Category: Uncategorized

Now Here’s an Opera Steve Smith Thought You Might Enjoy

Today, the New York Times classical-music critics each picked two contemporary operas of note, one of which was to have found a “niche” in the repertoire. Here’s what Steve Smith picked:
Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives is available on DVD, if you’re interested, or you can watch it on YouTube. Someone on YouTube commented that they remembered this airing on the USA Network in the early ’80s.

Better Know a Composer: Ernst Toch

If you know Ernst Toch for anything, it’s probably this:
“Geographical Fugue”is a perfect tongue twister of a showpiece for high-school and university choirs, the kind of rhythmic, referential, kind-of-humorous diversion that moms and younger brothers love (“Hey ma, it’s just a bunch of names of places! Lake Titicaca! Get it: titty-kaka? Ha!”).

It certainly didn’t start out that way.

The “Geographical Fugue” was the third movement of Gesprochene Musik (Spoken Music), which Toch premiered at the Berlin Festival of Contemporary Music in 1930. Toch had not written the piece to be performed live, but rather had it pre-recorded and played back at 45 rpm on a gramophone:
 
Gesprochene Musik was a wry bit of musical experimentation, an early example of electronic experimentation shot through with Weimar-era modernist wit.

Three years later, as the Nazis came to power, Toch’s burgeoning career in Germany ended when he fled continental Europe. After two years in London–productive ones, he scored three films–Toch made his way to the United States, first settling in New York, and then moving to Los Angeles. There, he earned a living writing film soundtracks, ultimately writing 16 and earning three Academy Award nominations.

It was also in Los Angeles, during a 14-year period from 1950 until his death in 1964, that Toch wrote all seven of his symphonies. Although the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians dismissively describes them as “late Romantic,” Toch’s symphonies are skillful, entertaining, and moving, combining the best of Wagner, Strauss, and Schoenberg with sharp modernist shocks that provide moments of genuine drama:

Symphony No. 3, premiered by the Pittsburgh Symphony on December 2, 1955, won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, but the fifth is also highly recommended.

Our Society is Crumbling: Blame Vin Diesel and Andy Samberg

Matthew Yglesias, the day after Paul Walker died, explains the the popularity of the Fast and the Furious franchise in terms of increasing income inequality in America:

In a world where the system increasingly seems to be rigged, it’s natural to turn to the Dominic Torettos of the world as heroes. Yet Dom, for all his hard work, ingenuity, and undeniable skill doesn’t really do anything useful or productive. He’s a nice guy who’s loyal to his friends and family. He lives by a code. And his outlook is increasingly appealing in an increasingly unequal America. But it’s ultimately destructive of the social institutions needed to generate prosperity.

In the Fast and the Furious movies, characters make choices that value personal relationships over  legal institutions; these decisions make perfect sense, according to Yglesias, to an audience that sees the societal game rigged so that the rich (presumably, not them) get richer while the poor stay where they are (or worse).

I’ve been thinking about the eroding of a particular traditional institution, the family, since watching the Thanksgiving episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. On the show, NYPD detective Jake Peralta eschews Turkey Day because he never had a happy one: when he was a child, his father left him and his mother, and she always had to work on the holiday. The lesson learned at the end of the episode was that Jake’s real family was his work colleagues, and that, because of his love for them, he could now enjoy Thanksgiving as an adult.

So, just as the Fast and the Furious franchise thumbs its nose at law enforcement, so does Brooklyn Nine-Nine realign our notion of family. The interesting twist in the TV show is that Jake shows his love not only for the people, but also for the NYPD as a whole, reinforcing the role of one as it disses the other. A perfect message for the surveillance-state era?

From Aural to Visual in Advertising

It isn’t until the end of his New York Times article “Who Killed The Catchphrase?,” in which he spends much time discussing the media-consumption behaviors of millennials, that Teddy Wayne gets at what has really contributed to the diminished importance of those infectious punchlines to TV commercials:

We are supplanting the catchphrase with GIF, Photoshop and Vine. As Ms. Fegley said, “It’s been replaced by viral videos and the eight million things we share every day.” The commercial catchphrase, meanwhile, has fallen, and it can’t get up.

At one time, lines like “Where’s the Beef?” or “Yo quiero Taco Bell” ruled not only TV, but were used in print and radio as well. Today, our culture has become increasingly visual, and the easily transferable catchphrase is now the shareable meme-image or video. We’re no longer as interested in listening as we are in looking–but we are still interested in sharing.

Is "Academic Jargon" A Cliche?

On the Times Higher Education website, Belinda Jack derides academic language as cliche that inhibits imagination:

As a writer I am, needless to say, a supporter of books and reading. I am an interested party. But if we are to avoid being caught up in self-contained linguistic prisons where everything that is said is, in effect, repetition and cliché, then we have to attend to words and their efficacy. Academic jargon can create just such a closed space in which the initiated talk to one another and there are far too few reality checks. Peer review, rather than acting as a control, can further strengthen the in-language and in-thinking. The pressure on academics to contribute to the research excellence framework can be yet another threat to the independence and integrity of the academic as writer.

I’ve read lots of criticisms of academic jargon online and railed against it myself as a grad student (you have not lived until you’ve sat through an afternoon of professional music theorists drone on about, well, anything really), but I’m starting to wonder if “academic jargon” is itself becoming a cliche that inhibits our ability to helpfully talk about improving dialogue within the academic community and with others. 

Better Know a Composer: Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten’s centenary is Friday, and while WQXR gives you five ways to celebrate, NPR.org reminds us that the composer spent time in Brooklyn and gives us a Britten cheat sheet.

In his home country, the Guardian has been streaming performances all week from Aldeburgh Music, the festival that Britten founded. 

If you like Wes Anderson, you probably know Britten. Moonrise Kingdom featured a lot of Britten’s music, as Russell Platt of the New Yorker discussed, including the second movemenbt of Simple Symphony (start below around 3:20):

Brooklyn Philharmonic Close to Bankruptcy

Crain’s New York Business reported back on November 8 that the board of the Brooklyn Philharmonic is considering bankruptcy.

Another victim of the financial downturn of 2008, the Brooklyn Philharmonic canceled its 2009-10 and 2010-11 seasons. While 2011-12, the orchestra’s only full season with the now infamous Richard Dare as CEO and Alan Pierson as artistic director, was a great artistic success, they’ve been practically dormant since then.

The New York Times also reported. 

Studies that Confirm the Obvious, Metal Edition

A study out of the University of Westminster on contemporary metal music concluded that this group is made up of (mostly) males who aren’t exactly the most confident people out there:

Those with a strong preference for metal “were also more likely to have lower self-esteem,” the researchers write. They speculate this style of music “allows for a purge of negative feelings,” producing a catharsis that may “help boost self-worth.”

The study focuses on thrash metal today, but heavy metal has always been a distinct subculture, dating back to its birth in working-class Britain. Fans have for decades used the music as a release of frustration and a way to build bonds with others who similarly feel outside the norms of society. At least it was like that when I was a boy.  

Reading Poverty

According to a new formula devised by the federal government, the number of poor in the United States stands at 16% of the population, not 15% as calculated by the existing, official formula. And without federal programs such as Medicaid and SNAP (oh, no), that percentage would grow significantly.

Reading this, I was reminded of a blog post by Tressie McMillan Cottom on the logic that drives poor people to buy conspicuously expensive things, especially clothes. She recounts this story of how her well dressed mother helped a neighbor work her way through bureaucratic morass of the local social services agency:

The woman had been denied in the genteel bureaucratic way—lots of waiting, forms, and deadlines she could not quite navigate. I watched my mother put on her best Diana Ross “Mahogany” outfit: a camel colored cape with matching slacks and knee high boots. I was miffed, as only an only child could be, about sharing my mother’s time with the neighbor girl. I must have said something about why we had to do this. Vivian fixed me with a stare as she was slipping on her pearl earrings and told me that people who can do, must do. It took half a day but something about my mother’s performance of respectable black person—her Queen’s English, her Mahogany outfit, her straight bob and pearl earrings—got done what the elderly lady next door had not been able to get done in over a year. I learned, watching my mother, that there was a price we had to pay to signal to gatekeepers that we were worthy of engaging. It meant dressing well and speaking well. It might not work. It likely wouldn‘t work but on the off chance that it would, you had to try. It was unfair but, as Vivian also always said, “life isn’t fair little girl.”

Ms. McMillan Cottom is African American, and her blog post addresses how racism exacerbates class insecurity, but as someone growing up in a white, rural, and poor area of Canada (and there are plenty of these, don’t let the “we have health care; we’re better than you” cracks fool you), I’ve seen for myself how being the same race is of little consequence. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the kids teachers dismissed as troublemakers or losers in school showed visible signs of poverty (poor hygeine, old, dirty, off-brand clothes), while kids of doctors and teachers who acted up in similar ways were thought of as simply needing “guidance.”