Testimony - Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich

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.

(Here's some music, Shostakovich's last string quartet, to listen to while you read.)

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  He says the composer refused to allow tape recordings and insisted that it not be published until after his death.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.

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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.

Other tangentially related Mixed Meters articles:
Aspics of Shostakovich - Dmitri Shostakovich, Johnny Green and things floating in jello
Schoenberg in Hell - Schoenberg's demeaning final years
Stravinsky, On the Cover - another Time magazine cover of a composer
Ten Most Influential Classical Composers - actually eleven, according to me
Suppose Wagner Had Been a Nazi

Testimony Tags: Dmitri Shostakovich. . . Solomon Volkov. . . Testimony

The Squirrel in Mike and Lynn's Aviary

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.

The Squirrel In Mike and Lynn's Aviary  © 2011 David Ocker 138 seconds

Detritivore Tags: reefer. . . Laughing Eel. . . Mike Boom. . . Lynn Morton

Bernie Madoff's Golden Parachute

Bernie Madoff's Golden Parachute is a piece of my music.  You don't have to read about it.  Just click here to listen to Bernie Madoff's Golden Parachute right now.

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.

Listen to Bernie Madoff's Golden Parachute © 2011 David Ocker - 149 seconds

Here's a WSJ article about what Bernie's life is like in prison.  He is Inmate No. 61727-054 at Butner Federal Prison

There are many variations of the Faust legend - not just operas. Read more about them here.

Madoff Tags: Bernie Madoff. . . white collar crime. . . Faust

30 Second Spot - Tuesday's More Modern Than Monday

Click here to listen Tuesday's More Modern Than Monday

© April 24, 2011 David Ocker - 45 Seconds

Modern Tuesday Tags: 30+Second+Spots. . . David Ocker. . . microtones

Skyping With Tom Brodhead

Here is a short video with my music featuring my friend Tom Brodhead.

© 2011 David Ocker - 141 seconds

Last month Leslie and I had a conversation with Tom via Skype. Tom introduced us to his new cat Charlie. The talk lasted nearly an hour. For 8 minutes or so I used the point'n'shoot in my pocket to take some still pictures of Tom's image on the screen.  Charlie made himself scarce while I was taking the pictures.

People who know Tom will recognize that his personality is a combination of high intelligence and high intensity, sometimes perilously so. He uses his hands when he talks and has an expressive face.  All of this means that he makes a good photo subject. I thought the pictures were pretty interesting - if not always in good focus.

Later, while I was wondering what to do with them, I read a hint which makes it easy to import a group of still shots into my video editing software.

Suddenly, an idea was born: I would create a video. compose music for it and entitle it Skyping with Tom Brodhead because that's what we were doing.  Each still is accompanied by music in a different tempo.  The result is wacky - but not that wacky. It's hard to tap your foot to it.

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Tom appeared in a previous Mixed Meters post: The Best Thing About Led Zeppelin. The Best Thing About Led Zeppelin is another piece of mine. Tom suggested the title accidentally.

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My desk has appeared in this previous video: Desktop Stilllife

Skyping Tags: Tom Brodhead. . . video. . . desktop

Oily Sheen

Some of the video shots which I make with the "point-n-shoot in my pocket" just demand to have music added to them.  This is one of those.

It was a rainy day in Pasadena.  I was walking along Lake Avenue where I encountered a large puddle at the entrance to a super market parking lot.  The puddle had formed because of a stopped-up drain.  On the water's surface there was a little oil from which light reflected.

As I filmed,  a car passed through the puddle and then someone walked right in front of my camera.  The car created waves which are what the piece is really about, I guess.  I edited the person's legs out completely.

Oily Sheen © 2011 David Ocker - 139 seconds

One of my previous video pieces was filmed on the same block, across the street. Here's that one as well:

(Sometimes I Feel Like A) Newspaper In Traffic © 2010 David Ocker - 99 seconds (click the title to see the original post)


Another Mixed Meters "oil and water" reference is my "piano" piece entitled Oil and Water Mix. No video there, just music.  That piece is 666 seconds long.

Oily Tags: Oily Sheen. . . water video. . . oil and water

Eli Broad: Masterpieces, Money and Monuments

Here's a quote I read a long time ago in a musician's union newspaper.  To me it seemed obviously true.

Play for the masses, eat with the classes.  Play for the classes, eat with the masses.

In other words, a musician who creates for an elite audience (the classes) should not expect to get rich.  But a musician with millions of listeners (the masses) could earn a lot of money.  Here's a list of the 10 richest musicians.  (Number one was a Beatle once, number two is a Country and Western star.)

These days even the richest musician doesn't have a Billion Dollars.  Few creative types accumulate that much wealth - J.K. Rowling just barely makes the billionaire list.  George Lucas and Steven Spielberg qualify.  (Here's a list of ALL the world's billionaires.)

A fundamental tenant of capitalism is that the people with the talent and passion for making money are allowed to gather as much of it as they can.  Once they have it, they're free to do anything they want with it.  Some choose to support arts institutions.  Museums (a category which includes orchestras and opera companies), even the ones nominally supported by public money, would perish without big chunks of private cash from people with money to burn.  Nothing new here.  This has been going on since the invention of rich people.  Top down funding of the arts is a fact of life.

Here in Los Angeles, one name dominates art philanthropy - Eli Broad.  In his career he has made not one but two piles of money, first in real estate and then in finance.  He's number 173 on that list of the world's richest humans.  These days Eli spends his time giving his money away in the realms of science and education as well as art.

Many Los Angeles arts institutions have gratefully endured the sting of Eli Broad's money.  Here's a New York Times interactive map showing locations of his munificence in L.A.

• He gave millions to rescue MOCA.  
• He was instrumental in getting Disney Hall built.   
• His dollars seeded the now largely forgotten L.A. Opera Ring cycle and festival.  
• He donated money for a building at LACMA which is named after him.
• He funded a performance space in Santa Monica which is also named after him.   
• The ultimate Broad art museum is planned for Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles.  

Last year the New York Times described Eli Broad:

Every American city has its power brokers, but only Los Angeles has an Eli Broad. Mr. Broad dominates the arts here with a force that has no parallel in any major city. Los Angeles would literally not look the same had Mr. Broad not chosen it as his home 40 years ago, and his business-focused method of managing his giving has earned him a reputation as both a genius and a despot.

Recently the Los Angeles Times published an interview with Eli Broad in which he discussed his art patronage.  Here's the opening paragraph:

Eli Broad is not known for being effusive, not even when talking about one of his greatest passions: collecting contemporary art. The billionaire philanthropist generally seems more comfortable talking about museum buildings than about the artworks that go inside them.

Since the arts community in Los Angeles will undoubtedly feel the effect of Eli Broad's money for generations to come, I feel like it's a good idea to pay some heed to what he talks about.  (Remember, at Mixed Meters quotes are always in purple.  All the following quotes in this post are directly from Eli Broad.) 

His stated motivations for collecting art and building museums surprise me.  I guess I expected him to mouth nostrums about the transformative power of art or pablum about making great art accessible to everyone.  I couldn't find anything like that, although it's doubtful he would actually disagree with such common wisdom.  Instead he talks a lot about hanging out with artists. Here's a quote from an interview with Charlie Rose:

I enjoy contemporary art because it's the art of our times.  I love the artists.  I find it invigorating to spend time with artists.  They have a different view of society than most business people do.

The next three quotes are from the Times article.  

My first career was in public accounting, ... so if I look at a spreadsheet I understand it quickly.  Numbers are hard and fast.  But it's a very different process looking at a work of art or visiting with an artist.  It's hard to explain your emotions when you see a work of art.

The reliance on numbers makes me wonder why Eli doesn't seem to have much interest in contemporary music - which, of course, is also "the art of our times".  Music is constructed largely out of numbers - rhythms, intervals, scales are all reducible to numbers.  But understanding a spreadsheet (i.e. money) and understanding a symphony (i.e. art) require different forms of perception.   I also wonder whether he finds it invigorating to hang out with composers.

He's clearly a practical man.  When asked how much he has spent on his art collection, he replied:

I don't know the exact number, whether it's $200 or $400 million, but it's probably closer to the latter.  If you ask me what it's worth, I've heard numbers that approach $2 billion, which blows my mind because I'm seeing all that happens then is that our insurance costs go up.

By any measure, he's a great success.  Here's how he described what it means to be a "successful" collector:

If I had to do it over again, I would buy some of the great work that I saw people like David Geffen buy several years ago for what I thought was an awful lot of money - like the Johns 'Target' he had.  I was too disciplined then.  I didn't have the money. ... Well, I had the money, but I wasn't prepared to spend $10 million for a great painting. ... To be a successful bidder means you're willing to pay more than anyone else in the world.  I don't know if I would call that a success.

This L.A. Times article gave impressions of what Eli Broad's vision for art in Los Angeles really is.  Clearly it involves two things: the actual monetary value of the objects which he has acquired combined with placing those objects on display for others to envy and enjoy.  The fact that these valuable objects of art might be culturally meaningful in some non-monetary sense, if indeed they are, doesn't seem terribly important to him. 

Eli Broad has used his money to serve the community of Los Angeles according to this vision.  Los Angeles ought to honor him in some way for that service.  In olden days great men, generally war heroes, were honored with statues astride a horse.  These days government doesn't have money to commission statues - even if there were artists who could recognizably execute such a piece.  Instead of art, governments have resorted to renaming streets or intersections after deserving gentlemen.  Los Angeles could honor Eli Broad by renaming Broadway, all twenty-some miles of it, after him.  It wouldn't cost a penny.  We would just start pronouncing the street name differently.

But great men of contemporary Los Angeles, those with sinful quantities of money, want more than a street name.  They want art museums with their names attached.  These days hardly anyone would remember Norton Simon, Armand Hammer, J. Paul Getty or Henry Huntington were it not for their eponymous galleries.  Decades hence who will remember Eli Broad except as just another one of those old rich guys who could afford to buy himself an art museum?

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Here's an article listing other living billionaires who own their own art museums.

Here's an L.A.Times article about similarities between Norton Simon and Eli Broad.

Here's a timeline of art history - mostly museums - in Los Angeles, 1927-1999.  It contains this fascinating tidbit:  

1951 The Los Angeles City Council decrees that modern art is Communist propaganda and bans its public display, but the ordinance has little effect.

A related MM post about art collecting: Our Culture Overvalues the Wrong Things

Related MM posts about rich people:

• House and Wooster and Income Disparity
• Prostitution, Obscenity and California Politics
• In Which Wealth Has Its Privileges

The one previous MM reference to Eli Broad which also mentions monuments.

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Here's a tribute to Eli Broad which I found on YouTube.  It's a music video which features a singing Eli Broad lookalike.  There are no credits or any indication of exactly what the reasons for this particular encomium for Mr. Broad might be.  The tune is hackneyed and repetitive but still somewhat Randy Newman-esque.  Watch for yourself.

Here's a Flickr page with still shots from this production.

There are other related videos: an invite to Eli's birthday party and a behind the scenes video from same:

Enjoy.


Broad Tags: Eli Broad. . . art collectors. . . art museums. . . monuments

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.

---

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