About Last Night

My mother, who like most septuagenarians doesn’t quite grasp what a blog is, just poked her head in my bedroom and asked, “Are you actually working on something, or are you just piddling?”

Possible answer: “Why, Mom, I’m busy shaping the cultural conversation.”

Probable response: “I’d rather you took out the trash.”

Here’s a better answer: if all of you out there in the blogosphere will be so kind as to click on this link and place an advance order for A Terry Teachout Reader (out in May from Yale University Press), then I can tell my mother I was working. Otherwise, I was just piddling.

(P.S. Even if you don’t want to order the book just yet, click on the link anyway and you can see the dust jacket!)

In case you’re just joining us, I’m blogging this week from Smalltown, U.S.A, the southeast Missouri town where I grew up and where most of my family still lives. My sister-in-law, who lives in Smalltown and reads this blog from time to time, e-mailed yesterday to inform me that she and my brother now have a high-speed modem, thank you very much. (I had previously mentioned in this space that I was having trouble getting used to the dial-up connection at my mother’s house.) Of all the new wrinkles that have come to Smalltown, U.S.A., since my last visit home, that one might just be the most significant.

I haven’t gotten around to replying to Felix Salmon’s recent comment on what I wrote about the Metropolitan Opera’s radio broadcasts, but it’s relevant here, so I’ll mention it now. In case you didn’t see my posting, I was writing in response to an article by Tony Tommasini, the chief classical music critic of the New York Times, in which he explained why it was a bad thing that the Met broadcasts, which have lost their corporate funding, might be in danger of cancellation. I begged to differ:

[T]he future of classical radio lies not in what has come to be called “terrestrial radio” (i.e., conventional radio broadcasting) but in satellite and Web-based radio, which make it possible to “narrowcast” a wider variety of programs aimed at smaller audiences. I suspect that’s where the Met really belongs–not on terrestrial radio. And if I had to guess, I’d say that the Tony Tommasinis of today would be more likely to listen to the Met on their computers than on high-quality radios bought by their parents.

(In his original piece, Tony had reminisced about how he’d discovered opera by listening to the Met broadcasts as a boy.)

Here’s part of Felix’s response:

The Met radio broadcasts reach 11 million people

“What is the Ninth Symphony compared to a pop tune played by a hurdy-gurdy and a memory!”

Karl Kraus, Beim Wort genommen

Bruce Weber has an excellent article in today’s New York Times about the state of the Broadway musical–excellent because he talked to a lot of people in the business and got candid answers. This is one piece that really needs to be read in its entirety, not quoted piecemeal (you can read the whole thing here), but if there’s a money graf, this is it:

“You could spell whither either way,” said Jack Viertel,
the artistic director of the Encores! series of musicals in
concert at City Center. “There’s a real reluctance on the
part of producers to take on new composers because to some
degree no one is sure what a Broadway show is supposed to
sound like anymore. Is it supposed to sound like Michael
John LaChiusa? Or Alan Menken? If the Broadway sound were
the pop music of the day, which it used to be, it would
sound like hip-hop, but I don’t think anyone feels there’s
much of a Broadway audience for that at the moment.”

What I think Viertel is groping toward–as well as several other people quoted in the piece–is that the success of the “classic” Broadway musical-comedy idiom was in large part a function of the existence of the common culture that began to dissolve in the Sixties, more or less around the time that the Broadway musical began to lose its way.

Here’s another relevant excerpt:

In any case, as rock took over the radio airwaves in the
1960’s, songwriters began turning from the stage to the
recording studio. A few songs from Broadway managed to
climb the charts – “The Impossible Dream” from “Man of La
Mancha,” for example – but the music of Broadway was being
overwhelmed by the cultural tidal wave that was
transforming the rest of the world.

“I can tell you almost specifically when it changed,” said
John Kander, Mr. Ebb’s partner. “When we did `Cabaret’ in
1966, I was unpacking in my hotel room in Boston, even
before we went to Broadway, and I turned on the radio and
heard five songs from the show. Our next show, in 1968, was
a musical called `The Happy Time,’ and I think we got maybe
one recording. So it was right in there that the changeover
happened.”

The “untheatricality” of rock music is a complicated subject about which I’ve never gotten around to writing. It’s far too complicated to go into in a short posting, but I can say that to blame the decline of the Broadway musical on rock is to mistake a symptom for the disease. What happened in the Sixties was that the old-fashioned standard-style ballad ceased to be the lingua franca of American popular music–and that nothing replaced it. Instead, our musical tastes shattered into a million pieces. After the Sixties, there was never again one kind of music to which “everyone” listened. In the absence of that kind of broad-based consensus of taste, popular music began to take a back seat in the mass media to other forms of pop culture.

Anyone old enough to remember The Ed Sullivan Show will recall that Sullivan regularly booked musical-comedy stars, and even presented whole scenes from hit shows. (It was Sullivan who turned West Side Story and Camelot into box-office hits.) Nowadays, there aren’t any prime-time variety shows, because the culture is so deeply fissured that such shows can’t draw a large enough audience to be commercially viable. Similarly, Top 40 has given way to a large number of sharply differentiated formats with minimal overlap. If you ever wondered why David Letterman and Jay Leno almost never bring on their musical guests until the end of the show, that’s the reason: no pop musician, however successful, appeals to a sufficiently large slice of the demographic pie. Were Leno to open the show with a musical act, no matter what it was, a significant number of his viewers would promptly switch to Letterman in search of something more to their liking–and vice versa.

All this means that there is no “universal” musical language in which a Broadway musical can be written. That doesn’t make it impossible to write good musicals, but it does mean that they will almost certainly appeal to niche audiences, not the masses that once flocked to (and bought original-cast albums of) the great musicals of the pre-rock era. For this reason, my guess is that the really interesting musicals of the coming decade will be small-scale, low-budget shows–and that at least some of them will be written for and premiered by opera companies.

My mother and I just finished watching Holiday Inn and Meet Me in St. Louis on TV. Holiday Inn is a much-loved film whose shining parts are greater than their slightly commonplace sum: Astaire and Crosby, “Say It With Firecrackers,” and two terrific Irving Berlin songs, “You’re Easy to Dance With” and “Be Careful, It’s My Heart,” that got lost in the looming shadow of “White Christmas.” Meet Me in St. Louis, on the other hand, might just be the most underrated of all the great movie musicals. Sure, it’s a bit heavy on the Hollywood nostalgia, but Judy Garland is at her purest and best, Vincente Minnelli’s direction is unobtrusively right, and the score–the score! Was there ever a movie that contained three songs as fine as “The Boy Next Door,” “The Trolley Song,” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”? (Yes, I know, Top Hat, but that film exists in a realm beyond comparison.) Even the orchestrations, by Conrad Salinger, are exquisite.

I enjoyed tonight’s double feature so much that it almost made me forget how irritated I was by a story I read in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal about how red and green are sooooo pass

“Subtlety is the curse of man. It is not found in the deity.”

Flannery O’Connor, letter to an anonymous correspondent (1961)

I wanted to write something about the orange alert, but Lileks did it for me:

Either we look back at the days of Orange with the same remote interest we have today when we see ration stickers in a Bugs Bunny cartoon

I took my mother to dinner last night at the newest restaurant in town, Ruby Tuesday. It’s one of the many franchised “dinner houses” (as they’re known in the food business) that dot the American landscape, and its presence in my home town is an anomaly. When I was young, the only restaurants in the area were fried-chicken-and-steak affairs, and there weren’t all that many of them. Most families ate at home, and they ate as families, gathering together at the table at a fixed hour to discuss the day’s events. Eating out was something you did on Saturday night, usually not all that often.

In time, the major fast-food chains made their way to southeast Missouri, and every new McDonald’s and Pizza Hut was a major event. By the time I left home in 1974, there were many such places in town, but nothing much more ambitious. It was the conventional wisdom that “dinner houses” would never take root here, even though they were doing a booming business in the college town 30 miles north of us. Then, last year, an Applebee’s opened on the south side of town, and drew customers with a vengeance. It seems that the eating habits of the younger baby boomers and Gen-Xers in town had changed without anybody noticing. They were no longer committed to dinner at the dinner table: wives were working, children busier, and dining out had become, here as elsewhere, less a luxury than a necessity, even in a small town like this.

After Applebee’s came Ruby Tuesday, to which I took my mother for the first time on the night before the night before Christmas. It was shiny-new, the waiters were friendly and helpful, and the menu, if not exactly continental, was nonetheless worlds away from what one ate at the Charcoal House circa 1966. I dined on a nicely blackened piece of fish accompanied by rice pilaf and steamed broccoli. As we departed, I noticed that Thomas Dolby’s “Blinded by Science,” one of the very first rock songs I ever saw featured on MTV, was playing over the restaurant’s sound system.

It seemed to me that we both needed a bit of countervailing nostalgia, so we drove around town after dinner and looked at the Christmas lights. They’re not as spectacular as they used to be, but I’d still say that one out of three houses in my home town is electrically decorated come late December. Then we came home, watched a Randolph Scott video, and went to bed, there to rest up from the encroaching onslaught of modernity.

(P.S. Speaking of Lileks, he had a nice posting yesterday on holiday lights.)