Archives for 2003

“During a technically very complicated recording at Goldwyn Studios, one of the playback machines broke down time and time again, causing endless delays. Finally I succumbed to the luxury of pointless anger.

I’m out of here for a couple of days. Tonight I’ll be seeing the premiere of Ken Ludwig’s Shakespeare in Hollywood at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. (I’m reviewing it for next Friday’s Wall Street Journal), and on Saturday afternoon I’ll be giving the annual Mencken Day lecture at Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library. Stop by if you’re in town–the Mencken Room, where Mencken’s private papers are stored, is open to the public from 10 to 5. I’ll be speaking at three o’clock and signing copies of The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken afterward.

Needless to say, none of this will interfere with the clock-like regularity with which “About Last Night” is published–24/5 as per always, unless I’m in Maine or jail. I’ll be here on Monday, and I’m here now with today’s topics, from functional to frivolous: (1) Of concert halls, museums, and fancy houses. (2) Is blog smog choking the Web? (3) A going-away party for a jazz giant. (4) The latest almanac entry.

Yesterday’s posting about Zankel Hall was picked up by my host, artsjournal.com, thus bringing me a heap of new visitors. (Hi, y’all.) Allow me to return the compliment. Click on the artsjournal.com logo at the top of this page and you will be magically transported to one of the best sites on the Web, a daily digest of news stories and commentary on the arts from throughout the English-speaking world (not to mention the host for a half-dozen wide-ranging arts blogs, of which “About Last Night” is but one). I look at artsjournal.com every morning. So should you.

Not to belabor the obvious…so I won’t. Have a nice weekend. Come back Monday–and bring a friend. (Whoops, I did it again!)

As I think about my first visit to Zankel Hall, and what I wrote about it yesterday, I’m struck by something that ought to be more obvious than it is: I took for granted that the architectural design of the hall ought to be of subordinate interest to its function. Beyond a description of the hall’s appearance and a succinct expression of my reaction to it (“I found the results to be attractive enough but somewhat sterile-looking, a typical exercise in safe concert-hall modernism”), I devoted myself exclusively to practical matters. How did the hall sound? Were the public areas comfortable? What about subway noise? Short of talking about the bathrooms (which I didn’t visit), I couldn’t have been much less aesthetic-minded than that.

I know what you’re thinking, and quite rightly, too: It’s a concert hall, for God’s sake. If the acoustics are lousy, who cares how it looks? Of course it isn’t quite that simple. The eye can fool the ear into thinking that an ugly hall “sounds” bad (this was part of the problem with Lincoln Center’s old Philharmonic Hall). Still, the basic premise holds true under most circumstances. First and foremost, a concert hall must sound good. After that, it must be congenial, meaning that going there should be a pleasant experience rather than an oppressive one. If the seats are uncomfortable, you won’t notice the acoustics–you’ll be too busy squirming. Once these enabling conditions are met, you start thinking about the visual appeal of the building, if then.

I mention all this because of the recent intramural squabble over the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, which some arts bloggers like and others loathe. Now I’m a dyed-in-the-wool aesthete who would dearly love to live in an exceptionally beautiful house and would willingly put up with a significant amount of nuisance value (i.e., leaky roofs) in order to do so…but not an unlimited amount. To put it as drastically as possible, I wouldn’t want to live in Fallingwater if it didn’t have indoor plumbing–and I might well think twice about it if there wasn’t a good place to hang my John Marin etching, either.

Clement Greenberg, the great art critic whom I not infrequently have occasion to quote, said something highly relevant in this connection:

There are, of course, more important things than art: life itself, what actually happens to you. This may sound silly, but I have to say it, given what I’ve heard art-silly people say all my life: I say that if you have to choose between life and happiness or art, remember always to choose life and happiness. Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.

I think these words ought to be done in cross-stitch and hung in the homes of artists and art-lovers everywhere, if not necessarily in the living room. Art is not the most important thing in the world. Earthly beauty is not an absolute value. (Among many other things, it isn’t worth killing for.) I may disagree with City Comforts about whether or not Frank Lloyd Wright was a genius, but I think we’re all basically dealing from the same deck when it comes to this larger question, and I suspect you are, too, whether you’ve thought about it or not.

If you haven’t, try it the very next time you find yourself sitting in a concert hall or theater. Sure, the very best auditoriums are both beautiful and functional. These two qualities need not be incompatible. But if you have to choose, and if the choices are mutually exclusive, there’s really no choice, is there? The trick is to keep them from becoming mutually exclusive–which is one of the many reasons why arts bloggers blog.

I close with these thought-provoking words
from City Comforts:

The two cultures which concern me are the one of people who carefully observe the built environment and the…what do I call it?….rest of our society. I haven’t quite figured out how to term it but I know that there is such a lack of knowldge and sophistication as to be quite remarkable. And mind you, this is amongst otherwise very bright people, all of them alive and living inside the built world. Yet, to my ears, they seem blissfully unaware of it or if somewhat interested, then often somewhat lacking in knowledge, compared to their general knowledge of other aspects of society. At least that’s my take. The built world is just a given, part of the background of their lives and over which, perhaps, they have so little control that understanding seems a pointless endeavor. I honestly don’t know. But I find it interesting, appalling and a bit confusing….

Are many intellectuals scared of it because it is so vast and complex? Maybe all. And that, if I dare suggest it, is why we have starchitecture running riot: there are far too few intellectual police with the confidence to put such work in its proper place.

We don’t agree about everything, but about this we are in perfect sync.

A reader writes:

I’m afraid that as blogs proliferate, the medium threatens to become as “oceanic” and inefficent as the myriad other venues on the net–and off. Not enough time is allotted to us in our lifetimes to paddle through this immense and ever-increasing expanse of random opinion. And I fear that the super-high SQ (Snark Quotient) threatens to trivialize the medium, sapping it of real serious intent. I suppose it may be contrary to the essentially free-wheeling nature of the medium, but is there a way to counteract “blog smog”?

I know exactly what my correspondent means, but I also think it’s in “the essentially free-wheeling nature of the medium” for arts bloggers (and all other kinds of bloggers, for that matter) to write whatever the hell they want and let their readers sort it out. This is, after all, a market, and a fairly efficient one, too. Given a certain amount of effort, it quickly becomes apparent which arts blogs are worth reading daily, which ones weekly, and which ones not at all.

Even more interesting is the fact that bloggers also tend to link to one another, meaning that we do the sorting, and my guess is that it is in this manner that the Web will gradually become less random and more accessible–through organic evolution rather than central planning, so to speak. It used to be widely said that what the Web lacked were “gatekeepers” who could sort through everything out there and tell the great unwashed public what was worth reading–sort of like, oh, print-media editors. But then the great unwashed public started noticing that more than a few of the existing print-media gatekeepers were doing a rotten job of keeping their gates, and shortly thereafter, the blogosphere started to pick up speed. Coincidence? I suspect not.

As for the snarkiness, well, I kind of like it, at least when it’s wicked clever, as Mainers say. “Serious intent,” after all, comes under many different covers. I won’t blow the cover of my correspondent, but I will tell you that he is the very distinguished classical composer whom I mentioned
in this space a few weeks ago–the one who sings Emily Dickinson poems to the tune of the Gilligan’s Island theme at drunken parties, and who has also been known to emit the odd snarky remark from time to time.

Lest we forget, blogging is a fairly new phenomenon, one still in the process of finding its footing. Frankly, I think we need more arts blogging, not less. For openers, I know I’d love to read a blog about the daily life of a classical composer. Any takers?

A memorial service will be held this coming Monday in Manhattan for Benny Carter, the great jazz musician who died July 12 at the age of 95. It’ll take place at St. Peter’s Church (619 Lexington at 54th St.) starting at 7:30. The service is open to the public, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the joint jumps, albeit decorously–jazz musicians like to send one another off in style.

I have to give a short speech elsewhere in the neighborhood at almost exactly the same time, but I plan to drop by if I possibly can. You come, too.

“It’s an odd mindset that sees hubris everywhere, but that cannot recognize evil.”

Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, Sept. 11, 2003

I’m still here, and whatever was wrong with me yesterday isn’t today, thus allowing me to present you with a basically normal “About Last Night.” All art, all the time, or at least on weekdays when my color is good–you know the drill.

Today’s topics, from queasy to comfy: (1) A quick peek into Manhattan’s newest concert hall. (2) A museological smackdown. (3) Bare naked ladies on canvas. (4) The Thurber wars. (5) The latest almanac entry.

Tuesday’s numbers for this site were the highest since I took a week off to go play on the cliffs of Isle au Haut. I attribute this solely to your industrious plugging (though I have no doubt that the adorable Megan McArdle helped!). Keep it up.

Whither www.terryteachout.com? It all depends on you.

My most recent “Second City” column for the Washington Post (accessible in the right-hand column), a preview of the fall season in New York, started off as follows:

If you’re a music lover–and it doesn’t much matter what kind of music you love best–the big event will be the opening this month of Zankel Hall, the new 650-seat auditorium that Carnegie Hall has carved out of its basement.

Even before the New York Philharmonic announced its plans to leave Lincoln Center for Carnegie Hall, midtown Manhattan was greatly in need of a medium-size auditorium with good acoustics (Carnegie Hall seats 2,804, Weill Recital Hall 268). Assuming Lincoln Center doesn’t try to block the Philharmonic’s move, Zankel Hall will become an even more important addition to New York’s surprisingly short list of first-class concert venues, since Carnegie Hall will suddenly find itself with an 800-pound gorilla as its principal tenant. An impressive roster of inaugural-season performers is guaranteed to keep the house humming, so all that remains is to find out what it sounds like. I’ll be all ears at Wednesday’s media preview matinee–watch this space for details.

Sure enough, I was there, but I don’t want to jump to any premature conclusions. I’ll be seeing a lot of Zankel Hall in the coming weeks and months, and will have plenty of time to get used to its idiosyncrasies. In the meantime, I do have a few preliminary observations:

Design. Zankel Hall is an old-fashioned shoebox (the most acoustically reliable shape for a concert hall) set inside an elliptical shell. The walls and floor are made of blond wood. The ceiling is an exposed lighting grid painted pitch-black–it feels as if you’re sitting underneath a giant assemblage by Louise Nevelson. Though the modular stage area and seating allow for multiple floor plans, the basic arrangement is that of a traditional concert hall with a steeply raked parterre (the sight lines are excellent), two shallow rings, and a small balcony. I found the results to be attractive enough but somewhat sterile-looking, a typical exercise in safe concert-hall modernism.

Comfort. Since Zankel Hall is underneath Carnegie Hall, the space available for public areas is necessarily limited. At first glance, the main lobby, which wraps around the elliptical shell, felt cramped and claustrophobic, even maze-like (some of the ceilings seem almost as low as the ones in the first-floor lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House), and it appeared as if the crowd was having a bit of trouble getting in and out of the auditorium, though that may have been due to the unfamiliarity of the floor plan. Again, this is something to which we’ll all have to accustom ourselves before drawing any conclusions.

In the seating setup used at the media preview, the parterre level of the auditorium had no center aisle and each row was about 20 seats long, meaning that latecomers will have to stumble over earlycomers, just as they do in the New York State Theatre. I hope the managers of the hall will try out a center aisle at some point.

Acoustics. Multipurpose concert halls are by definition acoustically impossible. Classical music requires long resonant times, pop music short ones. That’s why symphony orchestras sound good in Carnegie Hall, whereas amplified jazz groups sound soupy and unclear. Zankel Hall, by contrast, is meant to be used by everybody from Emmylou Harris to the Emerson String Quartet, though it’s a safe bet that the acoustics will be more flattering to some kinds of music than others.

The first part of the preview program consisted of six widely varied pieces of classical music: “Shatter Me, Music,” an a cappella vocal solo commissioned from John Corigliano for the opening of the hall; two piano-accompanied songs (one loud, one soft) by Richard Strauss; “Pagodes,” a piano solo by Debussy; the slow movement of Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasilieras No. 5 for soprano and eight cellos; and Concerto in slendro, a vest-pocket concerto by Lou Harrison for violin, two percussionists, and three keyboard players. Having listening to all these pieces, my snap reaction was that the hall seemed bright, clear, a bit dry, and distinctly bass-shy, a combination of qualities that I found to be unflattering to Ren