Alex Ross's Blog, page 99

The corner of Schönberg and Faust

Snapshot from Zurich: the Thomas Mann Archive, out of the picture to the left, is at the corner of Doktor-Faust-Gasse and Schönberggasse. The latter presumably doesn't refer to the Schö/oenberg, who had no Zurich connections that I know of, but the coincidence is amusing.

Previously: The corner of Strauss and Stravinsky.

The sports crisis

Louis Menand writes in this week's New Yorker about Matthew Futterman’s book Players: The Story of Sports and Money. One passage caught my eye: "[Futterman] thinks that the industry has expanded beyond the scale of its actual audience. 'One of the great illusions of the sports industry is mass fascination,' he says. It’s true that hundreds of millions of people watch special events like the World Cup and the Olympics, but the day-to-day audience for sports is tiny. In the United States, it amounts to about four per cent of households. Fewer than three per cent on average watch their local N.B.A. games; fewer than two per cent watch their home-town N.H.L. teams."

And more: "About twenty per cent of the average cable bill goes to sports channels, which pay the teams or the leagues for the right to show their games. Which means that sports are currently enjoying a very large subsidy from a public that doesn’t watch them ... A statistic related to the shrinking market is the rising age of fans in some sports. According to Futterman, in 2009 the average age of a postseason baseball viewer was forty-nine; in 2014, it was fifty-five. The average age of someone who watched a regular-season baseball game that season was fifty-eight .... Sports’ 'cultural relevance,' as Futterman puts it, may be in decline."

At the grave of Thomas Mann

Anthroposophical miscellany

At the Goetheanum, in Dornach, Switzerland.

On May 19, the National Arts Centre in Ottawa will present an omnibus program entitled Life Reflected, consisting of four recently commissioned works about formidable female figures. The composers are Zosha Di Castri, Jocelyn Morlock, Nicole Lizée, and John Estacio. Alexander Shelley conducts.... David Hanlon, whom longtime readers of this blog may (or may not) recall as the winner of the Rest Is Noise Classical Apocalypse Contest, has written a chamber opera entitled After the Storm, about the storms that have repeatedly laid waste to Galveston, Texas. Houston Grand Opera gives the première this weekend....  The Red Bull Music Academy unleashes three guitar symphonies by Glenn Branca in NYC on May 16.... In LA, the last WasteLAnd program of the season, on May 27, brings music of Griffeath-Loeb, Aperghis, Deyoe, Eckardt, and Michelle Lou. The following day, Dudamel and the LA Phil will introduce a new Arvo Pärt work, Greater Antiphons.... Next Monday, at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, I will talk to Peter Sellars about his plans for the Ojai Festival in June and various other matters.... The English rock band Radiohead have released a new album, entitled A Moon Shaped Pool. Like their previous albums, it is very good.... Q2's Peabody Award-winning Meet the Composer series is raising funds for a third season.

Babbitt 100

Milton Babbitt, a glorious singularity of a man, would have been a hundred today. Q2 is celebrating the occasion with a couple of archival broadcasts, including a 1986 seventieth-birthday tribute conducted by Tim Page. If you haven't watched Robert Hilferty's Babbitt documentary, now would be a good time.

Appearance

I am in the great Wagner-, Mann-, and Joyce-Stadt of Zürich, where the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste has invited me to lecture on general classical-music matters (Monday, 530pm). I just saw Dmitri Tcherniakov's formidable new production of Pelléas et Mélisande at the Zürich Opera, for which Jacques Imbrailo perhaps created the most psychologically intricate and unsettling portrait of Golaud I've seen —one that is all the more potent for stopping short of irrevocable violence. More on that at a later date, I hope.

Willa Cather on Strauss's Guntram

From a 1904 essay titled "The Case of Richard Strauss." It might be noted that a lack of direct acquaintance with a work or performer did not necessarily stop Cather from making imperious and persuasive generalizations about it, him, or her.

John Cage's Grammy

Via Laura Kuhn, by way of George Grella.

Bookshelf (non-musical edition)

Edna O'Brien's novelistic response to the unmasking and trial of Radovan Karadžić is as astonishing and harrowing as everyone says it is. To quote James Wood's review in The New Yorker: "What is extraordinary and unsettling about O’Brien’s novel is the way that it begins in an atmosphere of something approaching pastoral comedy, and steadily darkens as we become acquainted with the buried but unrepressed war crimes of the town’s resident trickster. It is like watching a blush turn into the red of murderous fury: it seems impossible that the same mild medium could be so brutally weaponized." The final sentence of the book contains the words "savage music," and they suffice to describe O'Brien's achievement.

A (long) McIntosh moment