Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 17

February 2, 2021

A “Unique Addition” to the Whitman Repertoire

When PostClassical Ensemble undertook our world premiere recording of the 1944 radio play Whitman, we did so in the conviction that Bernard Herrmann’s score was a Whitman setting of such distinction that the result was more than a radio play. Rather, we had stumbled upon a sngular addition to the symphonic repertoire of “melodramas” – compositions for music plus the spoken word.

The latest (and longest) review of our new CD, by Jack Sullivan, agrees. Sullivan’s opinion matters here, because he is the author of important books dealing with Herrmann (Hithcock’s Music) and Whitman (New World Symphonies) both.

Writing in Classical Voice North America, he says:

Whitman is a ‘big discovery’ fully worth of resurrection as a concert work . . . a unique addition to a huge, ever-growing body of Whitman settings, from the high Victorianism of Hubert Parry during Whitman’s lifetime to the bluesy hipness of Leonard Bernstein in the mid-20thcentury. . . .

“The flexibility of Whitman’s rhythm, the intimacy of his first-person voice, and the universality of his content have always been a draw for composers even though he was once denounced as profoundly unmusical (a ‘ninth-rate poet,’ in the words of Ezra Pound). Whitman assumed his connection to music to be self-evident. He was an opera critic for the Brooklyn Eagle before he was a poet, and his poems are packed with musical references . . . He regarded music as the ‘truest,’ most organic, and most inspiring art.”

As Sullivan also observes, “Whitman looks forward to a reaffirmation of American ideals in the wake of Fascism, a world where ‘tyrants tremble’ rather than bully.” Whitman’s present-day relevance, preaching an inclusive America, is scarcely less apparent – and was a core topic in the PCE’s More than Music film Beyond “Psycho” The Musical Genius of Bernard Herrmann.

Not the least gratifying aspect of Sullivan’s review is its American provenance. So little classical-music journalism remains in the US that it was a foregone conclusion that our all-American CD – celebrating Herrmann, Whitman, and the radio drama writer/producer Norman Corwin – would mainly be reviewed abroad. And so it has been. Particularly gratifying was this encomium from Scherzo, Spain’s leading classical-music magazine: “Each new album by PostClassical Ensemble and its director, Ángel Gil-Ordóñez, is both a surprise and a discovery. The deserved result of investigating beyond the predictable. And this new album of theirs is not an exception, but the joyful confirmation of that.”

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Published on February 02, 2021 20:04

January 8, 2021

Aaron Copland: “One Red to Another”

“If they were a strange sight to me, I was no less of a one to them. It was the first time that many of them had seen an ‘intellectual.’ I was being gradually drawn, you see, into the political struggle with the peasantry! I wish you could have seen them – the true Third Estate, the very material that makes revolution. It’s one thing to think revolution, or talk about it to one’s friends, but to preach it from the streets — OUT LOUD – well, I made my speech and I’ll probably never be the same! Now, when we go to town, there are friendly nod from sympathizers, and farmers come up and talk as one red to another. I’ll be sorry to leave here with the thought of probably never seeing them again.” 





That’s Aaron Copland in 1934, reflecting upon addressing a Communist picnic in Minnesota – “one red to another.” Here he is on the topic of “workers’ songs”:





“Every participant in revolutionary activity knows from his own experience that a good mass song is a powerful weapon in the class struggle. It creates solidarity and inspires action.  Those of us who wish to see music play its part in the workers struggle for a new world order owe a vote of thanks to the Composers Collective for making an auspicious start in the right direction.”





You can hear Copland (vividly re-enacted by Frank Candelaria) talk about his experiences on the far left in PostClassical Ensemble’s latest More than Music film: “Aaron Copland – American Populist.” The film also includes a rare performance of Copland’s prize-winning workers’ song “Into the Streets, May First,” with its call “Up with the sickle and the hammer!”





And Candelaria and Edward Gero re-enact the 1953 fall-out from these activities: Copland’s grilling by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who says:  





“May I give you some advice. You have a lawyer here. There are witnesses who come before this committee and often indulge in the assumption that they can avoid giving us the facts.  Those who underestimate the work the staff has done in the past end up occasionally before a grand jury for perjury, so I  suggest when counsel questions you about these matters that you  tell the truth or take advantage of the Fifth Amendment.”





It’s all eerily pertinent today, this saga of an iconic American composer jostled by Populist currents on the far left, then the far right – and finally retreating from the fray. Our film includes the participation of a couple of distinguished American historians: Michael Kazin (on Populism) and Joseph McCartin (on the Red Scare). It also incorporates extensive excerpts from PCE’s Naxos DVD of The City(1939) – Copland’s highest achievement as a film composer, and the least known consequential music that he composed. 





Ultimately, I suggest, Copland somewhat resembles “a cork in a stream,” buffeted by political and social currents – a saga that raises many questions, including: What is the fate of the arts in the United States? 





Here’s an index to our 75-minute film, memorably “visualized” by Peter Bogdanoff:





10:14 – Copland on that Communist picnic





11:48 – Copland on workers’ songs





12:34 – “Into the Streets, May First” sung by Lisa Vroman and William Sharp





16:37 – Copland on Hollywood film music (with some Korngold to listen to)





20:00 – Excerpts from The City





39:20 – Joseph McCartin on the Red Scare





44:34 – Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn grill Copland





58:25 – Music historian Beth Levy on Copland’s quest for musical identity





1:04:32 – Michael Kazin on Copland and the Popular Front





1:06:30 – My summing up — a “cork in a stream” – with comparisons to Charles Ives and George Gershwin: composers with deeper roots





1:12:54 – The last word goes to pianist Benjamin Pasternack, recalling an illuminating meeting with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood. 

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Published on January 08, 2021 10:20

December 29, 2020

“An Act of Empathy” — a Dvorak Radio Documentary





When PostClassical Ensemble produced an hour-long film about Dvorak and “the American experience of race” last September, we hardly envisioned turning it into a 45-minute public radio special for the holidays. But that’s what happened, thanks to an invitation from Rupert Allman, who produces the nationally distributed radio magazine “1A.” You can hear, it and read about it, here.





Jenn White, the 1A host, begins: 





“Hip Hop, Jazz, Pop – whatever the genre, music has the power to move us – and teach us something else about our own history and our place in it. Over the decades one narrative has formed around an iconic piece of classical music – a symphony that’s been described as introducing American music to itself.”





What follows is a sustained exploration of the “racial” content of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, with interpolated musical excerpts.





I summarize:





“If the New World Symphony remains the most beloved symphony composed on American soil, I think that’s because in the sadness and poignance of this work we recognize, however subliminally, an act of empathy –- Dvorak’s empathy for the African-American, born in slavery, and for the Native American, facing extinction.”





I add:





“But there’s an elephant in the room – ‘cultural appropriation.’ It’s a term we hear a lot nowadays. And it’s pertinent because Dvorak – a Czech by birth – is obviously borrowing from traditions not his own.” That is: he draws inspiration from the sorrow songs of slaves, and – via Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha – from Native America. There follows a terrific commentary by the eminent African-American bass-baritone Kevin Deas, whom we hear singing “Goin’ Home,” and also “Steal Away” in the imperishable arrangement by Dvorak’s one-time New York assistant Harry Burleigh. 





The other music we audition is taken from the Hiawatha Melodrama – the 35-minute composition for narrator and orchestra I created with the music historian Michael Beckerman – as recorded on PCE’s singular Naxos CD “Dvorak and America.” Premiered by Angel Gil-Ordonez and PCE in 2013, our Melodrama has been widely performed by American orchestras – and was also named one of the best CDs of the year by Minnesota Public Radio. 





In addition to Angel, Kevin, and myself, the participants in our radio show (which I produced with Peter Bogdanoff, who so ingeniously adds visual content to our PCE films) include Melissa Constantin, a Howard University biology major who delivers a memorable performance of Harry Burleigh’s “Wade in the Water.” The music historian Mark Clague talks about the urgency of a cultural and educational response to the murder of George Floyd. Finally – as in our film – JoAnn Falletta delivers the last word, embracing Dvorak as a “great humanitarian,” testifying to his “authenticity and honesty,” his “capacity to grow in a foreign country” – “an astonishing example to us today.”

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Published on December 29, 2020 17:46

December 22, 2020

The Erasure of the Arts

Upswing



This week’s The American Purpose carries another of my essays on the erasure of the arts from the American experience – how it happened and what to do about it. It’s a sequel to my piece in the current American Scholar on the impact of the pandemic on culture.





My new piece takes the form of a response to The Upswing, the important new book co-authored by the sociologist Robert Putnam (who also wrote Bowling Alone) on the disappearance of “social capital.” It’s another way at looking at today’s fragmentation of American life. 





I write: 





To me the most salient feature of The Upswing, the most surprising and disappointing, is incidental. In their consideration of how Americans bond or don’t, [the authors] fail to consider novels and poems, concerts and plays, paintings and sculpture. Beethoven preached universal brotherhood with overwhelming eloquence. Cold War cultural diplomacy discovered the healing commonality of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. But there are no symphonies or concertos in The Upswing. . . . 





In fact, I have the uncomfortable feeling that The Upswingmay partly be a symptom of the shortcomings it observes. And it is not alone. Another recent study of the American experience of wide importance is Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States. It’s a marvelous read, entertaining, informative, provocative, elegantly turned – and yet wholly omits the arts. Could an 800-page, one-volume history of Germany do without Goethe or Beethoven? Could the history of Italy be told without Michelangelo and Verdi? Britain without Shakespeare? Spain without Cervantes? And yet Lepore’s emphasis on the Black experience, so welcome and overdue, omits any reference to Black music; jazz and the Harlem Renaissance, Ellington and Armstrong, Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson are all silent. Absent, as well, are Whitman and Longfellow, Moby Dickand The Sound and the Fury, Huck Finn and Rhapsody in Blue, Hollywood and Broadway.





Is this perhaps a phenomenon of the left, rejecting “patriarchal” high culture? Apparently not. Ben Sasse’s Them: Why We Hate Each Other – and How to Heal, by a Republican senator with an impressive intellectual bent, plausibly opines: “The problem is that our ever more ferocious political tribalism and mutual hatred don’t originate in politics, so politics isn’t going to heal them.” Adducing the same torn fabric as Putnam and Garrett, he blames the digital age. He laments the diminishing pertinence of friends, church, and community. But I happen to be a stranger to Senator Sasse’s world of church and picnics. I worry that religion may be as much a divisive as a binding factor in America’s map of red versus blue. When I think about fostering a lost “sense of place,” I think about shared American identity via shared history and culture (as did Willa Cather, whose formative frontier experiences in Senator Sasse’s Nebraska included the Lieder and operas of German immigrants). 





And now there is the pandemic to drive it all home. In European nations, “save our cultural institutions” is widely regarded as a necessary cause. In the US, the same cry is not heard. What is going on? Were the arts always a negligible component of the New World experience, insufficiently cultivated? Or did they become negligible? Are we as a nation simply too young to dig deep expressive roots? Too diverse? Too much crippled by our original sins of slavery and the Indian Wars? Is any of that pertinent to bowling alone?

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Published on December 22, 2020 09:22

December 8, 2020

FDR, Radio, and What’s Wrong Today

The Fireside Chats: Roosevelt’s Radio Talks - Photo 4



“I can recall walking eastward on the Chicago Midway on a summer evening. . . . Under [the elms] drivers had pulled over, parking bumper to bumper, and turned on their radios to hear Roosevelt. They had rolled down the windows and opened the car doors. Everywhere the same voice, in old Eastern accent, which in anyone else would have irritated Midwesterners. You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by. You felt joined to these unknown drivers, men and women smoking their cigarettes in silence, not so much considering the President’s words as affirming the rightness of his tone and taking assurance from it. You had some sense of the weight of trouble that made them so attentive and the ponderable effect, the one common element (Roosevelt), on which so many knowns could agree.” 





Thus Saul Bellow, in 1983, remembering one of FDR’s fireside chats. The radio, at the time, was the first and only medium of instant mass communication. It centralized the American experience to the same degree that Americans – and the justly reviled “media” — are fractured today.





During the Depression, during World War II, FDR and radio bonded; he was even, as Murray Horwitz remarks in a recent American Purpose zoom chat (posted above) “the biggest star of old-time radio.” 





Another pair of stars were Norman Corwin, with Orson Welles the king of radio drama, and Bernard Herrmann, who working with Corwin and Welles both was the supreme radio composer; this was a seedbed for the supreme Hollywood scores Herrmann composed for Welles and Alfred Hitchcock.





When Corwin and Herrmann created their 1941 salute to the Bill of Rights, “We Hold These Truths,” the listening audience totaled 63 million – nearly half the American population. These were families gathered in the living room, not people cooking or eating or texting. 





Three years later, Corwin and Herrmann created another classic World War II radio drama: “Whitman.” As readers of this blog know, a new Naxos CD features PostClassical Ensemble in the world premiere recording. We’ve also produced a film– “Beyond Psycho: The Musical Genius of Bernard Herrmann.” The American Purpose zoom chat was a sequel to all that, focusing on a pair of urgent topics: What do Whitman’s ideals of democracy say to us today? What can we learn from radio’s early decades as we struggle to piece the United States back together? The result was a memorable hour-long conversation, led by the historian Richard Aldous, which gathered force as different voices weighed in.





What follows is a kind of listener’s guide:





Setting the table, the Whitman scholar Karen Karbinier observed that America’s “pre-Civil War angst was very similar to what we feel right now.” It provoked Whitman’s “efforts to unite Americans” and also governed Corwin’s ingenious selections from Whitman’s poems in fashioning a patriotic paean magically inflected by Herrmann’s orchestra.





Murray Horwitz, who knows a lot about radio past and present, began: “We’ve lost something – with consequences for democracy in America.” FDR’s radio chats “made Americans feel they were one nation.” “Broadcasting,” Murray continued, is a term borrowed from agriculture: “Early radio people saw themselves as cultivators, bringing American values up from the grassroots to be unified at the top.” Today we have “narrowcasting – instead of “e pluribus unum,” one out of many, ever narrower shards of demographics.”





Aldous, a native of Britain, opined that “the BBC still has that kind of punch-through ability to speak pretty much to the nation.”  





This got me started on a story I tell in detail in Understanding Toscanini– how the specter of an “American BBC” was defeated by CBS’s William Paley and NBC’s David Sarnoff. Their strategy was visionary: to implement programing so intellectually and artistically ambitious as to make the BBC model superfluous. These high ideals translated into the contributions of Corwin, Herrmann, and Welles – and also Herrmann’s CBS Symphony, which championed Ives and brought in Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Bartok as studio guests; Sarnoff’s NBC Symphony under Toscanini, and a plethora a kindred initiatives leading, in early TV days, to the NBC Opera and Leonard Bernstein’s music lessons. All of that ended long ago, and NPR and PBS proved no substitute. (Compare the hand-crafted radio and TV productions of Corwin or Bernstein to “Live from Lincoln Center.”)





I further observed: “We have no capacity now, even hypothetically, to bring the nation together or to experience culture as we once knew it, as a bonding agent: to seizing what had been our cultural roots” – “and the arts, if you haven’t noticed, are being erased from the American experience.” 





And yet, Richard Aldous pointed out, “Whitman seems to retain a very broad resonance.” Karen Karbinier took up this thread, opining “we are hopefully going ‘in and out’ . . . “a rejuvenation of the arts” could happen.





Not so fast, I replied with sinister glee. “I don’t feel comforted. I wish I did.” I added that nearly every review of our Herrmann/Whitman CD, celebrating iconic American masters, was published abroad. “Sad to say,” confirmed Angel Gil-Ordonez, who conducted the music, “the most profound analyses come from Europe, that’s a reality.” 





Then Angel said this: “I’m a son of the generation of the Civil War in Spain. Walt Whitman – in the middle of a civil war he’s trying to unite everybody. That was not the case in Spain. A civil war – that’s the worst thing that can happen to a country. It’s frightening that something that happened to a country over a century ago is still alive. In Spain it’s also the case.”





But Aldous persisted that, from the perspective of a historian of the US born and raised abroad, America and its institutions are notably “resilient.” He invoked de Tocquville. He then invited Murray to comment on “patriotic” cable news services that aspire to “speak to the nation.” Murray would have none of that: “Hogwash – I think it’s all commercial. You make more money by dividing the American people.”





The stage was set for William Sharp, who eloquently recites Whitman on the radio drama recording. “Whitman asks who we are, who do we think we are, who are we really? When I learn and interpret what Whitman said, I find it inspirational, but also aspirational. ‘This is what I believe we are’ – but read between the lines: ‘This is what we should be, what we want to be. It isnt’ what we are.’ And that’s painfully clear.”





Bill added that, as a teacher at the Peabody Institute, he has students that “live in a world that is very different from mine. But those people give me hope.”





My parting sally: Jill Lepore’s bracing new 800-page history of the US, These Truths, contains not a single sentence about the arts. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Aloneand The Upswing, both of which analyze a crisis in diminished “social capital,” do not look to the arts as a bonding agent. (I embellish these observations in a forthcoming essay for The American Purpose.)





Angel had the last word: “Everybody loves music. It’s the arts on which we need to be focused right now.” 

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Published on December 08, 2020 22:08

December 7, 2020

The Pandemic and the Arts: A “Climate of Fear” and “Radical Upheaval”

The current American Scholar includes my 8,000-word essay on the impact of the pandemic on the arts in the US. It seems to me a terribly important topic — please find time to read the whole thing.





Here’s a readers’ guide:





I begin by contrasting the European rush to “rescue our cultural institutions” to an eerie American silence. I write: “Why is no one in Congress or the White House talking about protecting vital cultural interests, echoing discussions abroad? For three centuries, Americans regarded Europeans as cultural parents; we would emulate, learn, and grow. Where does that relationship stand today? Are we still growing up? Reverting to infancy? Opting out?”





I note that the pandemic, which has already devastated employment in the arts, also exacerbates a new, ongoing crisis within the arts sector, arising from the propulsion of social justice priorities:





“Its most vivid public manifestation, as of this writing, is ‘We See You, White American Theater,’ a coalition whose twenty-nine page manifesto, released last July, was signed by 300 artists, and then thousands more online. ‘We See You’ calls more than half of Broadway’s theaters to be renamed after artists of color, for term limits for theater leaders, for more than half the actors, writers, directors, and designers employed by theaters to be persons of color ‘for the foreseeable future.’ 





“No one disputes the urgent need for redress. But this new, peremptory tone has instilled a climate of fear unknown in the arts since the Red Scare of the 1950s. An actress in a prominent company says: ‘We are performing plays right now that would never have even been considered before – badly written, poorly conceived. And if you speak up, you’re denounced and shunned – within the company.’





“A leading figure in a prominent political-theater company says, ‘We are in a moment of radical upheaval, of destabilization, of internal warfare and re-alignment, accelerated by the stress of the pandemic. We all know we can’t go back to the way things were. But that doesn’t mean we should burn everything down.’ . . . 





“The issue becomes one of means. In classical music, new priorities have impelled a disorganized scramble to perform works by Black composers. . . . An informed effort to curate the entirety of American symphonic music, prioritizing ‘Black classical music,’ is here an overdue antidote.”





(I have pondered why classical music in the US “stayed white” in a previous American Scholar essay.)





Another “pre-existing condition,” afflicting orchestras, is “a labor-management schism between musicians and administrators that impedes new roles orchestras could explore to expand their civic footprint.” . . .





“The strategic response, to date, has too often been reductionist: diminishing the percentage of white faces on stage, in the office, and in the audience more attacks a symptom than a cause. While undeniably pertinent – they can be a necessary first step — quota-based remedies risk myopia.”





I here propose the South Dakota Symphony as “the American orchestra that has most dramatically succeeded in championing social justice” – and consider the reasons why.





A big chunk of my piece is devoted to remembering how the federal government poured money into the arts during the Depression and the Cold War – in many respects, emergencies comparable to the Covid epidemic. That will not happen again. And yet: “No one disputes the outcome of Cold War cultural diplomacy. It worked. It ameliorated tensions between two great states – and at a cost miniscule in comparison with expenditures on defense and intelligence during the same period. If the arts, backed by government, proved healing during the Cold War, what might be surmised about their possible role in today’s fraught and fractured United States?” 





I cite the views of half a dozen others, including the historian Allen Guelzo, who points out: “As late as 1870, Boston had 250,000 people and 50,000 horses. Yet we had surprisingly deep levels of cultural cohesion: Lincoln could quote Shakespeare, Byron, and the Federalist, people sat up to wee hours in remote farmsteads debating free will and determinism. The century between 1870 and 1970 transformed the world as no other century has, and all in the direction of ease, safety, and comfort. We no longer haul fifty gallons of water from the pump to wash and drink; we no longer chop cords of wood to heat ourselves; we no longer regard a trip of twenty-file miles as equivalent to an entire day’s journey; we have no need of our neighbors. In other words, we live in a fairy-tale world of instant supply at the click of a mouse; we live in a phony milieu where our chief pleasure is denigration. If it’s too much to get off our sofas, it will be too much to listen to Beethoven. In fact,culture is now understood to be a political weapon, and any attempt to speak of it with any authority is set down at once as a gesture of dominance. We are on the verge of suggesting, in the name of social justice, that orchestras staff themselves by quota. Now is a time to rethink.”





I write in conclusion: 





“The pandemic is a diagnostic – and discloses a self-critical, self-confrontational United States that feels newly inchoate. We no longer hug a common cultural pantheon: [Henry Wadsworth]  Longfellow and [Frederic] Church are irrelevant; [Frederick] Douglass and [W. E. B.] Du Bois remain in a waiting room (and the formidable, formidably wronged Crazy Horse in a lobby). We are at work fashioning a national cultural inheritance that fits our needs and hopes today.





“Compared to nations abroad, we are not even secure in asserting that culture matters. In this fragile moment, Covid will be a catalyst or obstacle whose impact on government and politics, on the environment and the economy is already undergoing relentless scrutiny. At the very least, culture must become part of this conversation. Perhaps we can hope for more and allow culture to help us find the way.”





***





My article had just gone to press when Ari Roth announced his resignation as artistic director of DC’s cross-cultural Mosaic Theater Company, which he founded in 2014. His ouster was forced by complaints of “white supremacist behavior.” In October (over Roth’s objections), the Mosaic had posted a response to the “We See You” demands reading in part:





“We have programmed without consistent cultural competency, leading to harm of audience members and artists. . . . We have been complacent in validating a siloed and singular leadership style based on the comfort of routine. We have upheld white leadership to the detriment of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and People of Color] artistry and expertise.”





In a detailed letter of resignation, Roth wrote of “theaters that have been trying to become a truer reflection of their diverse communities”: “How do we manifest a new Anti-Racist ethos meant to disrupt and reduce harm, while not abandoning foundational commitments to the value of IDEA [Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility] that have been achieved, with palpable significance, and have created much more good than harm? Can a conjoining of paradigms be made without disqualifying, or fatally denigrating, the work (and workers) have have come before, and that remain the binding agents in our crucial, multi-racial alliances and common cause?”









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Published on December 07, 2020 09:00

October 15, 2020

Bernard Herrmann’s “Whitman” — A Subversive Yet Inspirational Entertainment for Today

In 1944, Bernard Herrmann collaborated with the producer Norman Corwin on “Whitman,” a half-hour dramatic presentation invoking America’s iconic poet to rally the home front during World War II. It was heard by millions of listeners. It’s a classic exemplar of a forgotten creative genre: the radio drama. 





The clip at the top of this column samples a moment of hypnotic eloquence: Herrmann’s treatment of Whitman’s famous meditation on the graveyard grass – witness to Civil War dead, young and old. This derives not from the original broadcast, with Charles Laughton, but from a new PostClassical Ensemble Naxos CD, featuring William Sharp as Whitman and PCE eloquently conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez. The remarkable visual treatment, by Peter Bogdanoff, derives from PCE’s latest “More than Music” film: “Beyond Psycho– The Musical Genius of Bernard Herrmann.”





Here is the entire film, which features commentary by Angel and myself — plus Whitman scholar Karen Karbiener, Murray Horwitz on radio drama, Dorothy Herrmann on first seeing Psycho with “Daddy,” and Alex Ross on Herrmann’s insufficiently appreciated legacy. 





Here is more on the CD, which also features terrific performances of Herrmann’s Clarinet Quintet (my favorite chamber work by any American) and his Psycho Narrative for string orchestra (not to be confused with the better-known, and far inferior, Psycho Suite) – a portrait of Herrmann “in the round.” As readers of this blog may recall, I consider Herrmann the most under-rated 20thcentury American composer. Here is something Alex Ross says in our film:





“Bernard Herrmann was absolutely one of the most original 20th-century composers of any country. I’m very happy that this CD is expanding our sense of Herrmann’s achievement, bringing a little known score to light . . . What strikes me about this combination of Herrmann pieces is that the emotional range is huge. It’s a very great talent that’s on display here, one that we’re very far from appreciating and celebrating in full.” 





Here is something Murray Horwitz says in our film:





“In 1944, radio was IT – the first instant mass medium. Corwin’s radio dramas reached as many as 60 million listeners – that’s nearly half the American population. . . . This confluence of fine art and a mass medium is something we’ve lost today.” 





And here, from the film, is Bill Sharp:





“When I hear Whitman’s words illuminated by Herrmann’s music, I really find it quite overwhelming. It speaks to us today on so many levels – when you hear ‘The President and all the government are here for you, not the other way around.’ . . . It’s just incredibly beautiful. I think that for modern audiences and presenters, it could be a magically wonderful thing to hear, very different from what audiences expect.”





And, finally, here is Walt Whitman, supported by Bernard Herrmann, extolling American democracy, “a teeming nation of nations” – words that today sound both inspirational and  subversive:

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Published on October 15, 2020 09:35

October 6, 2020

“Nothing Left to Lose” — My First Orchestra Job, etc.

I was delighted today to join my friend Donato Cabrera for his latest “MusicWise” youtube show. We talked about Dvorak and Revueltas, about PostClassical Ensemble’s More than Music” films – and about my own professional odyssey, which I traced back to feeling “disillusioned” and “betrayed” as a young New York Times music critic in the 1970s. 





After that, as I told Donato, I wrote Understanding Toscanini “as an act of therapy.” At the end of that once notorious book, I identified Harvey Lichtenstein’s Brooklyn Academy of Music as a place with a hungry and sophisticated audience – a place where classical music might be renewed. Harvey took me out to lunch and informed that the Brooklyn Philharmonic, in residence at BAM, had lost over two-third of its subscribers in two years. Would I be interested in taking over? I said yes – providing I could do what I wanted. And what is it you want? Harvey asked. Having had the experience, at the 92ndStreet Y, of curating cross-disciplinary festival programing, I said that was what I wanted. Harvey said OK – he had nothing left to lose.





So that was how I happened to wind up CEO of the Brooklyn Philharmonic and turned it into a humanities institution with NEH funding (and tripled BPO audiences). Donato wanted to know more and I told him about the origins, at BAM, of my first “Dvorak and America” program, based on recent research by the music historian Michael Beckerman. 





I met Donato when he was assistant conductor of the New Jersey Symphony. This was post-BAM, when Larry Tamburri, the adventurous NJSO CEO (and someone who reads books), entrusted me with an annual winter festival. One such festival was “Dvorak and America.” I then had occasion to meet with some NJSO musicians, including Donato. I inflicted my usual Dvorak quiz, playing a little of the F major Humoresque and asking people to guess the composer. The point of this quiz is that the invariable guess is Gershwin – which proves my point that the American Dvorak sounds “American.” Donato ruined the quiz by becoming the first person ever to correctly guess “Dvorak.” He’s now music director of the California Symphony and the Las Vegas Philharmonic. We’ve collaborated twice in Las Vegas: on “Dvorak and America” and “Copland and Mexico.”





The Copland/Mexico program ignited one of the most memorable post-concert discussions in which I’ve taken part, starting off with a woman raising her hand so eagerly she could not be ignored. “I HATED it!” was what she needed to say. Donato and I were delighted. Forty-five minutes later, when we disbanded, she came to the lip of the stage to talk some more with Roberto Kolb, who had joined us from Mexico City as the world’s leading Revueltas scholar. Others in the audience (as recalled today by Donato) were exceptionally moved to encounter a symphonic program extolling the revolutionary political art — on the far left — of 1930s Mexico.





Our chat is punctuated by some of my favorite excerpts from PCE’s recent “More than Music” films, with their extraordinary visual presentations by Peter Bogdanoff. “Groundbreaking,” says Douglas McLennan of Arts Journal. The next MTM film, on Bernard Herrmann, streams this coming Friday.  Here’s a glimpse: William Sharp on playing “Walt Whitman” for the 1944 radio play “Whitman,” hypnotically scored by Herrmann.









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Published on October 06, 2020 20:18

September 14, 2020

Dvorak and the American Experience of Race — An Antidote to “Checkbox Diversity”

“I know there has been a lot of discussion about how we can make a difference by programing one African-American composition per concert,” says Lorenzo Candelaria, the incoming dean of Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.  





“I call that ‘checkbox diversity.’ What I’ve found to be far more impactful is to take a piece and really live with it for a while, sit with it, talk about it  — contextualized programing. I’d think that would be a far richer experience in the concert hall. I think we’d be a better country for it, because the concert hall is one of the few spaces in which we can all connect together as a community.”





In this excerpt from PostClassical Ensemble’s latest More than Music film, what Candelria is thinking about (at 1:15:11) is Dvorak’s New World Symphony, which he terms “a flashpoint for a broader discussion . . .  transformative music that could be having a lot of impact right now.”





Dvorak’s symphony may not have been the work of a Black composer. But Dvorak embraced the African-American experience to a degree that would be controversial today. He undertook a “Black voice” in his Largo. Even more controversial: he endeavored to embrace the Native American experience via Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. The resulting composition is a minefield for the cultural appropriation police. And yet it remains the most beloved symphony ever composed on American soil.





What accounts for the enduring appeal of the New World Symphony? It’s our awareness, however subliminal, that Dvorak was – as JoAnn Falletta (the admired Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic) so eloquently expounds (at 1:17:45) – “one of the greatest humanitarians.”His symphony surges with compassion for the African-American, victimized by the bitter legacy of enslavement, and for the Native American, in 1893 still facing possible extermination. 





We owe our knowledge of the Dvorak-Longfellow connection mainly to the music historian Michael Beckerman, who more than anyone else has exhaustively explored alignments between Dvorak’s symphony and Longfellow’s poem. What to make of The Song of Hiawatha today? In our film, the literary historian Brian Yothers, in a tour de force of contextualization, tells us what we most need to know in ten minutes. “Was it a worthy model,” he asks, “or something more like fertilizer, the necessary manure out of which something like the New World Symphony could grow, but not particularly valuable in itself?” Yothers’ answer is copious – you can listen to it for yourself (at 33:00).





Central to our film is the Hiawatha Melodrama I co-composed with Beckerman in 2013, with orchestrations by Angel Gil-Ordonez. We here sample our world premiere recording on Naxos (named one of the best CDs of the year by Minnesota Public Radio). Combining the spoken word (verses from Longfellow) with music (passages from the New World Symphony and two other examples of the American Dvorak), the Melodrama makes an indisputable case both for the presence of Hiawatha in Dvorak’s symphony, and the eloquence of Dvorak’s response. It’s been performed, in whole or in part, by more than a dozen orchestras. 





The performers here are Kevin Deas and PostClassical Ensemble, with Angel Gil-Ordonez conducting. You can judge for yourself the caliber of commitment and understanding. For our film, the visual artist Peter Bogdanoff has culled pertinent American paintings and added artwork of his own. I believe that applying visual content to a symphony is in most cases a terrible idea. Here, it’s a logical idea: the cultural vocabulary of Dvorak’s America is reclaimed. JoAnn Falletta testifies (33:00): “As a young conductor, studying Dvorak’s symphonies, they were very Bohemian, coming from the heart of Europe . . . But there’s a completely hidden heart in [the NewWorld Symphony] – and I since I’ve known that I have be never been able to hear [it] in the same way. I hear it in a much richer way, a more sinewy way, a darker way, a more painful way, a way that’s somehow more important and moving.”





Finally, our film investigates the present-day pertinence of Dvorak’s ecumenical vision of the American experience – not least in teaching the story of American music. In fact, our follow-up zoom chat, on September 23, will feature commentary by students at Howard University, who this week are experiencing our film in remote classrooms. You can register for the chat here.The other participants will include Howard faculty members, plus JoAnn Falletta, Lorenzo Candelaria, and Mark Clague from the University of Michigan. Their filmed commentary was so rich I did not have room for all of it. 





Here (below) is another story told by Candelaria, which ended up on the cutting room floor. It’s about failing to persuade a major charitable foundation to support touring a program of African-American spirituals (with Kevin Deas) to unincorporated Mexican-American colonias in West Texas. This attempt to forge “pathways to higher education through music” was received as “culturally insensitive.” “I was told, ‘You’re trying to take African-American music into a largely Hispanic community.’ I was floored. We’ve stopped talking about the broader human story that anyone can tell.” The human stories told by the New World Symphony are truly inexhaustible.















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Published on September 14, 2020 08:42

September 12, 2020

On “Wagnerism” by Alex Ross

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In this weekend’s “Wall Street Journal” I review Alex Ross’s important new book “Wagnerism.” I write in part:





Great works of art are so powerfully imagined that their intent and expression mold to changing human circumstances. But the operas of Richard Wagner are arguably unique in this regard: No other creative genius in the Western canon so unerringly holds up a mirror to time and place. . . . Thomas Mann’s claim that Wagner “was probably the greatest talent in the entire history of art” cannot be dismissed as hyperbole.





Alex Ross’s “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music” takes up Wagner’s protean impact with unprecedented scope. In other writers’ accounts, Wagnerism ends with World War I in Europe and America and, slightly later, in Soviet Russia . . .  But in Mr. Ross’s wide-ranging chronicle, Wagner’s influence outside the world of music keeps on going . . . No previous writer has so copiously chronicled the sheer ubiquity of Wagner in important novels, poems and paintings. The result is an indispensable work of cultural history, offering both a comprehensive resource and a bravura narrative.





While the existing Wagner literature is vast and defies generalization, the best-known studies range from passionate advocacy to equally impassioned denunciation. Mr. Ross, who came late to Wagner, is a centrist—a circumspect, at times even diffident, Wagnerite. He writes: “The behemoth whispers a different secret in each listener’s ear.” Mr. Ross . . . is able to become many listeners. Relatedly, there are limits to his degree of engagement—and Wagner is about commitment, however dangerous or misguided. These limits frame and modulate Mr. Ross’s extraordinary book. . . . 





The author upon whom Mr. Ross lavishes the most attention is Willa Cather, whose Wagnerism—in her life as in her fiction—was an explicit leitmotif. . . . Cather’s achievement, [he] summarizes, “was to transpose Wagnerism into an earthier, more generous key. She offered grandeur without grandiosity, heroism without egoism, myth without mythology. Brünnhilde stays on her mountain crag, hailing the sun: no man breaks the ring of fire.” 





But is that all? In the early 20th century, most American Wagnerites were women, for whom Wagner was an antidote to lives marginalized in a man’s world of work and money. And so it was with Cather, whose most insightful Wagner commentary diagnoses Kundry, in “Parsifal.” One of Wagner’s most original creations, Kundry oscillates between extremes of submission and domination. Cather’s Kundry, at the Met, was Olive Fremstad, a Wagner soprano, Callas-like in veracity and intensity, with whom Cather became friends. Of Fremstad’s Kundry, Cather writes that it “is a summary of the history of womankind. [Wagner] sees in her an instrument of temptation, of salvation, and of service; but always an instrument, a thing driven and employed. . . . She cannot possibly be at peace with herself. . . . A driven creature, [she is] made for purposes eternally contradictory.”





Mr. Ross cites this commentary without comment. But read Cather, and read about Fremstad (who twice married abortively, identified with Ibsen’s women and chopped wood in Scandinavian forests), and it all fits together. Wagner, for Willa Cather, was more than an inspirational artistic model: He was a therapist, a medium for self-understanding and empowerment. 





This dimension of the Wagner experience is equally inescapable in considering the vexed topic of Wagner and the Jews. . . .





The peculiar intensity of affinity Wagner could arouse in Jews was perhaps most notably evinced by Hermann Levi, who conducted the premiere of “Parsifal” at Bayreuth. To his father, a rabbi, Levi wrote: “The most beautiful thing that I have experienced in my life is that it was granted to me to come close to such a man, and I thank God daily for this.” 





Or take the case of Gustav Mahler, who, as Mr. Ross observes, once argued that the devious dwarf Mime, in “Siegfried,” was “intended by Wagner as a persiflage of a Jew.” Mahler then added: “I know of only one Mime, and that is me.” There is, however, more to this aside. Mahler also said: “No doubt with Mime, Wagner intended to ridicule the Jews with all their characteristic traits . . . the jargon is textually and musically so cleverly suggested; but for God’s sake it must not be exaggerated and overdone. . . . You wouldn’t believe what there is in that part, nor what I could make of it.” For Mahler, Wagner exquisitely understood the Jew in Mime.





Mr. Ross ventures in a useful direction in considering the “special appeal” of “Lohengrin” for Jewish listeners: “The opera romanticizes the figure of the itinerant outsider who stands apart from the ‘normal’ community, much as many Jews perceived themselves within German society.” 





As a lifelong Jewish Wagnerite, I would go the distance: Wagner is the supreme poet of homelessness, the master musical portraitist of marginality. He is Siegmund, an orphan of ambiguous parentage, who exclaims: “I am always unpopular. . . . Misery is all I know.” He is Wotan and Tristan, who drop out. He is Hans Sachs, a lonely philosopher of pessimism. He is the cerebral Loge, whose irony is quick and irredeemable. As for Wagner himself, he suspected his actual father to have been Jewish. He fled the law as a political exile. He was always in debt. His enemies were numerous and powerful. His health was poor. 





That he was himself a paradigmatic outsider explains many of the most impassioned, most therapeutic manifestations of Wagnerism, beginning with his appeal to gays and women, to whom he seemed, as to so many Jews, “one of us.” And so he is also Parsifal, who may be read as androgynous; or Senta, Sieglinde and Brünnhilde, driven to flout convention because of oppressive circumstances—because of a brutish husband or clueless father. . . .

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Published on September 12, 2020 07:46

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