The greatest compliment I've ever been paid

Last Friday afternoon I interviewed (to drop a name) Don Preston, the original keyboardist with the Mothers of Invention, who will appear in Sellersville Aug. 9 with a couple of Frank Zappa's other old bandmates. (The act is billed as the Grandmothers. Clever, eh?) I felt the chat went well, but I didn't know just how well until today, when, before writing the article, I called Rob Duffey, the group's manager, to verify a couple of names. Rob told me that soon after we spoke, Preston called him to say he enjoyed talking with me, and that it was "not a stupid interview." Apparently, Don has has suffered through a lot of of stupid interviews, and, therefore, when he says an interview was "not stupid," it counts as genuinely high praise. It made my day.

Minor celebrity

We like to push the extracurricular activities of the editors here at Montgomery Newspapers, and so my upcoming guest shot on Marvin Rosen's radio show is now the subject of a preview article in Ticket, our entertainment insert.

We figured if our executive editor rated an article when he signed copies of his new book, a two-hour program on EC was just as newsworthy.

In the interest of objectivity, Frank Quattrone, the Ticket editor, assigned Mary Cantell to do the story, instead of letting me write it myself. I must say it was a little disorienting to be on the recieving end of an interview, though Mary made it quick and painless, much like lethal injection. When my sister saw the article, she said she was surprised to learn that I didn't like Lawrence Welk. To be fair, my father didn't like Elliott Carter.

Evelyn Lear 1926-2012

I learn from Lisa Hirsch that the soporano Evelyn Lear died July 1. Of course, I remember her first and foremost for American Scenes, American Poets, an album of songs by Charles Ives she recorded with her husband, the late baritone Thomas Stewart. It was my first exposure to the songs of Ives and remains both a favorite recording and another one of those Columbia classics Sony has never seen fit to release on CD.

Strange, though — Lear was an American (born Evelyn Shulman in Brooklyn), but for a long time I assumed she was ... well, I know not what. My confusion was due to a minspronunciation on the Ives recording. The song "The Light That Is Felt," with text by Whitter, contains the lines "And only when our hands we lay / In thine, Oh God! the night is day." Maybe she was distracted, maybe she was uptight, maybe she wasn't making sense of the lyric, but for some reason, Lear pronounces "lay" as "lee."

And only when our hands we lee ...

Regardless, it is a wonderful rendition of a wonderful piece. When my mother died in 1999, I hired a soprano to sing it at her funeral — in large measure because of the impression Lear had made on me 25 years earlier.

Radio Date

On Wednesday, July 25, I will appear as the guest on Marvin Rosen's radio program "Classical Discoveries Goes Avant-Garde" on WPRB Princeton. We will be playing and discussing the music of Elliott Carter. Airtime time is 11 a.m. - 1 p.m. EDT. For those of you in the broadcast area (including Philadelphia), WPRB is at 103.3 on the FM dial. The show may also be heard around the world at WPRB.com, and Marvin saves his programs as mp3 files for two weeks or so (server space is limited) at his own Classical Discoveries website.
The playlist will include Carter's String Quartet No. 4 with the Composer's Quartet and the the Concerto for Orchestra with Boulez and the New York Philharmonic, as well as some shorter pieces and historic recordings.
I want you all to blow off work and listen.

Two Controversies and a Conversation

Many thanks to BH to scoring me a ticket for the premiere of Elliott Carter's Two Controversies and a Conversation June 9 at Symphony Space in New York City. The piece is an expansion of Carter's Conversations, a small double concerto for piano, percussion and chamber orchestra first played in June 2011 at the Aldeburgh Festival. The two brief "controversies" were added at the suggestion of Oliver Knussen, who conducted the premiere of Conversations. On first hearing, I'm not sure what they added to the work, since they went by rather fast. They're both fairly brief and declamatory, and I liked Conversations well enough on its own. Still, the performance was memorable. Colin Currie was the percussion soloist, as he was at Aldeburgh, and the young pianist Huebner was more than an adequate substitute for Pierre-Laurent Aimard, the other soloist for whom Conversations was written. I got to speak to Huebner at intermission. (BH seemed to know absolutely everyone in the hall that night, and he introduced me to at least half of them.) He said the piece was fun to play and not nearly so hairy as the piano music from Carter's heroic period.

Mr. Carter was there, too, in a wheelchair, and was interviewed before the performance by Magnus Lindberg. He (Carter) was pretty funny about the practical problems of writing for percussion, which he said was largely a matter of having "the poor guy" run around too much. Ultimately, he said, he just had to stop thinking about it.

The rest of the program was also very strong. My mind began to wander during Boulez' ...explosante-fixe..., but I was quite taken with Nachlese Vb: Liederzyklus, for soprano and chamber orchestra, by the Swiss composer Michael Jarrell, whom I had not heard of before.

Read Steve Smith’s review.

Then listen to the concert, courtesy of WQXR.

I've tried embedding it, but it doesn't seem to want to play. Maybe you'll have better luck:



Sorry I've been offline so long. Been rather overwhelmed at work, and haven't had much focus the rest of the time. I'm leading exactly the kind of life my parents' envisioned for me, I think — long hours, low pay, no recognition, the kind of Darwinian struggle that teaches you that life is unfair and you had better dammed well pull yourself up by your bootstraps because if you don't no one else is going to and there's nothing to look forward to once the honeymoon is over and the only available comforts are religion and drink.

Yes, Adam and Betty, you were right. Happy now?

EC dreams

Had the oddest dream this morning. I was giving a lecture on Elliott Carter to a group of senior citizens. What made it strange is that what I was saying actually made sense: usually in my dreams, the talk is gibberish, but I can remember everything I said in this one - all about EC's birth, education, study with Boulanger, relationship with Charles Ives, etc. But there was a DVD playing on a flat-screen TV in the front of the room, and as the lecture went on, it got louder and louder, playing a bombastic symphony that  sounded to me a lot like  Shostakovich. Meanwhile, workmen were filling the classroom with folding chairs and other

furniture. Finally, they brought in a long armoire that blocked my view of the old people entirely. I couldn't be heard over the TV, the scraping of the chairs and all the talking, and I gave up. I stopped shouting, and, leaning back against the window sill, I said, "I'm not going to waste my voice."

The meaning seems pretty clear.

Yesterday I received in the mail Bridget Kibbey's CD Love Is Come Again which contains her reading of Carter's harp solo, "Bariolage." It's beautiful recording, both perfromance and sound quality.

OK, I don't like this

Anyone who knows me knows I dislike change, particularly when it is unannounced, and Google has just decided to change Blogger. There are lots of spiffy new features I will probably never use, and of course, it is no longer supported by the browser on my home computer, which means either all posting will have to be done at the office, or I have to plunk down fifteen hundred dollars or so for a new laptop. (Updating to Windows XP on my 11-year-old desktop, a prerequisite for a new browser, makes no sense and would probably overload the hard drive.) Right now, I am having trouble navigating the new set up. I found the "new post" tab pretty much by accident. I guess what I'm trying to say is, 1) it may be a while before I feel comfortable enough to get back to posting on an even half-way regular basis. And 2) damn you, Google, couldn't you leave well enough alone? Ugh. My life is horrid at the moment. The ceiling in my bathroom will not stop leaking, everything I own seems to be on its last legs, and I cannot afford to either move or replace anything. The last thing I need is more surprises.

A clerihew? We have a few ...

This winner from EH:

Richard Starkey
Lost his car key,
But Ringo Starr
Didn't need a car.


And one more from me:

Elliott Carter
Could not be smarter,
Though for many, his music
Is pretty confusic.

Please bear with us. These spells usually pass within a few days.

A couple more

This from EH in response to my first clerihew:

The wife of Johann Sebastian Bach,
possessed of only a sock
for protection,
created for orchestra a violin section.

It took me a second to get it, but I like it tons. One thing I have sworn never to do is reverse word order for the sake of a rhyme, but EH is a Latin scholar, so we can forgive the "Latinate" construction.

And one more from me:

Charles Ives
Led two lives,
Which freed him to compose
"From Hanover Square North at the End of a Tragic Day the Voice of the People Again Arose."

A clerihew

My Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines a "clerihew" as "a form of comic verse named after its inventor, Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956). It consists of two metrically awkward couplets and usually presents a ludicrously uninformative 'biography' of some famous person whose name appears as one of the rhymed words in the first couplet."

The dictionary offers this example:

Geoffrey Chaucer
Could hardly have been coarser,
But this never harmed the sales
Of his Canterbury Tales.

Reading that, I suddenly remembered a poem W.H. Auden once recited on the old Dick Cavett Show, and at last I recognized it for the clerihew it was:

John Milton
Never slept in a Hilton
Hotel,
Which is just as well.

So here, now, is a clerihew of my own (actually my only one) on a musical subject.

Johann Sebastian Bach
Possessed a limitless stock
Of contrapuntal profundity
And full-frontal rotundity.