About What We Do….

OK—we’ll start out with the comment on Facebook that Mr. Fernández made about the video:

I must admit that I have no clue what AC/DC is or was, but I do love this! And the guys are SOOOO good-looking!

Well, they start out good-looking; they later become bestial, as does the music. But I had seen the video two days before I read the comment, since I was one of nine million to view on YouTube, and Raf was one of twelve million. And my feeling?

Complete repulsion!

I think back to two classical singers, Ian Bostridge and Joyce DiDonato. Ladies first, and here’s what she’s said:

“Stop apologising, stop trying to sell our music by dumbing it down. Sell opera on the basis that it is like nothing else on the planet, not on the basis that it’s superficially cool and hip – that is so phoney.”

“Recently I performed at the Grammy awards. I felt like a fish out of water surrounded by all these rock and jazz musicians in a huge conference hall environment. But I sang the second half of Cenerentola’s rondo, and it seemed to go down very well.”

“What really moved me was an African-American girl who might have been 15. She came running up to find me afterwards and said ‘I don’t know what you call that sort of singing, but it was the most wonderful thing I have ever heard. Where can I find more of it?’ If we do our job properly, people will listen and get it. You see, great music just works.”

Spot on, Madame DiDonato! And you know, we could make a whole new generation of opera fans in a couple of weeks, if we wanted to. Because on April 5, the Metropolitan Opera is broadcasting La bohème in movie theaters across the world. Raf and I will go, Kleenex box between us, and guess what? We will be one of about six people who are not using wheelchairs, walkers, or canes. In fact, if you piled up all the implements, it would look like that scene at Lourdes—the cured having thrown away all their crutches….

We will take—if she consents, and that’s a heavy “if”—Naïa, the twelve-year old daughter of the owner of the café. Why? Well, it seems like an appropriate uncle-like thing to do. As well, is there any adolescent girl who can resist La bohème? The music is ravishing, the story is wrenching, the setting is magical. Face it, the opera is one glorious, extended working-out of every adolescent girl’s most basic fantasy.

So in one afternoon—assuming that we could get every teenage girl into the movie theaters—we could have a vigorous, passionate new generation of opera lovers, who would desert Lady Gaga and flock to Joyce DiDonato, making her a mega-superstar earning gazillions of dollars per concert. And you know what? She’ll behave herself—because she’s a nice lady from Kansas who works hard, to the point of breaking her leg in a performance at Covent Garden, and continuing the rest of the performance on crutches. She later did the performances in a wheelchair. Brace yourselves for a shock, soon-to-be-astonished Readers…

…the British love her!

And speaking of the British, what did Ian Bostridge have to say about pop music? Well, here’s a copy / paste from The Guardian, which refers to his…:

"…somewhat bizarre animus" towards pop music and his objection to the "huge social and corporate investment in continuing to believe that rock music is countercultural and on the side of the angels, while the serious music of the past is stuffy and class-bound."

Yeah? Somewhat bizarre? Bostridge, in the first place, has a PhD in History from Oxford. In the second place, he has spent years of his life perfecting an art that has been handed down scrupulously and lovingly for decades, if not centuries. In short, this guy is serious.  And guess what? He’s a second-class citizen, musically-speaking—nor is that bad enough. Because he now has to be a second-class citizen who also is a snob, and has to feel guilty about it. Oh, and look on as other performers—note the avoidance of the word “musicians”—with little talent or education are venerated as “cool.’ In short, he gets his face ground in the dirt and then has to apologize for it.

We classical musicians have a role in this, if we’re going to be honest. We need to move music out of the concert halls and back into the cafes, the bars, the street corners. We need to talk to our audiences, communicate our passion with them, all the while taking seriously what we do.

That would imply a respect for the people who hear our music. A respect, by the way, that I didn’t feel in the AC/DC clip. In fact, I was affronted:

“It was rank anti-intellectualism,” I told Naïa, the girl who may or may not be converted to opera.

“What does that mean,” asked Naïa. I forget sometimes that she’s just 12. So her tutor explained it: it’s the difference between a gourmet meal versus fast food.

That metaphor goes part of the way, but not all. And just now, I re-watched another video that has 12 million hits—The Piano Guys doing “The Cello Song.” Would I have the same reaction as I did to the AC/DC?

Yes, though to a lesser extent. I could have included it in this post, but why? Why not include a piece of music that is just as virtuosic, just as vibrant, just as beautiful—no, sorry…

…way more beautiful.

Thunderstruck or AC/DC or whatever it is will fade into the dust; Ginastera will last as long as anyone is around to listen….

When she doesn't show up

I liked her book; Jeanne didn’t.

“I found it indulgent,” she said. “I mean, it may just be me, but very few women have the resources to go off to three parts of the world for four months at a time and then come home and write about it….”

So you’ll have guessed, I’m talking about Elizabeth Gilbert, whose book Eat, Pray, Love was a mega hit. How mega, you ask? Well, according to Gilbert’s website, the book sold over 10 million copies, and was translated into over 30 languages. For all of that, Time made her one of the 100 most influential people of the year. Oh, and Julia Roberts starred in the movie.

So that presented a problem: what in God’s name do you write after that? And people started coming up to her and asking, “aren’t you afraid that your next book will flop?”

Which made Gilbert question—what’s with the myth of the fucked-up artist? More, why do we buy in to it so much that many of us are, in fact, fucked up?

Well, you can hear Gilberts thoughts on the subject below—and yes, she’s bright and funny and articulate. More to the point, she may be right.

It comes down to this—anybody who has every done anything creative has felt that chilling feeling: “who’s writing this? Who’s playing this? Am I writing or taking dictation? Am I dancing or being danced?”

I felt it first, and strongest, on 4 January 2011; I had written, or rather rewritten, the epilogue of my book, and I was in a fever of creative sweat. Taí, here at the time, was supervising the computer guy, who needed my MacBook to check about something on my iTunes. I passed the computer over and raced to a spare laptop, repeating the last line I had written so that I could go on.

I felt it various times since then. Some days the muse comes, some days I am a journeyman; the post yesterday was good, today’s less so. OK—it was somebody else’s turn to get the muse—there are other writers, you know.

And I also like what Gilbert says—if we are just scribes, that takes a lot of pressure off. The book bombed? The post stank? Not entirely all my fault….

Curiously, this notion seems to be akin to the preoccupation of another writer, though he may consider himself a singer. Ian Bostridge is fascinated with the hundred years or so when rational, intelligent thinkers went from believing in witches, demons, succubae, and the devil to not believing in any of that. People knew no more than they had previously; there was no test or technology or philosophical argument that had disproved the existence of the paranormal world.

People had simply decided to invest in another theory—the rational world. The cow died in the village—it was no longer a witch who had entered the cow and poisoned her; it was something in the air, something she ate, some physical illness that, if we didn’t know now, one day we would.

Bostridge wonders, first, why? What prompted this sea change of thinking? He also wonders whether it’s rational. And, in fact, not all of us have bought on—it was usual for my Evangelical students to tell me that so-and-so had a demon: that was the reason the guy had shot up the movie house, or blasted the kids into infinity in the school.

Conversely, there are any number of people who are convinced: angels are all around us. And even some very rational people believe in them. Once, my philosopher friend Harry was taking his 18-year old daughter to be interviewed for admission at the Art Institute of Chicago. They were late, they were lost, and they were trying to orient themselves, when a woman showed up, as if out of nowhere.

“Where do you need to go,” she said, and Harry said her speech was pressured, the words spilling out. She was looking at them with a peculiar intensity, her upper body pressed in slightly toward them.

“Here, I’ll take you,” she said rapidly, and grabbed Chris’s hand. She almost ran with them to the Institute, and then disappeared as fast, and as mysteriously, as she had appeared.

“She was an angel,” said Harry to his daughter, and he meant it.

There are also the documented cases of spirit possession in Haiti in the Voodoo (Vodou) rituals. Actually, aren’t there cases of spirit possession in all religions? People whirling into ecstasy, people talking in tongues, people seeing visions—not much normal goes on in the religious world….

Lastly, I think it’s the very randomness of the process that make the case for there being a muse. I was just as rested, just as focused, working just as hard on Sunday, when she came as I was today, when she was off somewhere else. She’s promiscuous, that lady who is now caressing some other writer’s ear, who has chosen another body to dance in. Which may be a good thing. If she stayed all the time, would I get bored with her? Could I sustain the pressure of working non-stop, batting out her words? Isn’t that the definition of mania?

Everybody needs just an average day.

On Singers and Performers

Confession—the news is so bad I’ve turned to music to get me through the day. So I devote half an hour to reading about North Korea, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan—oh, and let’s not forget those politicians pondering the seriously hard question of whether any lunatic (literally) should be able to buy a gun—and then I take a walk. Or rather, it’s “then we take a walk.” This week, Ralph Vaughan Williams joined me, and excellent company he was. He told me, which I didn’t know, that he had volunteered for World War I when he was 41—well past the age when he was compelled to. And he had served time as an ambulance carrier in the fields. Then he came home and saw the whole thing happening all over again, fifteen years later. He didn’t go, of course, to the Second World War, but he wrote a bitter, very dissonant symphony—completely unlike his usual stuff—about it. Years later, he said, “I don’t know if I like it, but I meant it.”

Second confession—Vaughan Williams died in 1958.

Or not. The music is going strong, there is a Vaughan Williams Society promoting his work, and if his words were resonating in my mind, on the morning trot, well—is he really dead? And so to the greater glory of Vaughan Williams, I wrote a post about him, and put it in a new blog, Words on Musick. (Sorry for the affectation—that “musick” business—but somebody had already got to “music”). The next day I got into Cecilia Bartoli singing all those wonderful arias written for castrati—the ones only a manic singer on cocaine can sing. They’re fun, they’re (mostly) more a romp than music, but who cares? There’s a place for Mozart, a place for Broschi.

Right, so that lead me into the world of the soprano, and I wasted an hour which I cheerfully have watching a BBC documentary on castrati—the singers who had parts removed to preserve their voices. And I discovered two or three remarkable singers. There’s Radu Marian, a guy from Moldavia who for medical reasons never entered puberty (though I noted today that he sports a mustache—don’t know what that’s about….) Anyway, Radu has a clean, high voice—fully soprano, very pure, and yes, I mean it when I say high. He could break glass.

Another singer, as well, Michael Maniaci, who like Radu never entered puberty—they’re both astonishing singers. Right, so it felt that the world needed to hear me weigh in on this, so I wrote about that.

It’s unfortunate, how easily just doing something three days in a row becomes a habit. What to write about today?

Well, there is the intemperance of commentary on YouTube; has anyone noticed it besides me? Or is it that musicians—I’m skating quite close to the truth, here, just to mix a metaphor—are an irritable, irascible bunch? Anyway, the YouTubians / YouTubists / YouTubers / nothing-satisfies-the computer-these-days are going at each other with sabers over the question of Simone Kermes. Here is one of the more temperate remarks—I fear to introduce the more incendiary to the Gentle Readers of this blog:

Whatever she's taken, I think I want some too! She has such a gorgeous voice but the coloratura just isn't accurate at ALL from the word go although she has way better technique than Bartoli (it's hard to do it properly!) All this drunk-auntie-at-a-wedding dancing, what is all that about? It is so vulgar I actually sort of love it. Quite frankly the best Rodelinda in the world (IMO) doesn't need to "prove" she can sing this (or not). 8/10 for singing, 10/10 for chutzpah!

This from the hugely talented and universally acclaimed…La Prima Ragazza.

I think you get my point. One of the reasons nobody listens to classical music much is that regular people have been snobbed out of it. Yeah, in the movies, classical music is OK. But actually go to a concert, with all the formality, the protocol, the anxiety of when you’re supposed to clap…. And what if you don’t like the music?

Well, Kermes gets called by Mosart200657 “The Operatic Lady Gaga,” so I decided to check her out. And here she is, romping her way through Come Nave in mezzo all’onde.

Well, as always, I’m mixed about it all. I think Ian Bostridge said it best: pop music is now the mainstream; if you really want to be counterculture, listen to Mozart. And isn’t it hypocritical to keep viewing popular music as somehow the underdog?

And why does Simone Kermes have to emulate Lady Gaga? Why does she have to sell herself—isn’t the voice and the music enough?

That said, I’m not so sure that I can comfortably pan her. If she wants to romp around on-stage, why not? Yes, it’s all a bit campy, it may also distract from the aria, but it’s another point of view, it’s something to see. My only problem with it is that Kermes will never out-gaga Gaga.

When are we going to admit the truth?

She easily out-sings her.

A Winter's Journey Re-journeyed

Right, so as usual I’m a little behind the times. It’s officially spring—time to pay the taxes, watch for the scilla (yes, my dear computer—it’s a little blue flower that against the newly green of grass and a fresh snow manages both to soothe and to shock the eye at the same time) and get the frisbee out for the dog to play with. I spent the last weekend, however, immersed in that most wintery of music, appropriately called Winterreise, a Winter’s Journey.

Now for a word of reassurance. Readers of Iguanas will know that this was the music that I chose that was given to me when I descended into madness in December of 2011 and the following January. Relax—I’m not in the same place, but in one much better.

Saying which, I will also confess to not knowing now, as I didn’t know then, whose finger had been on the iPod then, or the mouse pad now. I simply stumbled onto Winterreise, which of course I don’t believe and neither should you.

So I was there and not there, a state eerily similar to the experience of watching a documentary, Over the Top with Franz, about the filming of a DVD about the singing of a glorious English tenor and the playing of a majestic also-English pianist of a song cycle written by an Austrian composer about a guy with serious problems.

The composer is Franz Schubert, the year was 1827, and the physical / psychological conditional of the composer was, as we would now say, quite compromised. Right, Schubert was rotting away with syphilis, untreatable at the time, and staring into the face of eventual madness. This normally does not provoke gales of laughter….

So Winterreise has moved out of autumnal and into the coldest of regions. Fitting, then, that as I read the lyrics—which you can do in five minutes, though the performance will last an hour easily—they’re really images: the weathervane, the village inn, the frozen spring. And the lyrics are spare; these are the lyrics to the song in the clip below:

He used to see three suns, but two of them have turned away to shine upon another, and now he sees only one, and he wishes that would pass away and leave him to the darkness.

Schubert’s treatment, to me, paradoxically matches that sparseness and is extended as well. Thus, you find yourself suspended in a long, bleak, horizontal landscape with no possibility of escape. The singer has left willingly the warmth of home that he knew; he could but will not go back.  The first poem makes this clear:

By moonlight, in winter, the poet leaves the house as he came to it, a stranger. The daughter has allowed their love to grow, and the mother has encouraged the pair to think of marriage: but the daughter's love has wandered to some new sweetheart. So he quietly and secretly steals away while they are sleeping, writing 'Good night' on her door, and leaving the path of his footsteps in the snow.

Pretty romantic stuff—the moonlight, the poet, the broken romance, writing “good night” on her door. But it’s almost artifice, this hoary repetition of the hero with the broken heart—the music suggests much more. Curiously, Schubert’s other song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin (D. 795, Op. 25, 1823) has the same theme, but the jilted young man has both an unhappier end and yet a stouter heart. Yes, he drowns himself, the hero of Mullerin; the hero of Winterreise goes on mutely, accompanied by an organ-grinder he encounters at the edge of the village. But could anything be worse than endlessly enduring, stoically going on, a poet chained by his own misery to an organ grinder?

Everything about Mullerin speaks of youth; everything about Winterreise whispers age, decay, and death.  And yesterday, I came upon a wonderful clip of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears performing and discussing three songs of Winterreise. They say, as does everyone, that it’s music for the old; Pears decided to wait until he was fifty to perform it.

Ian Bostridge, thank God, decided otherwise. And while it had been a superb German baritone, Matthias Goerne, who was the singer who accompanied me on my own winter’s journey a year ago, it was Bostridge, an amazing English tenor, who sang for me last weekend. And more than sang—I followed him throughout the process of making the film as he argued and sparred with an opinionated director, David Alden, a guy completed uncowed by the two artists in front of him. Both the pianist, Julius Drake, and Bostridge must have been frustrated; equally, they must have trusted that Alden would produce an interesting piece.

And it appears that he did, though I would have slapped Alden several times along the way. He constantly pushes Bostridge and Drake to be more gothic—at one point Drake plays the open notes of a song in a perfect parody of a music hall organist. Drake means it to repel; Alden is delighted.

But however much Pears may have been right to wait until his fifties to sing this work, I’m glad Bostridge didn’t. He’s perfect for the part—rail thin, gaunt, sunken cheeks and wide eyes.

His singing is amazing, his control perfect, and he’s unafraid, in one of the clips I saw, to make a truly ugly sound a couple of times in the last song. It shouldn’t work, it wouldn’t work with anybody else, but with Bostridge it does.

Wikipedia quotes a contemporary of Schubert’s, Joseph von Spaun, in the following anecdote:

"Come to Schober's today and I will play you a cycle of terrifying songs; they have affected me more than has ever been the case with any other songs." He then, with a voice full of feeling, sang the entire Winterreise for us. We were altogether dumbfounded by the sombre mood of these songs, and Schober said that one song only, "Der Lindenbaum", had pleased him. Thereupon Schubert leaped up and replied: "These songs please me more than all the rest, and in time they will please you as well.'".

That hasn’t happened for me yet. I suffer through Winterreise when it comes upon me, and am glad when at last it goes. I endure, not listen, when the unknown finger hits the play icon. Nothing about Winterreise is beautiful, everything about it is essential.

Is that its strange beauty? 

Silent Noon, by Ralph Vaughan Williams