Stress and Silence

I should apologize for my silence on this blog for the past –

can it be? — two weeks. Or maybe not. I’d have

preferred to post, but (to bring up an issue more important than music, both

for myself and others) I realized this fall that I’d been very

stressed. My paying work, traveling, my teaching, this blog, meetings on future

projects, composing, my online book…I’ve had a lot of balls in the air at once,

and I noticed a lot of classic symptoms of stress. My mind

racing at night, back pain, irritable bowels; and throughout it all, a feeling

that I wasn’t having much fun. I read a book on stress, and was struck

by many things, including this: Studies show that people, queried after they’ve

made decisions, don’t regret choosing pleasure over work.

So I’ve been trying to change. I had a long Christmas

holiday, and then launched the series I’ve interrupted on this blog, about what

I think the classical music crisis really is about. And then I prepared the two

courses I teach, one at Juilliard, the other at Eastman, both about the future

of classical music. The Eastman course is a schlep, worthwhile, but exhausting –

up in the morning at 6 AM, catch a plane, fly from New York to Rochester,

teach, maybe lead a workshop on entrepreneurship, then fly back, and get home

late in the evening. Putting aside all my other work, of

course. Which includes preparing parts for my new symphony,

commissioned by the South Dakota Symphony, and scheduled for a premiere on

April 19. And also making small revisions, in response

to suggestions from some of the musicians, who’ve looked at the score and found

some places that are harder than they need to be.

I’m trying not to force myself to do anything (except, of

course, the things with rigid deadlines), trying not to work a full day seven

days a week, making sure I take time for cooking, movies, walks, and other

entertainments. I’m doing pretty well, which makes my life a lot more livable.

But I haven’t wanted to obsess about the blog, which unfortunately has left me

silent.

Not that I don’t have things to say. They’ll pop up here.

And I’ll resume my “Where We Stand” series, with some thoughts on popular

culture. I’m sorry for my silence, but, you know, I couldn’t help it.

Here are some things I’ve thought about, watched, read:

DVDs of Mozart operas from last

summer’s Mozart marathon in Salzburg

(they did the entire Mozart operatic oeuvre, 22 works in all, many written, of

course, when he was in his teens). Really vivid, sharp

productions, featuring an unforgettable giant venus

flytrap in La finta

giardiniera (and also a soprano riding gently on

the back of a giant dove). And a rewrite of the ending

of Lucio

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> Silla, making

it chilling, rather than celebratory. Though the real

achievement was making that opera gripping at all, with its long string of more

or less featureless arias. The production dug out the issues lying

underneath, and brought them to vivid life. These productions, taken as a

whole, have some of the best acting I’ve ever seen in opera, a tribute both to

the casting and to the stage directors.

The new Norah

Jones album. Quietly delectable.

Citizen

Kane, which I’ve been watching on my video iPod, to check my feeling that

the operas in the standard repertoire are getting to seem a little like old

movies — wonderful, but clearly from another era. I’ll

style='mso-spacerun:yes'> have more to say about this, of

course. But I thought I’d rewatch a certified Great

Old Movie, to make sure that even the best old movies come off the way I thought

they did. And they do.

Georgina Born’s

Rationalizing Culture, an

anthropological study (!) of IRCAM. And quite a detailed, serious

and savage one. Does nothing to refute my feeling that musical modernism

– even if it started well — ended up as something of a blight.

Quite priceless: the comments of IRCAM’s non-musical

staff on IRCAM’s concerts (“But no one comes to them!

And the music is terrible!”). And the detailed accounts of rampant sexism.

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s

style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Everyday Stalinism, the most vivid book

I’ve ever read on life in Stalin’s

w:st="on">Russia (and I’ve read a bunch of

them). Unlike other writing on this subject, it doesn’t simply tell a tale of

horrors (though of course they were there), or expose criminality and chaos.

Instead it shows what people thought about — the strutting, macho leadership,

the squalor of everyday life, the strong belief (rational or not) that things

were getting better. Why, for instance, did women start wearing makeup late in

the 1930s? With the approval, that is, of the Communist regime. It wasn’t

simply (as I’ve read elsewhere) that Stalin brought back many traits of older

culture, so he could rule with more stability. There was also a belief that the

revolution would make Russia

more cultured — that, for instance, the peasants might start to bathe more

often than once every two weeks. And once you got beyond that, what then? You might

learn the names of Shakespeare’s plays — and start to dress a little better.

class=GramE>A fascinating time, the 1930s, full of hope (and not only in Soviet

Russia), even when the hope didn’t make any sense.