Aspics of Shostakovich

I was in my early thirties when I first encountered anything served in aspic.

I had gotten a job doing revisions to a large symphonic piece for orchestra and jazz ensemble by the composer John Green.  He was better known as Johnny Green.  Every day for about a month I'd trudge over to Beverly Hills to work in his music library housed in a backyard outbuilding.  Occasionally I was invited to the main house for formal lunch, usually prepared by the composer himself.

One day lunch included a salad with some sort of vegetable floating in jello.  I had no idea what it was. John's secretary helpfully informed me that this was "aspic".   I was not impressed with my first encounter with aspic - although I tried hard to sound like I was.

Today, while reading Testimony, The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov), I read a passage about aspic (on page 30).  Given my mental association of composers with aspic I could not help but have a desire to share Shostakovich's comments.  I'm pretty sure they have lost something in translation.

A man dies and they want to serve him up to posterity.  Serve him, so to speak, trussed up for our dear descendants at the table.  So that they, napkin tucked under chin and armed with knife and fork, can dig in to the freshly deceased.

The deceased, as you know, have the inconvenient habit of cooling off too slowly; they're burning hot.  So they are turned into aspics by pouring memories over them - the best form of gelatin.

And since deceased greats are also too large, they are cut down.  The nose, say, is served separately, or the tongue.  You need less gelatin that way.  And that's how you get yesterday's classic as freshly cooked tongue in aspic.  With a side dish of hoofs, from the horse he used to ride.

I'm trying to remember the people I knew without the gelatin.  I don't pour aspic over them, I'm not trying to turn them into a tasty dish.  I know that a tasty dish is easier to swallow and easier to digest.  You know where it ends up.

A page later this paragraph seems to better explain what Shostakovich means:

It's so unfair.  People suffered, worked, thought.  So much wisdom, so much talent.  And they're forgotten as soon as they die.  We must do everything possible to keep their memories alive, because we will be treated in the same way ourselves.  How we treat the memory of others is how our memory will be treated.  We must remember, no matter how hard it is.

In light of some of the historical events of Shostakovich's life (notably the Great War and the Stalinist Purges), the need to remember those who were killed or simply disappeared would have been a duty of the highest importance.

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Here's an interesting article about Johnny Green where I found the picture of Johnny's Oscar ceremony badge which identifies him as "Musical Director and Shmuck".  He was a super-talented, super-loquacious, super-egotistical fellow who always wore a carnation and most likely would have enjoyed wearing a badge marking him as a shmuck.  He once told me that if he had been Italian his name would have been Giovanni Verdi.

The book Testimony suffers from a certain controversy about the authenticity of the great composer's memoirs.  I won't know for sure until I finish the book, but I don't think the dispute will do anything to challenge the book's overall insight into what life was like for a world-class Soviet composer.

The L.A. Philharmonic is producing a series of concerts devoted to composer Thomas Adès called Aspects of Adès which, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with Aspics of Shostakovich.

Tags in Aspic: aspic. . . Johnny Green. . . Dimitri Shostakovich. . . Testimony

House and Wooster and Income Disparity

House is a soap opera.  Of course it's not really an "opera" in the musical sense nor is it sponsored by a soap company.  It is an episodic weekly television drama which details the continuing experiences of a group of characters as their lives constantly evolve and revolve.  Each episode hangs on some inexplicable medical mystery which, inevitably, gets explicated.

The title character, the drug-addled miscreant genius Dr. House, is played by Hugh Laurie.  Dr. House the character is an American but Hugh Laurie the actor is English.  You'd never know it from watching the show.  Laurie's ability to imitate American speech is, at least for me, the most interesting aspect of the show.  (Okay, you figured it out - I don't particularly like House.)   

Over the last few months, several times a week, Leslie and I have spent some of our quality time watching the series Jeeves and Wooster, an English television production from the early 90s based on the characters and stories of P.G. Wodehouse.  Jeeves, the talented, discreet Gentleman's Gentleman, is played by actor Stephen Fry.  (When I first saw Fry as Jeeves I thought he was too young.  Now I'm 15 years older and he seems just the right age.)  Bertie Wooster, the young, carefree, rich, puffin-headed bachelor, is played by Doctor House, I mean by Hugh Laurie, using his own genuine English accent.

Leslie and I both adore Jeeves and Wooster.  We regret they only made 23 episodes.  The action happens in the 1930's, mostly in England, occasionally in New York City.  There's a steady stream of gorgeous architecture, lavish apartments and hotel-size estates.  There's another steady stream of gorgeous vintage automobiles.  The costumes, especially the men who run around about half the time in tuxedos, are also, well, gorgeous.  Nice theme music too.

As adapted by Clive Exton, P.G. Wodehouse's plots are no less predictable than contemporary television, but they are much funnier.  Most revolve around someone wanting to or not wanting to get married, pretending to be someone else, breaking and entering in order to steal some insignificant object, or attempting a hare-brained scheme for getting rich or out of debt.   All of them involve Bertie bumbling his way into embarrassing social difficulties from which he is, in the end, coolly extricated by Jeeves.

Wodehouse's characters fall into clear categories.  The upper-class women include Bertie's domineering Aunts and domineering marriageable women friends and even a few school girls in training to be domineering.  The upper-class men include a host of Bertie's ineffectual neer-do-well friends (who repeatedly say things like "Isn't she the most beautiful woman you've ever seen, Bertie?"), a few crusty older men who repeatedly threaten Bertie with bodily harm and even a few schoolboys who repeatedly cause mischief.  The lower class characters include waitresses, constables, butlers and other valets, con artists and rich American businessmen. 

These parts are brought to life by some fine English actors.  It's disconcerting when certain continuing roles are played by different actors in different seasons.  And not one of them comes close to the quality of the American speaking accent which Hugh Laurie does in House.  Probably English television audiences don't notice the difference.

Of course, the real weight of every episode is carried by the two principal actors, Fry and Laurie.  Their marvelous performances consistently convey the ridiculous in the most sublime fashion.  Here's a great example of the two of them together.  In this clip Bertie tries to sing a current popular tune (which you'll recognize) but typically must rely on the help of his ever-so-tactful valet to finish the job.

Did the world of Jeeves and Wooster ever really exist?  Most doubtful. I think Wodehouse was doing a fine job of writing parody. These days it's impossible to judge what bits of this television series might fairly represent those historical times. Two things come through from the scripts, however. First, there were distinct differences between English social classes.  There was also a great inequality in the distribution of wealth; certain people were fantastically wealthy. According to this, in 1936 53% of the total wealth of England was held by just 1% of the population.

Today, in the U.S. during the time of House, we strenuously deny that class differences exist.  We're told that anyone can get filthy rich if they're talented and driven and lucky enough.  To prove this, the media shows us a handful of super-wealthy people (think Oprah) who serve as inspirations to the hundreds of millions who will, most likely, never get rich.   However, like Bertie's England, America does have an incredible inequality in the distribution of wealth.  According to this, in 2007, 43% of total wealth in the United States was held by just 1% of the population.   (For more on America's financial inequalities check this out. Or this.)

While the upper-class wealth of Bertie Wooster's time would eventually decline over much of the 20th century, the wealth of the American elite today is climbing steadily.  Maybe that's why we perceive the English wealthy as idle slackers and the American wealthy as greedy over achievers.  It's not just a saying these days that "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer".  Today it's more like an actual law.

I think that the U.S. of 2011 needs our own P.G. Wodehouse.  We need an author or television producer who can parody the amusing day to day lives of super-rich people.  Why shouldn't there be a television show to make it clear how people like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett who have billions of dollars aren't close to being capable of muddling through their own lives, or even to mixing their own martinis, without the help of a faithful, discrete, patient, intelligent servant such as Reginald Jeeves?  I propose that such a show would make many less-than-wealthy Americans more accepting of the obscene disparities of wealth in our country and of their own place in the financial hierarchy.

You know, if we can't do anything else about the problem of the ultra-wealthy, at least we should be able to have a good laugh at their expense.

Wealthy Tags: Jeeves and Wooster. . . Hugh Laurie. . . House television show. . . P.G. Wodehouse. . . income disparity

Ghosts of Vesuvius

Last fall I attended an LA Philharmonic performance of a large work for chorus and orchestra - Graffiti by composer Magnus Lindberg.  The interesting text was created from inscriptions discovered on walls of the buried Roman city of Pompeii.  These have remained unchanged since molten lava engulfed the city way back in A.D.79.

Later I saw Ghosts of Vesuvius by Charles Pellegrino on a stack of Leslie's books.  I thought this might be a good way to learn more about the graffiti of Pompeii.  I just finished the book.  I was wrong.

I should have paid more attention to the subtitle of Ghosts of Vesuvius:

A new look at the last days of Pompeii, how towers fall, and other strange connections.

Ghosts of Vesuvius did tell me just a wee bit more about graffiti in the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.  Plus there was a lot of other fascinating information about Roman life, history, customs and technology.   I learned, for example, that in Rome there were eight-story apartment buildings with plate glass windows and sprinkler systems.  Roman inventors were working on steam-powered ships. And sunken Roman galleys have been found in places like Brazil and Venezuela - but scientists have not been allowed to study them closely because some people don't want Christopher Columbus challenged as discoverer of the New World.  Lots of stuff like that.

Clearly Mr. Pellegrino knows a good deal about many subjects.  Among the more surprising discourses I found in this book were:

• how volcanos may have fostered the first life on earth, 
• the history of the universe, starting now and working backwards to the very beginning,
• how the catastrophic Vesuvian explosion affected early (and probably current) Christian thinking about eschatology and the apocalypse,
• the sinking of the Titanic, which the author had previously studied up close in a deep-sea submarine and then written a book about.

The last relates to one of the celebrity endorsements on the back cover:

"Very interesting and compelling reading.  A killer.  Makes me want to do a movie about Pompeii." -- James Cameron, award-winning producer and director who has optioned screen rights to Ghosts of Vesuvius.

No, James Cameron is not crazy.  Ghosts of Vesuvius would make a great blockbuster movie very much in the mold of his movie Titanic.  That's because of two riveting sections of storytelling in which Pellegrino relates, in minute by minute detail, two horrendous events of sudden human immolation.

One, of course, was the explosion of Vesuvius, where humans caught in the hot lava were completely vaporized in a fraction of a second.  But he also finds personal stories.  Using scrolls encased in lava - on which the burnt ink can now be distinguished from burnt parchment through the miracle of Photoshop - we learn the story of a freed Roman slave girl named Justa who was trying to avoid being returned to slavery by conniving lawyers. 

The other was the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001.  Pellegrino was one of the scientists who, in the months after the attack, studied how the towers fell.  He has documented some of the surprising twists of horror and luck endured by the victims of that attack.

In both stories there are moments where complete destruction is found side by side with items that have barely been touched.  Tables set for upcoming meals remain just as they were while only a few feet away walls crumbled and fell.  People inexplicably survive the massive explosions, comparable in strength to nuclear bombs, by accidentally finding themselves inside "shock cocoons": spots where some trick of the crumbling architecture and explosive physics offers a shell of protection from certain death. Had these individuals been standing a few feet away, death would have been certain.

Ultimately, Ghosts of Vesuvius is about sudden destruction: a huge asteroid carving out the Yucatan in the Gulf of Mexico destroying the dinosaurs; a volcano in 1628 B.C. obliterating the Minoan civilization and giving us our legend of Atlantis; the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; an earthquake and its tsunami.  In each of these and many other cases, there was some morning, probably a beautiful morning, when life simply came completely to a halt.  There was no warning whatsoever.

And when such catastrophe does happen again there will probably be no way to prevent it.  A few lucky people might survive.  The rest of us need to enjoy each beautiful morning as it happens.

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You can visit the ruins of Pompeii via Google Street View.

Here's an Italian website devoted to the excavations and another at the Field Museum.


Immolation Tags: Ghosts of Vesuvius. . . Charles Pellegrino. . . World Trade Center

Theremin's Bug

Certain instruments, a violin, say, or a guitar, have specialized varieties which become associated with particular people, usually a performer or maker.  Think of a Stradivarius, say, or a Les Paul. It is less common for a whole family of instruments to be named after a person. The saxophone was named for its inventor Adophe Sax.  Less memorable is the sarrusophone, named for Pierre-Auguste Sarrus.

Another instrument which bears the name of its creator is the theremin.  The theremin was invented in the 1920s by the Russian Léon Theremin.  A theremin, of course, is a type of electronic music synthesizer.  A thereminist never touches the instrument during performance.  Instead there are two antennas which can sense changing distance of the performer's hands.  One hand controls pitch, the other controls volume.  Judging by a host of YouTube videos, achieving precise intonation on a theremin is not easy.  Vibrato and portamento cover many sins.

Unlike the saxophone, which has found useful employment in many different styles of music, the theremin is burdened with musical cliché.  Do you need background sounds for something otherworldly or ghostly?  Call for a theremin.  The theremin is sufficently established in our culture that it was enshrined by a Simpson's episode, The Ziff Who Came to Dinner.  (The family thinks there's a ghost in the attic, but it turns out to be disgraced tycoon Artie Ziff, Marge's high school suitor, playing Homer's old theremin.)

I discovered, via the biography Stalin by Edvard Radzinsky, that the life and other inventions of Leon Theremin were far more interesting than the music created on his namesake.  The young Theremin, after studying both music and engineering, sided with the Bolsheviks in 1917.

As a Bolshevik engineer, Theremin bombarded Lenin with ideas.  In the collected works of Lenin there is a letter to Trotsky dated April 4, 1922: "Discuss the possibility of reducing guard duties of Kremlin Kadets by introducing electric signal system.  An engineer called Theremin showed us his experiments in the Kremlin."  Theremin had invented his electrical "Radio Sentry."  It was immediately put on the secret list and installed in the State Bank.

Lenin himself played a tune on a theremin after it was introduced in 1921.  The instrument was a hit and the inventor became a rich, international star.  In the thirties Theremin also invented an electronic cello and drum machine.

People called [Theremin] a "second Trotsky" because he threatened to carry out a "world revolution in music" with his instrument.  Next, [Soviet Intelligence Director] Yagoda dispatched him in the full blaze of his glory to America, where he was to cooperate with the GPU [the Secret Police], and regularly pass on interesting information to the embassy.

So Leon Theremin was a Soviet spy.  But in 1938 Theremin was recalled to Russia and arrested.  People assumed that he had been executed.  Instead he was given a sentence of eight years.

He was quickly transferred from a normal prison camp to a sharashka.  This was one of [Stalin's] most impressive inventions: a closed research institute in which imprisoned scientists could continue their work.  Theremin helped the great Korolev and the famous Tupolev, both prisoners, to develop a radio-controlled, pilotless plane.  Then he was taken to another sharashka, where he developed a unique system of remote eavesdropping.  This system was called the "Snowstorm," and it earned its incarcerated inventor a Stalin Prize.

This eavesdropping invention is the most interesting of all.  It was a passive radio-controlled listening device.  The Soviets secretly installed it in a large replica of the Great Seal of the United States which had been carved by some Soviet boy scouts.  In 1945 this was presented to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as a symbol of friendship.  The naive Americans hung it in the ambassador's study.  It was only discovered by accident seven years later.

The trick of Theremin's invention was that the "bug" didn't need a battery or wires.  It was completely inert until activated by precisely tuned microwaves beamed from outside.  Then it served as a radio transmitter.  Had it not been discovered it might still be working to this day.  Read more at Wikipedia  about The Thing.   More interesting is this article, The Great-Seal Bug.

Theremin's technology of snooping should be plenty familiar to all of us today.  It became the basis of RFID - Radio Frequency Identification, a common tool of modern capitalism, used for asset management, product tracking and electronic article surveillance.  Yep, the next time you accidentally walk out of the store with an item you picked up, thank Leon Theremin for the alarm which reminds you to pay.

Of course spying at U.S. Embassies in Moscow did not stop in 1952.  Here's a 1987 N.Y. Times article New U.S. Embassy in Moscow Is Said To Have Wiretaps.

There's a movie Theremin - An Electronic Odyssey, which you can watch here.

Here's a fascinating, mysterious page of Theremin info (translated from Hungarian by Mr. Google.)

Here's video of a Russian photo scanner and photo-editing software, 3 years before Photoshop 1.0 was released.

RFID Tags: Leon Theremin. . . Soviet spying. . . Radio Frequency Identification

More Musical Signs

Mixed Meters has had several on-going photo series. For example, there was Fallen Avocados,  Blank Wall and Bunnies and Balloons.  No, these don't make much sense.  Why would you expect this blog to make sense? 

Another series involves pictures of business or product signs which use musical terminology.  Apparently many musical words hold some mysterious fascination for the non-musical.  Maybe musical words increase sales. 

This post is the fourth in a series.  In part one we learned the words trio, forte, cornet, arpeggio, aria and allegro. In part two there was koda, tritono and concerto.  Part three included melody, allegro, opera, counterpoint, cantata and Amadeus.

Today's word list includes several musical forms: aria, sonata and symphony plus one which contains only an opening movement.  There's a score, one on which it is forbidden to walk, plus parts.  I think these parts are for the sonata in the previous picture.  And finally there's a musical apartment building moving at a speed related to its latitude.

Do you wonder what The 1st Movement or Vizual Symphony do?
Yes, you can click on any picture to embiggen it.
All of the pictures were taken in Pasadena, CA.

Tags North: Musical Terminology

Street Art Now and Then

On the corner of Hill Avenue and Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena there used to be a Ford dealership.  It was called Pasadena Ford.  When it closed in August 2008 someone carefully painted out the word "Ford" on every sign.  Nothing else, just the one name wherever it appeared.

The lot is empty now.  For a while, students from Pasadena City College could park there cheap.  One day a year it's a prime spot to park huge RVs directly on the Rose Parade route.

Yesterday I noticed a new bit of "street art" on the wall just north of the main lot.  I figured it must be a Banksy since that secretive street artist is getting such a lot of publicity by being nominated for an Oscar.  A little research seems to indicate that this was done by a different anonymous street artist who uses the handle "¢ommon ¢ents".

The image has been printed on some large format printer and attached to the wall with glue.  At the bottom, where the artist signed his "name", the paper is ripped.  Here's a closeup of Lady Liberty's tablet - the same text repeats and repeats until finally it turns to plain old gibberish.

WAR!  DEATH!  CORRUPTION! MONEY!  RAPE!  MURDER!  LIES!  THEFT! VIOLENCE! FASCISM!

I wonder why ¢ommon ¢ents singled out the L.A. Times.  It's not the behind-the-scenes power broker of the General Otis or Chandler family days.  The poor paper is lucky to still be in business.

This art, in my opinion, is not terribly moving.  More interesting is the piece of graffiti which lived in this same spot previously, one actually drawn on the wall by someone.  That one appeared after the dealership closed.  After a while someone painted it out.   Here are pictures which I took on March 19, 2009.

 
A young boy in a Little League uniform is about to catch a small missile in his baseball glove.  We may imagine that the result will not be pleasant for the boy.  The artwork and the anti-war message is more subtle than ¢ommon ¢ents' Statue of Liberty by several orders of magnitude.

In April 2009 there was discussion of this painting at Pasadena Daily Photo.

By clicking the photos, especially the previous one, you will see an enlargement.


The real Banksy has a photo of a Statue of Liberty-themed piece on his website.  Here it is:

If you want, you could read my Oscar rant from last year.   Or you could look at these two Mixed Meters graffiti-related posts: Graffiti Animals of California and Taggers With Spellcheck

Yesterday Pasadena Adjacent had a graffiti-related post.

Street Tags: common cents. . . banksy. . . street art. . . Pasadena Ford

The Future From A Car Commercial

Last night I came across the nine-minute 1956 movie Design for Dreaming.  This particular bit of Fifties Futurism is a big-budget General Motors industrial musical - an almost-modern ballet with lots of costume changes danced to almost-modern music with sung rhymed couplets.

Girls don't go to motoramas, 

dressed in a pair of pink pajamas!

The Cars of the Future are the real stars, of course.  The movie ends with the "fabulous turbine-powered Firebird 2" which is "designed for the electronic highway of the future."

Firebird 2 to the control tower.

We are about to take off on the Highway of Tomorrow.
Stand by.

Tomorrow, tomorrow. 

Our dreams will come true.

Together, together.

We'll make the world new.

The Kitchen of the Future from Frigidaire, a subsidiary of GM, also makes an appearance.  That's where the lady of the house will bake a cake, decorate it and even put candles on top, all quite unattended.  The kitchen does this inside of some sort of glass dome and then phones her when the cake is ready.

Aside from any marketing or corporate branding aspects, this movie struck me as a great example of how we saw the future during the fifties.  And the future was good, all filled with gleaming chrome.  Here, watch the future for yourself:

I immediately associated this advertisement with a current one for a different automobile with a different view about the future, a much darker outlook.  Elaborate music, dance and poetry, gleaming chrome, formal costumes are all missing. Instead we have a car in a dark tunnel accompanied by a sober, threatening male voice listing the evils of the future as predicted by competing automobiles.

Here's his text. It's kind of free verse:

Hands-free driving.

Cars that park themselves.

An unmanned car

Driven by a search engine company.

We've seen that movie.

It ends with robots

Harvesting our bodiess for energy.

(motor sounds)

This is the all new 2011 Dodge Charger.

Leader of the human resistance.

Apparently, in 2011, Fear of the Future can sell cars.  As cars become more and more computerized it looks like the "electronic highway of the future" from Design for Dreaming might just happen.  But if that future is frightening, you can forestall it by purchasing a noisy, muscle car - one that wouldn't have looked or sounded out of place on the highways of the nineteen fifties.

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The tunnel in this (and many other) television commercials is Second Street in downtown Los Angeles.  Here's a shot from the end of the commercial showing the car driving out of the tunnel.  I've added the same shot from Google Street View.  Google, of course, is the search engine company developing a "self-driving" car.  In spite of what the Dodge ad says, the Google car isn't yet "unmanned".

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Here's an ad from the August 1964 Readers Digest (page 200). I xeroxed this myself sometime after the Three Mile Island Accident in 1979 and saved it ever since because it touts cheap electricity from atomic power.  The picture shows a well-manicured woman holding the household control device of the future and therefore it fits into this post quite well.

She's monitoring her baby in the crib via the "Video Scan".  The other rotary knobs are marked "R/C Clean", "Lawn Care", "Disposal", "Floor Care", "Food Prep."  (Click the picture for enlargement.)

 

 Here's the text in a format Mrs. Google's robot can read.

easy does it

someday you may be able to run your all-electric home by fingertip control

Whatever electrical wonders come your way in the future, there'll be plenty of low-priced electricity to help you enjoy them.

America's more than 300 investor-owned electric light and power companies are seeing to that right now.  For example, they are investing about a billion dollars to develop atomic power as another source of cheap electricity.

And they have more than 1800 other research and development projects in progress or recently completed.  All are pointed toward keeping you and all Americans amply supplied with dependable, low-priced electric service, now and in the wonderful new world of your electric future.

Investor-Owned Electric Light and Power Companies

People you can depend on to power America's porgress

Sponsors' names on request through this magazine.

Here's a collection of articles about how the 50s viewed the future, from a blog called Paleofuture.

Fifties Tags: Design for Dreaming. . . motoramas. . . Dodge Charger. . . the future. . . household automation

Milton Babbitt and the Super Bowl

A couple weeks ago, in the middle of the night, I flipped on the kitchen television to one of those overnight news shows. I found no news. Instead the anchors were picking their personal favorites in the Super Bowl.

At that moment I heard a little voice in my head. "You should write a blog post about Milton Babbitt and the Super Bowl."  Babbitt had passed away only a few days earlier.

"But," I replied, "Babbitt has nothing whatsoever to do with professional football."

"Not my problem," it countered.  I called it several unpleasant names - but the voice had already left my head.

That's how I got stuck trying to compare America's premier professor of serial music composition and America's premier professional football championship holiday.  It's my brain's fault.  Such an essay is uphill work because the intersection of the sets of properties of Babbitt's music and Super Bowl games is null.  (Babbitt would understand.  He was a brainy guy.)

I reread "Who Cares If You Listen", Babbitt's 1958 editor-titled essay in High Fidelity Magazine.  He lamented the lack of contextual background which listeners brought to serious contemporary music:

The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics.  Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields.

To Babbitt, writing music was highly technical and highly theoretical.  He thought that such research would lead to future musical benefits for all.  Theory and composition-wise that certainly never happened, although the miniature descendants of the room-sized synthesizer which Babbitt used in the fifties have since turned music on its head.

Babbitt concludes his essay with a reference to the "is classical music dead?" debate:

Granting to music the position accorded other arts and sciences promises the sole substantial means of survival for the music I have been describing.  Admittedly, if this music is not supported, the whistling repertory of the man in the street will be little affected, the concert-going activity of the conspicuous consumer of musical culture will be little disturbed.  But music will cease to evolve, and, in that important sense, will cease to live. (italics added)

Here's some of Milton Babbitt's music to listen to as you read about the Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl is a battle in abstract.  Two teams of armored warriors engage in ritual medieval combat while attempting to adjust the geo-position of an oviform leather ball to their own advantage. There are many ways in which the Super Bowl is different than Milton Babbitt's music.

• Milton Babbitt's music does not need a half time show.  Nor is there a cuisine (e.g. pizza, wings, chips and guacamole) associated with it.
• Babbitt's music receives little, if any, attention.  Super Bowl Sunday has become an important all-American celebration of capitalist sports. 
• Babbitt's music is not widely known.  The Super Bowl has millions of fans. 
• Babbitt's music is highly intellectual.  The brainiest aspect to the Super Bowl is probably chronic traumatic encephalopathy.   That's the progressive damage done to the brains of players who are constantly bashing into one another with great force.  This very violence is one of the reasons people like football. 
• Babbitt used higher mathematics in the composition of his music.  Mathematically, a Super Bowl fan must be able to add four numbers and decide whether the total is greater than ten.  Extra credit is given to fans who can remember the rules for Roman numerals.  This year was Super Bowl XLV.
• Listening to Babbitt's music requires intense concentration.  Watching football does not require much attention span at all.  The plays are short and there is plenty of time in between for commentators to explain what happened - just in case you missed something.
• Babbitt's music has little commercial value.  Corporations spend millions of dollars for a few seconds of Super Bowl air time to sell their products. 

Here's a television ad extolling four men who have attended every Super Bowl.  These men are no less the heroes of Super Bowl than the players on the field.  They are the conspicuous consumers of Super Bowl culture.  Other people are envious of them.   The ad announces a contest for a lifetime of free Super Bowl tickets given to one lucky winner.   I must have missed the competition to win free tickets to Milton Babbitt concerts for life.

Naturally I listened to some of Milton Babbitt's music before writing this.  I was struck by a certain nineteen fifties feeling of his pieces, sort of like giant audible Jackson Pollock paintings.  Overall, his abstraction is pure and his attention to technique is overarching.   On a micro level each event, each note, each drip becomes its own world, like a tiny atom whizzing through vast emptiness.   I strained (and failed) to hear connections.  What's more, his notes never combine to create emotion or excitement or drama, the very things I feel music is good at.  Maybe someone with better ears or more nimble brain can fathom Babbitt's music. 

I also watched some of the Super Bowl broadcast.  Football, like any sport, is goal oriented activity.  The goal is winning and the drive towards that goal represents great drama.   We can pick a side to cheer for and personally share in outcome.  The competition and violence become easy metaphors for much of real life.  These are amplified by the media until the whole event is larger than life.  The Super Bowl is geared to producing emotion, excitement and drama - and little else.

Milton Babbitt and the Super Bowl are opposites on any spectrum.  I guess the one thing they have in common is my personal failure to understand either one.  I find them both empty experiences.  I scratch my head because I see that other people seem to get pleasure from them.  I bet there are even certain people who love both Babbitt and the Super Bowl.  Why didn't the voice in my head visit them instead?   Those people should have written this article.

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Here's a one-hour movie entitled Babbitt: Portrait of a Serial Composer by Robert Hilferty, completed by Laura Karpman. If you're interested in the life and personality of this highly intelligent, academic, uncompromising artist, I highly recommend watching.  This was more fascinating for me than listening to Babbitt's music directly.

It also reminded me of the one time I met Milton Babbitt.   In the very early seventies I was an undergraduate at Carleton who had only recently decided to take a chance at a career in composition. He and I had a brief private discussion during which he was not particularly discouraging.  He gave a lecture to the assembled music students and faculty - many of whom attended out of politeness more than interest. 

I remember suggesting that he was a professor at Columbia (rather than Princeton) because I knew of him mostly through recordings from the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center. He seemed a bit annoyed at my confusion between the two schools.   This movie also reminded me just how quickly he could talk.

About 52 minutes into the movie a young woman makes this comment:

My brain is stimulated by Milton Babbitt's music and my heart is touched by the freeing of my mind, which is a different way to have one's heart touched than usual.  And in that way I find his music extraordinary and unique.

What a beautiful sentiment.  I wonder what she'd have to say about the Super Bowl.

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ADDENDUM: okay, here's one way in which serial music composition and professional football are alike: they're both activities of interest principally to men.

Milton Bowl Tags: Milton Babbitt. . . Super Bowl. . . serial composition. . . professional football

Arthur Jarvinen's Birthday

Art Jarvinen's birthday was January 27. He would have been 55 this year. I once mentioned to him that he shared his birthday with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a fact which impressed me more than it did him.  More interestingly, he shared his birthday with his wife, Lynn Angebranndt.

This is a three part post.  Each part is Jarvinen-related. The first is about a concert of Art's music given recently by students at Cal Arts. The second is about a radio show featuring Art's music. You can listen to that online. Finally, I have news of an upcoming live concert performance of While You Were Art, the infamous synthesizer track Frank Zappa named after Art Jarvinen.

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Arthur taught composition at Cal Arts for many years.  He was also an alumnus.  So it makes sense that Cal Arts would present one of the first concerts of his music after his death.  Last Sunday, January 23,  an ensemble of students lead by Amy Knoles performed a dozen works by Art Jarvinen.  They named their concert The Art of Art.

They framed the event with instrumental chamber music - opening with Egyptian Two-Step (which features antiphonal spray cans as part of the rhythm section) and ending with White Lights Lead to Red.   Solo pieces included The Door That Doesn't Open (for marimba and amplified heartbeat) and Carbon (for solo bass clarinet).

There was a tango setting of a poem by Charles Bukowski (Art wrote a number of tangos) plus selections from Arthur's album Edible Black Ink for guitar and bass.  And there were several of his performance pieces which Art called "physical poetry".  One of them was Pop Tarts in which the performer fires a dart gun at an airborne strawberry pop tart as it is expelled from a toaster. 

The enthusiasm and talent of the ensemble was impressive.  Some of the music is fiendishly difficult.  The less technical pieces made me reflect on how Art's own persona contributed to his music.  He was direct, focused and unwaveringly intent as a performer.  Time and again I can remember him performing his musical rituals, riveted to the task.  And, for a few moments, he could share this mental concentration with his audience.  New performers of his music have the task of finding that same concentration in future performances.

 
(You can read a remembrance of Art by Zona Hostetler, the mother of a colleague of Art's, Randy Hostetler, who passed away at a very young age here.  She describes a performance of Pop Tarts by Arthur himself.)

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Jack Vees was a close friend of Art. They met as students at CalArts.  Last December Jack visited radio station WRIU at the University of Rhode Island and played several hours of Arthur's music on a show called Music For Internets.  Better yet, the show is archived online if you want to listen.  Here's a direct link to the audio file.  (The show begins at about three and a half minutes.)

Throughout the show Jack paints a portrait of Arthur through his personal reminiscences and by choosing two different kinds of Art's music. 

On one hand he picks chamber music - Murphy Nights,  The Vulture's Garden and  Goldbeaters Skin. He also plays selections from Art's string quartet 100 Cadences which was written in memory of Art's teacher Lucky Mosko.  There are also excerpts of keyboard works including Queen of Spain (based on music by Domenico Scarlatti) and Serious Immobilities (yes, it's a 24 hour solo piano piece based on Vexations by Erik Satie).

On the other hand there are pieces by several of Art's more (or less) popular music-influenced groups.  Two hysterical tunes by The Mope (“Five Ugly Guys With No Record Interest”)  are Agent Jerry (a spy surf tune like Art's Invisible Guy series) and Drunk Poets Die Young.  Another group, Some Over History is represented Erase the Fake and Cheap Suit Tango.  And there's a cut from Art's Beatles parody: Sgt. Pekker.

Jack also throws in two cuts by Captain Beefheart whose music was a strong influence on Art.  Of course Art had far more influences than you can grasp from just a few minutes of Beefheart.  All together, the show makes a fine introduction to the music of Arthur Jarvinen.

("Blue" Gene Tyranny's review of the album Erase the Fake by Art's group Some Over History can be found here.)

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Another oft-mentioned influence on Arthur Jarvinen was Frank Zappa.  Art was employed by Frank for a few years doing work similar to that which I did.  The best known moment of Art's time with Frank was the infamous While You Were Art "performance". 

That was when the California EAR Unit, including Art on marimba, pantomimed to a recorded synthesizer performance of a transcription of a live Zappa guitar solo called While You Were Out.  It was renamed While You Were Art for that occasion. The Unit did this at the "prestigious" Monday Evening Concerts and no one in the audience noticed that they hadn't actually played the piece.  An awful lot of bad feelings were generated afterwards.  Art himself, after investing much hard work to get Zappa to write a piece for the EAR Unit, keenly regretted the results.

You can read my own telling of what happened and why it was important to me personally in the While You Were Art section of Bill Lantz's monumental David Ocker Internet Interview.  Be sure to click on the white buttons marked Art's Comment! to read the amendations which Arthur added later.  Since Art didn't like talking about this episode during his lifetime, these comments are all the more valuable now.

This coming February 5th (that's a Saturday), at Pomona College there will be a live performance of While You Were Out/Art.  The electric guitarist will be Pomona music professor Joti Rockwell who will play the original guitar transcription (While You Were Out) to the accompaniment of Zappa's later commercial release of the synthesizer tracks (While You Were Art).  The version of the piece played at the Monday Evening event was later suppressed by Zappa.

Here's information about the concert.  It's part of a yearly concert series of electronic music called the Ussachevsky Memorial Festival organized by yet another Pomona prof. Tom Flaherty.  There's a flyer to download here.  (In the 1960s the ersatz college student Frank Zappa briefly studied composition with music professor Karl Kohn at Pomona College.  Kohn is still professor emeritus there.)

Joti Rockwell kindly shared his notes for the concert with me.  He discusses why this piece and the event associated with it is important for academic study.  Here's an exerpt:

By musically comparing the two versions at the historical edges (1981 and 1986), one cannot help but imagine what might have resulted had the collaboration for the 1984 concert gone more smoothly.  Reflection and examination of this sort was the hope of Art Jarvinen, the piece’s namesake, and it will perhaps lead to a better understanding of Frank Zappa, electronic music, the history of music in Los Angeles, and the meanings of contemporary music.

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Art's Music Tags: Arthur Jarvinen. . . Jack Vees. . . Joti Rockwell. . . While You Were Art

In Which David Writes New Notes For A John Adams Piece

Last summer I wrote my own program notes for Short Ride In A Fast Machine.  The notes explain why.  Afterwards there's a short Q&A with the composer.

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The goal of this little essay is to tell you about John Adams' Short Ride In A Fast Machine and to include tips on what to listen for during a performance and also to explain why my own name appears on the final page of the orchestra member's parts and how that led to my writing this essay for the Portsmouth Symphony Orchestra performance. The real trick will be to keep it short enough so that reading these program notes takes less time than listening to the piece itself, just over 4 minutes.

Short Ride In A Fast Machine was composed in 1986 for the Great Woods Music Festival in Massachusetts where it was played by the Pittsburg Symphony conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. It is subtitled "Fanfare for Great Woods" but Short Ride is really too long for use as an actual fanfare, a ceremonial introductory piece. In 1985 John wrote a companion fanfare called Tromba Lontana. That is as quiet as Short Ride is exuberant.

John explained the title: “You know how it is when someone asks you to ride in a terrific sports car, and then you wish you hadn’t?”  (Yes, I certainly remember riding in my brother-in-law's Corvette and swearing never to do it again.) Unlike the famous 1923 musical depiction of a short ride on a steam train, Pacific 231 by Arthur Honegger, Short Ride In A Fast Machine isn't really a tone painting. John Adams' machine is pure musical adrenaline. There are plenty of twists and turns. It starts out a full speed and never even thinks of slowing down. By the end the chances are good you'll want to hear this ride again.

Short Ride is constructed on a rock steady beat played by the lowly woodblock. The other instruments, mostly, try to distract you from this solid foundation. The snare drum is one of the first offenders and then the low brass insist on playing four notes while the woodblock plays only three. My best advice: If you lose track of what's going on, keep listening for that woodblock. Eventually all the brass play longer notes over the charging rhythm and the piece ends with a short recap of the opening.

Short Ride may have a steady tempo but it doesn't have a perceptible meter, the regular alternation of strong and weak musical beats. If you watch the conductor, of course, you can see the meter, but you can't hear it. Short Ride is not in two like a march, or in three like a waltz, or in any meter. Instead there is a constant unfolding of rhythm without obvious downbeats. This feature has become a hallmark of John Adams' musical style.

Short Ride In A Fast Machine is early John Adams. It was composed at the same time he was working on his breakthrough opera, Nixon in China. Just one year earlier, in 1985, John had finished his first large symphony called Harmonielehre. I was asked to help prepare the performance materials, the parts, for Harmonielehre. The job is called "music copying". It's certainly more technical than it is artistic and most concert audiences know nothing about it. The task is to put the information each player needs into their individual parts as clearly as possible. Of course these days it's all computerized but back then everything was done by hand, using fountain pens and straight edges and translucent paper called vellum. The vellums were reproduced in small quantities by an ozalid machine, an ancient beast mainly used for blueprints. Ozalid prints smelled strongly of ammonia.

After I had finished my graduate music studies I managed to support myself as a freelance music copyist. I never suspected it would actually become my career. Because of my work on Harmonielehre John asked me to be his regular copyist, a job I still hold. "What's wrong with you?" he said back then, "You don't make mistakes." (If only.) But being John's copyist was never a full time gig and I felt the need to advertise my talents to other potential clients. In my imagination a good way to do this was directly on the music itself. So I wrote "Copied by David Ocker" at the bottom of the last page of each part. Sometimes I even added my phone number. No extra work ever came my way because of this. Eventually I wised up.

Surprisingly, the parts I copied in 1986 for Short Ride In A Fast Machine appear to still be in use today and my name survives on the last pages. I learned this from Janet Polasky, bassoonist in the Portsmouth Symphony. Janet and I knew each during a previous millennium as undergraduates at Carleton College. We played in a woodwind quintet together. Today we've re-established our friendship, at least in the Facebook sense, and she suggested I write these program notes. I'm happy to oblige. I'll probably reproduce them in my egocentric blog at mixedmeters.com, which - like this essay - is mostly about me.

 

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MIXED METERS INTERVIEWS JOHN ADAMS (June 2010)

MM:  Way back then, how did you feel about my advertising myself at the end of the parts?

JA: I never had a problem with your "advertising." You worked hard and always delivered on time, and if you got some extra jobs as a result, all the better.

MM: Do you remember saying "What's wrong with you, you don't make mistakes."? (it was an answering machine message)

JA: I don't remember anything I said into an answering machine ever---other than "Are you there? I know you're there! Please pick up!!"

MM: Do you agree with Leslie that the first sentence of my program notes was way too long?

JA: No, not too long. I'm the one who writes things that are too long.

Remember that "Short Ride in a Fast Machine" first had the horrible title "Fanfare for Great Woods." I was obliged to use that title for the first performances because it was a request from MTT to compose a piece for him to conduct to celebrate the very first concert ever at a new outdoor pavilion called "Great Woods" in a town about an hour south of Boston. The only thing I recall about the premiere is that the grounds weren't yet finished, that there were Porta-potties in the parking lot, and that the night before there had been a horrific June rainstorm, causing floods of water to muddy up the still unplanted grounds surrounding the auditorium.

And, oh yeah: "Lincoln Portrait" was narrated by Michael Dukakis, then still governor of Massachusetts. He delivered the lines with all the dramatic thrust of someone ordering plumbing fixtures at Home Depot.

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We Get Emails:

(Jan. 5, 2011)

Hi David,  Just wanted to let you know what a great laugh I had today whilst practising “short ride in a fast machine” when at the end of the piece I read “David Ocker: Tired Music Copyist”.

All the best from Hamburg, Graham Cox (Keyboards, Bamberger Symphoniker)

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The Portsmouth Symphony is NOT the Portsmouth Sinfonia.

John Adams, on his blog Hell Mouth, writes about what really happened when preparing the parts to Harmonielehre.  (Note: I am NOT any of the copyists John mentions nor was I even aware of most of his story - although I did recently leave a supposedly tongue-in-cheek blog comment - for which I apologize.) 


Fast Machine Tags: Portsmouth Symphony. . . John Adams composer. . . Short Ride in a Fast Machine. . . music copyist

Ten Most Influential Classical Composers

A New York Times music critic is spending his time picking the "ten top Classical composers of all time."  He's seeking the "greatest" composers.  The essential criterion will be, I suppose, the opinions of classical audiences.  After all, composers become great because people keep listening to their music. 

This idea got me thinking about which classical composers have the most influence on living composers.   When living composers are lucky enough to get performed they often must share the bill with the honored dead ones.  Those dead composers bring us musical ideas from the past.  Some of those ideas, but not all, still have life to them. Presumably living composers are commenting, in some fashion, on what has come before.

I suspect there are plenty of contemporary composers like myself who were inspired to take up the craft by the musical classics.  Most likely we still feel the weight of that tradition, along with other influences, when we sit down to write.  This is true even if we are not as interested in classical music now as we once may have been. 

Please note that the reasons I'm about to give for including these particular names won't seem particularly positive.  Regular readers of Mixed Meters will not be too surprised by this.  If you happen to be a composer (and who isn't) I'm sure your opinions will differ.  If you're not a composer, this might make no sense at all.  There's a comment form where good natured responses will be published.

Here's my list.  The links all lead to earlier Mixed Meters articles.

Johann Sebastian Bach   Finding a balance between beauty and technique, between inspiration and academicism is always an issue for composers.  It's a matter of simplicity versus complexity, freedom versus control.  Bach used dry, complicated musical rules and produced perfect elegance with them.  It's an unattainable standard.  How depressing.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart  Yes, he wrote some of the greatest pieces ever.  He's possibly my favorite composer.  But the real burden of Mozart for modern composers is that he was so blasted young.  The cult of the young genius lives on strongly.  These days a 30-year old composer who hasn't made it yet, won't.  We may well ask whatever happened to Jay Greenberg (who isn't even 20 yet.)
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Ludwig van Beethoven He wrote some great music.  But he did two things wrong.  First, he invented the tormented composer, the Great Artiste who pours out his stormy inner life through music.  These days that idea seems really old.   Second, he went deaf - which by rights ought to be a compositional kiss of death - but Ludwig wouldn't stop writing.  Worse yet, once deaf, he wrote an unendurably grandiose symphony with one hummable tune and a few lyrics of desperate hope.  Modern audiences still can't get enough of that one.  How's a modern composer going to compete?

Richard Wagner  Mixed Meters has been bashing Wagner for over a year now.  He deserves it for the villainous political ideas which have so easily shackled themselves to his work.  But his musical innovations, possibly the most influential ever, still cloud contemporary music.  And the vast scope of some of his works, especially the Ring, ought to provoke us into keeping our music on a more human scale.     

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky  Maybe a surprising choice.  He's never been one of my favorites, but he has symphonies, concertos and ballets that audiences can't get enough of.  It's not just about shooting off canons.  I think it's about his melodies.  Contemporary composers don't seem to write melodies.  We might have lost the ability.  More likely, however, we know that if we try to compose hummable tunes, the audience will reject them in favor of ones they already know and love.

Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel  These two count as one.  (They both wrote the same string quartet.)  Audiences have come to love their lush sound worlds.  Some contemporary orchestra composers  have recognized that they can't go far wrong by imitating the colors and textures of Impressionism.  In other words, when a new piece restricts itself to musical techniques at least 100 years old, ones that Ravel and Debussy would have understood, the audiences will go home happy.  

Arnold Schoenberg Audiences still revile Schoenberg's music.  I don't blame them.  But as the spirtual inspiration behind the serial tradition and the technique of pre-composition and the emancipation of the dissonance and the notion of "composer as professor", he's still a potent nagging voice inside any composer's head.  Also, it never hurts to reflect on how Schoenberg's career (but not his influence) was ruined by the politics of his countrymen.

George Gershwin Along with Sondheim and Ellington, Gershwin was specifically disqualified from the New York Times ten greatest competition.  While the first two don't seem like classical composers to me, George most certainly does.  Think about the popularity of his rhapsody, his concerto and his opera in concert halls.  This popularity manifests itself in ever so many pleasantly upbeat Pops concerts.  The notion of harnessing vernacular music to make a serious piece more accessible is very alluring to any composer.

John Cage His music is a long long way from the standard repertory.  Infinitely far away.  He has absolutely no chance of getting on the New York Times list.  But a serious composer has to come to terms with Cage's ideas.  And that's what his music was about: ideas.  Ideas and not much else - in my opinion.  A decent composer's education should fry the brain with Cagian philosophy.  After that you can ignore him, but he won't really go away.

Philip Glass  He's also disqualified from the Times list because he's still alive.  But I think many other composers look at him with a combination of awe and disgust.  Awe because he's so successful - with a steady string of commissions for symphonies, operas and film scores.  Disgust because we can't find a simple compositional style of our own, the way he has, one that's both direct and elegant and will bring some of our own listeners into the concert hall so we don't have to worry so much about what the Beethoven and Tchaikovsky fans think.

Don't be fooled into the notion that the great classical composers are the only influences on us lesser lights.  There are hundreds of semi-greats who can also look over a composer's shoulder if we let them.  Composition is an old art, highly developed.  There have been countless branches and offshoots.  The heavy weight of this past can be stifling if it is taken too seriously.

And any half-way decent composer is also influenced by many other types of music besides classical.  But this article was inspired by a purely "classical music" project - a futile effort to quantitatively rank composers on what must be, in the end, purely subjective judgements.  To me it sounds like a fools errand.

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ADDENDUM:

Due to multiple comments I'm adding a bonus selection, a runner up.

Igor Stravinsky  He made it clear that staying current and staying famous is the most important thing for a composer.  During his career he was three different composers,  radically changing his musical style twice, both times taking ideas from others.  It would have been a gracious gesture on his part to adopt serialism before his neighbor Schoenberg died.   But had he been a really nice guy he would have stopped composing in the 1920s and given two other composers a chance to be famous in his place.

Ten Greatest Tags: ten best lists. . . greatest classical composers. . . Anthony Tommasini