800 Words: A Brief History of Why Jewish Music Sucks: Felix Mendelssohn

Click Here for Part 1 of this series.

Click Here for Part 2.



It's impossible to listen to the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture or the Octet for Strings and realize that he wrote them when he was sixteen and seventeen. How could anyone that young write this music and not eventually be a composer to dwarf even Mozart and Beethoven? Yes, Mendelssohn was in some senses a spoiled kid whose parents bought him his own orchestra to conduct his own compositions. If he needed feedback, he could simply ask the family friends who happened to be the leading German intellectuals of the age; like Ignaz Moscheles, the Humboldt Brothers, or even Goethe (who was himself a fine musician and revered Mendelssohn’s talent even over Mozart’s). Some people have all the advantages life can bestow, but only a genius can take advantage of them in the way Mendelssohn did.


(A Wagnerian orchestra, made with only 8 string instruments by a 16-year-old kid.)

Mendelssohn was the kid you are simply desperate to beat up. He was the son of a rich banker and the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, the most influential and significant philosopher of the German Enlightenment. His parents created the perfect environment for him, and he not only displayed astonishing skill in composition but also displayed astounding gifts for the piano, organ, violin, drawing, painting, languages (ancient and modern), literature, philosophy, poetry, prose, mathematics, gymnastics, and fencing, all with near-equal precocity. There was not a German intellectual of his childhood’s epoch who did not pass through the Mendelssohn’s drawing room. He was the son of a family with enough means to educate him in whatever his mind desired. If it is only Nature herself which designates true aristocracy, then fate finally bequeathed one of nature’s aristocrats with a proper upbringing.


(Mendelssohn’s incredibly exciting First Piano Concerto, surprisingly seldom heard in concert halls, but played by virtually every advanced piano student of the last 150 years as their first romantic piano concerto.)

But rich and entitled does not imply undisciplined. Every day of his childhood, Mendelssohn was ordered to arise at 5 in the morning so that he would work at all his cultural pursuits throughout the day – and throughout his life, he maintained this truly Protestant work ethic. In retrospect, his music is precisely what one should expect from a rich genius afforded every opportunity; exquisitely crafted music which shields its listener from most of the darkness to which life subjects its less fortunate subjects. There is barely any sense in Mendelssohn of boundaries being broken, or even of a desire to break them. The closer Mendelssohn gets to middle age, the less striving there seems to be toward anything transcendent. The harmonic language may be Beethoven’s, but the proportions are as classic (if not more) than Mozart, and his part writing is pure Bach. As he matured, his music increasingly seemed to go through the motions of impeccable technique – a virtuoso display of pure musical mathematics but with less urgency summoned from one piece to the next.


(The Hebrides overture. He was just 20…)

On the one hand, the music of Mendelssohn is of an intelligence and cosmopolitanism to which we should all aspire. It is also music that is narcissistic as only privileged people can be. To take one obvious example, listen to Mendelssohn’s famous Hebrides overture – said by some people to be the first ever ‘Symphonic Poem’; it’s a pictorial depiction of Mendelssohn’s impressions of Fingal’s Cave, a natural wonder in Staffa, an island off the West Coast of Scotland. Like all gentlemen of means, he went on a long ‘grand tour’ of Europe as ‘finishing’ to his education. When he reached the cave, he was inspired to sketch both a drawing of what he saw and the first twenty bars of the overture, which he immediately mailed to his parents. There are so many exciting musical moments in this piece, of stupefying craft, of a genuine sense of maritime atmosphere, and of natural awe, that it is clearly a work conceived at the highest level of genius. But on the other hand, are we listening to anything more profound than the travel diary of an entitled rich kid? If so, then we get it, the cave’s a nice place. But is there any human sentiment in this music or is all this Romantic nature-worship simply a substitute for experiencing human emotions? The kid may be a genius, but he’s still just a snot-nosed rich teenager who thinks the world is interested in his every thought (note), no matter how trivial.


(Pure erotic energy. The last movement of the Italian Symphony, said to be Mendelssohn’s impressions of a girl in Rome dancing the Salterello with a Tambourine.)

On the other hand, Mendelssohn’s music speaks a language that transcends the typical boundaries of Romantic artists. In an era when musicians, artists, peoples, were balkanizing into competing Nationalisms, Mendelssohn sounded a note of interests in other cultures and for international understanding. Perhaps one had to be rich to feel cosmopolitan in the 19th century, but there is something truly inspiring about Mendelssohn’s ability to find value in sources far afield. Whereas Wagner makes claims for Germans to strive for greatness alone to the exclusion of all other peoples, Mendelssohn’s work makes what amounts to a plea for internationalization. Nobody should mistaken Mendelssohn for anything but a conservative, but Mendelssohn’s conservatism is a liberal conservatism that at least allows for the possibility of greatness from any place, any era, any epoch. For all its problems, Mendelssohn’s stodgy over-reverence is far more appealing than Wagner’s fanatical authoritarianism, which has so often, and dangerously, been misconstrued as progressive.


(The Fair Melusine Overture. Without the example of this piece’s opening, Wagner could never have composed the beginning of The Ring Cycle.)

Indeed, few people in history wanted to beat up a rich genius a more badly than Wagner wanted to beat up Mendelssohn. Wagner viewed Mendelssohn a bit like Abel to his Cain (or Fasolt to his Fafner) – blessed by God with a flock of sheep while Wagner had to toil the ground and grow his full creative fruits only after Mendelssohn had passed away. No doubt, Wagner’s animus toward Mendelssohn was as much class-related as racial. Wagner was the stepson (and probable son) of an itinerate actor who may or may not himself have been Jewish. Throughout his life, Wagner had to hustle and bully his way into the cultural eminence Mendelssohn was assured from birth. But the first thing that strikes one about Wagner’s anti-semitism is not how vituperative it was, it’s how stupid.


(Would Wagner have ever exhibited such masterly use of the Horn section without Mendelssohn’s example from the Nocturne of A Midsummer Night’s Dream?)

In his article, ‘Judaism in Music’ (which, class act he was, he only allowed to be published anonymously for the first twenty years of its circulation) Wagner declared himself a firm believer that Jews were constitutionally incapable of creating any great art of value or originality. Wagner saw Jews as rootless cosmopolitans, who are therefore incapable of speaking languages as native-rooted artists do, and thus cannot create literature or songs properly (whatever that means). As supporting evidence, he cites Mendelssohn’s lack of depth and Meyerbeer’s pompous vulgarities. Well, even if the accusations against both composers are true (and to a certain extent, they are), it is not their Jewish origins which inhibited them, it was anti-semitism itself. A light-hearted success like Mendelssohn or a popular success like Meyerbeer’s were the only avenues for musical greatness open to Jews of their time – who even in this relatively enlightened era had to be careful not to challenge accepted boundaries. A great, challenging composer of the Beethoven or Bach (or Mahler) variety would still have been squashed by anti-semites for his effrontery long before he was allowed to flourish in full plumage.


(Hark the Herald Angels Sing…yes, Mendelssohn wrote it)

Furthermore, there was one small problem with Wagner’s blaming Mendelssohn…Mendelssohn was not Jewish; not by religion at least, only by origin (not that that would have mattered to Hitler…). His father, Abraham Mendelssohn, was one of the richest men in Germany, yet even he had to flee French-occupied Hamburg in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, with his young children in tow. Abraham feared a coming vendetta from the Napoleonic government for his role in financing a breech of the Napoleonic blockade against the British. And as a man of Jewish origin, he had that much more reason to fear the extremity of French animus. When he settled in Berlin, he opened what became the final version of Mendelssohn and Co., a bank that would become the largest in Germany until Hitler ‘Aryanized’ it in 1939 by forcing it to sell all its assets to Deutsche Bank, all this in spite of the fact that there was hardly a single Jewish Mendelssohn in over a century.


(The opening chorus from Mendelssohn’s EXTREMELY Christian oratorio about St. Paul, Paulus)

Abraham Mendelssohn was nearly as militant in his pro-secularism as his father, the great Moses Mendelssohn, was determined to balance secularism with Judiasm. To his mother-in-law’s distress, he refused to circumcise his sons and added a second last name, ‘Bartholdy’, to his given surname (presumably after the Apostle Bartholomew, who spent the rest of his life preaching Christ to heathens). In a letter, he famously stated that ‘there could no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than there could be a Christian Confucius.’ In 1816, Abraham had his children baptized in the Lutheran faith, and did so in secret in the distant city of Frankfurt so that he could avoid the suspicions of Jewish family members. Six years later, he was baptized as a Lutheran himself. Abraham Mendelssohn was determined that his family be accepted as fully German, an acceptance which would prove impossible after more than a century’s worth of attempts by the Mendelssohn family. The more achievements their family won for Germany, the more resented they were by the people for whom they strove.


(The finale of the Reformation Symphony, in which Mendelssohn incorporates Luther’s most famous hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, as the principle theme.)

This desire for acceptance is all the more tragic when one realizes that Mendelssohn’s cautious conservatism, his veneration for everything establishmentarian, his evangelism for Music as a Public Virtue, made him an ideal fit for the rigid moralities of Victorian England – a country to which he journeyed nine times over the course of his short life. He was a close personal friend of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and even wrote four-hand piano music specifically meant for the Queen to play with him. Mendelssohn’s temperament, with its twin horrors of empty showmanship and original daring, would have found a natural home in the England of Disraeli. In his veneration for older models, he was in some ways a musical equivalent of Keats. In his reluctance to challenge middle class sensibilities, he was much like Dickens.


(Mendelssohn’s band. The still extant Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra which Mendelssohn lead for twelve years and built into the best in Europe.)

Mendelssohn was perhaps the first true musical classicist (in the University sense), who had no patience for his own day’s vulgarities, and sought to bring better, nobler, higher-minded music to the public than the tastes which fashion dictated. From his conducting originated the idea that the orchestra’s primary goal was to act as a preserver of music’s greatest literature – education rather than entertainment. As a conductor, he programmed not only his finest contemporaries, not only the ‘classics’ like Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert (and a great deal more besides), but also the ‘ancients’ like Palestrina and Lassus (Hector Berlioz, Mendelssohn’s musical antipode in so many ways, loved Mendelssohn personally but said that he was ‘a little too fond of the dead.’). In Mendelssohn’s chamber music, he strove to create chamber music for middle class homes that could act as a kind of self-betterment – never vulgar, never garish, limpid, beautiful, pastoral music for idyllic settings. It can be argued that the Golden Age of ‘classical music’ itself ended in 1829, when the great young hope of classical music introduced the great elder statesman in his grandest work: the St Matthew Passion of Bach. The next year, Berlioz first presented his Symphonie Fantastique, and from those two moments onward, the dichotomy was set in classical music, forever pitched in a battle between the preservation of the past and innovation for the future; a battle that still shows no signs of resolving…


(The Second Cello Sonata. Mendelssohn in typically exuberant mood.)

If Mendelssohn had lived to see the 1848 revolutions, he’d have been adrift. He was blind to the seismic undercurrents beneath him and ill-equipped to understand the era that followed him. Then as now, many viewed the rigidities of middle class sensibilities as a prison, and revolutionaries viewed Mendelssohn as the musical jailer. But had he lived longer, this very ill-adeptedness might have turned Mendelssohn into the great musical conservative of his age – the perfect rival which Wagner lacked. Mendelssohn’s temperament may have seemed untroubled, but it was not naturally so. As a conductor, Mendelssohn came again and again against those who would block his vision of making the greatest possible music, and as so many conductors have throughout history, his temper would raise the roof in response to his authority being questioned. Few composers ever worked harder than Mendelssohn, and no composer made as great an effort to travel further so that he could carry out his responsibilities. Merely as a conductor, Mendelssohn had official capacities all over Germany and England, and was a much sought after guest in Italy and France besides. In the 20th century, such travel is expected of top musicians, in the 19th century it was nearly impossible. This reckless travel schedule had to be honored in addition to his full schedule as a composer, his need to stay in shape as a pianist and organist, and his duties as a father. In those last few years, his music became more and more fraught with anexiety, stress, and emotional weight. Mendelssohn was finally composing like an adult. But it was too late for him to write a more sizable amount in this newly sober vein of his. The stress and strain of his workload no doubt contributed to the series of strokes which killed him in 1847.


(Minor-key Mendelssohn, his final string quartet. A completely different composer emerging?)

Furthermore, there is a new rumor that Mendelssohn, seemingly the happiest, most well adjusted of all composers, might have killed himself in response to the end of an extra-marital affair. An affidavit has apparently surfaced from the cuckolded husband, in which there is sworn testimony that Mendelssohn begged the revered Swedish Soprano, Jenny Lind, to elope with him to America, and threatened suicide if she didn’t. Like Mendelssohn, Lind was a deep artist above reproach, prized as much for her morality and the spiritual quality of her music making as for her general musicianship. Mendelssohn died barely a year or two after the letter was written, but it still feels like a conspiracy theory, an apocryphal theory like the kangaroo court which told Tchaikovsky to kill himself. But it does change our view of this composer – who is now revealed to be a suffering artist, and given to all the same hypocrisies as every other Victorian gentleman.


(Hear, Israel. A soprano aria from Elijah, written for Jenny Lind. The hypocrisy is a little thick…but a powerful aria anyway. Proto-Brunnhilde?)

Mendelssohn did not commit suicide, he had a series of strokes. He suffered from a family condition called “Mendelssohn Brain” first documented in his grandfather, in which the hyper-brilliance of their minds made them especially prone to aneurisms. No doubt, the stress of his affair might have contributed to the strokes, but so might have the death of his beloved sister Fanny from a similar stroke. Fanny might have become a still greater musician/mind than Felix had either her brother or her father approved of her developing her talents as anything more than an amateur pursuit. But as a female Mendelssohn, it would have caused a scandal had she become a professional musician, and while she suffered an additional indignity of not being allowed to pursue her gifts after the manner of Felix, she shared Felix’s hyperactive mental acuity, and suffered from its same imbalance.


(The most beautiful – and darkest – thing Mendelssohn ever wrote? The slow movement from the second string quintet.)

The music of Mendelssohn’s final years show a different composer emerging, using his natural genius to reflect emotions deeper than the typical light-hearted classicism Mendelssohn generally pervaded. A potentially new Mendelssohn, middle aged and bitter, is highly noticeable in his final works. After some failed early attempts, Mendelssohn had retreated all his life from attempting the Grand Metaphysical Statements of Beethoven. He simply lacked the nerve for daring vision. Even his Lobegesang Symphony (with its 40-minute long choral finale) and Paulus play by tasteful rules established long in the past, often seeming more like imitations than original compositions. Yet in his late oratorio, Elijah, a new Mendelssohn emerges. Like his other large-scale choral works, Elijah is a conservative work in every sense – a turgid monsterpiece filled with uninspired padding and lighter, sweeter moments than should probably occur in a dramatic oratorio. Yet there are passages in this oratorio of such heart-stopping drama that they seem far more like the greatest music of Wagner than like Mendelssohn.

(Click here for the Magnificence of Elijah in Full Cry)

Here is Mendelssohn, fully mature, finally ready to take on the metaphysic mantle of Beethoven. But whereas Beethoven’s message is essentially liberal, to embrace the masses and storm the Bastille; Mendelssohn’s message is fundamentally conservative, that those embraced millions have grown sinful and indolent, and therefore must repent. Beethoven found choral inspiration in Schiller’s poetry and the Catholic Mass, Mendelssohn found his inspiration in the Old Testament Prophets. Mendelssohn may not have been Jewish, but he had a Talmudic cast of mind and a Rabbinic sense of mission. It might be said that at the end of his life, in the midst of crises from which privilege previously shielded him, he finally composed with true purpose; a purpose found within the texts which his grandfather so valued.


(Psalm 2: Why Do The Heathen Rage?)

Mendelssohn may not have been Jewish himself, but the values he inherited were Jewish to the marrow: a fearsome if imperfect commitment to ethics, knowledge, community, family, and rule of law. And whether rightly or wrongly, Mendelssohn saw his values as being rejected by his era's revolutionaries. The full promise of Mendelssohn’s genius was not to be contained in his actual achievements, but Elijah and a few other works from his final years give us a glimpse into the man which his earlier work never allowed. In choosing to write an oratorio about Elijah, Mendelssohn seemed to compose a declaration of intent – no longer would he be the passive, benevolent builder of public virtue. From the premiere of Elijah onward, he seemed to announce an intent to be the militant defender of righteousness’s cause – composing not with pen, but with a sword every bit as steely as Wagner’s, used to defend the glories of his Jewish and German heritage, both of which had given him so much. Given ten more years, Mendelssohn might have become a very different composer than the one we know; perhaps he'd have become an heroic spiritual leader after the manner of Beethoven, ready to do battle with Wagner's revolution so that he might preserve Beethoven's. Or perhaps he'd have calcified into every bit the fanatical purveyor of nationalist bombast (unlikely as much of his music makes that sound) which Wagner was. In theory, Mendelssohn was the fanatical defender of an Old Germany which allowed Mendelssohn’s ancestors to flourish while Wagner was the fanatical promulgator of a New Germany which would allow his descendents to flourish just as greatly. But Mendelssohn died, and Wagner, with his completely different (inverse?) goals, assumed the mantle of Germany’s Greatest Living Composer. He assumed this mantle in reaction to a Germany shaped by the first generations of emancipated Jews as a way of curbing their influence to restore Germany to a more glorious, united, and pure past. Yet the Germany of Wagner was not so different than Mendelssohn’s Germany. In their different ways, they exhibited precisely the same uncomplicated love of a national ideal which only a true outsider can possess. Wagner believed that the German past would only be saved by supporting the 1848 revolutionaries, Mendelssohn (would have) believed that that same past would be saved only by opposing them. But they shared a goal of a united Germany, with a truly German music to inspire her. Even Wagner’s greatest achievement, the Ring Cycle, began as an idea Mendelssohn had for his first adult opera. Perhaps Wagner merits a chapter of his own in A Brief History of Why Jewish Music Sucks. I don't doubt he'd love to have one.

Two Extraordinary Musical Stories

Alice Herz Sommer A 108-Year-Old Pianist Who Survived Theresienstadt With Her Son. Amazing h/t DPF



The Kinshasa Symphony, Surviving The Worst Humanitarian Crisis of the 20th Century's Second Half Together. h/t Dad.

Underwear: by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I didn’t get much sleep last night
thinking about underwear
Have you ever stopped to consider
underwear in the abstract
When you really dig into it
some shocking problems are raised
Underwear is something we all have to deal with
Everyone wears
some kind of underwear
Even Indians wear underwear
Even Cubans
wear underwear
The Pope wears underwear I hope
The Governor of Louisiana wears underwear
I saw him on TV
He must have had tight underwear
He squirmed a lot
Underwear can really get you in a bind
You have seen the underwear ads for men and women
so alike but so different
Women’s underwear holds things up
Men’s underwear holds things down
Underwear is one thing
men and women do have in common
Underwear is all we have between us
You have seen the three-color pictures
with crotches encircled
to show the areas of extra strength
with three-way stretch
promising full freedom of action
Don’t be deceived
It’s all based on the two-party system
which doesn’t allow much freedom of choice
the way things are set up
America in its Underwear
struggles thru the night
Underwear controls everything in the end
Take foundation garments for instance
They are really fascist forms
of underground government
making people believe
something but the truth
telling you what you can of can’t do
Did you ever try to get around a girdle
Perhaps Non-Violent Action
is the only answer
Did Gandhi wear a girdle?
Did Lady Macbeth wear a girdle?
Was that why Macbeth murdered sleep?

And the spot she was always rubbing -
Was it really her underwear?
Modern anglosaxon ladies
must have huge guilt complexes
always washing and washing and washing
Out damned spot
Underwear with spots very suspicious
Underwear with bulges very shocking
Underwear on clothesline a great flag of freedom
Someone has escaped his Underwear
May be naked somewhere
Help!
But don’t worry
Everybody’s still hung up in it
There won’t be no real revolution
And poetry still the underwear of the soul
And underwear still covering
a multitude of faults

in the geological sense -
strange sedimentary stones, inscrutable cracks!
If I were you I’d keep aside
an oversize pair of winter underwear
Do not go naked into that good night
And in the meantime
keep calm and warm and dry
No use stirring ourselves up prematurely
‘over Nothing’
Move forward with dignity
hand in vest
Don’t get emotional
And death shall have no dominion
There’s plenty of time my darling
Are we not still young and easy?
Don’t shout.

h/t The McBee

Busch Plays Brahms

Why are the best performances so often in such wretched sound?

Quote of the Night:

Jordan: The courtyard over the bullpen is going to be a huge attraction. I read somewhere that the Orioles calculated that the average fan who sits there will spend $200 on beer.

Me: And we wonder why this country's going into the crapper...

Dad: You mean the urinal...

Quote of the Day:

Me: Where's Jordan
Dad: He's at the Orioles game. You and Jordan should really go to a game together this week before their season is over.

Quote of Last Night

My not quite four year old cousin Sam:

Sam's Mom: Y'know...Sam has a girlfriend.
Sam: I broke up with her.
Sam's Mom: Why?
Sam: She pooped her pants.

800 Words: The Failed Classical Revolution - Part 2

IV. The Five S’s

In classical circles, we’ve spoken with hushed reverence for over a hundred-fifty years about the ‘Three B’s’: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms (though when first coined it was ‘Berlioz’, not Brahms) – a shorthand for the ‘essentials’, the canon, the meat and potatoes of classical repertoire, without which there would be no reason to return, again and again, to this endlessly rewarding artform. One might wonder why these three rather than others (especially Brahms), but even today this triumvirate well represents the three bedrocks of Classical Music as we still think of it: pre-Enlightenment Sacred Music, Viennese High Classicism, and Nationalist (particularly German) Romanticism. And for all its achievements, there is not a single composer or musical movement among the Three B’s twentieth century successors that supplanted The Three B’s in the public imagination. For classical music, the 20th century is still an aftershock from the reverberations of more seismic periods.

Even so, that simple fact has never stopped classical musicians from waging an endless variety of idiotic ideological battles; atonalists fighting against tonality and both fighting against aleatoric music, historically informed performers fighting against traditional performers when they’re not fighting among themselves. It’s difficult to stop the thought that these battles seem like the desperate attempts of a certain type of music lover to avoid the one simple musical fact of our time: the music we call ‘classical’ is obsolete to new developments - the world has long since left classical music behind. In a hundred years, it’s highly likely that no one will listen to much by Boulez or Stockhausen or Cage, because there probably are/will be free jazz musicians, electronic musicians, conceptual artists, who have/will have made music which sounds almost exactly like theirs, only better and without all the ideological bullshit which accompanies them. In a hundred years, no one will care whether Bach is performed after the manner of Gustav Leonhardt, Karl Richter, or Joshua Rifkin. The fact that Bach will survive at all into a completely different cultural age will be its own victory and is by no means guaranteed.

For a century or more, endless ink’s been spilled over ideological battles that matter only to academics spoiled by tenure and the students coerced into pleasing them. The only factor keeping these fights so vicious is the lowness of the stakes. If these questions were of any consequence to the larger world, the infighting of the ‘classical’ world would have long since ceased.

Politically and socially, many classical musicians would like to think themselves on the vanguard of progress. But whether or not they choose to acknowledge it, the simple fact that they choose to belong to the world of acoustic instruments like the piano, the orchestra, the choir, means that they are the very paragons of arch-conservatism in today’s music world. Anyone devoting themselves to classical music at any point past World War I is proclaiming allegiance to something that by its very definition is a preservation of the past. Who needs to learn to read music, to master theory, to perfect an instrumental technique, when music just as potent (perhaps more?) can be made by someone who can barely carry tune and can play three chords on a guitar. THAT is the progressive point of view. In the twentieth century, to insist on any greater credential than a shade above incompetence is to be the very model of a conservative. I do not say that with disdain, in fact, it’s a welcome development. After the 20th century, great music is no longer the exclusive prerogative of obesessives who spend entire lifetimes honing their technique. The result is much great music-making that is less melodramatic and more balanced.

Whether or not one agrees with that statement, what can't be denied is how electronics changed music forever - moreso than any development since musical notation. From the time music began to be written down, a thousand years of ‘art music’ evolved over the centuries, honed with ever greater complexity, accumulating ever greater knowledge of how to create formal structures, harmonic ingenuities, rhythmic patterns, and instrumental colors. But with the invention of electronic recording, everything music once knew had to be forgotten.

It was a reset button, and in an instant a millenium’s worth of accumulated knowledge of what music was capable of expressing was erased. By 1925, an entire library of the musical greatness you heard in the concert hall could be heard by you and millions of others in your own homes: and for the first time, records could let you experience soul-stirring depths which you once either had to make for yourself or travel for hours to the nearest concert hall – all with a mere flick of a few switches and dials. For deeper experiences, you could hear entire Beethoven symphonies and near-complete Verdi operas. For lighter-hearted moments you could hear the Russell Hunting Co. perform Gilbert and Sullivan. For brasher ones you could listen to John Philip Sousa lead his band, and if you were really feeling wild you could listen to Scott Joplin play his hits.



But no invention does precisely what its inventor intends. Eventually, the creation gets away from the creator. Along comes Louis Armstrong and after 1923, everything which we thought we knew about music we no longer know. For the first time in modern history, you don’t have to have a good voice to sing well. You don’t have to have any new harmonic ideas, so long as you play old ones with lots of spirit and rhythm. You don’t even need to compose anything! All you need to do was play what you felt at any given moment within the framework of a few chords, and your work is done. It’s less labor intensive, yet it just might be more meaningful than any result that comes from decades of exquisite conservatoire training.

For the first time since Beethoven, the rules of music were completely rewritten. And it’s highly possible that Pops rewrote them far more completely than Beethoven ever did. What were ‘real’ musicians to do? One day, the high priests of Beethoven and Wagner woke up to find themselves transformed into monsters, no longer venerated, no longer thought by the world to be the purveyors of Holy Art. Art, once something only achievable by a chosen few who must undergo decades’ worth of initiation, was now something expressible by anyone. The world’s most aristocratic pursuit was now a democracy.

As in all grieving processes, it took a long time to move on – many still haven’t. In 20th century classical music, I can count five fundamental reactions to the ascendance of the ‘amateur’, all completely different from one another, yet all corresponding disturbingly well to Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief, and each stage can be explained by a particular composer. What we now call Classical Music has left people behind at each stage of the process. Only in recent decades has it shown any sign of moving on. But ‘classical music’ will not, cannot, move on, until the people left by each station’s wayside move on with it.

S1 – Denial – Sibelius.


(Tapiola – his final work before the thirty year silence from Ainola)

Until the end of World War II, Jean Sibelius was the world’s most venerated living composer. Yet from 1927 until his death 30 years later, he did not publish a single note. From the success of the 1890’s until his silence in 1927, the music of this Romantic Nationalist firebrand grew ever more hermetic, ever more expressive of nature (rather than human beings), and ever more inwardly focused, until it simply dissolved into silence.

What made Sibelius stop composing? Was it the pressure of being the final hero among living great composers? Was it the changing climate of contemporary music? Was it simply the fact that he had achieved the ultimate success and needn’t ever struggle to write another note if he didn’t want to? The world will never know.

What the world does know is that Sibelius spent his thirty year dotage on his state-granted estate in Rural Finland – never issuing the Eighth Symphony which he’d promised the world. After World War II, the esteem of other musicians dropped precipitously. Sibelius, once thought the epitome of progress, was derided by more avant-garde musicians as a musical Antichrist. Yet until his death, he still had a large – but older – following, always ready to proclaim him as one of music’s true titans – eager for the new work that never came.

It’s hard not to see the entire story of 20th century classical music in Sibelius. The music that was once so venerated became a museum; worshipped by an ever dwindling band of admirers, derided by more progressive types as reactionary and stodgy. Yet the museum never closed. Sibelius, like classical music itself, is still just barely a force in world music; hobbling along on the musical stock exchange, waiting all too patiently for a new generation to take notice and buy futures – yet there are legitimate doubts that anyone ever will. Actually, Sibelius’s stock has come back in recent years, but like classical music, it is for qualities which nobody noticed in him during his heyday (more on that in part V).

Among the descendents of Sibelius number all those blue-haired listeners who would like to turn back the clock on every development which classical music underwent since it ceased to be the world’s dominant music. The rest of the world moved on, but in many concert halls, the world is precisely as Sibelius left it, still waiting for his eighth symphony.

S2 – Anger – Schoenberg.


(The Golden Calf, from Schoenberg’s Serialist Opera, Moses und Aron, said to be Schoenberg’s depiction of the idolworshippers who worshipped a God other than his. Re: almost all of us.)

In 1923, the same year that Louis Armstrong began recording, Arnold Schoenberg explained to his pupils his new system of composing, the serialist, or ‘Twelve-Tone’ composition in which no note may be repeated until the other eleven have had their chance. He promised that this system ‘would ensure the supremacy of German music for another hundred years.’ a statement all too reminiscent of another Austrian… Like this other Austrian, he considered himself the carrier of ‘a prophetic message revealing a higher form of life toward which mankind evolves.’ He claimed Mozart and Brahms as important musical ancestors, but his mission was far higher than any to which they professed. I could line this section only with egomaniacal quotes from Schoenberg, who was, in his artistic way, every bit as authoritarian as any brownshirt; brownshirts assaulted persons, Schoenberg assaulted individual creativity, and there are graveyards filled to capacity with the unachieved promise of composers and their students who felt compelled to write music like his.

Like all the authoritarians of the Austro-Germany from which he hailed (and whom, one must acknowledge, reviled and were reviled by him), he detested modern permissiveness. Anything in music that smelt of inclusiveness was an accommodation to the mob. He regarded any deviation from his beliefs to be an appeasement of a monolithic evil, and that evil was popular taste. Among the descendents of Schoenberg numbers any music lover (usually to be found in academia) with a positivist, Hegelian view of music, which believes that any music – be it ‘classical’ or ‘popular’ – built on principles which differ from Schoenberg’s, or Webern’s, or Boulez’s, to be inferior. Also among his descendants number any number of academic dogmatists who insist that a certain way of performing music is the only correct one, or that only a certain type of training and systems of analysis is legitimate. These are all quintessentially modern form of religious fanaticism, a modern religion for music lovers who could never deal with modernity.


(A Survivor from Warsaw)

Like many of his compatriots, Schoenberg was a German nationalist who only realized where his authoritarian leanings would lead when they were turned on him. He had an uncanny prescience about the Holocaust, warning friends about the coming reckoning from the moment Hitler ascended to power. There is a true greatness to Schoenberg’s music, but it is a narrow greatness, which is obsessed with confronting the horrors of his epoch on their own terms yet admitting none of the joys. I have no idea what Schoenberg thought of Adorno’s statement ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ Yet I can’t imagine him disagreeing. In the world of Schoenberg, there are no consolation, only the reward of having seen mankind’s beastly nature for what it is. To see music through Schoenberg’s eyes is to see a world without saving graces.

S3 – Bargaining – Stravinsky.


(The Ebony Concerto. One of Stravinsky’s brilliant, if somewhat condescending, responses to Jazz)

Like all classical musicians, all five of the composers listed here have at least a foot in previous eras even as they live in our own. But by embracing other eras so fully as Stravinsky did, he seems to have at least begun the process of acclimating classical music to our own time.

In many ways, Stravinsky was not a composer in the traditional sense. So much of his material is based on the material of others – folk songs, the work of other composers, the techniques of other historical periods – that he represents perhaps the first of an entirely new kind of composer. Just as so many great ‘popular’ artists gained much of their power from reconceptualizing material written by songwriters for hire, or arrangers, or other singers, Stravinsky gained his power from reconceptualizing material of other composers. His early pieces gain much of their power by shaping Russian Folk Songs in modernist casts, Stravinsky then moved on to recast the work of any and every composer, seemingly from every period, every genre, every style – Pergolesi, Tchaikovsky, Bach, Woody Herman, Perotin, Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Hugo Wolf, even Schoenberg. Stravinsky provided classical music with a door to the future through its past.

But what about the present? If Sibelius was the last living composer-hero, then Stravinsky became the last universally known composer – his picture forever adorning the covers of Life Magazine. But even, especially, at the height of his fame, Stravinsky was not a figure of the present. He was an old Russian aristocrat living in Beverly Hills, a living link for Americans to a culture that no longer existed.

Igor Stravinsky initiated classical music’s transition to the 20th century, but he by no means completed it. His method was to bargain with older sources, extracting what he could out of them for a new lease on intellectual life. But it was to some extent an artificial, ‘refrigerated’ (to use Leonard Bernstein’s word) life. The rearrangement of the old, however clever, is no substitute for the invention of new material. In spite of the super-charged energy of his Russian period, there is nothing about Stravinsky’s methods which bear the stamp of a truly revolutionary wind. That revolution Stravinsky was supposed to signify was to be found elsewhere.

Among the descendents of Stravinsky are all those ‘classical music hoarders,’ Hoarders like me. Collectors who savor every individual detail in every different performance and recording we hear of works we know better than our own families. If there were no new music, we could spend our lifetimes dwelling in the museum of the past and not miss anything, because we can forever discover newer, smaller details than ones we had noticed before, every one of which deepens our understanding of music we already know too well.

S4 – Depression – Shostakovich.



Dimitri Shostakovich, the bleak black heart of twentieth century music, forever caught in the web of Stalin’s Soviet Union, a place of constant isolation and grief – an artificial cultural 19th century in which no one could express their feelings openly.

The freedom of Western music was not an option for Soviet musicians, where one could be shot simply for owning a Western record. Shostakovich, like many of his listeners, was a man hopelessly forced to remain inside the 19th century, and therefore was coerced to access the power of its music on a level which (in my opinion) no other twentieth century composer could approximate. Earlier I wrote that Sibelius was the last composer/hero, but that’s not quite true. In Eastern Europe, where no other artist was allowed the freedom Shostakovich was to speak so candidly to their listeners, Shostakovich was perhaps an even greater hero than Sibelius.

Shostakovich may have written like a 19th century composer, but he was very much a man of the 20th century. However, it was not OUR 20th century. If given his freedom, Shostakovich might have been greater than ever, or perhaps he would have been merely another minor master like Hindemith or Honegger. Shostakovich was trapped in an authoritarian world which looked at the developments of the West, of America, of modernity, with horror. The permissiveness, the liberalism, the freedom to express individuality enjoyed by so many in the 20th century was offset by people who wanted to create a society based upon all the authoritarian shackles (and then some) which Western countries had shaken off so successfully.

Among Shostakovich’s descendents are all those musicians, administrators, and music lovers, who feel trapped by classical music. Few if any of us have reason to suffer on the level of those in Stalin’s Russia, but many of us feel trapped in a mausoleum built in a former era which has no way to progress because we are filled too greatly with the dead ghosts of music past.

S5 – Acceptance – Steve Reich.



‘Classical music’ is no longer the music which dominates the world. It’s not even a first (or tenth) among equals in today’s ecology. In sales, it is a mere 2% of the market share, and would be much smaller without compilation albums like ‘100 Relaxing Classics.’ Its most innovative musicians count themselves lucky to find a sympathetic audience 2% the size of their rock and R&B equivalents. For an innovative ‘classical’ composer, great success means an enthusiastic world following of a couple thousand people.

In today’s world, classical composers are simply musicians who have chosen to create music in a more antiquated manner than others. Their rewards of decades of instrumental, theoretical and compositional study will never the adulation of millions, or hundreds of millions of dollars. Today, people become composers not because they want their music to change the world, only because they love classical music so much that they cannot imagine life outside of it. Next to the greatest musicians of more popular genres, even the best of us are probable footnotes in both the newspapers and posterity.
Like every other musician, we in 2012 America live in the free world, and we ignore its developments at our own peril. File sharing, both legal and illegal, gives us access to every conceivable technique to make music which the world has yet thought at the click of a mouse. In a climate such freedom, the sole limit to a musician’s creativity is their fortitude and imagination – and what limits those can be!

We finally have arrived in the second part of classical music’s decline, its re-acclimation. Thanks to Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and especially Steve Reich, classical music finally moved into the 20th century, and takes its seat in the contemporary world of music, sounding not altogether different from other musical genres. Its aims, and its achievements, are not on the grand scale of Beethoven (or of The Beatles), but it does have a place of its own in the modern world.

And now comes the hard work of bringing ‘Western Classical Music’ back into the mainstream of musical discourse. More and more often, we see that ‘popular’ musicians have classical training. Occasionally, they’re even influenced by classical music. But the lessons of Bach and Beethoven are still so far from the mainstream of today’s good music that the larger world would barely change if they were no longer performed at all.

But… perhaps one day, sooner than we know, some composers will come along that will re-establish the composer as music’s dominant voice, and will integrate all the musical developments of the 20th century into a thousand years of developments beforehand. If that ever happened, this composer can point to Steve Reich as a model of a composer who for half a century developed his inner voice with ever greater nuance and individuality, bucked all dogmas, and began the serious work of making ‘classical music’ relevant once again to its own time.

Whether or not they realized it, all five of these composers were conservatives in the musical climate of their day. It was the simple act of composing in an era when the very idea of composition as Mendelssohn defined it was so dated that made them so. But only now that many classical musicians have accepted our genre’s secondary status do we have a chance of moving ourselves back into the mainstream. How do we do that? That’s for later parts of this post…

Friday Playlist #10: Easter Edition

Ray Wylie Hubbard: Resurrection



Bach: Cantata BWV 6 - Bleib bei uns



Fred Astaire and Judy Garland: Easter Parade



Anton Bruckner: Christus Factus Est



Patti Smith: Easter



Tomas Luis de Victoria: Tenebrae Responsories



Advanced Playlist:

Handel: Messiah (it's supposed to be for Easter!)



Passover's still going next week...

Quote of the Day:

Der Fersko: Happy Birthday Jesus
I Hope You Like Crap:
http://www.bangstyle.com/2012/03/great-gatsby-movie-poster/

800 Words: The Failed Classical Revolution - Part 1

I. The NPR Top 100

A couple years ago, NPR made a particularly noble gesture toward classical music. It came out with a list of the 100 best composers under 40. On this list was everyone from Classical Great White Hope, Nico Muhly, to Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James. In a time when the boundaries between composition, arrangement, and performance get more and more blurry, it made the prudent decision of making a very liberal definition of what a composer is.

But even when the list is buffered by rock/electronic musicians like Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead and those Icelandic dudes from Sigur Ros, one can’t help noticing a striking problem. There is no way in this crazy mixed up world of ours that there are 100 young composers who are truly worth listening to – at least 100 worth listening to that we (or NPR) has heard of. Instead of being a list of the most talented, lists like these inevitably become lists of who has the best press agents, or who has the best connections. I would guarantee that I’ve heard more music by the composers on this list than 99 out of every 100 people who’ve read it. But out of all these 100 composers, there are at best a couple dozen who to my mind exhibit a real talent for composition, and probably less than ten who have any idea how to develop theirs. One day, when we’re all old and grey, it will be clear whom among these talents turned out to be great composers. In fifty years, we should count ourselves lucky if there were as many as half a dozen ‘immortals’ on this list.

Let’s imagine that NPR existed in 1840 and did a similar list. Any list of the greatest composers under 40 would begin with Mendelssohn, who was at that time thought of as the great heir to Beethoven. Chopin would not get many complaints either. Berlioz and Liszt would be on the list, but plenty old fogeys would write in to complain. Glinka would be there too, but there would be all sorts of xenophobic complaints from the Germans. Schumann would be there, but mostly as a thank you for all the reviews he’s done for NPR. On the other hand, it’s highly likely that neither Verdi nor Wagner make this list for another two years. But Ferdinand David would, so would Adolphe Adam, and Johann Strauss Sr., and Charles Valentin Alkan, and Georg Hellmesburger, and Louis Niedermeyer, and Sigismond Thalberg.

From a certain point of view, a list like this is completely ridiculous. We have no way of knowing who is going to write great music in advance of when they write it, and even after they do, we often judge it wrongly. Furthermore, there is something about the term ‘composer’ that reeks of 1840. Few if any of the most influential (some would add ‘inspiring’) musicians of the last 100 years were composers in the most traditional sense – even Stravinsky was arguably as much an arranger as a composer. Most of the great musicians of the 20th century were weird hybrids of composers, arrangers and performers who found the freedom to create music by which no one had in the heyday of what we now call ‘classical’ music could imagine possessing. Even I, when I look at the NPR list, have to wonder if there is a single traditional composer on it to make music as compelling as Dan Deacon or Imogen Heap.

I could go down the list and discuss the reasons why I think various composers on it have the potential for real greatness (Timothy Andres), or are very good and underrated (Sarah Kirkland Snider), good but overrated (Nico Muhly), mediocre and overrated (Mason Bates), mediocre but enjoyable (Colin Jacobsen), irredeemably bad (not telling) and completely full of shit (really not telling…). But there’s a very simple, gaping, question this list begs its readers to ask which is so plainly under the noses of whoever made it that I worry they’d never notice it unless it was pointed out to them…

Is there such a thing as classical music in our day?

II. Teapots and Gefilte Fish

A conversation on The West Wing between President Jed Bartlet and his aide Charlie, on their way to a concert at the Kennedy Center.

• Jed: Do you know what they’re playing?
• Charlie: I’m sorry, sir?
• Jed: The Reykjavik Symphony. Do we know what they’re playing and for how long they’re playing it?
• Charlie: It says here 'an evening of modern music.'
• Jed: Turn the car around.
• Charlie: 'The orchestra features 90 pieces, including anvils and castanets.'
• Jed: Turn the car around.
• Charlie: Modern music is cool.
• Jed: Modern music sucks. Anything written after 1860 sucks.
• Charlie: 'Samuel Barber, Symphony No. 2.'
• Jed: Sucks.
• Charlie: 'Stravinsky, Variations on a Theme.'
• Jed: Sucks.
• Charlie: 'Schoenberg, Enlightened Night for String Orchestra.'
• Jed: Totally blows.
• Charlie: 'After intermission, they’ll be performing the world premiere of a piece...'
• Jed: Played on teapots and gefilte fish.
• Charlie: '...by a new Icelandic composer.' They told me he got so nervous when he heard you were coming that he was rewriting the piece until six o’clock.
• Jed: If he wants more time, I’d be happy to take a rain check.
• Charlie: I thought you liked classical music.
• Jed: This is not classical music. It is not classical music if the guy finished writing it this afternoon.

It’s at least worth noting that President Bartlett turned out to love the Icelandic piece he heard. But in a sense, President Bartlett’s made an argument which lay music lovers have made for nearly a century. Whether they’re ultimately right or wrong, we have to concede that they have a point. Classical music is not classical music because of any instrumental combination it contains; and it’s not classical music because of the performers involved. Classical music – at least as we currently define it - is classical because it’s proven over a long historical period to have nearly as much, or more, value to audiences today than it did in the era when it was written. Many classical music professionals complain that the term ‘classical music’ is a masterpiece of negative publicity – trapping a still living artform within a museum of past creations. In a sense, they’re absolutely right to do so. There is little in the world more constricting to the creativity of contemporary composers than having to share programs with the greatest musical minds of the past. But it’s called ‘classical’ because it rises above the concerns of our day at the same time that it addresses those very same concerns. We can speculate as to which of today’s musicians will have value to music lovers in a century’s time, but unless we live to see it, we’ll never know.

Try as we may to tear the classical music’s pearly gates down, it will never work. The greatest music, the greatest of any artform, is larger than all of us. The reason Beethoven and Mahler dwarf most contemporary composers is not (just) because audiences are conditioned to love them. It’s because Beethoven and Mahler are better than most contemporary music, and the audiences know it even if the musicians don’t. Music lovers may be a fickle and spoiled lot, but they’re not idiots.

III. What Music is Better?

Indeed, what about that music which is better? There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, maybe even thousands, of creators of great music in our time. Who are they?

Well…let’s start with the classical realm. Better yet, let’s just stick to the Americans. Whom among living American composers have written music that we can honestly say has turned the possibilities of the world upside down as only the greatest art can? While trying as best you can to leave taste out of the question, and realizing that the extent of your knowledge is pathetically inadequate, you still have to try answer the question.

What living American composers wrote music after which the world was simply a different place than before they wrote it, even minutely? No doubt, there will be a lot of the Big Three: Glass, Reich, and Adams. From a still older generation, one can’t deny places to Elliott Carter, Ned Rorem, or Gunther Schuller. You’d probably have to make at least a little room for some lesser known older names as stylistically different as David Del Tredici, William Bolcom, Charles Wuorinen, Terry Riley, (and especially) George Crumb and Meredith Monk. Among the middle aged names (does Osvaldo Golijov count?), one ought to include Michael Hersch, Aaron Jay Kernis, Paul Moravec, Stephen Hartke, Richard Danielpour, Steven Mackey, Steven Stucky (or are they the same person?), Michael Daugherty, Eliot Goldenthal, and all the great composers of Bang on a Can (special citation to David Lang). And among the young American composers who show potential for the ‘ultimate promise,’ it’s a list that at least has to include Andres, Nico Muhly, and Sarah Kirkland Snider and perhaps twenty or so others whom I could name (and no doubt, hundreds more I couldn’t), But as Stephen Sondheim (a composer more slated for immortality than anyone on this list) would say, ‘art isn’t easy.’ In a healthy artistic community, it takes thousands of the talented artists to provide dialogue, competition, and support so that just a handful of immortals can emerge. I’m well aware that I know ten times as much about classical music as I do about any other musical genre. Yet even I could create a list of the essential living, ‘non-classical’ American creative musicians that’s at least twenty times as long. No doubt, some of you reading this could make one fifty times as long. Next to the historical contributions of a baker’s half-dozen like Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Stephen Sondheim, Ralph Stanley, Paul Simon, Brian Wilson, and Stevie Wonder, what are Glass, Reich and Adams but soon-to-be footnotes?

Quote of the Day:

Le Malon: (describing the trailer for the new Aaron Sorkin show) BOLD ROGUE (who doesnt actually say bold things) stifled by the PEOPLE WHO FEAR BOLDNESS

800 Words: The Perils of Being a Relic at 30

For most of my life, I’ve heard that I was born in the wrong era – though nobody could seem to agree when the right one was. There are very few areas of my life in which I feel like I’m a person of my time. Most of my favorite music comes from the turn of the 19th century, the plurality of my favorite fiction writers from the turn of the 20th century, most of my favorite movies from the halfway point of the 20th, and even most of my favorite ‘popular’ music is pre-1970. My politics and religious views both come from other ages and are nearly as unfashionable today as most contemporary views would have been fifty or a hundred fifty years ago. Some people might say that these are not the views of a relic, they’re the views of a snob. Perhaps they’re right…

Nearly everything I believe in: Secular Enlightenment Judaism, Vital Center Liberalism, the importance of a humanist education, the ability to balance sublimity and fun, seems to be dying out. Jewish life, as life in every religion today seems to be, is bifurcating between believers and non-believers. Liberalism is increasingly seen even by the Left as a dirty word, inadequate to today’s demands – which only progressives can meet. Education is now a word that, at best, means extensive training in a highly specialized field without the ability to see anything in the context of others. And just as fun was banished from many older civilizations, the ability to experience anything deeper than fun seems in the final stages of being banished from ours. Video games have almost completely passed me by, gaming is something I’ve barely done throughout my life, most independent film leaves me cold, most sci-fi and fantasy books bore me. I’m as ill-equipped for 2012 as most people are ill-equipped for any other era.

I go on facebook and I see what other smart people ‘like,’ and I think to myself – ‘what am I missing?,’ or frankly more often, ‘what are they missing?’ I see all the which other upper-middle-class twenty and thirtysomethings are suppose to like: Blur, Wes Anderson, David Foster Wallace,…and those are only the one’s I’ve heard of, and I think to myself: How can anybody like this crap?

Who am I kidding? I was already as much a relic in 1990 as I am now. Twenty-two years later, the difference is that I’m more sure of it than ever, grumpier about it, and much prouder of who I am. For a number of years, I concluded the problem was me. I spent much of my adolescence in a hilariously desperate attempt to conceal my inner geek-among-geeks, mostly around the LD jocks I was placed in school with whom I worried might beat me up if they ever knew the ‘awful truth,’ which of course they knew anyway. Needless to say, these attempts were an abysmal failure. I was beaten up occasionally in spite of it, and I was probably lower in the social pecking order than I’d have been if I were proud about the things I loved.

Every era values a particular cultural sentiment too much - we can't help it. Sometimes it's romance, sometimes comedy, sometimes tragedy, sometimes epic, sometimes pastoral. At various points in our lives, our appetites for a particular genre are inexhaustible. And most often, what we like is simply a reflection of the culture that produced us.

I don't think it's any secret that we’re living in ironic times – at the end of a developing culture that stretches back to the First World War. All too many people seem to have no faith in families, friends, leaders, communities, the world at large. The culture in which we grew up is such common currency that we seem to have a pop-culture shorthand for every possible situation and emotion. Back in 1922, T. S. Eliot could ironically quote the references of his culture, and assume that a general public would understand most of them instantly. Nearly a century, Family Guy can quote a whole different set of references with the same irony and the same assumption that their audience will understand enough of them to keep tuning in. The difference is that it took 3000 years for the culture of The Waste Land to live a full life cycle before it T S Eliot could write a poem as a eulogy for it. It has been 90 years since The Waste Land was written, and in that time, an entire equivalent culture – a popular culture - supplanted Western highbrow culture, and lived an entire life cycle. What took three millennia to produce TS Eliot took only ninety years to produce Stewie Griffin.

I love irony as much as anyone, and like to think myself better at using it than at least 99 out of 100 people. But so much of what my prematurely aged ears hear in so much contemporary culture is irony in isolation; irony without context. In so much of the ‘art’ which current tastemakers love (those quotes are used as unironically as possible in the given situation), it is taken for granted that we should feel numb to any new development. Much music, however loud, has neither highs nor lows. Many movies, however clever, should not be made to move us or make us laugh too loud. I could name rock groups and movies and much else which display this malaise in abundance, but I have a feeling most people reading this could name even more. Only what I cite with disapproval and contempt, they cite with approval, sometimes even love. I simply don’t understand that.

The best which cultural history has to offer has irony in multitudes, but it also has empathy, comedy, romance, tragedy, bleakness and generosity of vision in equal measure. Preferably, the best art of all cultures can offer all that at the same time, making our responses to it forever ambiguous, making us be the judges of what we see, and forcing us to contemplate long and hard what we view. That is artistic greatness – be it Michelangelo or Matt Weiner.

We’re now growing up in an age when young kids not only find Beethoven stuffy, or Duke Ellington, they also have no use for The Beatles. We’re coming very soon to an era when music before Michael Jackson and Madonna does not exist, neither do movies before Star Wars, or TV before The Simpsons, or books before Lord of the Rings. Everything before them will be, at least to a stunningly large degree, antiques. Even The Simpsons might date – because how could a new generation possibly understand the cultural references of a culture they no longer inhabit?

Whether or not we realize it, popular culture recently pressed the reset button. We’re now talking about popular culture in terms that used to be reserved for classical culture. Rolling Stone has talked about rock music in classical terms for decades. But go to the Onion A.V. and read their reviews of old TV shows, they’re every bit as reverent (and perhaps as stuffy) as any literary criticism. The same might be said for any number of movie magazines, or reviews of Graphic Novels. One day, all too recently, America woke up to find itself a culture with a history. Watching The Godfather or listening to Sgt. Pepper was no longer a pleasure, it was a duty toward two of the founding documents of our civilization. In its wake, a new generation will rise up and find a new way to rebel. Perhaps they'll rebel with sincerity.

And just as in the final years of the previous culture, we rebel with excessive frivolity. They had The Charleston, we have booty drops. They had speakeasies, we have raves. They had the Lost Generation, we have Indy Hipsters. But nothing dates like the cutting edge. Enjoy these things while you can, because one day soon, these kids will grow up and have as much control over the culture as people just barely older than me do now. One day soon, you all are going to wake up to find yourselves every bit as much relics as I am.

Quote of the Day:

HaZmora: A Sopranos parody in 2012?

800 Words: I Soprani di Gersia Nuova

It is a musical discovery akin to Schliemann's discovery of Troy. A lost cycle of six operas by Giuseppe Verdi (albeit the sixth is so long it will probably be divided into two separate operas and performed over a period of two days) which he wrote in segments for the rest of his life following the completion of La Forza Del Destino. Rumors of the these operas' existence had many champions at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Mussollini was credulous enough to dismantle and reassemble Verdi's villa in Bussetto in a failed attempt to find them. But since World War II the rumors of a lost opera cycle lying in a secret alcove at Verdi's villa have been dismissed by musicologists as a failed propaganda attempt by right-wing Italian patriots to stir up wounded Italian pride because Verdi never attempted an opera cycle on the scale of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung.

As was eventually discovered, the final score was not kept in Bussetto. It was accidentally found in boxes underneath the floorboards of a Milan apartment that belonged to the paramour of Verdi's old age, Teresa Stolz. This score was accidentally found by its current occupant, a Milanese rave dancer who wishes to remain anonymous. When reached for comment at the house of former Italian President Silvio Berlusconi, she released a statement saying "I am proud to have contributed so well to Italy's rich cultural heritage."

It was thought that Verdi, a moody but generous man and not given to professional jealousy, was not one who willingly would enter himself into competition with Wagner. It has been speculated that perhaps he never showed these operas to anyone because he did not wish to willingly place himself in competition with his German rival. The loss was to millions of opera lovers deprived of six Verdi operas.

The libretti of the first four operas were written by Verdi's longtime librettist Francesco Maria Piave. The fourth seems to have undergone revisions by Arrigo Boito, who contributed libretti to the final two - which are said to be far more florid and dramatically experimental.

The scores themselves are said to be among the most dramatic Verdi ever wrote, albeit with some inevitable longeurs. Phillip Gossett, a Distinguished Professor of Musicology at the University of Chicago, edited the scores, and when reached for comment said that Verdi wrote these operas as a private laboratory for his public works. "The signs that these scores were not meant for public consumption are on every page of this manuscript. Some scenes seem underorchestrated and Verdi made far less dynamic indications than he generally made for singers. But there are formal experiments with Wagnerian through-composition, strange whole tone Debussy-like harmonies, eleventh and thirteen chords that sound straight out of Scriabin, some strangely chromatic writing reminiscent of middle-period Schoenberg, and even some passages with rhythmic complexity on the same level as anything in Stravinsky."

A joint press conference is scheduled for Tuesday between Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb and Teatro La Scala Intendant Stephane Lissner, who shall together announce that a staged production of the complete cycle will be unveiled at both Teatro La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera over the course of Verdi's upcomming bicentennial year, 2013. Both productions will be under the direction of eminence grise, Franco Zefferelli. Both runs are slated to be conducted by the companies' respective music directors: Daniel Barenboim and James Levine. This also means that there will be an announcement on Tuesday that James Levine is slated to make a comeback out of his health-related retirement to conduct all six operas, though Fabio Luisi will remain on call if Levine proves unable to complete the cycle. Plans are also being made to bring productions of I Soprani di Gersia Nuova to the Royal Opera House in London, the Vienna State Opera, the Paris National Opera, the Berlin State Opera, the San Francisco Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Bavarian State Opera of Munich, the Zurich Opera, the Salzburg Festival, the Aix en Provence Festival, the Mariinsky Theater of St. Petersburg, and opera houses all over Italy with all due haste. Furthermore, the Chicago Symphony schedule is going to be completely revamped so that Riccardo Muti may present the complete cycle in concert during the fall of 2012, first at Orchestral Hall in Chicago over a period of two months, and then at Carnagie Hall in New York over the span of a week.

Details of the productions are forthcoming, but the Chicago Symphony, La Scala and the Met have announced that they will be sharing their casts and that both the manuscript and the printed score will soon be made available on all three websites.

Setting: Gersia Nuova and it's surrounding environs.

Time Period: The Late Fourteenth Century

Cast:

Don Antonio: Baritone - played by Dimitri Hrovotovsky (Placido Domingo campaigned for the part, but it was decided that a true baritone must undergo the role's first assumption.). The Doge of Ghiersia Nuova, The Lion of Caldvellia Ovest. A charismatic leader of men who pursues his enemies with horrifying vengeance, but is haunted and tortured by his terrible sins.

Donna Carmela: Mezzo - played by Olga Borodina. Don Antonio's seemingly loyal wife. An ageing lady of formidable stature who disarms her confidants while manipulating them ruthlessly to pursue her own interests.

Melfi: Contralto - played by Nathalie Stutzmann. A gypsy fortune teller whom Don Antonio often consults in secret about his decisions.

Christoforo Moltisanti: Tenore di Forza - played by Jonas Kaufmann. Don Antonio's nephew and designated heir. A man of terrifying rage who feigns loyalty to Don Antonio while constantly searching for ways to overthrow him.

Don Corrado: Basso Cantate - played by Feruccio Furlanetto. Don Antonio's uncle and rival of dangerously unsound mind.

Silvio Dante: Basso Profundo. Played by Matti Salminen. Don Antonio's trusted advisor who often manipulates Don Antonio into acts of terrible ruthlessness.

Paolo Noce: Basso Buffo - played by Paul Plishka. Don Antonio's bumbling but loyal general.

Antonino: Tenor - played by Gerhard Siegel. Don Antonio's lame son, who by virtue of his condition speaks truths to his father which no other man dare utter.

Medonia: Soprano (...) - played by Karita Matilla. Don Antonio's virginal daughter. The apple of his eye whom he shields from the horrors of our world.

Adriana La Cerva: Dramatic Mezzo - Played by Elina Garanca. The foul temptress of Gersia Nuova, who ensnares Christoforo into temptation in order to further the downfall of Don Antonio.

Janella: Coloratura Soprano - Played by Diana Damrau. Don Antonio's volatile sister who both supports and plots against Don Antonio.

Roberto Baccallieri: Basso Buffo: An officer of Don Corrado's army who changes his loyalty to Don Antonio an is rewarded with the hand of his sister. A reward he comes to regret.

Salvatore Bonpensiero: Character Baritone - Played by Leo Nucci. A loyal general in Don Antonio's army compelled by the church to betray Don Antonio. Nucci will also sing the role of the fish.

Donna Livia: Character Soprano - played by Anja Silja. Don Antonio's evil mother who plots to kill him.

Don Giovanni Sacramoni: Bass - played by Samuel Ramey: Don Antonio's rival with whom he dreams of an era of piece.

Rafael Cifaretto: Dramatic Tenor - penciled in to played by Rolando Villazon. A murderous captain in Don Antonio's army from whom Don Antonio fears insurrection and must have executed.

Don Fillippo Leotardo: Heroic Bass Baritone - played by Bryn Terfel. A ruthless rival Doge who declares war on Don Antonio.

Antonio Blundetto: Lyric Baritone - played by Thomas Hampson. Don Antonio's cousin who has forsworn violence and pledged himself to the church.

Arturo Bucco: Character Tenor - played by David Cangelosi. Don Antonio's peasant cook whose homespun wisdom is a source of consolation to Don Antonio.

Furio Giunta: Lyric Tenor - played by Vittorio Grigolo. A soft-hearted captain in Don Antonio's army who nearly assassinates Don Antonio because of his passion for Donna Carmela.

Riccardo Aprile: Basso Cantate - played by Rene Pape. The evil older brother of former Doge Giovanni Aprile who returns from exile and becomes betrothed to Janella before she kills him.

Vittorio Spatafore: Verdi's only known Castrato part, will probably be assumed by countertenors - played by Andras Scholl. Don Antonio's captain who develops a passionate loyalty to Medonia's betrothed.

Donna Rosalie Aprile: Baritone - played by Bea Arthur. The widow of Giovanni Aprile who is now the chief Lady in Waiting to Donna Carmela.