Archives for July 22, 2003

Jesse Green recently wrote a smart piece in the New York Times Magazine about Adam Guettel, the composer of the off-Broadway musical Floyd Collins (it’s about the guy who got stuck in the cave) and the pop-song cycle Myths and Hymns. I’ve been interested in Guettel for some time now–I think he’s the most gifted and significant of the post-Sondheim musical-theater composers–and I’m very much looking forward to seeing his latest show, The Light in the Piazza, once it finally makes its way to New York. (It just had its premiere at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre.)

Having said all this, I’m puzzled by one thing. Green, who obviously admires Guettel as much as I do, described The Light in the Piazza as a “serious chamber musical” and emphasizes its musical complexity:

Anyone can whistle a happy tune. But take a look at the score of ”Piazza.” To create its highly chromatic, yearning atmosphere (Guettel calls it faux-Lisztian), the harpist is kept so busy changing pedals that she’s basically doing a clog dance. The other instruments–piano, violin, cello, bass–aren’t spared, either. The vocal lines are compulsively notated down to the last crotchet, specifying the kinds of inflections and back-phrasings that other composers would leave to the singers’ sense of style. It’s not pedantry; it’s how Guettel hears, and in some sense tries to stabilize, his damaged world. Is ”Love to Me”–the romantic climax of the score–less heart-melting because it is set mostly in the compound time signature of 5/8 + 4/8? No, it is more so, thanks to that strangely limping extra eighth-note, which seems to argue that imperfection can be another kind of beauty. But just try learning it without Guettel’s longtime music director, Ted Sperling, hammering out the beats.

What few can learn, few can love. ”I can’t help that,” Guettel says. ”We can finally admit, confidentially, that being a prominent theater composer is like being a prominent manuscript illuminator. So let’s not ask people to think more of this art form than they want to.” Which seems a shame because, with enough tinkering, ”Piazza” could be a classic….

Well, duh, it sounds to me like it wouldn’t take any tinkering whatsoever for Piazza to be…an opera. So why not call it that, and invite an opera company to produce it? I am fascinated by, and have written more than once about, the continuing resistance of “new music theater” composers like Guettel to thinking of their work in operatic terms. Stephen Sondheim is the same way. It’s as though “opera” were the dirtiest world in the language.

Does it matter whether you call a show like The Light in the Piazza or Sweeney Todd a musical or an opera? I think so. As I wrote in the Times a couple of years ago apropos the failed Broadway run of Marie Christine, whose composer, Michael John LaChiusa, similarly insisted on calling it a musical:

“The key word here is ‘elitist.’ Mr. LaChiusa, who admits to having had to pawn his piano after writing ‘Marie Christine,’ clearly longs to be popular. Alas, he longs in vain. Broadway today is about ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘Footloose,’ not complex scores that demand your full attention at all times. To call ‘Marie Christine’ a musical is implicitly to claim that it has more in common with these simple-minded shows than ‘Carmen.’ Not only is this untrue, it’s bad marketing, the equivalent of a bait-and-switch scam. Labels are unfashionable these days, even politically incorrect, but sometimes they still matter. Had ‘Marie Christine’ been billed as ‘a new opera’ and produced by, say, Glimmerglass Opera, it would have drawn a different, more adventurous kind of audience, one better prepared to grapple with its challenging blend of pop-flavored rhythms and prickly harmonies.”

Judging by Jesse Green’s piece, I’d say Adam Guettel, for whatever reason, is making the same mistake—and I don’t think it will serve him well in the long run.

But don’t get me wrong—I love Broadway….

Our Girl in Chicago writes:

Is there a woman out there who doesn’t carry around the invisible scars of her teenage social life? If so, I don’t know her. For everyone else, though, I recommend Special, Bella Bathurst’s psychologically acute, emotionally charged first novel. Why it hasn’t been more widely reviewed is a mystery to me. The perfect title captures one aspect of the angst that makes girls of 13 treat each other so cruelly, even at the height of their own psychic tenderness. How do you square the idea, carried over from childhood, of your own inalienable specialness with the beginning of an adult social life and the regard for others it entails? How can everyone be special? In the adolescent social algebra that Bathurst renders with heartbreaking verisimilitude, to remain special implacably requires that someone else be chaff–to put it politely.

Bathurst tells the story of a school trip that brings eight girls to a shopworn English countryside. Removed from their usual setting, the girls quickly shake off the flickering authority of their two chaperones and hammer out their own pitiless social contract. Early on, one character looks out over the Severn River: “Something about the water seemed misleading to Hen. Over there in the distance the river looked harmless. Only when she looked down through the railings of the bridge could she see how fast it was going. You’d never know until you were dead that it might kill you, she thought.” It’s a powerful metaphor, both for the feelings churning inside the girls and for their shifting alliances with one another. Throw in boys and sex, distracted absent parents, and everyday insecurities, and you have plenty of lit matches to go with this powderkeg.

No doubt you’ve thought by now of Lord of the Flies, a point of reference duly noted in the book’s jacket copy. But it isn’t power that’s at issue here so much as the struggle to shape an acceptable self to present to the world. When the audience is narrowed to seven others involved in the same endeavor, beset by the same vulnerabilities, things get dangerous–like the Severn. The girls’ little world smolders, rather than explodes, but the conclusion is every bit as devastating.

This book dredged up uncomfortable memories of junior high school, but gave me new sympathy with my tormentors of old–something I wouldn’t have thought possible. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman that I find Bathurst’s girls even more fascinating than William Golding’s boys, and her novel at least as penetrating as his. But I think it’s because Special is simply that good.

I’ve been reading Edward Brooks’ The Young Louis Armstrong on Records: A Critical Survey of the Early Recordings, 1923-1928, a record-by-record study of Armstrong’s early work written by a Brit with a Ph.D. in musicology. Most of what he says is astute and well-informed, but I have to confess that I get the giggles whenever he writes about one of the many recordings in which Armstrong can be heard backing up such classic blues singers as Bessie Smith. Each of these latter entries begins with a wonderfully starchy summary of the lyrics of the song in question. To wit:

“The words describe a life of emotional imprudence, but without chronological plot; they are more a series of sorrowful, impressionistic comments about a wasted life caused by a wild temperament.” (Reckless Blues)

“A melancholy but resigned complaint about an uncaring, ill-treating, improvident, impecunious man, sung by a voice well acquainted with grief; it ends with a resolve to find another.” (Cold in Hand Blues)

“A demand for emotional status, the words contain a grain or two of oblique humor.” (I Ain’t Goin’ to Play No Second Fiddle)

I suspect–I hope–that Brooks is pulling our legs, but either way, his decorous little summaries somehow remind me of George Bernard Shaw’s parody of over-technical classical-music program notes:

I will now, ladies and gentlemen, give you my celebrated “analysis” of Hamlet’s soliloquy on suicide, in the same scientific style. “Shakespear, dispensing with the customary exordium, announces his subject at once in the infinitive, in which mood it is presently repeated after a short connecting passage in which, brief as it is, we recognize the alternative and negative forms on which so much of the significance of repetition depends. Here we reach a colon; and a pointed pository phrase, in which the accent falls decisively on the relative pronoun, brings us to the first full stop

I’m not exactly a Shaw fan, to put it mildly, but I forgive him a lot for having written that.

“As soon as I detest something I ask myself why I like it.”

Hans Keller, Essays on Music