April, though most of that was worked out over a two-month span from Memorial Day to mid-July. Then, a month ago, I finished the “second stage” of its composition resulting in a “sketch.” Now, I’m getting ready for the “third stage” which is transcribing that sketch into a finished piece, the post-compositional work of writing out a final draft, something I could then send out to musicians so the work can eventually be performed. Where it goes from there is anybody’s guess.

During this process, I had thought about “blogging the work” but found myself usually too brain-dead at the end of a day slaving over a hot piano or too depressed after a bad day when nothing seemed to be working.

But that is also part of the process. Part of me was saying “I don’t want to spend valuable time writing about the piece when I should be writing the piece.” And then, if you’re working “9-to-5" on a nine minute piece of music, daily reports can get pretty monotonous and, if there’s writer’s block to work through, whiney.

Since I finished the “Aria & Chaconne” on November 1st, I took the rest of November off to do something else – write a novel. Well, officially to write down 50,000 words toward a novel. This, too, is only the first stage of the creative process: editing it is something else. Again, I thought about “blogging the process” but came up with the same excuses even though the process is slightly different. Here, dealing with words instead of music, it was more “I tried to write 2500 words today so I don’t feel like writing another 1,000 words about it,” in addition to the usual argument, writing about the piece as opposed to writing the piece.

There’s also something different, I discovered, in writing a novel: I could easily have posted everything I wrote – the 2500 words plus the additional 1,000 words about it – and done an on-line novel-in-progress. But writing the first draft is different than presenting a complete work to the public (even if it’s only a few friends reading over it). Since I was not writing the novel chronologically from beginning to end, without that context of where it’s going it might be to easy to form the wrong opinion or a negative reaction to something – “well, of course that doesn’t make sense, that character (or event) is introduced somewhere else.” In most cases, these episodes I was writing were not self-contained – they’re part of an on-going narrative flow that I have in my mind. But I digress...

Creativity is a very private act. It’s not easy and in some cases not very rewarding.

For most of us, it’s not going to bring in the kind of income we could live off of. When I was teaching at the University of Connecticut in the ‘70s, one of my colleagues, a very respected if not very well-known composer, told his financial advisor as they were filling out the annual income tax forms that he made a little over $400 from his compositions that year – performance royalties – and yet he wanted to put down “composer” rather than “college professor” in the little space provided to list your occupation. The argument ran along the lines “but you earn your living as a teacher” countered by “yes, but I spend most of my time composing.” The advisor looked back over the forms with a raised eyebrow and said “Yes, but if you only made $427 from writing music, why would you DO that?” “Because I’m a composer and I teach so I can afford to compose.”

This made no sense to the financial advisor.

In fact, it doesn’t make much sense to anyone who’d consider themselves a practical person, a realist or just plain normal.

But I am none-of-the above.

When I found myself without a distracting job – listening to everybody else’s music for one thing, and most everybody in my profession’s negative attitudes about the kind of music I liked to compose – I decided to take my time and work out the details behind this new piece of music.

One of the reasons I spent about sixteen years not composing – whether through Writer’s Block, distractions from my job or perhaps depression – was the amount of work it would have taken for me to deal with the changes that were evolving in my compositional style.

As a student, I wrote spontaneously and without effort, being fairly prolific if not very discerning (discernment is not a student’s job: a student’s job is to write as much music as possible and learn by doing).

As I got older and had to deal with composing while earning a living, I found I needed more time to write but what I was writing was better. While teaching, there was little time to focus on composing until the holidays – summer, mostly, but I also remember creating a very involved choral piece starting from scratch on Thanksgiving Day and having most of it sketched out before it was time to meet some friends for dinner. Working for a radio station was a year-round involvement and hearing other peoples’ music in my head all day long left little room for my own.

Where I could sit in a practice-room and compose while other students around me were pounding out their Chopin, singing repetitive warm-up exercises or blasting out long-tones on their trombones, eventually the least little noise became an unnerving distraction. The neighbor’s dog would start to bark and I would throw my pen down and complain “How can I work under these conditions!”

If I had a half-hour between classes, I could find a practice room and work on a few more measures. Years later, it would take me three hours to get back into the “zone” before I could even begin to compose from where I’d left off the last time, and then at the end of whatever time I had available before needing to go to work, I might have a fraction of a measure worked out and often found, the next day, that I would probably erase half of that (yes, I know – decomposing).

As my style changed from the simple, spontaneous “whatever-sounds-good,” “play-it-over-till-you-find-the-right-note” method of composing to something more integral, more organic and much more systematic which started to produce something that sounded less like “everybody else’s music,” I realized the amount of work it took to do this – learning new rules or, in my case, making new rules – was more than I had time or, to be honest, interest. It wasn’t easy, any more: now what? So I thought I will do what I did before: put it aside and wait for inspiration to strike. In a few years, I realized I did not even miss composing.

It took several more years to figure out why life wasn’t going very well for me: I wasn’t composing any more. All my life, that’s what I wanted to be. So I started working at it again, slowly at first. I’m still recovering from that long dark emptiness.

Over the past eight years, once I started writing again, I began coming to terms with the technical apparatus I needed to compose.

It’s hard to explain: if a pianist just sat down and played whatever he liked but never bothered to practice – working on “technique” like scales and arpeggios, let’s say, or learning the notes and how they fit together – the pianist wouldn’t be very interesting to listen to. Talent at this level is called “facile.” There is a “facility” that may be impressive but it lacks depth or communication.

That’s what takes the work.

And so in the process of writing my Silmarillion-inspired rhapsody for violin and orchestra (taking its cue from the opening story of the Creation of the World through Music), I began seeing what I needed to do. In each successive piece – the String Quartet, the Symphony, the song-cycle “Evidence of Things Not Seen” – I set different challenges and learned a little more. It took a year to write the quartet, two for the symphony but only five months for the songs and each time I had to spend less time worrying about the foundation.

The first of the violin and piano pieces, a “Nocturne,” began out of something practical – I needed a piece John Clare and I could both perform in a relatively short time – and I had a passage that I wrote for the symphony’s last movement that seemed to make a better violin piece than a theme in a symphony. It was one of the few pieces I’ve written in the last 25 years that “just happened.”

Eventually other pieces were to be added to this to make a set – not a sonata, as it turned out, though if I’d thought more about it at the beginning, it might have worked (I joked with John about calling it the Nada Sonata). But I wrote some variations (the challenge here writing something emphasizing a more melodic element) and then a “scherzo” (still maintaining my ‘system,’ but trying for something light-hearted and, a real departure for me, a take-off on blues and rock elements). These were very different from the “mood piece” of the Nocturne and I wanted something else that would be even more different as a contrast. Perhaps the last movement or maybe – since my structures usually have their climaxes in the middle of an archway, like a keystone – in the middle of five pieces.

What became the “Aria & Chaconne” went through the same gestation as everything else: the idea came in a kind of flash but how it was going to be worked out was always the challenge. What a composer (or author or painter) sees in a flash of inspiration rarely takes a flash to realize. Most people cannot comprehend the amount of time it takes for an artist to get from Inspiration to Final Artwork. Sometimes it can be very long, but always much longer than it takes to hear or read or view the piece.

And if your job is based on bean-counter-friendly bottom-line principles and weekly deadlines, it’s impossible to compare. It’s not that one is better than the other: they’re just different.

So a few years after the initial idea (not a flash so much as a flicker) for the Chaconne, I started working out the logistics. My style would not easily encompass the restrictions a Chaconne by definition expects, so I had to find ways of “stretching” that definition to see if it could still work.

After a few days in April, I settled into the longer work of trying to find the right pattern. This involved lots of trials-by-error but often it got me one step closer to something I liked. Three weeks into this part of the process, I was fired and so suddenly I was relieved of two things – an income aside, there was the limited amount of time I had to compose before needing to go into work, and the distraction of hearing all this music I was playing on the radio. Now I could listen to only music I wanted to listen to when I wanted to listen to it. I had discovered a long time ago that usually when I’m composing, I try not to listen to a lot of music to allow my own music a chance to gestate subconsciously, something very difficult for the brain to do when it’s constantly bombarded by everything it hears, whether you like it or not, whether it’s the Pachelbel Canon or Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. Instead of spending three or four hours a day composing, I could spend eight or nine. And now I lived in a suburban house with no immediate neighbors and no distractions beyond the sound of lawnmowers.

So now I had the time, the lack of distractions, as well as the place to compose and, most importantly, to THINK.

This led me to explore many more options than I would have had time for before. Rather than settle for “okay, this can work” just to get it done, I started thinking “but what might work better?”

Three or four times, I had come up with a “final solution” but decided “not yet.” A little more exploring, a few more attempts and tweaks and then a month after I was fired, I had a plan, finally.

So far, other than this nine-chord pattern, I hadn’t written a note of music.

An interesting thing happened during the next process. A Chaconne is also a set of variations on this pattern: the pattern doesn’t change, basically (though I found ways around that so it’s not so literal and became variations on itself as it progressed), but the melodic line in the violin, in this case, would be a theme-with-variations over this pattern and its variations.

Now, the first piece in the set was already a Theme-and-Variations movement. I didn’t feel I wanted to do that again. What I didn’t have, though, was something really flowing and lyrical. My style is primarily “harmonic” and I had to really work hard on developing a sense of linearity (if not melody in the traditional sense) and the combination of those lines into something called “counterpoint.”

Somewhere along the way, I decided the Chaconne, with its rigid structure, was going to be the piano part and the violin was going to be this lyrical flowing song-like part – in essence, two simultaneous movements. And so the title became not “Chaconne” but “Aria and Chaconne.” Usually, that means the Aria would be followed by the Chaconne – as in “Introduction and Allegro” or “Song and Dance.” In this case, they happen together.

Another interesting simultaneity here, I discovered later, is that of stylistic approach: if music is either emotional (Romantic, Dionysian) or structural (Classical, Apollonian), the violin Aria was Romantic and the piano Chaconne was Classical.

The next challenge was, then, working out the Aria so it still belongs to everything that’s going on in the Chaconne and is not just a haphazard thing slapped on top of it (easy enough to do). So I worked on how I would make these two pieces belong to each other. I mapped their structures out – the different phrases of the Aria’s A-B-A structure over a string of 19 repetitions of the harmonic pattern that is the Chaconne (though each one moves through different pitch-levels like it’s constantly modulating so it doesn’t sound like “OMG it’s repeating again.” Climaxes on various levels, large and small, had to match. The one became integral to the other.

Now, another thing I realized early in this process was the other three pieces were just three random pieces. There wasn’t much connecting them. And by that, I mean the harmonic-melodic material which I tried to explain in earlier posts. The Variations and the Scherzo were based on one set of six notes (from which all the harmonic and melodic material was derived) and the Nocturne was a different set. Unfortunately, these two different sets had little in common, theoretically.

Since I had now planned the set of five pieces with the Nocturne at the end – this means there’s a 4th piece still to compose – and planned the proportions of the Chaconne to fit a span based on the Golden Section - blah blah blah - as No. 3, it seemed logical to combine these two six-note sets (a hexachord, if you’re into the jargon). Since I’m dealing with the simultaneity of the violin’s Aria over the piano’s Chaconne, it seemed logical to have the first two pieces’ hexachord form the basis of the Chaconne and use the last two pieces’ hexachord in the Aria.

The structural places, then, these shared climactic points, needed to form a consistent harmony. Forming one of these basic chords gave me three or four possible pitches for the violin part, so I wrote these options down first and then tried to place these in the flow of something that worked linearly, created out of its own hexachord.

Of course, the whole trick of being an artist is to take something difficult and make it look easy – that’s what performers do and that’s what composers should do.

The idea of the structure is to support what you hear (the surface), not draw attention to itself by saying “wow, this is a really complicated piece: see what I did here?” That’s why so many people get lost reading what composers write about the technical aspects behind their music (and if you think what I’ve just written is mumbo-jumbo, you should read this which explains in more technical terms what I am trying to express at all).

So now that the piece – or rather the pieces – is... uhm, are done, I have 193 pages of sketches to turn into a final draft: 68 pages of pre-compositional sketches, 79 pages of sketches for the Chaconne; 26 pages for the outer sections of the Aria and 20 pages for the middle section of the Aria. The piece is 137 measures long, lasts about nine minutes and took a little over five months to create.

And so now I’m ready for stage 3 – copying it out into a final draft.

It hardly seems productive when you figure the amount of time spent on the final “product.” What’s the term, “cost-effective”?

To repeat a story I’ve told in here before, back in the ‘70s I heard Elliott Carter – who turns 100 next week – tell an audience that his Variations for Orchestra was his most frequently performed work, more in Europe than in the United States. Talking to an audience before a performance of the work, he mentioned he’d calculated the amount of time it took him to write the piece compared to the commission he was paid to compose it: basically, he earned less than twenty-five cents an hour (Wow, we were thinking). Then, in the back of the audience, this bejeweled society matron stood up and sniffed contemptuously, “Mr. Carter! You mean to tell me you write for MONEY!?!”

That is not why those of us who create want to create. You don’t go into the arts to get rich. You might be lucky, but it’s very rare. But I know of nothing, myself, more satisfying that closing the book on a new piece I’ve just written and saying “Yeah, I wrote that.”

But after Stage 1 pre-compositional, Stage 2 compositional and Stage 3 post-compositional, comes Stage 4 – turning it into live music-making so that, Stage 5, an audience hears it.

For each creative artist, each stage requires a certain amount of courage. The last two are not always the easiest.

Dr. Dick

On the Making of Lists

Whether you’ve been celebrating Black Friday or just hope to survive the holidays to make it to the New Year, you will have to deal with lists.

In addition to hoping you make Santa’s List of Good Little Boys & Girls, you may be twice-checking those shopping lists, things to get for the kids or your folks, for the neighbors or your friends, your co-workers or Aunt Bea whom you see once a year; grocery lists to stock up on supplies for the next feast on the list, along with lists of all the cookies and other holiday trimmings you’ll need by the time you’ve made the list of guests to invite for the Christmas Party and the list with dates of all the parties you’ve been invited to this busy social season. Not to forget the infamous Christmas Card List...

Though the idea of “10-ness” is often inflatable, one way or another, there are thousands of lists of Top 10 Gift Suggestions from every source imaginable (how I hated doing those every year); lists of Top 10 News Events of the Year, Top 10 People of the Year, Top 10 Football Plays of the Year, Top 10 Grossing Films of the Year (or the Top 10 Grossest Films of the Year), Top 10 Most Memorable Performances of the Year, not to mention countless others including the much anticipated Top 10 List of Top 10 Lists.

In addition to store lists and chore lists, much to-do is often made about other kinds of lists. While not very much is made of books in this country, aside from lists of best selling books from the New York Times or the finalists for England’s Booker Prize during the course of the year (and this year, even the Best of the Booker Prizes), the end of a year is usually awash with Top 10 rankings of the best (and worst) dressed celebrities or the hottest (which for those of my readers who are of a certain age does not refer either to their temperature or their box-office clout). Spinning through some of these last week, I noticed most of the comments about the latter lists were primarily calling into question the pulse of those making these decisions since they had clearly overlooked [insert latest teen heart-throb here].

Those of us in the Classical Music World don’t get a network TV Award Show since the commercial market is too small to be worth the effort or the expense, just a casual passing mention on the Grammy Awards – so uneventful are they, there’s usually only one category that’s not released before the broadcast along with the other minor award categories). Even though the Classical Grammy Awards might be politically suspect one way or another, it is the closest thing we have to the Oscars, the Tony Awards, the Country Music Awards, what-have-you.

[“And this year’s Best Composer of the Year Award goes to... (long dramatic pause, audience noticeably hushed in palpable anticipation: drum-roll please) ...Elliott Carter!” and the crowd goes wild as the studio orchestra breaks out in a well-known passage from his Symphonia...]

Recently, the British magazine Gramophone came up with a cover story for its December Issue ranking the Top 20 Orchestras from around the world – the presence of a Japanese Orchestra kept it from being “from across the Western World” – and immediately, the list of those wondering about the veracity of such a list began growing. How were these orchestras selected, on what basis were they placed in this order, who was making the decisions and evaluations – and more importantly, on what grounds: recent live performances, reading reviews, listening to old recordings? Some even wondered about how an orchestra heard (or recorded) in its own hall might sound to a listener when they’re playing in a different hall on tour. And so on.

Unless the rankings are determined by rigid criteria in various categories like those Top 10 Colleges or Places to Live in the USA, taking into account standard-of-living issues, demographic ratios or other aspects that can be statistically compared, anything as subjective as a “best performance” is going to be suspect, especially when it’s not being determined by the same board of judges who would be traveling around the world listening to every orchestra on the planet (or at least those nominated into, say, the 40 Finalists).

[Now there’s a junket I wouldn’t mind serving on...]

Here is what the Gramophone website said about this issue’s cover story:

= = = = = = =

It's a classical title showdown! Swapping gloves for glissandi and punches for prestos, players from around the globe square up for the hotly contested spot of World's Best Symphony Orchestra.

Ranking the heavy hitters is by no means an easy task, but Gramophone has manfully taken the job in hand. Our panel of leading music critics comprised: Rob Cowan, James Inverne, James Jolly (all from Gramophone, UK), Alex Ross (the New Yorker, US), Mark Swed (Los Angeles Times, US), Wilhelm Sinkovicz (Die Presse, Austria), Renaud Machart (Le Monde, France), Manuel Brug (Die Welt, Germany), Thiemo Wind (De Telegraaf, the Netherlands), Zhou Yingjuan (editor, Gramophone China) and Soyeon Nam (editor, Gramophone Korea).

To compare like with like, we have limited ourselves to comparing modern romantic orchestras rather than period bands, but apart from that distinction it's a completely open field. The panel have considered the question from all angles - judging concert performances as well as recording output, contributions to local and national communities and the ability to maintain iconic status in an increasingly competitive contemporary climate.

The results have proven fascinating and will no doubt be as controversial as the question itself. But if nothing else, the task gives us all a chance to celebrate the forerunners of exciting, cutting-edge music-making. And that can't be a bad thing…

= = = = = = =

And so the method behind the rankings has been called into question, generating comments, for example, by Angela at TonicBlotter with other references, including Mark at Deceptively Simple, among others.

Now, I rather doubted even a magazine as significant in the eyes of many people in the Classical Music World as the Gramophone is going to spring for a budget to send a panel of experts around the world, considering the financial rewards they’re likely to reap as a result. How else could you manage it? Let’s just regard it as a cover story/marketing ploy and forget about, say, the indignation over the Philadelphia Orchestra’s absence from the list or that one’s home-town orchestra placed lower than another one.

(Quite frankly, out of all these 20 Orchestras, I’ve heard none of them live in recent years. But I had heard the Philadelphia Orchestra live a few times in the past several years and frankly I would not place it on a Top 20 List simply because I didn’t feel they were playing up to what that level implies, regardless of their past glories. Does an orchestra deserve a spot on a Top List simply because of its reputation? Maybe, however, that will change for them with a new conductor and a hopefully better chapter in the orchestra’s internal life.)

And even then, arguments could be made such lists would be suspect because it might have been a bad day for the performers or the judge was reacting to the conductor and not the performance or the fact they played Berlioz and one judge is noted for hating Berlioz.

Even the micro-points Olympic skating judges, for example, now award by computer cannot seriously overcome personal reactions and preferences over sheer technical analyses. If the winner is not determined by who crosses the finish line first with the fastest speed, how do you determine who’s in first place, much less who’s in twelfth?

How many times have I read about this or that piano competition where the first-place winner is deemed a technical automaton but that the second-place winner was far superior as an interpreter? And that No. 6 was by far the hottest?

It always amused me to read an orchestra’s publicity release that would say they are “among the six topped ranked orchestras in the country.” Ah, that means they’re No. 6. Or there’s the generic blurb, “one of the most acclaimed orchestras in the world” – by whom?

For that matter, can the quality of an orchestra be judged by ticket-sales or salary rankings? Has anyone come up with a statistically accurate ratio to compare what they pay the conductor and the executive director with the principal players and the rank-and-file members of the string section? Is an orchestra going to be better than others because this one has a better benefit package for its musicians, that one has a better “work-place-atmosphere” rating from its musicians, or another one has a hotter young conductor than that one?

Or do we do a televised reality show called “Orchestra!” and have viewers phone in to determine which ensemble gets voted off the stage?

With another crucial box-office season upon us for new movie releases, are we going to see films ranked solely by box-office take or by the quality of the film, the expert interpretations of its actors and the skill with which the director realizes the film’s potential? Is this film deemed a better film because more people, what with the bad economy and the political situation around the world, felt like taking in a let-me-check-my-brain-at-the-door comedy with a hot TV personality in it rather than one that’s a thought-provoking-often-cathartic-view-of-some-of-the-basic-core-issues-that-drive-humanity-in-our-world-today kind of film?

What do you think? You be the judge...

Oh, but one word to the folks at Gramophone. I haven’t seen the list as it will appear in the December issue itself, so maybe it’s been corrected, but the way it was reported on other websites, proff-raeders and fact-checkers somewhere missed that one of the Russian orchestras was called by a name it has not been called since 1991 when Leningrad returned to its pre-Revolutionary name, St. Petersburg. I missed that one myself, just noting “huh, the three Russian orchestras were all placed in a clump, Nos. 14-15-16...” Didn’t even see that one of them was the now out-dated Leningrad Philharmonic...

What does that imply?

As a few e-mails I received noted, apparently others feel more strongly about the impact of such a list’s significance. True, as Mrs. Alving told Pastor Manders in a crucial scene in Ibsen’s Ghosts, arguing against the rigidity of his old-fashioned moral precepts, all she wanted to do was pull at one tiny loose thread and then realized, after the fabric came undone, it was only machine made.

But as imperfect as modern-day clothing can be - another thing I need to add to a list: buy thread to sew the buttons back on a new shirt purchased a few weeks ago that failed to survive its first round through the laundry - it may be better to wear what we have rather than go naked in the world. As Mark Twain said, “naked people have little or no influence on society.”

So perhaps it’s best to bear with it, realizing that all lists are relative, just celebrate the music-making of twenty fine orchestras and be done with it.

Now, where is that list of Top 20 Living Composers?