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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for April 23, 2007

TT: Our (new) old selves again

April 23, 2007 by Terry Teachout

After a week of tweaking, adjusting, practicing, and otherwise getting used to our new publishing platform, I’m pleased (and relieved) to say that “About Last Night” once more looks the way it’s supposed to look. Making the switch to Movable Type wasn’t fun, but it turned out to be more than worth the trouble. Alas, Our Girl was out of Chicago on business last week and thus hasn’t had a chance to learn the technical ropes, but Doug McLennan and I hope to have her up and running within a few days.
The only problem we haven’t yet managed to fix is that our alternate URL, www.terryteachout.com, is still bouncing to the main ArtsJournal page instead of “About Last Night.” I don’t know why. The techies don’t know why. Nobody knows why. But we’re all working on it….
I’m also pleased to announce that the right-hand column has been updated, and I also added a half-dozen new blogs to “Sites to See.” Check it all out.
Now, back to blogging!

TT: Eight isn’t enough

April 23, 2007 by Terry Teachout

I wrote a review of Desmond Stone’s biography of Alec Wilder for the New York Times Book Review in 1996:

Alec Wilder spent his life looking for cracks to fall through. Though he wrote three songs that became standards (“I’ll Be Around,” “While We’re Young” and “It’s So Peaceful in the Country”), most of his “popular” music was too delicate and introspective to please a mass audience; though he composed hundreds of works for some of America’s greatest instrumentalists, these “classical” pieces were too strongly colored by jazz and popular music to win critical acceptance. Today, he is mainly remembered for his groundbreaking book “American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950,” surely the wittiest work of musical analysis ever written–and one that characteristically has nothing whatsoever to say about Wilder’s own songs, even such miniature masterpieces as “I See It Now” and “Did You Ever Cross Over to Sneden’s?”…
Wilder’s narcissistic shyness (he was precisely the sort of person for whom the term “passive-aggressive” was coined) didn’t stop him from moving to New York in the early 1930’s and setting up shop as a songwriter and arranger, but it did place severe limits on his ability to get ahead in the hard-nosed world of commercial music. As one contemporary recalled: “His music sounded different, he dressed differently, he acted differently….He just wrote what he wanted and the devil take recording supervisors, radio executives and bandleaders.”
No less problematic was his interest in writing music that moved freely from jazz to classical and back again, the first fruit of which was a series of three-minute cameos for five woodwinds, harpsichord, bass and drums. The limpid melodies, piquant scoring and fey titles (“Jack, This Is My Husband,” “It’s Silk, Feel It”) of Wilder’s octets delighted musicians and befuddled everybody else. Recorded in 1939 and 1940 by a crack group of studio players, the octets reinforced their composer’s reputation for uncommercial eccentricity, but also won him influential fans…

I’ve been praising Wilder’s octets for years to anyone who’d listen, but only seven of them have ever been reissued on CD. The rest remain firmly ensconced in limbo, and so far as I know, no one in the world has any plans to make them available again. (Are you listening, Hep Records?)
For this reason, I am delighted–nay, ecstatic–to announce that some anonymous benefactor lurking in cyberspace has celebrated Wilder’s centenary (he was born on February 16, 1907) by making eight of the Wilder Octet recordings available as podcasts.
Click on the links below and you can listen to:
• Concerning Etchings
• Dance Man Buys a Farm (the reference is to Artie Shaw)
• A Debutante’s Diary
• The House Detective Registers
• It’s Silk, Feel It!
• Little White Samba
• Neurotic Goldfish
• Sea Fugue Mama (the reference is to “Want some sea food, Mama,” a line from a 1939 pop song called “Hold Tight” whose lyrics are, ahem, cunningly naughty)
For the record, the rest of the octets have similarly fetching titles: “The Amorous Poltergeist,” “Bull Fiddles in a China Shop,” “The Children Met the Train,” “Footnotes to a Summer Love,” “Her Old Man Was Suspicious,” “His First Long Pants,” “Kindergarten Flower Pageant,” “A Little Girl Grows Up,” “Pieces of Eight,” “Please Do Not Disturb the House Detective,” “Remember Me to Youth,” “Seldom the Sun,” “She’ll Be Seven in May,” “Such a Tender Night,” “They Needed No Words,” and “Walking Home in the Spring.”
Give a listen. I guarantee you’ll be charmed.
UPDATE: Mr. Anecdotal Evidence is also a fan of Wilder’s octets.

TT: Almanac

April 23, 2007 by Terry Teachout

“Though the years are sad, the days have a way of being jubilant.”
Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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