A Child's Introduction to the Orchestra

Good news, especially for my two older brothers. The greatest out-of-print LP ever made, Alec Wilder’s “A Child’s Introduction to the Orchestra,” is available for free downloading at the Children’s Vinyl Record Series site (thanks to Bloggerythms for the heads up). This recording was a great favorite of mine in childhood, and was probably one of those random influences that made me (not to mention my two brothers) into a musician. It introduces each member of the orchestra with a little tune sung by a singer representing the instrument, followed by a solo on said instrument; there are Antoinette the Clarinet, Newt the Flute, Mellow Fellow the Cello, even Max the Sax in a very hip number. Well, hip for a child’s recording made in the late 1950s; it will never be reissued, because it is in fact hopelessly square in an age when They Might Be Giants are cutting kids’ CDs. It is really fantastic, though. Alec Wilder’s music and arrangements, conducted by Mitch Miller, are very forward-looking, anticipating the work of Gil Evans. The singers are excellent too: a high, Irish-type tenor sings the part of Bobo the Oboe (one of the most beautiful numbers on the LP); a basso profundo sings Old Muldoon the Big Bassoon (“they call me the clown of the orchestra, but it’s not necessarily so”); the sole girl singer is a kind of legit-slash-lounge type; they all do a great job. It all sounds remarkably corny, but it’s not. I’m so happy to have rediscovered this gem of children’s music. My son is digging it hard, too.

Musicologist Banned

I'm tempted to joke that more musicologists should be banned, but this is positively chilling. Nalini Ghuman is a member of the "Elgar Mafia," some of whose members are colleagues of mine, and whose only vices are far too boring and abstruse to mention here.

The Voices That Have Gone, Part 5: Music and Memory

“Memory is the great perturber of musical meaning. When memory is concerned, music is no longer itself; it ceases to have any proper plane of feeling; it surrenders itself wholly, with all its rights, to memory, to be the patient, stern, and terrible exponent of that recording angel. What is it? Only a few trivial bars of an old piano-forte piece – “Murmures du Rhone,” or “Pluie des Perles.” The drawing-room window is open, the children are playing on the lawn, the warm morning air is charged with the scent of lilac blossom. Then the ring at the bell, the confusion in the hall, the girl at the piano stops, the door opens, and one is lifted in dying or dead. Years, years ago! But passing through the streets, a bar or two of the “Murmures du Rhone” brings the whole scene up before the girl, now no longer a girl, but a middle-aged woman, looking back to one fatal summer morning. The enthusiastic old men, who invariably turned up in force whenever poor Madame [Giulia] Grisi was advertised to sing in her last days, seemed always deeply affected. Yet it could hardly be at what the actually heard – no, the few notes recalled the most superb soprano of the age in her best days; recalled, also, the scenes of youth forever faded out, and the lights of youth quenched in the gray mists of the dull declining years. It was worth any money to hear even the hollow echo of a voice which had power to bring back, if only for a moment, the ‘tender grace of a day that was dead’.”

(H.R. Haweis, Music and Morals, 1872)

Burl Ives--Noah Found Grace In The Eyes of the Lord

The Voices That Have Gone, Part 4: Burl Ives

When I was little, I had a beloved LP, “Burl Ives Sings The Little White Duck.” There was one song on it that I particularly loved, “Buckeye Jim,” a beautiful, tuneful, gently-strummed song that in Ives’s high, light tenor sounded like the sweetest melody ever. This is one of the few favorite LPs from my childhood that have been released on CD, and I got it for my son. He listens to it as if mesmerized, and also loves “Buckeye Jim.”

The only things I knew about Burl Ives growing up were that he was the singing snowman in “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which came on TV every Christmas, and, more importantly, that he had “named names” before HUAC, which trumped everything else if you grew up in my family. But I was allowed to have that LP anyway, so perhaps this was a rare instance in which parenting took precedence over politics.

Much later, I found out that the most famous name he had named when he was subpoenaed was that of Pete Seeger (we had some of his children’s records too, of course). Evidently Seeger forgave him; they appeared together onstage in 1993 at a benefit concert, before Ives succumbed to cancer a couple of years later.

John Rockwell, the former chief arts critic of the New York Times, said of Burl Ives's voice that “[it] had the sheen and finesse of opera without its latter-day Puccinian vulgarities and without the pretensions of operatic ritual. It was genteel in expressive impact without being genteel in social conformity. And it moved people.”

I’m about to post a really dated and corny but also interesting and nice clip of Ives singing a white gospel song.

Incidentally, the star of one of my other favorite childhood recordings, Jack Gilford, who narrated “Songs and Hums of Winnie-the-Pooh” (strictly pre-Disney), was also blacklisted in the Red Scare of the 1950s.

Dunque è proprio finita

"So it really is all over," Rodolfo says; "goodbye, dreams of love."

But, because the winter is so lonely, the lovers decide to wait until spring, when no one feels alone, to part.

(The sad thing is that they really do part; Rodolfo retreats into his writing, and Mimi finds a rich lover; but she comes home, to the poor garrett that Rodolfo shares with his friends, to die.)

Addio

This is from a live performance of Bohème at La Scala in 1979. The radiant Ileana Cotrubas is Mimi; the conductor is mad genius Carlos Kleiber. Mimi sings, "Addio"; Rodolfo whispers in disbelief, "Che? vai?" (What -- you really are leaving?) Pavarotti's expression is even more real, more nuanced than the one I described in the Karajan recording. Immediately following this scene is the famous quartet, perhaps the most poignant scene in all of opera. I'm about to post it.

The Voices That Have Gone, Part 3: In Memoriam Luciano Pavarotti

As I was getting my son dressed yesterday morning, I switched on WQXR. They were broadcasting Pavarotti singing “Nessun dorma,” live from his concert in Central Park in the summer of 1993, and I wondered briefly if he had died. My premonition did not lessen my shock and grief when the announcer related the news. I sat down in the rocking chair and wept. I was at that concert, incidentally, with my then-husband, who came to love opera in the course of his endeavor to understand his perversely elusive wife, and a young, up-and-coming character tenor, K., who shortly thereafter had a mid-career flame-out when his repressed memories of childhood abuse began surfacing, bringing with them the realization that, like so many of us, he had thrown himself into singing as a way to save himself. How many like us were among the hundreds of thousands gathered on the Great Lawn that summer night long ago?

Pavarotti’s death is another terrible loss to the world of music. It is not as tragic, perhaps, or as shocking as the death of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson last year, or Jerry Hadley’s suicide earlier this summer. But somehow, the world will not be the same without Big Luciano, one of the greatest singers of the twentieth century, and one of the last of a breed of Italian lyric tenors. His incredible musicality in, say, the Act III duet from La Bohème in the famous von Karajan recording with his townswoman from Modena, the divine Mirella Freni– the way that he almost whispers, “Che? vai?” when he realizes Mimì is really leaving – is an object lesson to artists of all kinds everywhere: the verisimilitude of grief, sadness, tenderness, resignation, and regret in that brief, half-sung phrase captures all the ironic fleetingness of youth and the bitterness of youth’s impossible love affairs. Those who have read the Mürger stories on which the opera is based know that Rodolphe eventually drifts away from Bohemia and enters the world of the comfortable middle class, with nary a thought for the great loves and adventures of his impoverished salad days. I am going to listen to the von Karajan recording again and try to determine whether that, too, is in the phrase. R.I.P., Big Luciano.

Whiskey in the jar

The first time I heard this song, it was already old. I don't mean old in the sense that it was, of course, an old song; I mean old in the form shown here, as a cover of an already very old song by a rock band. The Irish band Thin Lizzy, fronted by black Dubliner Phil Lynott, recorded their groundbreaking version of the traditional ballad in 1973, and I first heard it on a college radio station as a high school senior in the early 1980s. On that first hearing, I was filled with a strange and not unpleasant feeling of great loneliness, as if a vast plain were opening up in my soul. The despair of the song, coupled with Lynott's aggressive delivery and the mournful guitar riff that repeats throughout the song, spoke to my own loneliness in a convincing way, a way that would later be echoed by other (arguably better) music, such as Stravinsky's "Les Noces" and George Crumb's "Apparition."

I think Thin Lizzy's rock version of "Whiskey" is far superior to the rousing version by the Dubliners. It's a song sung from behind prison bars, after all, by a desperate man.

The Voices That Have Gone, Part 2

Many years ago I was a student in a small, exclusive, private liberal-arts college, which ironically is very close to where I now live, but might as well be a million miles away. The college was in a beautiful green bower separated from the daily world of dirt and commerce, and my current neighborhood, just down the road a few miles, is mired in that daily world (as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil”). The college was rich, and even the poor girls there, like me, were able to feel that we were in some intellectual aerie where we could live joyously in the realm of our lofty thoughts. My neighborhood, on the other hand, is mainly working- to middle-class, and you don’t get the sense of much lofty thinking going on in these parts (though lofty drinking is another story). Sometimes, in fact, I feel discouraged to be writing my dissertation in such an anti-intellectual milieu. But I suppose we should bloom where we’re planted.

In spite of all the beauty and the intellectual cosseting, I really hated that small private college. First of all, I was one of the aforementioned poor girls, and it pained me that I could never have the beautiful things, wear the beautiful clothes, or even be as beautiful as the rich girls who dominated the student population. And rich girls are indeed beautiful, because, as my friend Robert explained, powerful men marry beautiful women. But the place was also seething with darkness, with a kind of extreme adolescent amorality. Hard drugs and outré sexual experimentation abounded. Although I was not immune to their powerful allure, at the same time I felt an almost physical repulsion for the things I saw in my midst. I think that on the whole, the college was a very sad place, full of students on antidepressants and professors desperate to feel that what they were doing – educating the decadent rich – was a morally important endeavor.

At this college, however, I learned to sing. My happiest times were spent in the music building, where I would practice late into the night. I had a work-study job in the music library, and my Friday night shift was an orgy of delight as I raided the LP collection, discovering Puccini, Satie, and Harry Partch. A young graduate of the college worked there too, Mary L., who was then getting her master’s in voice at another institution. She became a lifelong friend and mentor to me, and her voice remains to this day the absolutely most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard in my lifetime. My hair used to stand on end whenever I heard her sing. She excelled especially at French mélodie. She never had a career in music; a difficult divorce, and later the demands of mothering a large family, preempted the energies that would have gone into making a career if that had been her priority. Her voice is one of the great, overwhelming secrets hidden from and by the world.

The Average Boddhisattva

My first husband, M., was a cradle Buddhist, who liked to say that he had lost his faith because of an episode that took place at a childhood sleepover, when he was terrified by the sound of grandfather clock. and his supplications to the Buddha brought him no consolation. As an adult, however, he began exploring his childhood faith again, as I was to do later, and his second marriage was performed in a Buddhist ceremony. Around the time that he started attending Buddhist services again in the late 1990’s, while we were still married, a prominent Buddhist priest and scholar came to his temple to speak. At that talk, a fellow member of the sangha mentioned the freedom that came to her when she realized that she was just average; not a “special” person, as we all want to believe and are encouraged to believe we are, but just an average one with average abilities and average hopes and dreams. The prominent Buddhist speaker replied that he was filled with admiration for her, bowed to her, and called her an “average Boddhisattva.”

Nothing could have rubbed me more wrong than when M. told me this story. I think it bothered me so much because I found it so terrifying. I was “special,” after all, and had been brought up with a clear recognition of my special gifts and what I assumed were the privileges that came with them – privileges such as the right to fulfill my appetites and curiosities without regard for average rules and morals – and I was convinced that I must never descend to the everyday world of the average person. It took me a long time to recognize that I am more average than I care to admit. I think that I am one of the millions who do not live up to their early promise, and I don’t know whether that’s a tragedy of epidemic proportions based on massive failures of parenting and society, or simply part of the human experience in a fallen world. It’s taken me a string of failures and catastrophes in the realms of health, relationships, and career to recognize my averageness, and in a way I wish for more of it, because perhaps if I could embrace my averageness, I could have some peace, and then offer others kindness instead of bitterness, and perhaps even become an average Boddhisattva.

The Voices That Have Gone

I switched on the radio today and was startled to hear a piece of music that I consider a masterpiece, “Apparition” by George Crumb. Crumb wrote the piece, set to excerpts of Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” for the great Jan DeGaetani, who premiered it in 1981. The first time I heard the piece was in 1993, when my friend Mary Nessinger sang it in a recital she gave as a competition winner, and her performance remains one of the great musical experiences of my life. I had the privilege of singing the piece myself in 2003, at which time an audience member unbelievably told me that she considered my interpretation to be the “definitive” one. That is simply not true, though I don’t think she was maliciously lying, just caught up in the moment.

Today, however, I was shocked to recognize the voice of Renée Fleming singing the piece. Her voice is very recognizable, of course, but even more so are her vocal “tics,” such as the way she has of overemphasizing certain words, consonants, and syllables. While I admire her as an artist in her own genre, I thought her interpretation of Crumb to be entirely wrong. It was, first of all, too loud. The score indicates extremely scaled-down dynamics throughout most of the piece. And it was too operatic, too outwardly-directed; the piece is intensely inward-looking, truly innig, as the Germans say, escept for two movements. And finally, it calls for great humility. When one looks at Crumb’s elaborately detailed, handwritten score, one knows that one is expected to toe the composer’s line. It’s about submitting totally to his soul, his genius, and that of Walt Whitman, something that Jan DeGaetani and Mary Nessinger both did in spades in their performances (DeGaetani's is recorded on Bridge Records), which is a big part of what makes them great artists.

The only opera singer I can think of who might do this piece justice (though I know it’s also been assayed by Dawn Upshaw and Christine Schaefer; I haven’t heard their versions) is Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died tragically young last year.

Old New York: August

I have always loved this time of year in New York City. There are rare, uncanny patches of silence in the day, holes in the constant noise through which you can almost hear angels passing. I love the smell too, the sort of pungent, slightly overripe green smell of the late-summer flowers of New York permeating the air: trees-of-paradise and mimosa, gutter trees that will grow anywhere. Their fragrance, a little too sweet, is a prelude to the burning smell of a New York autumn.

I remember the first summer here I lived all alone here.  The subway cars were hotter than a sauna, and covered with graffiti. I lived that summer in Flatbush, which was almost entirely Jamaican. Young men would offer to walk me home from the subway in order to protect me. I remember getting off at the wrong stop in Manhattan one morning and walking for a bit before finding myself in what seemed like the bustling port of Hong Kong; I had walked south and east, and was in the deepest Chinatown. Later, I would go back and wander around, buying rice face powder and packets of the gold-printed square paper used for Chinese New Year to write letters on. I wonder if Chinatown is still like that; it’s a long time since I’ve been there; twenty years ago it was almost a foreign land. Do you still see rows of seamstresses at their sewing machines in sweatshop windows as the D train crosses the Manhattan Bridge? New York is a different city now, and much has been lost: the sense of a patchwork of many small neighborhoods, the relative ease with which you could get by with no money, the bittersweetness that hung in the air at this time of year.

More Bad Dreams

We went to Promisek for a few days of respite. I had a dream that my husband and I were dating, and that after a few years he decided to break up with me. In the dream I was forty-two (my age now), and I was struck with fear that I would never marry, and would now have to revert to a way I used to relate to men, having sex with them in the hope that one of them might fall in love with me and perhaps even consent to spending his life with me. In the dream, I made a mental note to buy condoms, which seemed like a necessary ancillary to my new (old) life. It was a horrible, resigned feeling, and I felt myself looking down the road to a life of loneliness. I fear that my dream is the actual experience of many women in their late thirties and early forties, and it makes me horribly sad to realize that women have internalized the practice of giving so much in order to get so little in return from men, who in the old days recognized their role of caring for women and children and protecting them. In spite of whatever advances we seem to have made, I will not budge from my conviction that women want to marry, want to take care of men and children, whether they admit to it or not. It seems to me that the sexual revolution has done great harm to the idea of healthy relationships between the sexes, each of which now is always sizing up and second-guessing the other (He: “What does she want from me? I hope she understands that a roll in the hay doesn’t guarantee anything”; She: “Maybe if I perform really well in bed, he’ll want to see me again, and I’ll be his girlfriend”) while trying to avert and evade their real responsibilities to one another. But, at the risk of sounding medieval, I am willing to bet that most men who haven’t been profoundly damaged emotionally actually want to take care of wives and children, and that most women, even those who espouse second-wave feminist non-essentialism, want to have husbands and children.