Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 15

“Die Meistersinger” in Covid Times

Lise Davidsen, Michael Volle, and Klaus Florian Vogt in the Met Meistersinger

Like every lifelong Wagnerite, I regard any opportunity to experience Die Meistersinger as  special. It was my first opera at the Met, in 1962 – and also my most recent, last night. There have been half a dozen other Met Meistersingers in between. I’ve also encountered Die Meistersinger in San Francisco, Bayreuth, and Munich, and at the City Opera (in English).

These performances have varied greatly in certain details, but the sensation of Meistersinger uplift has been a constant. This time felt different: the opera’s central theme – the centrality of the arts in society, in a community of feeling, in a nation’s identity – today seems under siege. And of course there is the pandemic.

Die Meistersinger is an opera that must actually feel communal to register fully. On this occasion, there were swaths of empty seats downstairs, especially for acts one (because many arrived late) and three (or left early). I felt no tingling of expectancy from this scattered crowd. The fellow next to me occasionally examined his watch. The applause was tepid.  Symptoms of indifference? Of unfamiliarity? Post-Covid disorientation?  

The performance started slowly. The orchestra sounded soggy. Walther lacked the vocal heft to drive the act one climax. I felt I was witnessing an artifact from another epoch, dutifully mounted for posthumous inspection. 

But act three told. It almost always does. Eva commences an erotic game: claiming that her shoes pinch (they do not), she makes Sachs fondle her foot. When Walther appears, resplendent, the real reason for her visit is disclosed: she stands transfixed. Sachs takes out his jealousy on his hammer and leather: “Always cobbling, that is my lot!” Wagner’s instructions here read: “Eva bursts into a sudden fit of weeping and sinks on Sach’s breast, sobbing and clinging to him. Walther advances and wrings Sachs’s hand. Sachs at last composes himself and tears himself away as if in vexation, so that Eva now rests on Walther’s shoulder.” Sachs is unmollified: he rails against clients who cannot be satisfied, against widowed cobblers being made a sport, against women generally. So Eva takes charge. It was you who awakened me to womanhood, she sings. And if it weren’t for Walther, I’d marry you instead. This strategic lie prods Sachs to a pivotal act of resigned self-understanding: he will never remarry. Seizing the moment, he announces a christening of Walther’s song. The godparents will be himself and Eva, the witnesses David and Magdalena. For good measure, he promotes David from apprentice to journeyman. And he appoints Eva to lead the ceremony. This takes the form of a quintet; the opera’s musical and dramatic apogee, it seals the personal transformation of all five participants. Eva has acquired the mettle of an adult. Walther has honed his unruly genius. David, with whose callowness we are acquainted, will now wed the older, more experienced Lena. And Sachs will remain a widower and an artisan, reconciled to the wisdom of age and the boldness of youth.

I wept. And again at the beginning of the second scene – where there is no cause for weeping. It’s all Nuremberg, celebrating a singing contest: Wagner’s tableau of a wholesome and united civic culture, fortified by music, poetry, and dance. Today: a seeming chimera.

Further impressions? Hans Sachs, Wagner’s shoemaker/philosopher/poet, is both serene and disconsolate, elevated and eruptive. Donald McIntyre, who sang Sachs at the Met in the 1990s, reportedly called him “bi-polar”; and McIntyre memorably clinched this character’s propensity to anger and dark introspection. In the current Met run, Michael Volle – like most Sachses — projects a more uniform benignity. But his range of mood and address remains varied and knit.

Sachs’s two scenes with Eva illustrate in microcosm the human dimension of this miraculous opera. She herself is a miracle: could Mathilde Wesendonck – here in part Wagner’s muse — have possibly married as much sweetness and innocence with so charming a propensity for guile? In Evchen, every morsel of shyness or deference is suspect. In act one, she’s instantly and recklessly in love with Walther. Harboring no illusions about Beckmesser, who will sing for her hand, she proceeds to enlist Sachs’s help with a cunning as natural as it is desperate. Playing on his impractical affection (he is her father’s age), she teases him with the possibility of herself becoming his wife – an exchange in which both know more than they dare acknowledge. The tables turn once Sachs, through feigned innocence, forces Eva to anxiously declare her actual mission: she needs to know how Walther fared earlier in the day. Will he become a mastersinger and hence eligible to wed her? Can Sachs assist?  “For him all is lost,” Sachs replies in provocation. “Mister high and mighty – let him go!” Sachs having thus regained his composure, Eva loses hers. “It stinks of pitch here!” she exclaims and turns on her heel. “I thought so,” Sachs reflects. “Now we must find a way.”

Eva’s act two declaration that “an obedient child speaks only when asked,” and her father’s dim response (“How wise! How good!”), comprise a hilarious cameo of a relationship she surely rules. At the Met, Lise Davidsen’s straightforward delivery of this line summarizes the kind of detail her ingratiating Eva glides past. But her soprano commands a memorably radiant top (she over-balances the quintet) — and she seems a natural actress awaiting further instruction. Georg Zeppenfeld, as Pogner, is an artist of consequence with a voice just large enough for the Met’s over-sized auditorium. Johannes Martin Kranzle, the Beckmesser, fails to elicit sympathy (as the late Hermann Prey did opposite McIntyre’s Sachs); but his, too, is a portrait that tells. As for Klaus Florian Vogt’s underpowered Walther, I was at least grateful for his stamina and diction. Antonio Pappano, who conducts, savors the breadth of Wagner’s score. I appreciated the patience with which he weighted the pauses often prefacing its sublime moments.

If you are searching for a wholly satisfying Meistersinger experience on CD, good luck. The best I know is the 1936 Met broadcast conducted by Artur Bodanzky. Friedrich Schorr is Sachs – his signature part. Elisabeth Rethberg is Eva. The tenor is Rene Maison – an unremembered Belgian who if he materialized today would eclipse all competition in such parts as Walther, Florestan, Lohengrin, and Erik. I also recently sampled, on youtube, a 1949 Munich Meistersinger with the young Hans Hotter as Sachs, Eugen Jochum conducting. The act two Fliedermonolog is something to hear. 

Re-experiencing Die Meistersinger at the Met in challenged times made everything else seem small. It was a good feeling.

Charles Ives’ America

“’Charles Ives’ America’ is very likely the most important film ever made about American music” – JoAnn Falletta, Music Director, The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra

My forthcoming book, Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music (WW Norton, Nov. 25) links to six documentary films. 

Of these, “Charles Ives’ America” attempts a landmark feat of advocacy. It argues that Ives not only deserves to be situated at the center of American classical music, but that he should become as generally well-known and esteemed as such American icons as Herman Melville and Walt Whitman.

The film strives to overcome the notion that Ives is esoteric — not readily approachable. It approaches Ives through his words and music, and also the Civil War, the Transcendentalists, and his Connecticut porch.

My collaborator Peter Bogdanoff has rendered such music as “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” and “The Alcotts” (both included in their entirety) with spellbinding visual panache. For “The ‘St. Gaudens’ in Boston Common” he has done more than that: in combination with James Sinclair’s inspired commentary, Peter has taken the most elusive of Ives’s signature compositions and fashioned a visual rendering that will electrify first-time listeners.

If any music seals Ives’ pertinence today, it is this 1911 “Black March” memorializing Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s Black Civil War regiment as famously depicted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Boston Common bas-relief, with its proud Black faces and striding Black bodies. As I write in Dvorak’s Prophecy, “Ives’s ghost-dirge is suffused with weary echoes of Civil War songs, plantation songs, minstrel songs: a fog of memory, a dream distillation whose hypnotic tread and consecrating ‘Amen’ close celebrate an act of stoic fortitude.”

In addition to Peter Bogdanoff and Jim Sinclair, my collaborators on the Ives film include the music historians Peter Burkholder and Judith Tick and two peerless Ives performers: the pianist Steven Mayer and the baritone William Sharp (accompanied by Paul Sanchez).   

Information on all six films is posted here and here.

Arts Myopia

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Here’s my piece in today’s “American Purpose,” Jeff Gedmin’s daily online magazine which valuably charts a centrist position not only with regard to government and politics, but also pays due attention to the arts.

The condition of the arts in the United States has never been more chaotic or confusing. The pandemic revealed – if such revelation was necessary – a general indifference to “saving our cultural institutions.” This priority was swiftly heeded in Europe with respect to orchestras, opera houses, theaters, and museums. Meanwhile, a new emphasis on social justice either buttresses our institutions of culture or maims them. 

One thing is certain: More than ever, the arts need money. But from whom, and for what purpose? The traditional American model is laissez-faire: private sources, including corporate and foundation gifts. But private giving to arts and learning after the fashion of Carnegie, Mellon, Frick, and Rockefeller is not practiced by Gates or Bezos. The big charitable foundations, meanwhile, are no longer arts-focused. To understand this sea change, just watch, if you can, Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd. The European model of robust government arts subsidies is one obvious fix, but there is no political will to repeat anything like FDR’s WPA, with its ambitious arts and literacy projects.

The current stress on diversity and inclusivity, however warranted, endangers or distorts a cultural canon that we cannot (in fact, must not) wholly jettison. Indeed, the canon is newly pertinent. Think, for instance, of how Herman Melville, Charles Ives, and William Faulkner reference the African-American experience in words and music. Melville’s Benito Cereno, about a Black slave rebellion at sea; Ives’ “The St. Gaudens in Boston Common,” conjuring the stoic heroism of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s Black Civil War regiment; Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, in which Black servants humanize and instruct a dysfunctional white dynasty, and Light in August, about a man who cannot tell whether he is Black or white– these are not instruments of social reform. Rather, they inexhaustibly ponder American racial inequities. If they are part of a common cultural inheritance that we must claim and refresh, they’re also incorrigibly elitist – not for everyone. What is worse, if you’re woke, Ives quotes Stephen Foster songs once sung in blackface. Faulkner’s personal take on segregation – which, as revealed in Michael Gorra’s exemplary The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, does not diminish his fiction – was a product of its time. Melville’s lineage in Moby-Dick honors William Shakespeare, king of the white cultural patriarchs.

Enter Ask the Experts, by Michael Sy Uy. This new book, by an assistant dean of Harvard College, explores “How Ford, Rockefeller, and the NEA” (the National Endowment for the Arts) “Changed American Music.” The book’s central argument – that a “tight social network” has favored the advisory expertise and musical compositions of white males linked to “elite” and “prestigious” institutions, mainly in the northeastern United States – is both credible and unsurprising. Moreover, the book says, a disproportionate amount of money has gone to orchestras and opera companies to the detriment of folk and indigenous music, not to mention jazz.

Scouring public and private reports, Uy has amassed a detailed narrative spanning the years 1953 to 1976, an “explosive” period of arts and music funding. Ford’s music grants grew from zero to $3.4 million by 1974, with a peak of $81 million in 1966. Rockefeller’s music grants peaked at $7.8 million in 1957. NEA music grants rose to $25.1 million in 1977.

The Rockefeller Foundation prioritized university music centers that espoused serialism and other “advanced” non-tonal styles — what Winthrop Sargent, in The New Yorker, caustically dubbed “foundation music.” This music’s scientific patina resonated with the Rockefeller ethos. It was male and modern, insular and self-perpetuating. To Cold Warriors, including some in the CIA, it signified artistic freedom in contrast to lockstep Soviet Socialist Realism – in retrospect, a risible claim because serialism exerted its own tyranny. Uy names names: Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Lukas Foss, and Milton Babbitt repeatedly appear as Rockfeller “experts.” “It is “difficult not to pause and note,” Uy writes, “the gender and racial background of these ‘wise men’ who essentially served as gatekeepers.” He adds that “by ‘the arts,’ what the Rockefeller Foundation . . . had in mind were the high arts of the Western European tradition, and those located primarily in New York.”

The Ford Foundation, in comparison, was a bastion of traditional practice. Its experts were “not only non-practitioners but also conservative advocates of the status quo.” Ford’s signature arts initiative was its 1966 Symphony Orchestra Program: $80.2 million ($626 million today) gifted to 61 American orchestras in 33 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. This was the brainchild of McNeil Lowry, Ford’s activist arts and humanities head. He called the gift an “unprecedented act of philanthropy in the artistic and cultural life of a nation,” one that would help “the most universally established of cultural institutions.” A Ford annual report called it the “largest single amount ever given to the arts by any foundation.” Uy reports that Lowry was “initially concerned that federal entry into the arts field,” via the NEA, would “take away publicity from his own . . . program.” Uy also observes that “no one challenged the ‘universality’ of orchestras as a basic historical fact.”

The NEA itself, founded in 1965, was more egalitarian. Its “large and comprehensive system of panelists,” Uy writes, represented a “different approach to employing experts.” Its most proactive leader, Nancy Hanks, was a woman. Her music chief, Walter Anderson, was “the most powerful African American in government arts grant making.” Still, the NEA overwhelmingly favored “Western European high art organizations.“ Jazz and folk music constituted “only a fraction of its overall budget.”

Observing the grant-making process up close, Uy also documents an assortment of inevitable vagaries and inequities. What mattered was not only who sat on the panel but who happened to be in the room, since attendance could be erratic. And it mattered whether an application was reviewed when the panel was fresh or tired. Amid the mountain of statistics Uy has culled, notably impressive is the “Top Ten Foundation Recipients in Music, 2006-2015.” The Metropolitan Opera placed first, with $176.3 million from 2,059 grants. The Metropolitan Opera Association placed third, with $88.4 million from 1,327 grants. (The New York Philharmonic, by comparison, landed $67.6 million from 1,380 grants.) “One cannot emphasize enough,” Uy says, “the magnitudes of disparity. The Metropolitan Opera alone received more than six times what went to all folk and indigenous music groups combined.” He adds that donations from individuals whose household incomes were greater than $1 million exceeded foundation giving to arts and culture. It was all “profoundly undemocratic.”

Is Uy’s critique just? Finger-waving at Rockefeller and “foundation music” ignores what it felt like to engage with “contemporary music” in the 1960s. Tonal music was not respectable; to imply that Rockefeller could have somehow defied all conventional wisdom seems naïve. Also, Uy underrates Rockefeller’s Recorded Anthology of American Music, which made available the first recorded performances of historically important works by composers like Anthony Philipp Heinrich and Arthur Farwell under the supervision of music historians who knew something about Heinrich and Farwell. I wish that Uy had more to say about Rockefeller’s critique of Ford’s “deliberate rejection of academia as a vehicle for arts development in the United States:” In stark contrast to the museum community, the orchestras so lavishly supported by Ford made no attempt at liaison with scholars. This is one reason why orchestras failed to curate the American musical past, a defect – the topic of my forthcoming book, Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music – that mattered then and matters even more today. Classical music in the United States remains chronically Eurocentric; it lacks New World roots.

If the drift of Uy’s critique – that music funding was undemocratic and elitist – is undebatable, it leaves more important questions undebated. Do we still need a canon? If so, what should be included, what left out? Beethoven is an elite composer and opera an elite art form, but I cannot think of a more therapeutic art work right now than Fidelio. And what is Fidelio? The vast majority of educated people under the age of 30 probably cannot say. Are the arts therefore “dying?” Or, as I am told by members of the foundation community, are they newly “thriving,” empowered by a communal ethos that does not discriminate by gender, race, or class?

Orchestras are the elephant in the room. No other institutional embodiment of American culture has fallen so far or seems so clueless today. Here, the Ford Foundation is also an elephant. According to Uy, its massive Symphony Orchestra Program supported the status quo – but not really, I would say. Rather, the story resembles one of those foreign policy disasters in which good intentions ignite unanticipated consequences. One starting point for McNeil Lowry’s grand initiative was his accurate perception that symphonic musicians were grossly underpaid. Another was his thought that orchestras should, for the first time, offer full seasons of concerts and employment. These goals seemed to conjoin. By 1970-71, six orchestras had agreed to 52-week contracts; another five had contracts of 45 weeks or more. The new frequency of performance, however, was not audience-driven. True, many symphony musicians had now attained a respectable living wage for the first time – but at a hidden cost. Performing as many as 150 times a year, orchestras scrambled to devise concerts for which no listeners existed. Their budgets, including rapidly expanding departments devoted to marketing and development, mushroomed. There was also an artistic cost: fatigue and boredom. In retrospect, the musicians should have been paid more per service, not paid for more services.

The Ford Foundation was surprised and disappointed to see expanding orchestral deficits notwithstanding their largesse. Paradoxically, it became harder than ever for orchestras to “innovate.” For this failure they were duly punished: Foundations grew increasingly reluctant to help out. In the 1990s, when I was running the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra at BAM, the BPO was accepted into the Knight Foundation’s “Magic of Music” program, created to support artistic experimentation. We were truly experimental – our programing was thematic and cross-disciplinary – but other orchestras in the group were not. Knight responded by terminating “The Magic of Music.” Today, the only major charitable foundation funding artistic innovation in the symphonic field is Mellon.

Orchestras are mainly to blame for these troubles. By and large, they have failed to rethink the concert experience, failed to explore native repertoire, failed to revisit issues of purpose and scope. But foundations are not blameless. Knight’s “The Magic of Music” failed to engage informed consultants. Susan Feder, Mellon’s long-time arts and culture program officer, is an exception; when she arrived in 2007, she shrewdly discriminated between recipients who were coasting and those with something on the ball.

In sum, orchestras have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment, with its changing audience demographics and shifting political, social, and arts mores. It will not be enough to simply engage more Black instrumentalists, soloists, and composers. 

The story I have just told about Ford, Knight, and Mellon will not be found in Ask the Experts. Rather, Michael Sy Uy’s book is captive to the myopia of a precarious cultural moment, one that we today – all of us – mutually inhabit.

On the State of the Arts Today: An Emergency

Nicolas Bejarano Isaza is a young trumpeter, born in Colombia, living in LA. He specializes in new music. He also hosts a podcast: The Arts Salon.

I had the pleasure of meeting Nicolas via the trombonist David Taylor, aptly described in the New York Times as a “killer” virtuoso. Nicolas is no killer – but his cultural base and depth of inquiry are exceptional among young musicians today. He interviewed me for 90 minutes and 22 seconds – and if you have 90 minutes and 22 seconds, you won’t find our conversation boring.

The topic is the state of the arts today: an emergency.  

BURIED TREASURE: Farwell’s Forbidden “Hako” Quartet — Take Two

My most recent blog was yet another plea that the music of Arthur Farwell – America’s most important cancelled concert composer – become known. I posted the world premiere recording of Farwell’s amazing Hako String Quartet. In response, I have received an amazing comment from Curt Cacioppo. Since it’s buried in the comments section of my blog, I’m reposting it here so that it has a blog of its own.

Cacioppo himself is a formidable American composer. A substantial portion of his output absorbs his profound knowledge of Native American music and ritual. Before he retired from Haverford, he annually taught a course titled “Social Justice: Native American Music and Belief” — a cause he has long and widely championed.

When I call Farwell “cancelled,” perhaps I should produce a little evidence. There’s a lot of it in my forthcoming book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music, in which I call Farwell “America’s Forbidden Composer.” Here, for instance, is one case in point, as cited in Dvorak’s Prophecy:

“It is indeed ‘a tricky thing’ to advocate for Farwell today. One of the challenges is enlisting Native American participants. For [PostClassical Ensemble’s 2019 ‘Native American Inspirations’ Festival in D.C.], I unsuccessfully attempted to engage Native American scholars and musicians from as far away as Texas, New Mexico, and California. My greatest disappointment was the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, which declined to partner the festival [on the grounds that Farwell’s music, featured alongside other works by Native and non-Native composers, lacked “authenticity”] even though it presented in concert the South Dakota Symphony’s Lakota Music Project, brought to Washington at the invitation of PostClassical Ensemble.” 

And here is Curt Cacioppo’s stirring commentary:

“America is a country unexcelled in neglecting its composers. So marginal is the value placed on the arts in general that Saul Bellow said, ‘It is sheer madness to want to make art in America.’ In the case of Farwell, even the visibility he achieved in his lifetime was due almost entirely to his personal dynamism rather than external approbation or appraisal. Though he is now reviled and lumped together with supremacist agents of white patriarchy, his ethical stance as an artist and citizen made him heretic among mainstream contemporaries. In that context, it could be argued that he assumed the role of a critical race theorist a century or more before the present trend. Aside from American indifference to the arts, questioning Manifest Destiny and ‘the insatiable progress of our race,’ as James Carleton had phrased it, echoing instead such sentiments as those expressed by Edward Wynkoop, who came to view Indians as ‘superior beings,’ certainly did not serve Farwell as a formula for recognition. (General Carleton, along with Kit Carson, led the seizure of Navajo lands in the mid-1860’s; Major Wynkoop, who experienced a reversal of opinion regarding Indians, was writing about his encounter with Cheyenne representatives during the same period). Heir to a rapacious mindset that heard Sunday school teachers imparting to their youngsters indigenophobic rhymes, such as ‘Kill them all, big and small – nits make lice!, Farwell should be credited for his model defense against the genocidal norm.

“Farwell acts out his humanitarian feelings most consequentially in his HAKO quartet. Compositionally his pinnacle achievement, it rises to capstone importance as the first major stride taken in American string quartet writing, both for its scope and its integrative processes. About 50 years ago I discovered the HAKO ceremony of the Pawnee, Farwell’s source of inspiration, and have returned to study of it periodically ever since. Only very recently did I become acquainted with Farwell’s quartet, thanks to the efforts of Joe Horowitz, although I had been well aware of other examples of his work previously. Before anything else, I have to say that without having fully explored the source material, one misses the majority of what Farwell has attained here, or contrariwise how he may have strayed. The transcription of the ceremony has been library accessible for 120 years. Hardcover came out 10 years ago for under $30, paperback under $15. You can read it on Kindle for less than $10.

“Bravi to Joe, the Dakota String Quartet, and all who made this premiere recording of Farwell’s HAKO possible! The work is unique in so many ways. The risk that Farwell takes in stretching the single, sustained movement form to almost twice the duration of earlier one movement sonatas by Scriabin and Berg, for example, is in itself daring, especially considering the new music attention span of 1923. That aspect, if the listener stays with it, in itself can be engrossing. And the rhetorical pattern that Farwell establishes, drawn directly from the liturgical structure of the ceremony, of intimation answered by revelation, easily could elicit a sense of rapture. How the sonata scheme applies is another matter entirely, better reserved for a graduate theory seminar (my analysis reveals a binary structure or double exposition without an enclosed development section…).”

BURIED TREASURE: Arthur Farwell’s “Hako” — Will String Quartets Have the Courage to Perform It?

In the world of classical music, it sometimes happens that a major work lies dormant, undiscovered and unperformed, for a very long time. Consider the case of The Trojans, today known as a peak achievement in Romantic opera. Berlioz finished composing it in 1858. The first complete performance took place in 1890. Not until Colin Davis championed and recorded The Trojans in the 1960s did it become widely recognized as something more than an intriguing anomaly. 

In the world of American classical music, Charles Ives is the champion composer of buried treasure. The most famous belated Ives discoveries were John Kirkpatrick’s 1938 Town Hall performance of the Concord Sonata (today extolled as the summit of the American keyboard repertoire) and Leonard Bernstein’s premiere of the Symphony No. 2 (arguably the most iconic American symphony) with the New York Philharmonic in 1951. Ives finished the Concord Sonata around 1915. He finished his Second Symphony in 1901. 

Right now, it’s finally become inevitable that William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony, premiered by Leopold Stokowski in 1934, will become known as a galvanizing achievement in American symphonic music. Incredibly, our major orchestras still haven’t gotten around to it – but they will. (Angel Gil-Ordonez will lead PostClassical Ensemble in the DC premiere this coming March.)

And then there is Arthur Farwell’s Hako String Quartet of 1922. A new Naxos CD, produced by PostClassical Ensemble and scheduled for release next month, features the world premiere recording – which just had its broadcast premiere via David Osenberg’s always enterprising WWFM Classical Network as a new installment in WWFM’s “PostClassical” series.  The terrific performance is by the Dakota String Quartet – principal string players of Delta David Gier’s remarkable South Dakota Symphony. Go to 12:50 of Part II here.

The Naxos CD is entitled: “Arthur Farwell – America’ s Neglected Composer.” In my forthcoming book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music,” I write about Farwell extensively as “America’s Forbidden Composer.” As I remark in my spoken introduction to the WWFM broadcast: neglected or forbidden, Farwell isn’t played for reasons political, not musical. As the leader of our Indianist movement in music, he’s today condemned as a cultural appropriator.

I have discussed Farwell extensively in this space. What was he trying to do? He believed it was a democratic obligation of Americans of European descent to try to understand the indigenous Americans they displaced and oppressed – to preserve something of their civilization; to find a path toward reconciliation. His Indianist compositions attempt to mediate between Native American ritual and the Western concert tradition. Like Bartok in Transylvania, like Stravinsky in rural Russia, he endeavored to fashion a concert idiom that would paradoxically project the integrity of unvarnished vernacular dance and song. He aspired to capture specific musical characteristics – but also something additional, something ineffable and elemental, “religious and legendary.” He called it – a phrase belonging to another time and place – “race spirit.”

As for the Hako – I do not know of a more engrossing string quartet by an American.  I write in the program notes for the new Naxos release: 

The twenty-minute Hako String Quartet is the longest of Farwell’s Indianist compositions and the only one traditionally structured. A one-movement sonata form, it marks a pivot toward the chamber works (none of them Indianist) he would subsequently write. The point of inspiration is the Hako ceremony of the Great Plains tribes of the Pawnee Nation, a celebration of the symbolic union of Father and Son to maintain peace and fertility in the cosmos. Although at various moments the players are asked to evoke the woodpecker (to favor the storm gods) and the owl (guardian of the night), and although Native American tunes are quoted, the quartet is at the same time a subjective personal response to an Indian ceremony. It strives to honor and convey the “great mystery . . . to which refreshing source American life is leading us back form the artificialities and technicalities which have latterly beset European culture.” To the performers of the Hako Quartet Farwell wrote: “Certain things must be brought to the interpretation before it has even a chance of proving itself. E.g., the immensely reverential spirit of the Indian in general, and his immense dignity, and the unction with which each syllable is taken in his singing.” 

The Hako Quartet claims no authenticity. Rather, it documents the composer’s enthralled subjective response to a gripping Native American ritual. It is Arthur Farwell’s rapture that is here “authentic.” 

Musically, the Hako cannot be written off. Will today’s string quartets possess the enterprise and courage to perform it? 

Copland and Joe McCarthy on NPR – a “Surreal Experience”

“Aaron Copland and the Spirit of Labor Day” – the radio documentary I was delighted to produce for the enterprising NPR newsmagazine “1A” – is archived here.

I received a wonderfully bristling response from Steve Robinson, who for more than a decade ran WFMT/Chicago when it was (by far) the best classical-music radio station in the US. Steve writes:

“The Copland program was entertaining, informative and, if I can use a word that fell out of favor in public radio decades ago, educational.  Listening to this one-hour special on a nationally syndicated news program was a surreal experience and took me back to my early days in public radio (late ’60’s…) when stations weren’t afraid to air documentary programs about classical music that were challenging and thought provoking. I had thought those days were gone forever.” 

I share Steve’s admiration for Rupert Allman, who produces “1A” and proposed that the complex – and timely, and controversial – Copland odyssey be allocated a full 50-minute slot. 

The show narrates in considerable detail Copland’s adventures on the political left – and the price he paid: a 1953 interrogation by Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn, which we re-enacted.

I was expertly partnered by Peter Bogdanoff, with whom I have created six documentary films – including “Aaron Copland: American Populist” – that Naxos will release in November in tandem with my new book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music.

Here’s a listener’s guide to the radio show:

PART ONE:

1:40: “Into the Streets May First,” Copland’s prize-winning 1934 workers’ song (a possible radio premiere)

4:30: Copland’s advice to “participants in revolutionary activity” interested in producing “a good mass song” as “a powerful weapon in the class struggle.”

5:33: Copland addresses a Communist picnic in Minnesota, talking to farmers as “one Red to another.”

8:00: Backlash: the Red Scare and “a resulting climate of fear and intolerance, of division and polarization, of futility of dialogue and informed discussion” – all “pertinent today.”

PART TWO:

14:05: Copland’s Piano Variations (1930) – a modernist “wake-up call,” a “new American sound”

16:00: In Mexico, Copland finds himself “a little envious” of artists and musicians who inform the fate and identity of a nation, versus “working in a vacuum” in the US.

17:25: In search of “new musical audiences,” Copland fashions a style “for both us and them” – and takes it to Hollywood, where Erich Korngold’s musical upholsteries sound Viennese.

20:35: A trial run for Hollywood – Copland composes his best film score, today the most important Copland score we don’t know: The City (1939). It embodies a new American sound for the cinema – and also a manifesto on the left, propaganda for an activist government. We audition four excerpts, narrated and conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez with PostClassical Ensemble.

PART THREE:

34:07: Historian Joseph McCartin on the collision courses charted by Copland and McCarthy

35:50: Copland’s interrogation by Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn. Asked if he has ever been a “Communist sympathizer,” or has attended “a Communist meeting of any kind,” he wriggles as best he can.

40:15: Closing a circle, abandoning the “new audience” he once courted, Copland laboriously fashions a valedictory Piano Fantasy (1957) returning to the dissonant idiom of the Piano Variations he composed nearly three decades before. With commentary by pianist Benjamin Pasternack, who ultimately finds Copland the man inscrutable.

43:48: The Copland story as a parable about the fate of the artist in American culture and society – a “synthetic populist,” he’s both “iconic and marginal,” residing “both inside and outside the American experience.” I tell an eyewitness story about Copland being disrespected by the New York Philharmonic (1980) and contrast that with the manner in which Benjamin Britten was esteemed in Great Britain. Notwithstanding Copland’s influence and celebrity, his aspiration that he and his fellow American composers might shape the cultural affairs of a nation – as Carlos Chavez and Diego Rivera could in Mexico – remained unrealized.  

My parting shot (48:40): America’s artists have been allotted “an insufficient role.” My forthcoming Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music argues a failure to identify a “usable past.” “We absolutely need to connect with our past. In general, as Americans, we have short memories. And right now if we cannot claim and refresh a common cultural inheritance, we’ll be in trouble as a nation.”

Joe McCarthy Grills Aaron Copland: “As your Communist Party record is extremely long . . . “

“As your Communist Party record is extremely long, I think counsel [i.e., Roy Cohn] will want to ask you some questions. . . . Those who underestimate the work the staff has done in the past end up occasionally before a Grand Jury.”

–Senator Joseph McCarthy, addressing Aaron Copland (May 26, 1953)

This chilling audio re-enactment, with Edward Gero as McCarthy, is an excerpt from “Aaron Copland: American Populist,” a 45-minute NPR documentary to be broadcast as a Labor Day Special this Monday at 10 am ET via the newsmagazine “1A.”

The show derives from a Copland documentary I produced for PostClassical Ensemble – one of six documentary films exploring topics in American music, all of which Naxos will release this Fall in tandem with the publication of my book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music. 

Pressed by McCarthy, Copland denied ever attending “a Communist meeting.” But in fact he was deeply engaged by the Popular Front in the 1930s, even addressing a Communist picnic in Minnesota. His excruciating encounter with the Red Scare broaches topics urgently pertinent today: the suppression of free expression and open-minded dialogue (both on the left and the right); the marginalization of the arts in American culture and society.

My own mantra (as expressed at the end of the Copland broadcast) is that “Americans must claim and refresh a common cultural inheritance – or we are in trouble as a nation.” 

Joe McCarthy Grills Aaron Copland: “As your Communist Part record is extremely long . . . “

“As your Communist Party record is extremely long, I think counsel [i.e., Roy Cohn] will want to ask you some questions. . . . Those who underestimate the work the staff has done in the past end up occasionally before a Grand Jury.”

–Senator Joseph McCarthy, addressing Aaron Copland (May 26, 1953)

This chilling audio re-enactment, with Edward Gero as McCarthy, is an excerpt from “Aaron Copland: American Populist,” a 45-minute NPR documentary to be broadcast as a Labor Day Special this Monday at 10 am ET via the newsmagazine “1A.”

The show derives from a Copland documentary I produced for PostClassical Ensemble – one of six documentary films exploring topics in American music, all of which Naxos will release this Fall in tandem with the publication of my book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music. 

Pressed by McCarthy, Copland denied ever attending “a Communist meeting.” But in fact he was deeply engaged by the Popular Front in the 1930s, even addressing a Communist picnic in Minnesota. His excruciating encounter with the Red Scare broaches topics urgently pertinent today: the suppression of free expression and open-minded dialogue (both on the left and the right); the marginalization of the arts in American culture and society.

My own mantra (as expressed at the end of the Copland broadcast) is that “Americans must claim and refresh a common cultural inheritance – or we are in trouble as a nation.” 

Toradze’s Piano Stories — Take Two

My recent posting of Behrouz Jamali’s extraordinary film about Alexander Toradze produced a couple of comments so extraordinary that I’m re-posting them here.

The first is from David Bondy, an attorney who was once in artists’ management:

I too have been mesmerized by Toradze’s recording of the Prokofiev 2. The first movement unfolds like no one else’s. Others who tackle this work grab it as though it will slip through their hands if they give it any room to breathe. Toradze suspends time at the start, which requires absolute concentration and confidence that the listener will stick with him. I remember the first time I heard the recording. It was as though it were a different piece but so much more nourishing than the typical interpretation — thought-provoking and deeply felt. It has become hard to hear this work otherwise.

I agree with you about authenticity. Anyone who argues that an interpretation must reflect that of the composer’s wishes (assuming we could ever know them) must explain why we need further performances of Rachmaninoff’s concerti when we have his extraordinary recordings of them. If we play them anyway, is it “authentic” to copy precisely what Rachmaninoff did? And if you don’t copy what he did, are you playing authentically? When you consider the problem, you realize how ridiculous it quickly becomes.

Lastly, Ella and Oscar. What a wonderful story. I hope Mr. Toradze knows that there are Americans — at least a few — who revere these great artists as much as he does. I understand they mean something different to him than they can to me, growing up here where they were part of my cultural inheritance. But life would be dramatically less rich without their work, as it would be without Mr. Toradze’s.

And here’s the second comment, from the pianist Steven Mayer:

I have encountered Alexander Toradze at several key moments in my own career, including at the 1977 Van Cliburn Competition (Toradze didn’t win, but the controversy he created did for him what Martha Argerich and not winning did for Ivo Pogorelich in 1980 in Warsaw), his debut with the L.A. Phil in Ravel’s G Major Concerto (I was a prof at UCLA then, and just happened by the symphony that evening), and a fun recital at which both of us played as part of Ilana Vared’s Rutgers Summerfest.

Behrouz Jamali’s brilliant documentary captures the essence of Toradze.

Lili Kraus once compared Toradze’s talent to the force created by the splitting of an atom. I would add that, 44 years later, a certain poise, perspective and wisdom place Toradze uniquely on a perch, seemingly without peers.

Watch how skillfully Horowitz leads Toradze into intimate reminiscence — of touring the States with his personal K.G.B. agent by his side, refusing to play the next gig because Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson would be missed in a live concert, and so much more.

And listen to Toradze as he plays Prokofiev — before it’s placed in the next space capsule for extra-terrestrial interception.