Merrill Reese, who has been calling the games of the Philadelphia Eagels on radio since 1977, will appear with the Philadelphia Orchestra July 24 at the Mann Center. He will be the emcee for a program titled "Symphonic Sports-tacular!" — complete with the exclamation point. There will be music from the Olympics and Monday Night Football, filmed highlights from great moments in Philadelphia sports history (such as they are), and a fireworks display. It's a flagrant attempt by the orchestra to broaden its appeal and get more people into the seats, and that is all to the good.
I interviewed Reese, as well as Peter Schickele, for a preview in Ticket. Talking to Schickele was a lifelong dream, of course, but the talk with Reese was more enlightening, probably because each of us was taking a step outside his comfort zone. I've been a fair-weather football fan at best, and I haven't been able to make myself watch it since the news of players' head injuries came out. Reese was open and congenial, however, and he kept the conversation moving. When I was at a loss for questions, he told me about his children. His son Nolan is a visual effects editor who worked on Iron Man II and The Lone Ranger — though I would think he’d rather cross that one off his résumé
One thing I didn’t know — and the sports fans in the newsroom didn’t know, either — is that Reese keeps track of the chaos on the field with the help of a spotter. While he’s watching the ball, another guy in the booth is looking elsewhere, at the blockers and linebackers and the secondaries. This guy never speaks, but if a player does something worthy of comment, he will point to the player’s number on a chart and describe the action to Reese using one of thirty-five hand signals. The play-by-play men may sound omniscient, but they have an extra set of eyes.
Friday, July 12, 2013
Saturday, July 6, 2013
Where have all the scandals gone?
Two months ago, you couldn't turn on the TV or read a paper (if you still read papers) without tripping over the latest scandal inside the Obama Administration. There was talk of impeachment, the curse of the second term, and, most outrageously, of Nixon. Now, they have all gone away. The reporting on Benghazi emails turned out to be flawed, and the IRS, we learn, was scrutinizing left- and right-wing groups more or less equally. What was sold as an ideological vendetta seems, as some cooler heads predicted, to be nothing more than a case of an overworked, underfunded bureaucracy looking for a shortcut. (If you want to blame the stampede on the herd mentality of the news industry, you have my blessing.) There is still the problem with the NSA, but Republicans who can usually be relied upon to savage Obama over every little contretemps have backed off for fear of looking weak on national security.
Over at New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait has a helpful summary of how the air went out of the balloon.
Over at New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait has a helpful summary of how the air went out of the balloon.
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
A chat with Prof. Peter Schickele
Yesterday, I interviewed, by phone, Peter Schickele, creator of the unfortunately immortal P.D.Q. Bach, about his scheduled appearance with the Philadelphia Orchestra on July 24. (He’ll perform “New Horizons in Music Appreciation,” his play-by-play analysis of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, with sportscaster Merrill Reese, the Voice of the Eagles, as his color man.) Much of what we talked about will find no place in the article I still have to write, and I’d like to throw some of it down here, as chips from the workshop.
I asked Schickele what drives a serious musician to comedy (thanks to Renee for the suggestion), and he said that in his case, it was the other way around. He was funny as a kid, and he began studying music seriously only in his teens, when he picked up his mother’s old clarinet.
“My mother once told me I was entertaining people since I was a year and a half old,” he said. “That came first with me. What happened during my teenage years was I got more and more interested in music for its own sake. All my life I’ve done both the serious and the funny things.”
His catalog of so-called serious works is larger than his P.D.Q. Bach catalog, he said, and the latter contains more than a hundred pieces.
It seems perfectly in character that Schickele’s earliest musical hero would be Spike Jones, and when he was 13, he formed his own band, called Jerky Jems and his Balmy Brothers, which was a direct imitation of Jones and his City Slickers. The band consisted of two clarinets, a violin (played by Schickele’s brother), and tom-toms.
“I still have the first piece I ever wrote, which for some reason is called ‘The Sheik of Kalamazoo,’” Schickele said. “It sounds vaguely exotic. When I wrote it, I was not only writing an original piece of music, but I was also learning how to write music down.”
At the time Schickele began playing clarinet, his family was living near Fargo, North Dakota, in the sprawling if underpopulated metropolitan area known as Fargo-Moorhead. (Moorhead is over the state line in Minnesota.) When he eventually went for lessons, his teacher told him that he had developed so many bad habits that he should start over with another instrument. The teacher recommended the bassoon. Schickele took the suggestion, but he suspected an ulterior motive: there were no bassoonists in Fargo-Moorhead, and the local orchestra needed one. Schickele, along with another boy who had been talked into lessons, became the bassoon section.
“I never harbored any illusions of wanting to be a professional bassoonist,” he said. “The great thing about being a bassoonist is that they are needed. There’s always a shortage of bassoonists, whereas clarinetists are a dime a dozen.”
Of all the pieces he has written as P.D.Q. Bach, Schickele said, he holds a special place in his affections for P.D.Q.’s only full-length opera, The Abduction of Figaro.
“My own favorite P.D.Q. Bach pieces are sort of love letters to the composers they sound like,” he said. “That one is definitely a love letter to the big five operas of Mozart.”
For the record, my own favorite Schickele gag may be found at the beginning of The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach. It’s a reproduction of the manuscript of a song that consists of the words “front is” repeated over and over. The name of the song, of course, is “Front Is Piece,” a fragment from the Songs Without Points.
I asked Schickele what drives a serious musician to comedy (thanks to Renee for the suggestion), and he said that in his case, it was the other way around. He was funny as a kid, and he began studying music seriously only in his teens, when he picked up his mother’s old clarinet.
“My mother once told me I was entertaining people since I was a year and a half old,” he said. “That came first with me. What happened during my teenage years was I got more and more interested in music for its own sake. All my life I’ve done both the serious and the funny things.”
His catalog of so-called serious works is larger than his P.D.Q. Bach catalog, he said, and the latter contains more than a hundred pieces.
It seems perfectly in character that Schickele’s earliest musical hero would be Spike Jones, and when he was 13, he formed his own band, called Jerky Jems and his Balmy Brothers, which was a direct imitation of Jones and his City Slickers. The band consisted of two clarinets, a violin (played by Schickele’s brother), and tom-toms.
“I still have the first piece I ever wrote, which for some reason is called ‘The Sheik of Kalamazoo,’” Schickele said. “It sounds vaguely exotic. When I wrote it, I was not only writing an original piece of music, but I was also learning how to write music down.”
At the time Schickele began playing clarinet, his family was living near Fargo, North Dakota, in the sprawling if underpopulated metropolitan area known as Fargo-Moorhead. (Moorhead is over the state line in Minnesota.) When he eventually went for lessons, his teacher told him that he had developed so many bad habits that he should start over with another instrument. The teacher recommended the bassoon. Schickele took the suggestion, but he suspected an ulterior motive: there were no bassoonists in Fargo-Moorhead, and the local orchestra needed one. Schickele, along with another boy who had been talked into lessons, became the bassoon section.
“I never harbored any illusions of wanting to be a professional bassoonist,” he said. “The great thing about being a bassoonist is that they are needed. There’s always a shortage of bassoonists, whereas clarinetists are a dime a dozen.”
Of all the pieces he has written as P.D.Q. Bach, Schickele said, he holds a special place in his affections for P.D.Q.’s only full-length opera, The Abduction of Figaro.
“My own favorite P.D.Q. Bach pieces are sort of love letters to the composers they sound like,” he said. “That one is definitely a love letter to the big five operas of Mozart.”
For the record, my own favorite Schickele gag may be found at the beginning of The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach. It’s a reproduction of the manuscript of a song that consists of the words “front is” repeated over and over. The name of the song, of course, is “Front Is Piece,” a fragment from the Songs Without Points.
Friday, June 14, 2013
Robert Suderburg, 1936-2013
Somehow I missed the news that the composer Robert Suderburg died April 3. (Even Wikipedia still doesn't know.)
I remember Dr. Suderburg as the occasional guest of the Philadelphia Orchestra, which played his Orchestra Music I back in the 1970s when I was a kid and just discovering modern music. Michael Bookspan, the orchestra’s longtime percussionist, also commissioned Suderburg's Percussion Concerto, an attractive and memorable piece that, miraculously, the orchestra revived several years after its premiere. I heard the work both times and was impressed, on the second occasion, by just how much of it had stuck with me. The composer seemed pleased when I told him afterward. He was an approachable, soft-spoken gentleman, and one to the few one of the few tall composers I have ever met.
Mr. Suderburg is an unjustly under-recorded composer, but some outstanding performances of his music did once find their way onto vinyl, particularly the wonderful Piano Concerto In the Mirror of Time, with Bela Siki and the Seattle Symphony conducted by Milton Katims; and Voyage de nuit (Concerto d'après Baudelaire), with his wife, the soprano Elizabeth Suderburg, as soloist; and the Piedmont Chamber Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Harsanyi. Both are out of print, but they are worth tracking down. There are also some fine recordings of his chamber music on CD..
Mr. Suderburg was a member of the diverse but accomplished generation of composers born in the late 1930s, a class that includes Steve Reich and Charles Wuorinien. He had no truck with either serialism or minimalism, but neither was he a neoromantic pastiche-artist desperate for audience approval. His music can be angular (as in the Piano Concerto), or it can be smooth (as in Voyage), but it is always inventive, well-constructed, stylistically unified and recognizably a product of its time. I have long wished that it were better known.
The time has come to revisit my recordings.
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Composition in the 21st Century
On June 8 I attended an informal presentation, organized by th Philadelphia Fans of Classical Music, on the wide range of concert music that is being written today. Neil Sussman played snippets of 28 compositions by 27 composers (the American Arlene Sierra was the one repeat), whom he organized into eight categories: neoromanticism, neoclassicism, minimalism, modalism, drone music, atonality, serialism, electronic music, world music, and high energy pop elements. I have long feared younger, contemporary composers are essentially out of ideas, doomed to repeat the formulas and the techniques of the past. While I heard nothing to challenge that opinion significantly, I was impressed by the occasional display of freshness and energy — by the personality of this or that composer — and I came away more optimistic about the state of contemporary composition than I was when I went in.
If Neil had a thesis, it was that today, "anything goes." Words like "dissonant," "atonal," and "serial" were thrown around a little too freely, without much regard for precision, and "high energy pop" is not a wave I care to ride (the music of Hartke and Kernis, entertaining as it was, seemed content to be shallow), but I was struck at how much overlap there was among the categories. Many of the compositions resisted easy pigeon-holing. I heard traces of minimalism and romanticism in the so-called atonal music, and polytonalities in the neoclassicism. Perhaps someday soon, a unique voice will emerge from a synthesis of styles, even if, indeed, “anything goes” and rhythmic and harmonic innovations might no longer be possible.
All of the music was new to me, if some of the names were not. My favorite piece of the afternoon was Sierra's sextet Surrounding Ground, which reminded me, in spirit, of Carter's Triple Duo. I would never have mistaken it for Carter — there were too many repeated figures and a more regular beat — but I found the lively interplay of the instruments and polyrhythms decidedly Carterian.
The little seminar was held at the Wyncote at the home of Dr. Sydney Kahn, who assured me his was one of only two private houses in Montgomery County to achieve Leed Platinum certification.
If Neil had a thesis, it was that today, "anything goes." Words like "dissonant," "atonal," and "serial" were thrown around a little too freely, without much regard for precision, and "high energy pop" is not a wave I care to ride (the music of Hartke and Kernis, entertaining as it was, seemed content to be shallow), but I was struck at how much overlap there was among the categories. Many of the compositions resisted easy pigeon-holing. I heard traces of minimalism and romanticism in the so-called atonal music, and polytonalities in the neoclassicism. Perhaps someday soon, a unique voice will emerge from a synthesis of styles, even if, indeed, “anything goes” and rhythmic and harmonic innovations might no longer be possible.
All of the music was new to me, if some of the names were not. My favorite piece of the afternoon was Sierra's sextet Surrounding Ground, which reminded me, in spirit, of Carter's Triple Duo. I would never have mistaken it for Carter — there were too many repeated figures and a more regular beat — but I found the lively interplay of the instruments and polyrhythms decidedly Carterian.
The little seminar was held at the Wyncote at the home of Dr. Sydney Kahn, who assured me his was one of only two private houses in Montgomery County to achieve Leed Platinum certification.
Kennett Symphony to present program for brass and percussion
In a piece in this week's Ticket magazine, I interview Tim Soberick, the principal trombonist of the Kennett Symphony. Tim put together a program for brass and percussion that will be performed next week at Longwood Gardens. Like most interviews, however, this one includes some additional information and insights that go beyond the matter at hand.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Grim Statistics
We interrupt our regularly scheduled music discussion to present a few statisics on gun violence in the United States, nicely summarized by David Cole in The New York Review of Books:
Gun violence in the United States continues to far outpace that in other developed nations. Since 1960, more than 1.3 million Americans have died from firearms, either in suicides, homicides, or accidents. By this grim metric, we are unquestionably a world leader. The US firearms homicide rate is twenty times higher than the combined rate of the next twenty-two high-income developed nations. Between 2000 and 2008, there were more than 30,000 gun deaths a year in the US, for an average of more than eighty every single day. And in 2010 alone, emergency rooms treated more than 73,000 people for nonfatal gunshot injuries.
We read with horror of terrorist attacks around the world, mostly in far-flung places that regularly endure suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices, and the like. We breathe a sigh of relief that we don’t have to live with such violence, while we spend billions of dollars annually to prevent such attacks occurring here. But every year, about twice as many people are killed in the United States by guns than die of terrorist attacks worldwide. Americans face a one in 3.5 million chance of being killed in a terrorist attack, but a one in 22,000 chance of being murdered.
A friend once asked if I liked America, and if so, why. When I read things like this, I genuinely hate this country.
Gun violence in the United States continues to far outpace that in other developed nations. Since 1960, more than 1.3 million Americans have died from firearms, either in suicides, homicides, or accidents. By this grim metric, we are unquestionably a world leader. The US firearms homicide rate is twenty times higher than the combined rate of the next twenty-two high-income developed nations. Between 2000 and 2008, there were more than 30,000 gun deaths a year in the US, for an average of more than eighty every single day. And in 2010 alone, emergency rooms treated more than 73,000 people for nonfatal gunshot injuries.
We read with horror of terrorist attacks around the world, mostly in far-flung places that regularly endure suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices, and the like. We breathe a sigh of relief that we don’t have to live with such violence, while we spend billions of dollars annually to prevent such attacks occurring here. But every year, about twice as many people are killed in the United States by guns than die of terrorist attacks worldwide. Americans face a one in 3.5 million chance of being killed in a terrorist attack, but a one in 22,000 chance of being murdered.
A friend once asked if I liked America, and if so, why. When I read things like this, I genuinely hate this country.
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Found the Quote
In taking the hacksaw to Elliott Carter, Daniel Asia says of the rehearsals for the Concerto for Orchestra, under Leonard Bernstein:
It should be noted that Bernstein wasn't impressed by the fact that Carter wasn't aware that the clarinetist was playing in the wrong transposition for much of the piece ... why, when certain pitch relations were important to Carter, and he apparently couldn't detect errant pitches, shouldn't this suggest serious reservations about the composer and his music?
As I noted earlier, one of my correspondents wondered where Asia got this story, since he did not attend the rehearsals, and another suggested it was an urban legend, since he had heard the same thing about Schoenberg. I, too, thought I recalled something of the sort, and, rereading Charles Rosen's indispensable monograph Arnold Schoenberg (1975), I found this (pp. 49-50):
From time to time there appear malicious stories of eminent conductors who have not realized that, in a piece of Webern or Schoenberg, the clarinetist, for example, picked up an A instead of a B-flat clarinet and played his part a semitone off. These recurrent tales, often true, do not have the significance given them by the critics who believe that music should have stopped at Debussy, as each individual line in Schoenberg's music and even in Webern's later pointillist style defines a harmonic sense that, even when transposed, can fit into the general harmony of the work as a whole. (Here we must remember that harmony is conveyed as powerfully along a musical line as it is by a simultaneous chord.) The attenuation of the traditional concept of dissonance gives a considerable freedom to the movement of the individual instrumental voices, and for this to take place the central position in the hierarchy of musical elements can no longer be given to pitch. What is clear, indeed, is that the simple linear hierarchy must give way to a new and more complex set of relationships in which pitch is only one element among others, and not by any means always the most important.
So there you are -- Mr. Asia’s little gotcha moment has been addressed, and 35 years in advance.
And how stupid are clarinetists anyway?
Mr. Carter once said that while he could not, like Boulez, pick apart every detail of a performance, his music, when played correctly, sounded just as he imagined it. I will add only that for me, the reason Asia's story, true or not, doesn't suggest "serious reservations" about Mr. Carter's music is that the Concerto for Orchestra kicks neoromantic ass.
It should be noted that Bernstein wasn't impressed by the fact that Carter wasn't aware that the clarinetist was playing in the wrong transposition for much of the piece ... why, when certain pitch relations were important to Carter, and he apparently couldn't detect errant pitches, shouldn't this suggest serious reservations about the composer and his music?
As I noted earlier, one of my correspondents wondered where Asia got this story, since he did not attend the rehearsals, and another suggested it was an urban legend, since he had heard the same thing about Schoenberg. I, too, thought I recalled something of the sort, and, rereading Charles Rosen's indispensable monograph Arnold Schoenberg (1975), I found this (pp. 49-50):
From time to time there appear malicious stories of eminent conductors who have not realized that, in a piece of Webern or Schoenberg, the clarinetist, for example, picked up an A instead of a B-flat clarinet and played his part a semitone off. These recurrent tales, often true, do not have the significance given them by the critics who believe that music should have stopped at Debussy, as each individual line in Schoenberg's music and even in Webern's later pointillist style defines a harmonic sense that, even when transposed, can fit into the general harmony of the work as a whole. (Here we must remember that harmony is conveyed as powerfully along a musical line as it is by a simultaneous chord.) The attenuation of the traditional concept of dissonance gives a considerable freedom to the movement of the individual instrumental voices, and for this to take place the central position in the hierarchy of musical elements can no longer be given to pitch. What is clear, indeed, is that the simple linear hierarchy must give way to a new and more complex set of relationships in which pitch is only one element among others, and not by any means always the most important.
So there you are -- Mr. Asia’s little gotcha moment has been addressed, and 35 years in advance.
And how stupid are clarinetists anyway?
Mr. Carter once said that while he could not, like Boulez, pick apart every detail of a performance, his music, when played correctly, sounded just as he imagined it. I will add only that for me, the reason Asia's story, true or not, doesn't suggest "serious reservations" about Mr. Carter's music is that the Concerto for Orchestra kicks neoromantic ass.
Saturday, June 1, 2013
Actually, it won't
To follow up on my previous post: My column will not appear in the Sunday edition after all. I had to bump it to make room for another story. Sometime in the near future, perhaps - but that appears doubtful.
My column on the Rite of Spring
The following column will appear in the Norristown Times Herald on Sunday, June 2:
The day music changed: The 100th anniversary of ‘The Rite of Spring’
By Joe Barron
One hundred years ago this week, on May 29, 1913, a riot took place in Paris. The trigger was not the price of bread, or the arms race in Europe, or the constitutional right of citizens to carry concealed weapons.
It was the premiere of a ballet.
The hissing began at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées during the first few notes of Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” as the bassoon softly wailed a Russian folk melody in an unnaturally high register.
“Then, when the curtain opened, a group of knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down, the storm broke,” the composer recalled almost 50 years later. “Cries of ‘ta gueule’ (shut up) came from behind me. I left the hall in a rage.”
Stravinsky’s driving score and Vaslav Nijinsky’s spastic choreography (which even Stravinsky didn’t like) turned everything patrons thought they knew about ballet on its head. Fistfights broke out, and, as Stephen Walsh says in his biography of the composer, “if the music was heard at all, it can only have been as a component of the general uproar.”
Controversy has continued for a century about just what the audience was reacting to, and what that reaction says about the relationship of the artist to his or her public. Certainly, Stravinsky meant no offense. If he had, he would have been delighted by the scandal, but, he continued in his memoir, “I have never again been that angry. The music was so familiar to me, I loved it, and I could not understand why people who had not yet heard it wanted to protest in advance.”
What is equally certain is that the music, if not the dancing, became the touchstone for everything that followed. It appears at the top of everyone’s list of most important works of the 20th century, at least everyone who still cares about that sort of thing. Nothing like it had ever been heard before — and this at a time when a lot of other people were writing the sort of stuff that had never been heard before — and nothing exactly like it has been heard since. Even Stravinsky himself couldn’t top it.
Within 10 years, he moved on to cooler, more elegant forms of expression, and none of the music he wrote afterward, great as much of it is, is performed nearly as frequently today.
In a point of local pride, the U.S. premiere took place in 1922, when Leopold Stokowski led the Philadelphia Orchestra in a concert performance. Ever since, American musicians have spoken of their first experience with the piece as a revelation: Men as different in age and outlook as Elliott Carter and Frank Zappa have said that hearing it made them want to become composers. Kids in conservatories are still imitating it, if only unconsciously.
For me, appreciation came only gradually. I first heard the “Rite” in high school, and I did not like it for a long time. In retrospect, I understand my aversion had less to do with the music than with my recording of it. It was Stravinsky’s own, a performance he conducted in his late 70s. It’s not bad, but it lacks fire, and it lags badly toward the end.
Then, one glorious evening listening to the radio, I heard the recording by George Solti and the Chicago Symphony, and I said, “OK, I get it now.” It remains my favorite version, and it is the one I listened to on the anniversary of the premiere.
This music has become a part of me, as it has for so many others, and friends have heard bits of it escape from me at odd moments, either as humming or as whistling. It’s an embarrassment, but embarrassment is the price I’m willing to pay for having my life enriched in such a profound way.
A lot has happened in the past hundred years to make a riot over a piece of music seem quaint. Yet the undiminished vitality of “The Rite of Spring” keeps a piece of that remote world alive like nothing else, and reminds us of the power of art to throw the world off its axis. The experience of that first night must have been overwhelming. Had I been there, I would have been frightened, too.
The day music changed: The 100th anniversary of ‘The Rite of Spring’
By Joe Barron
One hundred years ago this week, on May 29, 1913, a riot took place in Paris. The trigger was not the price of bread, or the arms race in Europe, or the constitutional right of citizens to carry concealed weapons.
It was the premiere of a ballet.
The hissing began at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées during the first few notes of Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” as the bassoon softly wailed a Russian folk melody in an unnaturally high register.
“Then, when the curtain opened, a group of knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down, the storm broke,” the composer recalled almost 50 years later. “Cries of ‘ta gueule’ (shut up) came from behind me. I left the hall in a rage.”
Stravinsky’s driving score and Vaslav Nijinsky’s spastic choreography (which even Stravinsky didn’t like) turned everything patrons thought they knew about ballet on its head. Fistfights broke out, and, as Stephen Walsh says in his biography of the composer, “if the music was heard at all, it can only have been as a component of the general uproar.”
Controversy has continued for a century about just what the audience was reacting to, and what that reaction says about the relationship of the artist to his or her public. Certainly, Stravinsky meant no offense. If he had, he would have been delighted by the scandal, but, he continued in his memoir, “I have never again been that angry. The music was so familiar to me, I loved it, and I could not understand why people who had not yet heard it wanted to protest in advance.”
What is equally certain is that the music, if not the dancing, became the touchstone for everything that followed. It appears at the top of everyone’s list of most important works of the 20th century, at least everyone who still cares about that sort of thing. Nothing like it had ever been heard before — and this at a time when a lot of other people were writing the sort of stuff that had never been heard before — and nothing exactly like it has been heard since. Even Stravinsky himself couldn’t top it.
Within 10 years, he moved on to cooler, more elegant forms of expression, and none of the music he wrote afterward, great as much of it is, is performed nearly as frequently today.
In a point of local pride, the U.S. premiere took place in 1922, when Leopold Stokowski led the Philadelphia Orchestra in a concert performance. Ever since, American musicians have spoken of their first experience with the piece as a revelation: Men as different in age and outlook as Elliott Carter and Frank Zappa have said that hearing it made them want to become composers. Kids in conservatories are still imitating it, if only unconsciously.
For me, appreciation came only gradually. I first heard the “Rite” in high school, and I did not like it for a long time. In retrospect, I understand my aversion had less to do with the music than with my recording of it. It was Stravinsky’s own, a performance he conducted in his late 70s. It’s not bad, but it lacks fire, and it lags badly toward the end.
Then, one glorious evening listening to the radio, I heard the recording by George Solti and the Chicago Symphony, and I said, “OK, I get it now.” It remains my favorite version, and it is the one I listened to on the anniversary of the premiere.
This music has become a part of me, as it has for so many others, and friends have heard bits of it escape from me at odd moments, either as humming or as whistling. It’s an embarrassment, but embarrassment is the price I’m willing to pay for having my life enriched in such a profound way.
A lot has happened in the past hundred years to make a riot over a piece of music seem quaint. Yet the undiminished vitality of “The Rite of Spring” keeps a piece of that remote world alive like nothing else, and reminds us of the power of art to throw the world off its axis. The experience of that first night must have been overwhelming. Had I been there, I would have been frightened, too.
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