I was going to wait, but just couldn’t contain myself (and neither could Peter MacDonald, who mentioned this on Facebook.)
Pi Day is coming up, and Michael John Blake is paying tribute to everyone’s favorite mathematical symbol through music. He explains:
I can’t wait to hear what he comes up with for Pie Day.
If you want to know how rock died, go to Steven Hyden’s 10-part series Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation?. It takes forever–I’m only halfway through–but it’s worth it.
Yes, it helped that I was only 10 at the time, but GNR was unnerving in a way that even the scariest of metal bands couldn’t touch … Nirvana is credited with making ’80s hair-metal bands look silly with Nevermind, but GNR had already done that with the “Welcome To The Jungle” video several years earlier.
If you’re a New York Public Library member, you can now download tracks from the Sony catalog for free through the Freegal music service. That’s a lot of music. They’ve Isaac Stern playing Rochberg’s Violin Concerto and Mumford & Sons, Miles Davis and Justin Timberlake.
The good news is that the tracks are DRM-free: you can play them on anything. The bad news is that you can only download three tracks a week. So think hard about what you want to listen to.
David Hildebrand pointed out on the Society for American Music listserv that “The Star-Spangled Banner” became the official US national anthem 80 years ago today. The BBC interviewed him for World Update (at about 47:40). I haven’t seen much about it in the American news yet; I’m sure the Canadians will have something to say about it.
You probably know that the “The Star-Spangled Banner” got its melody from a drinking song. But do you know which one? And did you know that Francis Scott Key’s lyrics first appeared in September 1814 as a broadside in Baltimore?
The Smithsonian Museum of American History has a great section on its website where you can find out a bunch of stuff about our national anthem. Check it out and impress your friends.
And whatever you do, make sure you know the lyrics.
Itzhak Perlman, whose contract was up in June, resigned today as music director of the Westchester Philharmonic.
The Detroit Symphony management presented its “final offer” last night to striking musicians. They’d like the musicians to vote on the offer by Thursday night; the union’s response pretty much typifies their tone and approach up until now:
… according [to] musicians’ spokesman Greg Bowens, the union’s bylaws require a 72-hour waiting period after any proposal is submitted before a vote can be taken. He said if the contract offer was e-mailed to the union at 6:45 p.m. Tuesday as the DSO said, then 72 hours would mean a Friday evening vote. “Management,” said Bowens, “should have taken this into account.”
There’s just too much artsy stuff out there and not enough time. It’s a problem we face here in New York City. NEA chairman Rocco Landesman wants to solve it for us.
“You can either increase demand or decrease supply,” says Landesman, as reported in the Washington Post
this past weekend. “Demand is not going to increase. So it is time to think about decreasing supply.”
Michael Kaiser, who recently criticized arts organizations for timidity in programming, stood up for the little guy in his response: “My biggest problem with thinning out the field is that what people typically mean is: Thin out the smallest, weakest, least developed.”
Landesman’s comments came before Obama on Monday proposed cutting NEA funding, but the Washington Post article does note that Landesman may have been preparing people for the tough times ahead.
On Sequenza21, Armondo Bayalo claims that Michael Kaiser is “just plain wrong about the state of the art”–and then proceeds to tell us all the reasons why he’s right.
Bayalo’s real point isn’t that Kaiser is wrong, but that he is only right within his own big-arts frame of reference. He doesn’t see all the great stuff that’s going in “smaller, leaner operations” than the Kennedy Center:
Fair enough, but part of the problem is that the funders and fundraisers who hold the purse strings aren’t willing to invest in those grass-roots groups so that they can grow.
Kennedy Center president and one-note high-culture pundit Michael Kaiser called out arts presenters for a lack of imagination yesterday on his Huffington Post blog.
“The embracing of new technologies and the willingness to try new things seem to have become more the province of rock music and movies,” says Kaiser. “The classical arts have simply not kept up.”
Who’s to blame? Administrators, says the guy who founded a school for arts managers.
… groups of people are now more responsible for arts making than the individual. Boards, managers and producing consortia are overly-involved.
And these groups are misbehaving. They are overly-conservative, subject to “group think” and so worried about budgets that they forget that bad art hurts budgets far more than risk-taking does.
Kaiser tends to repeat the same argument whenever he writes–and it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense. At least for music.
When I read Kaiser’s post, I think of the time I noticed that three different orchestras were playing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in the same month, in the same hall (guess which one?). I also think of all the music I’ll never hear live because those orchestras continue to program the same music over and over, season after season.
I’d like to think that our programmers and music directors are doing this because the boards and management they answer to are closed minded. But I also know that it’s not that simple. And I know that Kaiser has his own blind spots, as Armondo Bayolo points out on Sequenza21.
Maybe it was because he was a communist, but you don’t hear much about Wallingford Riegger anymore. Two years before Riegger went in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1957, Gilbert Chase made a point in his book America’s Music of singling out the composer as “the leading native-born American composer who composes with twelve tones.”
Granted, that’s a pretty small group to be out in front of, but you get the point: Riegger was generally well respected, a composer who had emerged from the hotbed of avant-garde musical activity in 1920s New York City with a style at once daring and grounded in traditional technique. He was flaky, but not too flaky.
Dichotomy (1931-2) is one of his earliest works that typify what Riegger was all about, the first piece of his that showed the maturity he would later exhibit in his third and fourth symphonies.
His earliest success here in the US (he studied in Germany for a few years) was his Study in Sonority.
Mark Likes Music 
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