Author: Mark Berry

I Went to a Concert, and a Hockey Game Broke Out

Last Thursday, someone punched a 67-year-old man in the face while listening to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play Brahms.

It didn’t really rise to the level of a riot, but a lot of concerts have. Josh Kurp picked his top five music riots on Encore Magazine’s website. So did Laura Mann of the Dallas Observer.

Both mention Altamont and the Who’s 1979 concert in Cincinnati, as well as the 1913 Rite of Spring premiere. But Mann picks as her top choice something we don’t hear much about: a 1949 concert by Paul Robeson show in Peekskill, NY that was undermined by the KKK.

Zooey Deschanel’s National Anthem, Or How (Not) to Talk About a Performance

Two responses to Grantland‘s broadside against Zooey Deschanel’s national anthem bring up a problem that confounds everyone concerned with analyzing music: the difference between a transitory live performance, where an audience measures success in that moment, using a set of expectations conditioned by context; and t a recording of the same event, a mediated experience that listeners experience individually, over and over again.

Jason Heid, on Dallas’s D Magazine tells us what it was like to experience Deschanel’s rendition at the game:

I was at Rangers Ballpark for Game 4 last night, and loved the sense of melancholy with which Deschanel infused the familiar song. It felt almost like a funeral dirge, and I mean that as a high compliment. It was quite different from what we normally get at these games: when some mid-level country music or top 40 star is trotted out for a serviceable, but instantly forgettable, performance. 

A reader of Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish makes the point that the Deschanel version, as opposed to the much praised Whitney Houston’s at the 1991 Super Bowl, was perfect to sing along with:

Zooey sang it like she meant it. Even the way she softened the ends of most of the lines gave the audience room to hear themselves singing along, and isn’t that supposed to be the point?
Her job was not to deliver an aria to a silent hall; it was to lead the crowd in singing the song. 

However dramatic or pleasing Whitney Houston’s rendition might have been, you can’t sing along to it. you can only listen … Singing the national anthem is supposed to be a participatory ritual, not a spectator sport. 

Is it fair, as Grantland did, to evaluate a live performance based on a video recording of it? Are Caspian-Kang and Vargas-Cooper (these are their names, really), and Jason Heid responding to the same thing at all? And do we really want to sing along?


It Wasn’t as Bad as All That, Was It? Zooey Deschanel’s National Anthem

Relax, guys. On Grantland, Jay Caspian-Kang and Natasha Vargas-Cooper rant over this:

Here’s a sample:

Where have our divas gone? There is no strife in ZoZo’s lily-white aesthetic. No sex, no violence, just tweeting. What a tepid and sniveling symbol she is. She has nothing to draw on, nothing to find resonance in. She’s not even fit for our time. Give us a beleaguered icon. Someone trying to maintain their imperial draw even though they’ve grown bloated and waterlogged with age. I want to hear the sounds of a woman who has known loss and triumph, not the pubescent squeaks of a flinching sitcom star with cute bangs and a stupid blog. 

Very classy.

There have been far worse renditions of our national anthem, and many better. If you can stand reading their childish drivel, Caspian-Kang and Vargas-Cooper have their own best-of list.

Responses to NPR’s Dropping World of Opera, Lisa Simeone Firing

A few responses to NPR dropping Lisa Simeone’s World of Opera because of her involvement in organizing protests in DC, and her firing as host of Soundprint for the same reason:

  • On his Baltimore Sun blog, David Zurawick says that NPR has a code of ethics and needs to enforce it.
  • Libertarian website Reason thinks that the lengths NPR goes through to prove its objectivity only emphasizes its editorial bias; better just to acknowledge it and let its employees be Prius-driving, yoga-loving, liberal lunatics. 

On a related note, Michelle Norris, whose husband is now an Obama 2012 advisor, recently quit her job as All Things Considered host to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest.

Koyaanisqatsi and the "Crying Indian"

The so-called “crying Indian” ad is the most famous (or infamous) example of a patronizingly essentialist view of American Indians as environmental augurs:

I think Koyaanisqatsi is another. The only words you hear in the film are Hopi. Koyaanisqatsi means “life out of balance,” and the chorus that is part of Philip Glass‘s score intones three tribal sayings that can be interpreted as being warnings about the impact of human actions on the world.

It’s certainly not mean-spirited but can nonetheless be as limiting and de-humanizing as any cowboy-movie stereotype.

UB40 Goes Bankrupt

Well, at least it’s not an orchestra this time.

As reported in Digital Music News and the UK’s Daily Mail, UB40 recently declared bankruptcy. Lead singer Ali Campbell left years ago, alleging that the group’s management mishandled the group’s finances; I guess he was right.

Digital Music News points out that UB40 probably enjoys a “healthy royalty stream”–they’ve sold, apparently, 70 million records–but I don’t think anyone in that band ever wrote his own song. A couple of their famous covers:

What People Drink In the Famous Works of English Literature, Oliver Twist Edition

Gin and hot water seemed to be the cold-weather drink of choice for Dickens’s lowlifes in Oliver Twist. Mr. Bumble drank it, and so did Sikes. Fagin served it to Oliver.

Now that the nights are getting nippier, I thought I’d try it out. Let me tell you: gin and hot water is awful. It tastes like warm nail polish remover. Adding lemon juice helps, but not much. I found a recipe on Epicurious for a gin toddy that might be good.

I’m reading Treasure Island now, so I guess I’ll be drinking lots and lots of rum soon.

Philip Glass: "My Frontiers Are Behind Me"

In this short promotional video for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Philip Glass talks a little bit about his increasing interest in the classical-music tradition as a source of inspiration:

This has been going on for a while. Some people love his symphonies, string quartets, and the like; others don’t. Back in the fall of 2010, Robert McDuffie toured the country with Glass’s nod to Vivadli, American Four Seasons. In the Chicago Tribune, John von Rhein called it, “a Glass half empty.” Mike Paarlberg loved the piece, mostly for not sounding like Koyaanisqatsi.

Across the pond, two different reviewers for the same paper had very different opinions, as Richard Guerin points out. In the London Telegraph, Ivan Hewett hailed American Four Seasons as “classic art”; Michael White called it “unmitigated trash.”

Here’s the last movement. Decide for yourself:

Finally, Something the iPad is Good for

A couple of weeks ago, The Atlantic posted an article about the iPad’s usefulness as a replacement for hard-copy sheet music,  and included this video of James Rhodes making a big deal of his decision to go electronic:

About a year ago, Gizmodo expressed similar sentiments, declaring that the iPad is “perfect” as a sheet-music reader. Over at the Technology in Music Education blog, there is a review of music readers for the iPad. 

The music readers for iPads go beyond the gimmickry of Smule apps, but I’m sure there’s something disconcerting about relying on a computer in a performance setting. Paper music can blow off the stand, but if a tablet computer loses power, you’re out of luck.