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Boorish crowds - and who cares about posterity?

“At last, to make a long story short, I did play on that miserable, Wretched Pianoforte. And what really galled me was that Madame and her gentlemen never interrupted their drawing for one moment, they just continued, and I had to play for the chairs, tables, and walls. Given these miserable conditions, I finally lost my patience—I had begun to play the Fischer Variations and I had played about half of them when I stood up. They immediately showered me with compliments; but I said what had to be said, namely that I could not do myself justice on this Clavier, and I would be happy if Madame would choose another day when a better Clavier would be available. But she wouldn’t hear of my leaving and I was obliged to wait another half hour until her husband came. He, however, sat down next to me and listened to me very attentively, and I—I forgot the cold and the headache, and played in spite of the Wretched clavier—the way I play when I am in the best of spirits. Give me the best Clavier in Europe, but an audience that either doesn’t understand, or doesn’t want to understand, people who do not connect with me and my playing, and I will lose all joy in performing.”—Mozart, in a letter to his father dated May 1, 1778, translated and edited by Robert Spaethling.

I don’t know if she’s beautiful, but she’s HOT

dragonWe’ve (the Blogger Book Club) been discussing art critic Dave Hickey’s fascinating, challenging (and brief) The Invisible Dragon on Molly Sheridan’s Mind the Gap, so go there for entire group’s entries. This is my first.

I was struck by the radically American democratic call to arms (I almost wrote cri de coeur) that runs through each of Hickey’s five essays. He writes, “Art is either a democratic political instrument, or it is not,” on page 15, about the response of Senator Jesse Helms to Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, and goes on to write later about the value of an essentially intuited notion of “beauty” that should govern our choices about what is valuable in art as well as what the market deems valuable. He starts out by writing about the chilly reception he and his book received the first time they were published (the book, at least, Hickey’d been around for years) in 1993, with lecture halls filled with hissing students and faculty who marched out en masse. Anyone who cares not what the public thinks so long as their read is an elitist, at best, and that doesn’t explain Hickey at all.

Hickey’s aim is, as others in the book group have already said, to reinstate the notion of beauty as an artistic criterion on the level of all the others we cherish, and somewhat removing the intellectual appeal of art for something that’s more immediately gratifying. It’s the immediate gratification that leads us to pay attention in the first place, and which lead to its ultimate staying power. “Beauty is precedent,” he writes, with his own italics. “Beautiful works survive sans virtue. Virtuous works sans beauty do not. In a democratic society, we express our discomfort with Beauty’s off-site rationale by dispensing with it. But we keep the beauty.” So, we excise the reason(s) we think something beautiful, but keep the beautiful object.

I’d argue that the rationale was never even really dispensed with, since it was never arrived at or wrestled with in the first place. I think—and how to prove this I have no idea—that most people when confronted with a painting, a novel, a symphony, or The Sopranos, make a gut judgement about whether it excites them and they find it worth revisiting, or they leave it by the wayside. The why, the how, the mysteries of its creation, these aren’t exactly their focus. They want to be entertained, not to be treated as fools, and if the work on display achieves that, hey, great. If it doesn’t, sayonara.

Which leads me to wonder about his castigation of institutions and the “bureaucrats” who staff them, and their neutral, “therapeutic,” education-oriented attitudes. I say this not just because I am one of those bureaucrats who’s all-too-aware of their goals and the compromises that go into achieving them, but that I’m honestly a little puzzled by why the institutions are worth going after with tooth and nail. I mean, someone’s got to put this stuff on display, and that takes a great deal of planning and preparation and deal-making and negotiation, and compromise and a fair amount of artistic knowledge and a willingness to play nice and a willingness to give someone the what-for, and those seem like small prices to pay for the chance to go to the Met Museum and look at altarpieces, or go to Orchestra Hall, ahem, and hear the Chicago Symphony. I’ll grant in an instant that there are excesses and excessive timidity in certain cases, but those aren’t dealbreakers.

A lengthy quotation:

“The experience of art within the therapeutic institution, by contrast, is presumed to be an end in itself. Under its auspices, we play a minor role in the master’s narrative—the artist’s tale—and celebrate his autonomous acts even as we are offhandedly victimized by the work’s philosophical power and ruthless authority. [...] Whatever we get, we deserve—and what we get most prominently is ignored, disenfranchised, and instructed. Then we are told that it is ‘good’ for us.”

(”Victimized”? Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art sells a t-shirt that says “FEAR NO ART,” but I don’t think Hickey’s assaulting art is what they had in mind.)

Again, this is super democratic and basically a call for self-education, and while I think that autodidacts make fascinating people and would make an outstanding cadre of curators, I’m not yet ready to pronounce them the final arbiters. If nothing else, who’s going to do the fund-raising? And is it really so bad to have to look at a painting on a wall in a museum? Is coming across it as you backpack through Florence so superior?

FREE JAZZ

These need no set-up. Thanks to the impressive HM for the impish, vaguely revolutionary, second video.

Happy Father’s Day

The University of Oklahoma Press recently brought to fruition a work of scholarship several years in the making, at least seven, I think, perhaps more. On the Western Front with the Rainbow Division: A World War I Diary contains the written-down thoughts of Vernon Kniptash, a member of the Indiana National Guard whose grandparents immigrated to the United States, and who decided to fight against Germany in the Great War. The editor of this volume who saw to its publication is the chair of the history department at Ball State University, Dr. E. Bruce Geelhoed.

onwesternfront

Dutch much?

The Nederlands Dans Theater came to Chicago for two shows last week at the Auditorium Theater, on Tuesday and Wednesday, and it was the second I got to. Each night featured the same slate of three works, though, so this wasn’t such a great impediment, but with dancing on this level of expressive nuance and intricate storytelling, two performances probably isn’t enough to take it all in, let alone absorb everything that’s happening on stage. But what you are able to see and are able to grasp is deeply moving and almost tragic, and the dancers’ considerable technique fades from view and you - or at least, I - let my mind wander to the metaphysics the choreographers seem to be aiming for, and the dancers are delivering.

Beginning with Lightfoot León’s (Paul Lightfoot, Sol León) Shoot the Moon and ending with Crystal Pite’s The Second Person, the program moved from a narrative-driven choreography to a more abstract vocabulary. The five dancers in Shoot the Moon inhabit a set of rooms set on a turntable, on which the walls rotate so that we only ever see a couple, or a soloists. Videos projected above the dancers occasionally focus in on the action who are (were) out of sight. We see one couple fighting, another not fighting, and another room usually with just a male soloist in it.

At one point, the walls spin such that we can see the action in each room in quick succession, and it becomes bleakly clear that none of these people are able to interact at any deep level with anyone else, and that they never will. (At least, that’s how it seemed to me. They say that criticism always says more about the critic than about the work of art…and lord knows I don’t have the vocabulary to describe the actual physical movements.) The music was from Philip Glass’s Tirol Concerto for piano and orchestra, and the choreography mapped its ebbs and swells perfectly.

This is as good a point as any to praise the NDL’s website, which puts Flash videos of their dances at the top of every page. You don’t have to Click Here! to see their dancing; you don’t have to take some reviewer’s word that the company is awesome; you don’t have to register for some sort of update; it’s just there and the music and dancing start as soon as you arrive and you see the beautiful dancers immediately. Bravo. The dances danced in Chicago can be viewed here.)

Shoot the Moon

Next was Jirí Kylián’s Wings of Wax, which takes off from Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. As Breughel shifts our attention from the fall of Icarus to that of the commonplace action of the townsfolk, who are oblivious to Icarus’s recent flight and fall, Kilián moves his eight dancers in and out of view on a dark stage such that it’s a continual game to keep your eyes on the dancers. A giant tree hangs above the stage with a searchlight moving in an orbit around it. At one point, the four women come upstage and begin taking simple steps, forward and back, and as beguiling as their movements are, you can’t help but wonder if the men aren’t the actual focal point, and you’re being fooled.

As Kilián incorporated music by Heinrich Biber, John Cage, Glass, and Bach, he used that to cleanly delineate each of the passing moments. The fluid patterns during Biber’s Baroque opening stopped dead when one of Cage’s prepared-piano pieces began, and took a fittingly more mechanized turn.

I wish they had an image for this dance with the tree. Alas

I wish they had an image for this dance with the tree. Alas

Last up was the evening’s tour de force for the entire company, The Second Person by Crystal Pite. Working with composer Owen Belton’s electronic score, with samples of spoken words and massive industrial clankings, she fashioned a gritty, machine-like world that ultimately turned poignantly beautiful. She was aided in this by three Bunraku puppets, two doll-sized and the other life-size, and it’s no exaggeration to say that the breathtaking use of these dolls makes their appearance in Petrouschka look downright sophomoric. The dance’s conclusion (which is on the NDL website) in which one female dancer appears to have turned into a puppet, is one of those heartbreaking moments that isn’t soon forgotten.

ndt-the-second-person

And in the local relationships to this company, it’s fun to see that Hubbard Street Dance Company’s Jim Vincent is leaving Chicago become artistic director of Netherlands Dans Theater, while a former leader of NDL 1 named Glenn Edgerton is coming in to lead Hubbard Street. I’ll bring the Kleenex if last week’s NDL performances is anything like what Edgerton can bring to Hubbard Street.

Tuba mirum, baby

Mozart’s Requiem exists in a handful of version completed by others - his student Süssmayr, pianist Robert Levin - but leave it to the trombone section to make it swing. Here are New York Philharmonic principal trombone Joseph Alessi, jazz trombonist Wycliffe Gordon, and the Juilliard Trombone Choir with an arrangement of the Tuba mirum. Dandy.

Ode for King Igor

In case you hadn’t already heard, Google salutes the birthday of Igor Stravinsky on its homepage today. There’s a clear Firebird depiction there, and I think the garland of flowers is left over from the sacrificial virgin’s dance in The Rite of Spring…best interpretation I can come up with. Happy 127th, Mr. Stravinsky. Your music has given me more great nights in the concert hall than you can know.

Photo: Arnold Newman

Photo: Arnold Newman

Here I am

Has it actually been 15 days since the last post? Yes? Okay. Must improve. A few random updates:

Courtesy of Alex Ross, we now have das Mahlerblög, with Mahler’s publisher Universal Edition sitting down with the likes of Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, and Daniele Gatti to schoot the breeze about Gustav.

The Chicago Symphony’s Dvorak Festival (DVOUR DVORAK 2009) is entering its final week, and there’s a lively discussion on CSO Resound’s Facebook page about how you would go about commemorating that on a recording. So go become a FAN. The page is maintained by some daffy arts administrator.

The League of American Orchestras had its annual conference in Chicago last week at the historic (by which I mean ART DECO EVERYWHERE) Palmer House Hotel, and it came off pretty well, I think. A panel on the future of philanthropy was notable for Boeing’s representative cutting through the ambiguous conference haze and saying, “You should know that corporations don’t exist to fund your arts organization.” Boeing, by the way, sponsors eighth blackbird’s concerts at the Harris Theater, ICE’s frequent Chicago apperances, and underwrote Chicago Opera Theater’s production of Nixon in China in 2006. There was, of course, a conference blog.

Looking ahead, the CSO announced its MusicNOW series for next season, and the stylistic net seems to be getting wider all the time. An 85th birthday concert for Pierre Boulez in February 2010 features commissions from Dai Fujikura and Johannes Boris Borowski, along with four (count ‘em) works of Boulez’s own (Structures II, Messagequisse, Dialogue de l’ombre double and Anthemes II). Pierre-Laurent Aimard gets credit for the assist and CSO musicians take on the other soloists duties.

Beyond Boulez are concerts and demonstrating that stylistical widening I was talking about are works by Richard Rodney Bennett and Frederick Rzewski, as well as Gyorgy Kurtag, whose Messages of the Late R.V. Troussova should be fantastic. The master’s Scenes from a Novel showed up in 2002 and left me spellbound. And the series closes with a bill split between John Luther Adams, composer of some of the slowest-moving music ever written, and Osvaldo Golijov, also a composer of some of the slowest-moving music ever written. Beer and pizza to follow.

Sign up for EMI Classic’s Club and you can hear new releases from the Artemis Quartet (Piazzolla), Piotr Anderszewski (the pianist’s Carnegie Hall recital), and Paavo Jarvi’s extremely intriguing Mahler movements disc, with Mahler’s four stand-along movements played by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra. Those would be Blumine, cut from the First Symphony; Todtenfeier, a draft of the Second Symphony; the finished Adagio from the unfinished Tenth Symphony; and Benjamin Britten’s arrangement of “What the Wild Flowers Tell Me.” Purists will be outraged, and the impure among us can have, as usual, a good time.

Lastly, Jonathan Lethem has a new novel out in October, titled Chronic City. (Excerpt here.) Since it is 480 pages, I think it is officially a tome, having crossed over from mere book status somewhere around page 425.

I love that line on John Luther Adams’s site spelling out one piece’s duration:

“6 hours.”

Head-in-arms music

My own tastes run to the complex, I will admit. I gravitate to music that I need to hear a couple times before I can feel like I understand what’s going on, and if I get it after one listen, I’m generally bored after that first listen and don’t come back for more.

mizzou-skyWhich is why Josh Haden’s song “Spiritual” hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks on its first listen, in 1997, and why I keep going back to that first hearing. Haden leads the band Spain and wrote the simple, direct waltz for them, but my first exposure to it was through a cover his bass-playing dad Charlie made with Pat Metheny on their 1997 duo album Beyond the Missouri Sky (Short Stories).  In their version, Metheny’s multi-tracked on guitar and drums, with loops of his own playing providing some rhythmic framework for his own guitar solos, and Haden lays down some eye-wateringly lyrical playing of his own.

Their 8-minute version is the best $0.99 cents you’ll spend this year, so make the investment.

johnnyNow, besides this cover, there’s Johnny Cash’s from the 1996 Unchained. The gentle, expansive cornfield melancholy of Haden/Metheny has turned darker, more reflective. That distinctive baritone still had a lot of its firmness and color in 1996; hearing its gravelly decline through the later American series brought a lump to the throat.

To see and hear how Josh Haden himself sings his song, check out this video from last November, from David Letterman’s show. Quicker tempo, a little statelier delivery than Haden/Metheny or Cash. It’s cooler and less of an existential crisis, yet there’s a bleak undercurrent that isn’t going away. Strangely, despite using more traditional instruments, Haden’s version sounds somehow less “country” than Cash’s. (Note also Petra Haden sitting in on violin, Rachel Haden on cello, with Charlie Haden on bass.)

Still, Josh Haden’s approach changes from night to night, as can be heard on this looser live recording from 1999.

Friends of mine going through a rough patch have been known to have Beyond the Missouri Sky handed to them to speed the healing process. That’s mainly because of this last track, which focused my attention in ways that few songs or pieces have before or since. I just had to put everything aside, put my head in my hands and listen.

Here are the lyrics.

“Jesus, I don’t want to die alone
Jesus, oh Jesus, I don’t want to die alone
My love wasn’t true
Now all I have is you
Jesus, oh Jesus, I don’t want to die alone

Jesus if you hear my last breath
Don’t leave me here
Left to die a lonely death
I know I have sinned
But Lord I’m suffering
Jesus, oh Jesus, if you hear
My last breath.

All my troubles
All my pain
Will leave me
Once again
Once again”

Trail run, by the numbers

Location: Willow Springs, in the Forest Preserve District of Cook County (map)

Date: May 30, 2009. 7:45AM

Time: 2:16:19

Distance: 16 miles, give or take

Number of other people seen: 15 (2 runners, 8 hikers, 5 dog-walkers)

Number of deer: 4

Height of mud splatters: Up to the knee

Number of times “I’m completely f*&$^& lost” went through brain: 2

Number of scenic pictures taken of the incredibly beautiful scenery, with its forests, its wide open grassy spaces, ponds, deer, and birds: None, because I was RUNNING.