Archives for May 2007

Watch this space at 1:30 Wednesday afternoon for a major announcement–and I do mean major.
(Curious? You should be.)

Ms. Asymmetrical Information asked this question the other day:

As longtime readers know, I’m slowly reconstituting the music collection that was lost when I moved west. Veeeeeeeeerrry slooooooooowly. Currently, I’ve got about 1100 songs, which is fine, but not enough for me to achieve that sense of security that comes from knowing that you’ll have something you want to listen to every single time you fire up your iPod.

I posed the question to a friend over IM this morning: how many is enough? His answer: “all of them.” That can’t be right; it’s very rare that I think to myself that there is one, and only one, album in the world I want to listen to right now. You have to be able to achieve a sort of musical statistical universe well short of every song that has ever been written.

But how many is enough? 1,100 is, as I can personally attest, well short of enough; every time I open iTunes there is something missing. So how far am I from achieving my goal of musical nirvana? 3,000? 5,000? More? I’m not asking when I’ll stop needing new music; presumably, there will always be room in the inn. But when will I stop feeling that empty, yearning sensation every time I open a music player?

As of today I have 3,202 songs on my iPod, which is about all it will hold. From time to time I knock off a few old songs to make room for new ones, but for the most part I find that three thousand songs is enough, by which I mean that whenever I fire up my iPod, I never have any trouble finding something I want to hear.

My office, on the other hand, contains seven custom-built wooden CD shelves holding three thousand discs. In the past year or two, I’ve let days go by at a time without listening to any of them, and I’m sure there are at least a hundred (if not more) to which I’ve never listened, just as there is a not-inconsiderable number of books on my shelves that I’ve never read.

The sad truth is that I now spend more time reading and listening for professional reasons than I do for pleasure. As one of the characters in The Long Goodbye remarks to Philip Marlowe, “I make lots of dough. I got to make lots of dough to juice the guys I got to juice in order to make lots of dough to juice the guys I got to juice.” That’s not a bad description of my aesthetic life: I spend too much time having experiences in order to write about them and not enough having them purely for their own sake. This isn’t to say that I never enjoy myself–I very much enjoyed the afternoon I spent reading Donald Westlake’s new novel, for instance–but it strikes me that my priorities have gotten slightly out of whack.

I’m making this embarrassing confession for a reason, which is that I’m going to try to do something about it. I mentioned last Friday that I’d listened to Leos Janacek’s Concertino the day before. That wasn’t a random observation: I decided that morning to spend a part of each day listening to something I’ve never heard.

Last Friday I listened to Darius Milhaud’s Protée, and the next day I went to a press preview of the Broadway revival of 110 in the Shade, a musical whose score was new to me. On Sunday I chose Dmitri Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto, and yesterday it was Jaco Pastorius’ 1976 recording of Miles Davis’ Donna Lee.

Except for 110 in the Shade, I don’t plan to write about any of these listening experiences, at least not at first. All I’m going to do is post them on this blog, day by day, and see what effect they have on me over time.
The older you get, the easier it is to become a comfort-seeking creature of habit. I don’t want my aesthetic arteries to harden, nor do I want to start taking for granted the miracle that is music. To put it another way, I don’t ever want to have enough CDs. Hence this experiment in musical self-therapy. My hope is that it will freshen my ears–and enliven my soul.

It shines with a miraculous light

Revealing to the eye the cutting of facets.

It alone speaks to me

When others are too scared to come near.

When the last friend turned his back

It was with me in my grave

As if a thunderstorm sang

Or all the flowers spoke.

Anna Akhamatova, “Music” (trans. Grigori Gerenstein)

I just got back from the meeting at which the New York Drama Critics’ Circle votes on its annual awards. Here they are:
• Best play: The Coast of Utopia
• Best American play: Radio Golf
• Best musical: Spring Awakening
We also voted to give a special citation to the Broadway revival of Journey’s End.
To read more about the NYDCC and this year’s awards, go here.
UPDATE: Here’s Playbill‘s story about this year’s awards.

I was going to write at length about Mark Morris’ Metropolitan Opera production of Orfeo ed Euridice, but Tony Tommasini has already said most of what I wanted to say. Read what he wrote and you’ll get a good sense of what Morris’ melding of opera and modern dance looked and sounded like. The only thing I want to add is that I found it enthralling but not especially moving, and I think I know why.

It strikes me that this Orfeo is best understood as an ingenious attempt to solve an insoluble problem: how do you make sense of a small-scale opera in a large-scale opera house? As I wrote about the Met in a 1995 essay published in Commentary:

The present-day Metropolitan Opera House, which opened in 1966 as part of Lincoln Center, has 3,788 seats and a 54-foot-square stage opening. Because of the size of the stage and the depth of the hall, every one of the Met’s productions is by definition “spectacular.” The only variable is the style.

A spectacular production of a three-singer opera is a contradiction in terms, and I felt that contradiction operating throughout Orfeo, the same way I do whenever I see an opera at the Met that calls for anything remotely approaching dramatic intimacy. Even nineteenth-century story ballets have a way of getting lost in the Met, whose mammoth proscenium arch swallows up dance instead of setting it off. Modern dance, whose vectors point down, not up, has an even harder time registering in so fundamentally hostile an environment. To be sure, Morris and his designers did a brilliant job of filling the space, and their Orfeo is an absorbing visual experience–but I never got close enough to it, emotionally speaking, to feel anything but admiration.

Now that I’ve spent four years on the aisle as a theater critic, attending two or three performances each week in houses that rarely hold more than a thousand or so people, I find the monstrous scale of the Met to be even more problematic than I did when I was a working critic of music and dance. No doubt that’s one of the reasons why I no longer go there very often. For me, opera is drama or it’s nothing. Its purely musical values can be experienced just as well at home. Yes, I’ve seen some Met productions that made dramatic sense. John Dexter’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, Mark Lamos’ Wozzeck, and Elijah Moshinsky’s Queen of Spades all rank high on my list of unforgettable nights at the theater. But they’re exceptions to a rule that I find increasingly antipathetical.

As for Mark Morris’ Orfeo, it’s…well, spectacular. Which is fine in its way: I like a super-sensational spectacle as much as the next guy. I only wish this one had been accompanied by a more suitable soundtrack.

It’s been way too long since I trolled the Web for cool stuff, so here goes:
• The inimitable Mr. Think Denk nails House in one:

I propose that House is really “about” irony and sarcasm; it asks the question…what is the acceptable level of emotion in the modern world?

• Eddie Muller, author of a smart and funny book about film noir, offers a list of “25 noir films that will stand the test of time.” Go here to read it. I agree, mostly.
• I’d been wondering what became of Miranda July, the writer-director-star of Me and You and Everyone We Know, one of my favorite indie movies of the past few years. Well, here’s the answer–and it’s got me very excited.
• Something I wrote not long ago inspired this lovely reflection on the nature of music:

This is one of the bittersweet things about our art: a beautiful moment is gone as soon as it appears, living only in our memory of it, no matter how heated that memory is. This creates a special kind of conflict in the directionally-oriented structures of Western music. The music tells us we’re going forward towards something, but our minds may get stuck in particular moments that have already passed….

Read the whole thing, please, and after you do, consider this fugitive observation by Samuel Langford, the greatest music critic you’ve (probably) never heard of:

Everything passing is but a symbol, says the wise Goethe, and music, in one sense the most swiftly passing and intangible of all mortal things, is in another the essence of the imperishable.

Yes.
• My favorite blogger has been on a roll lately. Here’s an especially good example:

I feel like I “put up” with music when I eat out, although I’m surprisingly capable of tuning it out when I dine solo. But dining not-solo is another matter. Maybe the best soundtrack to a superlative dining experience is nothing more than conversation–and I’m not fussy about the topic; it could be a brilliant counterpoint about the food and wine, your laundry, and that sensational young pianist who just performed with the symphony. But music? It distracts…from the food and wine (if that’s what I want to pay attention to) and from the conversation (if that’s what I want to pay attention to) and makes me wonder: does this dining experience merit the challenge of this aural distraction?…

Yes, yes, a gazillion times yes.
• Here are two inimitable voices from the past: Kurt Weill singing excerpts from two of his songs…
• …and Vladimir Nabokov reading an excerpt from Lolita. (Scroll down for the link.)
• On a lighter but no less serious note, here’s the only surviving film of Clifford Brown in performance. It’s from a kinescope of a 1956 TV show hosted by–believe it or not–Soupy Sales.
• Speaking of jazz, a blogger-author recently posted the complete text of one of Donald Barthelme’s wittiest and most knowing short stories, King of Jazz. It’s brief and brilliant, and I commend it to your attention.
• This video has been bouncing around cyberspace in recent days. It’s John Cage’s 1960 appearance on I’ve Got a Secret, one of the most popular prime-time TV game shows of my childhood, and nothing I could possibly say about it comes anywhere near the experience of viewing it. Please do so at once…
• …and after you’re through, spend a couple of minutes looking at this excerpt from a 1964 TV broadcast of Septet, one of the very few Merce Cunningham dances accompanied not by the avant-garde soundscapes of Cage or David Tudor but by a bonafide piece of honest-to-God music, Erik Satie’s Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear.
As I wrote in an essay on Cunningham reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader:

To see it is to see the Merce that might have been–a conventional Cunningham. Though the body language of Septet is as idiosyncratic as anything the Cunningham company dances today, the tone of the dance is startlingly “normal.” It isn’t just that Septet derives its structure (and counts) from a piece of music…It’s the style, the cheery atmosphere of accessibility, that startles.

Ponder at will.
• Here’s the best Wikipedia entry I’ve read so far this year…
• …and here’s the most poignant news story I’ve read in I don’t know how long.
• Finally, here’s a great game for the literary-minded. I got a passing score–barely.

“It is something to belong to the same race of beings as Beethoven.”
Samuel Langford, Musical Criticisms