Kenneth Woods- A View From the Podium

Just as a follow-up to yesterday’s piece on state funding of the arts…. 

There are lots of conversations going on in the blogosphere, in newspapers and around the water-cooler about the so-called crisis in classical music. 

One central idea I have been trying to stress here and will continue to get at more often is my belief that in many, many ways the ill-health of the classical music business is a sign of the ill-health of society as a whole. 

This is not to say that we won’t all benefit from innovation, reform, regeneration and new ideas. It’s not to say that we shouldn’t expand our repertoire, embrace new audiences, and reach out to young people. Those are all things we should be doing in good times and bad. 

However, I think a careful look at recent history will show that classical music’s economic challenges (and that’s really the issue everyone worries about) are not brought about because we play too much old music or to much new music or too much European music or too much whatever music. It’s not because we still wear tux’s or because we won’t let the audience clap or cough in the middle of the concert. It’s not because we start concerts at 7 or 9 or whatever. It’s not because ticket prices are too high. 

The arts are the cultural canary in the coal mine, and there are some toxic fumes in our culture today- no wonder the birdy passed out. This is something I’m sure I’ll come back to many more times in more detail, but I’d encourage you to think about how the following questions- 

1. How are arts organizations affected by regulatory changes in publishing and broadcasting that have caused most formerly locally-owned and operated radio, television and newspaper outlets to become subsidiaries of huge national conglomerates? When so much of our media content is nationally syndicated, don’t local performing arts organizations get less coverage of everything that they do?
2. How are arts organizations affected by the erosion of educational standards in all areas, let alone by the wholesale demolition of arts education?
3. How are arts organizations affected by the national governments massive general reductions in humanitarian aid over the last 25 years? Funds to help victims of a tragedy like the Indian Ocean tsunami would have come from the state in prior generations, now they’ve come primarily from private foundations, foundations that used to fund arts organizations.    

    

Rather than being so introspective about what we need to do to be more like our times, perhaps we should instead become more proactive in addressing the challenges of our times. Instead of changing with the times, perhaps we need to become agents of change, or the future of classical music won’t be the only future we have to worry about.  

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

A view from the podium, Music and Media

Much as I’m happy to see Shostakovich getting so much attention in his 100^th anniversary year, I’ve been a bit sad to see the 150^th anniversary of the death of Robert Schumann go almost completely unnoticed, except at On An Overgrown Path. 

I actually very lovingly set out to combine the two anniversaries into a mini-series with the Surrey Mozart Players. The idea was to do back to back concerts of one symphony and one solo work by each, paired with a Beethoven overture (Beethoven being arguably the largest influence on either). The programs were going to look like this 

Beethoven- Coriolan Overture 

Schumann- Cello Concerto 

Shostakovich- Chamber Symphony op 83a Beethoven- Leonore Overture No. 3 Shostakovich- Poems of Maria Tsvetayeva 

Schumann- Symphony No. 3  I actually thought the pairing was exceptionally interesting and put both of them in a fresh context. Schumann the polemicist versus Shostakovich the yurodivy, Florestan and Eusebius versus Shostakovich the Old (loyal son of the regime) and New (secret dissident), it was going to be great. Well, soloist cost, the lack of people who can sing in Russian, marketing concerns and scheduling issues nearly did us in, but in the end we managed to keep everything except the songs, which have been replaced by the Prokofiev 2^nd fiddle concerto, which is a great piece, it just doesn’t fit the theme.  Sadly, by the time we had dealt with soloist availability and all that we ended up with both concerts in 2007…. 

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

A view from the podium, Performing Life

Have a look at this piece in today’s Guardian, and be sure to read the numerous comments that follow.

I find it interesting that the discussion so quickly deteriorates into an argument about market economics versus socialism. One reader extols the virtues of artistic life in Soviet Russia, another suggests that if an art form cannot succeed in the market place, it should be allowed to die or at least contract, while another suggests that if we just played more contemporary music and less Beethoven, everything would be fine (why is it always Beethoven that people like that complain about?).

Not wanting to waste my wisdom (?) on the comments page of the Guardian (unless their paying me!), I’ll weigh in here with a few thoughts-

1. The idea that we must choose between a Soviet-style system of government funded and controlled arts versus a privately system one is a false one. In fact most of Europe has often had a much more enlightened, balanced approach of mixing public money, commercial investment (from record companies and tour promoters), private sponsorship, foundation and corporate sponsorship and ticket sales. Sadly, in first the US, and more recently Britain, there has been a tendency to underfund the arts more and more at the state level. In Britain (and Canada) the problem has been that the tax structure has not been adjusted to incentivize philanthropy to help ameliorate the damage of lost state funding.
2.  State support for the arts does not have to lead to state control of the arts. The National Science Foundation in the USA provides a useful, and incredibly successful model. Instead of vetting funding requests through a central council or a legislature, NSF requests were always vetted via blind peer review. Decisions were made not on the potential market value of the proposed research, or the likelihood of outside co-funding, or the political popularity of the proposed research, but solely and exclusively on its SCIENTIFIC VALUE AS DETERMINED BY THE AD HOC COMMITTEE EVALUATING THAT PROPOSAL. This apparently naïve system produced the microchip, the internet, and most of the key scientific breakthroughs from World War II through the early 80s. It showed that support for the pure pursuit of excellence, truth and discovery was the most effective way of developing new economies, curing disease, understanding our world and solving problems ever invented.
3. State subsidy of the arts is not a manifestation of the lack of economic viability of the arts, but of the economic importance of the arts. States do not invest in the arts because they are unpopular, but because they are very popular and they spur more economic activity than any other arena of public life. Study after study after study has shown that each dollar invested by the state in the arts generates more wealth and more tax revenue than in any other area, including defence, transportation, medical research, infrastructure development or any thing else.
4. It is not true that only non-profits look for state subsidy of their activities. In fact, no company in America would open a new factory or call center or warehouse unless they receive a generous array of tax breaks, incentives and free infrastructure. Airlines do no have to pay for the roads that lead to the airports. WalMart does not pay for the roads it uses to distribute its goods. Sports franchises receive hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to build stadia and then receive enormous tax breaks, and yet don’t generate, dollar for dollar, anything like the same return on investment to the community.
5. Arts organizations suffer when they aren’t adequately subsidized not because they are not popular or valued, but because they are competing with other “entertainment” providers, like sports teams, that are incredibly generously subsidised. Cities build stadiums for teams, which they give to the team ownership (or lease for $1 a year or something like that, lest the team move to another city). Teams sell tickets by the tens of thousands to their games, and when they’re not playing, they rent out their stadium at a huge profit to rock bands. Record companies sell millions of records promoted by concerts in publicly funded stadiums, and advertised on the public airwaves (think how little a broadcast has to pay for their spectrum rights in comparison to what those rights are worth). In the last 20 years the arts have been far under funded compared to commercial music, sports, television and other mass media. No wonder we are struggling. Arts don’t get subsidies because they are struggling, they struggle because they are not getting anything like the same level of subsidy as everyone else.
   
    

Orchestras that receive generous state support get better audiences, not worse ones, because they can be more focused on developing their artistic mission (which is what the audience wants) instead of developing their brand position (which is what many private financial supporters want). They can be bolder in their programming (still doing lots of Beethoven, please), and can invest in the future of the art form through educational programs that reach out to new audiences and develop new artists.

We, as nations, should be seeing more government funding not only for orchestras and opera but should also be looking at other cultural projects that could benefit society artistically and financially were they better supported. In looking at all of them, and at classical music, museums and so on, we should be focused on supporting the best art our nations can produce, not on supporting the most easily marketed or pandering to political correctness by trying to represent every facet of society regardless of the quality of work being done in it. Philippa Ibottson writes “Even if there were sufficient resources to sustain them, the interest in classical music seems still to have dwindled badly.” What she doesn’t make clear enough is that the interest in classical music has dwindled badly because there are insufficient resources to sustain it. 

A view from the podium, Music and Media

Just came across this post in the Guardian on the future, or lack of it, of MTV.
Discovering MTV was a major turning point in my life. I found the channel just a few months after it went on the air, and soon became completely addicted. In that first summer, I was completely obsessed, sometimes waiting up all night to see a video come around in rotation again. For someone from a small city who didn’t have the chance to see major bands in person, it was amazing to see groups I idolized in concert footage.

This is worth emphasizing. In those early years, there were not a lot of true videos, so a huge proportion of MTV’s content was made up of clips of actual live performances, especially by its more rock-oriented artists. Excited as I was to finally see my favorite bands play, I discovered countless new acts that I would never have found. MTV also had a fantastic record of showing complete concerts, many of which I video-taped, and I now have quite a library stored away. In those early years, when the station was growing at an amazing rate, its programming was more creative, more diverse, more interesting than any radio station or TV network in the world. While mainstream radio emphasized finding the narrowest possible format, MTV embraced art rock, ska, reggae, thrash, metal, folk rock, hard rock, punk, new wave, rockabilly, funk, acid rock, acts of the 50s and 60s, arena rock and much more.

The given history in the press is that MTV really only arrived with the emergence of Madonna and Michael Jackson, but the fact is that that was the very moment that the network started its march to irrelevance. Within in 5 years MTV had made the irrevocable decision to be the content provider of choice for the musical bottom feeder. Early MTV fans might have bought 50 records a year or more, but the late 80s viewer was content to buy their annual fix of Madonna and Jacko and leave it at that. Today’s viewer might download one or two singles off I-Tunes, but that’s about it.

As a result, MTV’s music programming became less and less popular. Once the music lover realized there was no point waiting all week for that obscure live Who video to return once you knew it was gone forever. MTV’s response was not to return to the formula that made it one of the most successful brands in history, but to abandon music altogether. In the 90s the era of VJs was long over, Saturday night concerts and the Headbanger’s Ball had given way to The Real World (truth in advertising?????) and The Osbournes. You could see Ozzy’s dogs poo all over the mansion, but you would never again see the original video of Crazy Train.

So now MTV is on its last legs, and spaces like MeSpace and YouTube have filled the vacuum. Why? The offer a diversity of content that MTV doesn’t and won’t. What has MTV and the recording industry taken away from this? Not much. “There’s a lot of clutter and a lot of noise,” says John Reid, head of global marketing at Warner International. “MTV faces competition from the YouTubes and the MySpaces. It’s so hard to break an act these days. We have to focus on fewer and fewer acts.” (emphasis added)

Over and over again, it is music lovers who have been shown to be the strength of the music industry, yet it is the bottom feeder that the industry expends all its energy pandering to. Research shows again and again the people flock to content providers that offer DIVERSITY OF CONTENT, yet the big boys, who have more content than anyone to draw on, instead focus all their energies on the glorification and promotion of acts that are of no interest whatsoever to people who actually like music.  MTV can add all the interactive features it wants- at the end of the day, they’re not offering anything interesting to music fans. Let ‘em die!

A view from the podium, Music and Media

Much as I prefer to avoid autobiography on this blog, I have to share a very surprising and exciting piece of news.
This afternoon at 2:20 PM United Airlines finally delivered my suitcase into my hands here in Cardiff.
I’m not sure I have the verbal tools to adequately explain to you just exactly how unlikely this outcome has seemed since my poor suitcase disappeared from under my own gaze on June 25^th, over a month ago! Even a week ago, when the suitcase had been found but left sitting in Dulles Airport for 5 days, I seriously doubted I would ever see it.
Through the entire experience, the good folks at United have, by and large, acted as though this was the first piece of luggage the airline had ever had in its care, the first it had ever attempted to move from place to place, the first it had ever lost and the first it had ever attempted to locate. Although this is the longest period they’ve lost my luggage for, it’s not the first. United has lost or delayed suitcases of mine at least 9 times in the last 3 ½ years, which means they’ve failed to get my bags there about  60% of the times I’ve flown them in that period.

Frankly, my experience throughout the summer has been that the entire transport system of Western Civilization is in ruin. My recent US trip to Portland and Durango consisted of 10 legs spread out over two round trips on two airlines (United and Delta). Only one was less than 2 hours late, but that was the leg where the suitcase disappeared. Our trip to London this weekend started nearly 3 hours late when the bus didn’t show, and when it did the bus driver was a red-eyed, screaming madman. As a result we missed the last tube and had to take a cab. Three cab rides in four days, and every time the cabby was on the phone (very illegal in Britain), although the last one did make a heroic effort to get us to our bus. When organizing our side-trip to Glyndebourne, I called the “information” line to get train times, and they cheerfully explained that I could book both the train to Lewes and the bus on to Glyndebourne together as the “Glyndebourne Express,” a construct that was completely unknown to the staff at Victoria station. As a matter of fact, I can’t remember the last time I paid the fare at the station that I was quoted on the phone. Our attempt to return to the bus station for our return journey was a catalogue of horrors, including trains emptied because of bodies on the rails and a bus stopped for nearly 30 minutes at one stop light. By the way, doesn’t it seem reasonable that, when catching a bus, the logical place to look is the bus station (where it wasn’t) and not the train station (where it was)? And, as long as I rant, I must ask, why does one wait 30 minutes for a number 11 bus while 30 other buses pass, and when it finally arrives it is followed bumper-to-bumper by 2 more number 11 buses (both empty)????

I should be smiling- I have my suitcase, my long lost suitcase. Now if Delta would just process the 600 Euro compensation payment they still owe me….

 c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

A view from the podium, Performing Life

Here is a very moving post from someone named reidmt (see annonymous blogging). I actually know who he is, as will many of my readers, but nevermind, I thought is was a good post.

 Interestingly, I could have easily been in Pendleton this week for our youth camp at the OES, but took the year off. Given that I relate to heat about as well as to corporate country music radio, it’s probably for the best that I wasn’t there, given this.
KW

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

A view from the podium

Here’s a very nice “what I did with my summer non-vacation” from Leonard Slatkin posted at Classical Source. It reads an awful lot like a well-written blog entry. Leonard, are you going to steal my niche????

A view from the podium

I’ve been trying to steer friends towards these interviews with Rostropovich for a long time, so I thought I would take Pliable’s idea and post the links here.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/shostakovich/ram/rostropovich1.ram

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/shostakovich/ram/rostropovich2.ram

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/shostakovich/ram/rostropovich3.ram

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/shostakovich/ram/rostropovich4.ram

A view from the podium

There are two reasons I don’t do reviews on this blog, much as I might be tempted. The first, and most compelling, reason is that I am aware of what a big, beautiful glass house I live in, and secondly, I don’t particularly want to piss people off in my field. Practicalities aside, I think that too many reviews are really summary judgments- judgments passed on great composers’ works and on great performers performances, and who are we to pass judgment on the artistic work of others. Still, not all events can be successful, and analyzing what caused a project not to succeed can be a very rewarding and useful process, and in the last 24 hours I had the stimulating pleasure of attending two events that both seemed to fall well short of expectations. The second of these was the exhibition “Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction” at the Tate Modern. In spite of the crowds, the Tate Modern is one of my favorite places just to be- I’d love to work in a concert hall that felt like it. Kandinsky is one of my favorite painters- probably a favorite of most musicians. It was the one thing I was absolutely sure I wanted to do in London this week- I was sure it would be a pig in sh*t moment for me. 

Well, as it turns out, simply arranging a bunch of pictures by one artist in chronological order with background information (audio guide or captions) for only a quarter of them is not a very satisfying or stimulating way to present art. Even when the paintings are fantastic and important. 

Imagine the contrast from the Hayward exhibit on Surrealism that I went to on Sunday, which was so wonderfully and thoughtfully put together. In it, each piece was connected to all the others. Influences and conflicts were underlined and explored, context was established, and each work was illuminated. We weren’t told what we were looking at, we were told how it was conceived, how it was inspired, what impact it had on other artists and thinkers, and where the artist went from there. The entire exhibit took us closer to the generative ideas behind each of it’s parts.

On the other hand, at the Kandinsky show, most of the audio guide told us things like “there is a yellow circle in the lower left-hand corner, and four black lines running diagonally left-to-right.” For me there was consistently too much description and very little analysis. We were told Kandinsky was part of the Blue Rider group, something most of his fans already knew, but we weren’t told who else was, or what they believed. We were told that he was deeply interested in physics and spirituality, but we weren’t told which scientists and philosophers interested him. We were told that music was a big influence on his approach to painting, and even told about his chromaestesia, or musically triggered visions of color. However, the exhibition organizers made fundamental, basic technical errors in their discussion of music. They spoke of Schoenberg as the innovator of the 12 tone scale instead of the 12 tone row, and then used a freely atonal piece, the first op 11 Piano Piece as an example of his music- the implication being that it is an example of 12 tone composition, which it is not, even it was an influence on Kandinsky. Not only could they have gotten their facts correct, they could have unearthed some of Schoenberg’s own paintings or his writings on visual art. They could have showed his sketches or an analysis of how a row works. 

Kandinsky also painted works he called “Fugues,” and the audio guide for the Fugue in question played the Prelude in C Major from the Well Tempered Clavier while describing a fugue- WHY NOT PLAY A FREAKING FUGUE?!?!!?! Worse yet, they gave a meaningless and incorrect definition of a fugue as being a musical work in which a single theme is put through several variations (I paraphrase from memory, sorry). Any poor non-musician would have left with a barrel of fresh mis-information and a totally confused idea of both this one aspect of music, and of this aspect of Kandinsky’s paiting.We found out that he was in love with someone, and then later that they broke up, but we never found out why. We knew he liked putting a rider on horseback in his paintings and were told to look for him, but weren’t told when he showed up again. We were told he was influenced by the constructivists in Russia, but saw only scans of their work. Why not bring it together.   

Anyway, for me the obvious personal parallel is in programming and in how we present concerts. Just as even the greatest paintings benefit from context and illumination, surely Beethoven 9 or Thcaik 5 deserve the same treatment. Most of my programs have some little theme in them, but should we be trying harder to make the concert a more coherent event. I thought Underground Surrealism was way more fun than Kandinsky, and I like K’s stuff more than Dali (but not Picasso). Sometimes I think orchestras make the mistake of thinking that Mozart or Rachmaninoff will win the audience over no matter what, but a performance ought to be an act of illumination- a great concert is not only a pleasure to the senses, but a chance to share in the communication of meaning.

Telegraph feature

Guardian feature

Guardian review

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

A view from the podium

I want to call reader’s attention to a lovely comment from Harriet Gedge, daughter of conductor David Gedge. I’m so happy to hear that David is coming along in his march to recovery, but it sounds like a truly arduous process.
Other news today- over at oboeinsight, we have the revelation that not all classical musicians are smart. Patricia’s post was inspired by a rather silly news piece about a cellist robbing a bank, but there are plenty of other examples. One of my favorite moments was on tour in France with one of the IU orchestras as a student. We’d just had a long, frustrating rehearsal of a Mozart concerto under a not-very-good conductor. One of my roommates, also a cellist, and I  were bemoaning the lack of style and general elegance in our orchestra’s Mozart and I said something really deep like “Mozart’s music is really hard.” At this point, our third roommate chimed in with this one-
“Mozart is easy, you just count the rests and play the notes.”
Trust me, he wasn’t being ironic or making a sly point. No worries, though- he’s gone on to be principal _______ at one major orchestra and associate principal at another. Lack of brains or interest in music doesn’t have to be a handicap as long as you can get your fingers around the first page of Don Juan.

A view from the podium

It is unbearably hot in London this week, and it has really sapped my ability to concentrate enough to come up with new stuff. Fortunately, I have a few old things I’ve been meaning to add that were written for discussion groups, editorials and so on. This was written to the DSCH email listserve in response to someone’s question about if and how Shostakovich’s symphonies were influenced by Mahler. Once the weather cools off, I promise to let Dmitri and Gustav have a bit of time off and maybe get back to my modernism series or do something on jazz again. We’ll see.

KW

I liked the quesiton about M’s influence on Shostakovich. Most of the answers so far seem to focus on finding those moments in S’s output that “sound” like M. There are a few, but not many, and I don’t think that in any case they are the key to understanding the ways in which M influenced S’s approach.

One reason the two sound so different is that they are each rooted so firmly in the musical vernacular of their own culture- who could be more reflective of both the high and low musical traditions of his culture than M, except perhaps S? Where M brings together the elegance of Vienna, the contrapuntal tradition of high German composition from Bach through Brahms with a sense of the music of everyday life in its most varied and even vulgar forms, S is able to mix the daring and modality of Mussorgsky, the epic weight of Tchaik and the great operatic tradition with everything from polkas to revolutionary songs. I would say they are both deeply rooted in their own worlds, their own traditions but work in remarkably similar ways, even where their aesthetic aims are very different.

Look at their approach to form- Neither were radical, but both found great interest in manipulating and evading the expectations of classical forms. The formal structures of the 1st mvt of M9 and the 1st mvt’s of S5, 8 and 10 all show similarities. Rather than using the sonata form to create a sense of roundedness and closure, all use the expectations of true sonata form to create something more about departure and disolution, mostly by working with the ordering of musical ideas and key relationships in interesting and highly unorthodox ways.

In their approach to orchestration, they are also  very similar, even though their voices are very distinct. Both used the orchestra with the most extraordinary flexibiltiy, deploying massive forces but working often with discrete ensembles with the orchestra, both often reducing the orchestra to a trio or even a duet. They favor different unusual combinations of solo instruments, but both seem to love very unusual pairings. They both loved expoiting the symbolic potential of instruments on the extremes of register, especially the e-flat clarinet, pic and contrabassoon.

Finally, S seemed to understand that Mahler was right when he said the symphony must contain the whole world, and that therefore it had to live in its own world. He knew what he could take and use from other musics, but also understood that he had to find his own voice, one that is the most unique in his time.
 

c. 2004 and 2006 Kenneth Woods

A view from the podium

While in London this week I had the opportunity to see “Underground Surrealism” at the Hayward Gallery, a fascinating look into one very exciting moment in art history as witnessed through the prism of one magazine, Georges Bataille’s “Documents.” 

The magazine only lasted for about a year, yet Bataille and his colleagues were able to document an amazing array of the artistic ideas and philosophical debates of his time. More than any exhibition I’ve seen in a long time, this one did a fantastic job of both bringing to life the concert of ideas that helped spur the creation of new artistic forms and styles, but also showed how our current way of looking at life was so powerfully influenced by one group of thinkers and artists in one short window of time. 

More than anything, the exhibit is a testament to the supreme power of the idea as the core value of art. Bataille had a completely democratic attitude to art, which embraced virtuoso painters like Picasso, Dali and Masson, primitive art, historical art, Hollywood and even children’s drawings. Technique and theory don’t seem to matter much to him, but context and ideas do, and they matter a lot. Bataille’s exploration of the power of symbols and ritual seems to lead again and again back to his own ideas about humanity’s fascination with humiliation, death, degradation and mystery. 

I can’t help feeling a bit envious of those who were there. Looking back on all the explosions of creativity in the first 30 years of the 20^th Century, it’s almost inconceivable that in so short a time humanity was able to find so many completely new ways of looking at the world artistically, philosophically and scientifically. Perhaps historians will recognize it as the most fertile period in human history. Relativity, serialism, jazz, expressionism, cubism, and American musical theatre- the list goes on and on. By grim comparison, what have we accomplished since 1976? Has there been even one truly significant artistic revolution? One scientific breakthrough (the road to the internet was mapped out in the early 70s!)? One new musical genre? Where are the new ideas of our time? 

How fascinating then that within 30 hours I had had two very powerful illustrations of the power of a completely opposite approach to art. Bataille’s evaluation of art seems to be dependent entirely on what he perceives as the value and power of the ideas it expresses. Presentation is not treated as a value in and of itself, and this is a quintessentially 20^th Century outlook- where mere beauty is treated as a somewhat bourgeois value. Yet, when one hears Strauss’s Die Fledermaus or Elgar’s In the South, as I did on the next two evenings, one can’t help but admit that presentation does matter, that craft does matter. In the South is not one of Elgar’s most probing philosophical statements, but it is, in the very best sense of the cliché, a true tour-de-force of orchestration, voice-leading, harmonization and structure. It is an absolute joy to listen to from beginning to end. 

Johann Strauss Jr. is an even more extreme example of someone with an almost unfathomable natural facility as a composer and the most incredible instincts as a musician. How could one musician write so much in such a limited range of genres and yet always sound so fresh and alive. Strauss never seemed to have any ambition to be “serious” or in any way groundbreaking, but his music is as good as anyone else’s and better than most. Fledermaus does have ideas in it, but these were not an important part of the Glyndebourne production we saw this week, which was mostly a frothy, slapstick affair. What was important was the music- the sparking orchestration, the endless tunes, the wit, the flash, and the little touches of genius in every bar. Come to think of it, we haven’t done so brilliantly in the last 30 years on presentation, either, when compared to the era of Strauss and Elgar. 

 More on Undercover Surrealism

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

A view from the podium

Last August, Suzanne and I spent our holiday time traipsing around Normandy and Brittany. One afternoon, we found ourselves in a beautiful and unspoiled little medieval town in western Brittany looking rather aimlessly about. Having quickly found the market and the castle as well as a few other obvious “sights,” we were on the verge of running out of stuff to do. As we sought a bit of shade on a narrow little side-street, we passed a rather dilapidated old house with a hand made sign outside that said “Gallerie.” Having nothing else to do, and seeking further relief from the August heat, we stepped in. Although all décor had been removed, the space was still very much a house. Walls remained where they had been, and there were still plumbing fixtures on the walls of some rooms. The entrance of the building was all peeling paint and cracked plaster, but as we followed the signs upstairs, there were signs of recent painting (all white, of course) and wonderfully bare, old floor boards.

As it happened, there were two exhibits on, both of photography. The first was by a Russian artist I had never heard of. Within moments, though, I knew we’d stumbled onto something very special, and then, less than a minute after I entered I saw two photographs in quick succession that both gave me the exquisite, heart-in-throat feeling of experiencing art that is raw, alive, terrifying, essential- that feeling of seeing an image in the world that has been buried, unseen, in your own subconscious for all your life. The first was this one

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The artist was Alexey Titarenko.

We spent the next couple of hours very quietly looking. Looking and somehow changing as we absorbed these images of life, death, despair, menace and mystery. I was so moved and impressed that I did something I never do at museums and galleries, possibly because I feared I’d never see his stuff again. I bought the book!

We kept it safe in a corner of our little car so it wouldn’t get smashed by camping equipment until we got back to Cardiff. Even then, it was a few weeks before I finally took the shrink wrap off and read the book. I was a bit nervous that the photographs couldn’t possibly be equal to that first experience where it seemed like my heart was both racing and stopping. Fortunately, these are images that endure and haunt, and I’ve enjoyed the book immensely.

Imagine, then, my reaction when I discovered that music was a huge influence on Titarenko’s work. According to the book, his picture “The Black and White of Saint Petersburg” was inspired by the Brahms Violin concerto, and that, for him each musical piece, and its conveyance of the state of mind of the composer, affects how he sees a city or a landscape. In particular, one composer seems to have had a huge influence on Titarenkos approach and that is Dmitri Shostakovich. In particular, the Second Cello Concerto has “provided the underlying rhythm for the photographer’s inspiration.” In the artists words “I was so hooked on this concerto, that I could listen to it all day, every day. During my walks around the city, I realized that St. Petersburg offered endless living illustrations of this music. The monotonous opening cello melody was one of despair, but also of expectation. The concerto was instrumental in realizing certain images.” Fascinating. To me, this is probably the greatest cello concerto ever written. For all the glories of the Dvorak and the poignancy of the Schumann, even for Shostakovich’s own, brilliant First Concerto, to me, this work is the most essential work written for cello and orchestra, because, at least to me, its message is so important. It is music that is the singing conscience of a destroyed culture, and a very precious reminder of the frailty of humanity. It’s personal and universal messages are perfectly embodied in the juxtaposition of solo cello and orchestra. Few other works, maybe the Beethoven Violin Concerto, Berg Violin Concerto and the greatest Mozart Piano Concerti find this balance so perfectly. In any case, to what extent could my powerful reaction to Titarenko’s images be due to the fact that we shared this common love of one piece of music? How does music change us, imprint its layers of meaning on us? Perhaps I was carrying these images in my subconscious, not from birth, but from Shostakovich, or perhaps all three of us, and all of you, have always carried them inside us, but that only the true artist could bring them out into the world were we could all look or listen and say, “yes, I know this.”

More on Alexey Titarenko, including an interview in mp3 format.

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

A view from the podium, Favorite posts, Performing Life Alexey Titarenko, art, cello, shostakovich

Great post from Doug Ramsey on what happens to recordings when selling them ceases to be big money. A good follow-up to my post on copywrong, as it points out the danger access to our cultural heritage when that heritage ceases to be profitable.
YouTube was recently forced to remove some material owned by NBC. Of course, most of YouTube’s content is copyrighted, and there is a danger that they could go the way of Napster.
Instead, though, there’s money to be made selling ads at YouTube, and look for them to sell lisensing agreements with all kinds of content providers. I predict you’ll see an arrangement where customers can upload favorite clips from NBC or 20^th Century Fox or whomever, and YouTube will share the advertising revenue from those clips with the copyright owners, in effect acting as any other content distributor, except that decisions about what is available will largely remain with the viewers as opposed to the copyright owner.
 
 Sounds cool, eh? Will it happen?

A view from the podium

This represents a very unscientific sample, but I think I’ve worked or studied with seven people who, in turn, studied or worked with Copland, including one who was his assistant and another who was both a close collaborator and a boyfriend. All were very gracious in answering my questions about Copland, but funnily enough, if I asked four of them what Copland actually said about some interpretive problem or notational inconsistency, I often got four different answers, all beginning with “Aaron always told me that…” If I asked five, I might get five answers.

It is now known that one could get completely opposite information out of Shostakovich depending on which question one asked. Almost anytime another musician, composer or critic would say “don’t you think this passage should go faster than you’ve marked it,” he would say, “yes, of course, it should go faster.” However, if asked of the same passage “was this the tempo you intended,” he would always say “yes.” 

Bruckner willingly turned over his scores to the Schalk’s, who butchered them almost beyond recognition. He even allowed them to perform and publish their versions of his pieces. He never once told them not to, or refused one of their “corrections” but always privately insisted that his original versions reflected his true intentions. 

Rachmaninoff let his masterpiece, the Second Symphony, be chopped to pieces with hundreds of cuts, big and small, and even conducted the cut version. Why didn’t he then retract the original version? 

When another musician suggested that Mahler move the 5 minute break in the Second Symphony from its place between the first two movements to between the last two, ironically saying “I marvel at the sensitivity with which you (contrary to my own indications)have recognized the natural caesura in the work.” Surely language worthy of one of Shostakovich’s speeches of public contrition in it’s highly polished insincerity, but many have taken it at face value. 

Just because a friend of the composer says something about the composers work, doesn’t mean it’s true. The could be mistaken, confused or just making it up. Their remarks could be self-serving, or they could be made with the very best of intentions.  Just because a composer “accepts” another musician’s revision doesn’t mean that is how they, the composer, wanted it to hear.

A view from the podium, Nuts and bolts