Alex Ross's Blog, page 4

Upheaval at NYT Arts

The arts section of the New York Times, which in the past week has published eight articles about the latest Superman movie, announced yesterday that four of its staff critics — Jon Pareles, Jesse Green, Margaret Lyons, and Zachary Woolfe — would be taken off their assigned beats and moved to other, unnamed posts. An editorial memo gestures toward a perceived need for "new story forms, videos, and experimentation with other platforms." All four writers deserve praise, but the loss of Pareles and Woolfe hits close to home. Jon is not only one of America's foremost pop critics but helped to invent the discipline of writing about rock. Nat Chinen pays apt tribute to him. Zack is my cherished colleague and good friend; his abrupt removal after three brilliant years as lead critic makes no sense to me at all. Will Robin has written a discerning overview of what Zack accomplished at the paper. For anyone who believes in serious, independent criticism, this is a dismaying moment.

Revisiting John Cage's European trip, 1930-31

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Passenger list for the paquebot Cuba, June 24, 1930.

A pivotal event in John Cage's development was his trip to Europe in 1930 and 1931. This took place after he dropped out of Pomona College, where he had studied for two years. The journey is said to have lasted for up to eighteen months, from the summer of 1930 to the end of 1931, and included stops in France, Italy, Germany, North Africa, and Spain. Mark Katz, in his book Capturing Sound, made the fascinating observation that Cage had apparently attended a concert of "gramophone music" at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik's Neue Musik Berlin 1930 festival, on June 18 of that year. [1] This program included Hindemith's Trickaufnahmen and Ernst Toch's suite Gesprochene Musik, for sped-up pre-recorded voices, which yielded the famous Geographical Fugue. The idea of a teen-aged Cage receiving inspiration from the ferment of interwar Berlin is irresistible, and I included it in my book The Rest Is Noise. 

Alas, it didn't happen. In the course of researching Cage's early years in Los Angeles, I've uncovered a host of errors and omissions in the extant biographical record. In this post, I'll concentrate on the European trip, leaving other discoveries for a later, longer piece. I had become suspicious of the claim that Cage was in Berlin in June 1930 because of a comment that appears in his Pomona school record: "June 1930. Does not plan to return. Going to travel in Europe." This suggests that Cage did not depart until that month, and all indications are that his first stop was Paris. Having read Thomas Hines's revelatory 1992 interview with Cage [2], in which the composer recalled embarking at Houston on a boat bound for Le Havre, I went in search of passenger lists, and came across the document scanned at the top of this post. Monsieur John Milton Cage is listed among tourist passengers aboard the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique steamer Cuba, which sailed from Houston on June 24, 1930. Given the long sailing times, Cage would not have arrived in France until late July.

Cage, who like many artists was not the most reliable narrator of his life, seems to have been responsible for the confusion. Katz cited as his source a Lawrence Weschler interview with Cage, reported in Weschler's wonderful Atlantic article "My Grandfather's Last Tale," from 1996. Weschler is indeed Toch's grandson, and an authority on the great German-speaking emigration to Los Angeles, of which Toch was part. After mentioning that 1930 concert, Weschler writes: "A young American in the audience, John Cage, was particularly captivated, or so he told me years later, when I met him while researching an article about his and Ernst's dear friend the musical lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky. 'Ah, yes,' Cage said, that marvelously sly twinkle in his eye. 'Toch — boy, was he onto some good stuff back there in Berlin. And then he went and squandered it all on more string quartets!'" [3] In another essay, Weschler reports a family story about Cage having come to Toch's door in Pacific Palisades to inquire about the "composer of the Geographical Fugue" and to ask permission to publish of the piece in Henry Cowell's New Music Edition. Weschler dates this encounter to about 1935. 

A document in the Henry Cowell papers at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts gives a different picture of this Cage-Toch encounter. In a letter dated October 28, 1940, Cage tells Cowell that he recently visited Toch, as part of his efforts to win interest in a Center for Experimental Music. (In this period he also approached Leopold Stokowski and Diego Rivera; hoped-for meetings with Walt Disney, Charlie Chaplin, and Edsel Ford apparently did not come about.) He had made recordings of his percussion instruments and was playing them for various notables. He writes: "I just received an interesting score from Toch, whom I saw, and who heard the records I have. His score is for speech to be recorded 9 times as fast as it is performed. A 'Geographical Fugue' is particularly interesting." Contrary to the Toch family story, this letter makes it sound as though Cage had not known about the Geographical Fugue before he went to see Toch — although it's not out of the question that he had earlier learned of the piece or possibly even heard a repeat performance in Germany. [4] In any case, Cage now begins mentioning the work in letters and writings: in a December 1940 letter to Peter Yates; in another letter to Cowell in January 1941 (pairing his own Imaginary Landscape No. 1 with Toch's Fugue under the rubric of "music impossible without records"); and in a Modern Music column from 1942, dismissively reviewing Toch's Pinocchio overture ("I think we could get along without his popularities and music for films long enough to hear his Fuge aus der Geographie, written for speech nine times as fast as spoken"). [5]

Eventually, Cage helped to put together an English-language version of the Fugue and approached Toch about having it published in New Music Edition — in 1950, not in 1935, as some commentators claim. [6] Toch granted permission in a letter to Frank Wigglesworth dated June 27, 1950. [7] The Fugue was then performed live at a New Music Society concert at Columbia on May 10, 1951, with Marianne Weltman, Sydney Cowell, Frank Wigglesworth, and Cage himself delivering the spoken parts. Vladimir Ussachevsky was on hand to record the performance and play it back at nine times the original speed. The program also featured Virgil Thomson's Capitals, Capitals, Peggy Glanville-Hicks's Thomsoniana, Lou Harrison's Canticle No. 3, and the world première of Cage's own Imaginary Landscape No. 4, the legendary piece for twelve radios. [8] In the following years, the Fugue became a popular chestnut among college choruses, though with the electronic acceleration discarded.

[image error]Back t0 the early 1930s: Cage probably made it to Berlin sometime in 1931, although I have found no clear evidence to that effect. He was traveling in the company of Donald Sample, a Pennsylvania native and 1925 Harvard graduate who had been living in New York. The two had met on the island of Capri and begun a relationship. Sample, having specialized in literature in college, had turned toward art and was taking a particular interest in the Bauhaus. I've seen suggestions that Cage and Sample together visited the Bauhaus in Dessau, but when I attempted to confirm this by contacting the Bauhaus archive — records of visitors were kept at the time — an archivist advised me that Cage and Sample's names do not appear in the extant records. I've discovered quite a bit more about Sample, who remained in L.A. until his death, in 1964.  The photo above left comes from his Harvard yearbook.

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Click to enlarge.

More confusion exists around the timing of Cage's return. Kenneth Silverman, in his biography Begin Again, says that Cage and Sample came back to the United States "late in 1931"; David Revill, in The Roaring Silence, says "fall of 1931." [9] Paul van Emmerik's invaluable Cage Compendium website, working from information supplied by Frans van Rossum, indicates that Cage was on the island of Majorca in the summer of 1931, where he composed his first, untitled work (between Aug. 8 and Sept. 13, to be precise). But an immigration list for the SS Florida, sailing from Havana to Key West, Florida, on July 1, 1931, has Cage and Sample's names, together with their birthdates. My guess is that they sailed together on a CGT boat from Le Havre to Havana in early June, although my search for a corresponding passenger list has come up short.

To be continued...

NOTES

[1] Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Captured Music (University of California Press, 2004), p. 113.

[2] Thomas Hines, Interview with John Cage, May 21 and 23, 1992, transcript at Getty Research Institute, Special Collections.

[3] Lawrence Weschler, "My Grandfather's Last Tale," The Atlantic, Dec. 1996. Weschler's classic two-part New Yorker Profile of Slonimsky, "Boy Wonder," Nov. 17 and 24, 1986, is reprinted in his collection Shapinsky’s Karma, Bogg’s Bills And Other True-Life Tales (North Point Press, 1988).

[4] Diane Jezic, The Musical Migration and Ernst Toch (Iowa State UP, 1989), p. 60, writes that the Fugue "was performed all over Germany by a choral group from the Berlin Hochschule."

[5] See John Cage and Peter Yates, Correspondence on Music Criticism and Aesthetics, ed. Martin Iddon (Cambridge UP, 2020), p. 29; John Cage to Henry Cowell, Jan. 8, 1941, Cowell Papers, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; Cage, "South Winds in Chicago," Modern Music 19:4 (May–June 1942), reprinted in John Cage: An Anthology, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Da Capo Press, 1991), p. 67.

[6] See, for example, Carmel Raz, "The Lost Movements of Ernst Toch’s Gesprochene Musik," and Christopher Raines, "Preface to Gesprochene Musik, 1. 'O–a' and 2. 'Ta–tam,'", both in Current Musicology 97 (Spring 2014), pp. 37, 63.

[7] See New Music Society papers, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. I have found no correspondence with Cage in the Toch Papers at UCLA.

[8] Christian Wolff and David Patterson, "Cage and Beyond: An Annotated Interview with Christian Wolff," Perspectives of New Music 32:2 (1994), p. 85.

[9] Kenneth Silverman, Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Northwestern UP, 2010), p. 10; David Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life (Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 37.

A Peter Maxwell Davies moment

Peter Maxwell Davies's 1973 work Stone Litany is a setting of Norse runic inscriptions that are found on the walls of the great Neolithic tomb of Maes Howe, in the Orkney Islands. Davies's grouping ends with "MAKUS MATTR RÆISTRUNAR ThÆSAR," or "Max the Mighty carved these runes." Most commentators seem to take it as a happy coincidence that the composer found a version of his own nickname among the inscriptions. Having read through several transliterations of the complete graffiti, though, I have to conclude that Davies was having a bit of fun with his listeners. The name "Makus" does not appear. But in Barnes 15 / Farrer XXII, to use two competing numbering systems, the name before "carved these runes" is indecipherable, and Davies can be excused for making a convenient substitution.

Operas about composers

An incomplete list, including several operettas. There is surely no need for any more operas about Gesualdo, unless, as Will Robin once suggested, someone wants to write an opera about a composer who goes insane while trying to write an opera about Gesualdo. To date, only one person has written an opera about a composer and then gone on to become the subject of an opera. But maybe we will one day see a work entitled Pfitzner.

Ignaz von Seyfried, Die Ochsenmenuett, 1823 (Haydn)

Friedrich von Flotow, Alessandro Stradella, 1837/44

Louis Niedermeyer, Stradella, 1837

Charles Luce-Varlet, L'élève de Presbourg, 1840 (Haydn)

César Franck, Stradella, 1841

Franz von Suppé, Franz Schubert, 1864

Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 1868 (Hans Sachs)

Flotow, Die Musikanten (La jeunesse de Mozart), 1870

Suppé, Joseph Haydn, 1887

Rimsky-Korsakov, Mozart and Salieri, 1897

Stanislao Falchi, Il trillo del diavolo, 1899 (Tartini)

Chopin arr. Giacomo Orefice, Chopin, 1901

Schubert arr. Heinrich Berté, Das Dreimäderlhaus, 1916 (Schubert)

Hans Pfitzner, Palestrina, 1917

Franz Lehár, Paganini, 1925

Paul Graener, Friedemann Bach, 1931

Bernhard Paumgartner, Rossini in Neapel, 1936

Peter Maxwell Davies, Taverner, 1972

Francesco d'Avalos, Maria di Venosa, 1992 (Gesualdo)

Alfred Schnittke, Gesualdo, 1993

Franz Hummel, Gesualdo, 1996

Salvatore Sciarrino, Luci mie traditrici, 1998 (Gesualdo)

Scott Glasgow, The Prince of Venosa, 1998 (Gesualdo)

Franz Hummel, Styx, 2001 (Handel)

Bo Holten, Gesualdo—Shadows, 2003

Luca Francesconi, Gesualdo Considered as a Murderer, 2004

Jonathan Harvey, Wagner Dream, 2007

Marc-André Dalbavie, Gesualdo, 2010

Gabriel Kahane, February House, 2012 (features Benjamin Britten)

Dante De Silva, Gesualdo, Prince of Madness, 2013

Michael Dellaira, The Death of Webern, 2016

Avner Dorman, Wahnfried, 2017 (features Siegfried Wagner)

Todd Machover, Schoenberg in Hollywood, 2018

Johannes Boer, La Tragedia di Claudio M., 2018 (Monteverdi)

Tarik O’Regan, The Phoenix, 2019 (about da Ponte, features Mozart)

Victoria Bond, Clara, 2019 (Clara Schumann)

Elliott Sharp, Die Grösste Fuge, 2024 (Beethoven)

Ella Milch-Sheriff, Alma, 2024 (Alma Mahler-Werfel)

Sarah Kirkland Snider, Hildegard, 2025

Nightafternight playlist

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New and recent released of interest.

Schoenberg, String Quartets Nos. 1–4; Webern Quartet, with Yui Futaeda (Etcetera)

Corelli, Concerto Grossi Op. 6; Georg Kallweit and Mayumi Hirasaki leading the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin (Pentatone)

Tania León, Horizons, Raíces (Origins), Stride, Pasajes; Karina Canellakis, Edward Gardner, and Dmitri Slobodeniouk conducting London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO)

Ginastera, String Quartets; Miro Quartet (Pentatone)

Liza Lim, A Sutured World, Annunciation Triptych II: Mary / Transcendence After Trauma, The Compass; Edward Gardner, Franck Ollu, and Christoph Poppen conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony, with Nicholas Altstaedt, Carin Levine, William Barton (BR Klassik, out July 25)

Jürg Frey, Out of Chorales, Polyphonie der Wörter, Shadow and Echo and Jade, Landscape of Echoes, Blue Bird’s Tune, Because I could not stop for Death; EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble (Neu)

Hannah Kendall, Tuxedo: Diving Bell 2, shouting forever into the receiver, Where is the chariot of fire?, Tuxedo: Crown; Sun King, when flesh is pressed against the dark, Tuxedo: Hot Summer No Water, Even sweetness can catch the throat; Vimbayi Kaziboni conducting the Ensemble Modern, Wavefield Ensemble, loadbang, Jonathan Bloxham conducting the Hallé Orchestra, Anne Denholm-Blair, Jonathan Morton, Louise McMonagle (NMC)

Koechlin, Symphony No. 1, Au loin, 3 Mélodies; Patricia Petibon, Ariane Matiakh conducting the Württembergische Philharmonie Reutlingen (Capriccio)

Pygmalion's Bach, Timothy McCormack

Bach's Colossus. The New Yorker, June 30, 2025.

Speaking for many

Emily Witt on the resistance to fascistic thuggery in LA: "The public reaction to the presence of the ICE agents is often hostile. One morning, I followed a Unión del Barrio alert to an Army Reserve center in the city of Bell, which, that morning, immigration agents were using as a staging area. A veritable hive of officials with covered faces was loading into a fleet of American-made vehicles with temporary license plates and dark windows, and rolling out into the city for their day of work. Outside, helpless to stop them, someone pulled up and simply leaned on his horn. Others tried to block the driveway with their cars, but the agents had another exit. One person shouted profanities. In the video of Nancy Urizar’s father, the anger of the strangers observing what was happening in the parking lot is also palpable. 'Fuck every single one of you motherfuckers,' one person says. 'Fuck every single one of you.'"

Salonen's farewell in San Francisco

Joshua Kosman, in his On a Pacific Aisle newsletter, celebrates Esa-Pekka Salonen's final concerts with the San Francisco Symphony but cannot ignore the stench of incompetence that emanates from the orchestra's administrative offices: "Even after Salonen is gone, the Symphony will still be in the hands of those who drove him out. The choice of the next music director will be left to the very people who thought Salonen was dispensable; how much faith do you have in their judgment? Patrons will be asked to step up their support for an organization that will now offer them less reason to feel excited about or committed to what is happening in Davies Symphony Hall. And keep your eye on the orchestral personnel — on the vacancies that go unfilled and the high-profile departures that occur because San Francisco is no longer perceived as a good career investment. Angry? You’re goddam right I’m angry." 

Salonen himself said from the stage, with typical pith: "You’ve heard what you have in this city. This amazing orchestra, this amazing chorus. So take good care of them.”

For Alfred Brendel

This was the encore the last time I heard Brendel play, in 2008. Also lingering in my mind is his Beethoven cycle at Carnegie Hall in the nineteen-nineties. "Listening to him, the mind dances," I wrote then. A remarkable musician and man.

Lossless chords

"For myself, I can only say that I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the results of this evening's experiment — astonished at the wonderful power you have developed, and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever. But all the same I think it is the most wonderful thing that I have ever experienced, and I congratulate you with all my heart on this wonderful discovery."

                    — Arthur Sullivan to Edison, 1888