A bit of a con in that this title is a four CD box set, initially a six LP series, compiled from the performances of various artists. Well, I’m going anyway. Let’s talk about something important.
This is the music of history and ritual tradition, recorded at a certain point in time, frozen for posterity. A collection of striking field recordings put down by Alan Lomax in the American south of 1959, over two summer months of travel from Virginia to the Ozarks to the Delta to the Georgia Sea Islands.
The music he captured is naked humanity. It is simultaneously raw tradition and raw expression. Simultaneously completely relatable and totally alien (at least to this yankee), it has many qualities of history/anthropology injected into the music.
Mostly small scale performances that would fall into the folk and blues idioms, the music is drawn from traditions in the mountains, bayou, prisons, fields and elsewhere. The original disc titles are: Sounds of the South, Blue Ridge Mountain Music, Roots of the Blues, Blues Roll On, Negro Church Music, White Spirituals, and American Folk Songs for Children.
The massed hymns of the Negro Church Music/White Spirituals disc are likely my favorite by a slim margin. Perhaps due to their disembodied, communal character and borderline creepiness, they are unironic and rawly heartfelt. The children’s folks songs disc is unique, with rarely recognizable songs. Anecdotally, much of this music was sampled by Moby, most prominently “Trouble So Hard”, for his “Play” album.
Certain elements are under/unrepresented (native songs, dance songs) but this remains the finest collection of American music on record, easily surpassing the justly famous Anthology of American Folk Music compiled by Harry Smith. The fact that it remains out of print is purely criminal. The humanity in this music reveals itself completely and transparently. When Mrs. Mary Lee and her congregation intone “Jesus Is Real to Me”, the power of their beliefs is apparent and astounding.
Il Greenwood is a music lover, opera lover, and guitarist extraordinaire residing in Baltimore.
Click here for Der Thobaben's Contribution Click here for Doundou Tchil's Contribution Click here for Eta Boris's Contribution Click here for HaWinograd's Contribution Click here for Le Malon's Contribution Click here for Atomic Sam's Contribution
Click here for La Swaynos's Contribution Click here for Boulezian's Contribution Click here for HaZmora's Contribution Click here for The McBee's Contribution Click here for Le Drgon's Contribution Click here for The Brannock's Contribution Click here for The Danny's Contribution Click here for The Drioux's contribution Click here for El Reyes's contribution Click here for My contribtuion
It’s the word “favorite,” though. None of these are my favorite. Some of them, in fact, make me feel sort of awful. Certain pieces often remind me of the times in which I sought refuge in them. Music has been at best my therapy, at worst my retreat. There is one record, however, that returns me to perhaps the best and smallest moment of my life.
I listen to Weather Report’s Heavy Weather maybe once a year. Maybe. If frequency of experience is a barometer of “favorite,” then this album hasn’t been a favorite of mine since 2001. The reason I don’t listen to it often, however, is because I can hear it in my head just as clearly as I could in my headphones. The number of times I hear Heavy Weather per year is startling and almost subliminal. I hear bits of this album hundreds of times a year, and in thinking about this essay, I’ve realized why. My subconscious mind remembers something very important and powerful about the album and it really, really wants my active mind to remember as well.
For the uninitiated, let’s talk about the band and album for a minute. Weather Report was a jazz fusion powerhouse that, like most others in the genre, came out of the Bitches Brew sessions under Miles Davis. Joe Zawinul (keyboard instruments) co-founded the group with Wayne Shorter (saxophones).
Their music began as sprawling, esoteric, atmospheric funk jams and gradually became more melodic. In 1976, they recruited Jaco Pastorius to fill the bass chair. Jaco had made a name for himself playing with Pet Metheny and Joni Mitchell. I could go on and on about this guy, but suffice it to say that Jaco is the greatest electric bass player who ever was, and if you don’t know, you should.
Heavy Weather, released in 1977, was their first with Jaco on every track. It was a commercial success, largely because of the Zawinul-penned “Birdland.” The song, and its cover by Manhattan Transfer, launched the record all the way up to #30 on the Billboard Charts, which is unheard of territory for a jazz fusion group. “Birdland” is catchy and worth a YouTube, but is not my favorite.
The thing that fascinates me most about the album is its extreme use of space. The amount of space is vast, both horizontally (time) and vertically (texture/sonority). The second track “A Remark You Made” begins with a soupy synthesizer mix. The first chords, once played, simply hang in the air like mist while they dissipate. It is a sound that makes me feel alone. Not lonely; solitary.
This type of sound can be found in many places. “Teen Town,” the bass showcase, is a favorite of mine, less because I am a bass player but again because of the comfort the band has with space. “Harlequin,” “Palladium,” and “The Juggler” all do similar things. The music, even when loud, fills me with quiet somehow. “The Juggler,” in particular, is a great example of how a band with so many 1970s patch cable synths can remarkably sound like a rain forest. Wooden, watery. This music anticipates and bests the “world music” aesthetic that many 80s pop acts would adopt.
The final track, “Havona,” was written by Jaco and features his best solo. The notes throughout the entire piece come fast and furious, and something interesting happens here. Most times, fast music sounds manic and tense. Sometimes, with a gifted compositional touch, fast music sounds ebullient.
Rarer still, a composer or group will understand how to make fast music sound like air, or like water over a rock. Steve Reich accomplishes this in his seminal Music for 18 Musicians. This type of aesthetic takes time to form, time to write and arrange, and it also takes the exactly right kind of performance.
(Havona)
This brings me to my moment. It was May of 2000. I was perhaps a week away from my high school graduation. It was a busy time, like it is for everyone: prom, AP exams, the school play, last jazz band concerts of the year, and so on. I finished a random night’s (Wednesday?) events at school that evening and hopped in my 1992 Buick Century to head home. Nothing about the evening was noteworthy, with the exception of the weather. May in Ohio can sometimes be like early March everywhere else, but this particular evening was exquisite. The sun had just set and the air was starting to cool. I put the windows down and “Havona” just happened to come on my car stereo.
There has to be a better way to describe the way I felt. My mind became completely uncluttered. I had no thoughts - not even my usual self-conscious awareness of not having thoughts. I have never been one to feel truly relaxed. My inner monologue seems to only stop when I’m exercising or playing an instrument, and most times not even then. I have struggled with anxiety my whole life, and I seem to be forever possessed by imagining what worst-case scenario the next moment has in store. My mind, without careful management, is perpetually falling forward, and I lose the present. It is very frustrating at times and is a 31 year work in progress.
Heavy Weather is beloved by many for many grand reasons: its implications about the fusion of jazz and rock, its cultural and ethnic diversity, its crossover appeal, its ability to endure. People go apeshit for Jaco’s solos, for Joe’s synthesizer textures, for Wayne’s sinewy soprano sax lines. It is beloved by me because, for a moment when I was 18, its sound coalesced with the still, springtime air in Ohio and I felt completely present. It was a mystical, transitory moment; gone before I had realized it had occurred.
I struggle with fully remembering how to feel this way, but Heavy Weather prevents me from fully forgetting.
Der Thobaben used to write “classical” music and play in a band full time. He now lives a much happier life, always in pursuit of Sophrosyne. Click here for Doundou Tchil's Contribution Click here for Eta Boris's Contribution Click here for HaWinograd's Contribution Click here for Le Malon's Contribution Click here for Atomic Sam's Contribution
Click here for La Swaynos's Contribution Click here for Boulezian's Contribution Click here for HaZmora's Contribution Click here for The McBee's Contribution Click here for Le Drgon's Contribution Click here for The Brannock's Contribution Click here for The Danny's Contribution Click here for The Drioux's contribution Click here for El Reyes's contribution Click here for My contribtuion
Who would have thought that a world which only one-hundred years ago seemed so hidebound to rational explanations would not only become in thrall to the infinite, but also in thrall to the infinite because of rational explanations?
In one sense at least, this is the most exciting time in which to live since The Middle Ages. The contents of the world are, yet again, entirely unknown. The perfect harmonies in the Age of Newton and Kepler are replaced by the dissonant anxieties in the Age of Einstein and Heisenberg. And with this age comes the chaos of guesswork - our greatest certainties being not of our place in the universe but in what we see on earth, because more than the Age of Einstein, this is the Age of Darwin.
The Middle Ages was an era of extreme optimism when people joyfully proclaimed their disregard for the agonizing squalor of their world as but a mere trial before the joys of the world to come. This post-modern age is an era when people agonizingly embrace the manifold joys of the moment with the knowledge that those joys may not exist a minute from now, and may never exist again. In both cases, and for diametrically opposed reasons, life has taken on the quality of a carnival or a vaudeville show, in which anything can happen from moment to moment. Nothing in the Middle Ages was recorded, and therefore everything could be believed. Almost all music, all stories, all human thought existed almost completely in oral tradition. Who was to say that one version of a story was more true than another? All stories were equally unprovable, and therefore all stories about the world had to be believed. Today, everything is recorded: everybody’s music, everybody’s writings, everybody’s movies, everybody’s thoughts. Everybody's movements are recorded online, and everything online can be doctored to suit people’s purposes, therefore our instinct is to believe as much in nothing as Medieval Man’s instinct was to believe in everything.
I recently heard an NPR piece about the tremendous upswing in popularity for a pilgrimage in Spain called the Way of St. James. The pilgrims walk across Northern Spain to the monestary where it's alleged that one of the twelve apostles is buried. In the Middle Ages, such pilgrimages were made by foot and with the flimsiest of footwear. A pilgrimage which today’s Christians could do in a few hours would take more than a decade for yesterday’s, and held no guarantee that the pilgrims would survive to return home. A pilgrimage was the ultimate adventure - a trek into utterly unknown woods, with grave chances for disease, violence, death, excitement and adventure along the way. And for those who were not soldiers, it was their only chance for such adventure. Unless people went on pilgrimage or to war, their existence was completely stationary - plowing the same crops, walking the same trails, seeing the same views every day for their entire lives. Existence was monotonous.
Compared to any previous era of human history, our existence is the precise opposite of monotonous. What is today’s city but an urban forest; in which excitements lie in store for us on every corner, and dangers beyond our imaginings await should we stray down the wrong path? We live far longer than our predecessors, and we also die of disease for far longer. We can view every piece of the earth by satellite, we can mechanize every work process, we can ameliorate every irritation. Perhaps life has grown so exciting, that it’s become... monotonous?
The world is no longer a mystery. And as life becomes less of a mystery, we attempt to find ways to ways to make it so. In order to truly contemplate the mysterious, we have to turn toward things we truly don’t know. So we look to space, or to the sea, or to nature, or perhaps again to the divine. Eventually, perhaps space and the sea will be as well-mapped as the earth. And every time we venture out into the sea or into nature, we have modern provisions to ensure that our experience of it holds nothing like the dangers - and therefore, nothing like the excitement - of our forefathers. All that remains for human beings to revive their sense of purpose in this world is religion, and perhaps the remote possibility of space travel. But who can doubt that even space travel, should it ever happen on a large scale, would eventually be as child proofed as any jungle gym? However, were we to evolve past religion, would humans have the purposefulness to survive even another hundred years?
I would like to think so, and yet I doubt it. No matter what their religion or creed, too many people need a sense that their life’s petty frustrations and deep agonies are undertaken for a purpose. Without that sense of purpose, what reason would so many unfulfilled people have to carry on their struggle to make their lives better? And without that sense of purpose, even the rewards of such a struggle make life nothing more than a series of petty frustrations. It is especially in our era, when so many lives are consumed merely by frustrations and malaise, that the world asks: why do we go on? The people who experience deep agony look at the merely frustrated with seething rage, while the merely frustrated don’t enjoy their good fortune enough to defend it. Decadence breeds war, which breeds rebirth, and the life cycle of human civilization starts over again just as it has so many times before. In the meantime, these Christians will walk the Way of St. James. They're no less decadent than the rest of us, so this pilgrimage will take a week or two. They will fly to the trail's beginning point, without taking twenty years to walk from their country of origin. If they like, they sleep in hotels along the way, or at least sleep in a strong tent next to an artificial campfire. They can take bathroom breaks at very least in a port-o-potty, and they can visit all sorts of gift shops along the way to buy presents for the family members they'll see again next week. But maybe, just maybe, a few of them will truly experience some small semblance of the stillness and illogic which life once held for our ancestors - and if they do, it will be the most exciting moment of their lives.
Schütz was born one hundred years before J S Bach. He studied with Monteverdi, which probably makes him a link between the Italian and German baroque. Yet he was a Protestant, in an era where people killed each other over religion. He lived through the Thirty Years War, perhaps the most savage conflict Europe experienced before the 20th century. Millions were killed. Entire regions were devastated. Although Schütz worked for the Elector of Saxony in relative comfort, the world around him had been in turmoil since the Reformation. That kind of concentrates the mind. For Schütz, comfort was not a given. He writes glorious polyphony, but his beliefs were forged in fire.
Schütz's music is austere and deeply expressive. When you listen to things like Psalmen Davids or Musikalische Exequien you feel like you are totally alone in the darkness, sustained by faith in a power beyond human comprehension. Schütz founded what is now the Staatskappelle Dresden but he didn't have job security. When he fell,out of favour, he became impoverished. His family died young. He lived until the age of 87 which in those days was like Methuselah.
The first time I heard the Aufersthungshistorie was on a broadcast from the composer's beloved Dresden, it was like a kind of epiphany. I can't explain it, but the music shone out like a blast of light, illuminating everything with a kind of pure spiritual clarity. I don't follow Schütz's religion yet it moved me in a way I've never been able to rationalize.Maybe he connects to something very deep in the human soul penetrating past the trappings off church and society.
Schütz's Resurrection Story is written for simple forces. It is an interplay between the Evangelist and choir of youthful voices, supported by a cache of different violas de gambe and positive organ. Speaking about Bible-based music, a friend of mine recently said "We all know the story". What is so moving about Schütz's version is that it feels vivid, fresh, immediate. Until very recently, the Bible had been in Latin, not in German. It must still have felt shocking to hear Jesus depicted by a group of young male voices, their voices weaving like shimmering light. We're so used to Bach now, that we take Evangelists for granted. But Schütz's Evangelist tells the story in clear, direct terms, as if he's recounting something amazing happening right before his eyes. Even though the story itself is so well known we take it for granted, it IS amazing. A man defies death itself and rises to glory.
Schütz's Auferstehungshistorie is so uplifting (editor's note: it is available on Spotify). In my running days I'd jog along listening to it as I ran. after an hour I was pretty whacked but then the glorious finale would kick in. Gott sei dank! sings the choir, in multiple harmonies, while the tenor soars above all Victoria! Victoria!, and the chorus joins in splendidly woven polyphony. No matter how tired I was, when that finale came on, suddenly I'd speed up before collapsing in joyous ecstasy. I can't run now, and I won't live to be 87. But when I'm decrepit and on the point of death, I suspect that "Victoria! Victoria!" will ring in my soul. That's why I love the Peter Schreier recording above all others : He sounds genuinely excited, for nothing quite like this has ever happened before. Just days before, Jesus's followers had seen him die on the cross. Now suddenly he appears in their midst, speaks and even shares a meal with them. No wonder they can't believe their eyes. So Jesus sings "Sehet meine Hände und meine Füsse! Ich bin er selbst!" The voices bounce up and down with joy. Schreier's Evangelist creates a glowing aura like glanzende Kleider, around the other parts, for this is a miracle, not something prosaic. This performance is as unblasé as you can imagine.
The recording was made in 1972, in the dark days of the DDR when faith was perhaps as dangerous as it had been in Schütz's time. Even if the performers didn't share the composer's beliefs they knew who he was and what he stood for in early 17th century Dresden. You can hear clips from the whole Schreier recording, on the www.jpc.dewebsite, and perhaps elsewhere. One of the male sopranos (singing Jesus and Mary Magdelene) is Olaf Bär, who's now a respected baritone. Another reason for tracking down the Schreier version is that it was made in Dresden, whetre the Schutz tradition is very, very strong. What's more Schierer, who sings the Evanfgelist was the son asnd grandson of Kappelmeisters and a choirboy like Schutz was hundreds of years before. In February 1945, the ancient city of Dresden was destroyed by a firebom raid - totally unneccessary as it was a hospital and refuggee town. Young Schreier and the other choirboys were sheltering in a cellar, and escaped the mayhem. They were of course scared witless, worried about their families outside. Then their Kappellmeister told them to sing and they threw their hearts into it. Doundou Tchil is an internationally renowned music blogger and critic who blogs at http://classical-iconoclast.blogspot.com/
Click here for HaWinograd's Contribution Click here for Le Malon's Contribution Click here for Atomic Sam's Contribution
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I went to see Verdi’s Rigoletto yesterday afternoon at the Baltimore Lyric Opera. My date and I agreed that it was, in most ways, a very good performance. The Rigoletto and the Duke had fantastic voices, the Baltimore Symphony was in the pit and featured some magnificent work - especially in the brass section, and the conductor generally kept things quite taut with extremely brisk but flexible tempos. But even so, it was a performance that was lacking. Gilda, like so many sopranos today, had a distractingly wide vibrato which no amount of intelligent singing could disguise. The chorus was simply haggard - half the time they didn’t seem to know the words, but they didn’t have much of a chance because the conductor set tempos so fast that the words would never register anyway. No singer not among the five principles could be heard over the orchestra. The sets and costumes were traditional in the extreme, and Verdi designed Rigoletto for a company precisely like the one we have in Baltimore, just as he did most all of his operas before 1860. If a company like the Baltimore Lyric Opera can’t capture the true spirit of Verdi’s Rigoletto, can anybody do it anymore?
One day, I’ll do a much more specific post about Verdi. But there are one or two points to make. Verdi’s operas, particularly his early and middle-period operas are not ‘operas’ in the classic sense of Monteverdi and Gluck - which try to revive the Greek ideal of a ‘total art work’, in which drama’s used to combine the most exquisite parts of every artform. Verdi is ‘popera’, which has far more in common with the Broadway musical than it ever did with high-fallutin’ attempts to revive classical antiquity. In this way, Verdi is a great dramatist in the tradition of Shakespeare, Moliere, and Mozart before him, or Stravinsky and Sondheim after him. All of these men were geniuses, but their genius was rooted not in creating the ideal drama in their head. They were all true theater professionals firstly, and because they understood theater, they used their knowledge of the theater to create extraordinary results. They thrived on the limitations of their performers, and were able to accommodate their works to the practical realities of producing an evening’s entertainment the way a tailor does a suit. Each singing part is written especially for the singer who premiered it, each orchestral part for the particular capabilities of the orchestra. Just as Shakespeare would never have written Antony and Cleopatra had he not had a great boy actor to play the Egyptian Queen, Mozart would never have written The Queen of the Night’s famous aria had he not had a soprano with a truly amazing coloratura (who happened to be his sister-in-law).
(“Wrong baby in the fire.” This scene from Il Trovatore should, by all rights, be perhaps the dumbest scene in all of opera. But Verdi’s music (starting 4 minutes in particularly) makes it so much more powerful than it should be. You almost believe it.)
Let’s face it, when it came to brainpower, Verdi’s drama was probably more lacking than any other great theatrical creator. But short of Shakespeare, no man of the theater has ever been greater at creating drama. It is absolutely astounding how often you can find yourself profoundly moved and shaken by Verdi, even as you’re laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.
Verdi is a practical man of the theater, and like all practical playwrights, his plays were designed to play just as well - if not better - to provincial galleys as at the imperial theaters. There is something about a performance of early-to-middle Verdi at a great opera house that usually feels too smooth, too easy on the ears, too thoughtful to come to life. The music is simply too threadbare, too oom-pah-pah, too reminiscent of a village band, to be played with sheen. I want to see Aida at the Met, but I'd venture that Nabucco or Ernani would be more enjoyable in my back yard. The singing and playing has to be like Verdi's music, crude and red-blooded. It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to be effective. Verdi is popular music, and like the best of today’s popular culture, you can easily find yourself caught up in a drama which you know is ridiculous, and moved very easily by what you see and hear, even as you realize that it’s completely absurd. Later Verdi, like Otello and Falstaff, is written for the great houses, and requires the ministrations of a great conductor and orchestra. But even Rigoletto and Il Trovatore are practically conductor proof when the singers are great. Operas is the realm of the singer, and great opera singing can thrill as no other artform can. If the singing is no good, why are we listening?
There is a paradox in Verdi - a paradox which is true about all the great theater composers, but particularly so in Verdi’s case. You would think that Verdi lends himself well to a more theatrical experience in which every dramatic gesture is rethought for maximum coherence, but such an approach renders Verdi bloodless and endows him with a brain his operas don’t have. Because Verdi’s music is already so theatrical, he must be played as music first, theater second. No wonder opera's become so unpopular...
It’s commonly known that we opera-lovers live in the ‘Age of the Director’. People are no longer much thrilled by great opera singing, in no small part because singers today are simply not as thrilling. But it could never be any other way: we’re a visual culture, we’re more accustomed to movies than music, and even our pop music usually requires lyrics in order for people to listen. Opera, like everything else today, becomes more of a visual experience than an aural one, and the music often seems relegated to soundtrack status as it accompanies whatever goes onstage.
For 400 years, opera fundamentally existed with the barest trappings of theater. Yes, the great opera houses often had extremely lavish sets and costumes. But nobody insisted on a huge amount of coherence. Every attempt by composers to make opera more coherent, whether by Wagner, or by Gluck, or by Janacek, or even by Monteverdi at its founding, resulted not in greater naturalism but seeming still more mannered and even more ridiculous. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but Opera is resistant to any effort to make it anything less dumb than it is. If you put too much thought into it, you simply neuter everything that’s great about opera. But when you let opera be opera, the effect is extraordinary - an effect which most of America and Europe used to understand quite well.
Through the scratchy recording horns, we can hear dim vestiges of Italian opera in something resembling its prime. It’s tough to be certain about what we’re hearing, but what we hear is sort of miraculous. What we hear is Verdi singers who have far more secure techniques - with far less warbling, far clearer diction, and far more security up and down their registers. We also hear singers who were far more free and passionate in their interpretations, and yet they also obeyed many markings far more often. They didn’t have directors instructing them about every nuance on the stage - if because if they were great singers, it didn’t matter how they looked, and they acted with their voices. They simply cared more and gave much more thought to what they sang than their later equivalents. There are many things which contemporary opera does better than in former generations - most significantly , we now have 400 years of repertoire rather than five composers (for fifty years, opera basically meant Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, and Strauss). But it can’t be denied that in Verdi and Wagner, the very core of the operatic repertoire, today’s results are abysmal when compared to even half-a-century ago.
(Caruso, still the most popular tenor of the 20th century, singing the rabble-rouser Di Quella Pira - with laser-like intonation, pacing right on Verdi’s metronome mark, and amazing high notes. In our day, Caruso’s kind of singing is so impossible that even a great tenor like Placido Domingo can’t sing this in tune or tempo.)
And if we’re to believe accounts from a hundred years ago, the singers of the first recorded generation (Caruso, Ruffo, Ponselle et al) were mere shadows of those who came before them. Before the era of movies, opera singers were the movie stars of their eras - their social lives followed in newspapers in much the same way People Magazine follows Adele or Justin Bieber. It would appear that the greatest opera singers were so good that they inflamed their public to infatuation which even today’s most important entertainers would find hard to top. Today’s era calls opera an elitist artform, and it’s often wondered if it was always elitist, or is it as popular as people say it once was? The answer, of course, is ‘both.’
Opera, like film after it, can sometimes be an elitist artform, but it was also a popular form with much that appealed to lower classes. To be sure, there were composers throughout history like Wagner and Monteverdi and Lully who were discussed endlessly by contemporaries with intellectual aspirations - much as Bergman and Kubrick and Fellini were in the 20th century. There were also operatic songs by composers who had almost purely populist appeal like Paolo Tosti, which could perhaps be called the MTV music videos of their day because of their mass appeal and unavoidable presence in the lives of a certain era (or certain eras) in Italy. And just as many filmmakers - like Coppola, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford - found ways to appeal to both the masses and the intellectuals, there were many great opera and song composers who mastered the art of appealing to both connoisseur and mass - like Handel, Mozart (at least posthumously), Schubert (ditto), Schumann, Bizet (ditto), Dvorak, Faure, Richard Strauss, Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten....
There are an enormous number of similarities between opera and the Broadway Musical. Perhaps people will soon think of the Musical as the ‘new opera.’ But the difference between operas and musicals is that opera places its emphasis on music first, text second. In musicals, it’s the other way around. We live in an era that demands coherent plots, and you will not get such a thing from most of the great operas. Coherence is not the point of opera. The point of opera is to attach the deep feelings which one derives from a piece of music to specific situations. A composer and his ‘librettist’ (text writer) make those situations as specific as they can, but coherence must take a backseat to immediacy. Hopefully, those situations hit a nerve in you, and if it does, then the theatrical experience is almost unbearably moving. It was only in the 20th century that electronic amplification could guarantee that every word a singer sings could be heard. Opera singers used to do the best they could to make themselves understood while singing (and their diction was much better than today’s singers), but subtitles have obliterated the need to be understood at all, and so singers pay much less attention to diction than they once did. Everything in opera is now subservient to the visual experience and making opera as coherent a narrative as any movie. Our priorities are fully backwards, and the result is that opera is dumber than ever.
(From 1928. A Rigoletto with a bunch of Italian second string singers and a second string conductor, who bring much, much more character and good singing, better pacing, and more coherent enunciation than you can find anywhere today. In no way perfect, but made of a greatness we'll never hear live.)
Of all the NBC Thursday night shows of its generation, The Office was the best. None of these shows were truly and consistently ‘great’, but every one of them was a stellar attempt to make something better than an assembly line sitcom. And of all of them, perhaps The Office was easily the best. 30 Rock got justified plaudits for artistic consistency and integrity which The Office often lacked, but it was able to be so consistent because Tina Fey’s sensibility was always PG and tied to the ridiculousness of sketch comedy. Community was allegedly more intelligent; perhaps it was but for all Community’s high-concept humor, the show was never as funny as its most vocal supporters allege - and sometimes just clever in a way that’s humorlessly pretentious. Parks and Recreation is a wonderful show, but its aims are both smaller and larger than The Office. Parks and Rec often strains to show the entirety of the American political landscape within the confines of a small midwestern town’s government bureaucracy. It’s amazing how often Parks and Rec succeeds at doing precisely that, but it’s still not as amazing as The Office.
(My all-time favorite clip.)
Pam got it exactly right in the show’s last line when she observed that the most beautiful things are often the most ordinary. What makes The Office work, in country after country apparently, is that it’s concept is so universal - the workplace and the weird people who populate it - that it can be fleshed out with people so numbingly specific to the country in which it airs that each country could easily be people with whom they work, or live next to, or a relative. And every time The Office strains credulity with the over-the-topness of its antics, we have to wonder, are so many people we know less ridiculous?
(Dwight’s speech. Terrible sound, but probably the show’s emblematic scene...)
Let’s leave aside all the obvious flaws for a moment and the places where The Office went severely wrong, because it’s so strange to think about how rare a show like The Office is. Here is a TV show which had thirty main characters over nine years and well over a hundred secondary characters which longtime watchers could identify by name, and virtually all of them played excellently by their actors. The Office is a world so detailed that it couldn’t be anywhere else, and yet it was exactly like everywhere we’ve ever known. And like everywhere we know, it shows a business culture on an inexorable path to self-destruction. The world of The Office was a perfect indictment of contemporary America, made just in time for the greatest recession of our lives.
(Michael v. Toby)
The Office was a comedy, but it was a comedy in the minorest key imaginable. In many ways, the show was still darker than the British version upon which it was founded. The British Office was pure misanthropy. It saw its characters as irredeemably flawed and banal, completely deserving of their mediocrity. It had a very British conceit that these workers should ‘know their place’, and therefore asked for all their humiliations by aspiring to be more than they were. The American Office, inconsistent and sloppy as the British version was reliable, is a far more ambitious comedy. It began on the premise that all things are possible in America, and then asks why life is not better than it is. If the American Dream exists, then why has nobody lived it?
Rolling Stone referred to The Office as the emblematic show of our time. I wouldn’t quite go that far (especially now that Arrested Development returns next week), but I would say that The Office, during its many best moments, was more than that. It was the most American goddamn thing on TV.
And it wasn’t just America, it was pure Pennsylvania too. Every one of the NBC comedies had a character that existed in a life past the 2-D cardboardness of pure sitcomery (even good sitcoms). In 30Rock, it was Jack Donaghy. In Parks and Recreation, it’s Ron Swanson. In The Office, it was, obviously, Dwight Schrute.
Dwight Schrute is the scariest man on television. Dwight is not a villain, but he was a perfect explanation of how Americans become villains. Dwight Schrute is the American ‘system’ gone awry, with self-reliance gone into caricature, corporate hierarchies becoming a fetish, intelligence finding its worst applications, and family upbringing making you completely unprepared for the modern world’s complexities. He is perhaps the most specifically drawn character of his time, and when we enter the world of Dwight Schrute, we enter a world in which the rules of reality bend almost 90 degrees. If you want to understand the Tea Party, look no further than Dwight.
But you could expound in the same way about Stanley, or Oscar, or Phyllis, or Jan, or Creed, or Meredith, or David Wallace, or Bob Vance, or Mose (!!!), or the fantastic stupidity of Kevin (you don’t really need Kevin, but come on...), or even Jim and Pam - perhaps the sole believably functional marriage in TV history, and a genuine inspiration for couples looking to make it work everywhere in American cities and towns where the people around them are just as ridiculous as those at Dunder Mifflin.
But ultimately, even in his absence, it was Michael Scott’s show. The Office was a show about incompetence, and there was no one in the world more incompetent than Michael Scott. If Dwight is how Americans become villains, then Michael is the reason that villains like Dwight will take over America. Dwight is now Dunder Mifflin's boss, and while the show softened him at the end, how long are we really expected to believe this 'nice Dwight' will last before he begins a reign of lightening terror that ends in a zero hour orgy of blood? For all his terrible qualities, and perhaps because of them, it is impossible to dislike Michael. But it’s Michael Scott’s very gullibility that both makes him a terrible boss, and inevitably the man who becomes the boss. Like so many Americans in today’s world, he believes that the very best which life has to offer is his for the taking, and can never understand just how wrong he is. It was the perfect role for Steve Carell, who has got to be Hollywood’s most gifted improviser, and he set the tone for dozens of actors to stretch their capabilities in one of the great ‘actors’ shows’ there has ever been. When you hear about the other people considered for Michael’s role - Paul Giamatti, Martin Short, Bob Odenkirk, Hank Azaria - it becomes interesting to think about how different the show might become. Only Odenkirk could have brought even a sliver of the same bumbling genius to the role - Giamatti would have been too serious (and a waste of a truly great actor), Martin Short too hammy, Hank Azaria too placid. It’s a shame that Steve Carell now wastes his abilities on focus-tested paydays, because there’s a frenzy of underused talent in that actor which only The Office used properly.
The Office first appeared in 2005 - which will perhaps be remembered as television’s ‘Golden Age’, an age when The Sopranos, The Wire, Arrested Development, South Park, Deadwood, and Curb Your Enthusiasm were operating at peak form. When Arrested Development comes back next week, we’ll see whether that ‘Golden Age’ can revive its magic ten years later. Arrested Development was a show from the early Bush years, when savage fears of a world we didn’t understand required savage satire (more on that in the weeks to come hopefully). The Office premiered in 2005, and became America’s best-known show around 2007. It was a show from the period when we Americans had to accept that the world was changing, and that America was completely ill-equipped to deal with the world as it was now constituted. There is nothing that becomes contemporary America like ineptitude, and no piece of art which showed better just how inept we are.
Picking an album is hard. Neko Case is absolutely fantastic - she is probably my favorite vocalist working today. Her voice is spellbinding. Her writing is powerful and haunting and moving all without being too heady or overly complex. However, there is almost any album by Calexico. Or Mutiny on the Bay by the Dead Kennedys. Or Nevermind.
The reason I am picking Fox Confessor is that it played a significant role in two of the most important romantic relationships I've ever had.
The first was a three-year relationship, the longest I've ever had. By the third year, I think most relationships either begin to turn into something great and lasting, or are dying the slow death of malaise, frustration, and claustrophobia. We were the latter. We didn't fight. Nothing was obviously wrong, except nothing really felt right either. At about this time, I picked up this album. One of the songs, That Teenage Feeling has these lines:
And nothing comforts me the same As my brave friend who says: "I don't care if forever never comes 'Cause I'm holding out for that teenage feeling,"
This short song encapsulated every fear, every longing, every anxiety, everything I've grown to miss in a dying relationship with a wonderful person who simply wasn't meant for me. If there was a singular first crystal-clear moment of realization that things had to end, it was when I listened to this song's lyrics.
The second relationship came a few months later. I became involved with a woman from New Orleans. It was brief, but fiercely intense. Where the previous relationship simply faded into nothingness, this one ended with a crater so hurtful it took us almost two years to speak to each other.
At one point, she had sent me a mixed CD. That Teenage Feeling was on it. When I saw this title on the track listing, my heart, my breathing, my mind all stopped in shock of something so impossibly perfect and wonderful. This seemed so improbable I could imagine seeing it in a poorly written movie and chuckling about it. And yet.
So there it is. That's my story of Fox Confessor.
Cheers,
Boris Eta Boris is a scientist and dancer in Washington and possessor of a particularly Russian Soul. Click here for HaWinograd's Contribution Click here for Le Malon's Contribution Click here for Atomic Sam's Contribution
Click here for La Swaynos's Contribution Click here for Boulezian's Contribution Click here for HaZmora's Contribution Click here for The McBee's Contribution Click here for Le Drgon's Contribution Click here for The Brannock's Contribution Click here for The Danny's Contribution Click here for The Drioux's contribution Click here for El Reyes's contribution Click here for My contribtuion
