Archives for January 2014

Mrs. T and I had occasion over the weekend to drive all the way across Florida and back again–a total of seven hours on the road–in a single day. Most of our longish trip was spent on a lengthy, lonely stretch of highway along which there is nothing to be seen but orange groves and sugar-cane trees. Then, to our surprise and relief, we finally passed through a city, a farm-and-fishing town called Clewiston whose population is 7,000, more or less, and whose city-limit sign, presumably in homage to the local cash crops, proclaims it to be “America’s Sweetest Town.”

That charming boast put smiles on our travel-numbed faces, and we’d have pulled off the road and looked around had we not been in a moderate hurry to get where we were going. Alas, there’s not much of Clewiston to be seen from the window of a rental car roaring down Highway 80, just a modest assortment of storefronts, service stations, and fast-food restaurants. The only thing that caught my eye was a small sign that pointed the way to “John Boy Auditorium.” I took for granted that it was named after the character from The Waltons, but subsequent investigation disillusioned me. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, sometimes not.

“I wonder what it’d be like to live here,” I said. Mrs. T, who is a city girl from top to toe, responded by making a face. But I, having been raised in a town roughly comparable in size to Clewiston, gave my own question serious thought, and replied, “I know one thing–it’d be a lot different from the way it was when I was a boy.” She took my point at once.

When I was growing up in Smalltown, U.S.A., our main ties to the outside world were network TV and the public library. Our town had a grand total of two single-screen movie theaters, and there were no chain bookstores or record stores anywhere near us. For most of us, the world we saw was the world we knew. Everything is different now, be it in Smalltown or Clewiston. You can boot up your computer and connect instantly and without effort to an inconceivably vast universe of information. You’re only as isolated as you want to be.

Of course I’d miss a lot of things, starting with live theater, if I relocated from Manhattan to a rural town, but I wouldn’t be cut off from the world of art and culture, not by the longest of shots. Having lived in New York for more than a quarter of a century, I can’t know what it feels like to grow up in a small town today. That’s a different experience altogether. But were I now to withdraw to a place like Clewiston, I’d be bringing more than half a lifetime of accumulated cultural capital with me, and I suspect that I’d be able to live off the interest, so to speak, for the rest of my life.

We passed through Clewiston again on our way back to Sanibel Island. This time we paused long enough for me to visit the men’s room of the local McDonald’s, which was jammed to the walls with hungry patrons. By then the sun had set, and when I got back in the car, I said to Mrs. T, “I believe it’s time for some high culture.” I slid a CD of Joseph Szigeti playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto into the dashboard deck, and we listened hungrily to that most serene of recorded masterpieces, which can now be downloaded from anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds, as we drove through the darkness toward home.

Szigeti cut that recording in London in 1932, a quarter-century before I was born, and I first heard it in Smalltown forty years later, having read about it in a now-defunct, much-mourned music magazine called High Fidelity (for which I would later write record reviews) and ordered it from a store in Chicago called Rose Records (also defunct). Even then, the world was smaller than I knew. Now it’s smaller than I could possibly have imagined all those years ago. Does that make life better? I wonder about that, too–but I have no doubt that for people like myself, whether old or young, it eases the complicated solitude of being different in a very small town.

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Joseph Szigeti plays an excerpt from the first movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto, accompanied by Wilfrid Pelletier and the Orchestre de Radio-Canada:

From 2004:

A few years ago, I gave a speech in Kansas City, and as part of my fee I was given a completely private tour of the Nelson-Atkins Museum. I went there after hours and was escorted by one of the curators, who switched on the lights in each gallery as we entered and switched them off as we left. I can’t begin to tell you what an astonishing and unforgettable impression that visit made on me. To see masterpieces of Western art in perfect circumstances is to realize for the first time how imperfectly we experience them in our everyday lives. It changes the way you feel about museums–and about art itself. I didn’t realize it then, but that private view undoubtedly helped to put me on the road to buying art.
Perhaps one of our great museums might consider raffling off a dozen such tours each year. I’m not one for lotteries, but I’d definitely pony up for a ticket….

Read the whole thing here.

“It’s hard to admit we don’t understand something.”
Alan Arkin, An Improvised Life

From 2004:

A few years ago, I gave a speech in Kansas City, and as part of my fee I was given a completely private tour of the Nelson-Atkins Museum. I went there after hours and was escorted by one of the curators, who switched on the lights in each gallery as we entered and switched them off as we left. I can’t begin to tell you what an astonishing and unforgettable impression that visit made on me. To see masterpieces of Western art in perfect circumstances is to realize for the first time how imperfectly we experience them in our everyday lives. It changes the way you feel about museums–and about art itself. I didn’t realize it then, but that private view undoubtedly helped to put me on the road to buying art.
Perhaps one of our great museums might consider raffling off a dozen such tours each year. I’m not one for lotteries, but I’d definitely pony up for a ticket….

Read the whole thing here.

“It’s hard to admit we don’t understand something.”
Alan Arkin, An Improvised Life

Anthony Powell writes:

Just as most of the world find it on the whole unusual that anyone should be professionally occupied with the arts, Moreland could never get used to the fact that most people–in this particular case, Templer–lead lives in which the arts play no part whatsoever. That is perhaps an exaggeration of Moreland’s attitude. All the same, he always found difficulty in accustoming himself to complete aesthetic indifference.

I’ve never had any trouble getting used to that fundamental reality of human life, for the very good reason that no one else in my extended family has ever been “professionally occupied with the arts.” Except for my mother’s father, who played the banjo for pleasure, I was the first one to play a musical instrument other than casually, as well as the first, so far as I know, to go to a classical concert or an art museum, or attend a professional production of a play.
You’d think that my relatives would have been astonished by my decision to become an artist, but the truth is that they seem to have taken little note of it. I’d always been a bit odd, and my burgeoning passion for music was nothing more than further proof of that longstanding oddity. They loved me, of course–that was a given–but except for my parents, they weren’t especially interested in me. No doubt that’s why I soon fell into the habit of keeping my artistic side to myself.
It wasn’t until I left Smalltown, U.S.A., and went away to school that I started to meet large numbers of people who were like me. It stood to reason that from then on, they would become my best friends. A musician’s life tends to be isolating, in part because it’s difficult to explain to laymen, and by the time I graduated from college, I was so deeply involved in making and writing about music that I had scarcely any intimate friends who weren’t musicians themselves.
That changed when I left Kansas City, first to study psychology at the University of Illinois and, a bit later, to become a writer and editor in New York. Though I continued to befriend musicians on occasion, I thereafter spent most of my time around people who did other things for a living: scholars, writers, editors, dancers, actors, even the occasional executive. I still remember how surprising it was when I found myself romantically attracted for the first time to a woman who wasn’t a musician. Today I can count on the fingers of one hand the professional musicians with whom I claim anything like intimate acquaintance.
It happens that Hugh Moreland, the character to whom Anthony Powell refers in the excerpt from A Dance to the Music of Time reprinted at the top of this posting, is a fictionalized version of Constant Lambert, the British composer-conductor-critic about whom I’ve written here and elsewhere. Powell and Lambert were close friends in real life, which is all the more striking in light of the fact that Powell himself had no serious interest in music. (It is for this reason amusing to listen to his 1976 appearance on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs program, in which he talks about his friendship with Lambert.)
That two such ill-sorted men should have become close is not nearly so surprising to me as it would have been when I was in my twenties. Lambert, after all, was a man of extraordinarily wide-ranging interests, enough so that he could easily have made a living as, say, a critic of dance or the visual arts. I suspect that this explains why he was so powerfully drawn to Powell. One of the reasons why I myself got out of music was because I realized that I cared about too many other things to lash myself permanently to the mast of its all-consuming demands.
I no longer think of myself as a musician–nor should I. Yet music continues to be embedded in my sense of self, so much so that I was taken aback by how comfortable I felt when I took part in rehearsing the three operas that I’ve written with Paul Moravec (who is, not at all surprisingly, my closest musician friend). It was as if I were paying a visit to a land from which I’d been exiled years before. The exile, to be sure, is final: I will never again be a musician, and I wouldn’t want to be. But I still know my way around that lost world, and if I don’t feel completely at home there anymore, I’m not so sure that I feel much more at home anywhere else.
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Edith Sitwell and Constant Lambert perform excerpts from William Walton’s Façade in 1929, accompanied by an instrumental ensemble conducted by the composer:

An extremely rare video of Claude Thornhill performing “There’s a Small Hotel” on WGN’s The Big Bands in 1965:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“In some deep place I always believed that what anyone else was feeling or doing, whether it be an act of heroism or cowardice or compassion or greed or villainy or anything in between, whatever the characters were going through emotionally was possible for me. I sensed that the entire range of emotions possessed by one human being was universal and available to everyone. Each of us had our own emphases and proclivities, but I intuitively believed that all of us were possessed of the entire spectrum of human feelings, and nothing that I’ve seen or felt since has convinced me otherwise.”
Alan Arkin, An Improvised Life