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A Week of Music

Friday, October 18th, 2019

A quick post so that I can get back to the major project in which I have been immersed.

It has been a busy week for my music and for my experience of music.

A week ago, I awoke in Mattoon, Illinois so that I could drive up the road to Eastern Illinois University for my first Society of Composers conference in five years. I haven’t deliberately stayed away, but timing and location have conspired against me. I was able to enjoy five of the eight concerts, including performances of Daniel Perttu’s preludes for piano, my own Maximum Impact for jazz ensemble, and Kevin Wilson’s cello sonata. My personal highlight of the conference was James Romig’s Still. This hour-long solo piano work, with a very low density of notes, might have lulled me to sleep after a long weekend of driving and conferencing, but quite the opposite–I found the work intriguing and invigorating. The other highlight was getting to spend time with Becky, especially on Friday evening, when we reconnected with Dan Perttu and Magie Smith, who is professor of clarinet at EIU. It was practically a grad school reunion.

We left the conference early so that we could drive back on Saturday because on Sunday, I needed to attend the first Cleveland Composers Guild concert of the season at Cleveland State University. I can’t remember a stronger program, in no small part because of the performers, including Peter Otto and Randy Fusco playing Margi Griebling-Haigh’s Rhapsody and the Cavani Quartet playing Sebastian Birch’s Life in a Day. But of all eight pieces, there were really no duds. The premiere of my song And I Live With the Fiction that I Never Get Mad by Loren Reash-Henz and Ben Malkevitch went off very well, and the lyricist, Janice Reash, was in the audience and quite impressed. I wasn’t quite sure that I liked the piece until I was able to hear a performance of it, and I believe that I will keep it in my catalog, because it really does work well.

An embarrassment of riches, this week, really. Last night I went to hear the Cleveland Orchestra for the second time this season. The “build your own” subscription allowed me to pick exactly the music that I wanted to hear, and I was excited to hear Louis Andriessen’s newish work Agamemnon. Life intervened: conductor Jaap van Zweden was called to his family, and the replacement conductor, Klaus Mäkelä, was presumably unfamiliar with a work premiered by van Zweden. This was disappointing, but I determined that whatever music the orchestra would play would be excellent, and decided to not feel short-changed.

I was not wrong. A lesser orchestra would have thrown a familiar piece onto the program: a Brahms overture or the like, but we were given instead a reasonable replacement: Olivier Messiaen’s little-heard Les Offrandes oubliées. This early work was a revelation–especially the ending, which was reminiscent of Holst’s Neptune. Violinist Augustin Hadelich played Prokovief’s second violin concerto beautifully, although that work is not one of my favorites–there remain only a few violin concerti that really connect with me after all these years. After intermission, Mäkelä’s rendition of Beethoven’s Seventh was splendid: full of the life and vigor central to that work. I hope that he will be engaged again.

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Cleveland Orchestra Plays Neuwirth and Mahler

Friday, September 27th, 2019

Last night, September 26, 2019, I returned to the Cleveland Orchestra for the first time in the 2019-2020 season. After the orchestra addressed some of my concerns in personnel and programming, I am, again, for the time being, a subscriber. I particularly appreciated the addition of an option this year to build my own series instead of choosing a curated series and then having to swap out tickets to get to see what I wanted to see.

This was my first encounter with the music of Olga Neuwirth, an Austrian composer less than a decade older than me. Masaot/Clocks without Hands was a fascinating work, and the main reason that I chose the concert: while I love Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, I didn’t expect it to be a completely new experience (more on that to follow). I was able to examine a blurry online perusal score from Ricordi prior to the concert, but there appears to be no commercial recording available, which is unfortunate, as my experience last night suggests that the work would bear repeated listening. A tribute to Mahler, Masaot/Clocks without Hands captures that composer’s eclecticism in very direct ways–a klezmer-type ensemble keeps making appearances in a texture that is otherwise mostly concerned with sound masses and subtle timbral shifts. The look of the score belied the experience (again, I only had access to a tantalizing image of the score in my preparation)–I had expected a more driving, rhythmic sound, but got instead the subtle, nebulous textures that Franz Welser-Most seems to favor in new music; his approach on the podium was nearly as metronomic as the three metronomes in the score (but what other choice did he have, with them ticking away like that?). Ms. Neuwirth is clearly concerned with time and the perception of time, and that worked successfully in this piece. If there is a motivic structure, it was difficult to perceive on first hearing (again, another chance to listen would help), but there was sufficient interest that 20 minutes was not too long, and I will be interested to hear more of this work and others by its composer.

This was, of course, not my first encounter with Mahler’s C#-minor symphony. I was able to review my notes in my copy of the score and reread my blog posts from nine years ago on the piece, and it brought back some of my questions about the work from that period. While last night’s performance helped answer some questions, it raised others. In his pre-concert talk, Baldwin Wallace Professor Michael Strasser played exceprts from Bruno Walter’s 1947 recording of the work, which seemed unbelievably fast to me in comparison to the Bernstein recording that I have used as my reference for the last 25 years. Walter, of course, knew Mahler’ personally, so there is more authority to his reading, although he also had to take the limitations of his media into consideration in his preparations. At any rate, Welser-Most’s interpretation last night was deeply affecting, if not as free as Bernstein’s. I was able to appreciate a more brisk approach to the piece–the Adagietto does indeed come off better when it is around 7 or 8 minutes (by my timing) than a lugubrious reading that labors over each note. I was troubled by the decision to bring principal horn Nathaniel Silberschlag to the front of the stage–in the position between the concertmaster and conductor, as a concerto soloist–during the scherzo. I’m not sure what this added musically to the performance–the first horn part is extensive, of course, but it the movement never struck me as a feature for the horn. Mahler writes for the horn in a particular way, namely, as a fourth section of the orchestra. This is evident from the First Symphony on, as the eight horns in that piece (six in the Fifth Symphony) provide a counterweight to either strings, woodwinds, or heavy brass. To me, this is the exact reason Mahler favored a larger horn section. Taking the leader of that section away from the group–a good 30 to 40 feet away–makes him less able to lead in the section passages. I can only wonder if this is some kind of hazing, or a trick of the “dog and pony show” type that the orchestra engages in from time to time. Despite Mr. Silberschlag’s highly accurate and especially prominent performance, I’m not sure that the decision to feature him in this way was the right one. The orchestra played impeccably, and Michael Sachs’ opening trumpet solo struck the right balance for the entire work.

I look forward to my next trip to Severance Hall, in a mere three weeks, for music by Andrieesen, Prokofiev, and Beethoven, led by a conductor I have heard about but not yet seen, Jaap van Zweden.

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Homeschooled at 43

Monday, August 12th, 2019

I was back in Columbus to see my parents with the kids again this weekend–my third time in my hometown this summer, including a quick trip for our anniversary at the end of July and the early July trip that I wrote about in my last post.

You can’t go home again, of course, but the visits have been good for everyone, I think.

This weekend, I figured out a few things, so I’m putting them down.

I dated a girl, Krista, in my senior year of high school, and I’ve not stopped mulling it over for twenty-five years. She often comes to mind when I’m home, and there’s nothing to be done about it now, since she was murdered about 10 years ago. I’m not going into all the details of that, or of our relationship in high school, which was hesitant, largely because of me. Suffice to say, that I realized this weekend that, at age 17 and 18, I was nowhere near mature enough to be a good partner to her, and it wouldn’t have worked out even if I had done better. I wonder if the ex-boyfriend who killed her and then himself had the same problem.

My mother, who is 71, took the kids and I to the public pool, and my father stayed home. Mom got in the water with us, which wouldn’t be a big deal for most people. When we arrived, she unhesitatingly took off her yoga pants and got in the water in her one-piece suit–no skirt attached, her large surgery scar on her back showing between the straps. I didn’t say anything, but in the van on the way home, she told me that she used to be self-conscious, but has realized that she spent many years letting that keep her out of the pool, even though she loved going in the water, and she’s done with that. Go, Mom! Maybe if she can withstand the stares of judgmental Upper Arlington moms at the pool, I can keep remembering to put myself and my music out there in a serious way (more on that in a future post).

Also at the pool (we went two evenings), my kids learned a lesson about money and justice. We arrived at about 7pm and planned to stay the two hours until close. The Hastings pool has a lap area and a diving well, but also a pair of waterslides, a lazy river, and a large shallow end perfect for Noah and Melia, who are still learning to swim. On Saturday night, we arrived at seven, paid the admission fee, and swam for the first hour until break was called. At the break, we were informed that the pool was closing for a private party–we weren’t told this when we entered, and they claimed there was a sign about it, but we hadn’t seen this, and it wasn’t evident as we left. No refund was offered, but my mother was told that we could go to one of the other city pools, but by the time we could have gotten there, there would have been little point. The kids were disappointed, of course, and I decided it was time for a lesson in society, so I told them this: “In our country, with enough money, you can do whatever you want, but that doesn’t always mean that what you want is right or good. Now you know how it feels to be kicked out of the public pool because someone was willing to pay to have it closed for a private party. Remember this feeling.” We also practiced nonviolent protest by using the restrooms and fully deflating our pool toys before leaving.

The last thing I learned this weekend was something I read in Ella Frances Sanders’ wonderful book Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe, which I would recommend to anyone as a collection of wonderful little vignettes combining fact and poetry in a Carl Sagan vein. This quotation from page 63 is going to be my apothegm and motto for the coming academic year:

Be one of the ones who doesn’t stumble about with eyes closed and hands in pockets.

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The Music Man

Saturday, July 6th, 2019

Almost every summer since I was 9, I’ve gone to at least one movie at the CAPA Summer Movie Series at the Ohio Theater in Columbus. My parents started taking me in 1985 or so, with a screening of My Fair Lady, and I’ve listened to Clark Wilson play thousands of songs on the Morton organ–almost always arriving early.

I’ve missed a few summers when I was living in other places, but have always taken the opportunity to see classic films on the big screen whenever I can. My wife and I even had our first date there in 2004 (Ghostbusters).

Last weekend, Noah, Melia, and I were in Columbus while my nieces are visiting from Germany (they flew here as unaccompanied minors with plan changes and everything… total pros). I went to a Columbus Symphony Picnic with the Pops for the first time in about 25 years (their Columbus Commons venue is miles better than the old location at Chemical Abstracts), and I was amazed at the redevelopment that has happened downtown since I last lived in Columbus in 2007. City Center Mall, which was a cornerstone of my experiences downtown as a teenager and through my twenties, turns out to have been a millstone holding back the area, and Columbus has finally got the exciting, vibrant downtown it deserves–not the Continent, not the Short North, not the Brewery District, not the Arena District, but cool stuff happening right at the center of the universe, within spitting distance of Broad and High (it’s the center, because that’s where the street numbers start). As someone who has been going to downtown Columbus since the 1980s, I have to say that it has never looked better. Good job, Columbus!

We went to a showing of the 1962 film adaptation of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man. I first saw this movie in middle school general music class (when it was only around 25 years old!), and have loved it ever since. It was something I showed to students regularly during my K-12 teaching years, and a part of me has always dreamed of playing Harold Hill. This was my first time seeing it on the big screen, and the first time my kids saw it. Noah got into it and had a good time; much was lost on Melia, who was restless, but she’s five and seemingly possessed of perpetual motion.

I’ve always gotten a little soft about this movie, especially at the end, and this time, having not seen it in quite a few years, I had a lump in my throat through most of the last 30 minutes. There’s so much to unpack:

The show is genius, and watching on a big screen with a crowd really helps drive home how wonderfully comedic it is–jokes always land better at the Ohio Theater, and The Music Man is full of them, from obscure slang of the 1910s to the outrageous hats of the women of River City, to the one-liners and sight gags that are relentless–not relentless in the way that Mel Brooks are the Zucker Brothers are, because every comedic moment is tossed off casually and serves to build the characters.

And the characters are endearing–they all have quirks and tics that make them familiar and unique–the mayor’s wife has about seven of the ten really great lines in the film (“What Eleanor Glynn reads is her mother’s problem!”). Yes, they are broadly-drawn, but it’s a musical–we don’t have time for character development beyond the principals, and yet, it seems to happen, at least in Winthrop and some of the River City ladies.

The romance between Harold and Marion is one for the ages, and predicable, but Willson uses music in such a perfect way–in the scene just before Harold’s arrest, we are shown that Harold and Marion have been literally singing the same song the entire time. They both have their pretensions and their ideas about life, about music, and their discovery of each other erases the cynicism with which they enter the film.

It speaks to this former band director on another level: I don’t know that I suffer from impostor syndrome, but there are times I feel like I might, and Harold Hill is a band director who is an actual impostor. And yet, his love of music carries him through, somehow, in the end.

And of course the incredible library dance sequence (and the bag of marbles that actually contains marshmallows–more of Harold Hill’s misdirection and trickery)!

Experiences like this are why I keep coming back to the Ohio–congrats on 50 years of summer movies, and here’s to 50 more!

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Catching Up

Friday, April 12th, 2019

It’s been a while… still no posts in 2019? Well, this isn’t exactly true. I’ve been working on a series of posts about my first year as a public school teacher, which was 20 years ago this school year. It’s been taking up my time.

Some things that happened:

1. Four world premieres in a month

Between January 10 and February 10, I enjoyed the premieres of no fewer than four compositions:

  • Duo Capriccio by Tammy Evans Yonce in Brookings, South Dakota on January 14
  • Channels by the Blue Streak Ensemble here in Cleveland on January 17
  • Alexandrite by Trent Glass in Willoughby on February 8
  • My Uncle Was In Derry by the Chamber Music Society of Ohio in Cleveland Heights on February 10 (repeated on February 17 in Akron)

Makes one feel like a composer!

2. The Lakeland Jazz Festival, March 15-17.

Always a set of great performances, but a really nice headline act in the form of the Ralph Moore Quartet playing the music of John Coltrane.

3. College Music Society Great Lakes Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, April 5-6.

Becky and I made a nice trip out of it, thanks to my mom, who came to be with the kids for five days. I gave a paper on the Cincinnati Symphony Centennial Fanfare Commissions, a set of pieces from 1994-95 that I remember from my first year in college at CCM. I’ve only begun this scholarship, and I’d love to see someone else pick it up–there is probably a good thesis or DMA document in it. Olivia Kieffer and Zach McCoy gave a great performance of the clarinet version of Lady Glides on the Moon, and I had an excellent time talking about the sax version with Aaron Durst, who is in the process of recording it.

Becky and I spent a couple of extra days as well–it is a long drive to Menomonie! On our free day, we drove to the Twin Cities to see the Mall of America. Becky loves shopping, and I have a fascination with malls–so strange to see one that isn’t half-empty these days. I’m starting to think that I’m inspired to write a piece about malls. I have very mixed and complicated ideas about them, having seen them in their heyday of the 1980s and watched them fall into disuse.

Coming up: the premiere of First Chapter, a violin and piano piece for the Cleveland Composers Guild’s Creativity: Learning through Experience program, my fifth contribution in this vein. These are always exciting, and I’m looking forward to meeting with the violinist next week.

Work has been busy–this has been a rough year with a new dean, a new class to teach, and a search committee, all of which have been quite educational.

Becky has also gone to work–a big change in our lives at home, but one that has been good for her.

So composing has been a little on the back burner–other than the violin piece, I haven’t finished anything in 2019. I got most of the way through a setting of a short Yeats poem for choir, but didn’t get there before the deadline for the upcoming collaboration between the Guild and the Cleveland Chamber Choir, which I’ve been kicking myself for. I’ve had some encouraging experiences the last few weeks, though, so I’m getting ready to get back in the saddle.

 

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Returning to the Cleveland Orchestra

Saturday, December 1st, 2018

It hasn’t been so many months since I wrote about why I didn’t subscribe to the Cleveland Orchestra this year. With the dismissal of concertmaster William Preucil and principal trombonist Massimo LaRosa, I felt as though I could at least attend a concert with a clearer conscience, however. Hopefully, this is the first step to a more enlightened approach. I look forward to seeing if programming follows personnel in this case. I chose a concert that I would have been sure to pick as a subscriber: composer John Adams conducting his own work and that of Aaron Copland. As I said to my wife when I got home, every piece on the program was a banger, and there was no sense that I was waiting out part of the program to hear what I really wanted to see: an American orchestra performing American music, some of it from the 21st century.

One of my reasons for not subscribing was the customer service experience, and I was somewhat hesitant to buy a ticket given the iffy weather last week–I did not want a repeat of last winter’s having to forego Mahler’s Ninth symphony despite having the ticket in hand. So I put off buying until the day before the concert. The Friday night performance, unlike some Fridays, included the entire program, except for the pre-concert talk, which was not made clear on the website. I also had trouble using the website to purchase my ticket–I could not remember my password, and wasn’t able to reset the password once I had been emailed the code. I am very much in the database there–I actually received four copies of the email promoting this concert. A phone call to the box office solved the problem, however.

So–thinking I would hear the talk, I arrived an hour early, and once I found out there wasn’t to be one, I resigned myself to killing an hour until I ran into Mike Leone, who I know from my time at Ohio State, and who played trombone in the Lakeland Civic Orchestra for a time. We reconnected, and it was time well spent in the end.

The concert itself, then.  Buying my ticket late, I did not have my pick of seating locations, but I was able to find a seat that was very well-priced, and actually well-situated.  In particular, while I wasn’t any closer than I often have been, I feel like I could see and, more importantly, hear very well, and I will be looking for seats in this location in the future.

A side note: this is not my first time at Severance Hall this fall.  On October 30, I took my family to see the United States Marine Corps Band, another world-class ensemble. It was, of course, fantastic. As seating was first-come, first-served, we found seats in the Dress Circle, and the experience was very good.

The concert opened with John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine. Of Adams’ works, this is likely the most familiar, and with good reason. In fact, it is one of the pieces I emphasize in my music appreciation classes. The playing was exactly what the piece requires–precise, forceful, and on top of the beat in a way that I don’t always hear from the Cleveland Orchestra. Adams’ conducting is perhaps more suited to band than orchestra: mostly small beat patterns and a very literal approach to the stick. For Short Ride, it is appropriate, however, and it got what was needed from the musicians. Interestingly enough, after 30 years, Adams still conducts from the score for this piece (and all the others on the program). It gives this conductor-turned-composer-turned-conductor some hope. While I came to see Appalachian Spring and Leila Josefowicz, the curtain-raiser sticks firmly in my mind from last night’s program as the standout moment, perhaps because I knew immediately that I had returned on the right night.

Then to the music of Aaron Copland, and an incredible performance of Quiet City. This may be the Copland piece best suited to the Cleveland Orchestra, as it showcases this group’s incomparable string section and two of its strongest wind players–principal trumpet Michael Sachs and English hornist Robert Walters. The performance was impeccable, and, unsurprisingly, the strings seem to have adapted to the reality of acting concertmaster Peter Otto, who leads the section with confidence.

Appalachian Spring has long been one of my favorite pieces of music. For a time when I was young, it seemed like every group I was in performed the Variations on a Shaker Melody in either its band or orchestra version, but when I played the full 1945 suite in youth orchestra, it was a revelation. I normally study scores in advance of attending a Cleveland Orchestra concert, and I have the score to Appalachian Spring on my shelf, but it wasn’t really necessary in this case, although there are some things I am going to go back and look at when I get the chance.

One of my favorite Cleveland Orchestra concerts of the last few years was Marin Alsop’s rendition of Copland’s Third Symphony, so I knew that the orchestra was more than capable of presenting an inspiring performance of middle-period Copland (that said–wouldn’t it be great to hear Connotations or Dybbuk Severance? Just a thought…). This is a much tougher piece to lead than either of the two previous pieces, and Adams seemed somewhat less comfortable with it–I would be, too. He conducts mostly from the wrist and elbow, letting the stick do the bulk of the work, and saving the shoulder for bigger moments, which is similar to my approach, but this may limit his expression. I also saw more knee-work from him than I am comfortable with–since musicians can’t see your knees, for the most part, bending them isn’t particularly helpful, and can actually obscure what is happening with your upper body as you bob around in their peripheral vision.

The Orchestra, of course, takes all of this in stride, having played the piece many times. There was a tiny flub in the trumpet section, a rarity at Severance, and it was fascinating to see that lead the orchestra to sit up and take notice–tighten up in the way that the best musicians do in such situations. Overall, Adams’ interpretation was fairly strong, if not really ever unorthodox, and the musicians bought into it. While I have played Appalachian Spring and the Variations, I believe this is my first time hearing it from the audience, and it does not disappoint. I realize, now, how it truly is a suite of the ballet–it is very modular in its construction, shifting from one episode to another relatively quickly. As luck would have it, I am just completing the first draft of a piece, Channels, for the Blue Streak Ensemble, that is constructed more or less the same way, and I have been worried about whether it will convey a sense of unity. Copland here demonstrates that unity can arise from the sorts of rhythmic and melodic and stylistic variety that one finds in Appalachian Spring, and it is a balm to this composer with a looming deadline!

After the break came Adams’ own work again, his latest violin concerto Scheherazade.2, performed by its dedicatee Leila Josefowicz. I first saw Ms. Josefowicz perform when we were both teenagers–I in the audience and she onstage with the Columbus Symphony playing the Tchaikovsky. That vogue for very young violinists seems to have passed–and that whole generation (Josefowicz, Sarah Chang, Joshua Bell) has gone on to show that our excitement over them was not unfounded.  Josefowicz did not disappoint in the slightest, although Adams’ orchestration at times threatened to overpower her–this is suprising after reading his thoughts on his experience with his first Violin Concerto in the late 1980s in his memoir Hallelujah Junction. In his remarks from the podium, Adams admitted that his first experience with Scheherazade is Rimsky-Korsakov’s tone poem of the same name which, ironically, would have demonstrated a more careful approach to balance between solo violin and a large orchestra.

This is an interesting piece at this moment, and Adams admitted to this as well. I consider myself an ally to feminism, and it is clear that Adams does, too. Yet, is he the one who should be writing this piece? Aren’t there enough examples of men telling women’s stories? The other component of this work is its attempt to deal with male violence against women, and this is certainly a poignant moment for the Cleveland Orchestra to present such a piece, coming less than a month after the ouster of two misogynist members. In the notes, Adams states that the work is a “true collaboration” between himself and Josefowicz, and I would be curious to see how that collaboration unfolded. (Copland, of course, worked very closely with choreographer Martha Graham in creating Appalachian Spring, with Graham going so far as to suggest specific rhythmic ideas as well as the scenario–perhaps this is the reason Adams programmed the pieces together).

That said, I will be giving Scheherazade.2 more listening and score study. It is a kaleidoscope of orchestral effects and in juxtaposition with Short Ride in a Fast Machine, one sees just how far Adams’ style has progressed over the three decades since he came to prominence. One misses, at times, the organic, unified approach to a composition that his more minimalist-inflected work brought, but this is truly a different language, and Adams has long insisted that he never meant to be a minimalist. The cimbalom adds an interesting tonal element to the work as well, providing a link between the harp and the rack of tuned gongs in the percussion section. What I heard was good, but as the only work on this concert that was unfamiliar to me, I will have to return to it.  With Josefowicz having performed the piece 50 times in three years, it hopefully is finding a permanent place in the repertoire.

And so I returned to the Cleveland Orchestra, as was inevitable. It felt right, and I felt the joy I always hope to feel when I go, that I should always feel when I go. I felt both comforted and challenged, and I felt like the musicians had something important to say about the music they were making.  In all, it was time and money well-spent, and if it is professional development, I feel that I grew as a musician last night.

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Writing for Blue Streak (2)

Friday, October 19th, 2018

I’ve been digging further into the Cuyahoga River and the 1969 fire that spurred the nascent environmental movement in preparation for my new piece for the Blue Streak Ensemble. Part of the difficulty is separating myth from reality, Randy Newman songs and Mark Weingartner novels aside.

I’ve become fascinated, or remain fascinated, with the way that the river has been changed into a man-made object rather than a natural feature, at least for its last six miles. An amazing app of Cleveland Historic Maps has helped with this, as I have pinpointed the location of the fire, mapped it onto my own experience of the river over the last six-and-a-half years living near it, and begun to consider a shape for this piece. I’m amazed at how much industrial plant that was present in 1951, the year of a USGS aerial survey, is simply gone, leaving either scars or having been redeveloped. I’ve have read and heard about the decline of heavy industry in Cleveland, but to look at how it was crammed into the river valley in the 1920s and see the shape of the same places nearly a century later drives it home.

The scale of the places is just as  daunting–plants that employed tens of thousands of workers at their peak could surely ruin a river, and a lake. Little wonder that such places symbolized optimism and progress for the mid-century mind in the ways that they dwarfed their inhabitants.

I’ve also taken a page from Nico Muhly, who describes in a recent article his compositional approach. While my experience of being a composer is lived quite differently than his (I have no doubt that he won’t ever be looking to my writing or music for inspiration), I’m taking his idea of a one phrase synopsis and a one-page birds-eye view map of the piece quite seriously. My map is going to be based on a tracing of the shipping channel of the river–the lowest six miles that pass through Cleveland and that have be reshaped for the economic purposes of our species.

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Little wonder that by 1969 the river was lifeless, a murky, roiling soup of human and industrial waste–it was not allowed to be itself, from the 1820s when its mouth was recut to eliminate its final bend before draining into the lake, to the addition of steel-walls to fix the location of its banks, and straighten its meanders.

How to express all this musically? This is the problem.  I created a little sketch the other day–a mixed-meter passage that I could imagine opening the work, but I wasn’t satisfied with it, and I realized I wasn’t ready to put down notes yet, but I will need to be ready one day soon.  I still want to see the valley, the mounds of slag and ore and limestone; the enormous plants; the scene of the crime of this fire. I was hoping for a river cruise, but I have missed that window for 2018–the tourist boats have finished for the season, and it is this moment when one needs Friends With Boats, I suppose.  I spent some time on the river vicariously this morning watching video taken from lakers going to or from Lake Erie up the river to ArcelorMittal Steel, the path I would like to take, and that may have to do for now. Tomorrow, however, I will be taking Noah and Melia either to the zoo (if the weather is fair) or the natural history museum (if not). We make take some time to attempt to drive some of these areas as well, and soon, very soon, it must be notes.

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Turning Down The Cleveland Orchestra

Monday, September 3rd, 2018

Cleveland Orchestra, we finally talked about my subscription on Saturday, and I told you the news: I am not renewing this year, but we needed to talk.

It’s not me, it’s you.

The concerts are great. I’ve loved the concerts. I’ve been attending subscription concerts since 2000, with a long break in there when I lived out of town, but for many years I couldn’t imagine living in Cleveland without being a subscriber. In fact, attending your concerts has spoiled me for any other orchestra, I daresay. My wife and I once subscribed to the nearest symphony orchestra to where we were living–a 120-mile round trip–and I was glad to go, but there were two concerts that were just bad now that I’ve heard you (and Chicago, and the London Symphony Orchestra, and Cincinnati, and Columbus, and Nashville… there are other fish in the sea, even if they aren’t you). I wish I could afford better seats, but at Severance, all the seats are good enough to give a fantastic musical experience, even if you have to climb a small mountain to get to them.

I’ve heard and seen some amazing things the last few years: Abrahamsen’s Let Me Tell You, Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin, symphonies by Mahler (although not as many as I paid for), Shostakovich, and Sibelius, and Respighi, and Richard Strauss’ Alpensinfonie.  Even when I’m a little bit disappointed, like with your Rite of Spring last year (so polite!), it isn’t because your standards aren’t high, it’s because I live in a different world where orchestra music has scrapes and scratches and I forgive them because I make music with people who can’t devote all their time to it, even though they wish they could, and work as hard at it as they can.

The problem isn’t the performance, though.  I want you to know that.

Last year, I built my own season. There wasn’t a package that wouldn’t have had me trading in everything. You know there are things I like, and things I avoid. Give me new, give me big, give me challenging. I have a list of pieces I want to hear you play, and I’ve been checking them off. Since I’ve been 40, I think of it as my bucket list. I can’t afford all of the concerts, or even half of them. Four concerts is what it comes down to, and last year, you threw me a ticket to the gala, which was, of course, well-performed, but not really music I was excited about. It was an orchestra seat, and I never sit on the first floor, but the gala convinced me that maybe I should once in a while. I digress. I come alone, which isn’t ideal sometimes, but we have two small kids who can’t come, and my wife just isn’t interested enough to justify the extra expense. I consider it to be professional development, not entertainment, and I write off all the expenses of going (study scores, recordings, mileage, parking, tickets) on our income taxes.  It’s a big deal for me to go, and I look forward to it, and it, frankly, disrupts things at our house by putting more work on my wife as she picks up the slack. But it’s worth it, to me. So worth it. I even leave early and come to the talk.  These are not the things that are making me not renew, but rather the circumstances of my attendance, and I have long been willing to deal with them, and since I moved back to Northeast Ohio, I have gone to subscription concerts every year, and subscribed for the last five years. Last year, I even used one of my precious slots to come hear Mitsuko Uchida play my favorite Mozart concerto (No. 20), something I have eschewed before because of my personal tastes, but felt like I needed to try as a professional–experience part of a collaboration that will be legendary. (It was good. It was so good. But not for me.)

So here are my problems:

In January of this year, I had a ticket to see Mahler’s Ninth Symphony on a Friday night. For once, a friend and I had made plans to go together. My friend bought a single ticket. Then the weather turned, as is wont to happen. We consulted, and decided to stay home and live to see more Cleveland Orchestra concerts rather than risk the roads. It’s after 5pm by this point. Guys, you let my friend change to Saturday night, but told me, a long-time subscriber, that I would have to eat the ticket that I had paid for back in August. Mahler’s Ninth is on my bucket list, and now it will have to wait. It would have been great–I know it was, because my friend told me how great it turned out to be on Saturday. Seriously?

Now that seems a little bit petty, so let’s talk about programming choices. Let’s talk about last season, the Centennial season. Sometimes, I feel like you go into “dog and pony” mode. All of Respighi’s Roman tryptych on one concert, for example (brilliantly played, of course). The last couple of weeks of this season–your big centennial moment–had Tristan and Turangalila and a week of all nine Beethoven symphonies. Don’t get me wrong: I love Beethoven. I get that Beethoven is the reason that any orchestra exists in its present form, and that any orchestra needs to play a lot of Beethoven. But as your 100th birthday present to the world? As a way to mark what you have accomplished and look to the future? If I want to hear all nine Beethoven symphonies, I can do that in so many ways, from streaming, to popping in the complete set by Toscanini I bought years ago (or picking up the versions you recorded with Szell), or, honestly, by attending concerts at Severance and Blossom. How many of those were you going to play anyway? Three, four, five? Seems likely.  I’ve heard your Beethoven, and it was transcendant (the Ninth at Blossom a few years ago). I actually went to a Beethoven Ninth last year because a friend of mine was singing with the Cleveland Philharmonic, and as a conductor of a community orchestra, I just wanted to see what would happen. Yes, I schlepped all the way to Westlake to hear a pretty darn good rendition in a decent space, and I took my parents, and we didn’t have to pay to park, and my chair was more comfortable. I mean, it still wasn’t you, but it wasn’t a terrible experience at all.

My point is, you shot your centennial wad on celebrating the past, playing music that every community orchestra in the country goes after, that, let’s face it, your musicians have memorized at this point. This is the 1992 US Men’s Olympic Basketball team or the 1927 Yankees playing high school ball. This is Bobby Fischer playing chess on his smartphone. Yes, program Beethoven. But as your big thing? As your notch in the rock? Seriously? If nothing else, the disappointment when I opened up that brochure a year ago was almost enough, but there were some bucket list things in there, too for me: Messiaen, the Mahler (see above), Rite of Spring (see above), Jonathan Biss playing Sciarino (with Bruckner), and some I couldn’t go to because there wasn’t time or money. So I bought the tickets.

But do you know? I was a college freshman in 1994 when the Cincinnati Symphony turned 100. Do you know what they did? The commissioned a new piece for every subscription weekend. 25 or 30 pieces by living American composers. (They called them fanfares, in homage to the group of commissions they made 50 years earlier during the Second World War. One of those pieces? You might have heard of it: Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.) So anyway, as a freshman with a card that got me $7 tickets (seven dollars!!!–the sticker shock when I found out what full price at the symphony meant!) and a bunch of fellow music majors to split cabs with, I got an education on the state of composition in the US. Local composers. National composers. Even one who had been commissioned 50 years earlier! (Short on women and people of color, but more on that later). Cincinnati acknowledged their past in some big ways, but they also pointed toward the future, in essence telling us that they would be around for another century. The audience in Cincinnati was much more conservative and much more blue-haired than the audience at Severance. Music Hall was not nearly the venue that Severance is (although I haven’t been back since the renovation was done). Did you really let Porkopolis outdo you on this?

The Los Angeles Philharmonic turns 100 this year. And they have commissioned fifty new pieces, with an appropriate range of composers in terms of both style and background. I couldn’t believe the list–I felt like I was the only composer who didn’t get a commission on this project. Old, young, white, not-white, male, female. Every audience member and every potential audience member can connect with one of these people. I mean, if LA can pull this off in a town with a reputation for chintz and superficiality, surely Cleveland could have done such a thing, and with more grace and good-old Midwestern-meets-Mitteleuropan rigor, right?

And then this year. Where are the local composers? Where are the composers of color? Where are the composers who aren’t dead white men? I haven’t made a big deal out of it, but the orchestra I conduct, which puts on three concerts a year, has a piece by a female composer on every concert this year. That means we are programming 300% as much music by women as you have on your Severance series. A community orchestra. And honestly, not the best one around, and certainly not the one led by the best conductor around. But you know what, I just did it. I don’t have to explain why we’re doing it (or at least I shouldn’t, but here goes: lots of good music out there by women that we haven’t played yet; half our audience is female; more than half our orchestra is female; there are things a female artist has to say that need to be said; they are just good pieces; there are centuries of oppression and suppression to make up for… need I go on?). I’m still working on more music by people who aren’t white–I’m hoping to secure funding to be able to afford William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony this year. When are you doing Black composers other than on Martin Luther King Day? Your centennial season was also the 50th anniversary of the Hough Rebellion–your next door neighbors. Couldn’t you even acknowledge that with one piece on one subscription concert? It actually would have fit in well with your Prometheus theme and Beethoven the revolutionary! And there are great composers who have and do call Northeast Ohio their home. Don’t you think that the audience would connect with their work? Ernst Bloch ran the Cleveland Institute of Music. William Grant Still attended Oberlin. Donald Erb. Keith Fitch. Jeffrey Mumford. Margaret Brouwer (we played her last spring, and then she sent the parts we used to the Columbus Symphony, who apparently do know how to look around themselves for inspiration). James Wilding. Clint Needham (Albany and Akron know how awesome he is). Larry Baker. Nick Underhill. Frank Wiley.  And none of these people are just wannabes like myself, and they all ache to have their music performed locally. They have awards and major performances and have been recognized. They are the kind of composers who appear on Cleveland Orchestra programs but don’t register outside the region, and you can change that by championing them. The Cleveland Orchestra does not have to be an island of Europe in the middle of America.

I’ve also spent this year following the unfolding scandals throughout the classical music world as part of the #MeToo movement. As it happens, I also took the time to read The Cleveland Orchestra Story by Donald Rosenberg. I’ve been around the music world long enough to know about the open secrets–my alma mater in Cincinnati finally dealt with one of those this year, and let me tell you that as an undergrad trombone major, I had heard the rumors about that particular predator and his students. So Levine, yes. That was a long time ago, but talking to people who were around then, it was pretty clear what he was up to, and you all enabled it. You all gave him his start and let down generations of young musicians–again, the future of our art form. It could have been nipped in the bud, but in the name of art and I-don’t-know-what-else, you let it go. It was before my time, though, so I can’t really understand the decisions, and most of the people who let it go on are long gone. But Preucil. A great player, and a great caretaker of the string section, of course, but you’ve been paying him nearly a million dollars a year to abuse his position and the power it gives him over young musicians. And it’s been more than a month now, and you’ve still only suspended him with pay. I know there’s a union agreement, and I know there’s due process, but come on. Have you seen the Google search results for “Cleveland Orchestra concertmaster?” This doesn’t look good, and people have certainly been fired for less, and you know what? He will be fine, because you have been paying him nearly a million dollars a year.

So, I’m not subscribing. That’s why.

I might come to a concert or two (John Adams and Jennifer Higdon are both high on my list; I actually wish I would have gone to Tristan last year, because how many opportunities do you get, honestly, but it wasn’t a convenient week for me). I will definitely check out some of the other great classical music going on in Cleveland that I have been missing because I’ve prioritized your concerts: Apollo’s Fire, No Exit, Quire Cleveland, Akron Symphony, Cleveland Chamber Symphony. Maybe I’ll take a trip to Pittsburgh and see what I’ve heard on the radio for many years with the Pittsburgh Symphony. Possibly some things at CIM, where the orchestra did a by-no-means-flawless, but exciting Ring without words last spring under Brett Mitchell, a Cleveland Orchestra alum who I really admire.

There are, of course, other fish in the sea.

I’ll be back. I can’t stay away, because when you have one of the world’s great orchestras playing 20 minutes from your house, what else can you do?  (I was stupid and never went to a Cavs game while LeBron was here, but basketball isn’t my career.) So keep sending the brochures and flyers, and I’ll keep telling my students to head on down (but I’ll tell them why I’m not), and we’ll see each other when we see each other. But just know–it’s not me, it’s you.

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Still Here: My car, not my car.

Tuesday, May 1st, 2018

In 1997, my parents bought be a car, a tan, 1997 Ford Escort, anticipating that I would need to be able to get to and from student teaching that fall, and also because my part-time job in market research was moving across town and away from the bus line. The perjorative nickname my girlfriend gave to it, the Golf Cart, became my fond name for it. I drove the care through several moves and jobs, and through most of graduate school, until a Suburban failed to yield on a snowy day in 2007, and the car was totalled. Becky and I bought a used Saturn to replace it, and that car served us well, but it wasn’t my car.

Image result for tan 1997 ford escort

Above: Not my car, but you get the idea.

Once, I would see copies of the Golf Cart on the road regularly, but twenty years on, they have become rare, as to be expected. But there is a parking lot on my way to and from work where a Golf Cart is frequently parked. Sometimes I see it fairly regularly, and sometimes it disappears for weeks and months. There is some rust around the bottom of the body, but it has held up remarkably well, as it would have to for 20 years.  I recently stopped our minivan, with my confused children in the back, to stalk the Golf Cart a little bit and reminisce. I peered into the interior–somewhat messier than I used to keep it, but I won’t judge. It was familiar and yet not–like visiting a place one used to live. I never lived in the Golf Cart, but I put  many miles on it–over 100,000, all of them my driving. Job interviews, dates, relocations. It was the car I drove to both my weddings, and the car I had after my divorce. I had it when I conceived of my plan to switch from high school teaching to college and attend graduate school An old friend indeed.

And a lot smaller than I remember.

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My Latest Crackpot Theory

Saturday, September 2nd, 2017

This summer,  I taught MUSC 1800: Popular Music for the 25th time since coming to Lakeland.  It is not a course that I ever trained to teach, or ever envisioned myself teaching before I accepted my current job.  Once I finished graduate school, I assumed that I would be teaching music theory, which I taught my first semester at Lakeland, and, for various reasons, have not taught since.

So it has been an interesting journey teaching the history of Popular Music, which has become the bread and butter of my work life.  I like to think that I’ve become fairly good at it and developed some insight into the topic.  Here’s an idea that occurred to me this week:  The shape of popular music in the 20th century is indicative of a very different kind of middle class that developed during that period, in contract to what I will call the bourgeoisie of earlier eras.

A hallmark of middle class or bourgeois culture is that it tends to strive to emulate the culture of the wealthy:  thus, first names that begin by being applied to upper class babies filter their way to the middle class, and then to the lower class; upper class estates are mimicked in suburban lawns.  One need only listen to the lyrics to rappers to realize how pervasive this impulse still is:  Rolex watches, Mercedes Benz cars, expensive liquor, and designer clothes all feature prominently.  The middle class may shop at Target and Wal-Mart, but they (and increasingly the lower class) aspire to the trappings of wealth and the status symbols that, at least in the middle class mind, suggest it.

In music, this was also the case.  As the bourgeoisie expanded in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, it tended to lay aside the folk music of the lower classes in favor of the “cultivated” music of the upper class–what we today call “classical” music, which for centuries had been the music that kings and princes listened to while they ate dinner.  Public performances of instrumental music and opera became more common as a middle class began to be able to afford the price of admission.  The “true” art form of opera was even adapted for the working classes as singspiel and zarzuela, often with tickets available at cut-rate prices, but the story was always the same–middle and lower class audiences striving to engage in the culture enjoyed by the wealthy.  In middle-class homes, the piano and its musically-literate culture became an important status symbol, and every family aspired to own a piano, and middle-class daughters were trained in its use.  Alongside social dance, home music-making using the piano and printed sheet music (again, a more mass-produced version of the manuscripts that circulated among aristocrats) became a key part of the middle-class social life.

Folk music, the music of the lower classes, was, in part, left behind.  Composers like Haydn and Beethoven refer to folk music, and Beethoven even paid his bills by arranging folk music for publication (a lot of it–it seems to have been quite lucrative for the publishers), but by Beethoven’s intervention, it becomes very different from actual folk music.  Beethoven considered himself an equal with the aristocrats with whom he associated, even if they didn’t, and didn’t understand why he couldn’t marry into that world.  After Beethoven’s death, he became legendary, and middle-class pianists across the continent and in America began to pound through the Moonlight Sonata, which acquired its nickname around this time as it became the ultimate expression of bourgeois musical aspirations.

Yes, there was also the nascent sheet music industry during the 19th century.  But Stephen Foster had studied music with a German composer, and created music that he thought of as parlor music–meant to be performed in the home as part of courting rituals or simply for the entertainment of the middle-class family.  His sentimental songs are very much in the style of European song of the same era, even if some of his more famous–and infamous–songs refer to blackface minstrelsy.  In Europe, Brahms and Chopin were indeed staples of the middle-class repertoire, and Brahms became quite wealthy, starting with the sales of his sheet music (which proceeds he invested shrewdly and successfully–an upper-class behavior, enabling him to live a wealthy lifestyle).

This is a very different landscape from the one which emerges in American music of the 20th century.  Every major movement in American popular music, from minstrelsy, through ragtime, jazz, blues, country music, rock’n’roll, and hip-hop, has emerged from the working class, and often from the most disadvantaged and dispossessed cultures in society.  Minstrelsy apes mid-19th-century plantation culture and the music of slaves.  Ragtime was developed by composer-pianists playing in saloons and brothels.  Blues and country music have their roots in the rural South, and rock has its roots in the blues and country that remained behind when those styles moved to the city.  Hip-hop began in the ghetto among imigrants and teenaged street-gangs, expanding on a practice, toasting that was ubiquitous in Jamaican prisons.  Nearly all American popular music, beloved of the middle class, has its origins in music practiced by people who are poor, dispossessed, disenfranchised, and robbed of their liberty.

Even while the rest of middle-class culture looked aspirationally to the wealthy for cues through much of the century, music was drawn from lower-class models.  Why?  And are the instances in other realms of consumer culture where working-class and poor models have come to define the status symbols of the middle-class?

A theory:  the American middle class is fundamentally different from the various forms of bourgeoisie that preceded it.  The middle class and its values are a 20th-century creation, the result of industrialization, war, and the quasi-socialist state (never called such by its governing class) that developed during this time.  The enormous consumer culture only follows where the trail of spending leads it, at least in the early 20th-century.  The government played a crucial role in the creation of the middle class and its culture, through its efforts to assist in electrification, create guaranteed old-age pensions, allow organized labor to flourish, subsidize industry and the automobile culture, encourage middle-class home ownership, and provide public education to all students.  The Depression, and, especially, the two World Wars, especially, the Second, led to the creation of America’s mass middle class.  It is fairly homogeneous, as so many families were relocated during the 30s and 40s.  It was, for many years, well-educated by historical standards, but originally not college-educated.  The rapid modernization of America meant that the first generation of the mass middle class moved directly there, in many cases, from abject poverty; “born in a barn, died in a skyscraper.”  And this is the fundamental difference that accounts for the lower-class origins of American popular music.

Imagine a first-generation suburbanite, in Levittown, or elsewhere, in 1950.  Born around 1915, possibly in a rural setting, possibly to immigrants in a large city.  He grew up with lower-class music, and because of the availability of the phonograph, could access recorded music as long as he can remember.  While he may tolerate “mainstream” popular music, what he yearns for is music that reminds him of his youth, as will all of us.  So maybe he listens on the radio to the Grand Ol’ Opry, or purchases country and western records.  Maybe he developed a taste for other kinds of music during his military service, listening to V-discs with his comrades, or maybe he grew up listening to ethnic music, and those same records introduced him to a wider musical world.  At any rate, the music that is valued in his home, and that his kids grow up hearing, is music with its roots in the lower class, among the poor.  He may have a piano–after all, next to the television set and the automobile, it’s still a hallmark of the middle-class lifestyle–but it really is only played when the kids practice for their weekly lessons, or on rare special occasions, and while he knows he should care about Beethoven and Mozart, they don’t pull on his heartstrings the way Hank Williams or Louis Jordan do.

This man’s children, the Baby Boomers, will proclaim working-class music to be an art form, to be granted the same status and respect as the music of the upper classes.  It happens through the culture industry and consumer culture, which begins with attempts to prioritize classical music and high culture, but very quickly moves to giving the mass middle-class what it wants.  Toscanini steps aside for Elvis Presley and Mitch Miller and Lawrence Welk.  Classical music for decades lends prestige to a record label, but even that dwindles by the end of the 20th century as working-class music becomes the singular musical expression of American culture.  This is the music that is exported en masse to the rest of the world, and which the rest of the world will eventually echo back–British invasion, afro-pop, “world music,” J-Pop, K-Pop, narcocorridas, and all the rest.

The second generation of suburbanites–the Baby Boomers–make working-class music (and to an extent, dress) the core of their mass middle class, and from this point forward, Americans cease to have a need for the music of the elite, and increasingly, the elite are steeped in that music as well.  The irony is that, having so recently clawed its way out of poverty, the middle class often looks to the poor for a sense of authenticity, and holds a (usually false) nostalgia for “the good old days.”  For the children and grandchildren of the Baby Boomers, who know only the middle-class culture, there is no reason to look to the music of elites.  They may study it for a time (in its often-bastardized forms in high school marching band or show choir), yearning every second for “their” music and often secretly disappointed that their musical education isn’t helping them learn to play the music they truly love.  For a few, the bug for “classical” music bites, and with parental support, they carry forward the traditions of elite music-making, but the vast majority put down their instruments after graduation and immerse themselves in the mass middle-class culture, where opera is Il Divo, and classical music is watching an orchestra accompany an old blockbuster film.

This fundamental difference in origin stories between the old bourgeoisie and the modern middle class, would seem to account for the very different origins of the music preferred by those groups.  Any thoughts?

 

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