Archives for July 2007

Like CAAF, I am and have always been a compulsive list-maker. Aesthetic listmaking is only a game, but a good one, because when it’s done right, it helps to focus the mind and sharpen your sense of discrimination. To be sure, I think the postmodern journalistic fad for reducing all aesthetic experience to a series of lists has gotten way out of hand, but even so, I rarely resist the temptation to draw up another one whenever asked.
Carrie’s first “About Last Night” list is a good one, in part because I would have unhesitatingly chosen two of the items on it myself, Jeremy Thrane and (naturally) The Dud Avocado. Not surprisingly, it makes me feel the itch to get in the game again. I am, alas, too damn busy to put together a Really Reflective List, so instead I’ll offer you a quick and dirty one. Here are five CDs I recently acquired and plan to play at the earliest opportunity:
• Ornette Coleman Quintet, Complete Live at the Hillcrest Club
• Giovanni de Chiaro, Scott Joplin on Guitar
• The Best of the Fairfield Four
• Morton Gould, Showcase
• Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony, Beethoven Complete Symphonies and Selected Overtures (a newly remastered reissue of the 1939 broadcast cycle)

Here’s a trivia question for readers with long memories: what musicians who are still making commercial records today started recording in the 78 era? Bear in mind that the long-playing record was introduced by Columbia in 1948 and replaced the old-fashioned 78 single shortly thereafter, so it’s been a very long time since anyone last cut a commercial 78.
I haven’t thought it through carefully, but the only people who come immediately to my mind are four jazz musicians, Roy Haynes, Lee Konitz, Marian McPartland, and Sonny Rollins. (Oscar Peterson and Max Roach date from the same era, though their recording careers now appear to be over.)
Presumably there also are some classical performers who qualify–but who?
UPDATE: The ever-alert Ethan Iverson chimes in with three names I should have come up with on my own: Hank Jones, Clark Terry, and (drumroll) Earl Wild.
I just thought of two glaringly obvious omissions: Dave Brubeck and Horace Silver.
Michael Hendry throws another name into the hat: Charlie Louvin, the surviving member of the Louvin Brothers, one of country music’s all-time great duet acts. This in turn caused me to remember that bluegrass giant Ralph Stanley, who began recording in the late Forties, is still very much alive, well, active, and making records.
Walter Biggins says that B.B. King cut his first record in 1947 or 1949, which means it was almost certainly a 78 (though it might well have been recorded on magnetic tape).
Mark Stryker says that Sir Charles Mackerras, the British conductor, “got in under the wire at the end of the 78 era and is still recording.” He also shoots and scores with Gunther Schuller, who played French horn on several of the Miles Davis Nonet’s 78 sides–the “Birth of the Cool” records–and continues to record as a conductor.

“The people who you think are radicals might really be conservatives. The people who you think are conservative might really be radical.”
Morton Feldman, Morton Feldman Says (courtesy of Alex Ross)

Today “About Last Night” welcomes a guest blogger, our first since Our Girl in Chicago became a permanent fixture three-and-a-half years ago. Litblogger Carrie Frye, better known as Ms. Tingle Alley, joins us to comment on books, reading, and whatever else may happen to be on her mind. The headlines of her postings will be signed “CAAF,” just as Terry’s are signed “TT” and Our Girl’s “OGIC.”
Carrie’s presence adds a point to the “About Last Night” compass, since she hails from down south. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, a community hailed by Rolling Stone as “the New Freak Capital of the U.S.” We’ll let her tell you the rest herself.
Take it away, CAAF!
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Hello and howdy, greetings from Asheville, N.C. As Terry and OGIC said, my name’s Carrie Frye and I keep a quasi-literary blog called “Tingle Alley,” which was named after an obscure little street downtown where I used to live. I now live on the east side of town, one door down from the national forest, where there are fewer meth heads, more bears.
The best thing about Rolling Stone‘s line about Asheville as the “New Freak Capital of the U.S.” is imagining the shivers of delight that must have thrilled through the Chamber of Commerce at its publication. Otherwise, it’s not the most apt description. Asheville is an eccentric town, a motley town, weird & charming–but not in so strident a way as “freak” suggests. My memory is foggy but at the time Rolling Stone was here, there was a much-tattooed guy who liked to rollerskate around downtown in nothing but his skivvies, and I’ve always thought we owed the “freak” designation to him. He was like our own Naked Cowboy Guy, a ringer for the tourists.
I’m not sure I’m getting it right either, however. I’ll try to describe Asheville better for you in the next few weeks as well as write about books and whatever little projects and outings strike my fancy. For now, I just want to say how wonderful it is to be writing here. “About Last Night” was one of the first blogs I discovered and it’s remained a great favorite. It’s a thrill to be on summer-share with Terry and Laura, like being invited to stay in a house where everyone likes Barbara Pym and Dawn Powell and is willing to cool it in the rec room watching re-runs of Buffy.
Terry has asked that I “explain about the initials”: “CAAF” is the nickname I go by here in Asheville. It was given to me when I was working as a reporter at Mountain Xpress and publishing all my stories as “Carrie A.A. Frye.” (I always ask for my initials as I’m always afraid people will forget who I am without them.) For a round-up feature my contributions were marked as “CAAF” and some friends glommed onto that, and so CAAF it’s been. And as someone who has stood in a video store and said in all seriousness to her (non-blog-reading) companion, “We should get this, OGIC said it’s good,” it’s pleasing to use it here and continue “About Last Night”‘s fine tradition of acronyms.

For the most part, I find it impossible to recall how I discovered the blogs I regularly read or to remember the first time I encountered them. They seem to have permeated my consciousness undetected, like vapors. Tingle Alley, the home of our new co-blogger CAAF, is a rare exception. I remember reading it the very day it debuted, directed there by Maud among others, and instantly being charmed into bookmarking and blogrolling this handsome new site with its oddly arresting name (explained here). Tingle Alley has remained a frequent and favorite stop. Carrie’s smarts, wit, and unflagging good nature have made it a reliably sunny retreat on the internets.
It’s a happy occcasion, then, to welcome her to ALN to blog beside us. Make yourself at home, Carrie! This is going to be fun.

Beverly Sills was just before my time. I saw her give a recital in Kansas City in the late Seventies, but it made no impression on me–recitals were not her medium, and I can’t even remember what she sang–and she’d long since retired from the operatic stage by the time I finally made it to New York a quarter-century ago. Alas, Sills is poorly represented by her records, few of which were made when she was in her prime, and in any case the bel canto repertory in which she specialized has never appealed to me strongly. Nor did I see her on Tonight or The Muppet Show, or interview her in her latter-day capacity as celebrity arts administrator. For all these reasons, her death meant little to me personally. Several critics, including Tim Page, Tony Tommasini, and Manuela Hoelterhoff, have written eloquently about her in recent days, and I commend their pieces to your attention, yet they make me wonder how long she will be remembered by those who, like me, never saw her on stage.

Most of the obituaries made prominent mention of the fact that Sills’ TV appearances brought classical music to the attention of millions of people who might otherwise never have heard of it. I wonder about that, too. She was by all accounts a charming on-camera buffoon, but I’ve never met anyone who got the opera bug from seeing her swap stories with Johnny Carson. Yet these appearances, taken together, may nonetheless have added up to the most consequential thing she ever did.

I wrote a few months ago in The Wall Street Journal about a concert in which my operatic collaborator Paul Moravec took part:

Last Sunday I went to a concert by the Amelia Piano Trio, an exciting young chamber-music group whose fresh-faced members teamed up with the great clarinetist Richard Stoltzman to perform Tempest Fantasy, a piece by Paul Moravec that won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for music. Mr. Moravec, who lives in New York City, was there as well, and he talked to the audience about his piece, explaining in a clear, no-nonsense way how its various themes were musical portraits of the characters in Shakespeare’s play. As Mr. Moravec spoke, the musicians played the themes associated with Ariel, Prospero and Caliban. Then they played the whole piece from start to finish, and when they were done, Tempest Fantasy received the kind of ovation that any composer of modern music would die for.

It occurred to me as I listened that what Mr. Moravec had to say about Tempest Fantasy, illuminating as it was, was no more important than the mere fact that he was willing to get up on stage and talk about his work in so plain-spoken and unassuming a manner. Most concertgoers, after all, have never met a major classical composer, much less heard him tell a self-deprecating joke.

All at once I remembered another Sunday afternoon years ago when I tuned in one of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts. The topic was American music, and at the end of the program Bernstein introduced an ordinary-looking man in a business suit who proceeded to conduct the finale of a symphony he’d written. The man, Bernstein explained, was Aaron Copland, and the piece was his Third Symphony, one of the permanent masterpieces of American art. Young as I was, I got the message loud and clear: art doesn’t just drop from the skies. It’s a normal human activity, something that people do for a living, the same way they paint houses or cut hair. It is a message that every artist in America should be sending as clearly–and frequently–as possible.

Beverly Sills was sending that message at a time when comparatively few American artists thought that it needed to be sent. Now we know better.

Greg Sandow blogged the other day about his belief that “the [fine] arts–as an enterprise separate from our wider culture, and somehow standing above it–are over….any attempt to revive them (this includes classical music, of course) will have to mean that they engage popular culture, and everything else going on in the outside world.” Up to a point, I think Greg is right. If we want to see a revival of anything remotely resembling the middlebrow culture of the pre-Vietnam era, in which most middle-class people who were not immersed in the fine arts were nonetheless aware and respectful of them and made an effort to engage with them, then artists will have to shake off what I have called their “entitlement mentality” and go where the audiences are.

Should they? There’s a serious case to be made for not doing so, the case for elitism in the arts, and I don’t need to restate it here. Clement Greenberg put it best when he claimed that “it is middlebrow, not lowbrow, culture that does most nowadays to cut the social ground from under high culture.” True enough–but if you care about the continuing fate of museums, symphony orchestras, ballet, opera, and theater companies, and all the other big-money institutions that were the pillars of American high culture in the twentieth century, you’re going to have to accept the fact that these elitist enterprises cannot survive without the wholehearted support of a non-elite public that believes in their importance.

Sills understood that, and did something about it. Perhaps more than any other American classical musician of her generation, she did her best to communicate to ordinary Americans the idea that the making of high art is a normal human activity, one whose fruits are accessible to all who make a good-faith effort to understand them. That’s not quite true, of course, but it’s a noble and ennobling lie, and I wouldn’t be greatly surprised if Beverly Sills is remembered for telling it long after the particulars of her performing career are forgotten.

UPDATE: A friend writes:

Beverly Sills was my mom’s age, and for a time in my early teens we saw her perform during her years at the New York City Opera, before she went to the Met. This was long before English subtitles, and I knew next to nothing about opera, but I remember her work very well. She didn’t have a big voice, but she was a fine actress and knew how to use what she had to make the story real. I think my folks included me in their opera subscription to keep me out of trouble, which in hindsight is hilarious, because most opera plots are full of good clean fun like murder, adultery, treachery and such. Her Lucia will stay with me forever. I can still see her doing that mad scene in a long white nightgown, smeared with blood, arms raised and head cocked slightly as she sang in ecstasy to a lover who was clearly not present. I thought it was nifty. She gave me a greater appreciation for opera, which up till then had been a noisy collective of fat people stumping across the stage, booming in other languages. I totally bought her because she made me believe her story, which is the performer’s job. I’ve always felt that a classical singer who can also act is a powerful thing.

Me, too. I wish I’d been there.

Several months have gone by since I last tidied up the links in the right-hand column, so in honor of the impending arrival of CAAF, I spent an afternoon working on them. I combed through our blogroll, pruning out the sites that are no longer active and changing the addresses of the ones that have moved since my last visit. Then I tested all the links in the audio and video sections, removed the ones that were no longer available on YouTube due to copyright restrictions, replaced them wherever possible with alternative selections, and added a couple of dozen new links while I was at it.
If you’ve never explored our bulging cache of arts-related videos, I strongly suggest you do so. As I wrote last year in a Wall Street Journal column:

YouTube, like the other new Web-based media, is a common carrier, a means to whatever ends its millions of users choose, be they good, bad, dumb or ugly. You can use it to watch mindless junk–or some of the greatest classical and jazz musicians of the 20th century.
In recent months, jazz-loving friends have been sending me YouTube links to videos by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and other celebrated artists, most of them drawn from films of the ’30s and ’40s and TV shows of the ’50s and ’60s. Some of this material is available on DVD, but most of it lingered in limbo until Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, YouTube’s co-founders, made it possible for anyone with a computer to post and view video clips at will. Fascinated by the links unearthed by my friends, I spent the better part of a long weekend trolling through YouTube in search of similar material. When I was done, I’d found hundreds of videos, some extremely rare and all compulsively watchable, posted by collectors from all over the world.
I discovered along the way that using YouTube’s literal-minded search engine to track down high-culture links–or anything else–can be a tricky business. (It doesn’t help that so many YouTube users are poor spellers.) To ease the way for first-timers, I posted the fruits of my labors at www.terryteachout.com, where you’ll find a list of links to performances by Armstrong, Ellington, Count Basie, Pablo Casals, the King Cole Trio, Miles Davis, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Benny Goodman, Jascha Heifetz, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Andrés Segovia, Bessie Smith, Arturo Toscanini and numerous other musicians of comparable significance. All can be viewed free, whenever you want….

I went on to say that “by posting this list of links, I have, in effect, created a Web-based fine-arts video-on-demand site.” True enough–and it remains, so far as I know, the most extensive such listing of arts-related video links to be found anywhere on the Web. All of the aforementioned artists are still represented in our video section, along with hundreds of others, and while some of the clips will be reasonably familiar to connoisseurs, others are likely to surprise you. If you’ve ever longed to see Noël Coward singing “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” or Dmitri Shostakovich playing piano, or Jackson Pollock painting a painting and talking about how he did it…well, you’re only a click away.
Our list of audio links is scarcely less comprehensive and no less full of buried treasure. Among other astonishments, it will allow you to hear the speaking voices of Guillaume Apollinaire, W.H. Auden, William Jennings Bryan, Stuart Davis, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edward Hopper, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, Philip Larkin, Huey Long, W. Somerset Maugham, Dorothy Parker, George Bernard Shaw, and Evelyn Waugh.
What are you waiting for?
UPDATE: To the reader who kindly sent me an mp3 file of the speaking voice of Max Beerbohm, would you kindly write and let me know whether there is a Web-based source for this file?
Also, I’ve been looking in vain for a downloadable copy of the 1948 recording of a radio interview with H.L. Mencken. (I have an old cassette of the interview, but I can’t upload it.) Can anyone oblige me?

“Music may be yet unborn. Perhaps no music has ever been written or heard. Perhaps the birth of art will take place at the moment in which the last man who is willing to make a living out of art is gone and gone forever.”
Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata