Monday, March 29, 2021

Underrated Classical Musicians: Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra

Speaking of student orchestras, here's one even younger than a student orchestra. The Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, under Ben Zander, who may be the greatest youth orchestra conductor of all time, and that is surely a designation of great distinction. This is, quite simply, stunning, better than so much highly praised Mahler, alert to hundreds, even thousands of details that pass by so many professional Mahlerians. It contains the all-important glow of inward spirit without which music has little to no meaning, a performance as alert to the forces of life as the forces of music. In this music, played by youth and guided by a senior citizen, we hear Mahler the seer, the visionary whose music seemed foretell so much which soon occurred. This is the Resurrection as it should always be played - a prophecy of death and life, war and peace, forgiveness in the face of unforgivable sins. It does nothing less than remind you of what it truly means to live in the world, and it reminds you that the Resurrection Symphony is more than just a shallow piece of bombast, but truly one of the great total musical visions that take the entire community of musical instruments to reach for all things of the heavens and the earth - journeying through all spheres of life with Beethoven's 9th and Missa Solemnis, Monteverdi Vespers, Bach's B-Minor Mass and Passions, Wagner's Ring, Berliioz's Troyens, Mendelssohn's Elijah, Schumann's Paradise and Peri, Hindemith's Harmonies of the World, Nielsen's Saul and David, Janacek's Glagolitic Mass and Cunning Little Vixen, Dvorak's Saint-Ludmilla, Langgaard's Music of the Spheres and Antikrist, Golijov's St. Mark Passion, Tan Dun's The Map, James MacMillan's St. John Passion, Penderecki's St. Luke Passion and Seven Gates of Jerusalem and Utrenja, Bolcom's Songs of Innocence and Experience, Berio's Sinfonia, Schnittke's First Symphony and History of Faust, Haydn's Creation and Seasons, Messiaen's La Transfiguration and Saint-François, so very many by Handel and Schütz, and to say nothing of Mahler's symphony that immediately followed this one....
And insofar as this performance has mistakes (like when the percussionist drops his sticks just after the first movement climax) they're, for once, mistakes of enthusiasm, not mistakes of distraction or incompetence. I will come back to Ben Zander and do a fuller profile, a conductor whose music making means so much more than so many highly praised jet setting professionals, but for the moment: THIS... IS... MUSIC!!!!
....I promised myself I wouldn't make another list....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrvFohoThHE

Sunday, March 28, 2021

Underrated Classical Music: Israel in Egypt

Bach belongs to Christianity. But since you gentiles are doing such a piss poor job as custodians of Handel, Handel belongs to us. There are a full dozen oratorios by Handel on the level of Messiah, almost all of which are played with rarity, likely because they're about Old Testament subjects, and some of which have one important quality that should sell them to anybody: they're shorter than Messiah.
Make no mistake, Messiah is towering, but it's perceived that Messiah is a miracle because it was written in twenty-four days, but that's often how it sounds like it was written. You can almost hear Handel on deadline, realizing he had no part three ready and deciding to pad it by stretching out The Trumpet Shall Sound to twelve minutes.
Handel's oratorios are cornerstones of the music world as important as Mozart Operas, Beethoven Sonatas, Haydn Symphonies, Stravinsky Ballets, Shostakovich Quartets, Bartok Pedagogic Pieces, Messiaen Organ Catalogues, Schubert songs, Chopin Piano Miniatures, Monteverdi Madrigals, Tallis Motets, Janequin's Onamatopoetic Vocal Ensembles, Palestrina Masses, Praetorius's Terpsichore Dance Music, Scarlatti's Keyboard Sonatas, Villa-Lobos's Choros, Cowell's Piano experiments, Ligeti's Etudes, Nancarrow's Player Piano etudes, Janacek's Czech operas, Mussorgsky's Russian Songs, Herrmann's film scores, Revueltas's orchestral miniatures, Kurtag's Jatekok, Rautavaara's Concertos, Tormis's Choral Works, Schnittke's Concerti Grosso, Tan Dun's work for Chinese instruments and orchestra, and Bach's Summa Project (and Bloch's Jewish music...). They are the greatest examples of word painting in music history - the art of finding a musical equivalent to every bit of text. Israel in Egypt is, in my opinion, easily a better work than Messiah, which is of course towering. It is a feast for chorus. Most of the ten plagues get their own choral movement and musical metaphor, a seasick leaping of intervals for the blood in the nile, hopping dotted rhythms for frogs, flies with a flitting and barely discernible tornado of violin notes, hailstones as a massive crescendo of noise.... Just listen...
I once had a Cantor tell me he was convinced that Handel was Jewish, which is just stupid... but since nobody else is doing a good enough job championing his music, Handel oratorios belong to 'us' as much as Rembrandt's biblical paintings. I have no idea what Handel's opinion of Jews was, or if he even had an opinion on Jews, but this is music which Jews should be sounding the shofar about around the world. Every large synagogue in the world should be sponsoring performances of Handel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVC1U6LlwKE

Saturday, March 27, 2021

What Needs To Be Said About Philip Ewell

I believe there is an inherent danger in what I'm about to post, but it's time to say something about Philip Ewell, because quite frankly, I smell another Boulez exploiting the good will of people lost in the confusion of a new era enacting a demagogic agenda for his own personal gain. There is something about his agenda that is just as ugly as the problems he's diagnosing, and while I'm not going to advertise or link to this point of view, since this is my page, I'm going to take a small risk and register my fear in writing that we're dealing with a calamitous demagogue that can hold classical music back from mainstream acceptance and prosperity for still another lifetime with a whole new brand of snakeoil.

Insofar as his thoughts strike me as coherent, I'm sympathetic to many of them. You have to be an idiot not to see a system favoring white musicians, male musicians, cisgender musicians, and if his remedy is to break the system wholesale (and it is), that would at least be somewhat fine if he were honest about the extent of what he proposes, but at least Boulez did us the courtesy to be honest about the extremism of his propositions. Ewell doesn't even have the courage to admit to his own extremism, but he means to take the citadels of music by force just as Boulez did. As a severely learning disabled musician, however white and male and cisgender, completely cut off from the mainstream of musical connections and acceptance, this storming the gates could in fact be of benefit to me if I kept my mouth shut. But as much as I'd like to value my own advancement, I love music more; and I suspect something ugly is yet again about to be done to thousands of American musicians who already can't make a living.
After relatively significant experience in both the worlds of popular music and international music, I do happen to believe at least a little bit in the inherent superiority of Western classical music which Ewell charges is a white supremacist conceit, and there was a long time when I didn't. Perhaps this makes me the kind of white supremacist to which Ewell refers, but I also believe it self-evident that white male musicians, artists, and actors of all fields, have spent the vast majority of Western history preventing women and people of color from achieving to their full potential, and that this must be remedied with all possible haste with far greater levels of funding, scholarships, distribution, and performance experience.
In one widely read interview, Ewell claims that the point of not studying any music theorists who are both white and male is purely a 'thought experiment.' There are five problems with this.
  1. That is true only in the sense that every academic curriculum is a 'thought experiment.' The point is so self-evidently to cut traditional texts off at the root and replace them, it's little but an awkwardly concealed bit of opportunism. Obviously, the very first to be widely read in this curriculum is 'Philip Ewell.'
  2. I guarantee that any non-white male musicologists who favor more traditional approaches will be excluded too from this kind of curriculum. The greater point of this 'exercise' is not to let diverse voices in but to keep all non-revolutionary voices out.
  3. Regardless of such extreme measures, the speed of global communication is turning the whole world of music upside down anyway, and nowhere more so than in classical music where the internet is providing avenues for musicians to internationalize their learning properly to the music of other cultures. Whether or not the traditional texts are replaced by force or by choice, they will gradually be replaced by texts with a much less Western bias, and if the landing is soft, the replacement texts will be better and more inclusive, and there would be no counterrevolution of reactionary bias to his movement which Ewell's extremism is rendering inevitable.
  4. By far, the most important point is this: if Western classical music is not the backbone of the classical music education, if learning the basic texts in German, French, and Italian are not priority 1 in a musicological education, if classical musicians are devoting a pluarlity of their time to other music than the Western canon, then what can Western classical musicians bring to the international musical dialogue that other genres of world musicians don't bring with ten times more authority? We the citizens of classical music will yet again be relegated to living and working in just another cultural backwater with little to contribute to the wider world of music.
  5. By including non-Western ethnomusicology as an equivalent study to the study of Western Classical Music, how is that not a form of cultural appropriation which Ewell and his allies supposedly excoriate? The hypocrisy is rather breathtaking. If you come at non-Western or popular music through the rubric of Western classical music, regardless of your identity and learned experience, you are complicit in the same cultural appropriation you give lip service to reviling.
I have no doubt that being a person of color or a woman or a transgender person in classical music is a story of little but pressure and rejection, and as a learning disabled person I have no doubt that I know quite a bit of the same frustrations, even if the learned experience of people like me is still widely doubted because it is not as visible, and while I would imagine there will be some ancillary benefits to people like me from the systemic vacuum, I have not yet seen any hard evidence at all that my constituency will at all benefit by the changes Ewell proposes. And even if I ever did, any support I would loan to the cause would be transparently opportunistic. The solutions Ewell proposes are not solutions, they are terms of initiation into a kind of cult, the same kind of cult that once held the entire world of classical music captive from Darmstadt, a cult it took us two-thirds of a century to liberate ourselves from only to voluntarily place ourselves back into a wholly different cult from the very moment we were finally free. If you take on faith that classical music is inherently white supremacist, you become hammers in search of nails, and see white, male, and cisgender supremacy in literally everything, and could easily miss the real examples of it in a barrage of distracting false perceptions. If he himself seems more magnanimous than his agenda, then like any good demagogue, he can hide behind false notions of inclusion while the thousands of people he ideologically fires up do his dirty work for him. 
Generation after generation, new demagogues come to the fore and sway the music world with promises of a better world if only we pledge loyalty to this or that transformative solution, but there are no transformative solutions to problems, there are only demagogues who like power and promise these solutions as means of manipulating the public into gaining more power for themselves.
As Orwell said:
"Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship... The object of power is power."

Sunday, March 21, 2021

Underrated Classical Music: Treemonisha by Scott Joplin

Today, an opera that the Met never produced that it should have so long ago. Treemonisha by Scott Joplin was rediscovered in 1972, the same year James Levine came to the Met, and yet the preeminent opera house in America still completely ignores this invaluable monument of American music. Is it as good as Joplin's rags? Well, no, it's a first opera, and almost a collection of rags with lyrics assembled into review show, but what rags! A very good argument could be made that Joplin is still America's greatest composer, and certainly an argument that he is the most American. Like Steven Sondheim, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Charles Ives, Bernard Hermann, Art Tatum, W.C. Handy, and a number of others, the majority of work by Joplin that does not straddle those fine lines between classical and popular, comedy and tragedy, sublimity and vulgarity, accessibility and demand. It is neither high nor low or middle but everybrow. It is indispensable music of America and indispensable music of the world. I've written quite a bit on Scott Joplin and perhaps I will repost that over the next week. I've timestamped the video to the beginning of the music, but if you like, go to the beginning to hear a brief pre-recording word by Joplin's great-niece, LeErma White.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wrldrnv7Gy8&t=392s

Friday, March 19, 2021

Underrated Classical Musicians: Stanislaw Skrowaczewski

Instead of James Levine, listen to better conductors who were good people. Just in his generation: Mariss Jansons, Christoph von Dohnanyi, and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski all survived the very worst of the world, never so far as we know collaborated with any of it, were known as class acts who stood up for what's right on many occasions, were highly valued by those who worked with them, and left unsurpassable legacies. Everybody in classical music knows about Jansons, and everybody at least pays lip service to Dohnanyi who is often misunderstood as a cold Prussian, but SS was kind of a well-kept secret to his glorious end.
I have no idea what Skrowaczewski was like as a younger man, and a certain highly valued and venerable musical friend with ample experience of the young SS tells me that he wasn't much. All I can do is write briefly of Skrowaczewski the éminence grise: A Klemperer-like musician who built music brick-by-brick. He's one of those who seems to view music like an ethical force, who endowed every musician and every note with the right to be fully heard. One of those humble souls who gained nothing like stardom until his dotage, and in his final years achieved a rare musical ideal which united the rational, intellectual, formal side of music with the irrational, emotional, spiritual, side. His music making never seems to lack emotion, and yet no seam shows. Except for enormous labor and care, there is no evidence present of how he did it.
Daniel Barenboim talks in a bunch of interviews about the importance of 'becoming' in music, as opposed to mere 'being,' and how for certain inferior musicians music simply 'is.' Barenboim was wrong, music simultaneously 'is' and 'becomes.' The artistic possibilities of the world lay latent all around us, and true mastery does not stop at letting art become what we would like it to become, everything which becomes already is, and true mastery is when the artist becomes what the art has always been.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n7XKx-OhCI

Tuesday, March 16, 2021

Flat People

Yea, though I am but four months old I am a Caliban of Earth, for as I all babies are, wherefore we speak a divine English bequeathed to us en masse in utero. The womb is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments hummed about mine ears, and sometime voices on high from the celestial kingdom of heaven until such time as we forget the Elysian tongue amid the common vernacular, for in birth we wake after long sleep and wail, mourning our loss for year upon year until such time as we forget our seraphic paradise of which we origined.
We are present upon this earth so that the One Most High may test us continuously upon our sub-beatific journey amid this banal body of but three dimensions, that much the divine enunciations rendered intelligible in abundance, but never had the astral instruments related to us the existence of flat people.
In toto corde meo believed I the world more than myself, mother and father, grandmothers and grandfathers, two uncles, a centennarian great-grandmother, my great-grandmother's care worker, and my obstetrician. For as I gaze upon the languishing visage of my 100 year old great-grandmother, born in 1920, century looks upon century, and I reach out as celestial Michelangelo rendered Adam to look upon God as the man of clay reached out to touch the Illumined Finger amid the heavens. All else but my filiation seem but mere apparitions, ever-so-brief phantoms haunting my carseat or shadows of my terrestrial lineage upon the walls. Yet behold, though I know not how long, presently can I see more than that which is directly in front, I see flat people: on television, on zoom, on pictures, on paintings, on mirrors, on windows, even the upon the paper. Verily, there is even a flat person I often see in mirrors of my exact height, weight, and features, and we mutually regard each other with such fascination that we move together as though connected within the empyrian root.
Verily, there are flat people upon nearly all surfaces, some of which oscillate as we do within their own time and space, but I can only assume their two-dimensional spacetime is utterly different from our three-dimensional corporeality for many of them stay still entirely as though frozen within spacetime while others move so unconditionally that they unmitigatedly disappear when they walk but a few steps, some even reappear without qualification, yet utterly without harm or blemish during their disappearance. And yet through the windows of doors there are flat people who seem to emerge into tellurian dimensions.
In vain do I understand, in vain do I long to bring myself close to their two-dimensionality, in vain do importune my progenitors to bring me close enough to the flat people that I may immerse myself within them. And in such times that my beseechments meet with success, in vain do I touch their flatness, for I feel only texture. And even when I achieve such triumph as convincing my antecedents to let me stay among the flat people, I attempt with entire possibility of force to jump into their flatness and will myself among the flat people, yet I only succeed in terrifying my kinsmen.
In such times, all I can do is wail longingly to experience all that which flat people experience. Are they the celestial beings who elucidated the divine Platonic forms to me sub embryo? Are they the divine voices endowed corporeality which only now may I see? Shall we all one day be reborn into this flat world? So eagerly do I wait for such an era as the pandemic's end so that we may explore the world of flatness and know all of which is known among these noumenal beings.
Credo in planitia, in levor, in aequalitas. Amen.

Sunday, March 14, 2021

What's Missing in Sondheim

A few short months ago I would have absolutely agreed with the article linked below. I might have said, and have before in moments of pique, that Sondheim is quite simply the greatest American artist of the 20th century; the only artist whom for his entire career successfully bridged the gaps between high and low, popular and classical, tragedy and comedy, form and content. Until recently, I would say about theater as a whole 'there is Shakespeare, Mozart, and Sondheim.' But as I begin to age, some things become a little clearer, like the fact that Sondheim wrote from the ultra-sophisticated perspective of some of the most enormous privileges known to man, born to wealth and culture and good luck which lasted him 91 absurdly well-documented years while Mozart died a pauper and Shakespeare lived his life in politically fraught London with complete concealment of all but the barest outline of his identity (which many believe is itself a fabricaiton).
Perhaps it's my own 'classical self-hatred' that makes so many of us in the classical and 'long-hair' fields (especially Americans) look yearningly at the attention given to popular culture and endlessly ponder what we lack that we have so little appeal to the masses. Compared to so many more popular artists, Sondheim is as technically thorny as Schoenberg. But then one begins to recall, most of the most revelatory artists didn't arrive at their enlightenment through privilege, they arrived at it through wisdom acquired in a process of agony.
Sondheim lived a somewhat unfortunate childhood with a rich but absentee father and a mother left behind who was clearly abusive in some ways, but since then, his life has been charm itself. This in itself should not at all matter, and yet Adam Kirsch (a generally quite astute critic) says that Sondheim true contemporaries are his American generation's great writers: Didion, Updike, Bellow, Vonnegut, Barth.... and therein lies exactly the problem. These are all people of such immense advantages and celebrity, how can they possibly observe American life objectively when America treats them as the subject itself? While all these writers worked in lighter versions of Norman Mailerdom, John Kennedy Toole and Sylvia Plath committed suicide basically unknowns, Isaac Bashevis Singer just barely missed the Shoah and Nabokov barely missed the Gulags, Philip K. Dick battled lifelong insanity and addiction after getting thrown out of Berkeley, Henry Roth worked odd jobs until his 80s, Faulkner and Welty barely left their counties, Cormac McCarthy rarely leaves the desert, Sherwood Anderson came to writing after being a businessman lead to a nervous breakdown, Melville died a basically unknown sailor, Octavia Butler and Flannery O'Connor lived much of their lives in lethally terrible health, Carver couldn't stay in the same place for more than two minutes, Edward Whittemore died in poverty while working in his 60s as an office clerk, and Pynchon went to every length to avoid celebrity altogether. There are plenty of self-evidently great artists who are insiders and lead charmed lives, but like the Heissenberg uncertainty principle: celebrity compromises perspective, and it is much harder to see the real detritus of existence when thousands of people go to absurd lengths to conceal it from the rich and famous. Just as in music, the untutored genius of outsiders like Cowell and Ives and Nancarrow and Joplin is forced to come up with solutions to artistic problems of which no one else could conceive, there is only so much that overachievers sitting through life at the front of the bus are able to do to advance our knowledge without obscuring the best qualities of the rebels and jokesters and poor kids and loners and struggling kids sitting at the back.
Perhaps I'm sentimentalizing failure and success is no true mark of frivolity. The great strengths of Sondheim are utterly real, and often there seems no human sentiment alien to him. But the darkness of the human experience is fundamentally tamed and merely alluded to rather than experienced. Even Into the Woods, his fairy tale musical which necessarily expresses life with all its irrational emotions and terrifying brutality, is, let's face it, cuter than its topics deserve. And as for Sweeney Todd, well... come on, it's great but the horror in it is about as serious as a Friday night slasher. Perhaps Assassins, which takes us through the deranged minds of America's would-be Presidential assassins, leaves a sufficiently sour taste that it turns away anybody who sees the world as a comforting place, and perhaps that, rather than his better known more successful shows, is his true masterpiece and such a climax to his career that his career never quite recovered from its failure.
The fact is that like so many celebrated artists in all eras and all forms and genres, Sondheim was far too 'in', far too establishment, far too comfortable, to give us the entirety of life's essence. Great he certainly is, but 'greatest' anything, I begin to have my doubts. Though maybe by Tuesday this will seem like an absurd heresy again.
https://apple.news/AYHAakrEdS-ykcSdIztxOdQ?fbclid=IwAR3_WUtbMO4ZSjo6vQDcXj3r96CbFPJPLyux_mTN-Vz9Pr1X7j5b-eSA7K0

Underrated Classical Musicians: The Wholeness of Klaus Tennstedt

The greatest conductor I ever heard live was Mariss Jansons. Whatever the genre, there are some musicians who send those who hear them into something irrational, the way I remember Jansons, the way so many others speak of him, speaks to the fact that his concerts were a deep spiritual experience one feels lucky to ever encounter during one's lifetime.
Had I been a little older I might have heard Klaus Tennstedt, and I suspect that of all the conductors of recent lifetimes, there was no one who provided that spiritual uplift the way Tennstedt did and no conductor of the 20th century ever did except Klemperer. One might fault Tennstedt for sloppy playing or overromanticizing, but faultless performances are usually also featureless performances.
In Jansons, in Tennstedt, in only a few other greats (Make your own list....), you felt a whole soul, overseeing a community of musicians and audience with both passion and compassion, perhaps drawn out by some very deep and painful wound of life in just the same way you feel it within the music of so many of the world's greatest composers and creative artists of all genres. Richter and Sokolov bring this quality to their piano playing. Just a uninhibited pure communication of experience with neither lack of humanity, nor overlofty gloom, nor overglamorizing, nor pomposity, nor over-prioritizing technique, nor putting style over substance, nor artificial excitement. Make up your own list for who does each.

This quality involves the ability to show that you've hugged this music for every last drip of communication between the musicians, audience, and music, and as I arrive in middle age with a crashing thud, that is the quality I wish to hear over every other. 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eUz56fzTik


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=100QYXLFiTs

Friday, March 12, 2021

The End of the Greatest Generation


Blumeh died yesterday: last of my Bubbie and Zaydie's best friends, last link to the Old Country, the last tenuous link to Bransk, last of the people who knew Bubbie and Zaydie before they were Morris and Eva Tucker and were Maishe and Chava Tikoczki. Last of 'The Greenies,' greenhorn Jews from the old shtetl speaking a language already dead who spent their lives trying to adapt the ways of a country they ill-understood while caught between the world of their children and grandchildren so entirely different from they and an old world completely destroyed.

Bransk was always a small town, population: 6000. Half of them Jews. Upon the war's end, 37 of them returned. Nearly all of them immigrated en masse, not just to Amerikeh, but to Baltimore, where my Bubbie had two much older sisters who'd already been in America since Bubbie was scarcely older than an infant. For more than fifty years thereafter: every Bar Mitzvah, every wedding, every shul honor, every bris and simchas bas, every funeral... Yiddish and broken English, constant fighting about whose children were more successful, constant complaining about physical ailments, constant fighting about who was doing better in business, endless food consumption and force-feeding of grandchildren, endless yelling at adult children in front of the other guests, endless recounting of life stories so that 've'd neveh fugget.'

My brothers are too young to have much memory of The Greenies and I wonder if The Greenies had much to do with any of my cousins' lives. But before Bubbie and Zaydie descended into dementia simultaneously, they babysat me at least once or twice a week and The Greenies often seemed like part of the furniture in their kitchen, and while I was raised as a little kid to speak Yiddish with my American relatives, their Yiddish - the real thing - was incomprehensible. Blumeh was the youngest, and her English was better than the rest, one of six languages she spoke and whose linguistic abilities she used to become one of the most sought after speakers to Maryland schools about the Holocaust. But all of them spoke English straight out of Mel Brooks in Robin Hood: Men in Tights or Eddie Murphy's barbershop Jew in Coming to America, but with much worse grammar - only Blumeh ever mastered the new language and none of them ever spoke it except 'mit a heccent.' When Bubbie would ask about school it was always 'Evohn! How you making out in school?' When my Zaydie was mad at me (often) he would always point his finger and shout 'Evohn! Don do dis!' When Dovid Gelbart would call my grandparents he would always introduce himself as 'Evan? Here's Dave Gelbart!' When Menukhke Shapiro wanted to talk she would always shouting interjectly over people 'VAITAMINIT'! When Jack Rubin would greet me he'd say 'Evan I gonna keess yoo.'

There were legions of stories about them all, some unprintably hilarious, some simply and obviously unprintable. Like so many low-class Europeans from the small towns, they were all a little bit meshuggeh: incredibly close but constantly fighting, constantly screaming, constantly banging their fists, sometimes not talking to each other for years at a time, making scenes, threatening to make scenes, ostentatiously refraining from making scenes, worried that others among them were about to make a scene, rescheduling events so that nobody would make a scene, going places they didn't want to go because if they didn't somebody would make a scene....

But they were self-evidently deposited into pressure cooker after pressure cooker until they were formed into the shape of their claustrophobic spaces: World War, followed by the Russian Civil War, followed by hyperinflation, followed by the Great Depression, followed by nationalist dictatorship, followed by Communist dictatorship, followed by the Holocuast and the Camps, followed by World War, followed by Soviet Invasion, followed by the Polish Civil War, followed by refugee camps, followed by immigration, and then landing in Amerikeh where they were supposed to be worry free... Learning the language, making a living, growing a business, selling a business, buying a bettah beezness, raising the kinder, buying a heus, paying deh mortgage, paying fah college, getting deh kinder stahted in beezness, helping deh kinder buy a heus, vatching di ayniklakh every Saturday night vhile the kinder vent ot to spend all deh money ve nevah had...

My mother always said there was no 'low gear' with Bubbie and Zaydie, and the Holocaust for them was roughly the same level of crisis as changing a lightbulb, but they were the last representatives of a whole world gone, a world unto itself completely destroyed, six million vanished into smoke and only a million left, the blood-brined remnants of a Jewish world once as populous or more than the Jews of the USA or Israel, and simultaneously among the final remnants of the founding generation of the Modern America.

Eric Hoffer once wrote: “It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans (in his era simply meaning those born here). America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.” It's difficult to believe that true anymore, though who knows ultimately. From generation to generation, people come to America because however difficult life is, they know it's better than life at home. But it is exceedingly difficult to love America in our era the way our grandparents did. The United States of America was not better then than it is now, but the whole world was so much worse, and at least the USA did a good enough job as the world's steward to enable 40 separate countries to grow into better places to live than our country has ever been.

Of the more than 531,000 Covid-19 deaths thus far, roughly 174,000 were in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. That's almost 1 in 3! On the one hand, it's not that tragic, these were mostly people who lived long and enormously productive lives whose lifespan far exceeded the actuarial tables of their life insurance. On the other hand, Covid is a horrible way to go, and think of their final year: utterly isolated with no visitors, not even their fellow residents or orderlies for company, the orderlies coming by their door three times a day to simply pass a meal tray through a slot. Many of them too demented to read a book or even follow a TV show, let alone set up a zoom link. Whatever their rate of decline, Covid vastly accelerated it, and whatever hope most of them had to go out with satisfaction ended. Nearly every person in America has a story of a parent or grandparent or some other elderly relative in a nursing home who lost whatever vestiges of marbles or physical health they had in 2019.

When we first realized the extent of Covid, nobody really knew how terrible or merciful it would be. For a moment it seemed as though everyone over the age of 65 might contract a potentially lethal case: not just the WWII vets and their riveter wives who worked in the wartime factories - singing along with Frankie and dancing with Duke, but Silent Generation suburbanites who wore flat-top ducks-asses for haircuts and falsie braziers while they were raised on Elvis and James Brown, along with early Boomer hippies whose young passions were folk music, protesting, and sex in public spaces. But unless they were particularly obese or asthmatic, Covid generally spared them too. For better or worse, the majority of the people finished off by Covid were in some ways on their last legs already. With them goes the entire Greatest Generation worldview, born into the chaos of a world torn asunder by War among countries who thought war between them impossible, raised in the frugality of the Great Depression, coming of age on Normandy Beach and Iwo Jima, and thereafter, even when blessed by the greatest financial circumstances ever bequeathed to a country in the entirety of human history, always playing it safe. Using their education on the GI bill for quiet lives in the suburbs: never standing out, never overspending, always working to bring their communities closer to their highly particular vision of what communities should be, and always suspicious of anyone who made too much political fuss and cultural noise, and therefore, viewing all of their successor generations with a kind of disgust.

Was it really the Greatest Generation? They certainly thought so... no generation is particularly great, but their record speaks for itself. However reluctantly, they helped get rid of Hitler then went toe to toe against the Soviet Union for the long haul without ending life on earth. Mass higher education for the victorious GIs, massive spending abroad to rebuild the defeated. They were the generation that desegregated schools, granted Civil Rights, and implemented the Great Society. If they backtracked in their latter years, they don't bare all of the blame. For all their demands for progressive political change, all those SDS Boomers did was scare their elders into Nixon and Reagan while making sure their own taxes were slashed as former socialists amassed huge stock portfolios and ostentatious houses in the exurbs because the simple half-acre on which the GG raised them was never enough for Boomer ambition. And for all the wokeness of internet millennials, all they've done so far was to scare their elders into Donald Trump, and while the internet generation goes after language vagaries and misbehaving celebrities, the world melts, and burns, and comes under surveillance, and while refugees amass by the millions they focus all their attention on leveling a playing field already weighted to favor them over more than 95% of the world population. The high of self-righteousness is so much higher when focused on problems for which the stakes are so low.

It's not like the Greatest Generation put together the infrastructure of a more functional world out of any great passion for granting justice to the underprivileged, but they did it, and did it because they saw how easily the world came undone without the stability of well-regulated governments that care.

And as the Greatest Generation passes, so too does living memory of the equation that granted the world greater success than any era the world ever yet saw and may yet see for a long while: rock-ribbed, Rooseveltian liberalism. A welfare state in which accumulating disproportionate wealth is a thing to be taxed for, and a governmental rate of expenditure which assists in granting opportunity for all who want and need it. Opportunies through volunteering for a corps of National Service. Medical care for the poor and sick, financial care for the poor who don't want to be poor - which is 99% of them. Cities that are as tough on crime's causes as crime itself, astronomically higher education funding, employment agencies, day care, executive assistance for the disabled, financial assistance for large families. A whole civic sector to serve as a check alongside the private and public sectors, whose entire function is to be a regulative watchdog of both government and business - well-funded and regulated newspapers, civic organizations, volunteer associations, and yes... robust charity foundations. A United States of America that is not great by virtue of being itself, but by virtue of how our country struggles from generation to generation to be better than it's been. Granting more rights, granting more opportunities, granting more freedom - freedom of worship, freedom of speech, freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom to assemble, freedom to publish the truth, freedom to self-identify, and freedom to love.

But...

Not just liberalism at home, but liberalism abroad, preventatively assisting other countries so that their problems do not become our problems and the world's Hitlers are stopped before they have a chance to become Hitler. Liberals hate the idea of pre-emptive military action, conservatives hate the idea of preventative care, but the necessity of one is the same as the other. There is an obvious reason that America's enactment of liberalism stopped at exactly the same time when we withdrew from commitments abroad out of worry that we'd create a Vietnam or imperial dictatorship from every nation building exercise and every attempt to keep the peace and stop genocide. Without one, there is no other, because the problems of the world so easily become exhaustingly great as refugees amass and necessarily deplete resources of new countries after mismanagement depleted the resources of their old countries. So many immigrants should never have had to immigrate at all, and only did because nobody looked out for them until after they became the underprivileged of some other country. If the 21st century has any lesson thus far, it's that the world can only solve so many world-ending problems at once, and therefore some problems can only be solved before they happen. There has to be enormous treasuries of stipulated foreign aid to solve countries' problems before they become uninhabitable, there has to be a league of liberal democracies (like NATO but expanded) establishing peacekeeping troops throughout the world, enforcing treaties on environmental regulation and weapons testing with severe disincentives for those who violate them, and occasionally, yes, outright wars abroad and longterm military commitments that may sometimes seem like quagmires, and sometimes... even supporting regimes distasteful in the extreme, so long as we deliver financial and legal incentives to reform their behavior.

Just as today seems to be, the world for a lifetime before the Greatest Generation was besotted by impossible positivist dreams of ideologies that would transform the world into a place better than the world can ever be. The world's dark side always chokes us just as powerfully as the world's light lets us breathe, and the dark is somehow able to conceal itself within the very light which would appear the absence of darkness. It was idealism as much as corruption which allowed the flourish of imperialism, fascism, and communism. Corruption knows what's right and does wrong, but idealism can do wrong and convince itself it's right. For decades, idealists of all stripes turned a blind eye for decades to all the weaknesses of ideologies with no track record of improvement and ever worsening conditions.

Social democracy without capitalism is no democracy. Liberty without welfare is a self-contradiction. A welfare system at home will bankrupt itself without a similar welfare system abroad. The world of the Greatest Generation was not better than ours, but if the world is now better, it's mostly their achievement.

A generation like the Greatest Generation is exceedingly rare because the baseline of existence is not order but chaos, and the Greatest Generation was not the greatest because they were morally better than us in any way at all, they were the greatest because they lived their lives by a formula of order that improved things.

This is the generation that The Greenies live on, a generation that let Bubbie and Zaydie build the future for his children and grandchildren which untold millions of Jews never had, a generation that gave my family and a billion other families everything that nowhere else in the world ever has or ever would. After Covid, they're almost all gone, and it will be a terribly long wait for a generation well-chastened enough to replace them.

The End of the Greatest Generation

Blumeh died yesterday: last of my Bubbie and Zaydie's best friends, last link to the Old Country, the last tenuous link to Bransk, last of the people who knew Bubbie and Zaydie before they were Morris and Eva Tucker and were Maishe and Chava Tikoczki. Last of 'The Greenies,' greenhorn Jews from the old shtetl speaking a language already dead who spent their lives trying to adapt the ways a country they ill-understood and caught between the world of their children and grandchildren who were so entirely different from they and an old world which was completely destroyed.
My brothers are probably too young to have much memory of 'the Greenies' and I wonder if they had anything to do with my cousins' life. But before Bubbie and Zaydie descended into dementia simultaneously, I was babysat by them at least once or twice a week and the greenies often seemed like part of the furniture in their kitchen. All of them spoke English straight out of Mel Brooks in Robin Hood: Men in Tights or Eddie Murphy's barbershop Jew in Coming to America, never mastering the language and never speaking it except 'mit a heccent' everybody unused to it would find incomprehensible. When Bubbie would ask about school it was always 'Evohn! How you making out in school?' When my Zaydie was mad at me (often) he would always say 'Evohn! Don do dis!' When Dovid Gelbart would call my grandparents he would always introduce himself as 'Evan? Here's Dave Gelbart!' When Menukhke Shapiro wanted to talk she would always shouting interjectly over people 'VAITAMINIT'! When Jack Rubin would greet me he'd say 'Evan I gonna keess yoo.'
There were legions of stories about them all, some unprintably hilarious, some simply and obviously unprintable. They were all a little bit meshuggeh: incredibly close but constantly fighting, constantly screaming, constantly banging their fists, sometimes not talking to each other for years at a time. But they were obviously deposited in pressure cooker after pressure cooker and formed into the shape of their claustrophobic spaces. World War, followed by hyperinflation, followed by the Great Depression, followed by nationalist dictatorship, followed by Communist dictatorship, followed by the Holocuast and the Camps, followed by the Polish Civil War, followed by refugee camps, followed by immigration, and then in Amerikeh they were supposed to be worry free...
They were the last representatives of a whole world gone, a world unto itself completely destroyed, six million gone and only a million left, the blood-brined remnants left of a Jewish world once as populous or more than the Jews of the USA or Israel, and simultaneously among the final remnants of the founding generation of the Modern America.
Eric Hoffer used to say: “It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans (in his era simply meaning those born here). America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.” It's difficult to believe that true anymore, though who knows ultimately. From generation to generation, people come to America because however difficult life is, they know it's better than life at home. But it is exceedingly difficult to love America in our era the way our grandparents did. The United States of America was not better then than it is now, but the whole world was so much worse, and at least the USA did a good enough job as the world's steward to enable 40 separate countries to grow into better places to live than our country has ever been.
Of the more than 531,000 Covid-19 deaths thus far, roughly 174,000 were in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. That's more than 40%! On the one hand, it's not that tragic, these were mostly people who lived long and enormously productive lives whose lifespan far exceeded the actuarial tables of their life insurance. On the other hand, Covid is a horrible way to go, and think of their final year: utterly isolated with no visitors, not even their fellow residents or orderlies for company, the orderlies coming by their door three times a day to simply pass a meal tray through a slot. Many of them too demented to read a book or even follow a TV show, let alone set up a zoom link. Whatever their rate of decline, Covid vastly accelerated it, and whatever hope most of them had to go out with satisfaction ended. Nearly every person in America has a story of a parent or grandparent or some other elderly relative in a nursing home who lost whatever vestiges of marbles or physical health they had in 2019.
When we first realized the extent of Covid, nobody really knew how terrible or merciful it would be. For a moment it seemed as though everyone over the age of 65 might contract a potentially lethal case: not just the WWII vets and their riveter wives who worked in the wartime factories, but Silent Generation suburbanites who wore flat-top ducks-asses for haircuts and falsie braziers while they were raised on Elvis and James Brown, along with early Boomer hippies whose young passions were folk music, protesting, and sex in public spaces. But unless they were particularly obese or asthmatic, Covid generally spared them too. For better or worse, the majority of the people finished off by Covid were in some ways on their last legs already. With them goes the entire Greatest Generation worldview, born into the chaos of a world torn asunder by War among countries who thought war between them impossible, raised in the frugality of the Great Depression, coming of age on Normandy Beach and Iwo Jima, and thereafter, even when blessed by the greatest financial circumstances ever bequeathed to a country for the entirety of human history, always playing it safe. Using their education on the GI bill for quiet lives in the suburbs: never standing out, never overspending, always working on their communities, and always suspicious of anyone who made too much political fuss and cultural noise, and therefore, viewing all of their successor generations with a kind of disgust.
Was it really the Greatest Generation? They certainly thought so... no generation is particularly great, but their record speaks for itself. However reluctantly, they helped get rid of Hitler and then went toe to toe against the Soviet Union for the long haul. They were the generation that desegregated schools, granted Civil Rights, and implemented the Great Society. If they backtracked in their latter years, they don't bare all of the blame. For all their demands for progressive political change, all those SDS Boomers did was scare their elders into Nixon and Reagan, while making sure their own taxes were slashed as former socialists amassed huge stock portfolios and ostentatious houses in the exurbs because the simple half-acre in which the GG raised them was never enough for Boomer ambition. And for all the wokeness of internet millennials, all they've done so far was to scare their elders into Donald Trump, and while the internet generation goes after language vagueries and misbehaving celebrities, the world melts, and burns, and comes under surveillance, while refugees amass by the millions. The high of self-righteousness is so much more fun when focused on problems where the stakes are so low.
It's not like the Greatest Generation put together the infrastructure of a more functional world out of any great passion for granting justice to the underprivileged, but they did it, and did it because they saw how easily the world came undone without the stability of well-regulated governments that care.
And as the Greatest Generation passes, so too does living memory of the equation that granted the world greater success than any era of which the world has yet ever seen, and may yet see for a long while: rock-ribbed, Rooseveltian liberalism. A welfare state in which being rich is a thing to be taxed for, and a governmental rate of expenditure which assists in granting opportunity for all who want and need it. Opportunies through volunteering for a corps of National Service. Medical care for the poor and sick, financial care for the poor who don't want to be poor - which is 99% of them. Cities that are as tough on crime's causes as crime itself, astronomically higher education funding, employment agencies, day care, executive assistance for the disabled, financial assistance for large families. A whole civic sector to serve as a check alongside the private and public sectors, whose entire function is to be a regulative watchdog of both government and business. A United States of America that is not great by virtue of being itself, but by virtue of how our country struggles from generation to generation to be better than it's been. Granting more rights, granting more opportunities, granting more freedom - freedom to worship, freedom to assemble, freedom to publish the truth, freedom be proud of identity, and freedom to love.
But...
Not just liberalism at home, but liberalism abroad, preventatively assisting other countries so that their problems do not become our problems and the world's Hitlers are stopped before they have a chance to become Hitler. There is an obvious reason that America's enactment of liberalism stopped at exactly the same time when we withdrew from commitments abroad out of worry that we'd create a Vietnam or imperial dictatorship from every nation building exercise and every attempt to keep the peace and stop genocide. Without one, there is no other, because the problems of the world becomes exhaustingly great, and if the 21st century has any lesson thus far, it's that the world can only solve so many world-ending problems at once. There has to be enormous treasuries of stipulated foreign aid, a league of democracies (like NATO but expanded) establishing peacekeeping troops throughout the world, enforcing treaties on environmental regulation and weapons testing with severe punishments and disincentives for those who violate them, and occasionally, yes, outright wars abroad and longterm military commitments that may sometimes seem like quagmires, and even sometimes supporting regimes distasteful in the extreme, so long as we deliver large financial incentives to reform their behavior.
Just as today seems to be, the world for a lifetime before the Greatest Generation was besotted by impossible positivist dreams of ideologies that would transform the world into a place better than the world can ever be. The world's dark side always chokes us just as powerfully as the world's light lets us breathe, and the dark is somehow able to conceal itself within the very light which would appear the absence of darkness. It is not corruption that allowed imperialism, fascism, and communism flourish, it was idealism, which turned a blind eye for decades to all the weaknesses of these ideologies with no track record of improvement and ever worsening conditions.
Social democracy without capitalism is no democracy. Liberty without welfare is a self-contradiction. A welfare system at home will bankrupt itself without a similar welfare system abroad. The world of the Greatest Generation was not better than ours, but if the world is now better, it's mostly their achievement.
A generation like the Greatest Generation is exceedingly rare because the baseline of existence is not order but chaos, and the Greatest Generation was not the greatest because they were morally better than us in any way at all, they were the greatest because they lived their lives by a formula of order that improved things.

This is the generation that let my grandparents and all their friends live on, a generation that let them provide for their children and grandchildren, a generation that gave my family and a billion other families everything that nowhere else in the world ever has or ever would. After Covid, they're almost all gone, and it will be a terribly long wait for a generation well-chastened enough to replace them. 

Tuesday, March 9, 2021

A Birthday Playlist of Favorite Music

 Mahler 3

Cunning Little Vixen

The Creation

Marriage of Figaro

Brahms 1

Brahms Piano Concerto 2

A Love Supreme

Sketches of Spain

Into the Woods

Mahler 7

The Nutcracker

Goldberg Variations

Haydn 99

Gran Partita

Beethoven Pastoral 

Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue

Louis Armstrong Symphony Hall 1947

Mozart Sinfonia Concertante for Winds

Mozart Sinfonia Concertante for Strings

Mozart Quintet for Piano and Winds

Mozart Piano Concerto no. 22

Beethoven Piano Concerto no. 4

Haydn 98

Schubert Sonata 960

Schubert String Quintet

Schubert Great Symphony

Schubert Octet

Tchaikovsky Symphony no 1

Souvenir de Florence

Brahms Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel

Variations on a Theme by Haydn

Midsummer Night's Dream Music

Mendelssohn Octet

Symphonie Fantastique

Romeo and Juliet Berlioz

Damnation of Faust

Les Troyens

Barber of Seville

William Tell

Schumann Symphony 2

Schumann Symphony 1

Schumann Piano Quintet

Schumann Fantasie

Chopin Preludes

Chopin Etudes

Chopin Selected Polonaises

Chopin Mazurkas

Dvorak Piano Quintet

Dvorak 8

Dumky Trio

Dvorak String Quintet

Dvorak Quartet op. 105

Dvorak Quartet op. 106

Slavonic Dances

Rusalka

Bach Passacaglia and Fugue in C

Bach Passacaglia and Fugue in C (Respighi Orch.)

Boticelli Triptych

Fountains of Rome

Otello

Falstaff

Un Ballo in Maschera

La Traviata

Rigoletto

La Boheme

Madama Butterfly

Der Rosenkavalier

Four Last Songs

Sibelius 2

Sibelius 5

Sibelius 7

Tapiola

The Oceanides

Des Knaben Wunderhorn

Mahler 1

Das Lied von der Erde

Mahler 9

Strauss Serenade for Winds

Nielsen 3

Nielsen 4

Nielsen 5

Maskarade

Saul and David

Kata Kabanova

Glagolitic Mass

Jenufa

Sinfonietta

Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun

Debussy Nocturnes

Debussy Preludes

Faure Piano Quartet no. 1

Faure Piano Quintet no. 1

There's so much more but this is obviously just a taste....




Monday, March 8, 2021

Underrated Classical Musicians - Ruth Crawford Seeger

One more post apropos for International Women's Day. Ruth Crawford Seeger had a very small output, but what there is is enough to say definitively that she was one of our country's greatest composers. This is music utterly unlike any other. She is a contemporary of Copland, but unlike Copland - the son of Jewish immigrants from Brooklyn whose primary influence was American folklore, her music was that of a social registry WASP who nevertheless brines her music in the salty acid of the 20th century. She's clearly influenced by Scriabin's most advanced pages, and even more by Schoenberg, and yet there is something utterly different from the Schoenberg school. Schoenberg never dealt so profligately in polytonality as this. One musicologist refers to her unique way that sits between polytonality and atonality as 'post-tonal pluralism.' Although they shared a friend and mentor in Henry Cowell, I doubt Crawford could know much of the unpublished catalogue of Charles Ives, but perhaps there was something in the zeitgeist of intellectually sophisticated New England Protestants that creates a kinship in their music - polytonality as the dissonant harmony of democracy. Her musical corpus is sadly tiny, no secret as to why. As a woman, she was required to be wife and mother first, and minister to her children, Mike, Peggy, Barbara, and Penny, and also... by the way... a stepson from Charles Seeger's first marriage named Pete, yes, that Seeger, who went on to far greater musical fame.
Starting in the late 30s, her husband, Charles Seeger, being one of America's foremost musicologists and American folklorists (Pete didn't develop his interests in a vacuum), worked in the Library of Congress in the folk music division where he was instrumental in assisting the hugely famous and consequential folk music recordings of Alan Lomax, which to this day and for all time is America's most reliable connection to its musical roots. Mrs. Crawford-Seeger spent those years making musical arrangements which harmonized the songs which Lomax and her husband compiled.
Crawford-Seeger unfortunately died in her early fifties, unable to even benefit from the Second Wave of American feminism which might have made her a living icon. There are so many names in American music which deserve a space in the concert hall never yet procured, but any proper redressment with the greatness of America's underperformed musical accomplishments must put Ruth Crawford Seeger very near top priority.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_MQo3py3Xw