Archives for August 2003

I reviewed The Thing About Men, an off-Broadway musical that opened Wednesday at the Promenade Theatre, in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s the lead:

I didn’t go to “The Thing About Men” expecting to have my mind changed about the diminished state of American musical comedy. The posters for the show, which opened off Broadway at the Promenade Theatre on Wednesday, feature a photo of the torso of a half-naked person of indeterminate gender whose necktie dangles from his (or her) open trousers in such a way as to suggest…well, you get the idea. And so, I thought, did I. But “The Thing About Men,” much to my surprise, turned out to be something altogether different from the silly sex farce I was prepared to endure. Instead, Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts, the authors of “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change,” have now made another honorable and largely successful attempt to breathe new life into the moribund tradition of the middlebrow musical….

To read the whole review, simply go to the nearest newsstand, part with one (1) hard-earned dollar, and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section of this morning’s Journal, which is, as ever and always, full of good stuff.

Courtesy of the ever-interesting 2 Blowhards, some statistics gleaned from the magazine American Demographics:

According to a study commissioned by AD with research firm Ipsos-Reid, only 17% of American adults are aware of blogs, and only 5% claim to have read one. The awareness of blogs skews towards men; 21% of male Internet users report they’re hip to the blogosphere, while only 13% of women are. Financially, visitors to blogspot.com are either rich or poor; those making under $25,000 or over $100,000 a year are over-represented, while middle-income visitors are under-represented.

These numbers strike me as intuitively right, though I’m a bit surprised at the underrepresentation of middle-income visitors. It’s certainly been my experience that most people don’t yet know what a blog is. On the other hand, what the numbers don’t tell us is exactly who those 15 million American adults are, though I have some guesses. The income spread, for instance, strongly suggests that they are either well-to-do or young (since younger people are both less likely to be making a lot of money and more likely to be comfortable with the Internet).

If you’re interested in blogging about the arts, that should make you sit up and take notice. Given the well-established fact that the Internet is an ideal way to reach highly motivated niche audiences, it stands to reason that Web surfers with an interest in the arts are likely to stumble onto an arts blog sooner or later. Bloggers typically link to and write about one another (that’s a big part of what blogging is all about, as 2 Blowhards recently and rightly pointed out), and it follows that such interaction is bound to encourage significant growth in the art-related sector of the blogosphere, especially now that younger people are increasingly inclined to look to the Web as a source of news and information.

My own experience may be relevant in this connection. I first heard the word “blog” some three years ago, and like most blogwatchers of that period, it was Andrew Sullivan who first got me in the habit of looking at a blog or two each morning. Not long after I started visiting www.andrewsullivan.com, it occurred to me that it would be possible to launch an arts blog that worked more or less the same way as his political blog. What stopped me in my tracks was that I hadn’t the faintest idea of how to start such a site (the user-friendly software employed by most of today’s bloggers had yet to be invented). Within a few months, I got sidetracked by the need to finish writing The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, and my still-inchoate plans were filed away, though not forgotten.

The tremendous growth of the blogosphere in the past year revived my interest in www.terryteachout.com, and when I met Megan McArdle, who writes Asymmetrical Information, she persuaded me that it was time to give it a try. (In other words, blame her.) At that exact moment, Doug McLennan of artsjournal.com called me cold and offered to start a site for me. Within a week, “About Last Night” was up and running.

The surprising thing (or maybe not) is that it wasn’t until after “About Last Night” went live that I first encountered any other arts blogs. Think about that. Here I was, a potential blogger with a serious interest in the medium, yet I didn’t know of the existence of even one arts blog. It wasn’t until I started getting e-mail from fellow arts bloggers and clicking my way through their blogrolls that I finally discovered what was already out there, and how good so much of it was.

All this indicates to me that arts blogging is a phenomenon waiting to happen, in much the same way that political blogging gradually built up to a critical mass, then suddenly mushroomed in the wake of 9/11. The difference, of course, is that arts bloggers can’t count on a cataclysmic event to stimulate interest in what we’re doing. We’ll have to publicize ourselves, not only by linking to one another (though that’s important) but also by reaching out to potential readers who don’t yet know what a blog is. That’s why I always include the www.terryteachout.com URL in the shirttails to the pieces I write for the print media. That’s why I remind you each morning to tell someone you know about this site. People who come here will go elsewhere, too.

Am I having fun yet? You bet. But I want lots more people to come into the pool. As I wrote in this space a couple of weeks ago, I believe that serious arts journalism in America is destined to migrate to the Web. If you’re reading these words, you’re part of that migration. Don’t keep it to yourself.

A reader writes, apropos of my recent posting on film scores:

Add Johnny Mandel to your ALN list. Among his best on CD are I Want to Live (Rykodisc) and The Sandpiper (Verve). And The Verdict (it’s almost no writing, but what there is is perfectly placed).

I couldn’t agree more, and am chagrined to have momentarily forgotten about Mandel, whose name is universally known and admired throughout the world of jazz. This may explain why I forgot to think of him in connection with film scoring–he simply does too many things well, including songwriting. To have written “The Shadow of Your Smile,” the theme from The Sandpiper, is achievement enough for a lifetime. All praise to Johnny Mandel, then, for never having rested on any of his myriad laurels.

Incidentally, my favorite recording of “The Shadow of Your Smile” is by Singers Unlimited. It’s only available in a box set at present, but if you’re feeling extravagant, I can’t think of a better way to spend a hundred bucks.

The author of today’s almanac entry will be familiar to some of you, but for those who don’t recognize the name of the now-obscure Constant Lambert, he was one of the most fascinating figures in 20th-century English cultural life. I suppose he’s best known for his invaluable book Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline, though balletomanes with long memories will also know him as the first music director of what later became the Royal Ballet, in which capacity he served as a ballet conductor of genius, collaborated closely with Sir Frederick Ashton, and had a stormy affair with the very young Margot Fonteyn. He also wrote quite a bit of amazingly pungent music criticism, none of which has been collected (Music Ho! will give you a feel for the way he wrote about music), and made quite a few marvelously vital recordings, only a handful of which have been reissued on CD. Lambert even pops up as a major character in Anthony Powell’s multi-volume novel A Dance to the Music of Time (he’s Hugh Moreland).

In the long run, Lambert will be best remembered as a composer, and in recent years there has been a mini-revival of interest in his music, much of which has now been recorded. I once contrived to get Time magazine (which used to be interested in the arts) to list the premiere recording of Tiresias, Lambert’s last ballet score, as one of its ten best CDs of the year. It’s still in print from Hyperion, fortunately, as is an equally fine album that contains The Rio Grande and Summer’s Last Will and Testament, two superlative works for chorus and orchestra that used to be moderately well-known once upon a time, at least in England. All these pieces are at once jazzy and unnervingly melancholic–quite a combination, that.

Every few years I try to stir up interest in Lambert, most recently in a 1999 Sunday New York Times profile called “A British Bad Boy Finds His Way Back Into the Light” (no link, alas–the title refers to the fact that Lambert was a prodigy who died of acute alcoholism in 1951, two days before his 46th birthday). It went for naught, but I’m not done trying. Read today’s almanac entry and see if it doesn’t make you at least a little bit curious.

“After some of the most memorable and breath-taking experiences in my musical life it was indeed shocking to find that the critics next day were damning it with faint pseudo-academic praise, but it was not to me surprising. For the reason that I have, in the past, had to earn my living by that melancholy trade and realise all too well that the average English critic is a don manqué, hopelessly parochial when not exaggeratedly teutonophile, over whose desk must surely hang the motto (presumably in Gothic lettering) ‘Above all no enthusiasm.'”

Constant Lambert, Opera (December 1950)

Of all the items I’ve posted on this blog in the past month and a half, the one that’s stirred up the most comment is a mini-essay I wrote two weeks ago about the experience of seeing a masterpiece for the first time. If you read it, you’ll recall that I went to Lincoln Center to watch the Mark Morris Dance Group perform V, a dance by Morris set to the Schumann Piano Quintet. I’d seen the New York premiere of V a couple of years ago, and was curious as to the source of the absolute certainty of my reaction to that first viewing: “By now, I know V well enough to be able to talk in a fairly specific way about what makes it so good. But how did I know how good it was the first time I saw it? What made me so sure it was a masterpiece?”

It occurred to me that my immediate certainty must have had little to do with any conscious form of analysis, so I decided to take a closer look at what I felt while watching V, and came to the following conclusion:

As A.E. Housman famously said, “Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.” I know what he meant. Instead of analyzing V, I read its quality off myself, the same way you can read the seismographic chart of an earthquake and know how strong it was. Or–to put it more simply–I knew how good V was because of the way it made me feel.

It never occurred to me when writing these words that anyone would give them a second glance, much less find them controversial. Critics are always sounding off about how they do what they do–it’s an occupational hazard, if not a professional deformation. (I’m posting an assortment of these reflections all week in the daily almanac. Today’s entry is by Kenneth Tynan, the great English drama critic.) But when I published the blog that night, Our Girl in Chicago e-mailed me a few minutes later to say she thought this particular posting would draw a crowd. Boy, did she get that right.

Several readers were unimpressed (to put it mildly) by my attempts to understand exactly what it is that causes us to recognize that we’re in the presence of a masterpiece when seeing it for the first time. Among them was one of my favorite bloggers, God of the Machine, who gave me a going-over so thorough as to border on an outright fisking:

Terry Teachout, a distinguished critic who surely knows better, unaccountably sets out to adventure among masterpieces in his review of Mark Morris’s ballet V, even quoting Housman with approval. V is a “masterpiece,” Terry is sure, for five reasons, none of which has anything to do with what happens on stage. He is “immediately involved,” he “realize[s] that the person who made it knew exactly what he was doing,” he is not bored, he is “anxious,” because “what I was seeing on stage was so beautiful that I was afraid something would go wrong”; and when he finds that this something, whatever it might be, does not go wrong after all, his “eyes filled with tears.” This is all so refined that I nearly forgot that I began the piece knowing nothing of ballet and ended it in exactly the same state. Tell you what, Terry: if I give you the great soul, will you promise, next time, to talk about the ballet?

Pow! Thump! Ouch! A number of other bloggers quickly came to my defense, for which much thanks. For my part, I was mostly pleased by the attention, though my snap reaction was to recall what Dawn Powell wrote in her diary upon reading a mixed review by Diana Trilling of one of her books: “Gist of criticisms (Diana Trilling, etc.) of my novel is if they had my automobile they wouldn’t visit my folks, they’d visit theirs.” I respect God of the Machine greatly, and I take his point–except that I think it’s at least a few degrees beside my point. After all, I wasn’t writing a review of V. Instead, I was trying to understand how we respond to art at first sight, and I came to the conclusion that in my case, conscious analysis simply doesn’t have much of anything to do with it. Art makes us feel. These feelings are anterior to understanding, and after a lifetime of experiencing art I’ve come to trust them. In a very real sense, they are the whole point of experiencing art. As R.P. Blackmur once said, all knowledge is a descent from the paradise of immediate sensation. (I don’t know where he said it, alas–Arlene Croce quoted him years ago in an essay, and I committed the quote to memory the first time I read it.)

Is that criticism? Nope. My job as a critic is to try to understand what it is about a masterpiece that evokes these feelings, and to convert that understanding into intelligible and persuasive prose. Merely to assert is not to criticize, though mere assertion may well be of considerable interest to people who have learned from experience to trust your taste. I mean, I like to think that at least a few of you would rush right out and buy, say, Deidre Rodman‘s first CD if I told you that it was really, really good–which it is–even if I didn’t explain why it was good. (You’re curious now, aren’t you?) But I wouldn’t ever try to tell you that I’d just committed an act of first-degree criticism.

So yes, analysis matters…but it doesn’t matter most, and it doesn’t come first. If you’re sitting in your aisle seat trying to figure out why you’re getting goose bumps, you’re missing the point of getting them. The point is to be there–to be present and fully receptive to the immediate experience. Otherwise, you’re acting just like Tom Townsend in Metropolitan, who preferred reading what Lionel Trilling had to say about Jane Austen to actually reading Mansfield Park. And that’s what I was writing about the other day.

I can’t say it often enough: I go to the ballet to have a good time, not to give myself something to write about. What’s more, I’ll bet that God of the Machine does exactly the same thing.

“I see myself predominantly as a lock. If the key, which is the work of art, fits snugly into my mechanism of bias and preference, I click and rejoice; if not, I am helpless, and can only offer the artist the address of a better locksmith. Sometimes, unforeseen, a masterpiece seizes the knocker, batters down the door, and enters unopposed; and when that happens, I am a willing casualty. I cave in con amore. But mostly I am at a loss.”

Kenneth Tynan, Curtains

I went to see Open Range on Monday, and somewhat to my surprise, I liked it very much. Kevin Costner still isn’t much of a director, but the screenplay and cast were so strong that it worked anyway. Robert Duvall can do no wrong, of course, and I was scarcely less struck by Annette Bening, in part because she made no effort whatsoever to pretend that she was anything other than a middle-aged mother. Her beautiful face is now visibly careworn–you can count the lines–and that made it look even more beautiful, at least as far as I was concerned. Bening is an odd duck, a remarkably gifted actress whose career never quite seemed to catch fire, but who doesn’t seem to be terribly bothered by that fact. (I guess there’s something to be said for being married to Warren Beatty.) At any rate, she now looks as real as Emmylou Harris, and Open Range profits incalculably from her lived-in presence.

Michael Kamen, on the other hand, did everything he could to make Open Range trite by smearing his banal music all over the soundtrack. Film scores are far more important than most non-musicians realize, especially when they’re no good, and Kamen’s mishmash of Aaron Copland and John Williams was notable mainly for its odious ubiquity. He underlined each and every significant glance in the movie, laying on the sentiment with a trowel.

As I say, most people don’t think all that much about film scores, which is both normal and proper. The best ones are largely (though not always) unobtrusive, supporting the emotions of a scene in the same subtle manner that a lighting designer helps to control the way you see a play. Generally speaking, a score is something you shouldn’t notice until the second time you watch a film. If the score jumps into the foreground on first viewing, it might mean the film isn’t good enough to hold your attention.

I love first-class film music, of which there is both not nearly enough (it’s surprising how many important films have lousy or unmemorable scores) and much more than you might think (it’s just as surprising how many mediocre films have wonderful scores). A number of the best scores have been recorded separately from the films they adorn, and I thought it might be fun to point you in the direction of some albums that can help you hear how much good music adds to the immediate experience of a good film. You can purchase the CDs by clicking on the titles:

Elmer Bernstein, The Magnificent Seven

Leonard Bernstein, On the Waterfront

Aaron Copland, The Heiress

Jerry Goldsmith, Chinatown

Bernard Herrmann, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

Bernard Herrmann, Vertigo

Erich Wolfgang Korngold, The Adventures of Robin Hood

“What advice, then, would I give to someone forced–for no one could be willing–to become a reviewer? Firstly, never praise; praise dates you. In reviewing a book you like, write for the author; in reviewing any other, write for the public. Read the books you review, but you should need only to skim a page to settle if they are worth reviewing. Never touch novels written by your friends. Remember that the object of the critic is to revenge himself on the creator, and his method must depend on whether the book is good or bad, whether he dare condemn it himself or must lie quiet and let it blow over. Every good reviewer has a subject. He specializes in that subject on which he has not been able to write a book, and his aim is to see that no one else does. He stands behind the ticket queue of fame, banging his rivals on the head as they bend low before the guichet. When he has laid out enough he becomes an authority, which is more than they will.”

Cyril Connolly, The Condemned Playground

Even though I receive complimentary press tickets to most of the shows I want to see, I still get a huge kick out of free performances, especially when they’re outside. I love the uncomplicated carnival atmosphere, the feeling that everybody came to play. Of course it helps that in New York, you often get to see fairly famous people for free, meaning that the crowds are staggeringly large–but it’s still fun as long as the weather is nice, and sometimes even when it’s not.

I don’t know how hot it was when I went to see the Paul Taylor Dance Company at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park a couple of days before I left for Maine (I was too scared to check), but it definitely wasn’t balmy, and I didn’t care, at least not too terribly much, since you can never see the Taylor company often enough, hot or not. I was particularly interested in their appearance at Lincoln Center Out of Doors because they were dancing Promethean Fire, a new work that had its New York premiere in March, and I was curious to see how it would hold up on a third viewing (I also saw an incomplete runthrough last year at Taylor’s downtown studio).

As soon as I got home, I looked up what I’d written about Promethean Fire in the Washington Post back in March:

Taylor must have been in one of his apocalyptic moods when he made this jolting piece, set to three of Leopold Stokowski’s orchestral transcriptions of Bach organ music. The first one, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, was used in “Fantasia,” which Taylor claims was his inspiration. Maybe, but nothing in “Fantasia” is remotely as hair-raising as the final tableau of the first section, in which the dancers pile up in the middle of the stage, looking for all the world like a heap of corpses, out of which Patrick Corbin and Lisa Viola emerge to dance a stunned pas de deux.

At the same time that Taylor claimed Fantasia was his inspiration, he specifically denied having had 9/11 in mind when making Promethean Fire, and I took him at his word. Like George Balanchine, he’s very careful about disclosing the “secret meanings” of his dances–he wants you to think about what’s happening on stage, not in your head. Nor was I inclined to suspect him of being coy.

Yet as I watched Promethean Fire under the stars at Lincoln Center, with low-flying jets gliding into LaGuardia Airport not so very far above my head, I started to have my doubts. It’s true that Taylor has always been drawn to the unspecifically apocalyptic (this, after all, is a man who once made a dance called Last Look). But as I watched the male dancers hoisting women over their heads in positions eerily evocative of flight, after which the whole ensemble crumpled into that terrifying center-stage heap, I found I couldn’t simply write off Promethean Fire as a piece of pure abstraction.

Once the applause had died down, I turned to the friend I’d brought with me.

“Paul says this isn’t about 9/11,” I told her.

“Yeah, right,” she replied.

Does it matter? Not a bit. A plotless dance is about what you think it’s about while you’re watching it. The next time, it might be about something completely different. What Paul Taylor was thinking about when he made Promethean Fire is his business, to be disclosed if and only if he chooses to spill the beans. I admire his refusal to give his viewers an easy escape path to equally easy meanings.

But…is Promethean Fire about 9/11? Your guess is–literally–as good as mine.