lies like truth

Thomas Choinacky likes Kate Winslet. A lot.

In Thomas Is Titanic, the solo performer’s sweet, self-absorbed show at DC’s Capital Fringe Festival, Choinacky shows us the inner workings of an obsessed fan.

Choinacky has an endearing, cute presence on stage. There are also one or two inspired moments, such as when he displays a graph showing the ups and downs of his relationship with the movie star. The graph plummets at the point in their history “together” where Choinacky comes out as being gay.

On the whole though, Thomas Is Titanic is a bit of a wreck. The performer spends too much of his 45-minute production flailing around miming and lip-synching scenes from the film. I guiltily found myself enjoying watching Leo and Kate go at it in screened excerpts from James Cameron’s Oscar winning movie more than watching Choinacky interpret their actions.

 

The Library of Congress is consistently giving me more to snack on during my lunch breaks than mere sandwiches and coffee. I get food for thought here on a regular basis.

Right now, I am sitting on the sixth floor of the Madison Building listening to Steven Raichlen, one of the country’s leading BBQ experts, on cooking out of doors using fire.

Raichlen, an engaging, easy-going speaker, is talking about two million years of human history as seen through the prism of grilling. From Thailand to Turkey to Texas, grilling is  apparently a way of life. We live on a BBQ planet.

Barbacoa is a form of cooking meat that originated among the native tribes of the Americas, from which the term “barbecue” derives. They cooked slow and low over a smoky fire.

BBQing began with homo erectus, an extinct species of hominid that lived from the end of the Pliocene epoch to the later Pleistocene, about 1.3 to 1.8 million years ago.

Raichlen has a theory that there was a forest fire which roasted a bison or prehistoric deer and uttered the first grunt of gastronomic satisfaction. The discovery that you could cook meat with fire led to massive changes in how humans were built. It led to a tripling of the size of the human brain and a shrinking of the size of the jaw.

Raichlen talked about how these hominids started fire. They struck pieces of flint against pieces of marcasite (which has metal in it) to generate sparks. You can’t scrape two pieces of flint together — this doesn’t generate enough heat.

Originally, meat was just thrown into the fire. Then there was a technical innovation of putting the meat on a stick.

BBQ was bound up with religion in the ancient world. Animal sacrifice played a key role in paying homage to the gods.

In The Iliad by Homer, there’s a scene of an animal sacrifice. A pyre was raised on the beach and a cow slaughtered. The meat was covered in fat and the salt and basted every now and again in red wine. “I’ve made it and it’s delicious,” Raichlen said.

In the Middle Ages, St Lawrence, “the patron saint of grill masters,” was roasted alive when martyred. On the spit, he allegedly asked his torturers to turn him over so he could cook more venly.

In Virginia plantations, a pit was dug and the meat laid over planks suspended over the pit.

BBQs were used to celebrate big patriotic events. When the British lost battles, BBQs were staged.

Abraham Lincoln’s administration influenced the course of BBQ. With abolitionism, a new profession arose that was a “pit master” who would cook meat for money. This new class of cooks led to the rise of BBQ joints.

Henry Ford had a lot of wood scraps left over from manufacturing the Model T Ford. He figured out how to develop the charcoal briquette using the ground down wood.

The modern grill’s roots lie with the nautical buoy, believe it or not. The first commercial BBQs were created by upturning half of a buoy and putting ventilation holes in it.

Raichlen has whizzed through the history of BBQ. I can barely keep up. Now he’s showing examples of different types of grilled meats from around the world, from grilled foie gras in Israel and grilled kangaroo in Australia to grilled octopus in Greece and grilled eggs in Cambodia. The images that Raichlen is showing to illustrate the various delicacies are making my tummy rumble.

Most of the world doesn’t grill with grates. Mostly people grill over pits using sticks or tongs.

Raichlen is now talking about different grilling technologies and systems. One enterprising gourmet grill master, I think in the US, makes a new wood fire using local oak for each dish. He also has a pulley system to raise and lower food to make minute adjustments to the way it cooks.

“It’s been 1.8 million years since the invention of BBQ,” Raichlen concluded. “And things haven’t changed much at all.”

As an arts journalist who covers a very broad spectrum of musical genres, I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of the etiquette that surrounds the start times of various different concert-going formats.

Western classical musicians start playing right at the advertised time. Musicians who play in most other idioms take a looser approach to curtain up. If it says “doors open at 8pm” on a concert flier for a pop music concert (I’m using the word “pop” in the broadest sense of the word, covering styles from jazz to hip-hop) it’s not unusual for the headline artist to appear at 11pm, after one or two warmup acts.

Every now and again though, I’m caught out by these general standards, making me think that promoters and venues should be more explicit about how they advertise particular events.

This happened, unfortunately, on Saturday night. I was scheduled to attend a performance by the songful, longstanding country outfit, The Desert Rose Band, which I was excited to experience at The Birchmere Music Hall, a seminal and lovely rock, pop, country and folk venue in Alexandria, VA.

The concert was advertised to begin at 7.30pm. I showed up at around 8.30, thinking I’d be more or less in time for the end of the first support band. How ludicrous of me to assume that there would be a support band, or indeed that the concert would not somehow start right at the advertised time! Apparently The Birchmere, or The Desert Rose Band (I don’t know which having never been to the venue or attended a concert by this group previously) run according to a schedule more often found in the classical music world. By the time I showed up, the concert was reaching its final stages.

Luckily, I did get to hear two marvelous tracks the band, which played to a packed house, clearly proving that I don’t understand something about the meaning of punctuality in Virginia music venues.

The first song was the group’s big hit, “One Step Forward.” It was a lyrical, energetic performance of a song that elegantly tells the story of a relationship that can’t seem to get off the ground. Next, I heard the encore, a cover of Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” which was equally melodious and easy-going.

And then the whole thing was over at just shy of 9pm and everyone went home to their Saturday night hot cocoa and pajamas.

To make myself feel better, I headed back into Washington DC to see if I could scope out some more live music. Luckily, my timing for indie rocker Justin Jones at the 9:30 Club couldn’t have been more perfect. I arrived at the venue at around 10.15pm. A few minutes later, the main act came on stage. Happiness.

Jones, who looks to be in his early- mid-thirties and sports a hipster beard, has a round and full low tenor voice, a friendly stage presence and sings beautiful ballads that are at once punchy and melancholy.

The frontman and band communicated well with each other and they seemed pretty happy to be up on stage. There was quite a bit of smiling. This isn’t common practice among indie rock musicians who play music as introverted as a lot of Jones’ material seems to be.

I especially appreciated the turns by a handful of guest artists — a singer/harmonica player, keyboardist and guitarist — at various points during the show.

Between the two songs I heard by Desert Rose and the full program I caught up with by Justin Jones, I felt like it had been a wonderful musical evening all in all. I guess I’ll be more careful to check in with unfamiliar venues about schedules in the future.

Oh, and the 9:30 Club is on my list of favorite places to hear live music. It’s a warm, roundish space, with several easy-access bars and airy balconies which include risers for sitting. I hope to get back there again soon.

With Beertown, The Washington DC-based ensemble theatre company Dog & Pony has created a theatrical universe that is so compelling and inclusive that one barely notices two and a half hours go by.

The piece, which premiered in the DC area last November, is now playing at the Capital Fringe and was developed through a devised process by the 17-member company, has a gimmicky premise. But don’t be fooled.

The basic format of Beertown,  which is named after an imaginary American city that, like many others of its kind, has seen better days, is a town hall meeting. The audience members all don name badges upon arrival and instantly become citizens of Beertown (“Beertonians”). We discover that every five years, the people unearth a time capsule in which they place 13 keepsakes that have some kind of historical, emotional, artistic or other intrinsic value in terms of propagating the cultural memory of the city.

During the meeting, which we learn has happened 20 times in the town’s history at five-year intervals, the citizens of Beertown get to propose new items to be added to the time capsule, vote whether to add any of these items to the cache, and vote items out. The ritualistic event includes a collective singing of the Beertown hymn, detailed voting instructions and reenactments of key scenes from Beertown’s history.

The production is beautifully pitched — the actors create characters that are larger than life and yet subtle and real enough not to be far-fetched caricatures. And the scenario rings so true –  there are “dying” places like Beertown, where local businesses are shutting and citizens left long ago, all over the United States.

As a result, we find ourselves very quickly adopting the mantle of proud Beertonians without even trying. One of the delights of the show is seeing the funny side of these small town rituals. It’s easy to giggle and the cast offers us plenty of opportunities to let off steam.

But we also find ourselves completely drawn in. Last night, by the time we got around to voting for whether a piece of the defunct local bar, a block of wood graffiti-ed with the names of local boys who went off to Vietnam and never came home, should make it into the capsule, I cared deeply about Beertown’s legacy. I felt like my life depended upon the inclusion of this item in the time capsule.

More than that, Beertown presents a fascinating exploration of the collective conscience, the democratic process and how individuals and communities grow and shrink and mark time together.

I don’t think I have had such a satisfying experience at the theatre since War Horse at the National in London several years ago. This one is going on my list of top ten theatre experiences of all time. I’m not kidding. See it.

The year was 2006 when Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a musical about the United State’s bullish seventh president was first developed.

The piece was workshopped by the New York-based experimental company Les Freres Corbusier in August 2006 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and in May 2007 at the New 42nd Street Studios, New York. It premiered in January 2008 in Los Angeles at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, in a production by the Center Theatre Group.

All of the excitement about the show was building, in other words, when George W. Bush was U.S. President. And I can imagine that for those early audiences, witnessing the first full scale production in LA in an election year after two terms of Bush, the show must have been extremely pungent.

Jackson is portrayed in the work, which was created by Michael Friedman and Alex Timbers, as a swaggering pirate, who is as trigger-happy as he is a man of the people. The parallels between the man who was in office in 2008, who shared Jackson’s traits of being both a war monger and a “down home, regular guy,” and the portrayal of Jackson in the musical, must have hit home.

When the ensemble sings the number “Populism” near the start of the show, 2008 audiences were very likely tapping their feet and nodding their heads not just as a result of the rhythm but also because of the sense of recognition. Clearly, they must have thought, this country has been here before.

After four years of Obama, who can neither truly be regarded as a populist nor a warmonger (at least, nowhere near on the same scale as Dubya) Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson simply doesn’t carry the same weight.

The production which opened at Washington DC’s Studio Theatre on Sunday night is beautifully put together, with sharp performances from the talented ensemble cast led by a charismatic Heath Calvert. But it honestly feels a little passe.

This isn’t simply the result of the political moment being over. From an aesthetic perspective, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson seems very 2008. With its rampaging indie rock music score and sexy hipster cast members with spiky hairdos and tight jeans, it resembles other hit musicals of the period like American Idiot and Spring Awakening.

There will no doubt come a time in US political history, perhaps in the fairly near future, when this musical will strike a chord once again. But even though a lot of the action in the piece takes place in our nation’s capital and we’re in an election year, this isn’t the moment for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson to shake its fists and snarl in DC.

July in Washington DC is the perfect month for a Fringe Festival. It’s unbearably hot and muggy outside and much more blissful to be indoors experiencing weird and wonderful performances.

I attended two Capital Fringe shows yesterday which were both very different. One of them, pictured, was a conceptual dance piece entitled Colony. It involved a pair of dancers in prison colony stripes. When the audience entered the odd-shaped room at the downtown Fringe venue called “Caos on F,” the performers were running on the spot, rhythmically and perfectly in synch, against a dirge-like and slightly sinister-sounding electronic music background.

The piece felt in some ways like a Steve Reich piece — the dancers movements changed very slightly, always together, in incremental ways. At one point, I’d be watching them, almost in a trance, as there arms pumped backwards and forwards infront of their faces; a moment later, their arms were above their heads. The change happened perfectly between them. I felt like I was watching strange, pre-programmed drones.

The robotic quality also came across in the deadpan way that the performers occasionally and in monotonous voices, sang a line from “I wanna be loved by you,” the the song that Marilyn Monroe made famous in Some Like It Hot, and “Singular Sensation” from A Chorus Line. This was a strange chorus line indeed. The performers’ moves and voices seemed completely de-sexualized in some ways, yet the way in which they lingered on certain syllables and stared intently at individual audience members while saying “I’m in love with you” was deeply carnal.

I’m not sure what the piece adds up to, but it is both eerie and hypnotic.

The other show I saw yesterday was a solo piece by Dylan Fresco, a storyteller from Minneapolis. Entitled Domino’s Pizza Saved My Life, Fresco’s piece combined guitar-strummed songs and a spiraling yarn that took us from the storyteller’s teenage exchange program with Cold War Russia to the 2008 Republican Convention in Saint Paul, MN.

Fresco has an amazing tenor voice (which more than makes up for his not-quite-as-beautiful guitar playing) and an endearing personality so I felt engaged with him throughout. I could listen to him sing songs in Russian and Ladino (the language of the Iberian Jews) all day and night.

But the story itself wasn’t always compelling and there’s something about the solo show storytelling format that feels quite stale and old to me — the way in which performers try to sound chatty and natural, like they’re telling you about their lives in a bar over a beer, when really it’s the most artificial of situations and you’re being forced to sit there and listen to a very one-sided “conversation” for an hour.

I think Fresco was trying to make some overall point about how people from different social, linguistic and national backgrounds can reach a mutual understanding with such anecdotes about his grandfather’s immigration from Turkey in the early part of the 20th century and his own narrative about learning Russian. But this didn’t seem like a very interesting message overall.

I did however, love the final story about Fresco finding himself in a Domino’s Pizza refrigerator with a bunch of strangers as the tear gas reigned down on protesters in St Paul at the Republican Convention. It was quirky and made Fresco’s point about people from different walks of life coming together more succinctly and humorously than all of his other stories put together.

The picture to your left shows a bunch of Washington DC Fringe Festival audience members reenacting a scene from a children’s book about human reproductivity.

The people in the photo, which I snapped in the middle of a show entitled Cecily and Gwendolyn’s Fantastical Capital Anthropological, Inquisitorial Probe, are all pretending to be sperm.

One of them is wearing an imaginary top hat and carrying a red rose. Momentarily, he will catch sight of the egg (also being played by an audience member who can’t be seen in this picture) and make a flamboyant entrance.

What impressed me about all of this is how willing and eager the audience was to participate in the performance. And this was just one of the three shows I experienced yesterday at the Capital Fringe which all emphasized audience participation one way or another. I came away in each case thinking that the audience is really much more of the ‘spectacle’ than the people charged with putting on the productions. Is that a good thing? In some ways, it’s an interesting phenomenon — we learn a lot about ourselves through participating in performance. But it also makes for some pretty dull moments and strikes me as a rather lazy and gimmicky way of making theatre.

I imagine that there must be a smattering of “traditional” performance productions at this fringe festival in which the audience sits quietly on chairs in the dark and watches one or more performers undertaking speech and/or movement before their eyes. But this wasn’t the case remotely for the random sampling of shows I booked myself in to see yesterday.

Being new to Washington DC and not knowing much about the performance culture here, I relied on an article about “10 shows not to miss at this year’s Fringe” in the Washington Post and various other scraps of knowledge I’d gathered from talking to people and looking on the Web to make my decisions about what to see on this first day of Fringe-going.

So perhaps it was a coincidence that all three of the events I picked revolved heavily around audience interactivity. Or perhaps many of the shows at the Capitol Fringe operate along these lines.

I knew that the first item on my list, BFF (which stands for “Best Friends Forever” for those of you reading this who aren’t American teenage girls) would involve me heavily, though I didn’t realize until right before it started that I would be the only audience member. For some reason, when I read the show description, I imagined that it would involve a small group of people all somehow interacting with each other. The group was indeed small — conceptual artist Brian Feldman undertakes his piece with one audience member per “performance.” So during the course of the festival, only 50 people will get the chance to experience BFF. No wonder all his performances yesterday were marked as being sold out.

I was glad to have participated in BFF, though the conceit wore a little thin after a while. The premise is a simple one: The lucky audience member gets to spend two hours in the company of the performer. What happens is really up to the artist and audience member in the moment.

What did we do? Well, first of all, I hadn’t realized that Feldman’s piece required two hours of my time. So I had booked myself into another Fringe show an hour or so later. This reality dictated how Feldman and I would spend our second hour together — he obligingly agreed to buy a ticket for the show and join me. I felt bad about dragging him to see a performance. So I paid for half of his ticket. If we were going to be BFFs, I thought, I ought to start by treating him as I would a friend.

With that piece of business squared away, Feldman — I’m going to start calling him Brian now — announced that he had a scratchy throat and so we went to Safeway to pick up some coconut water to soothe it. We had a mundane little walk around the neighborhood, chit-chatting about this and that. I learned about his history as a performance artist in Orlando, Florida (where Brian performs a show in which he and his family eat dinner on stage together) and about his decision to move to Washington DC, where he has been based for the last four months.

When I learned that I was Brian’s tenth BFF participant, I started to worry about how I could make this a memorable one. I wanted him to remember our two hours together but I didn’t know how I could compete with some of the other people he’s interacted with so far, such as the guy with whom he went on a cycle ride and ended up accidentally knocking off his bike. “Luckily, he had a helmet,” Brian said.

This desire on my part to make an impression was about the most interesting thing I gathered from the experience. I wonder what that’s about? I also wonder what Brian is doing, if anything, to process his BFF encounters during the festival? If performance can be reduced to just hanging out with someone for two hours, albeit a stranger, then what’s the difference between art and life? Perhaps that’s the point. But it’s not a very interesting one if it is. I think all three Fringe events I experienced yesterday suffer from the same problem, to a degree.

As I mentioned earlier,  I ended up dragging poor Brian (who mostly seemed tired and strung out during our time together) to the next Fringe production on my dance card. It was called The Circle, and it revolved around a 30-minute audio walking tour.  I made a half-hearted attempt every now and again to stick with Brian, but he seemed to be in his own world most of the time, and not a very happy one at that. He loitered behind the rest of the group for most of the walk with his hands on his ears (perhaps he was having trouble with his headphones?) and a scowl on his face. I decided to just immerse myself in the experience of The Circle and not worry about the fact that I was still technically “in another show.”

As in Cecily and Gwendolyn’s Fantastical…, which would be my third stop of the evening, the people who attended The Circle seemed extremely excited to be part of the proceedings. Most of the group, which had about 10 people in it, behaved like lemmings. We followed our tour guide, a sweet young man by the name of Otis who has the physique of a dancer, all around the neighborhood. When he skipped, we skipped. When he took someone’s hands as we walked on a low wall, we all grabbed the hand of the person to our right (except for Brian, who didn’t seem to want any part of the action.)

Every now and again, Otis would stop to examine an unusual object that had been placed in a tree or against a wall, motioning for us to do the same. We glided past a few performer-plants — someone handing out sketchbooks for us to draw a picture in and a guy who stood still in a clearing, holding a torch which spurted water, like a human water fountain. At one point, we stopped to look at some books that had been placed at the foot of a tree and Otis started doing yoga poses with a book in his hand. Most of us didn’t hesitate to undertake yoga poses with him for a few seconds before we danced off to the next curiosity.

All the while, the audio was going in our ears. But there was so much to look at that I didn’t really get much of a sense what the voices and sounds coming through were about. It had something to do with time travel. I later found out that the performance piece was conceived to be performed in the Dupont Circle neighborhood (that’s what the title of the show refers to.) It will be performed there later this summer and in the fall. I’m guessing that the references in the audio recording will make much more sense in that setting. In any case, I didn’t pay much attention to what I heard. What I liked about the experience was that it turned the neighborhood into a wonderland. It made me see things in a different way, beyond the usual buildings and trees and grass and passersby.

I already mentioned the third show of the day — Cecily and Gwendolyn’s Fantastical Capital Anthropological, Inquisitorial Probe. This production was the first I experienced in a conventional black box theatre space. It involved two performers pretending to be Victorian-era anthropologists traveling in time to 21st century America to study the people of that world. The performers’ fake upper-crusty British accents and white, ankle-length hoop skirts were a nice touch. And the discussion they created with the audience — in this case about education (which quickly devolved into a conversation about sex education) was gratifyingly interactive. The audience really did share their thoughts and happily got up to reenact the scene described above.

But I also found the schtick to predictable and I left thinking that I hadn’t learned a whole lot about anything much except that people apparently like to pay to be part of “scientific” experiments. What I did like, however, is the fact that the intrepid anthropologists are taking the opportunity to document their findings on a website, to which members of the public can also contribute. So the “performance” lives on in a fun and informative way through some measure of analysis.

OK. Now I’m off to the Goethe Institute for another day of fringing.

One of the great delights of working at The Library of Congress is being able to attend all manner of lectures on marvelously obscure subjects.

Yesterday’s fascinating jaunt through the cultural history of the piano accordion by musicologist Marion Jacobson was no exception.

Jacobson, who plays the accordion herself, has just published a book on the subject entitled Squeeze This: A Cultural History of the Accordion in America. I learned a great deal not only about the instrument over the course of an hour but also, more surprisingly, about American cultural history as a whole.

What intrigued me most was Jacobson’s case for the accordion as representing the “high brow-low brow” tension that symbolizes a lot of American culture.

Named from the Italian word “accordare,” meaning “to sound together,” the accordion’s flexibility as an instrument enables it to play a vast range of types of music, from works from the classical music cannon to circus music. It’s a more sociable, low-cost piano, a portable one-man-band.

For a while, it was taken pretty seriously as an instrument: Apparently NBC used to have a staff accordionist — Charles Magnante. There were entire accordion orchestras and accordion virtuosi were accorded rockstar status. Composers wrote concerto for accordion. High street studios opened up across the country for teaching the instrument. And in post-war America, sales of the piano accordion outpaced that of all other band instruments combined.”The piano accordion was a tool of upward mobility,” Jacobson said.

On the other hand, by the 1970s, having been dropped by mass audiences in favor of the guitar during the rock music explosion of the 1960s, the accordion became the butt of ridicule. In the 1980s and 90s, accordion-playing comedians like Weird Al Yankovic and Pete Barbutti helped to propagate a strong sense of the silly around the instrument. Jacobson shared some typical accordion quips:

Q: What do a lawsuit and an accordion have in common?
A: Everybody is happy when the case is closed.

Q: What’s the difference between an onion and accordion?
A: No one cries when you chop up an accordion.

Accordion teachers apparently saw rock music as a passing fad and refused to teach students how to adapt the instrument to suit a rock sensibility. One instrument maker tried to introduce a version of the accordion called a “rockordion” but it didn’t take off. It had fewer switches and reeds and a smaller range than a typical piano accordion, so seasoned accordionists didn’t take it seriously. For a time, the pop music industry was marked by celebrities who once played the accordion but stopped, like Connie Francis and Bill Haley. Others, notably John Lennon, still played. “But not publicly,” as Jacobson curtly put it.

Now, of course, the accordion is hip once again. In the Bay Area, which seems to be something of a hotbed for the accordion renaissance, the instrument has become synonymous with the artistic underground, especially the so-called “New Burlesque Movement”.

I personally am done with seeing groups of scantily clad twenty- and thirty-something girlies with accordions strapped to their corsets regaling audiences with “Lady of Spain” while dangling provocatively from low-slung trapezes. We get way too much of this kind of thing in the Bay Area.

What I’d like to witness is more high quality zydeco and Cajun music in my neighborhood. Oh, and it would be fantastic to experience the San Francisco Symphony doing an accordion concerto at Davies Symphony Hall.

The Daily Telegraph reports that sales of the Tallis Scholars’ recording of Thomas Tallis great, 40-art choral work, Spem In Alium, rapidly rose this week owing to readers of E L James’s erotic novel 50 Shades of Grey. From the story:

“The piece Spem in alium, sung by the Tallis Scholars is this week at number 7 in the official UK Classical Singles Chart.

The piece features in the novel by EL James. Readers who have bought the book have downloaded the song from iTunes, prompting the single to go from number 20 to number 13 to number 8 and then, this week, to number 7.”

It’s no news to the classical music industry that sex sells classical music. CD cases adorned with attractive classical artists in skimpy clothes have been de rigueur for the past 15 years or so.

But the case of Spem in Alium and 50 Shades of Grey puts a different spin on the this well trammeled belief. The point is this: With clever product placement, the classical music industry may be able to leverage the benefits of sex appeal without having to resort to the bare shoulders on CD covers (which, let’s face it, don’t make that much of a difference to sales figures anyway at the end of the day.)

50 Shades of Grey is doing wonders for the Tallis Scholars and the singers didn’t have to take their shirts off and wiggle for the camera. (Not that this group would ever consider marketing itself in this way!) Perhaps the classical music industry could start to more aggressively work with publishing houses, movie producers and television companies to have classical music products “placed” at strategic points in the narratives?

It would be a case of selling classical music using sex (or sports or whatever else catches the mass market’s eye) but less obviously like prostitution.

 

The first thing I did after I first landed on the East Coast in 1998 was attend the July 4 celebrations. I was just about to embark upon a fellowship year at Harvard and I have dim memories of standing on the banks of the Charles River listening to the Boston Pops Orchestra, eating hotdogs and seeing the lights.

I’ve celebrated many Independence Days since, eating burgers, drinking beer and watching fireworks in the San Francisco fog, mostly. I’ve always found the experience to be pleasant enough, but I never felt particularly strongly about this holiday. I have always liked Thanksgiving much more.

Yesterday’s July 4 experience was a little different however. For one thing, it was my first Independence Day as an American citizen. For another, it was my first in the nation’s capital.

Best of all, though, was the music. I spent a few hours late in the afternoon in the company of By & By, a Washington DC-based bluegrass band. The band was playing a concert on a temporary stage set up in Rose Park and I was transfixed. It was hot as a geisha’s kimono, but the band performed with verve and energy.

I particularly enjoyed Elise Smithmyer’s singing. I gather By & By is the vocalist’s first bluegrass group — she was mainly a soul songstress before joining the band. As such, Smithmyer has the high notes of a diva — she shoots straight from the hip. But she keeps the sound straight and unadorned, in the traditional folk style.

At one point, an audience member asked the group to sing a patriotic song for holiday. By & By obliged with a rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” that was clean and strong and proud. Smithmyer didn’t need Christina Aguilera’s melismas to make her point.

One of the things you don’t want to do in Washington DC in July or August is go outside. So it’s a good thing that the three buildings of The Library of Congress, where I am currently working for the summer on the Song of America project, are connected by a handy rabbit warren.

At lunchtime today, I burrowed beyond the almost windowless 1980s confines of the Madison Building where the Music Division is housed, to check out a couple of small exhibitions that caught my eye yesterday in the opulent, be-marbled Jefferson Building. (While burrowing my way back to base after lunch, I overheard someone say: ‘The Library of Congress is responsible for the most beautiful and the most ugly buildings on the whole of Capitol Hill.”)

First I visited Hope for America: Performance, Politics & Pop Culture, an exhibition which draws inspiration from comedian Bob Hope to draw attention to the links between politics and entertainment in the 20th century.

The exhibition packs a great deal into a snug space. There is information on everything from Bob Hope’s admiration of Lenny Bruce to John F Kennedy impersonators to the conflation of entertainment and news, most recently in the hands of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. I loved the photographs and videos and particularly enjoyed the several “jukeboxes” tucked away in corners, which allow visitors to browse topical audio recordings from the LOC archives. Great stuff.

Then I made a pit-stop in the Gershwin Room, an even smaller space dedicated to the music and lives of George and Ira Gershwin. The LOC Music Division is responsible for furnishing the room and it’s a tiny jewel.

Seeing the original manuscript of Porgy and Bess took my breath away. (I’m surprised in fact to have any breath left in me having spent part of the afternoon touring the Music Division stacks with one of the curators who allowed me to get up close and personal with the original scores — yikes! — of Brahms’  Violin Concerto, Mozart’s A Major Violin Concerto, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and drafts of Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics for “Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music. It was wonderful, also, to see George Gershwin’s Steinway and writing desk and a self-portrait by Ira Gershwin, depicting himself at the easel standing in his underwear. From the exhibition, one gets a very strong sense of the two personalities at stake here: George, a glamorous, raging furnace of a man who died at 38, and his quieter, more meticulous sibling, who lived till he was a very old man and obviously didn’t take himself very seriously.

Hesperus, an early music trio, rounded out the 2012 Washington DC Early Music Festival by performing a live soundtrack of assorted Medieval European music to a screening of the 1923 movie version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame starring Lon Chaney.

The musicians — Rosa Lamoreaux, Tina Chancey and Priscilla Smith — focused on monophonic music (a tune played on a recorder, shawm or voice, accompanied by a drone on a bagpipe or vielle, for example) which gave them the flexibility they needed to fit the music to what was going on on screen. It also helped the audience maintain a balanced focus on the music and the visuals, which would have been more difficult to do with a complex polyphonic soundtrack. (In earlier performances, Chancey told us, Hesperus used more polyphony and it proved to be less flexible and more distracting.)

The mixture of pieces by Guillaume de Machaut, Guillaume Dufay and Hildegard von Bingen as well as a bunch of stuff from 12-15th century Europe whose authors were unidentified, enlivened the movie. The performances by the members of Hesperus were nuanced and virtuoistic throughout.

On the other hand, Hunchback is already a heavily dramatic film. (Anne Midgette, the Washington Post’s classical music critic, who was in the audience last night, remarked after the screening ended that Hunchback is really a 19th century opera in disguise; even the title cards, which say things like “Assassin!” are Verdian in style.)

As such, the highly descriptive live soundtrack perhaps lays it on too thick. At times, the score veered the experience into the land of  kitsch. Jaunty salterellos and estampas gave the party scenes Monty Pythonesque proportions as actors in Medieval garb frolicked down Parisian streets. And hallowed Hildegard von Bingen chants (beautifully sung by Rosa Lamoreaux) added slightly schlocky gravitas to moments of churchly devotion.

I didn’t mind too much though. The Hesperus Hunchback is first and foremost a lot of fun. What an amazing, unexpected way to start my two month sojourn here in Washington DC!

And I have Twitter to thank for the experience. I sent out a tweet yesterday from the airport in San Francisco simply saying I was on my way East to work for the Library of Congress’s music division for the summer. When I landed, there was a tweet from @seatedovation (music scholar and critic Will Robin) saying that he too was in DC working at the Library of Congress for the summer. In the ensuing flurry of tweets that passed between us, Will told me about the Washington Early Music Festival. Bingo. It was fun to meet him in person there.