Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 30

What Texas City is a National Cultural Showcase?

#

For the past decade I have enjoyed the privilege of regularly collaborating in “Dvorak and America” festivals with Kevin Deas, one of the supreme African-American concert artists of our day. His performances of “Goin’ Home” and the “Hiawatha Melodrama” invariably make a great impression. #

Kevin’s self-evident generosity of spirit is as vital to his appeal as his luscious bass-baritone. But he has his foibles, one of which is a chronic reluctance to sign CDs. #

For the recent El Paso “Dvorak and America” festival, I instructed both the El Paso Symphony and the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) to purchase hundreds of CDs for signature and sale. The CD in question is “Dvorak and America” (Naxos), featuring Kevin Deas singing “Goin’ Home” and the “Hiawatha Melodrama,” plus a number of startling Dvorak-related novelties. #

Kevin invariably predicts that no one will purchase “Dvorak and America.” Knowing El Paso, I knew otherwise. I managed to goad him into venturing into the lobby of the Plaza Theatre at intermission, where a table stacked with CDs awaited his attention. He discovered a line of customers so long that it disappeared around a corner. They were young and old. Many were Hispanic. Some were first-time concertgoers. They all had something they wanted to tell him. And they wanted to buy signed CDs. #

In fact, El Paso is the perfect place for a Dvorak festival. Serendipitously, the El Paso Symphony is the only American orchestra with a Czech conductor. His name is Bohuslav Rattay and he is terrific. The orchestra enjoys a following both hungry and diverse. The orchestra roster includes 18 Hispanic musicians. #

As for UTEP, I have never encountered more eager or absorbent students. Of UTEP’s 22,800 students, 78 per cent are Hispanic. More than 60 per cent of UTEP graduates are the first in their family to earn a B.A. One-third of all UTEP students report a family income of $20,000 or less. They disclose no sense of entitlement. The faculty is distinguished – pedagogues who savor the opportunity at hand. The school is a launching pad. Its purposes and effectiveness are inspirational and obvious. #

El Paso itself, with a population of 650,000 (80 per cent Hispanic), is a perfect size for communal cultural endeavor. The orchestra, the university, the public schools partner easily. The various departments of the university are seamlessly collaborative. For the Dvorak festival, a fabulous scholar of nineteenth century American literature, the Melville specialist Brians Yothers, boned up on Longfellow and vitally participated in our explorations of the impact of The Song of Hiawatha on the New World Symphony. #

The Dvorak topic is protean, actually inexhaustible. His ecumenical conviction that African-Americans and Native Americans were emblematic Americans, crucial to any valid notion of American identity, remains provocative and timely. #

The El Paso festival began with a presentation at Chapin High School that was streamed to other public schools. I lectured for three large UTEP classes, connecting with a mixture music and non-music undergraduates and graduate students. Kevin and I performed our “Harry Burleigh Show” for a gathering of all UTEP music majors and grad students. The multi-media El Paso Symphony concerts  featured the Hiawatha Melodrama and a visual presentation for the New World Symphony. The pre-concert speaker was Brian Yothers on Longfellow – his range of influence, his shifting reputation. #

Finally, there were two concerts on the UTEP campus. Lowell Graham led the UTEP Orchestra in an arresting program of music from Dvorak’s America by George Chadwick, Edward MacDowell and Dudley Buck. The UTEP Chorale offered spirituals and rare “Indianist” works. Here, the main event was Arthur Farwell’s 16-part a cappella “Pawnee Horses,” an American choral masterpiece that remains virtually unknown,  brilliantly prepared by UTEP’s Elisa Wilson. #

More than 300 UTEP students attended the El Paso Symphony concerts. Many had never before heard an orchestra. #

Two indispensable factors were Frank Candelaria, a visionary music historian who also serves as UTEPs Associate Provost, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which supported the festival as part of its Music Unwound orchestral consortium. #

Next February I return to El Paso for “Copland and Mexico,” which will use Aaron Copland’s Mexican epiphany as a starting point for exploring the Mexican cultural efflorescence of the 1930s. In that decade, it was not only Berlin and Paris that lured American artists and intellectuals abroad. Copland, Paul Strand, John Steinbeck, and Langston Hughes were among those flocking south of the border. Mexican’s own cultural vanguard included a composer of genius still insufficiently recognized: Silvestre Revueltas. The iconic Mexican film Redes, scored by Revueltas with cinematography by Strand, will be the centerpiece of “Copland and Mexico.” UTEP, the El Paso Symphony, the El Paso Film Festival, and the El Paso Museum are already on board.  There is a strong push to include events across the Rio Grande in Juarez. The opportunities at hand are inexhaustible. #

More than any other American city I know, El Paso deserves to be recognized as a national showcase for the ways in which cultural and educational institutions can work together to instruct, inspire, and unite. #

Celebrating Bernard Herrmann

  #

#

A towering figure in twentieth century American music, Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975) has long been pigeon-holed as a “Hollywood composer.” Though he is widely acknowledged the supreme American composer for film (Citizen Kane, Vertigo, North by Northwest, etc.), his concert output remains virtually unknown. Working with the young Orson Welles and later with the legendary radio and screenwriter Norman Corwin, he was also America’s foremost radio composer, and conductor of a radio orchestra – William Paley’s visionary CBS Symphony – that boldly promoted new and unfamiliar music. #

The forthcoming Bernard Herrmann festival in Washington, D.C.  – a collaboration of PostClassical Ensemble, the National Gallery of Art, the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, and Georgetown University — is the first ever to celebrate Herrmann “in the round” as one of the most important and influential American musical personalities of his generation. It includes world-premiere recreations of two classic Corwin/Herrmann radio dramas with live actors and orchestra, the DC premiere of Herrmann’s “Psycho: A Narrative for String Orchestra,” a one-hour exploration of “The Music of Psycho” with live orchestra, screenings of 21 films, and much more. In addition to myself and PostClassical Ensemble  Music Director Angel Gil-Ordonez, the participants include the conductor/scholar John Mauceri, the Herrmann scholar Christopher Husted, the Corwin scholar Dan Gediman, the film-music scholar Neil Lerner, the composer’s daughter Dorothy Herrmann, and Norman Corwin’s daughter Diane Corwin Okarski.
The festival has been undertaken in the conviction that Simon Rattle’s performance of Herrmann’s  Psycho Symphonic Narrative, opening the present Berlin Phiharmonic season, is a harbinger – that Herrmann is a major twentieth century musical personality whose time will come, and relatively soon. He has never lacked admirers, even venerators, for his incomparable film scores. But no musician capable of inventing the brilliant faux French Romantic opera aria of Citizen Kane, or the immortal shower screeches of Psycho, or the daring Liebestod of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir could possibly have failed to matter beyond Hollywood. That Herrmann’s pioneering radio work, as composer and conductor, is a necessarily ingredient in appreciating Herrmann’s film genius is in fact one starting point of our festival.
Of the festival’s participants, John Mauceri was responsible for rescuing the Psycho narrative from undeserved oblivion. Christopher Husted was responsible for creating the performance materials for the radio plays “Untitled” (1944), about a dead American soldier, and “Whitman” (1944), which pays tribute to Walt Whitman. During World War II, these and other Norman Corwin radio dramas, scored and conducted by Herrmann, were a vital part of the “home front” effort. The radio-drama genre, of which Corwin was the acknowledged master, became a forgotten art with the advent of television. Dan Gediman, a peerless authority on Corwin and the golden age of radio drama, will use audio clips to illustrate the Corwin/Herrmann collaboration and how it fostered Herrmann’s film work to come.
The festival screenings (April 1 to 24) will take place at National Gallery of Art and at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. The National Gallery of Art screenings are free of charge. Tickets for screenings at AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center can be purchased at AFI.com/Silver or in person at the box office. Select screenings will be accompanied by commentary. The other festival events (all free of charge) are: #

  #

Friday, April 15, 2016: Bernard Herrmann “Interplay” at Georgetown University (McNeir Auditorium) #

PART ONE: 1:15 to 2:45 pm–Dan Gediman on radio drama (with audio clips)
— Corwin/Herrmann: “Untitled” (1944) – radio play with live actors and GU Orchestra; directed by Anna Harwell Celenza
–Dorothy Herrmann on her father’s magnum opus, the opera Wuthering Heights (with audio clips and a film clip from the film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir)
–Discussion: Gediman, Herrmann, Christopher Husted, Neil Lerner, etc.
PART TWO: 7:30 –Dan Gediman on the legendary Norman Corwin/Bernard Herrmann collaboration, illustrating an organic interpenetration of script and music (with live excerpts from “Untitled” with the GU Orchestra)
INTERMISSION
— 8:45: Christopher Husted on the CBS Symphony, created by William Paley and conducted by Herrmann as a showcase for new and unfamiliar music (the antithesis of David Sarnoff’s NBC Symphony, with Toscanini). (with audio clips)
–9:15: Neil Lerner on Herrmann the film composer – how his collaborations with Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock built on his radio work with Corwin (with film clips)
–9:45: Discussion
Saturday, April 16, 1 to 6 pm: “The Music of Psycho” at National Gallery of Art Film Auditorium

PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez #

1pm – Dan Gediman introduces “Whitman” (with audio clip)
1:15 pm – The classic Norman Corwin/Bernard Herrmann radio play “Whitman” (1944) with live actors and PCE conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez (world premiere of the reconstruction by Christopher Husted). With Sean Craig as Walt Whitman; directed by Anna Harwell Celenza.
1:45 pm – “The Music of Psycho” – a presentation by Neil Lerner and Christopher Husted, with live musical excerpts (Herrmann and Bartok) performed by PCE conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez (60 min)
2:45 pm — Intermission
3 pm – Psycho (1960) – (110 min)
5 pm – Discussion (Dorothy Herrmann, Gediman, Lerner, Husted, Horowitz, Gil-Ordonez, etc.) – with additional audio and film clips
Sunday April 17, 2016 at 3:30 pm:  Concert at National Gallery of Art West Garden Court #

PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez; commentary by John Mauceri #

  #

David Jones, clarinet #

Natenal Draiblate and Eva Cappelletti-Chao, violins #

Phillipe Chao, viola #

Benjamin Capps, cello #

  #

Bernard Herrmann: Souvenir de Voyage (Quintet for Clarinet and Strings (1967)
Lento; Allegro moderato #

Andante (Berceuse) #

Andantino (canto amoroso) #

  #

Intermission #

  #

Bernard Herrmann: Sinfonietta for Strings (1935-36) #

Prelude: Slowly #

Scherzo: Presto #

Adagio #

Interlude: Allegro #

Variations #

  #

Bernard Herrmann: Psycho: A Narrative for String Orchestra (1968, restored and edited by John Mauceri in 1999) #

  #

            DC Premiere
Discussion: Festival Wrap-Up with John Mauceri, Christopher Husted, Angel Gil-Ordonez, and Joseph Horowitz
  #

  #

  #

American Music — An Alternative Narrative

#

Bernard Herrmann, whose film credits include Psycho, Citizen Kane, Vertigo, and (his most Romantically charged score) The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, is one of eight featured composers on PostClassical Ensemble’s all-American 2015-16 season. The others are Harry Burleigh, Charles Ives, George Gershwin, Kurt Weill, Lou Harrison, and Daniel Schnyder. #

The season begins this Saturday night in DC with “Deep River – The Art of the Spiritual” – a multi-media exploration of how Harry Burleigh transferred spirituals into the concert hall. (To see the entire schedule, click here.) #

Binding these eight composers is an “Alternative Narrative” based on my Classical Music: A History (2005). #

The Standard Narrative for American concert music starts with Aaron Copland after World War I. It presumes that Copland and others of his generation were the first to create an “American style” based on American songs, American rhythms, American energies. Such populist Copland scores as Billy the Kid (1938) and Appalachian Spring (1944) are seen as seminal. At the same time, these composers are observed engaged in the project of creating an American symphonic canon, hot in pursuit of the Great American Symphony. #

Part two of the same narrative, post-World War II, observes a mass migration to non-tonal styles, Copland included. This music (a product of Cold War times) was not remotely “populist.” In fact, it drove a schism between composer and audience. #

In Classical Music in America, I propose that in fact there are multiple American musical narratives, none of which takes precedence over the others. I call these “musical streams, all of which achieved substantial results and none of which reached fruition.” In particular, I dispute the assumption that there was no American, American-sounding concert music of great merit before Copland. #

The biggest flaw in the Standard Narrative is that, having been constructed beginning in the thirties, it fails to account for the genius of Charles Ives – whose music was not yet generally known. It is now evident that Ives composed Great American Symphonies some time before the interwar composers took up that cause: both his Symphony No. 2 (1907-1909) and Symphony No. 4 (1912-1925) are supreme achievements, mating American vernacular sounds and images with a hallowed European template. #

And there are others. Louis Moreau Gottschalk, back in the 1850s, used black Creole tunes from his native New Orleans to fashion a captivating American idiom – music that didn’t re-enter the repertoire until the 1950s. In Boston, George Chadwick (dismissed by Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Leonard Bernstein in their influential versions of the Standard Narrative) created Jubilee (1895) and other salty American cameos that our orchestras have yet to discover. In New York, Antonin Dvorak turned himself into an American, creating an 1890s New World style inspired by “Negro melodies.” #

And there is a “maverick” American tradition defined by such idiosyncratic, self-made Americans as Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Lou Harrison. Beginning with stray car parts, they collaboratively created the percussion ensemble as a musical genre. They also prophetically merged Western and Eastern musical styles. Harrison (1917-2003), in particular, was an American master who had no use for the Standard Narrative. He heralded today’s pervasive “postclassical” music, a post-modern phenomenon that chucks every assumption that “classical music” on the European model retains priority as the highest possible realm of musical experience. #

Finally, there is a tradition of “interlopers” who have blended American popular and classical styles. Here the seminal figure is George Gershwin – once widely dismissed (as was Ives) as a dilettante. If we can admit film music to this “musical stream,” the towering figure is Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975), best-remembered for his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock on such films as Psycho, Vertigo, and North by Northwest. Herrmann was ignored by the established non-tonal composers of his day. Now is the time to discover his concert works – of which the Clarinet Quintet (1967) is an American masterpiece somewhat in the style of Vertigo. As a leading radio conductor, Herrmann was an early champion of Charles Ives (as was Lou Harrison). #

PostClassical Ensemble’s season explores alternatives to the Standard Narrative. From the fecund pre-World War I period, we celebrate Dvorak’s assistant Harry Burleigh (1866-1949), who was instrumental in transplanting spirituals into the concert hall. In fact, such pivotal Burleigh arrangements as “Deep River” are as much compositions as transcriptions – an observation we’ll explore in “Deep River” – The Art of the Spiritual. #

Coming next, chronologically, is Charles Ives, whose Second Symphony (belatedly premiered by Leonard Bernstein in 1951) has yet to attain the canonic status it obviously deserves. PCE’s Angel Gil-Ordonez conducts the Georgetown University in this American masterpiece – part of a PCE-produced Ives weekend also including two peerless Ives advocates: baritone William Sharp and pianist Steven Mayer. #

Bernard Herrmann – Screen, Stage, and Radio is a multi-week immersion experience advocating the versatility and ingenuity of a leading American musician still incompletely known. Our series of screenings and concerts includes world-premiere restorations of two classic Norman Corwin radio dramas (music by Herrmann) in live performance, as well as a one-hour exploration of The Music of Psycho. #

Lou Harrison – The Indonesian Connection illuminates Harrison’s groundbreaking percussion compositions, alongside Cowell and Cage, as well as his mature gamelan-inspired idiom. (PCE will also record a Harrison CD for Naxos.) #

Finally, our “Schnyderfest” explores the musical world of the Swiss-American composer Daniel Schnyder (b. 1961) – an emblematic postclassical musician who delves deeply into jazz (he is a gifted saxophonist), and also mines the musics of Africa and Asia. With California’s Pacific Symphony, PCE has commissioned a Schnyder Pipa Concerto for the pipa genius Min Xiao-fen – to be premiered at the National Gallery of Art May 1. Our Schnyder weekend also includes Schnyder’s takes on George Gershwin and on Kurt Weill (a key post-Gershwin “interloper”), as well as F.W. Murnau’s silent cinema classic Faust (1926) with Schnyder’s film-score performed live. #

I write in Classical Music in America: “In 1965 Elliott Carter lamented ‘the tendency for each generation in America to wipe away the memory of the previous one, and the general neglect of our own recent past, which we treat as a curiosity useful for young scholars in exercising their research techniques – so characteristic of American treatment of the work of its important artists.’ Carter’s plaint applies to . . . the streams of American classical music, each of which so little interacted with any other. It points to a pervasive fragmentation, to an absence of lineage and continuity complicated by a late start and a heterogeneous population, by two world wars and the confusing influx of powerful refugees. But this same fragmentation may be read as a protean variety: of composers who imitated Europe or rejected it; who preferred German music or French; who viewed the popular arts as a threat or as a point of departure. To a surprising degree – surprising because American institutions of performance have understood so little – American composers have partaken in the diversity of American music as a whole. It is, in the aggregate, a defining attribute.” #

  #

The Real Vladimir Horowitz

#

Sony’s new 50-CD compilation, “Vladimir Horowitz: The Unreleased Live Recordings 1966-1983,” is a startling exercise in candor three times over. #

1.It argues that a series of “live” Horowitz recitals, released on RCA between 1975 and 1983 and edited by RCA’s Jack Pfeiffer, misrepresent and diminish those concerts by fixing wrong notes. #

2.It frankly documents Horowitz’s artistic nadir: the disastrous 1983 concerts he played while heavily medicated. #

3.It blames this debacle on the publication of Glenn Plaskin’s unnervingly unsympathetic Horowitz biography of 1983. #

The first of these claims, fingering a company absorbed by Sony, is made explicit by an essay, “Horowitz: The Penultimate Chapter,” by another Horowitz: my son Bernie, who (as “Bernard Horowitz”) contributes an essay reading in part: “We can now see clearly that the RCA versions were so heavily spliced and edited as to project a Madame Tussaud version of Vladimir Horowitz.” Bernie singles out a 1979 Chicago performance of Schumann’s Humoreske: “[It] documents an artist with an original reading of a complex work, executing it down to the minutest detail and bringing the audience along every step of the way. It strikes a fatal blow against those who denigrate Horowitz’s musicianship or question his depth.” #

This invitation to compare RCA’s “live” products with the new, unretouched Sony releases is worth taking seriously, and not only because Horowitz’s unedited Chicago Humoreske is (unlike Pfeiffer’s synthetic recreation) one of his most artistically compelling performances. The practice of recording music in a studio, sans audience, begot the practice of combining multiple “takes” in pursuit of perfection. All this started understandably enough: long ago, studio recordings were sonically superior to anything that could be captured in a concert hall or opera house. Even so, my favorite recordings, of whatever vintage, are rarely studio-made. (Try comparing Feodor Chaliapin’s famous Boris Godunov studio excerpts of 1922 with his less famous but more truthful Covent Garden performance of July 4, 1928, now readily available on youtube.) #

The second claim inherent to “The Unreleased Live Recordings” is also made explicit by Bernie’s essay when he writes that in 1983 Horowitz “reached a point of collapse.” The most glaring evidence in the new Sony set is a Boston recital on April 24, 1983. To see what Horowitz looked like – bloated, dazed – at this sad juncture, there is the evidence of his notorious Tokyo recital of June 11. #

Had Horowitz disappeared from view in the wake of his Tokyo debacle, the trajectory of his career would have terminated with a descent into obscurity. That he was able to put all this behind him – that he in fact enjoyed what Bernie calls an Indian Summer – required absorbing the shock of the Plaskin biography. Bernie reveals: #

“As the ‘70s drew to  a close, Glenn Plaskin began collecting information for an unauthorized biography. In 1979, he wrote to Caine Alder, a longtime Horowitz devotee who had provided Plaskin access to a lifetime of Horowitz research: ‘To get a substantial advance . . . and good commercial response to the book we cannot make a white-washed tribute that ignors ]sic] facts and figures about Horowitz’s life that may be painful to him . . . The tensions of performance and emotional turmoil at times sent him into depressions and evidently into institutions at various times in his life. The suicide of his daughter and what the means, ETC., ETC.., ETC.’” #

The resulting book, which reached Horowitz in stages during its period of gestation, began its sordid life-narrative by claiming (erroneously) that Horowitz fabricated his place of birth. It portrayed an artist without a core. #

Horowitz, to be sure, was a man with troubles. His family was decimated by the Russian Revolution. He wound up in the US, age 24, unworldly and unmoored. As with so many artists, he was the beneficiary or victim of a nervous intensity so powerful it could have destroyed him. Sony’s “Unreleased Live Recordings” newly discloses what he could accomplish when, in late mid-career, he channeled his demons without taming them. #

(For more Horowitz on Horowitz on Horowitz, click here and here.) #

“Music Unwound” — The NEH and the Music Education Crisis

#

  #

  #

  #

  #

Processing a terrific performance of Sir Edward Elgar’s Piano Quintet at this summer’s Brevard Music Festival, I found myself pondering both musical and extra-musical paths of engagement. #

Elgar, born in 1857, became Britain’s most famous concert composer, an iconic embodiment of the fin-de-siecle Edwardian moment. From its retrospective relationship to Imperial England, his music derives its singular affect of majesty intermingled with anguished nostalgia. Added to that, the Great War shrouds the Quintet with a poetic veil of mourning. (Elgar’s much performed Cello Concerto, also completed in 1919, is even more elegiacally veiled.) #

The audience at Brevard – one of the nation’s leading summer training-camps for pre-professional classical musicians, in the foothills of North Carolina – mainly comprised young adults new to this piece, probably even to this composer. They were ardently attentive, effusively appreciative. I asked myself how many of them knew  “Edwardian England” – or the Great War, or Queen Victoria. What cultural content, outside music, could they bring to a first hearing of Elgar’s quintet? I would venture to guess: little or none. #

There are many manifestations of the current crisis in music education. Some derive from accelerated cultural change, which makes canonized symphonies, plays, novels, and paintings ever more remote. In classical music, the crisis is acute because the canon is closed — the mainstream repertoire for orchestras and opera companies ends  well over half a century ago with Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Britten. #

Among America’s music schools and festivals, Brevard is unusual for crafting a targeted response. With the support of the National Endowment of the Humanities, next summer’s festival will incorporate a cross-disciplinary festival-within-a-festival: “Dvorak and America.” All the collegiate musicians performing Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony will read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha – which happens to be a pertinent point of reference for this most popular symphony ever composed on American soil. Even conductors who assay “From the New World” do not realize that – as Dvorak testified – the middle movements are inspired by episodes from Longfellow’s once-famous narrative poem – that the Scherzo sets “Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast,” and the Largo re-experiences Minnehaha’s death in shivering winter. #

At Brevard’s performance of the “New World” Symphony next July, these movements will be accompanied by a “visual presentation” incorporating excerpts from Longfellow’s poem (a core specimen of the American experience) and paintings by nineteenth century Americans, including the important “Indianists” George Catlin and Karl Bodmer. And a “Hiawatha Melodrama” combining verses by Longfellow with music by Dvorak will be performed in tandem with the symphony. #

The purpose of this exercise is to launch an inquiry into the question: “What does music mean?” It is the same question I asked myself about Elgar’s quintet. It has no correct answer. But the question is invaluable, I believe, if fledgling classical musicians, reconnecting with masterworks of centuries past, are to maintain a living relationship with the legacy they inherit. #

When “Music Unwound” was initiated in 2010 with a $300,000 NEH grant, it was a consortium of professional orchestras — the Pacific Symphony, the North Carolina Symphony, the Louisville Orchestra, and the Buffalo Philharmonic — committed to undertaking thematic festivals on two topics: “Dvorak and America” and “Copland and Mexico.” A secondary component was institutional collaboration: the four recipients  were challenged to link with high schools, museums, and – especially – colleges and universities. As director of “Music Unwound,” I frankly imagined that these relationships would at best materialize slowly and fitfully. I did not foresee that the project would rapidly evolve to target students. #

In addition to five professional orchestras, the current “Music Unwound” participants include the Brevard Festival, Chapman University, and the University of Texas in El Paso. It has unexpectedly become an experiment in infusing Humanities instruction. #

At Chapman – a small liberal arts college in Orange County, California – “Music Unwound” is driven by a visionary chancellor — Daniele Struppa — who believes that allying with a major professional orchestra is a necessary strategy for introducing undergraduates to symphonic music. When next February the Pacific Symphony produces a “Music Unwound” celebration of Charles Ives, Chapman students will be invited to explore what Ives and Mark Twain have in common. The premise of his exercise will be that what Huckleberry Finn is to the American novel, Ives Symphony No. 2 (1909) is to the American symphony: a landmark achievement in transforming a hallowed Old World genre through recourse to New World vernacular speech and song. #

At the University of Texas, “Music Unwound” is driven by a visionary Mexican-American music historian — Frank Candelaria — to whom collaboration with the El Paso Symphony seems a necessary opportunity to introduce high school and college students to the Mexican Revolution and its formidable composers and painters. #

If “Music Unwound” is renewed for a third funding cycle, the consortium will expand to include the DePauw University School of Music, where a visionary dean — Mark McCoy — is attempting to re-invent conservatory education. One part of this new template is a new  way of teaching Music History – not as a sequence of Great Composers, but as a Sociology of Music privileging institutional history and cultural circumstance. #

Dvorak would open a window on Longfellow and Catlin. Ives would connect to Mark Twain, to Emerson and Thoreau. Elgar would register the passing of Empire and the trauma of unprecedented “world war.” These topics need one another. Their binding synergies can no longer be assumed. #

(For more on “Music Unwound,” see my postings of March 31, 2011; Feb. 23, March 20, May 20, and June, 11, 2012; and May 1, 2015.) #

  #

  #

Charles Ives and Huck Finn

#

“Music Unwound” is an orchestral consortium supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It funds contextualized symphonic programs in collaboration with colleges and universities. To date, two topics have been in play. “Dvorak and America” explores the quest for American cultural identity ca. 1900; the central work is Dvorak’s New World Symphony, supplemented by a “visual presentation” aligning the music with Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha and the canvases of Frederick Church, George Catlin, and Frederic Remington. “Copland and Mexico” explores Aaron Copland’s Mexican epiphany of the 1930s; the central work is the iconic Mexican film Redes (1935), with Silvestre Revueltas’s terrific score performed live. #

Music Unwound” is now commencing a second funding cycle with the addition of “Charles Ives’s America” — which debuted in Buffalo three weeks ago and included two Buffalo Philharmonic subscription concerts plus half a dozen ancillary events at a museum, a library, and a university. The central work was Ives’s Symphony No. 2 (1900-1909) – an irresistible Great American Symphony only premiered in 1951 when Leonard Bernstein rescued it from oblivion for a national New York Philharmonic radio audience. #

That notwithstanding Bernstein’s impassioned launch, Ives’s Second Symphony never entered the mainstream symphonic repertoire records a discouraging lack of advocacy. It has simply not been performed sufficiently to acquire the audience it deserves. As a result, orchestras resist programming Ives’ Second because it doesn’t sell tickets – a vicious circle perpetuating the stereotype of Ives as a cranky composer of “difficult” music. The “Music Unwound” program – which tells the Ives story with a 30-minute visual track – is a necessary attempt to win audiences over to our most important symphonist. #

Central to the presentation was a performance by baritone William Sharp (a peerless singer of Ives) of the hymns and songs that generate Ives’s symphonic motifs. These range from the inane college song “Where Oh Where Are the Verdant Freshmen?”, which Ives whimsically appropriates as a lovely sonata-form second subject, to Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe,” which in Ives’s Civil War finale signifies compassion for the slave. #

These twin aspects of Ives’s Second Symphony – the exuberance with which it subverts a hallowed European genre with American vernacular strains; the poignancy with which it connects to slavery and race – resonate mightily with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, which Ernest Hemingway famously called the starting point of American literature. What Huck Finn is to the American novel, Ives’s Second is to the American symphony. And the moral epiphany of Twain’s novel – the scene on the raft in which Huck humbles himself before the human being in Jim – parallels Ives’s compassion for the African-American, a legacy inherited from his Abolitionist grandparents. #

Twain’s rambunctious sense of humor, thumbing his nose at European cultural parents with pretended innocence, is also Ivesian – as when in the Second Symphony a Bach fugue must contend with “Camptown Races,” and Stephen Foster comes out on top. (I write about Ives and Mark Twain in the least-known, least-read of my ten books: Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siecle.) #

The “Music Unwound” Ives program will next be presented by the Pacific Symphony in Spring 2016. William Sharp will again participate. The central university partner will be Chapman University. The possibilities for cross-disciplinary inquiry are limitless. #

Some day, Charles Ives – who knew Mark Twain; who identified with the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau — will take his rightful place in the American cultural pantheon alongside such equally self-made Americans as Twain, Emerson, and Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Hermann Melville. Were Ives a writer or painter, this would have happened long ago. But American cultural historians ignore classical music, and American orchestras remain chronically Eurocentric. #

Prokofiev’s Happy Ending, and Further Thoughts on Conducting Ballet

In 1936 Sergei Prokofiev decided to move with his family to Stalin’s Soviet Union. He had first returned to Russia in 1927 and had written in his diary: “It’s a shame to part from the USSR. The goal of the trip was obtained: I have certainly, definitely become stronger.” Subsequent visits were also fortifying. In Europe, he had felt his creative gift atrophy. He discovered that he needed to compose on Russian soil. #

Though the Soviets had coaxed him with prospective commissions and performances, and with promises that he could continue to travel abroad, in 1936 they issued an ultimatum: unless Prokofiev relocated to Russia, he would no longer be permitted in Russia at all. So Prokofiev took up residence in Moscow knowing a thing or two about Soviet conditions. He also knew that he would never be allowed to leave with his wife and children. As it happened, he last left Soviet Russia in 1938. He died there in 1953, the same day as Stalin, at the age of 61. #

In the West, Prokofiev had competed with Stravinsky as a modernist. Works like the Fifth Piano Concerto (1932) attempted a complex, non-traditional idiom. In the Soviet Union, he embraced a “new simplicity” connecting to “the people.” It was the same conscious reorientation that Aaron Copland undertook in the US, a move from modernism to populism, a response to changing social and political conditions. #

An early product of Prokofiev’s “new simplicity” was the ballet Romeo and Juliet. He finished composing it in 1935. But in Soviet Russia composers were subject to aesthetic dictates and to peer-review committees. Not until 1940 was Romeo and Juliet as know it premiered in Leningrad. In the intervening four years, the head of the Bolshoi Theater had been executed as an “enemy of the people.” This delayed production of Prokofiev’s ballet, as did various objections to the scenario and to the music. #

The most intriguing of these objections was to Prokofiev’s “happy ending.” Prokofiev did not wish the lovers to die. Publicly, he explained that “the dead cannot dance.” Also, the director Sergey Radlov argued for a Socialist Realist ending updating the story as “a play about the struggle for the right to love by young, strong, and progressive people battling against feudal traditions and feudal outlooks on marriage and family.” But there can be little doubt that Prokofiev’s adherence to Christian Science was a crucial factor. #

He had become a Christian Scientist in France. For him, the body was illusory, the spirit (transcending death) eternally real. And so Prokofiev’s Romeo witnessed Juliet awakening from the effects of Friar Laurence’s potion. The ballet was to end with Romeo bearing Juliet “into a grove,” where she slowly revived. Meanwhile, a gathering of people observed the lovers. Romeo and Juliet “express their feelings of relief and joy in a final dance.” A quiet apotheosis came last. #

Prokofiev’s own account of what next happened to his ballet reads: “Curiously enough whereas the report that Prokofiev was writing a ballet on the theme of Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending was received quite calmly in London, our own Shakespeare scholars proved more papal than the pope and rushed to the defense of Shakespeare. . . . After several conferences with the choreographers it was found tat the tragic ending could be expressed in dance and in due course the music for that ending was written.” #

Whatever one makes of the changes imposed on Prokofiev’s ballet (including bravura moments for the dancers), the result was an international triumph – and an ending quite literally recapitulating Shakespeare. #

Not until decades later did the music historian Simon Morrison (whose 2009 book The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years discloses the story I here recount) discover that Prokofiev’s initial “happy ending” survived. It has since been performed several times in the US, most recently by the Pacific Symphony last week in Orange County, California. It has not (to my knowledge) been recorded. #

The discarded happy ending is fully 15 minutes long – substantially longer than the revised ending we know. Some of the music is the same. But unique to the happy ending is the passage of public excitement – an Allegro moderato that years later became the scherzo of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. The apotheosis (Andantino), beginning with a sublime pizzicato passage, is also much different from anything in the Romeo and Juliet we normally see and hear. Prokofiev’s discarded happy ending is not a mere novelty – it remains a beautiful and viable alternative. #

The Pacific Symphony’s performances – of a one-hour mini-production of Prokofiev’s ballet — incorporated two dancers and two actors. The actors were Romeo and Juliet in old age, reminiscing. The dancers (compassionately choreographed by Lorin Johnson) were their younger selves. This ingenious concept was the brainchild of Carl St. Clair, the orchestra’s music director. It fell to me to write the script, combining Shakespeare with such faux Shakespeare as: #

ROMEO:

But family feuds are not so readily ’scaped

As by mere lovers wishéd dreams.

Tybalt, thy fiery distempered cous’,

Did my bosom mate Mercutio slay

When I would forestall their bloody duel.

So I in turn my rash weapon drew

And in my own anger raging Tybalt slew. #

St. Clair’s affinity for this Prokofiev score is distinctive – he reads it with maximum emotional and musical weight. The addition of the happy ending was seamless. A fade to black silhouetted the paired Romeos and Juliets. This presentation deserves future performances – as does the happy ending itself. #

A footnote: No less than Valery Gergiev’s recent performances of Prokofiev’s Cinderella with his Mariinsky Ballet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, St. Clair’s Romeo – with its portentous tempos and massive rallentandos — illustrates what can happen when a conductor leads rather than follows the dancers. Like the happy ending, this is a trade-off worth pondering, a risk worth attempting. #

When I shared this blog in draft with Lorin Johnson, he wrote back: #

“You ask about the dancers. Since we had rehearsed the choreography to recorded music that was faster, they needed to completely reevaluate how to use the space. They never became frustrated with the challenge, but instead found ways to ‘fill out’ moments in time that had been of shorter duration in rehearsal. Actually, when I came to Sunday’s final performance, I was amazed at the level of nuance they portrayed on stage. The choreography had taken on new life, and they had very much ‘found themselves’ within both movements and music. I feel I saw the chemistry of Carl/orchestra/dance come together in this final show.” #

Surely a dynamic, dialectic interaction of music and dance is what best serves the big ballets of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev. #

What Are Ballet Conductors For?

What is the function of the conductor in ballet performance? Never in my (limited) experience has this question been more provocatively posed than during the Mariinsky Ballet’s recent residency at BAM. This is because two of ballet’s most stirring symphonic scores – Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Prokofiev’s Cinderella – were purveyed in the pit by a world-class orchestra under the leadership of a master conductor. The orchestra was the same great Mariinsky band that next performs Prokofiev and Shostakovich at Carnegie Hall. The conductor was Valery Gergiev, who now presides over the big Mariinsky ballets as he does when the Mariinsky gives the operas of Mussorgsky or the concertos of Rachmaninoff or the symphonies of Mahler. #

Gergiev’s Swan Lake is a distinguished musical achievement, but his Cinderella is something else: unique and unforgettable. His St. Petersburg orchestra has the most distinctive symphonic sonority to be heard today. Its dark textures and fullness of tone are what the Prokofiev ballets crave; a disturbing claustrophobic intensity – surely Stalinist in provenance – is composed into these scores (think of how Cinderella begins). And Gergiev secures, as well, an unflagging tidal impetus. The big waltz, the clock scene (progeny of Boris Godunov) are propelled with an elemental energy. #

Over at American Ballet Theatre, the Prokofiev ballets sound thinner and more generic. They aren’t as quick, the tempos are steadier, the colors and dynamics are everywhere more neutral. Above all, they defer to the dancers. Gergiev commandeers the stage as he would conducting opera. It bears mentioning, as well, that the Mariinsky supplied some 75 players in the BAM pit, whereas ABT fields a substantially smaller instrumental complement in a house (that of the Metropolitan Opera) twice as large. Another thing: there is no stopping for applause during the Gergiev Cinderella: the musical statement preserves its integrity. #

I am aware of the complaints that Gergiev’s tempos are inconsiderately quick, that he tramples the dancers’ prerogatives. And what about the music’s prerogatives? When Hans Knappertsbusch conducted the Ring at Bayreuth in the 1950s and ‘60s, his slow tempos made the singers audibly uncomfortable. But Knappertsbusch remained a popular and undeflectable fixture, because those tempos secured a magisterial template that fed the whole. I cannot believe that the Mariinsky dancers don’t benefit from the potency of a significant musical reading, whatever the rigors it imposes. #

In any event, hearing such a Cinderella emanating from a theater pit is a new experience – and not only in New York. In Russia too (I am reliably told), there is no precedent for concert conductors of international stature regularly leading ballet. #

When Prokofiev endowed Cinderella with a score of the highest distinction, he surely intended a Gesamtkunstwerk, not another Paquita or Don Quixote. I am no informed judge of the dancing and choreography (by Alexei Ratmansky) of the Mariinsky Cinderella performances at BAM. But it seemed to me on January 20 that the dancers held their own with the music, and that the result was bigger than the sum of its parts. #

Can a Music School Be Re-Invented?

There is a powerful consensus that music schools and conservatories have to rethink the education of 21st century musicians, but no one, so far as I know, has implemented a new template. This is what Mark McCoy is up to at the DePauw University School of Music. He calls it the “21st-Century Musician Initiative” and it isn’t window dressing. #

My own harangues on this topic have long focused on two necessary educational opportunities: #

1.It is high time that Music History be reconfigured to include the history of musical institutions and of music in performance (as in my own Classical Music in America: A History, which I shamelessly recommend as a state-of-the-art textbook). That way, the basic questions are front and center: What is a concert for? What is music for? Why be a musician? #

2.Conservatories and schools of music should regularly self-present cross-disciplinary festivals with resonant themes. That way, some more basic questions are pushed into play: What is a concert? What does it have to do with anything outside music? #

DePauw’s two-week “Dvorak and America” festival, which concluded last weekend, incorporated four concerts, each of which found its own idiosyncratic format. All were hosted by students who created their own commentary. Three included visual elements. One was fully scripted. The DePauw orchestra, wind ensemble, chorus, chamber musicians, and pianists all took part. So did a members of the English and Athletic Departments. The topics included “Dvorak and the Indianists Movement,” “Dvorak and ‘Negro Melodies,’” and the New World Symphony. The composers, additional to Dvorak, included Gottschalk, Joplin, Harry Burleigh, Arthur Farwell (his amazing eight-part a cappella Indianist choruses), Charles Wakefield Cadman, and Art Tatum. #

Meanwhile, in the classroom and concert hall, there were related master classes, coachings, workshops, lecture-performances, and visitors. Because McCoy has the entire student body (totaling 160) meet en masse every Wednesday morning, I was able to inflict myself on everyone at once (week one), and to partner Kevin Deas (a peerless exponent of spirituals) in a “Harry Burleigh show” (week two) exploring how Dvorak’s African-American assistant took plantation songs into the concert hall. Many students (including every member of the orchestra) read The Song of Hiawatha (because it inspired Dvorak). Quite a few read Classical Music in America. #

The festival worked because DePauw is small enough to implement a consolidated learning/teaching experience, and because Mark McCoy is strong enough to inspire and cajole maximum participation. The inspirational lessons Dvorak once taught us seemed powerfully absorbed. Dvorak’s three-year American sojourn, during which he pursued a mandate to help Americans find their own voice in the concert hall, illuminates what music is about. Even more important, it illuminates what music is for: how it can help people and nations perceive and understand themselves. #

About three-quarters of the way through, Mark began to wonder out loud what might have happened had Dvorak not returned to Prague in 1895. This departure was not preordained. It resulted from the Panic of 1893, which decimated the resources of Jeannette Thurber. She was the educational visionary who had enticed Dvorak to preside over her National Conservatory of Music in New York. Dvorak died at 62 in Prague in 1904. He had talked of retiring to Spillville, Iowa, where he had composed his American Quartet, American Quintet, and Violin Sonatina in the wake of composing the New World Symphony in Manhattan. His prodigious American output also included the Cello Concerto, the G-flat Humoresque (the one we all know), and American Suite (the topic of my most recent Wall Street Journal article). #

That the American Suite sounds “American” is something I regularly demonstrate as part of my standard rant about the history of classical music in America, how it ran off the rails, and what to do about it. Dvorak would doubtless have continued to explore his American style had he remained in America. Also, he was keen to compose a Hiawatha opera or cantata. So that, too, would have happened but for the 1893 Wall Street collapse. Even his short stay fundamentally influenced Burleigh, Amy Beach, and George Chadwick (whose Jubilee is prime Americana – every American orchestra should perform it). #

Here are three more what-ifs:

1.What if Mahler hadn’t died in 1911 at the age of 50 and had instead remained at the helm of the New York Philharmonic? It is said he had taken an interest in Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 3.

2.What if Charles Griffes hadn’t died at the age of 35 in 1919 – just after composing his scorching and original Piano Sonata?

3.What if Gershwin hadn’t died at the age of 38 in 1936? What might have been the progeny of Porgy and Bess? #

The way things transpired instead, a too-heavy burden was placed on the shoulders of Aaron Copland, a gifted second-tier composer who undertook in the twenties and thirties to jump-start an American classical music infused with a French modernist aesthetic. So far as Copland was concerned (and also Thomson, Bernstein, and many others), there was nothing much in place to work with. Gottschalk, Dvorak, Ives, Joplin, Chadwick, Griffes were all invisible to them. But these pre-1920 composers would have become unignorable if Dvorak had stuck around another half dozen years. #

If this is a pipe-dream, Mark McCoy’s reinvention of the DePauw School of Music may be the real deal. Beginning next fall, “State of the Art” will become mandatory for all sophomores. This course – as I discovered – takes a hard and informed look at classical music in America and how it got that way (the instructor, the cellist Eric Edberg, has long espoused and taught Improvisation at DePauw). “Entrepreneurship” will become mandatory for all juniors. (Yes, I know that is now a music-education buzzword and in itself means nothing.) Every senior will have to invent a “project” — something less generic than a recital or thesis. The sequence will be supported by an agenda of composer and ensemble residencies crafted to push everyone beyond the traditional boundaries of classical music. #

That this is a genuine experiment I have no doubt. #

(To see a video summary of the festival, click here.) #

“The Chasm Between Doing Music and Thinking About It”

The most resonant sentence in Robert Freeman’s highly quotable new book The Crisis of Classical Music in America reads: “It is my own strong conviction that, in the years ahead, music will need all the help we can give her. To my way of thinking, that means the development of collegiate musicians who are dedicated at least as much to the future of music as they as are to the unfolding of their own careers.” #

Freeman’s own career – presiding over the Eastman School, the New England Conservatory, and the Butler School of Music at the University of Texas/Austin – has at all times targeted the “future of music.” His book – subtitled “Lessons from a Life in the Education of Musicians” — is unignorable for anyone invested in the musical education of young Americans. #

Another resonant Freeman formulation is “the chasm between doing music and thinking about it.” I have myself been pondering that chasm, and trying to do something about it, for as long as I have been producing concerts and writing books. But I had to think twice when I read, in Freeman’s book, what Archibald Davison, long the chairman of Music at Harvard, had to say about it in 1926: #

“It is sometimes urged that there is an analogy between the type of ability required in the manipulation of apparatus used in the physical lab in preparation of entrance examinations, and the merely mechanical business of playing the pianoforte, for example. This is hardly true, for the ability to handle skillfully laboratory instruments presupposes the use of logic or original thinking in the experiments that are to follow, whereas playing the pianoforte may be a purely physical matte in which the intellect plays a relatively small part.” #

Freeman comments: “However misguided such a philosophy may be from the perspective of any thoughtful modern musician, the original design for the study of music in the United States perpetuated the European split between doing music and thinking about it. . . . Theory and practice, isolated from one another, needlessly fracture not only music’s integrity as a discipline but the possibility of its broader influence in America.” #

When I entered Swarthmore College in 1965, the Davison distinction was firmly in place: no credit was offered for playing a musical instrument – or for acting in a play, or for creating a painting or a poem. Then the college inched forward under the guidance of a committee charged with rethinking the curriculum. I remember being asked by a distinguished member of the English faculty why musical performance should become curricular. His governing assumption was that only an “intellectual” component of this activity would validate it as credit-bearing. My answer was weak – something about the cerebral dimension of translating notes into sounds. #

I now recognize what seems obvious: that making music importantly hones a range of human capacities – intellectual, emotional, experiential. In any event, Swarthmore proceeded to grudgingly offer a quarter-credit per semester for preparing and performing chamber music under professional supervision. As a participating pianist, I was assigned Copland’s Sextet for piano, clarinet, and string quartet. The coach was Paul Zukofsky, who told us that we were tackling one of the most difficult pieces in the chamber repertoire. I remember learning and performing it (not very well). I equally remember that, beyond listening to Copland’s own recording, I failed utterly to “think about it.” Notwithstanding our motivating quarter-credit, the fascinating history of this piece (which began as a symphony), and the composer’s complex odyssey as a modernist turned populist, remained equally unknown to me and my fellow chamber musicians. #

How much has changed? I could cite many experiences with gifted young instrumentalists who learn the notes of a symphony or sonata without “thinking about it.” #

At today’s music conservatories, the need for formidable change is pervasive, but formidable change is not. It is, however, coming. An experiment of which I am aware – and which Freeman mentions in his book – is taking place at DePauw University, where Mark McCoy is intent upon re-inventing the School of Music. At DePauw’s upcoming “Dvorak and America” festival, the participating orchestra musicians will be required to read a book. (I wonder if there is a precedent.) The symphony in question is Dvorak’s “New World” and the book is Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, which as followers of this blog know figures fundamentally in the Largo and Scherzo. There will also be a rehearsal at which the pertinence of this information in pondered. #

Does the knowledge that Dvorak was inspired by the Dance of Pau-Puk-Keewis change the way we perform or hear the opening of the Scherzo? There is no right answer. But the question itself is a pertinent one if the chasm Freeman documents is to be broached. Nor is this question irrelevant to the concert experience and “the future of music.” More than before, more than ever, musicians must not only ask themselves what it’s about, but what it’s for. #