When Facebook Becomes Blogging

If I can make one rec for your family's consumption during all this that you certainly don't have to follow:

Today is the 90th birthday of Stephen Sondheim, and a 90 year old smoker probably doesn't have much time left. More than any movie director or songwriter, more than any artist or writer or traditional composer, he's our Shakespeare, our Mozart, our Tolstoy. Long after we're all forgotten, he'll still have things to offer for generations whose conditions we can't possibly yet conceive. Maybe even more than The Simpsons.....

Into the Woods is a work about Fairy Tales, what is true about them and what are lies, and what is inevitable about telling them. It is both as light as air and as dark and disturbing a tale as the world has. It is appropriate for anyone old enough to understand the concepts it speaks of, but it is in no way a casual experience that the fairy-tale premise seems to promise. But most importantly, it tells children and parents both what they need to know in order to make meaningful lives in the face of all the world's tragedy. It is his greatest work, and perhaps our greatest work: the greatest work of art ever brought into being by any American in any form. The second act has been playing in my head non-stop all week, it saw everything that may soon be coming. It shows how we got ourselves into this mess, and it shows the way out. 

Nothing will change by your watching it, but you might find what may come just a little bit easier to bear. 

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

It may be because he gets free publicity from his brother on CNN, but Andrew Cuomo is looking more and more like the great hero of this moment. He was a non-starter as a candidate in 2020 because he was personality who can't make politics look like anything but politics (remind you of someone from 2016?), but at a moment like this, this is the chief executive you want. Had he a chance in 2020 I'd have given him a very serious look. His father, Mario, should have been President, could have been President, would have been President, but he got cold feet in both 1988 and 1992. No politician is perfect, and Cuomo clearly had dirt around him that he did not want exposed. He clearly lacked Bill's endless stomach to have his dirty laundry aired in public, but the same endless capacity for battle was probably related to the Clinton capacity for selling out all the people they claimed to speak for. Cuomo never seemed to do that. He was a liberal in the FDR tradition, and like his son, he made government work. And good Bill Clinton was, Mario Cuomo was a better, more charismatic speaker even than Clinton. He's the missing link between JFK/LBJ on the one hand, and Obama on the other. Had Cuomo been been President instead of Clinton, maybe he would have lost in 96, but if he won, the Gingrich revolution would have been cut off at the knees. He never would have compromised on Glass-Steagall, he never would have given up the healthcare battle, or given in on welfare reform. And now, here we are. 

I find this speech soothing, because it shows that it didn't, it doesn't, have to be this way for America. I don't know when it will be possible to change course, but it is possible. And one day, hopefully sooner rather than later, it can be done. 

Underrated Classical Musicians: 3/19/20

I just heard the music of Elie Siegmeister on the radio, an oft-forgotten from America's musical past who seemed to intersect with my life relatively frequently. His music was very much in the Copland vein, but more progressive, closer to the avant-garde, certainly more challenging, much more like the acerbic, ascetic vein of early or late Copland than his more beloved middle period. It causes one to wonder, what ultimately is originality? There are so many American composers who sound like Aaron Copland that Copland can't possibly be said to be particularly original, and yet Copland produced a series of masterpieces in the late 30s and early 40s that define a period in American classical music - he simply 'got it right' in a way that perhaps no other composer of his generation did. And yet, there are so many other great works by his contemporaries. 

Siegmeister may not have Copland's innate sense for ideal proportion - a work like Fanfare for the Common Man is absolutely perfect - not a single wasted note, and on a different much more impressive scale, Appalachian Spring is pretty much as perfect a piece of music as a half-hour ballet score could ever be allowed to be. But Siegmeister goes further than Copland into both the avant-garde and populism. Schoenberg and Stravinsky are in his music, but so is jazz and folk and R&B. On the one hand, there's a work like the Western Suite, premiered by Toscanini, and incorporating all kinds of cowboy tunes, or the Ozark Suite which I've linked to below. On the other, works like his symphonies which use snippets of every genre of American music plummet into the atonal depths of the American darkness like Roger Sessions and Wallingford Rigger. 

Siegmeister's son-in-law was a professor at my podunk music school who probably should have retired at least ten years before I had him, but he was a brilliant pianist and I'll do a much more affectionate reminiscence of him here at some point than that would imply. But nearly every American piano student of intermediate level plays something by Siegmeister - usually something from the American Kaleidescope which was clearly meant to be an answer to Bartok's Mikrokosmos. 

But Siegmeister wrote in heady days for American classical music, as they were heady days in America. On the east coast there were establishmentarian composers like Copland and Siegmeister who could simultaneously write both for the public and for the specialist, and know that their works would get at least a couple performances by the best conductors and pianists in the world. In the West, perhaps even more interesting things happening from the 'mavericks' like Cowell and Partch who reset the boundaries of what music was thought conceivable to do. All civilizations have golden ages, and while later periods always have their glories, the flesh flush of achievement can never truly be recaptured. Immigrants and their children, white immigrants in New York at least..., could embrace an American identity that matched patriotism with the liberalism of the FDR era, the bulwark against tyranny which their cousins unfortunate enough to never make it out could never experience in Europe. 

The featured music here is the Ozark Set for Orchestra, based on music of the Ozark mountains in Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, conducted by Dmitri Mitropoulos, one of the very greatest of all time, in a performance of sadly deficient sound. This rendering of rural Americana is so very different from Copland's. Copland's music is not truly meant to be Appalachian, it was merely a tacked on title by the choreographer Martha Graham after she decided to choreograph Copland's music as a scene in American Appalachia. On the other hand, this is far truer music to the spirit of the Ozarks, rough-hewn and rednecked but simultaneously with great appreciation for beauty. Just another masterpiece by a forgotten name....

Underrated Classical Musicians 3/18/20

"About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;..."

Auden is now an old master himself, dead nearly fifty years, but when speaking of the era of Breughel, he could have been speaking just as well to the prescience of a musical master like Nicolas Gombert. There are, of course, so many reasons why religion makes particular sense in the season of death, and even as existence after death always remains a mystery, death always comes, and therefore humanity always returns to religion. For worse or better, we are hard wired to entertain notions of the sacred. 

Just like the first few lines of W.H. Auden's Musee des beaux arts could be written about today, the sacred text of Media vita could have been written about next week. 

"In the midst of life we be in death: Of whom may we seek for succour, but of Thee, O Lord, which for our sins justly art moved? Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, Deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death."

The art of the sacred was not created for moments when life is in its full flower. When life gives us no existential questions to answer, the better we listen to profane music about love and pleasure, and the great old music masters of the Church wrote plenty of music for those seasons of life too. But most of them reserved their true effort for those moments when living requires effort, for those moments when people need to work to find the meaning in their lives. 

There are very few if any composers from the era before Bach who are properly rated let alone overrated. The church music of the High Renaissance is an entire era of music that seems to have disappeared in the 18th century from public consumption in much the same way that what we now think of as classical music is disappearing from the pubic discourse. Like classical music, it speaks to an ethos completely alien to later eras, and yet the ethos was clearly no less meaningful. 

I could give a biography of Nicolas Gombert, it's pretty interesting as far as composer biographies go, but to assign an identity to this music would almost defeat the point of it. The very point of such music is its disembodied anonymity. I could talk of this composer's heavy lexicon of techniques and how they differ from his contemporaries and teacher (Josquin), but the point of such techniques is not to stand out but to blend these polyphonic voices into a seamless thread where it is impossible to look at or listen to the strand and determine where one voice or phrase begins and another ends. 

What's truly crucial about this music is not its composer but to whom the composer addresses the music. Is it us? Is it god? Is it both? Or is it false our vision of god? The greatness of music, the malleability of musical meaning beyond all the other art forms, lies within music's ability to make itself about anything within which the listener perceives the music. This is why the non-specificity of music, more so music than literature or even art, is where the religious experience most commonly resides. 

More transcendental speculations about early music on another day.3

In The Beginning Was...

And so it begins. And of course, the first place we read about it is on social media.....

We hear about this one's friend who gets it so can we send amusing gifs her way to cheer her up? We hear about a good friend's aunt who was in the hospital but was OK, but who gave it to her son who had a surprisingly virulent case of it for a healthy guy in his mid-30s, and gave it to her husband who is just in the beginning phases. We hear from people who got sick who might have in fact had it but can never know because there were insufficient testing resources.
The mind starts playing tricks. You've been having a headache and nausea for more than a week... You went in to see your GP last week, and was told that it was probably a viral infection you caught from your brother who had the flu, but that your immune system is kicking its ass. And yet every day, usually at night, you get a bad headache, and think hoo boy here we go.... You start evaluating family members over the phone, Mom's laugh sounds a little throaty, the tone of the articles Dad sent today sounds like he takes this a little more seriously. You make mental notes to call people, and of course forget to call them for two days at a time. You begin to notice the urge to cough, anticipating that this is the big one, but forget that you just ate through yet another tub of ice cream which probably tripled the size of your mucous membrane. 

This is the one of the most extraordinary and unlikely moments in the entirety of American history - maybe the single most extraordinary. Once your kids go to bed, what you're hearing now is the one thing that has not existed in American history since before the twentieth century: existential quiet. The idea that there is something going on somewhere else that's worth seeing, or doing, that's all gone now. There is only the now and the here, there only the experience of where we are at exactly this place and exactly this time, because tomorrow, we may no longer be anywhere at all. John the Apostle called it 'Logos,' Heidegger called it 'being there.' That moment when there is literally nothing but the thoughts of you reverberating against your skull, and out you can tune them no longer. These are the moments when revelations are made and come to, they are also the moments of our deepest agonies. 

It is this existential quiet which every American has spent decade upon decade drowning out from their ears just as their parents did before them, and their parents before them, and their parents before them. There was always something else to do, something new to see and hear and taste and touch at The American Carnival: that unending festival that went on every single day of the twentieth century without a stop, exciting us through two world wars and a Great Depression, made more extensive and expensive with every new wave of immigration, excitement piled upon excitement until it long since was exponentially more exciting than any carnival the world has ever seen or assembled, so exciting that the most rebellious spirits in every country of the world all wanted to assemble right here so that they could do everything it was that they were told not to do elsewhere. And whether they created the best sights and sounds and thoughts the world had ever seen, they certainly created the most rebellious, the most exciting, the most intoxicating. The American Carnival was the topic of everything from Citizen Kane and The Great Gatsby to the reality show or shitcom you stumble on at 4 in the morning. The Simpsons and Walt Whitman and Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan all chronicled it in their different ways. And now, almost a hundred thirty years after the Chicago World's Fair, it's all over. In the span of a week, all it took to fold the tent was a microscopic organism that can't be filmed, has nothing to say when you put a mic in front of it, needs no slogan to increase its sales, needs no bottom line to increase its profit. 

....more tomorrow.....I'm not where to take this yet....

Underrated Classical Musicians 3/12/20

It feels incredibly odd to keep going to plan when Götterdämmerung seems everywhere, but it's nice to have a place of normalcy. 

So today we'll talk about the extremely old sounding music of an old favorite of mine: Cyrillus Kreek. His Psalm settings are some of the glories of choral music, but again, it's in Estonian, a language no singer is ever taught, so how many people even know about him outside Estonia? He was a contemporary of Bartok's and, surprise surprise, collected lots of folk music around his native environs and then wrote harmonies to them. Without Kreek, no Tormis, no Pärt, no Estonian Song Festival (the world's largest annual gathering of amateur choruses, or one of them...), no Singing Revolution (more on that in a few days...). Listen to Psalm 104, this could be written by Perotin. The harmonic drone underneath the melody sounds like they could be wind pipes from Homeric times. Or listen to Psalm 137. It has all the soul-stirring rise and fall of Russian Orthodox chant, but in seven parts rather than four. Or the deceptive simplicity of Psalm 22, only four parts, but all sorts of creepy chromaticism everywhere. Or the even more deceptive simplicity of the very brief Psalm 84: open fifths everywhere, open fifths and fourths everywhere. 

What can I say except for that this is amazing music? Kreek was a hugely prolific composer whose vast majority of work I have not explored, and I'm not even sure that there is a way. Go on Spotify and you see that there are only two CD's of his music. Estonia, which is clearly such a musical country whose government clearly provides robust support for its musicians, owes it to itself to provide Kreek a complete recorded edition. But one last work....

The Requiem of Cyrillus Kreek is unlike any other. While the text of the Requiem Mass is an Estonian translation of the Latin text (though for whatever reason the recording on youtube is sung in Latin...), many of the melodies are those of the traditional chant, which Kreek arranges in transformations that would have made the original Church Fathers' beards fall out. If you know the original Requiem chant, put it on and wait a few minutes. This is one of the great large-scale choral works ever written.

A Canon: A Weekend Playlist to HEAL AMERICA!!!!

(this was done five years ago and somehow I never published it, probably because I didn't come close to finishing it)

Samuel Barber: Agnus Dei

Samuel Barber: Adagio for Strings (world premiere recording)

Samuel Barber: Knoxville: Summer of 1915

William Grant Still: Afro-American Symphony

Avery Parish: After Hours

Benny Goodman: Airmail Special

Benny Goodman: 1938 Carnagie Hall Concert

Benny Goodman: Sing, Sing, Sing

Irving Berlin: Alexander's Ragtime Band

Irving Berlin: God Bless America (sung by the Red Army Choir)

Ella Fitzgerald: All The Things You Are

Willie Nelson: Always On My Mind

Giancarlo Menotti: Amahl and the Night Visitors (original broadcast)

Bonnie Raitt and John Prine: Angel from Montgomery

Aaron Copland: Appalachian Spring

Aaron Copland: Symphony no. 3

Aaron Copland: Fanfare for the Common Man

Aaron Copland: The Promise of Living

Count Basie: April in Paris

Count Basie: April in Paris (Blazing Saddles Version) 

Dooley Wilson: As Time Goes By

Jay Ungar: Ashokan Farewell

Clifton Chenier: Ay-Tete Fe

The Ronettes: Be My Baby

Jerome Moross: The Big Country (Soundtrack Suite)

Bob Dylan, The Band, and many other superstars: I Shall Be Released

The Band and The Staples Singers: The Weight

The Band: Up on Cripple Creek

Joni Mitchell: Big Yellow Taxi

George Crumb: Black Angels (a very dark sort of catharsis) 

Bob Dylan: Blowin' in the Wind (sung by Peter, Paul & Mary)

Bill Monroe: Blue Moon of Kentucky

Elvis Presley: Blue Suede Shoes

Cab Calloway: Blues in the Night (the original version)

Coleman Hawkins: Body and Soul

John Lee Hooker: Boogie Chillun

Bruce Springsteen: Jungleland

Bruce Springsteen: Thunder Road

Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run

Bruce Springsteen: Highway Patrolman 

Eddy Arnold: Bouquet of Roses

Thelonious Monk: Round Midnight

Sonny Rollins: St. Thomas 


T-Bone Walker: Call It Stormy Monday

Mel Torme: Christmas Song

Sam Cooke: A Change is Gonna Come

A Chorus Line: What I Did for Love

A Chorus Line: Nothing

A Chorus Line: One

Pete Steele: Coal Creek March

Loretta Lynn: Coal Miner's Daughter

Dolly Parton: Coat of Many Colors

Mamie Smith: Crazy Blues

Mahalia Jackson/Duke Ellington: Come Sunday

Clarence Ashley: Coo Coo Bird

Mary Lee: Jesus is Real to Me

Sacred Harp: Present Joys

Sacred Harp: Nearer My God to Thee

Sacred Harp: Alabama

Sacred Harp: Sardinia

Sacred Harp: Hallelujah

John Coltrane: A Love Supreme (the whole album)

John Coltrane: Blue Train

John Coltrane: My Favorite Things

Sound of Music: My Favorite Things

Sound of Music: Do Re Mi

Sound of Music: The Hills are Alive

Sound of Music: Edelweiss

Sound of Music: So Long, Farewell

Sound of Music: Climb Every Mountain

Oklahoma: Oklahoma

Oklahoma: O What a Beautiful Morning

Carousel: If I Loved You

Carousel: What's The Use of Wonderin'

Carousel: You'll Never Walk Alone

Carousel Waltz

South Pacific: Younger than Springtime

The King and I: Getting to Know You

The King and I: Something Wonderful

William Warfield: Ol' Man River (Showboat)

Showboat: Make Believe

Ava Gardner: Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man (Showboat)

Showboat: You Are Love

Showboat: Life Upon a Wicked Stage

Merle Travis: Dark as a Dungeon

Grateful Dead: Dark Star (live, what else?)

David Grisman: Dawgology

Doc Watson: Brown's Ferry Blues

Doc Watson: Deep River Blues

Marian Anderson: Deep River

Paul Robeson: Let My People Go

Paul Robeson: Goin' Home

Chanticleer: Shenandoah

Kate Smith: Dream a Little Dream

Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians

Steve Reich: Tehillim

Steve Reich: Daniel Variations

Steve Reich: Different Trains

Igor Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms

Igor Stravinsky: Orpheus

Igor Stravinsky: Ebony Concerto 

Igor Stravinsky: Symphony in C

Igor Stravinsky: Dumbarton Oaks

Bela Bartok: Concerto for Orchestra

Bela Bartok: Piano Concerto no. 3

Ray Baretto: El Watusi

Sly & The Family Stone: Everyday People

Fiddler on the Roof: If I Were a Rich Man

Fiddler on the Roof: Sunrise Sunset

Fiddler on the Roof: Miracle of Miracles

Fiddler on the Roof: Matchmaker

Fiddler on the Roof: To Life

Carol Channing: Hello, Dolly

Hello, Dolly: Ribbons Down My Back

Ethel Merman & Bruce Yarnell: Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better

Annie Get Your Gun: There's No Business Like Show Business

Muppets & Ethel Merman: There's No Business Like Show Business

Kermit the Frog: The Rainbow Connection

Kermit: It's Not Easy Being Green

Muppet Theme Song

Kermit & Fozzie: Movin' Right Along

Muppets: Happiness Hotel

The Music Man: 76 Trombones

The Music Man: Piano Lesson

The Music Man: Pick a Little

The Music Man: Ya Got Trouble

The Music Man: Iowa Stubborn

The Music Man: Marion the Librarian

The Music Man: Shipoopi

The Music Man: Goodnight My Someone

The Music Man: My White Knight

The Music Man: Till There Was You

The Music Man: Rock Island

West Side Story: America 

West Side Story: Maria

West Side Story: Tonight

West Side Story: Mambo

West Side Story: One Hand, One Heart

West Side Story: Tonight (Quintet) 

West Side Story: Jet Song

West Side Story: Something's Coming

West Side Story: A Boy Like That


James Taylor: Fire and Rain

Parliament: Flash Light

Lionel Hampton: Flying Home

Earl Scruggs: Foggy Mountain Breakdown

Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson together

Flatt & Scruggs, and DocWatson: Liberty

Jerry Orbach: Lullaby of Broadway (42nd Street)

We're In The Money (42nd Street)

Elizabeth Cotton: Freight Train

Nat "King" Cole: Route 66

Max Steiner: Gone With the Wind (soundtrack suite)

Erich Korngold: The Sea Hawk (soundtrack suite) 

Erich Korngold: The Adventures of Robin Hood (soundtrack suite) 

Bascom Lamar Lunsford: Mountain Dew

Chic: Good Times

Beach Boys: Sloop John B

Beach Boys: Wouldn't It Be Nice

Beach Boys: God Only Knows

Beach Boys: Good Vibrations

Jess Morris: Goodbye Old Paint

Simon & Garfunkel: Bridge Over Troubled Water

Simon & Garfunkel: Mrs. Robinson

Simon & Garfunkel: The Boxer

Simon & Garfunkel: The Sounds of Silence

Jerry Lee Lewis: Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On

Jerry Lee Lewis: Great Balls of Fire

The Platters: The Great Pretender

Ferde Grofe: Grand Canyon Suite

Guys and Dolls: A Fugue for Tinhorns

Guys and Dolls: A Bushell and a Peck

Guys and Dolls: Adelaide's Lament

Guys and Dolls: Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat

Guys and Dolls: Luck Be a Lady Tonight

Frank Sinatra: My Way

My Way on Mad Men

Frank Sinatra: The Way You Look Tonight

Frank Sinatra: Strangers in the Night

Frank Sinatra: That's Life

Frank Sinatra: New York, New York

Frank Sinatra: It Was A Very Good Year

Frank Sinatra: I've Got You Under My Skin

Frank Sinatra: Lady is a Tramp

Frank Sinatra: All The Way

Frank Sinatra: One For My Baby

Frank Sinatra & Grace Kelly: Something Stupid

Judy Garland: Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Judy Garland: Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Judy Garland: This Joint is Jumpin'

Liza Minelli: Mein Herr (Cabaret)

Liza Minelli: Cabaret

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

I already feel absurd having written this....

To the few reading this who will not be with us next year. It probably won't be you, it probably won't be me, but it may be true that at least one or two of us will not be here to read and write much more.
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Your life had purpose, your life had meaning, you were loved, you were appreciated. You made a world of difference to hundreds of people, you will be remembered with nothing but affection and fondness and charity by people who will always love you in your absence, and be remembered with very few things less charitable than laughter by the people who didn't. The world was a better, more interesting place for your being here. Whenever we remember this period, we will always remember the lost, we will think of you, and even as our hearts are empty for knowing you are no longer here, they'll fill up again for the privilege of having known you. Your suffering will be over, you will rest, and one day, sooner than we realize, we may yet see you again. 

To those who are about to lose their jobs, lose their homes, get a divorce, sap their education funds for their children, deplete their life savings, to those whose relationship with the people they're under quarantine with will become much more difficult, perhaps even ruined, it will probably not be you or me, but the chances of it being us rather than someone else are much higher.

None of us know what happens next, but you don't go through a crisis like this without it triggering the possibility of many more. Many businesses will fold in the next while, and the ones who don't may have mass layoffs, the value of currency could very well fluctuate in every conceivable direction, investments may mean very little, savings accounts may be run through like a sieve, debts will be run up even much more than they are already. Life flows like a river, bad experiences follow good and then good experiences return, humiliations follow triumphs which follow humiliations. But we will all feel some share of this together. Many people have thought in the last while, occasionally including me, that there is no point to suffering, and that any notion that there is nobility in suffering only excuses the people who inflict it. Dispel with that belief as soon as you can. There is no life without suffering, it is an inevitable portion of life's cycle, your children will remember your trials, they'll tell what you endured to your grandchildren, and one day they will all begin to understand, and they will feel gratitude that you endured so much to bring them life. At some point, prosperity will return, it is inevitable. The point of life is not our solid achievements, which can always disappear in the blink of an eye, the point of life is life, and enduring bitter experience is part of what creates in us the will to live. You will live more, you will experience better times, and you will provide better times for the people you love. 

To the doctors, nurses, hospital and nursing home staff, public health officials, home caregivers, orderlies, government officials and civil servants.

This is the moment you've been training for your whole lives. You know that we're all dependent on you. You have to embody the strength and authority none of the rest of us have, and if you don't have it in yourself, you need to act as though you do and get whatever help you need to summon it. You will be faced with the choice who will live and who will die. No matter how many people you save, some people are going to call you murderers. Be ready for it. Some people will express their gratitude by spitting on you. A few of you will get infected so many times that you won't make it through this either. The rest of you may find yourselves turning to very destructive behaviors in your downtime that you would never advise for the people you serve. But whenever you get through this, whatever else you've done, you will always be heroes to your communities, you will have the gratitude of every family with a life you saved, and even the gratitude of many families with lives you couldn't, and will be able to live the rest of your lives knowing you saved many more people who will never even know how much you did for them. 

To those who are about to lose people they love, perhaps even watch them die, perhaps even be unable to watch them die. And though we hope otherwise, there is a chance that may be most of us. 

This is the hardest job of all. Circumstances will beset our brains with delusions about what's possible, our hearts will break a dozen times, our souls will collapse another dozen under the exhaustion of it all. There is nothing in the world that will give us the endurance that may soon be demanded of us. But nothing is written in stone. The more you're able to distance yourself from others now, the less people you love you'll be separated from later. But there will, of course, be moments when you can't help yourself: to stop the stir-craziness you'll hug the people you love, you'll go out to crowded public places, you'll eat too far into your emergency supplies, you'll take too long to wash dishes, you'll have sex, you may even forget to wash your hands for a day at a time. We're all extremely fallible, and if people we love die, we're going to beat ourselves up every day for the things we might have been able to do to prevent it. But so will everybody else. Whomever we hate now, we all will bind each other's wounds. Whomever we don't forgive now, our sins against each other will be like wool. Whatever guilt we feel, we will not forsake each other. And as the darkness deepens and helpers fail, we will abide. 

Amen.

Underrated Classical Musicians: 3/11/20

What makes the contemporary music of Northeastern Europe so particularly special is its ability to show that content and accessibility needn't be mutually exclusive. My musical friend Jens Laurson writes of Erkki Sven-Tüür that he's 'one of those composers whose music is both uncompromisingly modern and above-average accessible.' In America, in Western Europe, we talk as though one must choose a side and make concessions to it. But Tüür's music is fully modernist and fully tonal, as informed by Schoenberg as by Sibelius. 

Perhaps it's generational, he's roughly thirty years younger than Tormis and roughly twenty-five younger than Pärt. Pärt, like so many of his generation, started as a serialist. In an time and place that demanded social realism of its artists, the atonality of Schoenberg and Webern was a way for composers to embrace a profundity that was also subversive. But everything that once was subversive becomes establishmentarian and for most composers born in 1959, regardless of place, atonality was a millstone about their necks. Nobody in Europe was forcing social realism on artists after 1990, so if they wanted to develop their voice, what point is there in not letting oneself evolve away from a style of 1925 to declare one's independence from the dogmas of 1948? 

Tüür reconciled influences that were particular to his musical generation, on the one hand the American minimalism of Glass and Reich, on the other, the European complexity of Xenakis and Ligeti, to arrive at a Schnittke-like poly-stylistic eclecticism. Like a particular favorite of mine of the previous generation, Alfred Schnittke, Tüür reconciles the bifurcations that existed in classical music all throughout the twentieth century. But whereas MacMillan lets all the influences stand out without blending, perhaps like Mahler, Tüür seems to integrate them like Sibelius at a more elemental level - simple rhythmic patterns alternating with complex ones, or coloristic elements of Schoenberg blending with elements of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. 

Túúr had the added distinction of being leader of one of the pre-eminent rock bands in Estonia in the years around Communism's fall. The band, called 'In Spe' is clearly extremely influenced by prog-rock, the fascinating and often controversial genre of rock which takes marrying classical complexity to the adaptive accessibility of Rock as its bible. 

Jens Laurson also calls Tüür the preeminent symphonist our time. I'm not expert enough to make anything like that definitive declaration, but what makes Tuur interesting is his ability to blend so many different strands of musical material, and the the fact that he can let so many different sources seep into his music makes a musical mind like his ideal for creating large forms. 

But for today, we'll just talk about a couple of his ingenious works for string orchestra. Listen to Lighthouse, a work for string orchestra. In spite of its title, this is no pastoral string orchestra work like those (glorious ones) by Vaughan Williams or Holst. This is an encyclopedia of ways to write for string orchestra, nothing necessarily too 'out there,' but just out there enough to make every musical gesture have maximum impact - that, not using all your material at once, is the sign of a great compositional artist. Every time you think the attention might wander, Tüür has a new trick. It's this grey area where styles and worldviews are married that true individuality has the best chance of happening, individuality can certainly happen at the extremes, but the stronger the movement, the more easily the movement can subsume one's voice. 

Or these ingenious marriages of harmony and color in Insula Deserta - from back in 1989, it was Tüür's first classical hit. I honestly have no idea what the title means, but the work is a tornado of activity that goes back and forth between dissonance and consonance, using strings both for traditional melody and harmony and also for weird and creepy textures and asymmetric rhythms, and doing it all with such deft virtuosity that in 1989 it must have seemed to announce to its audiences a whole new way of composing. 

But best of all is Flamma, a work that takes all these string techniques to a whole new level, incorporating natural harmonics, complex polyphony, very brief snippets of Beethoven and Bach and Schoenberg and maybe even Led Zeppelin that seem to be quoted like a musical hyperlink (though I'm probably just hearing things...). It is perhaps an admirable successor piece to Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, that smears the ink of previous music all over the page.

Underrated Classical Music: 3/10/20

The greatest choral composer of the 20th century is Veljo Tormis. I don't even know if it's a competition. But his music is set to texts in Estonian, a language nobody speaks, so no chorus sings it, and no audience knows about it. Its probable that his only true competition is Zoltan Kodaly, and Kodaly's music is in Hungarian. As such, there is a lot of choirs that demand modern composers to sing, and a lot of their music is shit.

Tormis is no soft-ass ersatz romantic in the style of John Rutter and Morton Lauridsen, nor is he a hard-bitten atonalist in the style of Schoenberg and Webern. Like Kodaly and Bartok, he was simultaneously a modernist and a primitivist, who took a scientific view of the untamed, untrained folk music around him, and like his predecessors, went on 'collecting trips' to hear the regional folk music of musicians from Estonia, Livonian Estonia, Setos Estonia, Setos Russia, Russia, Latvia, Livonian Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Finland, Ingrian Finland... Like not only the aforementioned two but so many other greats, Tormis used his explorations into folk music to ground his compositional idiom in a music of the earth. Composers like Bartok, Kodaly, and Tormis represent whole new ways of infusing classical music with new life, in which the composers of every emerging nation can graft modern musical forms onto the music of their storied pasts to create whole new systems of tonality and rhythm from those used in Western/Bachian hegemony, each of which listeners can listen to and love for generations before they begin to approach complete understanding.

His most famous piece is probably 'Curse Upon Iron.' It's practically a choral Rite of Spring, but his more than 500 other choral works transport us in so many different modes than this one piece. Much of his music has this kind of primitive folk energy, but within it, he finds every conceivable variety and hew. Here's a paragraph of mostly his own words from the ECM Records website:

'Many of Tormis’ works are written for choir and based on an ancient form of Estonian folk song called regilaul. He has written: “National musics can also convey religious feelings; they often represent pre-Christian forms of spirituality, which should also be important and meaningful in our integrating world. Old Estonian runo songs certainly communicate the nature worship and rituals of prehistoric times.”'

It's one of the ironies of vocal and choral music that the music produced directly from our bodies is the music which sounds the most disembodied. Dancing is done with our extremities, it is a manifestation of the physical. But singing comes directly from our core. We cannot see where which the music emanates, so in a trick of evolution, the most physical act in all music is a manifestation of aphysicality, the phenomenal, the spiritual, the divine. Choral composers from Machaut to Bach understood this seemingly direct connection between the voice and the transcendent, and created centuries of a cappella vocal music for direct transit to the soul. But the great insight of Tormis is that in our modern, urban age, so divorced from our natural origins, we clearly long for return to our physicality, and therefore vocal music is a direct conduit to pagan spirituality. Tormis is, in many ways, the next logical step from Le Sacre du Printemps, and the fact that he could do all this and still create music this subversive that Soviet authorities did not ban makes his achievement all the more miraculous.

I'm going to post quite a few of his works in the comment section to give a sense of his choral music's stunning diversity, excitement, and beauty. There is no achievement like it in 20th century music, and any list of the greatest composers of the 20th century, not the greatest choral composers but the greatest composers of any form, must include Veljo Tormis among its very elite.

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

I'm going to put this 'above the fold' because a lot of people clearly think the rest of us are going insane. I know a lot of you think that coronavirus is just a panic and no threat at all, but if this virus becomes nothing, and I'm obviously someone who has my doubts, it will in large part be because of the preventative measures others take. It won't kill you just to go to the store now: buy the rice, buy the beans, buy the canned vegetables and fish, buy the toilet paper. Even if you don't need it, at some point, whether or not it's now or in a while, you'll get to use it. Right-wingers rightly go apoplectic at left-wingers who bristle at preventative measures for terrorism and war, and it reflects poorly on the character of people who don't believe that we have a fundamental right to security just as we do to liberty and equality, but illness is a kind of terrorism too, and if you're not preparing, you're collaborating with it. The world has just as much a right to be free of illness as it does of explosions in the streets. Just do it, whether or not you're going to need it, it might not make a difference to anybody at all, but it just might make all the difference in the world to people you care about.

Underrated Classical Musicians: 3/9/20

Tomorrow, Veljo Tormis, the greatest choral composer of the 20th century and a belated third in a 'Trinity' of Finno-Urgic musical genius that reflects the sounds of nature back at our ears with Bartok and Sibelius. Today, as it's my birthday, here's the first track to a recording of a particular favorite piece of mine. It's not the best recording, the best is still the original recording on Hanssler around the time of the work's premiere 2000. If you can find it on Spotify, I recommend it more highly than this one, but this remake will do. This is a favorite work, the work which showed me that it's possible to be a composer in the modern world who lets in the light of everyday life, an inspiration and aspiration. I think a birthday in the calm before coronavirus can exonerate me of the need to write any essay tonight. Let me just copy what I wrote about it seven years ago:

When I listen to Osvaldo Golijov’s music, I don’t hear anything exotic, I hear home. Golijov, like me, came from a Yiddish speaking immigrant family from Eastern Europe with all too many close relatives who perished in the gas chambers and work camps, and with extensive family connections spread all around Israel, America, and Argentina. He is ‘My Composer.’ When I listen to the Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, or especially the Lullaby and Doina, I simply can't keep it together. This is the music my subconscious heard long before my conscious self ever realized what it was hearing, and I wonder if there is any music so quick to destroy me emotionally. But nothing Golijov ever wrote, not one piece, prepared me for the impact which La Pasion Segun San Marcos would have on me. I kept thinking back to Berlioz's account of the first time his teacher heard Beethoven's Fifth Symphony - he was so moved and so disturbed that when it came to leave and put on his hat, he couldn't find his head.

When I'd finished the album, I literally felt as though my life had the purpose which I'd always lacked. For once in my life, this weird, unshakable obsession of mine for classical music no longer felt like a creepy fascination for embalmbed relics - here was, finally, a place which felt as though contemporary music met history on its own terms. A piece in which classical music fully engaged the world outside the mummified concert hall, and contemporary popular music didn't seem so historically unaware of what came before that its musicians didn't seek to reinvent the wheel.

One day I'll write the 7,000 word post which I've danced around writing about this, the greatest piece I've ever heard written in my lifetime, for years - and no doubt will delay writing that post for many years more. So I'll simply conclude by saying that for this 'nice Jewish boy', all too steeped in a cultural inheritance he neither asked for nor could ever shirk, the finale of this work is one of the very most moving moments in all of music - more emotionally cathartic (if only for me) than anything else in Golijov, Adams, Reich, Bernstein, Britten, Shostakovich, Copland, Strauss, Mahler, Janacek, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Bruckner, Verdi, Chopin, Schumann, Schubert, Haydn,... or Hebrew Cantillation or Christian chant or the Muslim Call to Prayer, or even in truer gods than theirs', like Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach.

After more than an hour's worth of telling the story of Christ's death in Spanish (and, vicariously, Latin), during which momentum gradually snowballs for over an hour to an avalanche unheard since the heyday of Berlioz, the text changes without warning to the cadences of Biblical Hebrew, and Christ laments on The Cross in his original tongue of Aramaic. The chorus responds afterward - not with an account of The Resurrection, but with The Kaddish.

The Kaddish is the Jewish prayer for the dead which every Jew must chant three times every day for 11 months whenever their parents, spouses or children precede them into the earth. To hear this prayer intoned at the end of a medieval Passion play - a play so often used in history as a way to inflame congregants against the Jews living among them - is both the greatest shock of my musical life and the most unbearably moving moment in all music. It is the greatest display I know of how music may yet bridge the gap between cultures locked pitifully in millenia of misunderstanding. Even now, as I type this (running on no sleep in 36 hours), I find myself more than a bit ashamed at the tears which flow fast and freely down my cheeks as I think about this most defining musical moment in my life. To me, this music is the subdued cry of the entire world, and if not the entire world, then certainly the subdued cry of my world.

I can't help but think of my father's older sister, Tzipporah, raised between 1942 and 1945 in a convent by Catholic clergy for whom discovery of her origins meant certain death for her, them, and probably all the other children within their care, only to die of typhus a few days after my grandparents could reclaim her. I think of my own grandmother, forced to flee her hometown in 1940 with her sister and my grandfather as she heard the machine gun fire which she knew was aimed at every other Jew in her town, including her mother. I think of my grandfather, fighting unbearable depression and malnourishment as he hid in barns and fields during the Baltic winter of 1943, and the unbearable urge to which he later admitted to turn himself and his own family in to save them all the anxiety of waiting any longer for an end which seemed so inevitable. I think of my Great Aunt Rochel, who risked capture every week of the Holocaust to go into the nearest town without a Yellow Star and buy what little food she could so that the three of them could live to see another week, only to die in a crossfire during the Polish Civil War which followed World War II's end. I think of a hundred (hundred thousand? hundred million?) other relatives who died or just barely survived in that terrible century of death, their stories both known to me and completely unknown. What were your sacrifices for? What accomplishment is there which I ever could do that could justify the suffering you underwent so that I may live on this planet with all the privileges you'd never know?

Perhaps this is all just the unbearably feverish sentimentality of a too extravagant person in dire need of sleep. But for me, this music, this Kaddish, is the ultimate symbol I've ever known in my life for hope. I'm thirty-one, and the generation after me springs up all around us. What is there to save us but the hope that future generations will do better than we've done? Maybe, just maybe, our human nature is getting better. And if it is, then what better evidence is there than that a Jew can voluntarily say Kaddish for a man whose name could only provide dread for so many millions of us for so many centuries?

When Facebook Becomes Blogging

37 looked to be a lot more fun than 38 is looking. The Times of Israel column still looked like it might take off, I was creating the best music I'd ever done, and I was falling in love. And now, it's just two years from 40, and we're all staring into the valley of the shadow of death. 

We're not all about to die from coronavirus, that's certainly not the case unless you were already in the age and wellness range of people for whom death might well come anyway, but if coronavirus is going to be as serious as so many experts say, then this could well be the beginning of what is, for better or worse, a seismic shift for a world that I've always feared might come unmoored and takes a generation of death to settle into a new order. If a disproportionately large amount of death is truly coming for the elderly, then what leaves with them is their entire economic era, their demographics, the entire world of stability, security, and certainties in which they lived their adult lives. All too many people I know would read that and say 'good riddance.' You can't help loving your friends even if they believe in the woo-woo. Sometimes you even love them because they're woo-woos. What they seem to treat so lightly is that there's no such thing as a sudden historical shift without lots of lethal chaos in its wake that could claim them and everyone they love. There's no such thing as a sudden historical lurch without lots of people falling into holes from where they can't get out. It's as true for what revolutionaries believe as what reactionaries believe, and for the first time since 1945, this chaotic, tragic world seems run not by a stable, skeptical, vital, liberal center, but by reactionaries who want to unmoor the world to turn it back to the way they mistakenly think it was, and increasingly by the revolutionaries who want to help them unmoor it on the off-chance that the world will embrace a revolution that has about as much chance of working the way they want it to work as the arrival of a Messiah. 

It would seem that we have ten more years to solve the planetary crisis. It's hard enough to solve that with an economy like ours today that works so dysfunctionally, but wheezingly unequal as it is, our economy still works. It might be easier to solve global warming in the long term if the whole economic edifice comes tumbling down and the world must be rebuilt, but with that tumble comes a potential tumble into death for god alone knows how many millions around the world. It's really, really not worth the price. 

For the last 5-or-so years, the realization has gradually dawned on Americans, and on the world at large, that we're dancing atop a volcano. The volcano may not blow this time, but just about everybody now realizes that in one form or another, it's there, ticking away until some subterranean tectonic kindles its explosion. 

We all knew this would be an unbearable year, even if we didn't expect that the old and sick among us could be wiped clean like a slate, this year was always going to be brutal past even the last four. Barring his contracting coronavirus, which I suppose is quite possible when you're campaigning, Joe Biden is going to be the nominee, and god forbid he's incapacitated from coronavirus, so very well might Bernie Sanders, so very well might Donald Trump, and so might even Elizabeth Warren. But if this election is Biden vs. Trump, it will be ugly past any reckoning, made all the more so by technological manipulation, and all the more so because Trump correctly sees Biden as a much larger threat than Sanders. There will have been no election in living memory like this. However ungenerous we feel now to people who believe differently than us now, six months from now we're going to feel much, much more angry. And that's only if our candidates survive the year, along with all our grandparents and even, god forbid, some of our parents. Will all that grief bring people to their senses, or will it only make everybody more bitter and uncharitable to people who diagnose the problems of our world differently? 

The problems of America have grown so large that nobody understands them anymore, perhaps least of all me. Here I am, correctly predicting 15 of the last 4 disasters to beset the world, but the uncertainty of what's coming is making people do still worse things: Elizabeth Warren should absolutely be the frontrunner right now, she was clearly the best candidate, the one with the clearest path to victory, the one with the most obvious cross-party appeal if only she got far enough to pitch herself to Republicans, and quite obviously, would make the best President. I disagreed with a number of Warren's positions, and in this era when Putin is mobilizing the far-Right around the world to do his bidding, I still doubt she's given more than a moment's thought to foreign policy, and until she gave it serious thought, most of her proposals would come to nothing. But the difference between Warren on the one side and the two frontrunners was that she, like Obama (and both Clintons) is an intellectual heavyweight who wouldn't have needed much study to understand what's at stake. She may have come to different conclusions than Clinton or Obama, but even Bill Clinton, whom I by and large agreed with on foreign policy, made calamitous mistakes. There's no preparation for being President. A great president gets one out of three decisions right, a bad one gets one out of five, and that's the difference between long-term improvement and long-term disaster. 

I know nobody wants to hear what I have to say about this one way or the other, but... you can stop reading at any point because this is my page and I really don't give a shit.... Of course it's true that Elizabeth Warren, like Hillary Clinton before her, encountered virulent sexism during her candidacy, but what lost Warren the election was ultimately not sexism, what lost it was the country being unaccustomed to not getting what it wants. What lost her the election was a combination that Bernie Sanders should never ever have been running, the medicare-for-all idiocy, and most importantly, the confused anger of many people in the party (mostly men of course) who feel entitled to get their views precisely represented on the party platform over other people's views and still don't understand how potentially dire the country's situation is, and the politicians lying to all of them saying that what they want is possible. As foreordained as it sometimes seems, elections are utterly chaotic events, and what deposits a President in the White House is often pure luck. There will be a woman president; it may not be the one you want, but it will happen, and soon, and who knows, it may still be Elizabeth Warren. 

To understand the near-futility of uniting the Democratic party, let's very quickly go through the medicare-for-all debate. In order to appeal to progressives and social democrats, she had to endorse Medicare-for-all, I think she knew it was a ruse. I think both she and moderates knew it was an impossibility, but moderates believed her, so she alienated them. To appeal again to moderates, she had to explain how she'd pay for it and to show how practical she was, she admitted that the transition would be rough and that for at least a while, wait times and premiums may go up. Like in the 'Pocahantes episode,' she did exactly what she should have done, but she consequently angered demographics who demand the impossible from their leaders and of course, never get what's impossible. If coronavirus had hit before the primary season, people might have understood the depth of what we all stand to lose, and would have thought more clearly about what they did. 

Of the big four or five candidates, Warren had easily the best chance, and unlike Biden, the people who would have gone for Warren were a solid block of guaranteed votes from both the left and the center. Biden may bring in moderate Republicans, but Trump will do everything within his power to slime Biden in the eyes of swing voters who are currently fond of him. Winning this election will be daunting for Biden, and his Vice-Presidential pick is something he cannot afford to get wrong. He is not only choosing someone who appeals to demographics to whom he does not naturally appeal, he is choosing a potential successor in an election for whose victory he has to work so hard that the election might incapacitate him to the point that he cannot take office. The VP nominee will almost certainly be one of three people: all women - Kamala Harris, Stacey Abrams, or Tammy Duckworth. Any of the three would probably be a more reliable President than Joe Biden. 

But Joe Biden seems the choice of all the people both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren claim to speak for, but clearly don't. Minorities and the working class, the people who stand to lose or gain most with every election chose Biden because they know better than we pointy heads what's deliverable and what isn't. Elizabeth Warren went to inordinate lengths to undermine Obama team policies, but Joe Biden was happy to stand in Barack Obama's shadow and was only of help to the first black President. That is why he's the first choice of most African-Americans and why Elizabeth Warren never could be. While Sanders stood on socialist ceremony, Biden presided over an auto-bailout that not only saved the car industry but let it thrive again. That is why he's the candidate of working class voters - Sanders bases a lot of his candidacy on the idea that working-class Republicans will switch allegiance when presented with a socialist option, but he can't even win over working-class Democrats. It's not because he's seen as electable, it's because they know he is their supporter, and would have little hard evidence that either Sanders or Warren would improve their lives unless they became President. Even if Warren and Sanders are right about certain issues (and they are), it's very difficult to claim to speak for the underprivileged when the underprivileged don't want what you want for them. 

America's a huge country, it's own continent even. It often seems that it holds as many constituent groups and contradictions as it has people, and it's impossible to give all those contradictory constituencies what they want. But the internet is a place that can convince anybody that anything they want is possible, and that getting everything they want on every issue is a matter of life and death. Meanwhile, death stares us straight in the face, and we do everything we can to look away with the distractions of minor issues we convince ourselves are major. When the death of millions and perhaps even more is still at stake, it amazes some of us that the rest of you get worked up over issues less big than that. The main issue of life is not happiness, and it's not even fundamental rights. The main issue of life is life, everything from happiness to liberty to equality to is either in the service of letting life keep going, or is at best a distraction from that and at worst an impediment. So long as life keeps going, there is hope that life will get better, but if life ends, there is no life to improve. The responsibility we all have is to keep life going, no matter how colossal the struggle. Death stares at us every day, but life always stares back. No matter who prematurely dies, no matter how few survive, life will go on - a struggle as it ever was, but the struggle, not the achievements, is both the nature of life, and the goal. And with every new life, life becomes a goal fulfilled. 

What's amazes me most about the last few years, and I'm sure it amazes you too, is that in this time when our country has tasted real pessimism for the first time in a lifetime, everybody I know had kids. In a scenario setting life and death before you, you all, bless you, chose life. And coronavirus, so it seems at least, will spare all your children. It feels so much like a miracle. The people after us will remain here, they will experience struggle and heartbreak and terror just as colossal as ours, but through it all, they will keep going just as we will. Death comes for everyone, but it does not, it will not, it cannot, come for everything at once. The struggle always keeps going. 

I'm unmarried with no children and my near-to-mid-future in my vocations looks pretty stale, flat, and unprofitable. I'd certainly like to stick around and see how things develop, less so for me than for people I like, love, and am always proud of, but I have to imagine there are lots of great concerts and books in olam ha'ba (the next world). If death chooses me, in whatever form, what can I say but 'Here I am'? But the longer we live, the more we thrive, the better chance those we love have too. Life begets more life, death begets more death, blessings beget more blessings, curses beget more curses. Our responsibility, then, is to always choose life, especially when living seems hardest. 

Amen