The software that runs this whole blog/website business allows me to find out what search engines people used to reach my site, and what their search phrases were. Not surprisingly, most searches are things like “Kenneth Woods, conductor” or “conductor blog woods.” 

Today was a new one-  “podium sex”  Do I now have to go through the whole archive here trying to find the phrase “podium sex?” Please- podium sex person, what were you thinking????????

What next- should I start writing ”podium sex” in every blog entry to improve my search ranking? Can I ask all my readers to google “podium sex” and click on the link to my site to improve my standing? Can I get this reblogged on “PodiumSexReblog.net?” Should I just stack this one entry with ridiculous references to podium sex? What is podium sex? Why would someone google podium sex? Why would they go down through pages and pages of results until they get to me when the search for podium sex? Are you searching for podium sex? KW  c. 2006 Kenneth Woods 

A new review of the recently-release chamber music CD “Fortune Has Turned,” which is a collection of chamber works by American composer Chris Lastovica. We recorded my parts in one night about 5 years ago in Cincinnati- my contribution was really profoundly minimal, but I do like the piece. You can hear a sample of our track here.

The CD already earned the kind words of Fanfare Magazine-

“[Fortune Has Turned] announces a distinct and clear voice … There is no denying [Lastovicka's] skill and potential …. there is a real sense of power and refined craft.”  -Peter Burwasser, Fanfare Magazine, July/Aug 2006

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods

Best first six paragraphs in an article I’ve read in a long time, from this piece in Salon today- 

“Three blondes have albums coming out in August: Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson and … yes, Paris Hilton, have already dropped their various single droppings into the Clear Channel pop airwaves, with full albums following. 

This raises questions: How do we tell them apart? And, for that matter, how do we know that any of them aren’t Ashlee Simpson? 

All three “singers” are “blonde.” At least two have had nose jobs, and at least two have had breast enhancements. Two are more famous for having sex than they are for singing. One is more famous than the other two for urinating in taxicabs because she dislikes public restrooms. And none of them are Ashlee Simpson — but, squinting with both eyes and ears until only the clap track, white head and boobies are apparent … can it really be said that any of them are actually not Ashlee Simpson? 

Lastly, why does this locustlike proliferation of blondes seem to somehow be … a Republican plot? 

Conventional beauty has long been attainable for anyone willing to throw enough time, effort and cash at it. If there is one thing we have learned from great Hollywood makeup artists like the late Kevyn Aucoin, just about anyone without severe craniofacial deformities can look TV sexy with enough lighting, spackle, tweezing and shellac, if they are properly blow-dried and in a comely mood. Add D cups, rhinoplasty and peroxide, and the world is your birthday pony. 

If the advent of J.Lo taught us anything, it was that Madonna was no anomaly: If you can shake your bon-bon with enough Will to Power, it is entirely unnecessary for a pop star to be able to sing. With enough audio pancake concealer, multiple track layerings, a loose reverb wrist, 130 beats per minute and a sweaty cleavage video, the ordinary bleatings of any leaky sex doll can become a virtual cash cow of spring-break anthems.” 

Amen… 

One thing I like about blogging is that I can feel free to contradict myself. 

“Concerts matter.   We’ve got to deliver. The best way to advance classical music is to give better concerts.” 

Thus spake me…. 

I still believe that, but there are many examples of conductors of great skill who were beloved by their musicians, yet who were unable to translate their great artistic gifts into a vibrant organization. 

I recently had the chance to visit with an elderly relative, someone who’s intelligence I’ve always admired since I was a young child. During our visit, I was more than a little surprised to discover that she has become a regular watcher of a TV pundit/screaming-head, who’s views and approach I find (and I would have expected her to find) despicable. 

As we discussed the issue, it became clear that what drew her to this particular personality was his very direct way of speaking to his audience, as if he were having a conversation with them every day. What to me looks like rather ham-fisted manipulation techniques can be quite effective over time with an audience. Why? 

I can’t help believe that our current social structure has created a very profound sense of alienation and isolation for many citizens- few things are more appealing to audiences than a sense of connection. 

Orchestras can offer immediacy by the bucket full, and yet, sometimes, we don’t connect. Our marketing is often a problem- we tend to advertise via platitude. I personally loathe “adjective advertising,” including such misleading ads (real ones) as “Tchaikovsky’s thrilling 6^th” and “Mahler’s Exultant 6^th.” Truth in advertising??? 

Artistically, we have to accept that part of what makes a great concert is the impact it has on the audience- musicians, conductor… we all have to connect. A performance is more than just the execution of musical instructions, it is a communicative act, and we have to all be ready to get our hands a little dirty to help make that communication happen.

Making that connection is a powerful tool. Once an audience member feels that there is a bond between them and the orchestra, they can be fiercely loyal friends, but just as with our personal friends, we should always remember to treat there friendship as something of great value, not to be violated. 

From the archives-

Written for O-list in 2004 for a discussion about music director salaries. The debate was sparked by a NY Times piece on top music director salaries (everyone else was in agreement that they were overpaid), and I decided to take the devil’s advocate point of view and make the argument that, in the context of our times, even the top conductors, and orchestra musicians, are underpaid.
Finally have time to put in my very brief two cents on this rather contentious issue…
 
Before we get too bent out of shape looking at Barenboim and Maazel’s salaries, maybe we should look at what the top paid members of other professions make. How would their salary compare to the top lawyer, banker, real estate broker, basketball player, football coach, college football coach, stock broker, Enron execuctive, etc? Before we say that those comparisons aren’t valid because orchestras are non-profit, remember that most business and all athletic endeavors receive their own forms of government subsidy and tax exemption as well. Most professional sports teams play in multi-hundred million dollar stadiums financed by tax payers, and most big corporations receive huge tax breaks from state and federal governments to encourage them to locate in the communities where they are based.

Finally have time to put in my very brief two cents on this rather contentious issue… Before we get too bent out of shape looking at Barenboim and Maazel’s salaries, maybe we should look at what the top paid members of other professions make. How would their salary compare to the top lawyer, banker, real estate broker, basketball player, football coach, college football coach, stock broker, Enron execuctive, etc? Before we say that those comparisons aren’t valid because orchestras are non-profit, remember that most business and all athletic endeavors receive their own forms of government subsidy and tax exemption as well. Most professional sports teams play in multi-hundred million dollar stadiums financed by tax payers, and most big corporations receive huge tax breaks from state and federal governments to encourage them to locate in the communities where they are based.I’ve often said that money is the most important and tangible way in which our modern society measures value, whether we like it or not. Right now, as a society we think that bench warmer or a basketball team is worth at least five times what the best paid orchestra musician in the country is. We’ve decided that an exotic dancer is worth more than a public school teacher, and that a lawyer for a tobacco company is worth more than a Nobel laureate at a major research university. I think we can make a good case that conductors should be paid a hell of a lot more.

I also think orchestra musicians should be paid a hell of a lot more, not because they are being treated unfairly relative to conductors and administrators, but because their contribution to society is worth more. If you look at the difference in salary between a music director and a section player and compare that with the difference between a corporate executive and a front line employee in almost any other field, you’ll see that in music the gap is very, very small (this is not a moral point- I believe that it would be better that all business reduced that range, but in our society, the large gap is the norm, and failing to reflect that norm infers that our leaders are worth less than those in other fields). Especially when you take NY and Chicago out of the equation, American MDs look almost suspiciously generous. Poor Robert Spano, making only five times ASO base pay! Can you imagine that happening at GE or Ford????????

Of course, orchestras could move away from their current rather corporate structures and instead move to a model more like a sports team- after all, in professional sports leagues, players often earn more than their coaches. On the other hand, they have no long-term job security, and have to negotiate their contracts as free agents. Do musicians want that level of permanent insecurity? If musicians want to make the case for a new model to the business leaders who make up boards, we’d need to really present it as a whole different way of doing business, because most board members have spent their professional lives working in traditional, hierarchical organizations

No, I would contend that society ought to pay us all, players and conductors, even critics, a lot more, but that realistically we ought to be in line way behind teachers, nurses, medical technicians, university professors, agricultural workers and the people who clean and maintain our workplaces.

At least top US orchestra musicians can take comfort in being paid almost twice what many British musicians make for about half the work. Hopefully instead of fighting among ourselves, we can be more effective in convincing people to think about how the ways in which they spend their money expresses society’s values, and that we need them to vote for he importance of music and culture.

c. 2004 Kenneth Woods

Contrary to popular perception, I believe that relevance is one of the great strengths of classical music.

At it’s best, music can reflect human experience at it’s most personal, most historic, most universal, most tragic and most humorous. Because it is unhampered by the limitations of written language- where the most powerful words tend to lose their impact all too easily- abstract music can cut to the very truth of experience in a way that never dates.

In the 20^th Century, it was classical music that was often at the center of our search for meaning in the great events of our time- Shostakovich is the great example of a composer who’s music became the journal of his time, but there are countless others who had the ability to speak to the great issues of the time. Britten’s War Requiem brought the truth of war into the concert hall, Copland’s great works gave America a sense of destiny and possibility when it was weakened by the depression and the war.

Today, critics and musicians often react with suspicion when  a composer chooses a contemporary subject, such as 9/11, for their work, but music has a unique ability to turn the most horrific human tragedies into art that heals, inspires and improves those who come to know it.

Below is an essay I wrote two years ago about just such a piece, Viktor Ullmann’s Third Quartet.
 

Viktor Ullmann- String Quartet No. 3
(arr. for string orchestra by Kenneth Woods)

Viktor Ullmann’s String Quartet no. 3 was completed on January 18, 1943, in the final part of a career that began with him acknowledged as one of the great hopes of German musical life, and ended in his murder at the hands of racist fanatics.

In his early career, he studied and apprenticed under Schoenberg and Zemlinsky, and his early works, especially his Schoenberg Variations op 3a (1926), attracted attention throughout Europe. A passionate humanitarian with a deep interest in literature, culture and philosophy, Ullmann took a partial hiatus from composition to study the anthroposophical philosophy of Rudolf Steiner. In 1932 he and his second wife bought a bookshop in Stuttgart where they traded primarily in books on philosophy and humanism.  Only months after the purchase of the bookstore, Hitler seized power and the Ullmanns fled to Prague.

In 1933 he began work on his most significant piece to date, an opera that would eventually become “The Fall of the Antichrist,” a work he completed in 1935.  This masterpiece would be the crowing achievement of his prewar years, and yet it was to be the events of WW II that would spur him on to his very greatest artistic accomplishments.

Ullmann was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto outside Prague in 1942. He was one of a handful of extraordinary creative geniuses in the ghetto, including the composers Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas and Hans Krasa. Never a particularly prolific composer in his earlier years, Ullmann composed a stunning volume of work during the two years he was in Theresienstadt, including piano sonatas, chamber music and a second opera, “The Emperor of Atlantis.”

Just hours before being deported to Auschwitz on October 16, 1944 some friends convinced him to leave his compositions behind.  It is believed Viktor Ullmann was murdered in the gas chamber at Auschwitz on October 18, 1944.

‘For me Theresienstadt has been, and remains, an education in form. Previously, when one did not feel the weight and pressure of material life, because modern conveniences – those wonders of civilization – had dispelled them, it was easy to create beautiful forms. Here where matter has to be overcome through form even in daily life, where everything of an artistic nature is the very antithesis of one’s environment – here, true mastery lies in seeing, with Schiller, that the secret of the art-work lies in the eradication of matter through form: which is presumably, indeed, the mission of man altogether, not only of aesthetic man but also of ethical man.

“All that I would stress is that Theresienstadt has helped, not hindered, me in my musical work, that we certainly did not sit down by the waters of Babylon and weep, and that our desire for culture was matched by our desire for life; and I am convinced that all those who have striven, in life and in art, to wrest form from resistant matter will bear me out.’
            ~ Viktor Ullmann, 1944

The Third Quartet can in many ways be seen as a culmination of Ullmann’s development as a composer. In it one finds an exemplary balance of rigor and passion, a compelling formal logic, and a wealth of beautiful melodic writing.Although the work unfolds in a single musical span, its structure can easily be divided into a traditional four-movement structure where each of the four movements is linked by sophisticated motivic inter-relations.

The first movement, Allegro moderato is primarily lyrical in character and full of wonderfully luxurious harmonic writing, lightened at one point by a wonderfully waltz-like melody. The second, Presto, is ferocious and violent in much the same way as the second movement of Shotakovich’s famous Eighth Quartet. If the first movement has introduced the protagonists of our story, then the second has brought us music fit for the vilest villains. The before the third movement begins Ullmann brings back a passionate and despairing reminiscence of the first movement- what was nostalgia in the first movement is now transformed into genuine despair. The third movement, Largo, is truly the work’s heart of darkness, beginning with a fugue of desolate and unrelenting intensity. The waltz theme of the first movement here returns full of sadness.

Like the Presto before it, the character of the Rondo Finale is overwhelmingly antagonistic, violent and often terrifying, and is built from a horrific manipulation of the theme of the first movement. However, just when all is despair, Ullmann brings back the music of the first  movement in the shape we first encountered it,  but nostalgia replaced by defiance and regret replaced by passion. A voice of passionate defiance from within the walls of the concentration camp at midnight of humanity’s darkest hour? If ever any person wrote truly courageous music, it was surely Ullmann and this is surely that music.

c. 2004 by Kenneth Woods

I want to thank A.C. Douglas, host of the always-readable blog Sounds and Fury for adding me to his blogroll this week. Mr. Douglas has a particular interest and expertise in the music of Wagner, and his post today does have a Wagner angle, but it’s most interesting for the way in which he captures so perfectly the horrific magic of a social occasion gone horribly wrong. It sort of reads as a real-life, classical-music Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. 

In any case, a big thank you to him. 

I’m sorry content has been a bit thin this week- I’ve been traveling and have not had much chance to work at the computer. Check in tomorrow for something substantial, I promise. 

KW 

c. 2006 Kenneth Woods