Recently I had to relearn a personal lesson about being a composer. Of course I'm not a composer any more - I gave up using that term. I prefer to call myself 'someone who makes up music'.
The lesson I had learned during my 'called myself a composer' days was: "Don't enter competitions."
With one exception, I never won any. (I'll get to the exception in a minute.) Every time I did enter, in spite of myself, I started to imagine the positive rewards of winning. Fantasizing like this inevitably made losing extra bitter for me. I was bitter enough already. I reasoned that if the only result of entering a competition was feeling bad then I shouldn't enter in the first place. Who needs that?
Earlier this year I became aware of a particular competition asking for works not unlike my video Solstice Lights which I was just then finishing. Of course I knew the moment I read the email that if I entered I would not be chosen. I also immediately knew that if I entered, in spite of my best efforts not to, I would let myself fantasize about the benefits of winning. And I knew that once I was informed of my loss I would feel like an idiot for entering in the first place.
In spite of all this prudent rationality, I somehow convinced myself to enter. (Yeah, I'm leaving out lots of details. You're welcome.) Turns out, I was right. Solstice Lights was not chosen and I feel like an idiot.
This experience reminded me of that exception, my one and only competition-winning piece. I wrote it nearly 40 years ago when I was in college. It was one of my first compositions. (Gosh, I've been writing music for nearly 40 years.) I was in my early twenties. What did I know?
I'm not even sure exactly who awarded the prize - some organization with a name like Minnesota Association of Music Teachers. I was chosen in a particular age group. I don't remember there being a prize, maybe I received a small check, maybe not. I do remember that there was an awards ceremony. I chose not to attend the ceremony. I guess I had a bad attitude even then.
The piece is for clarinet and piano. I called it Unity and Variety. There are two movements - the first one is entitled "Variety", the second is called "Unity". "Unity and variety" were concepts I had learned in my composition lessons - two opposing qualities which good composers were supposed to balance in their work. The music seems particularly enthusiastic to my older ears. Maybe I'm just projecting that onto the music because I remember how naive I was.
I'm posting a performance of Unity and Variety should you be curious about how an award-winning Ocker composition might sound. Be careful, the performance is strident, not terribly accurate or inspired. If you only have heard my music from the last few years it might come as a surprise - or maybe not. Everyone has to start somewhere.
Winning that award probably affected my career decisions right after college. Today, of course, it's totally insignificant, laughably so. I still think it's a pretty good piece - especially for a college kid who barely played the piano and who had virtually no experience writing music. I imagine that it would be fun for me if someone wanted to play this music again - except I'm not even sure where the music is.
Recently I was surprised to hear operatic singing from a television commercial. There was even a bass voice. You never hear basses sing on television. The ad was for a big financial firm which has figured out how to make money from people who can't wait to be paid. On YouTube I discovered three such opera-mercials - all with the same music but different voices.
The first commercial spoofs an actual opera on stage:
The second focuses on the uses of cash now - like home repair, car repair, newborn quintuplets:
And the third is everyone's favorite setting for opera music - a city bus:
Watching all three of these, I was struck by the recurring use of one particular image: the horned helmet - sometimes called a Viking Helmet. I guess nothing says "Opera" like a metal hat with horns on it.
If you think there might be a better music/horned-helmet association, you'd be correct. Here's a picture of Moondog:
The Moondog picture came from here - where you'll find a link to some radio interviews on WBAI. For a while - a few years ago - certain of Moondog's compositions were being used in automobile advertisements. (Couldn't find those on YouTube.)
Do yourself a favor. Listen to some Moondog.
Previous MM posts about classical music in television commercials: Selling With Vivaldi "These four uses of Vivaldi are all pretty standard capitalist realism - art in the service of profit."
Advertising with Disney Hall "It would be a much better world if you were reminded of classical music each time you saw the bank's stagecoach, rather than being reminded of a bank each time you saw the concert stage."
Who is Weiden & Kennedy Anyway "A dark story of crushing defeat as the home team loses by one point in the last second because an opponent is wearing better shoes. Life is like that, huh?"
(If you have time to watch only one of these videos, definitely watch the last one, Beer Vivaldi.)
In the museum-like world of classical music one of the most revered and oft-displayed masterworks is a set of violin concertos, The Four Seasons of Antonio Vivaldi. These pieces easily evoke meteorological images in the minds of listeners who, after all, have come to believe that music is really just like a movie - but without anything to watch.
But these pieces are among the very few which have a life as part of contemporary pop culture. They aren't as well known as the Ode to Joy or the Ride of the Valkyries. One doesn't have to look too hard to hear them in unexpected places - for example, as a soundtrack to a television commercial.
This short advertisement, running currently on television, shows a fearless stunt every-man jumping out of his luxury car onto an auto carrier, in hopes of acquiring an even better luxury car. The exciting derring-do music is the end of the first movment of Vivaldi's Winter. Perfect images for baroque music, don't you think?
Lest you think Vivaldi can only be used to sell automobiles, here's an ad for Hewlett Packard computers. The music is from Vivaldi's Summer and the guy waving his hands, creating fantastical images in mid-air, is none other than Joshua Bell, a violinist most famous perhaps for his performances in the Washington Metro. If he really could make visuals like these, live on stage just by waving his hands, Bell could probably become a really big star.
Lest you think that Vivaldi can only be used to sell autos and computers, here's another ad, with the very same Joshua Bell performing the same movement from the same Vivaldi concerto. The only difference is that in this one he is selling perfume, not that you can tell until the very end. Listen for the horrible cut in the music, just before the voice over.
Lest you think that Vivaldi's Four Seasons can only be used to sell high cost, high tech or high prestige items, here's an example of it being used for a different type of product. We see a scruffy college student amidst piles of forbidding obscure tomes, apparently translating an oriental language. In his notebook he writes "The divine truth one must find lies within." This idea provokes him first to deep thought and then to begin a quest through the stacks of the library. What he finds is ... a package of noodles. (Actually it finds him.) The remainder of the saga involves fancy kitchen prep work - the kind performed nightly by inscrutable Japanese chefs at your local Benihaha.
If you're paying attention, however, this commercial should make you want to buy an Audi. Yes, this noodling music comes from the same Vivaldi movement so perfect for jumping out of your car on a busy freeway.
These four uses of Vivaldi are all pretty standard capitalist realism - art in the service of profit. Our last example is much more interesting, vastly more creative, much more focused on Vivaldi's music - it's another performance of the same Winter movement which we've heard twice already. Alas, it is also much more forgiving of over consumption - in this case the item being promoted is beer. The image we see is a creative inebriate, an otherwise anonymous person called Pianobloke who must be a big fan of beer, creating pitches on a wide selection of beer in bottles, cans and glasses - the last of which he performs like a glass harmonica. These recorded snippets are assembled into Vivaldi using fancy video editing.
This video is chock full of visual imagery. There's no way to catch everything the first time. Go to YouTube and watch in high definition if you can. Notice that the first note is performed on a bottle of Duff, the beer of the Simpsons. After the music finishes each bottle of beer gets a cameo shot. Then our hero passes out. Congratulations, Pianobloke, a job well done. If you can turn out something like that I guess you weren't really that drunk. Why would you want us to think you were?
Other Mixed Meters pieces discussing classical music in advertising: Advertising with Disney Hall "It would be a much better world if you were reminded of classical music each time you saw the bank's stagecoach, rather than being reminded of a bank each time you saw the concert stage."
Who is Weiden & Kennedy Anyway "A dark story of crushing defeat as the home team loses by one point in the last second because an opponent is wearing better shoes. Life is like that, huh?"
Today, precisely at 5:16 P.M., is the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. Summer solstices are the kind with a long day and a short night. Elsewhere, somewhere far away to the south, today is the winter solstice: short day / long night.
In general, I like summer solstices better than winter. That's because I'm the kind of guy who works at night and sleeps during the day but still wants to be awake for at least a few daylight hours. During the depths of a Los Angeles winter the sun stays up just long enough for me to keep my nocturnal schedule but squeeze out an hour or two of waking daylight. That way I avoid SAD - Seasonal Affective Disorder.
There is one thing I don't like about the Summer Solstice: I know it means that the days will start getting shorter again bit by bit. I believe the familiar yearly cycle will repeat yet again because it has done that so many times before. I assume that eventually I will confront winter darkness one more time. Then, at the Winter Solstice, I will take heart in the notion that days will begin to lengthen bit by bit.
"So what else is new?" I hear you ask - because this is not a particularly new idea. Solstices and equinoxes were clearly known thousands of years ago to observant people who dragged huge stones forming massive structures so precisely positioned according to astronomical events that not even modern egos can deny that they must have known exactly what they were doing.
I wonder how many millennia before Stonehenge or Chichen Itza some human genius first consciously noticed the yearly cycle. That must have happened an unimaginably long time ago. That genius, whoever he or she was, probably also thought that lighting bonfires on the Winter Solstice was a good way to convince our friend the sun to return. Whatever rituals were performed, they always worked. The days always started getting longer. And religions were formed. Winter Solstice is a time of holidays in many different cultures.
Lights (like those bonfires) are an important aspect of the Winter Solstice celebrations and have gradually morphed in meaning through the ages. In our electrified times strings of colored bulbs (or LEDs recently) are displayed on many houses. These lights served as the first inspiration for my video piece, Solstice Lights.
The inspiration came indirectly from the Point'n'Shoot In My Pocket. While on my daily walk I tried to take video of my neighbors' blinking Christmas lights. Alas, Mister Point'n'shoot could not focus properly in the dark. When I saw the results on my computer screen I knew instantly that I would use these glowing abstract circles of color in a piece of some sort.
I first assumed that would be a Jingle Bells piece - my yearly compositional effort to claim some personal control over the seasonal onslaught of Christmas music. (Previous Jingle pieces are still available for listening. You can find all the links at the beginning of last years Jingle post A Combination of Jingle Bells and the Internationale. Lots of fun pictures of Che Guevara as well.)
Indeed, Solstice Lights does have one brief moment of Jingle Bells. But the work took on a different cast after the death of my friend Arthur Jarvinen in October 2010. Upon hearing the news I knew immediately that I would need to write a memorial piece for Art.
Arthur himself wrote several memorial pieces. His very affecting gong solo Out of the Blue, one of the pieces performed as his own memorial service, was a tribute to composer Randy Hostetler who died at a young age. Art wrote 100 Cadences, a string quartet, in memory of his teacher Stephen "Lucky" Mosko. That piece is very Feldman-esque in feel if not in length.
Eventually I realized that a fragment from Arthur's piece Goldbeater's Skin, one I performed many times in the past, would fit perfectly into what I was writing. The opening of the Goldbeater's Skin melody occurs twice, at 7'15" (simultaneous with Jingle Bells) and also at 8'16". Solstice Lights was finished almost three months ago. It was not until yesterday that I had the notion of posting it here to coincide with an actual solstice.
Solstices are about long cycles of time. They are markers of the behavior of natural phenomena like the spinning rock on which we live and the moving bright light in the heavens. Together these define the thing we call a "year". Years are real things, not an artificial division of time into segments. We humans use years to measure our lifetimes. We often celebrate these yearly cycles with lights of some sort.
Arthur Jarvinen was someone keenly aware of the limits of the human lifespan, not just his own. You can find references to death throughout his writing and his music. Some are obvious, come covert. He may not have known exactly how or when he would die, but I believe he knew all along, somehow, that he would not live into old age. These are the things I thought about while writing Solstice Lights. I hope my music communicates those ideas.
If I had to guess at his reaction, I would say that Art would not particularly have liked Solstice Lights, had he been able to hear it. Like me, he was someone with strong personal independent opinions about music. In writing it, however, I tried to remember something I heard him say several times, "You have to do your best work." That's what I tried to do. I'm certain Art would have understood that part.
Last fall Carson Cooman composed a piece entitled Journeybook: in memoriam Arthur Jarvinen for mixed sextet (bass clarinet, soprano sax, soprano voice (or trumpet), drums, violin and cello). It was performed by the ensemble thingNY
Saturday afternoon Leslie and I headed north from Pasadena to an event called Art on Millionaire's Row - an arts and crafts show at the Altadena Library. At one time Altadena, nestled into the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, was a gathering place for the wealthy, back when a million was real money.
We knew about the show because our friend Susan Braig, decked out in a white lab coat, was showing her jewelry designs. Susan makes decorative jewelry using discarded drugs. Here's her own description:
My jewelry was inspired after paying nearly $500 for my first chemo-therapy anti-nausea pills, which seemed more like precious gems!
My breast cancer is in remission (5 years), but my debts metastasized because my insurance policy did not cover many of my treatments. Now I have to peddle drugs to pay my medical bills.
The metaphor, "Health care in this country has become a luxury item" evolved into this collection of conceptual jewelry.
The picture is of Leslie and Susan. The small print on the sign reads:
I have to sell drugs to pay my medical bills! Health Care should not be a luxury item!
In fact, as Leslie was paying, Susan said "Now I can pay for my last office visit with my Internist."
Last March the L.A. Times ran an article about Susan. Better yet, they made a video about her. I recommend watching - you can see Susan at work while she tells her story and get a real sense of the joy she takes from this work.
Here are pictures of Susan's designs which Leslie purchased. The first earrings are Ducolax stool softener, the second are 10 mg. diazapam and the little green pill in the pendant is 2.5 mg. Coumadin. (Click on pictures for enlargements.)
More from Susan's brochure:
Patient Information
Warnings: Keep out of reach of children!
Directions: All items are wearable and denatured (sealed, glued and no longer usable as drugs or medical supplies)
FRAGILE: Treat with care. Store in a dark cool place, preferably in pill bottle. Avoid prolong sun, heat and moisture.
Dosage: Do not ingest orally, only aesthetically and conceptually.
Side Effects: May induce irony.
Susan may be reached at ssbraig "at" earthlink.net
Back when I had enough free time to take an active part in other peoples' blogs, I posted occasionally on Daniel Wolf's Renewable Music, a fine example of a composer's blog. Recently I rediscovered his Thanatophiles which he originally posted over four years ago. I responded to it at length but I never cross-posted my essay here. Now's as good a time as any. I added a bit of highlighting if you prefer to skim.
First, read Daniel's concluding two paragraphs (although I urge you to read his whole piece - considerably shorter than my response - here):
While it's clear that much of 20th century classical musical life can be characterized by the active rejection of new composition in favor of the interpretation of older work, we desperately need some smarter ideas about the ways in which repertoires integrate or reject innovation, and perhaps we can get some ideas from religious and literary scholarship about the ways in which communities for whom the canon has been closed still maintain a creative life.
We still understand very little about the impact of the various technologies for "fixing" a music -- from oral transmission, to notation, and onto sound recording in its changing modes of exchange. A bit of music may or may not have some platonic ideal behind it which these various technologies reproduce to a greater or lesser degree of accuracy, but these technologies raise all sorts of questions about both liveliness and morbidity and further questions about how to distinguish between these two states in an environment in which a parasitic attachment to past liveliness is -- for better or worse -- a substitute for getting on with real change.
Although I agree with some of your observations, I cannot agree with your conclusion. I think classical music is quite dead. It's easy to overlook this fact because many people still enjoy listening to it and there are many healthy organizations providing performances and recordings. I would argue that's not enough for the music itself to be "living".
Classical music has had defined, unchanging, largely immovable boundaries for many decades. Allowable performance practices have a small acceptable range. When you talk about "classical music" I, and everyone, know exactly what you are referring to. Since the advent of authentic baroque and renaissance performance decades ago not much has changed. Oh, there's more flash and more marketing these days. "Classical" music isn't changing. There's a lot of "new" music asking to be let in. The audiences are not terribly thrilled by it. Chilled would be a better description. Exceptions are so rare you cannot claim they are a revitalizing influence.
You point out that an active academia codifies the practice. Absolutely. Music schools are filled with people who have devoted their lives to finding newer and newer things about a fixed body of knowledge. They teach the "proper" way of playing. Teachers and students may know history but they are still being forced to repeat it.
You point out that other parts of the world have growing classical music "scenes". Doesn't this mean that people are still finding the meaning and elegance which the classics has always provided to anyone who cares to partake? More cynically, it also might mean that other societies are attempting to find some equality with the European musical homeland. There is still class distinction in classical music.
Of course composers continue to suggest paths for a possible future of classical music. They (we) attempt mostly to evolve from what was there before. The performing and recording companies promote a painfully small subsection of these possibilities, based, in my opinion, more on importance than on talent. But few pieces have been accepted by the general audience. Most of the audience prefer to pay to hear their old friends Beethoven or Schumann or Wagner or Brahms again and again. And it's not clear if any of the new "pledges" to the composer pantheon will be allowed to really join the "fraternity". Who since Bartok has really been awarded decades of repeated performances?
I suggest that we would be better off to accept that musics have lifespans - they come and go, they are born, they flower and then they die. We can still enjoy the dead ones, preserved for us in elegant museum-like concert halls. But the formative, creative, socially relevant periods of dead musics have passed. We can honor the fact that they've had a huge influence on our culture and provided great beauty and meaning and challenges to anyone who cares to take advantage of them. As a culture we have concluded that these musics should be preserved and that knowing them is an essential experience of our time. So is experiencing Shakespeare, but I hope no one would suggest Elizabethan theater is not dead.
We should all look to the future with the realization that something new is coming, something that will reflect our present without a restrictive obeisance to the past, something that will mirror the hopes and dreams and fears of a whole lot of living people, who will anxiously wait to find out if their most wonderful dreams or most horrible fears come to pass, who don't have much time to think about music but will know absolutely which organized sounds resonate with their thoughts and hopes and feelings. And which don't.
Those of us who appreciate and revere what came before may not like the new stuff. That's too bad, but there's nothing forcing us to listen to anything in particular. Everyone seems to listen to something. And everyone seems to know what they like.
Finally, the search for new metaphors to describe the death or life of this or that music is itself a living art. Newer and stranger comparisons and analogies are regularly found to prove the same points over and over. The problem is that any music - whether classical, jazz, rock, hip-hop, take your pick - encompasses a vast sweep of society, a long history and varied aspects of culture as to be indescribable as a whole in any simple manner. You could say classical music is an elephant beset by countless blind men and women, each trying to describe their small corner of the beast and each finding a unique descriptor. Yes, that's another metaphor. Oops, I did it again.
Other Mixed Meters attacks on Classical Music's mortality (plus teaser quotes):
If Music Be The Food of Love "Hip Hop, as the magazine cover says, is not dead. However Hip Hop has recently discovered its own mortality."
A New Rhapsody in Blue "It occurred to me that if many (or even a few) performances of classical music had this level of creativity in them - of even a small fraction of the creativity in this performance - I would not think of it as such a dead art form."
Everybody Loves Beethoven (Probably) "it is probable that 98% of all Americans these days don't know any contemporary composers at all, and if they did - unlike in Mencken's hypothesis - their reaction to finding out about them would be the shrugging of shoulders and the changing of channels."
Classical Music Isn't Dead, It Just Needs a Rest "I conclude that in such situations the music is not meant to offer a contemporary perspective. They have other forms of art for that. I fear this music is more like a spa treatment for ones ears."
Could Terry Riley's In C be Accepted As Classical Music? "Yes, getting this piece into the standard repertory is a long ways off. If it happened, In C would change from a "minimalist classic" into an actual piece of classical music. That would provide strong evidence that classical music has some life left in it."
The dissatisfied group showered Stalin with declarations, signed personally and collectively. As Ilf and Petrov noted once, "Composers denounce each other on music paper." They overrated composers, they wrote denunciations on plain paper.
and one from page 202:
Of course, I know that an entire brigade of respected Russian dullards wrote a collective book praising that White Sea canal. If they have an excuse at all, it's that they were taken to the canal as tourists one day and the next day any one of them could have been shoveling dirt there. Then again, Ilf and Petrov got out of participating in that shameful "literary camp" anthology by saying that they "knew little" about the life of inmates. Ilf and Petrov were lucky, and they never did find out about that life, the way hundreds of other writers and poets did.
Shostakovich gives the impression that everyone will recognize the names Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, but of course I had no idea who they were. These two men co-wrote several comic novels in Soviet Russia during the 1920s and 1930s and are also known for an account of their 1935 auto trip across the United States. Their works have been made into movies several dozen times including once by Mel Brooks.
I was curious, so I ordered a DVD of Brooks' The Twelve Chairs and a new translation of Ilf and Petrov's other novel The Golden Calf.
Mel Brooks made The Twelve Chairs after The Producers but before Blazing Saddles. Since those are two of the funniest movies I've ever seen, I expected a lot from The Twelve Chairs. Yes, it's funny but not THAT funny. The leads are played by Ron Moody, Dom DeLuise and a very skinny Frank Langella as the petty criminal Ostap Bender. These characters compete to find a fortune hidden in one of twelve identical dining room chairs which had been taken from a nobleman's family by the Communists after the Revolution. The plot and the film itself remind me of a low-budget It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, if you can imagine that classic happening in 1920's Russia rather than 1960s California.
At the end of the novel version of The Twelve Chairs, Ostap Bender dies. In spite of that, Ilf and Petrov brought him back as the lead character in The Golden Calf. Bender, with a small group of friends of ill-repute, are out to con a lot of money from another Russian who has amassed a large illegal fortune. Although this may have been a tremendously popular and influential book in Russia (where there is even a statue of the lead characters and their junker automobile, a Lorraine Dietrich), I found it only mildly amusing. However, as a window into a time and place far away where there was a very different society, it's quite fascinating.
I think America could benefit from a wider familiarity with The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf. In a time when greed is still good and we make heroes of rich people, even those who have twisted the law to get ahead, and when 40% of Americans expect to be part of the wealthiest 10% someday, it couldn't hurt us to hear a few counter opinions about the meaning of money and the folly of getting rich quick. Someone needs to ask whether our incessant chase after the almighty dollar is really worth it.
And if that question happened to be couched in comedy and comes to the people of the United States via a pair of long dead Soviet journalists who have earned a permanent place in the collective memory of their own collectivist nation, one reviled here for its anti-Capitalist dogmas, so much the better.
"The time, that we have, is the money, that we don’t have."
One final note: I've mentioned several times how hard I am on the books I read because I carry them back and forth on my daily walks to coffee shops. They are exposed to various elements, the foremost being sweat and coffee. After I have finished a book it definitely looks used. But my copy of The Golden Calf is a curious exception - it still looks great. It's a trade paperback and seems to have been printed on particularly high quality paper with a very resistant cover. The publisher, Open Letter at the University of Rochester, is to be commended for a quality product even in this era of e-readers.
The picture of the Golden Calf statue came from here. Both statues are located in Odessa which is now part of the Ukraine.
And San Francisco has no lavish comic book-inspired production of Wagner's operas to sink it into $6,000,000 of debt. (Has LA Opera paid that off yet?)
I wonder if San Francisco Opera has opened a beer garden outside War Memorial Opera House like the one last year outside the Music Center? Endless operas can make a guy thirsty.
As better and better topics kept presenting themselves, I devoted nearly every Mixed Meters post for about three months to various aspects of Ring Festival LA and Wagner's legacy. (See the end of this post for a complete list.) Readership dropped as a result. Apparently opera fans are not interested in contrarian views about their sacred music. And non-opera fans are not interested in anything about opera.
But, as it says prominently on Mixed Meters, this is a blog about me, David Ocker. Even I wondered why I spent so much time obsessing about an event that was terribly easy to ignore. And, if nothing else has changed in Los Angeles because of the LA Opera Ring, at least I gained some insight into my own emotional responses. Unless you're my personal friend there's no reason you should care. Even then, it doesn't much matter.
My motivations for all that effort can be sorted into three categories: my musical background, my Jewish background and my Los Angeles background.
My Musical Background
My musical education - formal and otherwise - was always focused on the future of music, music as a forward looking thing. I have always been intrigued by novelty, by the desire to know what happens next. Even in high school I was constantly looking for new and wild things to listen to. Eventually new music became my career - even if it wasn't my own music. While I agree that there is much classical music that is beautiful, I recoil at the notion that it is somehow intrinsically superior music.
Unsurprisingly, there's an awful lot of music which I don't like. I have strong opinions about music. In particular I dislike a host of 19th century music and an awful lot of opera. As such, Wagner is the quintessential music I would like to avoid. In the context of my musical background, Wagner, probably the most unavoidable historical composer ever, is the prototypical example of everything I hate about music - endlessly long, crude-oil thick, college-lecture boring, evangelically sermonistic, narcotizingly stupefyingly heavy and musically irrelevant to the future.
My Jewish Background
I'm not a religious Jew but I am Jewish both socially and culturally - my parents got that much through to me. When I was a kid the Holocaust was not particularly a big deal in our family. Still, the incredible importance of the subject was somehow hammered home to me. It was something that we were supposed to remember, "never forget". "Who could forget?" I wondered. I concluded that forgetting during my lifetime was not possible.
While my parents strongly encouraged my musical interests, they pointedly didn't listen to Wagner. They told me that Jews didn't "do" Wagner. The one time in my life when I saw my parents protest anything politically was at a symphony performance. I was about 10 or 11. They got up, along with other Jewish people, and left the concert to avoid hearing a Wagner overture. Besides this one event I never once saw them attend a protest meeting, write a letter to the editor or get upset about politics.
Holocaust survivors in Israel didn't want to listen to Wagner. They had good reasons. Whatever those reasons were, they are the same reasons my parents taught me about Wagner's music. In my opinion a County-endorsed public Wagner festival starkly represents the very act of forgetting the things which should not be forgotten.
My Los Angeles Background
While I still regard graduate school advice that I should move to New York as misguided, it would have been useful for me to experience an actual, intense creative new music scene someplace while I was still young. But I had the notion that such a community could be created right here in Los Angeles. After all, this town is big and has musical talent and media and patrons and foundations up the wazoo and it has had periods of intense creative activity in other fields - for example modern art or pop music. I spent a lot of my youthful energy trying to make new music in Los Angeles happen.
Over the decades I've concluded that I was wrong: a Los Angeles new music scene patterned after my own dreams just isn't possible. Sorry, it won't happen in LA. (Please, prove me wrong before I die.) The serious new music that Los Angeles wants to focus its attention on is almost always created elsewhere. "Elsewhere" in this context mostly means Europe. This pattern began even before Stravinsky and Schoenberg and continues to this day. Sometimes audiences are happy with East coast music. "Elsewhere", "Europe" "East Coast" all begin with E. What does that mean?
The Los Angeles of 2010 Ring Festival did not turn out like the one I imagined in 1976 when I took up residence in Los Angeles. In November 2008 I was surprised by just how badly things had turned out in this regard when I read Plácido Domingo's announcement that
"Ring Festival LA will be a defining moment in the cultural history of Los Angeles."
Can you imagine my disappointment? Not only was a forward-looking music scene not going to happen here, but Domingo, an icon of music from Elsewhere, was announcing that we would henceforth define Los Angeles musical life around four boring operas based on medieval German mythology composed by a self-promoting anti-Semite who died more than 125 years ago. What has that got to do with the future of any thing? I can't think of anything less representative of Los Angeles.
More than a century ago, composer Richard Wagner conceived his epic four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen as a festival event that completely engaged the city of Bayreuth, Germany. In 2010, LA Opera will join forces with more than 50 cultural and educational institutions in Los Angeles to stage Ring Festival LA. “Ring Festival LA will be a defining moment in the cultural history of Los Angeles,” said Plácido Domingo, LA Opera’s Eli and Edythe Broad General Director. “The presence of so many of LA’s cultural, educational and civic leaders clearly demonstrates that the city’s creative forces can be brought together through a cultural festival — in this case, a festival based on LA Opera’s production of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle.”
Can Plácido really have thought that a festival centered on the Ring could define the cultural history of Los Angeles? Not even all of Los Angeles - could he have possibly thought that the Ring would define the history just of music in Los Angeles? Even just serious music? Apparently so. I am still infuriated by the thought.
Aside from my distaste for Wagner's music and Hitler's complicity in Wagner's legacy, the idea that music in Los Angeles - where I've lived well over half my life and don't expect ever to leave - could be defined by Wagner and his music is simply despicable. Domingo was talking long term - he used the word 'history' after all - not just for the few weeks of the festival itself.
Reading that quote was maddening, exasperating. I wondered how could they could have the gall to even think thoughts like that. While it's true that opera is relatively unimportant in Los Angeles, let me remind everyone that he was also suggesting that RFLA would be the biggest thing since the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival - which was a massively big deal. Fortunately that part of his plan turned out to be purely hot air.
I assume that Plácido is paid an awful lot of money to guide Los Angeles Opera. Local opera fans seem to adore him. He draws extra paying customers when he sings. Moreover, the patrons of the opera must trust his judgement because they take his advice. Indeed, part of his job is to help define what serious music in Los Angeles will become over time. And the vision he brought us was "Bayreuth on the Pacific!" It's simply shameful.
Compare his vision of Los Angeles - supported by millions upon zillions of dollars - with the vision I thought I might have a chance of creating back in the Los Angeles of the 70s and 80s. Do you think that confronting the disparity of those images might still make me upset? Don't bother to answer, I'll just tell you ... yes, it did. A lot.
And, frankly, there was nothing I could do about it except bitch. So what did I do? I bitched.
As a final wrap-up of the subject, here's a list of the articles (plus teaser quotes) in which I bitched about Ring Festival LA:
November 21, 2008 Ring Festival L.A. - Wrong Festival L.A. "this festival, as it was announced, will be far from representative of the arts community as a whole. In fact it is elitist in the extreme."
July 16, 2009 Mike Antonovich and Ring Festival L.A. "requesting that the “Ring Festival LA” shift the focus from honoring composer Richard Wagner, to featuring other composers as headliners, to provide balance, historical perspective and a true sampling of operatic and musical talent."
July 21, 2009 Wagner with an Asterisk "This suggestion will in no way impede efforts by our local oligarchy to get Los Angeles recognized as a great European city by producing their very own Ring."
February 17, 2010 A Windfall of Musicians "The combination of some of Europe's greatest musicians with two local music enthusiasts, Peter Yates and Lawrence Morton, turned L.A. into the bloodiest cutting-edge music scene anywhere for many years."
March 24, 2010 Wolfgang Wagner (1919-2010) "'Once we have rid the world of the Bolshevik-Jewish conspirators, then you, Wieland, will run the theater of the West and you, Wolfgang, the theater of the East."
April 5, 2010 Ring Festival L.A. Begins "If you really speak about the festival's significance to the culture of Los Angeles, I'm afraid Plácido's statement has The Big Lie feeling about it"
April 20, 2010 Ring Festival L.A. Meets Hitler's Birthday "Has no one at Ring Festival LA noticed that this is one small step in the exculpation of Adolph Hitler? Maybe they don't care about this aspect as long as the event involves Wagner in some way. Maybe there's been drinking at RFLA as well. Maybe they're ROFL."
June 9, 2010 Composers of the Nazi Era "And if some music is good, I suppose it follows that some other music is bad, degenerate. This attitude is the beginning of a slippery slope. At the bottom of that slope you will find the story of how the Nazis used and abused music. "
June 16, 2010 Kenton Wagner "If there is a Hell (which I personally doubt) Richard Wagner is there being forced to hear this album over and over for all eternity."
June 17, 2010 Wagner Inspires Pop Music "Apparently, someone, somewhere thinks every popular musician in the whole world during the last 150 years somehow owes their musical style to Richard Wagner. What a sad world it would be if that were true."
June 20, 2010 Wagner Invades Poland "The comparison of Wagner's Ring to an opiate is apt."
June 26, 2010 Suppose Wagner Had Been Jewish "as Ring Festival LA "leader" Barry Sanders said "We're not putting lipstick on a pig in this thing.""
July 9, 2010 Suppose Wagner Had Been a Nazi "Wagner fans do not want to talk about that elephant. The elephant is Adolf Hitler."
July 18, 2010 Hitlerdammerung "Hitler actually got to perform his part from a Wagnerian plot and recreate a bit of German mythology at the same time, spilling real blood and burning real cities."
August 15, 2010 A Modest Proposal For Replacing Placido Domingo at LA Opera "With the Ring in its rear view mirror Los Angeles Opera could decide to now set itself the goal of really creating a defining moment in Los Angeles culture. The first thing it would need to do is thank Plácido for his services and send him packing. "
June 7, 2012 LA Opera's Ring Festival LA - two years later "By remembering Hitler when we perform Wagner, we give ourselves the best chance for preventing recurrences of such despicable and immoral behavior."
A good deal of this post was reworked from private email correspondence with my friend John Steinmetz, who prompted me to explore the reasons for my emotional reaction to Ring Festival L.A. Thanks, John.
I knew about the controversy when I started Testimony, The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich - as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov. This book, with an extra long title, was published in 1979, four years after the composer's death.
It wasn't until I finished reading that I did more research. Turns out that the controversy is a big one - but only for people in the dull-as-dust world of musicology. To them, deciding whether this book really is the memoirs of an important 20th century composer (or not) has become a humongous article of faith. For the rest of us, it should be no big deal.
My personal impression is that I was indeed reading the voice of a real composer. It reminded me of bitch sessions I myself have had with composers - although none nearly as famous as this one. After a drink or two, while sitting with trusted friends, out come stories about colorful but incompetent performers, dottering inscrutable professors, wonderful still unfinished pieces, unflattering unfair reviews and encounters with a sexy harpist or horny fellow composer or two -- successes, failures, life.
Unlike this book, however, most composers reminisce in small bits.
Testimony represents 276 pages of Shostakovich's first-person narrative. It is very much stream of consciousness. Improbably, Volkov claims to have created it from notes taken by hand during one-on-one conversations during Shostakovich's last years. He says the composer refused to allow tape recordings and insisted that it not be published until after his death. Volkov maintained that the manuscript had been approved by Shostakovich himself but provided no direct proof of that.
Yes, Volkov's story is a mite suspicious. Given the circumstances, he must have done an awful lot of "editing". But I'm okay with that. Shostakovich had good reason to be suspicious that people were looking over his shoulder. Telling the truth could have gotten him into trouble.
Testimony revealed Shostakovich as secretly opposed to certain political currents in the Soviet Union - most notably Stalinism. This upset Westerners who insisted that Shostakovich was a devoted Communist composer. This also upset Soviets who also insisted that Shostakovich was a devoted Communist composer. No one could agree on what sort of devoted Communist composer Shostakovich actually was. Did he really mean what he says in this book? Had he been hiding his true feelings all along? Are there secret messages composed into his music?
It's hard for us freedom-of-expression types to understand the times through which Shostakovich lived, when uppity creative artists could be taken away in the middle of the night and never be heard from again. Afterwards people were too afraid to ask what might have become of them or even mention their names. Shostakovich had good reason to fear this might happen to him. One of the reasons he gives for dictating his memoirs is to preserve some memory of people who did disappear.
Here are the first few paragraphs of Testimony:
These are not memoirs about myself. These are memoirs about other people. Others will write about us. And naturally they'll lie through their teeth - but that's their business.
One must speak the truth about the past or not at all. It's very hard to reminisce and it's worth doing only in the name of truth.
Looking back, I see nothing but ruins, only mountains of corpses. And I do not wish to build new Potemkin villages on these ruins.
Let's try to tell only the truth. It's difficult. I was an eyewitness to many events and they were important events. I knew many outstanding people. I'll try to tell what I know about them. I'll try not to color or falsify anything. This will be the testimony of an eyewitness.
Of course, we do have the saying "He lies like an eyewitness."
Here is a video showing Shostakovich in 1975 about the time of his interviews with Volkov. He talks at the beginning and again at 6'40". He was in poor health and seems nervous.
It's not unreasonable to assume that Dmitri Shostakovich harbored a certain ill will about some of the difficult conditions under which he lived. In order to survive, Shostakovich adapted his music to the political conditions and demands of his time, writing pieces celebrating the Russian revolution or adapting to "just criticism". He may have survived, while others did not, thanks to his name recognition outside the Soviet Union plus the fact that Stalin liked his film scores. If he harbored secret personal opinions, he also knew better than to speak them in public.
Of course the Soviet Union was not the only 20th century society in which artists knew which things they were supposed to say in public. I've written about the experiences of composers during the Nazi regime. Even in the United States, during certain periods, composers have been expected to toe the political-speak line. You can read Aaron Copland's 1953 testimony before Senator Joe McCarthy's Senate investigating committee. Copland denied being a Commie, of course, but his Lincoln Portrait was still removed from a concert celebrating the inauguration of President Eisenhower.
So, if Shostakovich knew how to keep his mouth shut and only ventured to tell his stories when he knew death was near, who among us can blame him. Some of his stories are pretty good - especially when he tells how Soviet musicians tied themselves in knots to please their musically unsophisticated dictator.
But, in the end, you can only feel sympathy for Dimitri Shostakovich. Here are some quotes from the last few pages:
No, I can't go on describing my unhappy life, and I'm sure that no one can doubt now that it is unhappy. There were no particularly happy moments in my life, no great joys. It was gray and dull and it makes me sad to think about it. It saddens me to admit it, but it's the truth, the unhappy truth. ...
No, every new day of my life brings me no joy. I thought I would find distraction reminiscing about my friends and acquaintances. Many of them were famous and talented people, who told me interesting things, instructive stories. I thought that telling about my outstanding contemporaries would also be interesting and instructive. Some of these people played an important role in my life and I felt it was my duty to tell what I still remembered about them.
But even this undertaking has turned out to be a sad one.
I have thought that my life was replete with sorrow and that it would be hard to find a more miserable man. But when I started going over the life stories of my friends and acquaintances, I was horrified. Not one of them had an easy or a happy life. Some came to a terrible end, some died in terrible suffering, and the lives of many of them could easily be called more miserable than mine.
And that made me even sadder. I was remembering my friends and all I saw was corpses, mountains of corpses. I'm not exaggerating, I mean mountains. And the picture filled me with a horrible depression. I'm sad, I'm grieving all the time. I tried to drop this unhappy undertaking several times and stop remembering things from my past, since I saw nothing good in it. I didn't want to remember at all.
And so, in this book, I read that at the end of his life one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century could find nothing whatsoever to smile about. Should I believe this? I think so. The reason is simple: because Shostakovich makes the same point elsewhere - in his music. Here again is the link to his last string quartet, number 15, written the year before he died.
The website Shostakoviana includes an even-handed introduction to the Testimony controversy entitled A Manual for Beginners. There's a lot more beyond that. You're welcome to it. As controversies go, it's far less interesting than wondering who really shot Bobby Kennedy.
The Time Magazine cover is from July 1942. You can read the article about Shostakovich in that issue. This was that unique time when the Soviet Union and the United States were friends.
The photo of Shostakovich playing the piano while an obviously retouched Stalin looks over his shoulder comes from Testimony.
Last weekend Leslie and I traveled to the East Bay so Leslie could participate in BAYMAC. That stands for Bay Area Marine Aquarium Conference, a gathering of reefers - people whose hobby is salt-water aquarium keeping. In spite of what I might have thought at first, "reefers" refers to the ocean reefs where the many fascinating plants and animals originate.
Curious little marine beasties often hitch rides hidden inside corals and other things as they travel from those far-away reefs to their new homes in suburban aquaria. Eventually these animals grow larger and mystify the eager reefer. Experts must be called upon to identify the unknown critters. Leslie is such an expert.
And so it was last Saturday, in the cafeteria of Chabot College in Hayward California, that Leslie spent many hours seated below a sign reading (I kid you not) Spineless Marine Life Visual Identification Booth. Hundreds of people shuffled to and fro, looking at high-tech lights, glass tanks, small corals from which mighty reefs might grow, sea-water mix, jars of live copepods and who knows what all else. You can see pictures here. Some of these people brought Leslie crap from the bottom of their tanks and asked her "What is that little thing crawling around inside there?". Leslie is someone who knows the answer to that question. She knows because she's an expert. According to Leslie the word of the day was detritivore.
I made the trip with her so we could spend some time with our friends Mike Boom and Lynn Morton. Mike obligingly loaned Leslie the microscope, video camera and monitor for her presentation. I've known Mike since before he gave up playing the oboe to devote his life to being a mushroom-hunting, underwater-video-making computer technical writer. Lynn met Mike when she was a ballerina. Here's a picture of the two of them together. It clearly shows their relative distances above sea-level.
You can watch Mike's videos at Laughing Eel Underwater Video. Unlike some people (e.g. me) who carry all their video equipment around in one pocket, Mike travels the globe with hundreds of pounds of dive gear, video cameras and computers. The results he gets are pretty spectacular. Here's another picture of Mike taken while hunting for edible mushrooms near their home.
Lynn has turned the backyard of their house into a veritable outdoor aviary where dozens of wild bird feeders, many positioned right in front of windows, produced a constant flurry of colorful activity. This fascinating "bird television" impressed both Leslie and me a lot. The birds give Mike and Lynn's cat ample opportunities to stalk and the bird feeders give the local squirrels ample reason to hang about, waiting for a dropped seed or kernel. I made a short video of one patient squirrel. It proves that I do not carry a tripod in my pocket. Last night I composed some music to go with it. You can guess what comes next.
Bernie Madoff might be the biggest crook in the history of the world. He created a ponzi scheme masquerading as a Wall Street brokerage house which stole as much as $20 Billion and might have been going on nearly 40 years. He was arrested in 2008 when the recent "George Bush" recession made it impossible for him to keep robbing Peter to pay Paul. Madoff realized that the jig was up and confessed to his sons. They turned him in. Six prior investigations by the SEC had failed to notice that anything was wrong.
A Golden Parachute is severance pay for corporate executives. When a CEO is fired they often receive such a payout. This is irrespective of how well they did their job. Here's a list of the largest-ever golden parachutes. It includes Angelo Mozilo (who was accused of insider trading during the recent mortgage bubble; he got $44 million), Michael Ovitz ($130 million for working just a few months) and Michael Eisner (who collected a $1 Billion bonus for making Disney strong enough to control U.S. copyright legislation.)
I don't know whether Bernie Madoff had a formal golden parachute agreement with his company. If he did it wasn't worth the paper it was written on because after his conviction he had to forfeit all his wealth. Since he knew full well that what he was doing was illegal it's doubtful that he expected to retire with the same level of comfort and splendor in which he lived.
Still, Bernie Madoff lived the good life while he could. I've seen estimates that his fortune was around $800 million. He lived in a New York penthouse. He created a philanthropic family foundation and gave money away to charities. After his conviction he was sent to prison in North Carolina. He'll be eligible for parole in 2139 (when he's 201 years old).
America likes its criminals. We often celebrate their stories with works of art - mostly movies and television shows these days. Jesse James, Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde - the list of hero/crooks is a long one. Makers of such entertainment must cover their ass morally by making sure the bad guys die at the end (or at least go to prison). Of course to be popular these stories must have a great deal of action including chases, gunplay, daring heists and sanitized love-making.
In comparison, Bernie Madoff's story is a yawn. In this age, when the "greed is good" philosophy is no longer even slightly controversial, the tale of how one boring guy in a suit sat in an office and quietly stole a pile money beyond the dreams of even the most avaricious thief, might actually sell lots of movie tickets. Bernie Madoff Gets Rich could be just as popular as the movie about Facebook.
The plot of the Bernie Madoff story will seem familiar to opera fans. It's Faust by Charles Gounod. Bernie plays the part of Faust himself (although his victims might think of him more as the Devil). In the beginning Bernie/Faust, of his own free will, makes a deal with Mephistopheles and is rewarded with riches and other perqs. But the deal is good only for a limited time only. After that, the devil claims the hero's soul and sends him to Hell.
Being sent to Hell is Faust's own golden parachute. And Bernie's too. These days many of us don't believe in a actual physical post-death fire and brimstone eternal torment. Being sent to prison in North Carolina for the rest of our natural lives, however, is a pretty darn good substitute.
I wonder how many Americans would make the same deal with the Devil that Bernie made: trading a few years in prison for decades of wealth, influence and notoriety.
