Molly Sheridan

Elliott Carter got a birthday shout-out on the local news last night. It’s also rumored that there will be some Willard Scott attention tomorrow morning on Today.

UPDATE: The Willard Scott segment has been postponed till “early next week.” We’ll keep you informed.

UPDATING THE UPDATE: Our pal Sarah over at B&H phones in to report: “We received confirmation from the TODAY show that Willard Scott will wish Mr. Carter a happy birthday this Friday, December 21, at 8:30 a.m. EST.” Be advised, my Carterphiles.

Delivered without the nuance of the nation’s great editorialists, perhaps, but much less annoying than CNN’s Headline News, no? To be fair, school kids, not ADD office workers wasting time on the internet, are the intended audience for these two-minute music video newscasts.

Brian is teaching me the joys of being a cat person. We have adopted, but riffling through Russian literature and Greek goddesses is turning up nothing resonant as far as potential names. We’d call her Lulu, but that just seems to be courting disaster.

Any suggestions hit ya?

So, a few posts back I turned up the volume on an internal debate I was having between “intellectual” and “real world” creation. I got off on a rant because I was anxious about spending so much quality time with just my computer, and I was looking to get a little physical.

Since then, I have spun right round like a record. Obama may be on course for a smooth transition, but I am feeling a little lost while locking in on future goals.

This may be a bit of a red herring, but a major tripping point in my thought process has come down to the fact that I am a woman.**

It wasn’t until I turned 30, got married, and moved out of New York City that I confronted sexism head on (though thankfully, in my case, the overall dent has been minor). But even though I bring home an equal paycheck and can use my own power tools just fine, thank you very much, I admittedly feel held to and actually enjoy some traditional stereotypes: I like to cook and make things that people use–and use up. It’s a matriarchal work tradition, and I march in that parade with joy in my heart and conflict in my head. A lovely meal is, after all, eaten, and while it may not be forgotten, it won’t enter the canon of great art no matter how carefully I blog about it. And maybe that’s just fine. It sure does add to the quality of life and the household’s Gross National Happiness quotient. But then I retire with my after dinner drink to the living room, surrounded by our collection of great literature, and wonder if I’m apportioning my energies well. While I’m baking my own bread, I’m not pitching a new article to an editor. Looking further down the road, that’s not even starting on what adding children to this mix will mean.

Women have been confronting these questions for decades and finding a balance point for themselves one way or another. In the 21st century, there are probably quite a few men having similar debates. But it seems to me that the creative sector, especially in the Internet age, braids the line between home life and professional productivity in ways other professions don’t, and I’m surprised by how few models I have to look to as I make these decisions for myself. How are you working your creative mojo to make art, a happy family, and a satisfied self a reality? What helped you find your balance point?

** Related: Encouragingly, people are having more success making a real living off of their creative pursuits, but women
artists are statistically paid less for their work than men.

In an age when holograms beam in to report for CNN and I attend staff meetings via Skype, I guess it’s not so crazy that you can audition for a seat in a symphony orchestra without leaving your basement. Sure, you could MapQuest your way to Carnegie Hall, but why bother now that you can just upload your audition via YouTube and Tan Dun, MTT and Co. will listen at their leisure? Bonus: On-demand audition review mean no one risks missing the finale of Heroes or anything. Ah, the 21st century is a magical place.

It’s not cutting edge technology at work here, but of course that’s the point. So when you bring participation in that cultural beast we know and love as the Symphony and offer it to the People, what happens? I’ll be watching the comments on this one.

UPDATE: The Detroit Symphony is also getting its geek on in order to connect with patrons from “the generation that has figured out how to use that Internet browser thingie on its cell phones. ”

Before orchestra musicians get up on stage to play those massive masterworks, they grocery shop and pick up their kids from daycare just like the rest of us. When life breaks from the hum-drum and things get really intense, however, they have a distinctly appropriate mental playlist on hand.

We have all been to the panel discussions and/or read the articles lamenting that the symphony just isn’t as cool/sexy as other genres, but it seems that as a society we still cleave to the collective action of many classical musicians to carry us through periods of extreme turbulence. Would the helicopter ride of Apocalypse Now been as terrifying or the devastation in Platoon been as heartbreaking without its “classical music” scoring? Rather than making the genre artificially starlet hot or Dancing With the Stars fun–at least those are the ad campaigns I usually see when they’re doing anything out of the ordinary–why do we never address the grand gestures such music often addresses as it relates to contemporary life? There probably are examples of this in action, but I have missed the
memo. Can anyone pull something out of the subscription mailing pile
for us and illustrate?

One man with a piano might be able to poignantly hold our hand through the death of one
princess, but maybe it takes more than one musician and some hefty repertoire to help a nation
confront the larger-than-life issues on the table at the start of the 21st century. If it was assumed that Americans were too safe in their bubble-lives for that message to resonate, well, I think enough people have been slapped out of that daydream for some new lines of communication to open up right about now.

Now, see, in this example, the singing totally doesn’t seem like the silly, far-fetched part! It works in the trailer. In full-length, apparently not so much. Sad! Anyone have a report?

So, um, what 21st-century opera needed to seem less ridiculous was an ice pick! I’ll leave that to the sociologists. Do wonder though: What would Ron Rosenbaum say?

A couple of short composer interviews I conducted have surfaced on the internet in recent weeks (Doug Cuomo / ACO composers). In all cases, the point of these pieces was to provide a little amuse bouche for potential attendees. If I did my job, they serve as the warm oven of the concert hall. Want a taste of this? Well, walk this way.

Grabbing a quick drink after the BAM production of Cuomo’s Arjuna’s Dilemma, my concert companion said she really enjoyed the show, but pointed out that she wouldn’t have had any idea what was going on if she hadn’t read the composer interview before she arrived at the theater. It made me wonder how many other audience members had come in cold Friday night after a long work week and had to just hold on as tightly as they could to what was unfolding (partially in Sanskrit) before their eyes. Is it an unspoken rule that he who buys a ticket to any performance is responsible for his own research? He who arrives too late to the theater for program note reading is lost? Or are we failing patrons when we don’t provide some level of context within the parameters of the production. All I could think of later was what a difference, “In fair Kurukshetra, where we lay our scene…” might have made in this case. Or maybe not, but you see my point.

Later, I also had the chance to listen as my friend explained what we had seen that evening to another patron in the bar. It was striking only because her description was absent of any of the lingo I would have probably fallen into using. It made it a little less precise to an insider’s ear, perhaps–a “cool little show” rather than a “chamber opera in one act”–but more present. And it served as a reminder of how vital it is to talk about this kind of work with people outside its often insular world if we want to maintain a language that we all comprehend.

*Photo by Stephanie Berger@2008, pictured Tony Boutté as Arjuna.

After all the hand shaking, speech making, and historical precedent setting that came to a massively satisfying celebratory close on Tuesday night, you would have thought the President-Elect would have had to–I don’t know–sit down for a few minutes. But it’s Friday and already the train is pulling out of the station. Maybe this is how it always works, or maybe it’s just plain necessity considering how many things are broken in our nation, but damn does it impress me.

There are a lot of people working hard on the issues of the day, and yes, the most pressing involve life and death and war and mortgages. But some of them are tied to creative cultural life, innovative technology, and fair distribution, so the folks at the Future of Music Coalition aren’t wasting any time either. If you’re just coming out of your post-election news fog now, you can get up to speed quickly here. And you’ll want to be in the loop, because artists and new media folks have needed a moment like this for a long while and we don’t won’t to miss the opportunity now.