Alex Ross's Blog, page 247

Bernstein returns

Bernstein at Tanglewood, 1948. From the Library of Congress.

Twenty-seven years after its premiere, Leonard Bernstein's opera A Quiet Place is finally arriving in Manhattan: New York City Opera presents the work beginning on Wednesday. Zachary Woolfe has a preview in today's New York Times; there's also a piece by William Braun in Opera News. With Lenny in the air, I thought I'd link again to "The Bernstein Files," a three-part multimedia piece I published on the New Yorker website last year. Here's a quick highlight reel from the Nixon tapes, in which Nixon, H. R. Haldeman, and, briefly, Ginger Rogers address Bernstein's Mass and other musical matters:

Nixon vs. Bernstein

Book tour diary 2

The Listen to This book tour has roared down the West Coast, causing indescribable scenes of chacona frenzy and dithyrambic lamentation in one city after another. I'm tremendously grateful to all those who invited me to speak, came out to see me, picked up copies of my book(s), and shared favorite bass lines. I have more appearances in the coming week: a reading at Book Court in Brooklyn tomorrow night (Friday), the Westport Library in Connecticut on Monday, the Free Library of Philadelphia on Tuesday, conversations with Andrew Patner and John Luther Adams in Chicago on Wednesday and Thursday, and a final Chacona at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Friday.

The not always sun-kissed Pacific Northwest had a spell of glorious weather while I was there. During the flight from Seattle to Portland, I had this view of Mount St. Helens, with, I believe, Mount Adams in the background:

Yes, Farrar, Straus and Giroux rented a vintage B-17 Flying Fortress for the tour. I had a lovely event that night at Powell's Books, which is a strong contender for the title of the greatest bookstore that ever was or will be:

The Portland aiport was wrapped in an oddly magical haze:

On landing in Berkeley, I made the obligatory stop at the Cheeseboard, inarguably the world's greatest pizza:

I appeared in Berkeley's august Cal Performances series and also spoke to the UC Berkeley music department, where none other than Richard Taruskin honored me with an introduction — more entertaining and eloquent than the main event. I was considerably more relaxed when I visited the West Coast Live show the following day, alongside author and blogger Jonah Lehrer. I'm afraid that neither of us matches the literary fame of Tucker Max:

Mediocre pizza in Sausalito was the perfect cure for a sudden onset of Traveling Author Personality Disorder:

Each day in the Bay Area I woke up to a beloved view (thanks as ever to Danny, Hilary, Josh, and Stephanie):

On my way to speak at California Lectures in Sacramento — the Crest Theatre is seen at the top of this post — I drove through the Sacramento River Delta, avoiding the boredom of Highway 80. Here's the massive Antioch Bridge:

Rio Vista was once the scene of a memorable visit from Humphrey the Humpback Whale:

I flew down to Los Angeles the following day to appear in the Los Angeles Public Library ALOUD series. Everything in LA was strangely wet. It's almost as if water were falling from the sky:

My West Coast stint ended at the imaginatively curated Arts & Lectures series at UC Santa Barbara. Laurie Anderson had appeared there the previous night. You wouldn't believe the mess she made of the dressing room:

I could easily have lingered in Santa Barbara a little while:

It gets better

My blog has gone purple today in support of the campaign against anti-gay bullying.

Providence

More richly deserved attention is falling on Community MusicWorks, the passionately innovative music-education initiative that I wrote about in 2006. Last month, Sebastian Ruth, the founder of the organization, received a MacArthur Fellowship. Today, at the White House, Michelle Obama will present members of Community MusicWorks with a National Arts and Humanities Youth Programs Award; on Friday, the group will celebrate with a musical block party outside its storefront headquarters, in Providence, Rhode Island. Geoff Edgers, of the Boston Globe, has the story. For more on the program, see Chapter 14 of Listen to This.

Lamento everywhere

Each time I do my "Chacona" talk, several people come up afterward to name their own favorite lamento basses. (Go here to see what I'm talking about, or watch the video.) My cluster of examples from modern pop music—"Chim Chim Cher-ee" (courtesy of Paul Lansky), "Michelle," "Hotel California," "Ballad of a Thin Man," Nina Simone singing "Strange Fruit"—is obviously just the beginning. Sarah Cahill, the noted Bay Area pianist, points out that Roxy Music's "Both Ends Burning" has what I call the "classic" four-note falling bass line, the one that is heard variously in Monteverdi's Lamento della ninfa and Ray Charles's "Hit the Road Jack." Almost all songs with this bass line are in the minor mode, but "Both Ends Burning" is more or less in the major, which produces a wonderfully jarring effect.

Barney Sherman sent along a link to an Independent article in which Donovan discusses the Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." This song has a recurring bass line that begins with the notes A G F-sharp F-natural:

While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Barney generously describes the article as a "smoking gun" for my theory that descending bass lines in 1960s and 70s pop and rock may have a conscious link to the Baroque examples that I discuss in Listen to This. Donovan says: "It's based on a descending pattern based on a Bach piece. I just passed it on. I simply had some forms at the time that they didn't." The claim is arguable, since the Beatles had earlier used a similar kind of sighing figure in "Michelle," but the citation of Bach is telling. What piece Donovan have in mind? It's possible that he was thinking of "Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen" ("Weeping, Wailing, Fretting, Quaking"), which was reworked as the "Crucifixus" of the B-Minor Mass. The bass line is not the same, but there is a family resemblance of lament:

Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen

An Edmund Rubbra moment

Inspired by An Overgrown Path.

Miscellany: Jacaranda, etc.

On October 23rd, Jacaranda, the ever-adventurous SoCal series, opens its season with music of Charles Ives (a "portfolio" of short piano, vocal, and ensemble pieces), Samuel Barber (his Knoxville Summer of 1915), Krenek (his George Washington Variations), and the great Ben Johnston (the world premiere of his Revised Standards).... Will Robin reports on a wild night of avant-garde music theater at the Staatsoper in Berlin.... Alexandra Gardner muses on "tired ears".... There's one more performance tonight (Sunday) of Jonathan Dawe's Cracked Orlando, a "fractal" reworking of Italian Baroque opera.... Jon Wiener has posted John Cage's 1972 letter in support of Yoko Ono, from the period when she and John Lennon were threatened with deportation.... James Pritchett blogs about the process of preparing and performing Cage's "number pieces".... Is Marc-André Dalbavie's Gesualdo the Gesualdo opera we've all been waiting for? Shirley Apthorp says yes.

Other publications

Listen to This aside, I'm happy to say that I have pieces appearing in two other volumes this fall: my article on Marian Anderson has been chosen for the 2010 edition of Best Music Writing, edited by Ann Powers and Daphne Carr; and Charles Youmans's Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss will contain my essay "Strauss's Place in the Twentieth Century."

Book tour diary 1

I've set out on a book tour for Listen to This. I gave my "Chacona, Lamento" talk last night at Seattle's Town Hall; I'm going on to Portland today, for a reading at the great Powell's Books. Tomorrow night I'll speak at Berkeley's Cal Performances; appearances to follow in Sacramento, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara. I had a lovely time at Town Hall, and am grateful to all those who came out to watch me dance the chacona and get the Led out.

For Professor Brinkmann

I am very sad to hear that the musicologist Reinhold Brinkmann has passed away, at the age of seventy-six. His book Late Idyll, on Brahms's Second Symphony, is a masterpiece of scholarship and a searching meditation on the art of melancholy.