Archives for 2007

“I dare say I am compelled, unconsciously compelled, now to write volume after volume, as in past years I was compelled to go to sea, voyage after voyage. Leaves must follow upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days gone by, on and on to the appointed end, which, being Truth itself, is One–one for all men and for all occupations.”
Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record

I’m in Washington, D.C., attending a meeting of the National Council on the Arts, and if I hadn’t been working nonstop since six this morning (I had to file Friday’s drama column before leaving town) I’d tell you all about my day. Instead, I think I’ll go to bed.
Later.

I announced back in May that Paul Moravec
and I had been commissioned to write an operatic adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s The Letter. Of course we’d been working on it for some time before then, but the only thing we had on paper at that point was a draft of the first five scenes of my eight-scene libretto.

Paul retired to the MacDowell Colony last month to start writing the music. He drove back to New York two weeks ago to play me his first sketches. We’ve known each other for more than a decade and are close neighbors and good friends, so I had every reason to expect that our collaboration would be a reasonably smooth one. Nevertheless, I was feeling a bit nervous when I knocked on the door of his Upper West Side studio, and I nearly jumped out of my skin when he put a sheaf of rough pencil sketches on the music rack of his piano. Would I like the way they sounded? Would he be open to criticism? Would I be open to it?

I’m delighted to say that the answers to these questions turned out to be yes, yes, and yes. I was thrilled to hear my words set to Paul’s brilliantly apposite music, and no sooner did he finish playing through the sketches than the two of us rolled up our sleeves and started revising words and music on the spot. Any mutual apprehensions we may have had about our ability to collaborate were dispelled at once: we were entirely frank with one another, and the fruits of our joint labors are already the better for our frankness.

So far, our working process appears to have more in common with the making of a musical comedy than the writing of an opera. In fact, we did something two Sundays ago that comes straight out of the Broadway playbook. Paul had already sketched the music for an aria whose words are not yet written, so I knocked out on the spot what professional songwriters call a “dummy lyric,” a piece of nonsense verse that matches the rhythms of the pre-written music exactly, thus allowing the lyricist to work more easily on his own after the fact. The most famous of all dummy lyrics is the one Ira Gershwin wrote for “I Got Rhythm”: Roly-poly/Eating solely/Ravioli/Better watch your diet or bust. Here’s the one I wrote for the first stanza of an aria in which one of the characters in The Letter laments the death of her lover:

I am a toad,

Green, grey,

In a dark, dark, dark wood,

And I’m longing for light.

Needless to say, there are no toads in our opera–at least not in singing roles.

Once I’d penned these soon-to-be-forgotten words, Paul packed up his sketches and returned to the MacDowell Colony, there to resume the writing of the score to The Letter. Composing, like writing, is a solitary business, and a major composer doesn’t need to have a wordsmith peering over his shoulder as he grapples with the knotty problem of snatching notes out of the air and putting them in the right order. But it’s a lonely business, too, and I suspect that Paul, like me, found it immensely exciting–and reassuring–for the two of us to sit down in a soundproof studio and face the music jointly.

To be continued…

UPDATE: As the next-to-last paragraph of this story in today’s Guardian reveals, The Letter will be staged by Jonathan Kent, who directed last year’s Broadway revival of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer.

Cool, huh?

“Audiences are rarely on the same wavelength as performers. In fact, two very different things are going on at once. The musician is wondering how to get from the second eight bars into the bridge, and the audience is in pursuit of emotional energy. The musician is struggling, and the audience is making up dreamlike opinions about the music that may have nothing at all to do with what the musician is thinking or doing musically. If audiences knew what humdrum, daylight things most musicians think when they play, they’d probably never come.”
Dick Wellstood (quoted in Whitney Balliett, American Musicians II: Seventy-one Portraits in Jazz)

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that’ll appear here on Tuesdays.* Sometimes I’ll make the list, sometimes the list will come from someone else.
Here is where I confess I have a terrible weakness for lists. Always have. A picture from the fourth grade shows me at a desk in my room with a list of what I hoped to accomplish over the Christmas holiday (one of the items was something like: “Read pgs. 60 -100 of The Outsiders” ). If there were a List Fancy magazine I would not only subscribe, I would try to work there, so I could spend glorious status meetings with my coworkers, drinking coffee and making lists of everything we had to do (“1. Make lists”).
So of course I love reading lists that suggest books to read, and I like making them. As with all such lists, sometimes the relationship between the books is obvious, but it’s more fun when the relationship is unexpected but, on examination, completely apropos. Example: I’d put M.T. Anderson’s Feed, recommended below, on a list of “Great Books About Failing Empires” alongside J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Meg Rosoff’s young-adult novel How I Live Now, and Jared Diamond’s Collapse.
For this inaugural 5×5, a list of books I press upon thee. If you yourself are someone who likes to press books upon people, you probably have certain books you like to give again and again. In college, my favorite books to give were Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love and Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale. These are five current favorites, books that, while they’re not new, I read for the first time this year:
1. Jeremy Thrane by Kate Christensen: At one point, the eponymous Jeremy says, “The better a book, the more frantically I dog-eared it, the more food I spilled on it. I almost couldn’t tolerate too much verbal brilliance flowing past my eyes; I was driven very nearly mad by my inability to physically ingest every word.” That’s how I felt about this book: It’s so good I wanted to eat it. Christensen’s fourth novel, The Great Man, comes out in August. Read Jeremy Thrane while you wait. (Maud provides an overview of Christensen’s novels.)
2. The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy: The adventures of one Sally Jay Gorce in Paris in the 1950s. Reading this novel was, for me, like watching a great old screwball comedy. Frothy and funny on the surface, and beautifully constructed underneath. The plot does a bit of a 23-skidoo at the end, but that’s almost beside the point (again, like an old comedy). It’s Sally Jay I loved — her healthy animal egotism (a nice break from self-effacing Plain Jane narrators), her acute yet rapturous observations. (If you haven’t already, see Terry’s introduction to the NYRB’s reissue of the novel.)
3. Feed by M.T. Anderson: I’m a little obsessed with Anderson right now. His most recent book, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, won the 2006 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, but I prefer this earlier novel, an incredibly smart & chilling satire/love story that takes place in a future world where a media “feed” is hardwired into people’s brains. Even if you think you don’t like science fiction or young adult novels, I urge you to give this a try. (A charming interview with Anderson.)
4. Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey by Isabel Fonseca: A nonfiction title that deserves to be a classic, in my opinion. Like Alma Guillermoprieto (The Heart That Bleeds, Looking for History), Fonseca is a marvelous synthesizer, combining first-hand reportage with history, linguistics and other disciplines, to present a picture of modern Gypsy (or Rom) culture in Eastern Europe. Fonseca has a novelist’s eye for the enlivening detail and a gorgeous writing style; she also can write with a great (and contagious) fury when the occasion calls for it. (Gossipy side note: Fonseca is married to Martin Amis, yet profiles of him often neglect to mention that she’s an author too. Now that I’ve read Bury Me Standing, this makes me bristle.)
5. A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons by Robert M. Sapolsky: Another nonfiction title. This may seem an odd compliment to pay a primatologist, but as an author Sapolsky reminds me of a rather wonderful, intelligent monkey: Deeply curious and alert to the absurd, kind without being pious. Here he recounts decades of study of a single baboon troop in Kenya. Over the years he traveled extensively around Africa, and these sections are especially fascinating. The description of teaching himself how to tranq. baboons as a student at college is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read, like a lost chapter from James Thurber if Thurber had a yen to study monkeys.
* Yes, it’s a Buffy reference.

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)