January 2005 Archives

HANDS I'VE SHAKEN (no particular order): Oscar Peterson, Eddie Albert, Andras Schiff, Stephen Bishop Kovacevich, Phyllis Diller, Marian McPartland, David Lindley, Rosanne Cash, Richard Thompson Zubin Mehta, Leonard Bernstein, Peter Guralnick, Greil Marcus, Vince Aletti, Joel Krosnick, Jan DeGaetani, Paul Katz, Robert Gottlieb, Dan Rather, Zubin Mehta, Joan Osborne...

TOP TEN ROCK CONCERTS (fab dinner party game):

1. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Denver, June 20, 1978 [fresh out of high school, entranced by DARKNESS, in advance of Dave Marsh's RS cover story... by the third number, " Spirits in the Night," when he lept into the front rows with us and started dancing, you felt certain you were in the presence of greatness... I kept thinking "this is what it must have felt like to see Elvis..." A life-changing event.]
2. The Who (Who By Numbers tour), Denver Coliseum, December 1975 3. Bob Dylan and the Band, Denver Coliseum, January 1974
4. Paul McCartney and Wings, Denver Coliseum, May 1976
5. Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, War Memorial, Buffalo, NY, December 1984
6. Nick Lowe and his Cowboy Outfit, Paradise, Boston, 1995
7. Marshall Crenshaw (trio) [opened with "I'm Sorry But So Is Brenda Lee"], Paradise, Boston, 1989
8. Fats Domino, Jazz and Heritage Festival, New Orleans, 1989 [humped his piano all the way across the stage]
9. Richard Thomson, Rochester, NY, 1985
10. George Harrison, Denver Coliseum, 1974 [this tour was unjustly slammed: Willy Weeks on bass, Andy Newmark on drums, Robben Ford (!) on guitar, Billy Preston on keybs with solo spots... and "In My Life" was searing... Harrison had a blast]

Can classical music ever reclaim the populist influence of Leonard Bernstein?

Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts (Kultur Video, 9 DVDs)
The Joy of Music (Amadeus Press)
Leonard Bernstein: An American Life (WFMT Radio Network, produced by Steve Rowlands for CultureWorks Ltd.)

Leonard Bernstein's absence looms over classical music and its current dilemma: superstar conductors and dwindling receipts, "crossover" CDs and spiraling sales, and the ongoing burnout between academic composers and listeners. When Bernstein began his YOUNG PEOPLES CONCERTS in early 1958, classical culture was different in ways he changed irrevocably: the concert tradition was "high culture" filtered through Europeans like Toscanini, targeted at an educated elite, and orchestras were the province of elderly white men.

How quaint that all feels today, looking at Kultur Video's reissue of 25 (of 52 total) Bernstein Young Peoples Concerts spread across 9 DVDs. This set eavesdrops on a different space and time for classical music, and measures how things were more complicated than they seemed. To screen these programs now returns you to an era when live, black-and-white television was the high altar of techno-cultural achievement (Edward R. Murrow's interviews, the Playhouse 90 telecasts, the Kenney-Nixon debates). The concerts began a few months after West Side Story hit Broadway; they concluded thirteen years later, in 1972, with a program on Beethoven's Fidelio. (Bernstein died in 1990 at the age of 72.)

This enormously influential series, in the vaults until now, portrays Bernstein at his best: as a passionate conductor and teacher, unlocking ideas embedded in the most complex orchestral scores. At the time, he was a self-conscious emblem of his century's merger between high art and pop culture. When he greeted his first television audience, he was not just a newfangled maestro who wrote Broadway show tunes but an evangelist who ushered Americans like Roy Harris, Virgil Thompson, and William Schuman into the repertoire; an omnivorous listener who made compelling cases for then-obscure material, like the songs and symphonies of Gustav Mahler, Vaughn Williams' Fourth Symphony, or Shostakovich's darkly comic Ninth. Everything Bernstein lays out in these programs became the new norm for "classicism," only we keep acting like it never happened. So what became of Bernstein's extravagant promises?

"Bernstein's view of western music as a larger continuum, an interactive tapestry between highfalutin and popular, academic and everyday, is among his greatest legacies..."

How radical it must have been to watch these programs in Eisenhower living rooms and hear Bernstein refer to jazz and rock'n'roll as cousins to Mozart. Six years before the Beatles crashed the party, Bernstein's analogies were current and down-to-earth; he drew inspired connections between classical scores and rock songs. Later on, the triumph of the Beatles only fueled his ideas: to his ears, "And I Love Her" became a lyrical 3-part sonata form; and "Norwegian Wood" traced the Mixolydian mode. Bernstein's view of western music as a larger continuum, an interactive tapestry between highfalutin and popular, academic and everyday, is among his greatest legacies. (And he's enjoying a resurgence: Amadeus press has just published a new edition of The Joy of Music, and the Young People's Concerts book is due next year. Leonard Bernstein: An American Life, a candid 11-hour audio biography narrated by Susan Sarandon, was broadcast last fall to over 700 public radio stations.)

There's more to Bernstein than these concerts can show: he was an eccentric, uneven conductor who pined for respect as a "legitimate" composer, in both popular and concert idioms; a classical figure who behaved like a rock star, and steered the stuffy classical world off into the tabloids. Toscanini was his European father figure, who, at age 87 in 1954, concluded a 17-year run conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra. His reign turned post-war America into a new center not just for European musicians but for European concert music itself. America responded by hailing him the "greatest conductor of all time." In cultural terms, Toscanini played John Wayne to Leonard Bernstein's Elvis Presley.

Bernstein's rebellion was about substance as well as style: Toscanini was dictatorial, a white-haired ball of intimidation who had less jazz in him than Vice-President Richard Nixon. A few more narrow-minded, Euro-centric brutes like him, Bernstein reasoned, and classical music would fossilize. So he got CBS to mount its own symphonic series, whereby New York's first American-born conductor would charm audiences into music's New Frontier -- ahead of John F. Kennedy. Whirling between piano and podium to illustrate his points, Bernstein turned in bravura performances, even if his persona upstaged his insights. Only a showman could make Haydn slow movements breath with such relevance. Along the way, he tore down every elitist assumption he could think of, beginning with the idea that the classical music need be somber (an entire lecture on "Humor in Music"), or exists in a sacred vacuum, detached from popular styles ("The Latin-American Spirit"). He even brought a young Gunther Schuller out to conduct "Journey Into Jazz," with text by critic Nat Hentoff, a kind of swinging Peter and the Wolf.

His ideas both enlightened audiences and nourished the New York Philharmonic's playing. Alongside the transition from black and white to color, the series covered the orchestra's move from old world Carnegie Hall ("Home of the world's greatest musical events...") to the open square of the newly built Lincoln Center ("Home of the world's greatest musical events..."). The virtuoso players, from legendary concertmaster John Corigliano (father of the composer) and principle flutist Julius Baker, take thrilling risks on their instruments, and they sound much jauntier than they look. As Bernstein preached a new populism, the orchestra responded with a vitality that favored feel over polish. Nowadays, major orchestras lock down smooth, shopworn surfaces as a matter of habit into the standard repertoire.

"They sound much jauntier than they look..."

So why does so much classical music sound sterile -- even fossilized, if you believe some critics? Many reasons, but mostly because the stars aligned behind Bernstein's charisma. Like Kennedy, his timing was genius. Where liberal arts music departments and public libraries will cherish this set, these Young Peoples Concerts have a mixed heritage. Instead of writing the great popular tunes of his time, Bernstein stepped down from the New York Philharmonic early, in 1967, to compose. First came the unspeakable Mass, which fed off the era's worst hippie clichés. Even though he roared back with the Harvard Norton Lectures, his high-low sensibility was reviled by both sides. American culture continued to cherish its movies and rock music like art, but Bernstein himself seemed to lose his nerve. So he spent a lot of his late career obsessed with his legacy: Beethoven, Brahms and Mahler cycles with the Vienna Philharmonic, a vanity recording of West Side Story as grand opera (with José Carreras and Kiri Te Kanawa), and a devolving personal life reflected in his face as a withering degeneracy. Where Bernstein's opening act was all populism and plurality, his second act slowed to vainglorious pomposity.

In another sense, Bernstein's popularity merely echoed Toscanini's cult of personality. If his audience outreach is the model on which all conductors must now market themselves, most of them forget Bernstein's key principles -- humor, showmanship, expansiveness -- before they lift their batons. The exceptions prove the rule: Michael Tilson Thomas, a Bernstein protégé, who leads the adventurous San Francisco Symphony; or Robert Spano, who's shaking up Atlanta (the new Cleveland!). Many more of Bernstein's students, like John Mauceri, work far more in Europe than at home. While it's tempting to dub Bernstein's era as "the good old days," that presumes too much of one man's authority and too little of all the women and minorities performing in today's orchestras. There are no more large-scale, unifying TV "networks," but there are best-selling movie scores like Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings, which expose millions of moviegoers to fantastic orchestral dreamworlds. Perhaps Bernstein's vision will reach even more ears now that this series is finally available to any classroom with a DVD player, and anyone interested in taking the best music appreciation class ever. (Tim Riley)

BERNSTEIN LINKS:

Leonard Bernstein Society
YPC Scripts
Leonard Bernstein Collection (Library of Congress)
Sony discography
Deutsche Grammophon discography
Leonard Bernstein: An American Life
iTunes: Bernstein

ALTERNATE HEADS:

The New Hi-Lo Frontier
Democracy's Baton
Roll Over Toscanini
Pulping the Classics
Leader of the Pack
High-Minded Populism
Will You Still Listen Tomorrow?
Blue Suede Tuxedos

Why are Slate's "Today's Papers" heads so consistently awful? Do they simply let Umansky have his head since he probably turns copy in around 5 am? Just this past week we've had:

Bishop Taken (for some Muslim cleric story)
Rice-a-Crony (for Rice's testimony)
Goodnight, Johnny (for Johnny Carson's death)
The Sunni Will Come Out Tomorrow (about Iraq electorate)

Puts me in the mind of Lucifer at the gates of hell when he says "Put the punsters in with the mimes..."

I've been tough on Nancy Franklin, so to be fair here's a lead that made me chortle: "America is having a torrid love affair with “Desperate Housewives,” and I feel so left out..." [Greg's archives RULE.]

GOOFY GOOBERS -- NOT:

"...It is not the first time that children's TV favorites have come under the critical spotlight of the U.S. Christian right. Tinky Winky, the purse-toting purple Teletubbie, was in 1999 declared a homosexual role model by Rev. Jerry Falwell." (NY Times, Jill Serjeant in Reuters)

While waiting in the car yesterday, we came across "Surfin' Bird" by the Trashmen (actually a mashup of two songs by the Rivingtons. Adam (4) insisted on listening to it maybe 100 times in a row, laughing until he cried. The joy that bubbled out of him was delirious. None of the repetitions got boring, it was like an infinity compressed into a single now forever, over and over again. By the time Moses and SKL got back to the car, we shared our new treasure, and Kubrick's sniper scene from Full Metal Jacket was a forgotten context.

From there we drove to Johnny Rockets for dinner, and no joke, right as Aretha Franklin's "Respect" got boosted over the PA, the staff lined up in front of the grill and danced together, coordinated hand gestures and steps, things just stopped and we were suddenly extras in the "Think" scene from the BLUES BROTHERS. Diners went nuts, then back to their food. Just when you start underestimating these New England stiffs...

Bow-tied neocon scuzzball Tucker Carlson, the guy Jon Stewart confronted on the sinking ship Crossfire? Turns out to be a major source for Sister Helen Prejean's death penalty piece (from NY Review of Books):

...In his autobiography, Bush claimed that the pending execution of Karla Faye Tucker "felt like a huge piece of concrete...crushing me." But in an unguarded moment in 1999 while traveling during the presidential campaign, Bush revealed his true feelings to the journalist Tucker Carlson. Bush mentioned Karla Faye Tucker, who had been executed the previous year, and told Carlson that in the weeks immediately before the execution, Bianca Jagger and other protesters had come to Austin to plead for clemency for her. Carlson asked Bush if he had met with any of the petitioners and was surprised when Bush whipped around, stared at him, and snapped, "No, I didn't meet with any of them." Carlson, who until that moment had admired Bush, said that Bush's curt response made him feel as if he had just asked "the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed." Bush went on to tell him that he had also refused to meet Larry King when he came to Texas to interview Tucker but had watched the interview on television. King, Bush said, asked Tucker difficult questions, such as "What would you say to Governor Bush?"

What did Tucker answer? Carlson asked.

"Please," Bush whimpered, his lips pursed in mock desperation, "please, don't kill me."

Carlson was shocked.[4] He couldn't believe Bush's callousness and reasoned that his cruel mimicry of the woman whose death he had authorized must have been sparked by anger over Karla Faye Tucker's remarks during the King interviews. When King had asked her what she planned to ask Governor Bush, Karla Faye had said she thought that if Bush approved her execution, he would be succumbing to election-year pressure from pro–death penalty voters...

Also, don't miss:
Best Critique of the Election: Mark Danner in the NY Review of Books, nice balance between failure and optimism:

...Kerry might have done better to declare early on that Iraq and the war on terror could no longer be separated, and to argue, forcefully and consistently, that Bush had conducted both incompetently—so incompetently, in fact, that four more years of his leadership would put Americans at ever greater risk. But to have been convincing, such a strategy, at least implicitly, would have meant accepting the necessity of going to war in Iraq—a position that many committed Democratic voters strongly disputed and that Kerry's own past statements tended to contradict. And it would have meant demonstrating the kind of single-mindedness, relentlessness, and rigor that the Bush campaign managed but the Kerry forces never did. Either way, as long as Bush was able to succeed in melding Iraq and the war on terror and placing them firmly at the center of the campaign, Kerry faced an incumbent "war president" who, whatever his missteps, Americans would be hesitant to abandon—without a very good reason for doing so. Kerry never produced that reason...

Vexing how persistent these misperceptions are, long after the battle was waged, won, and consumerized. Talking about the pre-Beatle years in the early 1960s, Bruce Bawer writes: "Those years were America’s liberal moment, and a pivotal point in American history."

But his lengthy article in the Wilson Quarterly is full of misnomers, evasions, and crude conclusions:

"Paar represented a distinct, even radical departure from mainstream 1950s entertainment, but he was not a man of “The Sixties.” It was on his show (not Ed Sullivan’s, as legend has it) that the Beatles made their American TV debut, on film, singing “She Loves You” in January 1964—though as Paar has always freely admitted, he showed them not because he liked their music but because he thought they were “a joke,” a silly fad. What he was laughing at, of course, without realizing it, was the era to come, which the Beatles would personify, then and forever, and which would soon relegate the tastes and values of Paar’s heyday to the dustbin of history."

Do I have to spell it out? I like Paar as much as anybody, but does anybody really think John Lennon couldn't outclass, outtalk, out-anything Jack Paar, and deserved to be more famous? By omission, Bawer writes as though everything that followed Paar, Nichols and May, and the rest is inferior, without a single example or comparison. Stuff like this baffles me. Such a wayward viewpoint wouldn't even get argued if rock's triumph hadn't been so complete.

Would you take a $3.99 chance on this pay-per-view?

"Evie, a wallflower in a dead-end job, is obsessed with a struggling musician. Through a fanatic event, Evie comes into focus and Casey capitalizes on the attention."

-- listing for the film A Slipping-Down Life, starring Lili Taylor and Guy Pearce (from an Ann Tyler novel).

from WBUR's Arts page: The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, by David Thomson (Knopf)

The title of David Thomson's new history of film employs a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald's THE LAST TYCOON: "You can take Hollywood for granted..., or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don't understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not a half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads." Thomson wants us to hear Fitzgerald himself talking in that passage, and throughout his sweeping narrative, as he snakes detail through those ominous words.

Chronicling icons like Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Erich von Stroheim, David Selznick, Louis B. Mayer, and on to the modern era with Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, Thomson spices familiar legends with illuminating digressions, like his thoughts on Edward Hopper's painting "New York Movie" (1939). His first portrayal of how writers (producers, directors, celebrities) don't usually get the "whole equation" uses one of its most respected figures: Robert Towne, who wrote CHINATOWN, and battled famously over its ending with director Roman Polanski. For Thomson, CHINATOWN provides a neat metaphor for all of Hollywood:

...It's sinister, yet tidy. The film was set in 1937, but when audiences first saw it in 1974 they had no difficulty in (or no way out of) seeing its contemporary relevance. The water rhymed with Watergate, and even if the film made the dark plot clear finally, still, there was no way of punishing Noah Cross for raping the land, or his own daughter. He was in charge, and he could fend you off with dreamy philosophizing as to what exactly constituted "rape." ...CHINATOWN is not only tragic and foreboding, not just a parable about the ways in which Los Angeles has relied on exploitation, power, rape, greed, and a sense of the future, but a subtle magical metaphor for Hollywood and filmmaking in which the lone seeker of truth is told to shut up at the end, to go along with being left alive and (probably) paid off, and accept that the system, the business -- "they" -- are always going to survive and endure and run the show.

...All of Thomson's historical detail, however, is a platform for his thoughts on the profound effect the movies have had on America's thinking and behavior, indeed, its very identity. Thomson senses a frenzied interaction that still takes place between darkened audience and the lit screen which nearly subsumes thought. "...Our education is still largely based on what words mean, how they fit together grammatically," Thomson writes. "Against that, how many of us have ever had any education in the nature of moving imagery, its grammar, its laws or lawlessness, or how the naïve viewer is expected to distinguish news from fantasy, art from deception?..."

(click here for entire review...)

From WBUR's Here and Now homepage:

It was quite a year for pop culture and the pop culture wars.

Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction launched a year long values debate that culminated in the presidential election.

Gay marriage was in the headlines, but abysmal marriages were at the core of the wildly popular new television show "Desperate Housewives," a prime-time soap opera watched by almost as many viewers who tuned in to the year long trial of Scott Peterson convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and unborn child.

The trial increased sales of tabloid newspapers by 300,000 a paper and spiked TV ratings. At year's end the Washington Post did a terrific report on the high number of pregnant women who are violently killed. But no one paid much attention to that bigger picture.

What does 2005 hold? Donald Trump of "The Apprentice" might be soooo 2004 Fox has a new reality show called "Who's Your Daddy?," in which adoptees try to guess their birth father for a $100,000 prize!

And Here & Now's pop music critic Tim Riley also says (RA) huge changes are occurring in the music world...