The real joy of music

As I wrote in my previous post, I spent all day Sunday at one musical salon or another. One of the nicest things about it was that, for a full afternoon and evening, I was able to forget about the presidential race. It started much too early, it's been going on much too long, and none of the constant barrage of information is of any lasting interest. All of the minute-by-minute polling and the commentary, as urgent as it is made to seem, is instantly forgotten. A year from now, no one will care to remember that Jeb! or Ben Carson ever ran. It will all be as interesting as last week's traffic reports, the only difference being that traffic reports are at least useful at the time. For one day, it was a pleasure to leave the hype behind and create a lasting memory.

Riches from a very long day

A large number of short pieces led yesterday to a musical experience of Wagnerian proportions. For the first time in my life that I remember, I attended two concerts in one day. No single work on either program lasted more than fifteen minutes, but together they added up to more than five hours of music. At 3 p.m. the Fine Art Music Company presented a concert of music for violin, saxophone and piano at Ivy Hall (in the Georgian mansion known as the International Institute for Culture) on Lancaster Avenue. Then, at 7, Andrea Clearfield hosted her monthly salon at her home downtown.

Maybe I was just fresher in the afternoon, but I would have to say that, while both programs were memorable, for musical satisfaction, the Ivy Hall program had the edge. (It also had chairs. In Andrea’s living room, most guests sit on the floor.) Jonathan Moser played the Debussy Violin Sonata with just the right combination of lightness and grit, accompanied with expert deference by Katarzyna Marzec-Salwinski, and Jeremy Juteson introduced me to the sound world of Joan Tower with Wings for solo saxophone, a tour de force of tone color and rapid mood shifts. (The piece depicts a falcon in flight, Justseon said, and both the score and the performance certainly made the inspiration clear.)

The program also included Hindemith’s Sonata for Solo Violin, Op. 31, No. 2, and two attractive if slighter works, the Trio for Violin, Alto Saxophone and Piano by Jeffrey Quick, and Cantilene et Danse, for the same three instruments, by Marc Eychennne. The middle movement of the Quick was titled “The Answered Question,” a shout-out to Charles Ives, though the composer took too big a chance by inviting a comparison. The music came nowhere near capturing Ives’s sense of wonder. As an expression of faith, it struck me as a little too self-satisfied.

I was going to skip Andrea’s Salon this month until I learned it would include music by my longtime acquaintance Sheridan Seyfried, whom I first interviewed for his hometown newspaper more than a decade ago, on the occasion of his acceptance to the Curtis Institute of Music. Sheridan and three of his Curtis friends performed a short, exuberant work for piano quartet that deconstructs a well-known patriotic air. I refrain from naming it, since, in accordance with the composer’s intention, no one outside a circle of initiates is ever supposed to guess what it is.  

The music at Andrea’s salons is always diverse, and last night’s program gave me my first glimpse of a wholesome young folk group called Sunday Muse, and the singer-songwriter Alexandra Day, who had some funny patter. The five-star discovery of the night, however, was Karolina Syrovatkova, a wafer-thin Czech pianist with a delicate jaw like the limb of a crescent moon. She played a dance and a folk-song arrangement by Smetana, and her touch seemed a miracle of weightlessness.  

I did not get home until  close to midnight, and falling asleep was not an issue.

Salon of Russian Music and Poetry

From left, mezzo-soprano Tatyana Rashkovsky,
pianist Katarzyna Marzec-Salwinski, and reader
and all-around good egg Inna Lobanova-Heasely. 

It's always an exciting challenge to find something to do on Super Bowl Sunday other than watch the game. This year, my Facebook (and real life) friend Inna Lobanova-Heasley invited me to a salon f Russian poetry and music held at the Ethical Society of Philadelphia on Rittenhouse Square. It was a lovely afternoon out that was also educational. Russian anything is a gaping lacuna in my cultural education.

The salon was dedicated to the memory of Alexander Pushkin. Inna read his poems (in Russian) and mezzo-soprano Tatyana Rashkovsky, accompanied by either Kasha Marzec-Salwinski or Rollin Wilber on piano, sang settings of his verses. The program also included solo piano pieces big and small, with Kasha and Rollin switching off.

I've never been a fan of Russian music, and the outer movements of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Sonata, with which Kasha ended the program, reminded me why. The score is stuffed with fat and carbohydrates  ― yummy, but not really good for you. (The fingering is so ostentatiously furious Kasha broke one of the black keys. Bravely, she kept whaling away.) Scriabin's Fifth Piano Sonata, however, which Rollin played at the end of the first half, was a wild ride. I especially liked the way it ended, suddenly breaking off as though the composer, or the performer, got sick of the effort and said, "To hell with it." The smaller piano pieces were lovely, too, even those by Rachmaninoff, and the songs were a revelation. The discovery of the afternoon had to be Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951), and who was represented by his songs "I Have Outlived My Aspirations," "Winter Evening," and "To the Dreamer," and whom I had never heard of. There was something old-fashioned and painfully nostalgic about the whole enterprise ― the youngest composer on the bill was Shostakovich ― but it was a memorable afternoon.

This morning, I found the Puppy Monkey Baby on YouTube. The commercial proves that combining one good thing with another good thing does not necessarily result in a third good thing. The Greeks understood this.

So, those of you claim to watch the Big Game for the commercials,tell me, which of us made the healthier choice?

... ly Ballou here in Times Square

Bob, left, and Ray, right.

I note, with great sadness, the passing Feb. 2 of Bob Elliott, one half of the great Bob and Ray, one of my two favorite comedy teams (the other being, of course, the Marx Brothers). I bought the soundtrack album to Bob and Ray: The Two and Only with paperboy money when I was 12, and a year later, I saw the touring company (which consisted of the same cast) at the now-defunct Locust Theater in Philadelphia. A few years later I followed Bob and Ray on WOR in New York (which I could pick up in Southeastern Pa.) and then on National Public Radio.

I never missed a chance to hear them, if I could help it.  They were clean, subtle to the vanishing point, and at their best, hilarious. I was such a fan that in the early 1990s, while I was active in community theater in the Washington, D.C., area, I strung together several of my favorite bits into a one-act play I called "The Bob and Ray Suite," which I directed and appeared in and which turned out to be a great hit.

Having no no idea how to get the performance rights to the  material, I wrote to the Museum of TV and Radio in New York, asking that my request be forwarded to Bob, wherever he might be. Weeks later, I was surprised delighted to find a typewritten response from Bob Elliott in my mailbox. (The return address on the envelope was Cundy's Harbor, Maine, where Bob was reported to have died.) Bob granted me permission to perform the skits without payment. He asked only that the program give proper credit. I still have the letter.

File under Bou - Bow

The death of Pierre Boulez on January 5 was quickly overshadowed by the death of David Bowie a few days later.  Bowie was the talk of my newsroom for an afternoon, and of course, none of my co-workers had ever heard of Boulez. Even many of my classically trained Facebook friends had more to say and more posts to make about the flamboyantly pansexual rock star than the quietly asexual composer and conductor.

Though I never actively followed Bowie’s career, I always felt his presence: He seem to lurk in the background of my life, on the jukebox in my high school cafeteria, on the car radio, or on the television. Taking inventory after he died, however, I realized the only Bowie song I have in my entire music collection is a cover ― Rickie Lee Jones’ version of “Rebel, Rebel” on the album Stuart’s Coat.  It’s my favorite Bowie song, and guitar riff has been stuck in my mind for days. Yet I’m certain than when it finally leaves me alone, my strongest memory of Bowie will remain his unexpected, and hilarious, appearance on the Looney Tunes 50^th anniversary special:

Boulez, on the other hand, became a central figure in my musical life early on, first as a conductor, and only later as a composer. His name appears throughout my record and CD collections as the leader of treasured performances of Berg, Carter, Debussy, Mahler, Ravel, Schoenberg , Webern and Zappa. I first saw him conduct in New York City in 1974, when directed the New York Philharmonic in Charles Ives’s Fourth Symphony. (The Ives centenary was celebrated that year.) Three years later, I attended the premiere of Carter’s wonderful Symphony of Three Orchestras, also with Boulez and the Philharmonic, and in 1986, I saw him lead the Ensemble InterContemporain in the US premiere of Carter’s Penthode at Avery Fisher Hall. (His recording, released in 1990, unfortunately does not capture the charm of the live performance.)  

As regards his compositions, it seems I have been on the verge of truly appreciating them for years. Every so often, I’ll listen to some of them, like what I hear, and then go on about my business. Certainly, he was precocious, influential, and most important, good. Already in the 1950s, with Le Marteau sans Maitre, he had mastered an idiom that Elliott Carter would turn to his own purposes only years later. Robert Craft's recording of the piece, on Columbia, was epoch-making, to be sure, but Boulez' own, made half a century later for DGG, is gorgeous. I will, in the coming days, continue to explore the discography, and, I hope to come away with a deeper understanding of a composer who lived long but departed too soon. 

Spenser's frame of reference

Ace Atkins has written a fourth novel in his continuation of Robert B. Parker's Spenser franchise. This one is called Kickback , and it's based directly on the kids-for-cash scandal that played out a few years ago in Luzerne County, Pa., my proud home state.

(About that title: toward the end of his life, Parker skimped on his prose. The page count stayed the same, but the type got bigger, the margins wider, the leading deeper, and the titles were mostly reduced to one word. He seemed to be a race against time. The hireling author has filled out the pages again, but he has turned bi-syllabic titles into a tradition.)

Of  Atkins' attempts to inhabit the Spenser universe so far, this is the first  one that doesn't fall apart at the end, although he does feel the need to introduce organized crime into the story, the one element not drawn from real life,  just to he can set up an obligatory bloodbath. Just once, I'd like to read a Spenser novel in which goons are not sent sent to scare the hero off. The crime bosses never seem to realize that if they just left him alone, he'd have no leads to track down.
   
As with the last Spenser book, I couldn't help thinking about Spenser's age, which is never nailed down numerically, but which has to be over 80. Parker, who used elements of his own life in fashioning the character, was born in 1932, and Spenser was already in his forties when he was introduced in 1973. Do the math. Our urban knight errant is now dealing with a reconstructed knee, and he's gone on a diet, cutting out his beloved donuts (though he'd lose weight faster if he stopped drinking). Barring a complete reboot a la Star Trek, he'll soon be breaking down doors with a walker.

What drove the age issue home most forcefully, however, wasn't Spenser's physical condition, but his cultural references, which seem stuck in a time warp. Parker had a lazy way of describing characters, especially women, by comparing them to celebrities of the day, but at least the names he used were of the day. Atkins reaches back into the pop culture past, as though he knows he's writing for an aging demographic.

But to be fair, he's writing about a character who still listens to Artie Shaw and wears a Brooklyn Dodgers cap.

Here are a few examples, with page references. See how many you recognize.

A haggard woman missing two front teeth got up to slow dance with a man in a flannel shirt and unlaced boots. They could have taken a lesson from Arthur Murray. (44) Is that even around anymore?

The hood lay loose around his neck, making him look like Nanook of the North. (44)

All this sleuthing was exciting as hell. If only Bulldog Drummond had the Internet. (75)

Only myself an Warner Oland could sleuth over a plate of scallion pancakes. (78)

"I know you," I said, snapping my fingers at the old guy. "You were in the Mickey Mouse Club. You, Chubby and Annette. Wow. Brings back some real memories." (121)

"Enough," I said. "Not that I don't enjoy the Lux Radio Theatre ..." (134)

He looked about as menacing as Howdy Doody on a buckboard. (186)

His thick, curly hair had been cut shorter than Daddy Warbucks's. (232)

I waited for the purse to clock me with all the ferocity of Ruth Buzzi. (245)

He looked like a young James Caan without the looks. (290)

There was also a reference to Madonna in there someplace.

 

A lovely Sunday afternoon in the wilds of suburbia

Taking part in the Salon Extraordinaire in Gladwynne Sunday are, from left, Qin Qian, erhu; Rollin Wilber, piano; Tom Kozumplik, perciussion; Anndrea Clearfield, emcee; Karthryn Woodard, piano; Michele Cann, piano; Joe Soprani, accordion; and John Byrne, leader of the John Byrne Band.

Yesterday I attended my first (and I hope not my last) Salon Extraordinaire, a free concert organized by the composer Andrea Clearfield and held in the comfortable confines of the Main Line Reform Temple in Gladwynne.  Eclecticism was the order of the day as the performers, each of whom got about ten or so minutes to perform, comprised two classical pianists, a Celtic band, a Chinese violinist (that is, a woman who played the Chinese violin, though she also happened to be Chinese), an Italian accordionist (that is, an Italian-American who played the accordion, though on this occasion he happened to play Italian music), and a percussionist-composer who in performance also uses electronic effects, such a voice loops and digital echoes.

Everyone was a standout, and I sat grinning dippily through the whole affair, but the performers who made the deepest impression on me at the time were Qin Qian (pronounced Chin Chan), the erhu player  who was accomanied deferentially by pianist Kathryn Woodard;  and the percussionist, Tom Kozumplik. Not that they were any better than anyone else. It’s just that something about my mood or the novelty of the sounds provoked a stronger response.  Qian played three selections, all composed in the 1960s, but all employing traditional Chinese materials. The first mimicked the galloping of Mongolian horse racing, the last bird song, and the one in the middle, while not specifically imitative, evoked moonlight on a stream as only pentatonic scales can.  Together, they made a small sonata in three movements – fast, slow, fast – and Qian was great fun to watch, grinning slyly as she tore into the rapid figurations. The erhu has a rough sound to match its rough look, and Qian’s facial expressions made it clear that what seemed to Western ears like screeches and wrong notes are all part of the tradition.

The afternoon closed with the young piano virtuoso Michele Cann playing Adolf Schulz-Elver’s  “Arabesques on ‘An der schönen blauen Donau.’” The music itself is either dazzling or hilarious, depending on your definition of taste, but Cann was a marvel, and a great audience favorite. It should be mentioned that the piano at the temple was used by Samuel Barber during his days at the Curtis Institute, purchased and donated by a pair of congregants.    

I enjoyed meeting the accordionist Joe Soprani, whom I interviewed for my preview piece on the salon, but he was rather difficult to hear in performance. He played two pieces ― Julie Giroux’s “Italian Rhapsody” and Rachmaninoff’s “Italian Polka” ― and was, in each case, accompanied by recordings of the US Air Force Band. It was an unwise decision, in my view. On the one hand, the sound system didn’t really convey the kick of big band, and on the other, it seemed at times Soprani was holding back, afraid he would drown it out. He’s a great musician who's had the most remarkable and varied career of anyone onstage yesterday. Next time, I’d like to hear him go it alone and find out just how much volume he can squeeze out of that box.     

One word on the notion of salons: Andrea Clearfield likes to say her own salons were inspired by the salon culture of the 17th and 18^th centuries in Italy and France, which themselves, she said, trace their roots all the way back to ancient Greece. She also asked if me if I could recommend any books or research on the subject. It might be grist for an interesting historical discussion, but it seems to me all the justification is unnecessary. How much precedent, really, do you need to bring musicians together for an afternoon?  

Andrea Clearfield's Salon Extraordinaire

Andrea Clearfield

Here is a link to my article on the Salon Extrordinaire, a public but informal get-together organized on occasion by the composer Andrea Clearfield. The Salon will be held this Sunday, and it's free.

I had not heard of the Salon, and I had not heard of Andrea, but after interviewing her, I was glad my editor threw the story my way. She is currently working on an opera, she tells me, with a libretto by the playwright Jean Claude van Itallie, author of America Hurrah and Mystery Play, which I acted in a few years ago..  

Another 'Sleigh Ride' Watch

I've said in the past that Christmas isn't Christmas until I've heard Leroy Anderson's "Sleigh Ride," and on the condition that hearing it must be as close to accidental as possible - such as over a store's loudspeaker, or in a TV commercial. Radio does count, even though one Philadelphia station plays Christmas music for a month, and hearing "Sleigh Ride" is inevitable if you tune in for any length of time.

Today, I was pleased to discover that the tunes means as much to the young musicians of Plymouth Whitemarsh High School, in Whitemarsh, Pa., as it does to me. The concert band plays the piece ever years at its winter concert, and the band members apparently regard it as a rite of passage. Digital first's own  M. English has written an lively, informative article on the students and their relationship to the music, and I must say I'm jealous she beat me to the story. You can read it here, and I suggest you do.

By the way, my first exposure to "Sleigh Ride" this year a couple of weeks ago, before Thanksgiving, when it was broadcast over the TV in the newsroom. I forget which station. It might have been CNN, which would prove that even a network as fatuous as CNN is good for something.

The New Colossus - a footnote

With apologies to Emma Lazarus:


The Woman with the torch looks out to sea
And tells the world, "I'm changing my criteria.
Send all your homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
Unless they come from Mexico or Syria."