Stephen Merritt - photo by Marco Krasilcic

“What are you hoping to hear?”

“…Anything from 69 Love Songs would be great, I guess.”

“That’s tied up with an old relationship for me.”

“Yeah. I think we all have a little bit of that.”

First set

1. Kiss Me like You Mean It – 69 Love Songs, vol. 2

2. You Must Be out of Your Mind – Realism

3. Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side – 69 Love Songs, vol. 1 (Stephin Merritt did hold out the big high note at the end)

4. We Are Having a Hootenanny – Realism

5. Shipwrecked – Gothic Archies’ Lemony Snicket soundtrack

6. Walk a Lonely Road – Realism

7. When Will You Love Me Again? – Realism (iTunes bonus track) (also one of the night’s most heartbreaking songs)

8. All I Want to Know – Pieces of April soundtrack

9. Suddenly a Tidal Wave – The Wayward Bus

10. I Have the Moon – The Charm of the Highway Strip

11. Looking for Love (In the Hall of Mirrors) – The 6ths’ Wasps’ Nest

Second set

1. Xylophone – 69 Love Songs, vol. 3

2. Interlude – Realism

3. The Nun’s Litany – Distortion

4. I’m Sorry I Love You – 69 Love Songs, vol. 3

5. The Little Hebrew Girl – Stephin Merritt, Showtunes (Notable for sending me and the gentlemen next to me into fits of laughter for rhyming “Calvinists” with “Jesus exists!”)

6. The Flowers She Sent and the Flowers She Said She Sent – Holiday

7. You You You You You – The 6ths’ Hyacinths and Thistles

8. Always Already Gone – Realism

9. Fear of Trains – The Charm of the Highway Strip

10. The Dolls’ Tea Party – Realism

11. 100,000 Fireflies – The Wayward Bus (Merritt: “Some of you…weren’t even alive when this was written.” [1990])

Encores

1. I Die – i (I may be wrong, but I believe this is the world’s shortest hyperlink)

2. From a Sinking Boat – Realism

Corey Dargel - photo by Luke Batten & Jonathan Sadler

The first Chicago appearances of both Corey Dargel and John Luther Adams fall in the next week, and I encourage everyone to get to both. Dargel has re-written what an art-song can be in our era, and beyond that dry description, his electronic art-songs are invariably touching and humane. Dargel is singing his one-year-old song cycle Thirteen Near-Death Experiences with ICE Saturday at the Velvet Lounge. There is a podcast. It’s $10 (the concert, not the podcast), and I scribbled about its premiere last year.

Before that, though, the Chicago Symphony runs down one of Osvaldo

Jessica Rivera

Golijov’s most beautiful works with soprano Jessica Rivera, How Slow the Wind from the Three Songs, and she also sings his settings of Schubert songs. Robert Spano conducts the rest of the American/Copland evening. How Slow the Wind is the only piece that’s ever made me wish I played clarinet. I think that Rivera’s performances can be part of the movement to reclaim the songs from Dawn Upshaw. Tickets are what they are.

John Luther Adams, by contrast, writes these gigantic slow-moving pieces which are, likewise, invariably touching and humane.  CSO musicians and others are playing his Qilyuan at MusicNOW on Monday March 15, which I praised here. Another percussion work and one for brass, and a few Golijov pieces appear. Qilyuan, for four bass drums, remains one of those pieces, at least, to me, where you remember where you were the first time you heard it, so bizarre it sounded and how raptly it held your attention. I was sitting at my Time Out desk. Tickets are $20. (Farther down the line, Jaap van Zweden conducts Adams’s Dark Waves with the full CSO in October.)

And while it’s not related to live music, ICE’s pianist Jacob Greenberg released an exquisite and wide-ranging disc of Mozart, Schoenberg, Kurtág, Schumann, and his own Lied ohne Worte nach Rilke. Mozart’s Rondo in A minor, K. 511, is especially expressive, and follows nicely, and surprisingly, out of a selection of Kurtág’s Játékok.

There’s also this gem of a commercial, courtesy the Royal Opera House, for their production of…well, you’ll figure it out. (via ProperDiscord)

I had a wedding to play. Most trumpeters who last as long as I did develop a repertoire of short works to play at weddings; processionals, recessionals, fanfares, and other such flashy-sounding but not all that difficult pieces. I was no different. I could toss off a trumpet voluntary, put the trumpet back in its case, grab my check and be on my way while the families and friends were still waving to the bride and groom on their way to the reception. It was simple, and all was well with the world.  Bridesmaids inevitably swooned.

Without the pressure to make a career out of the trumpet impelling me to practice daily, I did what any self-respecting student would do: I stopped practicing. (I also was taking summer-school classes to get caught up on my musicology coursework.*) This was not wise.

The wedding was for my best friend Michael Cox, whom I’d known since we were both undergraduates at Butler University. He was marrying his childhood sweetheart near Richmond, Indiana. The pianist for the occasion was another of our friends, Greg Sanders, who’s now a professional pianist/accompanist in Indianapolis. This was a labor of love and no one was getting paid, is what I’m trying to say.

The weekend of the wedding arrived, and both Greg and I had driven to Richmond to stay there for the weekend. He and I had rehearsed in Indianapolis, I think, and no major problems had presented themselves: the piece didn’t go very high, and since this processional was basically a glorified march, we weren’t going to lose each other.

At the wedding rehearsal, the processional was fine. The recessional was fine. Maybe I wasn’t as secure as I would have liked, but it sounded bright and happy and vaguely Masterpiece Theater-ish, which is all anyone expects from these sort of things. All that was left was the wedding itself.

An explanation: When you stop playing a brass instrument, your lung capacity plummets. The result is that you can’t play for as long without taking a breath. Since you are breathing more frequently, you are not going to be very efficient with what air you do have. And finally, when you aren’t very efficient, your lips aren’t supported and you press the mouthpiece harder into them in a frantic bid to maintain the pressure they should be getting from the air, from the opposite direction, and they get more tired because they are having a piece of brass ground into them. This is my theory on what happens when brass players stop playing for any length of time, and therefore my theory for what happened next.

Morning of the wedding, spend some time playing scales and exercises, feeling pretty good. In the wedding, sitting with trumpet beneath pew, warm Indiana afternoon. Smiles everywhere. Time to go up to the front of the small church for the processional. No time to tune with the piano because that would be coarse.

First phrase, the one that doesn’t go very high, no problem. Second phrase, the one that ascends to a high A, it’s not a high A. It’s A-ish. Rest of phrase a blur. Third and fourth phrases bear resemblance to processional as written.

Have to repeat entire piece due to bride walking at a pace that must surely rival that of the glacier as it carved its way south through here thousands of years ago. High A this time is more of a foggy bleating sound, like a piccolo, emasculated foghorn with an inferiority complex. All is getting dark as light seems to be receding from the church.

I told Michael after the fact that I owed him a steak dinner, which I was able to follow through on for him and Jeannette 2 1/2 years ago in Dayton, Ohio, where they now live. Dinner was followed by a screening of Talladega Nights. We still keep in touch, and were it not for a work-related disaster that demanded my attention and cost me hours of sleep over the most recent holidays, I would have seen them then. And we could all have laughed over the time Jeannette walked up the aisle to a sound that hasn’t been heard from since.

*I wrote a paper on Motown and the civil-rights movement while sitting next to my apartment complex’s pool that summer, but that’s a story for another time.

Hector Berlioz

Which makes Berlioz’s Chant des chemins de fer (Hymn to the Railroad, or Railway Cantata), written in the space of three days in 1846, such a curious little big piece. Less than ten minutes long but scored for full orchestra (minus tuba), chorus and tenor soloist, it packs a mighty wallop which must surely have captured the proud emotions felt of the townspeople of Lille as the railroad (Gare du Nord) connected them to Paris. Jules Janin’s poem celebrates the workers who built the railroad calling them “soldiers of peace” for whom “a crown awaits.” It hits all the big patriotic themes: the King, the fatherland, while adding another: “Commerce and its benefits!”

The big refrain, repeated six times, is a lusty tune in 6/8 time, but Berlioz doesn’t stick to the main key of B major -- it climaxes on in an unsuspected G-major chord before returning back to B. There’s a verse celebrating the railroad’s traversal of the mountains in D, a solemn hymn for just the basses in E (“When they see this sight, old men / Will go to their graves smiling”), and an odd passage only six measures long in which the tenor sings with whirligig accompaniment from the winds (“Witnesses to these industrial marvels / We must raise a hymn to peace!”). In the last verse, Berlioz modulates to the delightfully difficult key of G-sharp major. What could have been a straightforward exercise in musical patriotism is instead a chance to work out a few harmonic challenges, giving the chorus something more interesting to chew on and keep the orchestra paying attention.

Nathan Gunn - Here to break up the text Photo by Dario Acosta

No one writes music like this anymore! (No one writes poetry like that, either, but that’s another topic.) We don’t have orchestras and choruses at hand, and an operatic tenor ready to sing the praises of the hard hats who hoisted beams and ran the wiring and probably did something with a “joist.” And I for one think the world is poorer for it. John Williams gave it a noble effort  with the quartet he composed for Barack Obama’s inauguration, but, come on — a quartet? For the President? Berlioz would have scoffed. Everyone knows it would’ve been better with an orchestra of 100, a choir of 200, and Nathan Gunn** up there belting out an ode to tolerance and freedom and the sheer awesomeness of drone airplanes as antiterrorist weapons. Do that with some F-16s flying in formation overhead, and Sarah Palin herself would’ve admitted to getting Obama “all wrong back there.”

I digress. Berlioz barely mentions the Hymn to the Railroad in his truly funny, deeply tragic, Memoirs. The scholar and conductor D. Kern Holoman fondly labels it as “certainly worth an occasional hearing,” though, and that seems just. Berlioz’s biographer David Cairns tells us the work’s score was stolen after the performance in Lille, but recovered, and gives more time to relating the difficulties surrounding the week’s events (“thieves were everywhere”) than the piece itself. (Side note: Has anyone, anywhere, tried to steal a new piece of music since 1846?)

Me, I’d like to see more room given to works like this, history’s oddballs that don’t fit neatly into any sort of scheme. Part cantata, part rousing paean to science and progress, it’s emblematic of its time in a way that, say, the Damnation of Faust, written at the same time, isn’t. We know a little bit more about those provincial Frenchmen having heard this piece.

As far as I know, there’s only one recording of the Chant des chemins de fer, in a two-disc collection of Berlioz’s little-known choral works conducted by Michel Plasson. You can find it as a reissue from ArkivMusic. EMI hasn’t saw fit to put that on iTunes yet, so you can’t get just that piece for $0.99. Je suis désolée.

** I know Gunn is a baritone and not a tenor; the point is, he’s an American opera star and looks like a million dollars

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.

That album is going to be released in the US this Tuesday (it’s already available on iTunes and in Europe and Asia), and even though I try to keep myself in the background as much as I can about this stuff, nothing we’ve done at the record label has made me as proud as this album. All of our albums have added something new to the catalog, I believe, and demonstrate what the CSO sounds like as it’s constituted today, with the outstanding principal players whose solos you hear now.

Fifty years from now, when someone wants to know what the Chicago Symphony sounded like in a Mahler symphony in the early part of the century, they can hear them in four Mahler symphonies (1, 2, 3, and 6) conducted by Bernard Haitink, and hear that it was an excellent ensemble. Pretty good by any measure – if the label suddenly decided to cease all Mahlerian activity, those four symphonies would still be a milestone.

But with this Boulez album (or “Boulez/Stravinsky” as I’ve been referring to it in innumerable staff emails), it’s personal. There isn’t any living musician who’s had as large an influence on me as Boulez has had, through his writing, lectures, and records (up to and including the $50+ purchase of a first American edition of his out-of-print Notes of an Apprenticeship). I started researching this in detail in grad school around 2001 and visiting Chicago whenever he was conducting, and, for once in life, familiarity didn’t breed contempt, but a desire to dig deeper into music and work out how the details created the sonic picture he was creating.

The Boulez interpretation became a sort of ideal version for me. It’s a cliche now mention his “structural clarity” or that he creates an “X-ray of the score,” but it’s true. Following a score during a Boulez performance, there’s never anything in front of you that’s inaudible. Other conductors, you can read the score and wonder why the cello countermelody is going slack or being ignored, but with Boulez, it’s as if the music becomes a spectrum of precisely etched colors, each immaculately shaded and standing out boldly from those next to it.

I’ve heard him do this with Stravinsky; several Bartok scores; his own works; contemporary scores, most notably Marc-Andre Dalbavie; Mahler symphonies; Debussy; Ravel; and probably several others I’m forgetting at the moment. Even Janacek’s thunderous Sinfonietta with its eleven trumpets, played last season, was turned into a riotous game of counterpoint instead of the brassy thunderstorm it usually is.

So, when the repertoire of this new album was decided to be entirely by Stravinsky, and we had a clear path forward for what the album was going to be, it was satisfying to work on a project with a conductor and musician who’s meant so much to me, personally.

The CSO goes on tour next week to play in Ann Arbor, and my younger brother, whose tastes run more to Kanye West than the WDR Sinfonieorchester, attends the University of Michigan. I told him he has to go to this, since Boulez is conducting. I sold it to him by saying that Boulez was a composer people will be talking about in 200 years the way they talk about Beethoven now. I believe it. Beethoven was hugely controversial in his time, and Boulez still annoys and frustrates some composers stuck in university composition departments. The controversy surrounding Beethoven has settled into an established frame through which we hear his skill routinely, and I think something similar will happen with Boulez as time goes by. He has advocates to conduct and perform his music, and I hope he continues to gain younger ones.

I hope you give the album a listen, and that you enjoy it, because I think the musicians enjoyed the concerts, Boulez enjoyed conducting them and making the album, and it’s been fulfilling and meaningful to me. The recording business may be crashing to the ground around us, but this album will be necessary for years. And so, I should add, will Pierre Boulez.

Shara Worden / My Brightest Diamond

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.

“[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.