Deceptively Simple

“Bird had a knack for getting from one note to another like nobody else.” That’s how Dizzy Gillespie summarized what made Charlie Parker stand out from everyone around him. Parker had the technique to run circles around people, and the harmonic ingenuity to upend jazz harmony as we knew it, but what made his playing so distinctive was the articulation and what happened in the tiny transitions between notes – regardless of tempo.

That quotation came to mind two weeks ago when Pierre Boulez was conducting Bartok’s one-act opera Bluebeard’s Castle. There’s a quiet, meandering passage near the beginning, when Bluebeard has just entered his castle with his young bride for the basses and cellos, in unison. The way Boulez approached this was to be utterly calm, and let the line seem to drift of its own accord. The sound of those groups of instruments is one I’ve never heard another conductor approximate. It’s precisely controlled, but not rigid, and while every note in the line seems to come as a surprise, the passage, after it’s finished, ends up feeling entirely logical and preordained. How to balance that spontaneity with the forward-thinking logic is some sort of a Boulez hallmark.

You can hear this in a similar passage for the basses alone at the beginning of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, in his recording with the CSO. Once again, it has this sense of stasis while still moving forward, and you don’t know what key you’re in, and yet it sounds entirely natural. When a trumpet chorale enters, there’s something churning down in the lower depths, something motoric, mysteriously but entirely planned.

Boulez and the orchestra seem to navigate these passages the way your hand does as you smooth out a bedsheet. Ahead of your hand is a series of peaks and valleys, with a clear surface beneath them. Boulez makes that surface appear, the way your hand does as it glides across the sheet. And now that I think about it, a hand moving across a sheet happens to be a very Boulezian conducting gesture. (This may be the first time laundry and Bartok have appeared within 100 words of each other.)

So, Boulez also has a knack of getting from one note to the next like nobody else. As with Charlie Parker, I don’t know how he does it, but it sounds intrinsically right, and, in the end, that’s all that matters.

New files were made publicly available yesterday from the Nixon Presidential Materials by the Nixon Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California. If there aren’t any smoking guns, or crass examples of Nixon behaving badly, there are documents that can help fill in some gaps, and connect some dots.

For one, there are several memos between Nixon aides H.R. (Bob) Haldeman (Chief of Staff), Charles Colson, Gordon Strachan, and Dwight Chapin about Frank Sinatra. Could Sinatra, who by this time is releasing Greatest Hits collections, be seduced to endorse Nixon in time for the 1972 election? The Sinatra-related materials released yesterday begin with September, 1971, and go through February, 1972.

Vice President Spiro Agnew enjoyed spending time with Sinatra at his Palm Springs house, as well as with Bob Hope, with whom Agnew was especially close. Hope let him into the circle of friends he’d call early in the morning with new jokes.

So the administration knew they had an entry. But the first new document is a memo from Haldeman to Strachan checking on a rumor that Ed Muskie, Democrat Presidential candidate, used Sinatra’s plane recently. This was laid to rest two days later, when Strachan, quoting an Agnew aide, assured Haldeman that “Sinatra is still one of us,” and that the plan was owned by Sinatra and a friend, and it was the friend who ok’d Muskie’s use.

But then, Colson writes a long, confidential, memo that October outlining steps to lure Sinatra closer to the Nixon camp. (PDF) The administration should set up a meeting with the singer and the President, because

“We understand  Sinatra  to  be  a  very  deep  thinking  and
well  informed  person,  who  will want  to  discuss
important  substantive  subjects  with  the  President
rather  than  engage  in  light  conversation.”

This meeting of the minds, with Sinatra and Nixon discussing Vietnam, Communism, and school busing, would be a success due to the President’s undeniable “ability  to   charm people   on  a  personal    basis.” You can read the rest of the memo, but the upshot was to be that if the steps were followed, “we  are  relatively  certain  to  have  completed  our  seduction of  Frank  Sinatra.” The memos that follow are inconclusive on whether this meeting was set up, but, it would seem, something did happen.

Maurice Stans

By next February, an accountant named Maurice Stans left his position as commerce secretary to become the finance chairman for the Finance Committee to Re-Elect the President, which was part of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). Stans was in charge of a slush fund, according to J. Anthony Lukas’s Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years, which maintained no public records. Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods did keep a list, however, and while she claimed it was to keep track of invitations to social functions, Lukas added, “there is some evidence that it was used to dispense more tangible favors.” Donations to this fund were usually in cash, and Stans and his assistants worked madly to build the account before April 7, when a new campaign finance law would go into effect.

What does this have to do with Frank Sinatra? He allegedly contributed $100,000 in cash ($509,000 adjusted for inflation) to the fund in April, 1972, according to Gus Russo’s floridly written 2006 history of the Chicago Outfit, Supermob. One of Sinatra’s friends was Angelo DeCarlo, whom the FBI claimed to be a hit man (or as they put it, a “methodical gangland executioner.”) DeCarlo was serving a 12-year prison sentence for extortion. An Agnew aide then, allegedly, contacted John Dean, who then forwarded a request for a pardon to the Justice Department. Sinatra also allegedly made an additional $50,000 gift to Nixon’s campaign fund. Nixon was re-elected in November. DeCarlo was released in December, having served 1 1/2 years.

It would seem that Colson, who described himself as a “flag-waving, kick-’em-in-the-nuts, anti-press, anti-liberal Nixon fanatic,” devised a plan that managed to benefit both men’s interests.

In Louis Menand’s New Yorker article (in the January 11 issue, and not available online) about the life and reception of Andy Warhol, there’s this intriguing fact:

“[Tony] Scherman and [David] Dalton report that a profile of Warhol, by David Bourdon, had been scheduled for the cover of Life, but that after [Robert] Kennedy’s death the story was killed.”

Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968, and Kennedy was assassinated two days following Warhol’s attempted murder. The magnitude of Kennedy’s death understandably required a few headlines to be written and the story covered, but the bumped coverage of Warhol coincidentally tied Kennedy’s murder to that of his brother in 1963, which also had an avant-garde twist to it.

In that year, Thelonious Monk was set to bring his big band and quartet to Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall) in the new Lincoln Center complex, which had opened in September of 1962. Known and respected for his leading role in the rise of bebop since the ’50s, everything seemed to be coalescing towards even more mainstream recognition, and no longer as a quizzical member of jazz’s fringe.

The Philharmonic Hall concert was scheduled for December 30, 1963. Time readied a cover feature on Monk and his music for their November 29 issue. But when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas on November 23, coverage shifted from avant-garde art (as Monk’s was generally viewed at the time) to the more urgent matters of a nation mourning.

The 5,000-word article (“The Loneliest Monk”) covered his music and his eccentricities, and would eventually be published in February, 1964 (“sophisticates find in it affinities with Webern”). The Philharmonic Hall concert was released by Columbia in 1964, and remains in print.

The Chicago Symphony is playing Mahler’s Fourth Symphony this week, a work I always manage to both anticipate and dread. Maybe not “dread,” especially, so much as back away from. It’s a smaller symphony than those it’s bracketed by, the Third with its women’s and children’s choirs and eight French horns, the Fifth with its four brawny movements and the lovely Adagietto. The Fourth doesn’t have a tuba or even a trombone section in it, by contrast. It can kind of get overlooked, despite being a solid hour long on its own, and having a soprano feature at the end that manages to be both tidy and expansive.

What I like about the symphony, and what makes me look forward to it—and this may not appear to have all that much to do with the symphony itself—is that it reminds me of the first time I heard it live. I drove up to Chicago in 1999, treating myself to a birthday present of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony with the CSO and conducted by Riccardo Chailly. The program also included Mahler’s orchestration of Bach’s Third Orchestra Suite: a two-fer. I met up with a couple of other friends who were visiting family that weekend, and we had a time of it afterwards, at Miller’s. I think I had to pull off the road and sleep at a rest station on I-65 for a little bit as I made the three-hour drive back to Indianapolis, having set out for the return trip around 11:30. It was one of the few times I heard Bud Herseth play before he retired in 2001.

But there’s a flip side here, naturally. In 2003, I was in Bloomington, Indiana, and coming down off a day of studying, and had the radio on. It was a broadcast of the Indianapolis Symphony playing Mahler’s Fourth, with Sylvia McNair as the soprano soloist. I think it was her; I’d gone to Indianapolis to hear the concert recently, and she was singing that weekend, at any rate.

This was the spring of 2003, which was the culmination of the long buildup to the Iraq War. Speeches were being made, troop levels discussed, presentations to the UN being given, everyone was talking about WMDs and whether Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 or if the Taliban was in Iraq, and it was all a muddle, basically, because as we now know, the information we did have was twisted beyond recognition and our leaders really wanted to go into Iraq.

So, March 20, 2003, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is on the radio, and I was probably reading a book with my cat resting on my lap, the way we spent many evenings during the week. The final movement began, and I don’t remember how far the ISO, conductor Jun Markl, and McNair got into it. McNair was singing that lovely poem, giving voice to a child rhapsodizing about the wonders of Heaven.

By the standards of the American middle-class, let’s say, it’s not much of a vision of Heaven, though. The child is basically pleased to sing about a place where there is sufficient food, itemzing plenty of meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, and bread. Everyone there also dances a lot. This isn’t Heaven where every wish is fulfilled; this is Heaven where simple subsistence and having enough are true blessings.

McNair was singing about these things, of a child’s joy in a life where his needs were met, when the music went into a fade-out and the announcer came on. “We’ve just received word that bombs have begun to drop in Iraq,” he said. In my mind’s ear, it was profundo voice of George Walker intoning those words.

In the space of a couple seconds, then, we had gone from the joyous and naive poem about Heaven’s richness to word that we had just started a war. Leaving aside how that war has progressed since, it was nevertheless made vividly clear that the delight Mahler was composing and the cheerful victory he was broadcasting at that time was incomparably far from reality. Sadness and misery were going to be the lot in life for several thousand people, on both sides of the firing lines.

Mahler is famous, of course, for the irony in his music, the sense that however happy the music is now, melancholy or resignation is rarely a page or two away. But it’s usually in the music, and not from whatever is going on in our own lives that produces that tension. However you or I feel going into a concert is going to have some bearing on how we feel after it, but, usually, for two or three hours, we leave it up to the music to provide a channel for our emotions to go through. With Mahler’s Fourth, though, the piece can never really do that, because of the very non-musical memories I have bound up in it. That might not be the ideal way to approach the symphony, but it is a symphony I’ll never miss a chance to hear.

The Ring Cycle as Imagined by Felix Mendelssohn:

“My best thanks also for your last letter. Do you know, I think your suggestion as to the Nibelungen most luminous? It has been constantly in my head ever since, and I mean to employ my first leisure day in reading over the poem, for I have forgotten the details and can only recall the general colouring and outlines which seem to me gloriously dramatic. Will you kindly communicate to me your specific ideas on this subject? The poem is evidently more present to your memory than to mine. I scarcely remember what your allusion means as to the sinking into the Rhine. Can you point out to me the various passages which struck you as particularly dramatic when the idea first occurred to you ? and, above all, say something more definite on the subject, as the whole tone and colouring, and characteristics, take my fancy strongly; therefore I beg of you to do so, and soon, too; it will be an essential service to me. Refer entirely to the poem itself, for before your letter can I shall certainly have read it, though I shall not less eagerly expect your opinion Accept my for this happy thought as for all else.”—Felix Mendelssohn in letter to Fanny Hensel, 1840