Combining Four-letter Words: Oboe + Blog

Part One: BASE + BALL, DIES + IRAE, HIP + HOP

I received an email about my post In Which David Is Confused By The Second Coming. This concerned a piece of hip-hop music, The Second Coming by Juelz Santana, which quotes the Dies Irae. It was used in a television commercial for basketball shoes. I can tell you, it confused the hell out of me when I first heard it.

That post has gotten more hits than any Mixed Meters post ever. When you're one of the first to write online about a subject many people are actually interested in, I guess that's what happens. This wave of hits rose up and carried Mixed Meters along for a while, giving me a whole new understanding of the phrase "Surfing the Internet".

Anyway - like I was saying...

I received an email about my post on Nike/Dies Irae/Juelz Santana from Susan Spector. Susan plays oboe at the Met in New York City. That means she wears black clothing and sits in the big hole in front of the stage where only people in the first few rows can see her. Here is her picture from her blog Perfect Pitch showing the proper way to hold an oboe. What a grip.

Obviously a blog called Perfect Pitch is about BASEBALL Duh. Specifically her blog is about her team, the Mets. Susan is a big fan of the Mets.

Let's review: Susan plays at the Met and she roots for the Mets. What were the chances?

What brings

• Hip Hop and
• Baseball and the
  
• Dies Irae and an
  
• Opera Orchestra Oboist

all together in one post? I'm glad you asked.

Well, The Second Coming, that same music from the Nike commercial, is being used to rouse the Mets fans into something approaching excitement at their home games. Susan's first reaction, not unlike mine, was confusion. She has a good deal more to say about The Second Coming story and the meaning of the Dies Irae. Read her Perfect Pitch Post entitled Day of Wrath here.

Part Two: RICH + POOR, FEMALE + CRITIC, MUSIC + DANCE, POLITE + PEOPLE

In a more recent MM post Rich Critic, Poor Critic, I asked whether there were any female music critics out there. Another blogging-oboist (or oboe-playing-blogger), Patty Mitchell of OboeInsight, added a comment alerting me to the history of female music critics in the Bay Area. She also mentioned NY Times' critic Anne Midgette. Thanks Patty.

(Later without any help I remembered music critic Donna Perlmutter here in Southern California.)

In Patty's blog I found this article entitled To: Guy Who Screamed Obscentities at the Ballet the Other Night which links to a too-good-to-pass-up story told in this Craigslist posting.

Here's a sample.

It was then you yelled, in your beautiful gray-haired old crotchety man voice, "WILL YOU PEOPLE SIT DOWN AND LET THE *POLITE* PEOPLE SHOW THEIR APPRECIATION?!," slight pause, "YA ASSHOLES!"

Just read the whole thing for yourself. Gentility lives at the Ballet. At least the recent fist fight in Boston was at a Pops concert.


PART THREE: DEATH + MUSIC, CHAMBER + NIGHTCLUB, THEN + NOW

On Sunday, June 24, at my local Pasadena Starbucks I picked up an abandoned copy of the New York Times Arts & Leisure section. The featured column-one article was "Music That Thinks Outside the Chamber". I read the first few paragraphs finding these striking quotes:

...an acquaintance informed him that the two most boring words in the English language were "chamber music."

...for many people, chamber music is dead.

"Wow" I thought. "I wonder whose article this is."

I looked for a by-line. It was by none other than Anne Midgette. Since the death of classical music is turning out to be a frequent Mixed Meters theme I read on. A couple more paragraphs and I found this:

"At the moment supply outstrips demand," said John Steinmetz, a bassoonist and composer active in the chamber music field.

"Double Wow" I thought. John Steinmetz has been a close friend of mine for many decades. He and I were students together at Cal Arts, co-founders of the chamber ensemble X-tet, frequent performers of one anothers music and, these days, close neighbors (if only by the loose standards of Southern California geography). And here he was being quoted on the front page of the NYT Arts section above the fold. Way to go, John.

"I'd better read this entire article." my thoughts concluded.

(For those of you who wonder "What's a Bassoon?" imagine four oboes laid end to end and twisted around the body of the performer. This picture shows a somewhat younger John Steinmetz playing one.)


Anne Midgette's article dealt mainly with people playing chamber music in "non traditional spaces" Um, that means "bars".

Fine. Let's give this idea another try. In 1976, when John and I were studying at Cal Arts, the chamber ensemble Tashi (including my clarinet teacher Richard Stoltzman) played The Quartet For The End of Time at the Bottom Line in New York City. That concert was big news back then. Yep. And it really changed everything in the world of chamber music. Nothing's ever been the same since.

Apparently Anthony Braxton shared the bill with Tashi at the Bottom Line.





Oboe+Blog Tags: Perfect Pitch. . . OboeInsight. . . Juelz Santana. . . The Second Coming. . . baseball. . . nike. . . The Mets. . . Metropolitan Opera. . . female music critic. . . Anne Midgette. . . chamber music. . . death of chamber music. . . non traditional spaces. . . Susan Spector. . . Patty Mitchell. . . John Steinmetz. . . Richard Emmet. . . Frank Zappa. . . Tashi

Anne Midgette's fascinating 2002 article, A Critical Difference about being a woman and a music critic is here. (Thanks to Diva341 for pointing this out.)

The "Beats The Hell Outa Playing the Oboe" picture came from Roboflutist

Another MM post, entitled Who Is Weiden-Kennedy Anyway?, about a different Nike television commercial which used religious-themed classical music to sell basketball shoes.

Here's an article about the 2008 reunion of Tashi.

The picture of Richard Emmet, John Steinmetz, Frank Zappa and myself - and others like it - can be found on Richard Emmet's website.

X-tet's website can be found here.

John Steinmetz's website can be found here. He has been mentioned previously in Mixed Meters here and here. The little metal rat sculpture was given to me by John years ago. You'll have to ask him what it signified and why he wanted me to have it.

Counting to Seven

Alex Ross' blog The Rest Is Noise linked to The Juilliard Manuscript Collection.

I spent only five minutes looking at musical manuscripts. It's a very cool and efficient website.

During that 5 minutes I found this mirthful little example from the hand of a famous departed composer. I provide it anonymously because even these 4 little notes are probably an egregious copyright violation.


Since at least one of my three readers is not (much of) a musician, for a mere five dollars I'd be happy to send a free explanation of what is wrong with this particular mixed meter.

Mis-Noted Tags: music notation. . . Juilliard Manuscript Collection. . . musical errors

P.S. Besides telling Viola Jokes, musicians know a few Dancer Jokes. One that I tell is "How does a Dancer count to seven?". Sorry, but the punchline can't be typed, it must be counted out loud.

Notes from ComposerHead

(This is a guest posting from an anonymous reader named ComposerHead. Thank you ComposerHead. I guess Mixed Meters now has three readers. /David)



Notes from ComposerHead

I like best the notes I could have written, but didn't.


There are only two kinds of notes. Ones next to each other, and ones on top of each other.


I like the ones next to each other better than the other kind. Although I will say it's kind of amusing to imagine the implied other ones.

You can quote me

ComposerHead



ComposerHead Tags: ComposerHead. . . Notes. . . Music

(BTW - only the text came from ComposerHead (really). The illustrations were my choice. /David)

Lifestyles of the Wet and Spineless

This is Spark. He's an artist. He draws and paints things both real and imagined. He's very good. I met him because we both hang out at our neighborhood Starbucks.

I took this picture of him as a kind of a challenge: he had said that only a great artist could take a good picture of an empty Starbucks cup. So I whipped my point & shoot out of my pocket and fired one shot. Lucky click. Maybe I'm not a great artist but the picture came out pretty well. I think.

Next is a portrait of Leslie done by Spark in acrylics . Leslie had seen a painting of a woman with an octopus crawling out of her backpack. She wanted a painting of herself with worms instead of an octopus. You see, marine worms are Leslie's biggest passion. The best I can hope for is to come in second after the worms. I'm okay with that. Really. (Click on the painting for an enlargement.)


The third picture is a pen & ink "snapshot" of me done by Spark on a Starbucks napkin. Spark has an ongoing project of drawing people on Starbucks napkins. He shows me sitting with my laptop, in my favorite Starbucks chair. (click on the drawing for a large enlargement.)

As this drawing was taken I was working on the fourth movement of my piece Wagner and Schubert Have Intercourse. I've been working on it for months as time allows; it's now scheduled for uploading beginning in July.

The fourth movement of Wagner and Schubert Have Intercourse has since changed into the third and fifth movements, which are entitled "Endless Symphony" and "Endless Opera". These things happen.


This Saturday, July 23, 2007, beginning at 11:45 A.M. at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, located in Exposition Park - Leslie will be giving a lecture and slide show, showing many of her fascinating pictures of bizarre marine invertibrates and describing their strange behavior.

This lecture is entitled:

Lifestyles of the Wet and Spineless.

If you're in the neighborhood, please attend. (Directions to NHMLAC, down near USC and the Colliseum)

Links for this post:

Some of Leslie's worm photographs. Highly recommended!!

Weekend Activities at Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (this weekend only, starring Leslie Harris - check back next week for something entirely different.)

More about one of the world's largest marine worm collections at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Leslie Harris, collection manager.

Spark's MySpace Space It says he's 8' 11" tall. Check out his pictures, see what he does for a living.

Spark's ComicSpace Space Check out more of his pictures and an entire comic book he did called Helix.

Spark's previous Starbucks-Napkin-Drawing of me is featured in THIS Mixed Meters post from antiquity.




Painting Worm Tags: Spark. . . painting. . . drawing. . . marine worms. . . polychaete. . . Starbucks. . . Natural History Museum. . . Los Angeles. . . Richard Wagner. . . intercourse. . . Franz Schubert

A Los Angeles Summer New Music Festival

A flyer for SASSAS arrived in my mailbox recently.

It announces a handful of concerts in 3 different locations, June through September. This makes it the biggest summertime new music series in LA county that I'm aware of.

The performers are described as

• founder of a free-noise collective
• someone who revels in "thrift store brutism"
• a psychedilic bagpipe minimalist
• a cellist who reveals the "sublimity of the small"
• eight "heavy metal and harsh noise" players combined in "randomly chosen ensembles"
• three "international icons of modern improvisation"

Find out who these people are and what the letters SASSAS stand for at their website http://www.sassas.org/ which was, amazingly, not listed anywhere on the flyer.

SASSAS Tags: SASSAS. . . new music. . . noise. . . improvisation. . . Los Angeles

Rich Critic, Poor Critic

I met Alan Rich, Los Angeles Weekly music critic, about 25 years ago. Seems that I see him at every concert I attend. We usually speak briefly, often leaving me to wonder what other things he's really thinking about.

Alan's reviews are available online. His column is called A Little Night Music. I recommend it highly although I don't always agree with him. He wrote some nice things about me, back in antiquity when I merited review.

Many of the music critics I read in these modern days have been lamenting the firing of other music critics whom I do not read. Alan took his turn at bat on this subject in this post under the heading "What I Do and Why". He wrote:

"A community’s musical life needs a spokesperson."

He doesn't really say why this is so. We certainly don't need critics in order to form our own opinions.


Every person who hears a musical event, be it concert, club or busker in the subway, forms their own independent opinion. Not everyone knows the words to express their ideas. Such vocabulary is learned through the corrupting influence of music education.

People who never studied music might find reading a post-concert review helps them articulate personal thoughts, whether they agree or disagree. For a critic to presume he writes only what the majority of the audience thinks, as their spokesman, is exceptionally pompous. No, Alan didn't actually say that.

Music reviews do help people like me who can't (or won't) attend many concerts. We can learn the basic facts of who played what, when and where. Beyond that a reader needs to gradually create a filter for each critic's arsenal of adjectival ordnance. Suppose he never wrote a decent word about Andrea Bocelli. You might not need to read his take on Sarah Brightman.

(Are there any female music critics out there?)

As Alan mentions, music reviews can also entice people to attend concerts they might not have known about otherwise. We pretend not to notice when a review praises an upcoming concert which has paid advertising elsewhere in the same issue.


Critics do get the chance to speak truth to power in the the music world. This is good. When Leslie read the draft of this article she said that the music community does need spokespeople to talk to the "Pharisees, Administrators and Bean Counters." (Alas, she refuses to ghost-write Mixed Meters.)

Arguments about why certain parking garages should have certain concert halls built above them apparently paid off. (Can't find the link, but I read that Ernest Fleischman felt Mark Swed's LA Times music criticism helped get Disney Hall built. I hope that Mark's comments about how certain museums have mistreated certain chamber music series might actually cause certain administrators to make certain changes.)

Back to the point: no one of us who loves music needs to care what a critic thought of a performance or composition in order to have our own opinion. That's what I think and I seem to be repeating myself.

Anyway, Alan also says:

[Classical music] "comes cloaked in a certain air of mystery, which the critic is there to penetrate. Because it has a strong impact on emotions, it also generates a lot of nut cases who, these days, have access to the Internet, so that we have both not enough music criticism — or, let’s call it, “writing around music” — and too much in the form of blogs."

This seems to argue for a type of elitism where just a few people get to create the opinions and others consume them. With a blog anyone can talk back to bonehead reviewer comments. This is a good thing. Alan, are you listening? You trumpet your own refutations of other reviewers, for example Chris Pasles. But you decry the musical community's discovery of a way to speak for itself.


Alan, now safely back in the third person, goes on to praise the Internet music blog with more readers than any other: "The Rest Is Noise" by Alex Ross. I've referred to it often on Mixed Meters. I recommend it highly although I don't always agree with it.

To me the title "The Rest Is Noise" has always trumpeted that very elitist attitude. It seems to say "I review only good stuff and every thing I ignore is merely cacophonous pandemonium."

• Maybe that's not the intended implication of the title.
• Maybe someone will suggest alternative meanings.
• Maybe the title is explained in Ross' book "The Rest Is Noise. "
• Maybe I'll give up writing a blog and find time to start reading books again.
• Maybe someone out there thinks cacophonous pandemonium is the highest form of music. My apologies to that person.

Tim Mangan is another SoCal Music Critic whom I recommend but don't always agree with.

Rich Tags: Alan Rich. . . music criticism. . . music critics. . . music critic. . . LA Weekly. . . Pharisees. . . bean counters. . . administrators. . . Alex Ross. . . The Rest Is Noise. . . A Little Night Music

Chowderhead - our newest family member

Leslie has a big soft spot in her heart for lost or injured animals. That's how she got me. Also several of our cats.

A few weeks ago she befriended a friendly, limping dog that had been abandoned near the double-wide where her laboratory has been temporarily moved. For a while she thought she could find a good home for him. But it soon became clear that she wanted to keep the puppy for herself.

We voted on it. The vote was one to one. I lost.


He's fairly large and a red color. A mixed breed, obviously part chow. She named him Chowderhead. She regrets this now because I've insisted on keeping that name. She calls him Chowder or Chow-Chow or Ch-Chow. But I know that his name is really Chowderhead..

By coincidence our handyman is doing some maintenance tasks at the moment. Instead of those important jobs he's built fences so our back yard will securely hold a canine-type creature. Tonight is Chowderhead's first night with us.


In just a few hours Chowderhead has managed to get himself sprayed in the snout twice by skunks.

And he also broke into the house through the screen door and chased a cat across the house and into my office.

Yep, we have a lot of new experiences to look forward to, here in dog and cat land.

The wild creatures we're living near at the moment ....

A family of skunks living under the house. Leslie took this picture one night ago. They're gathered around a ceramic pig which holds a succulent that sits just inches from our back door.


Right across the street from us, high in a magnolia tree, a pair of hawks is raising their young. We've heard the chicks but have seen only the adults.

There are also recent raccoon and possum sightings. Cute little baby opossums and big raccoons standing on their hind legs.

We haven't seen a coyote in a long time. If we lived closer to the mountains we might see black bears. Southern California television stations always cover bears who swim in backyard pools.

Here's a previous Mixed Meters post involving a skunk.


Chowderhead Tags: Chowderhead. . . dogs. . . Chow Chow. . . skunks. . . hawks

Advertising with Disney Hall

Ever since they completed the swoopy architecture of Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles it has been a common backdrop for advertising - especially for fancy automobiles.

I really liked this picture of actresses from Leslie's copy of Vanity Fair . Unfortunately this is not the new uniform for Disney ushers, it was promotion for a movie.


No word on how many ankles were broken when they landed. Here's the same scene sans jumping actresses.



Here's an NPR article about jumping fish.

It's quite right for corporations to contribute to the Philharmonic. This is a form of patronage. In exchange the corporations should be properly acknowledged. This is a form of advertising.

Acura, for example, offers a small rebate to certain concert goers. For some concerts you get free parking if you drive up to Disney Hall in one of their cars. That's a big $8 discount. (The cheapest recent Acura sold on Ebay was an '86 Integra with 163,000 miles. It went for $585.75, about the cost of parking for just 74 concerts.)

The last time I attended a Disney Hall concert Acura also sponsored the after-concert reception. They served Acura brownies. (click picture to enlarge it)


While eating our brownies, we watched this static light projection on the wall of BP Hall. It makes me wonder where Batman is.



Inside the concert hall itself the stage has been named.


I guess their idea is that everyone at a concert will be reminded subliminally of this:


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.


But I doubt any orchestra has enough resources to patronize a bank. Just imagine the tagline: "This bank has been brought to you by ... "

You can buy a Fuck Frank Gehry t-shirt here.

Here a The New Yorker story about Frank Gehry's reaction to the shirts.

Patronizing Tags: Disney Hall. . . Acura. . . Wells Fargo. . . advertising. . . corporate philanthropy

Camille and the Cardiacs

Here's an NPR story about popular music in France. I turned the car on midway through the clip of singer Camille. She is described as "part Bjørk and part her own dangerous imagination." Bjork? Nah. "Dangerous Imagination" Okay, I'm in.

I suggest you listen to the radio story before reading on. Can you guess which bit of the Camille excerpt caused me to decide immediately to buy that album?

Based on less than a seconds worth of sound I eventually purchased the album called Le Fil. Read about Camille here. Here's Camille's website where you can hear a couple cuts from Le Fil by watching videos.


Musically I find Le Fil completely involving, even intriguing. Plenty of vocal textures, vocal noises, vocal drones, overtone singing. There's hardly any instrumental backup. It's a very open, widely spacious, expansively empty album. Any one would like this (except minimalists and serialists.)

After several listenings I was surprised to discover many pages of lyrics in the booklet. I've always said I like pop music more if I can't understand the words. But French is a special case, filled as it is with non-human sounds to which my brain fails to assign linguistic meaning. And so I process the sounds not as language but as music. That's a good thing.

My second victim today is On Land and in the Sea by the Cardiacs. I can't understand the words on this album either even though they're all in English. This is because the lyrics are all shouted rapid-fire over annoyingly loud rock and roll.

The Cardiacs are an English punk rock band. Just look at their picture. They look like a punk band, don't you think?


These two albums are as different as two albums can be. Well, one is French the other is English. One is a up and coming mega-pop star on a major label, the other is a decades-old under-ground independent-label noise band.

I ran across this video of "Tarred and Feathered" by the Cardiacs on You Tube months ago. I was smitten by the obvious weirdness and the crazy rhythm. Imagine that instead of going over to the dark side of 12-tonality late in life, Stravinsky had written punk rock music instead. Might have sounded something like this.

I searched for a Cardiacs album - the clerk at Canterbury's, the good Pasadena record store, asked me "Where do you find these things?"

Independently of this, I received an email from a gentleman in England named Ben Singleton. He wanted to ask me questions about my least favorite Frank Zappa album Thingfish. I noticed that on Ben's MySpace Page he had listed the Cardiacs among his favorite music.

After I answered Ben's question he offered to send me a copy of a Cardiacs album. After a short while On Land and in the Sea arrived as Ben's thank you gift. He's a nice guy. I hated the album. I even threatened to use it to drive Leslie out of my office when I wanted her to stop using my computer.

So what did I do after listening to this awful album a few times. I went to the Cardiacs website, of course, and ordered their greatest hits album. Maybe I did that to fulfill John Cage's commandment:

"If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all."

Or maybe I'm just a masochist.

Here are more Cardiacs videos to confuse you more. Enjoy them.
The Consultant's Flower Garden
R.E.S.
R.E.S.
A Little Man and a House


Here's some other recent Mixed Meters CD purchases:
Marc Blitzstein "The Cradle Will Rock" If you don't know this political musical I suggest you watch Tim Robbin's movie Cradle Will Rock as an introduction. MarcBlitzstein.com

Electric Gypsyland - I'm a sucker for these remix albums of East European brass bands like Tarif de Haidouks. I'm a sucker for Tango remixes too (like the Gotan Project) There's now an Electric Gypsyland 2 too.

The Puppini Sisters (their over-designed home page is here) - Betcha Bottom Dollar. Leslie requested this album. The close-harmony female trio formed, apparently, in response to the Mixed-Meters approved soundtrack to the animated movie Triplets of Belleville Hopefully in the future there will be other, more interesting, versions of I Will Survive done in the style of the Andrews Sisters.

Trance Fusion - a guitar solo only album by Frank Zappa that puts the Shut Up series to shame. (The uber-over-designed Zappa.com Trance Fusion page is here.)

Two discs of music by Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) - my brief investigation into reasons why composers are forgotten. Here's a Rued Langgaard website. I decided I needed to hear some of this Danish composers works when I read that the fourth phase of his creative career was entitled "Obstinacy and absurdity" Okay, I'm in.

Speaking of Danish composers. Here's a trenchant quote from a recent post by Roboflutist, a real working musician:

"Our audience wouldn't like the Nielsen. So which Mozart will you be playing?"

Okay, I'm way off topic now. Leave a comment if you think you discern a common thread among all this. Or if you really want to know which tiny little bit of the Camille album started it all.


Album Tags: Camille. . . Cardiacs. . . Ben Singleton. . . Marc Blitzstein. . . Cradle Will Rock. . . Electric Gypsyland. . . Gotan Project. . . Trance Fusion. . . Frank Zappa. . . Puppini Sisters. . . Triplets of Belleville. . . Rued Langgaard. . . Roboflutist. . . John Cage

30 Second Spots - In America Everyone Is A Great Artist

You will make more sense of this post if you first refer back to In Which David Listens to Two Radio Stations Alternately. Pay special attention to the comment by Alex Shapiro.

Oh heck, here's what she wrote (in purple):

The demise of L.A.'s commercial classical radio station has presented a new and thrilling opportunity for your radio game:
Schoenberg/Willie Nelson mash-ups.
Or, Bartok/LeAnn Rimes.
Maybe, Brahms/Charlie Pride....?
I think it's time to open your ears to a NEW kind of stereo effect...

By now Alex should know better than to offer any opportunity (no matter how slight) to serve as my muse. Apparently she didn't learn her lesson from her previous tangle with Mixed Meters. Check out and listen to this post entitled The On and Off Topic Blues for Alex in which you can hear the music I created to avoid attending a composers' forum.

By the way, Alex seems to have disappeared from the paradise known as Malibu. Rumor has it she's been banished to a gulag on a remote island in the far northwest of the country because of her moderate behavior. I trust there is an abundance of classical radio and contemporary performance there. Maybe she'll get time off for good behavior. Her blog is about music derived from seaweed. Check it out.


In America Everyone Is A Great Artist is a combination of two types of music I don’t like – 12-tone Music and Country Music. It combines the classically country themes of faithless lovers, big honkin' eighteen wheelers, serialism and the quest for tenure into an annoyingly saccharine comment on every American baby-boomer's birthright: our entitlement to creatively express our identical sheltered experiences repetitively in the hopes of expanding our 15 minutes of fame into a vast fortune.

In America I can take two kinds of music I don’t like and combine them into one piece you don’t like. Is this a great country, or what?

mog.com

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In America Everyone Is A Great Artist is one minute and 33 seconds long. It is copyright (c) 2007 by David Ocker.

P.S. I'm trying this new little embedded mp3 player from the website MOG where I have established yet another David Ocker blog. I just can't resist when they're free. I hope both my readers will leave a comment on how well this works. Please? Purty Please?

P.P.S. The picture of the Maverick cigarette box has two tenuous musical relevances. One is MTT's excellent American Maverick radio series. The other is a country band called The Mavericks, with whose music Leslie lovingly tormented me in the early years of our marriage.

P.P.P.S. My radio station game survives between KUSC (the classical classical station) and KJAZZ (the classical jazz station). The results aren't great as often as they were between two classical classical stations, but it sure beats listening to KKGO (the country classical station).

P.P.P.P.S. If you hate my recurrent bit about "both my readers", please leave the third comment to this post.

Great Country or What Tags: Classical Radio. . . Country Radio. . . KKGO. . . KUSC. . . KJZZ. . . Alex Shapiro. . . American Mavericks. . . The Mavericks. . . Maverick cigarettes. . . American quality. . . Meet Your Muse. . . 30 Second Spots. . . David Ocker

Mingus Epitaph

Think of a U.S. President approaching the end of his second term, worrying about his "legacy". There's little he can do to change people's memory of how he screwed up his first 6 years.


In the same way it's dangerous for a composer to write his own musical epitaph; any attempts to suggest how people ought to remember you will simply be accused of self interest.

Some composers, disappointed in their accomplishments, console themselves that they'll be resurrected, Bach-like, to great acclaim 50 years hence. Other composers, unwilling to face reality, delude themselves, Schoenberg-like, that they alone know the future. No wonder composers can be so bitter.

Suppose a composer, accutely aware of his own mortality, writes a huge, complex piece fully expecting no one will hear it until after he dies. And he tells people "I wrote it for my tombstone." And then he doesn't even finish it.

But wait. What if he's not just pissing his ego into the wind? Suppose he really is a great composer and as time passes people steadily value his music more and more. What then should we think of his own attempt to define our memories of him when there are plenty of excellent reasons to remember him anyway.

These were some of my contorted thoughts as I returned home from a rare performance of Charles Mingus' Epitaph. Yep, he named his own epitaph "Epitaph" and he described it as a symphony, although it's way beyond that.


Wednesday night Epitaph was performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall by 31 musicians, all funereally attired except for one trombonist, and conducted by Gunther Schuller. Schuller is to be commended for helping rescue Epitaph from oblivion and making it performable.
Read about this production of Epitaph here.
More about its previous history is here.

Schuller talked too much. During his first speech someone in the audience shouted "Just Play It" only to be shushed. They should have shushed Gunther instead, his commentary was longwinded and patronizing. He told us that we probably wouldn't like all of it. That's true for me - I find the opening movement curiously off-putting.

Someone asked me about the recording of the previous performances and I said "It shouldn't be your first Mingus album" - that's true but the wrong thing to say to someone who, as it turned out, already had several.


Afterwards a friend suggested that what Epitaph needs is an editor. There's just too much of it. Mingus didn't put the final polish on it. Others should feel free to sort the components into shorter, more accessible formats. Call it an "Epitaph set" (for jazzers) or an "Epitaph suite" (for the classically minded).

Either way, it will never be performed much because it requires such formidable resources - double jazz band with little added amenities like oboe, english horn, bassoon, contrabass clarinet, timpani. (The improvised bassoon solo is one of my favorite spots - played excellently with multiphonic enhancement by Michael Rabinowitz. But if they could amplify the pianos why couldn't they amplify the bassoon just a bit too?)


Finally, I had an epiphany during Epitaph. One of the sections is a well known, up-tempo Mingus tune called Better Git It In Your Soul. It was performed by a small ensemble like the ones Mingus himself led; Schuller didn't conduct that section.

During this famous, high-energy, exciting piece that I've heard countless times before and which is as much of a standard as any Mingus tune, why did I find myself crying like a baby? Tears rolling down my cheeks. No kidding. What the heck was going on here?

Later I hypothesized that I was witnessing the birth of classical music - like a new volcano breaking the surface from below. Mingus' real epitaph, the one WE actually remember him by, is not his complex "I'll prove I'm a serious composer" works. What he will be remembered for are his pieces that people can enjoy and understand immediately. He wrote many pieces like that - and when I heard this one in a fine concert hall constructed especially for the classics (a different sort of classics but still the classics) it felt monumental.

People get to choose which music becomes "classical". They pick music because they want to remember it, share it, learn from it, be friends with it. At that moment I knew Better Git It In Your Soul is a classical piece that belonged in Disney Hall every bit as much as Beethoven. Maybe more.

My previous post on why Mingus is one of my favorite composers is here.

Another Mixed Meters post describing the previous time I cried at a concert.

Six moods of Gunther Schuller:



Addendum from a 1982 letter to Thomas Oboe Lee from Gunther Schuller, posted on the Internet here:

The history of music is rampant with examples of composers who were overrated and over-praised in their time only to be forgotten later and, the reverse of that, neglected composers finally discovered after their time. Then there is the classic difference between a composer's own conception of the validity of his work on the one hand, and his contemporaries' perception of his work...

Young Gunther Schuller Photograph from Encyclopædia Britannica Online Other Gunther pictures from here and here or here and elsewhere. The picture of George "War" Bush came from here.

Tombstone Tags: Charles Mingus. . . Epitaph. . . Mingus Epitaph. . . Gunther Schuller. . . classical music. . . jazz