Posts Categorized: Posts

From chimpan-A to chimpan-Z

ctop1

In hard-hitting news that I am 100% not making up, the Canadian National Post reports on a story about a U.S. “scientist” from UW-Madison who has been conducting research on what kind of music monkeys are into. From the article:

Two university professors in the United States sought to find out whether monkeys would appreciate 30-second clips of music specially created for them more than popular music created for human listeners. Previous studies have found that monkeys prefer silence to any human music with a tempo, including German techno songs and Russian lullabies.

Frankly I think most sentient species prefer silence to German techno songs and Russian lullabies, but this gets better:

The human versions of songs used in the experiment included 30-second clips from Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Metallica’s Of Wolf and Man and Tool’s The Grudge. Researchers studied their responses for five minutes after each song played.

While Metallica and Tool were used as examples of music humans find arousing, the monkeys found the crunchy guitar chords calming. Eating, grooming, and engaging were indications the monkeys were relaxed.

Fair enough.  In fact, the monkey at the top of this post looks like he might have spent the better part of the 80’s rocking out to Metallica, maybe a little too hard — if you know what I mean.  The article goes on to explain, however, that the putative UW-M “researcher” collaborated with his friend David Teie, a cellist in the National Symphony Orchestra, to create music specifically designed for the monkeys’ enjoyment.  Here is the first clip:

https://www.willcwhite.com/audio/Monkey%20music%202.mp3
which I believe was meant to inspire some sort of simian George Crumb-Merce Cunningham collaboration.

OK, there’s no way to prepare you the second piece of music for the monkeys:

https://www.willcwhite.com/audio/Monkey%20music%202.mp3
And again, I am totally not making any of this up.  About the monkey music, the article goes on to say:

When the primates heard the monkey versions of both songs, on the other hand, they reacted as the researchers predicted they would. The monkeys urinated, shook their heads and stretched, indicating an increased state of arousal.

Funny, I did the exact same thing after hearing that last clip.

In the name of science, I would like to suggest a slightly different program for the monkeys, one sure to gain their undivided attention:

https://www.willcwhite.com/audio/Monkey%20music%202.mp3

https://www.willcwhite.com/audio/Monkey%20music%202.mp3

smiling monkey

Learn Conversational Italian through Rossini!

In Just a Few Easy Lessons!

LESSON 1 – Repeat after me:

Chi è costei?
Who is she?

È mia nipote.
She is my niece.

Di qual paese?
What country are you from?

Di Livorno ambedue.
We are both from Livorno.

Ah! non so dal piacer dove io mi sia. D’un’Italiana appunto ha gran voglia il Bey. Sarete la stella, lo splendor del suo serraglio.
Ah! My joy has quite unmanned me. The Bey longs for an Italian woman to be his favorite, and thou wilt be the star and splendor of his Seraglio.

Picture 1

Critical Commentary

Fanfare Magazine’s review of the American Chorale Premieres CD has just come out, penned by one Jerry Dubins.  It’s not much of a review, and I’m guessing that very few people will actually read it outside of the Cedille Records administration and Choral Music Junkies (if such things actually exist), but I simply must take issue with Mr. Dubins’ overall critical approach.

First off, let me just say that this is not an argument against his “review” of my piece.  In fact, he doesn’t really review my piece as much as offer a vague and vaguely dismissive semi-description of the music sprinkled with biographical misinformation (I’m well known in the Roman Catholic community?  For my choral music?  When did that happen?)  Since he doesn’t even attempt to figure out what my piece is about compositionally, there’s not much that I can respond to.

Where I really take issue is with his review of Egon Cohen’s Stabat Mater.  In the interest of full disclosure, I do know Egon, as we were both students of Easley Blackwood at the same time, and I would list him as an acquaintance – not exactly someone I would rush to defend under most circumstances.  I do quite like his piece on this disc, but that’s neither here nor there.  Here’s what Mr. Dubins had to say:

Finally we come to Egon Cohen (b. 1984), the youngster among this assembly. His Latin-titled Stabat mater set in English translation was written in response to an invitation to submit a piece for this CD. The music effectively captures the doloroso character of the text; but it does give me cause to wonder why a young, Jewish composer would be drawn to this deeply Roman Catholic 13th-century sequence that meditates on the suffering of the Virgin Mary. Surely, as Rochberg and many other Jewish composers have, Cohen might have found an equally moving text from the Hebrew liturgy.

Um, Excuse Me? You wonder why he couldn’t find a Hebrew text?  That so clearly falls into the category of None of Your Goddamn Business.  Would Mr. Dubins conclude a review of Mendelssohn’s Christus by asking the same question?  How about Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei?  How about John Adams’ A Flowering Tree, for that matter?  Any critic who can’t understand that a composer might possess a vivid enough imagination to think outside of his closest cultural boundaries is truly wanting and kind of missing the point of a vast swath of artistic output.

I have no way of knowing if this Jerry Dubins is himself Jewish, and is perhaps a Yenta-ish figure of some sort, bemoaning the fact that a member of his tribe couldn’t meet a “nice Jewish text”.  Even in that case, I don’t really think that a music criticism magazine is the best venue for such an opinion.

Call me crazy, but I kind of think it’s a critic’s job to get inside the piece, whether or not it be his cup of tea.  David Effron, my conducting teacher, tells us that it’s our job to love any piece of music that we’re conducting.  Well, clearly it’s not the critic’s obligation to love everything he reviews, but I do think that a decent critic loves the process of delving in deep and trying to take a piece on it’s own terms.

This is where so many of the critiques of Inglourious Basterds go wrong.  I’d say about 90% of the reviews fail to penetrate the surface, or at least the immediate sub-surface level, even some of the more sophisticated ones.  For example, take Stephen Rea’s review in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Tonally schizoid and rife with anachronisms (a David Bowie song on the sound track, out-of-era vernacular), Tarantino’s Third Reich folly is utterly exasperating.

Umm… “rife with anachronisms” is as far as you got?  OK, fine, this is a particularly shallow analysis, but most of the reviews don’t get past listing the many genre references that pervade the film.  Almost none of the reviewers get to the heart of how QT uses the genres artistically.  To me, the Big, majorly subversive element of the film [oh, btw, spoilers a’plenty follow] is not so much QT’s re-writing of history, but in how this interacts with our pre-conditioned genre expectations.  Because of films from The Longest Day right up through Saving Private Ryan, we the viewers damn well expect realism from the WWII genre — it’s almost like an unwritten moral code.  Even in more fictional WWII films, the details of an individual squadron or battle or whatever may be made up, but the outcome is always the same.

Tarantino absolutely knows this, and that’s why the third act of his film has tension — because the viewer is sitting there wondering “How is this plot going to fail?“.  Now, the problem is that that’s really the only reason why the third act has tension — there’s very little internal to the movie to make you yearn for the success of the grueling finale.  Within the film, the American “Basterds” are depicted as way more brutal than any of the Nazis, and the character of Hitler is imbued with a Mel Brooks-esque buffoonery; Tarantino is relying completely on the viewer’s personal sense of history to justify his (Tarantino’s) violent end to the Third Reich.

I’ve got a feeling that there might be a much, much deeper message here, that Inglourious Basterds is an Anti War Film – that is, both an Anti-War Film and an Anti War-Film, if you know what I mean.

So Jerry, what’d you think of the movie?

At the Movies

rebelscreen

About four months ago, I saw Giant (both the movie and the musical) and it dawned upon me that I hadn’t seen James Dean’s other two movies, East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause.  Over the past couple days, I have filled in this cinematic lacuna.

I can dispatch with Eden pretty quickly by referring to Dan Callahan’s review at Slant Magazine (except I’m sure that Mr. Callahan meant to refer to Leonard Rosenman’s painfully overt score as “pseudo-Schoenberg” rather than “pseudo-Stravinsky“).  He’s got it all right – Dean acts like an overwrought Brando impersonator, Kazan’s direction is flaccid, and the story is reduced to a rather trite fable.

Then we come to Rebel Without a Cause.  Here, I’m perfectly willing to go along with Roger Ebert’s analysis, but we’ve got to take a step back on this one, because watching this movie brought me to a horrible, gut-wrenching realization: West Side Story is, in many respects, a Knock Off of this movie.

That’s sacrilege of the highest order, and something that pains me — PAINS me — to write, but there’s really no denying it.  OK, maybe “knock off” isn’t quite right, but WSS definitely owes a lot to Rebel.  Even, to a minor extent, the score. Sort of.

There, I said it… breathe deeply… BUT, the good thing is that whatever debts WSS owes to Rebel, it in every way improves upon its predecessor.  And obviously, Romeo and Juliet was the true model for West Side, but there are so many elements of Rebel that it’s impossible to ignore them.  I mean, Hello – Knife Fight? [See above.]

wss knife fight

As to what I said about the score, first off, Sondheim, thankfully, denies it.  And it may be wholly a coincidence given the subject matter and settings, but there’s no denying that this:

does sound in some ways like this:

Although upon further review, the latter possesses such a greater sophistication that the point is rendered almost moot.  Lenny’s score is a masterpiece and there are traces of everyone (“Hey, we’re having a party – why not invite the Black Panthers?”) so I guess it shouldn’t bother me too much that Rosenman has a small say in the dialogue.

Frankly I think very little prevents Rebel overall from being MST3K movie fodder… in fact, it largely resembles my absolute favorite episode thereof: “I Accuse My Parents“.

Speaking of movies, tonight is of course Inglourious Basterds night, and I’m definitely looking forward to it.  Quentin’s media saturation has reached monumental proportions even by his standards.  But it’s like, Quent, dawg, if you would just make movies a little more often, there wouldn’t be quite so much pressure on the success of the few that you do make.  I think, and I think most creative types would agree with me here, that it’s maybe the most important thing that an artist produce.  All the time.  Although there’s got to be some kind of limit to that, because even Stravinsky jumped the shark, and Lord Knows he was poppin’ ’em out all the time.

Speaking of which, I really ought to compose before taking in the cinema.

Oh, P.S. The trauma from my Rebel-WSS related psychoses was totally outweighed by the awesomeness of getting to see Mr. Howell in an apron!!

rebel-backus

Gotta Dance!

I’d like to share two recent discoveries:

1) You can have EVERY SONG like EVER from the 1930’s for 25 bucks on iTunes.  I shit thee not, people — 129 songs for $25.  Even if you’re only marginally interested in the top hits from the ’30’s, that’s still a helluva deal.  Highly recommended.

2) But what you can’t get on iTunes, for some blasted reason, is the totally amazing, English electro-pop musician FrankMusik whose music is seemingly the perfect mix of ’80’s, ’90’s and ’00’s dance music.  (Pardon my infomercial-speak).  Thank God for YouTube:

Let’s just hope it doesn’t take 70 years for him to get North American distribution.

The Bilbao Song

q club entrance

Having just returned from Hyde Park, I am charged with the unenviable task of decrying the current condition of the Quadrangle Club.  In song.  Be patient – this might take a little Weill.  (lol — I kill me!!)

The Quadrangle Club is a place that used to exude a tremendous aura from its blunt haunches on 57th Avenue.  For students at the University of Chicago it holds a tremendous mystique; one sees Professors, both feared and admired, enter the front door and what happens next is anybody’s guess.  One of course assumes that some sort of perverse, Eyes Wide Shut scenario follows, but one can never be sure.

That is, until one gets the rare opportunity to enter the club oneself.  For me, this happened when I was but a wee 1st-year college student.  I had made the acquaintance of one of Hyde Park’s – and the Club’s – great movers and shakers, a gentleman by the name of Todd Schwebel, and I had quickly ingratiated myself into his Garden Party Society as a hired pianist.  This was around 2001 or ’02, and the members of the Club had just reinstated the traditional “Revels” entertainment, to which Mr. Schwebel cordially invited me.

I’ll never forget that first night at the Club.  It seemed as if the stale air, a potpourri of damp smoke and Beefeater martinis, had been awaiting my arrival for nearly a century.  Old ladies passed by with immobile gray hair and sweetly pungent perfume.  Bowties appeared in profusion.  It was at that point that I knew my destiny lay at the Quadrangle Club.

I went back many times during my undergraduate years, and as soon as I became a staff member, I joined the club.  One quickly finds out that the specialty of the bar is, fittingly enough, an old-fashioned.  One also discovers that there really are no rules, no formalities, and no structure to the whole place.  It’s just like the song says:

The stools at the bar were damped with rye,

On the dance floor, the grass grew high,

Thro’ the roof, the moon was shining green,

And the music really gave you some return on what you paid.

Hey Joe, play that old song they always played…

And then came 2008, the year in which the University of Chicago assumed control of the club and hired an outside management firm to run the place.  And now, utter ruin.  To quote Josh Schonwald of the Chicago Chronicle:

The green awning is gone. The landscaping is different. The facility has been deep cleaned, and many of the rooms have been replastered and painted. There is a new menu, with a new kitchen ethos toward fresher, more seasonal offerings. There are new plates, silverware and tablecloths. Even the servers look different; they still dress in black and white, but will wear bistro aprons at lunch and the trademark vests at dinner.

Yes, the Green Awning is gone.  What were they THINKING???  The Green Awning made you feel like you were Someplace and Somebody as you walked under it.  I mean, tell me if this ain’t class:

the old club 2

[I have a secret theory that the Green Awning was actually stolen as a prank by the Faculty Club of Northwestern University (if they even have one) and that it is to be found hiding somewhere in Evanston.]

I had a long talk with the Membership Director the other day, Poor Girl, and explained to her that without the awning, the club has a very open, inviting entrance, and that that’s exactly the wrong direction for the club.

As for the supposedly new and improved menu, I suppose this must be what they’re talking about:

q club soup menu

Ahh yes… finally soup served with the Appropriate Garnish.  Not like the old days when it was invariably accompanied by a hyena carcass and earthworms.

The thing is, we all knew this was coming.  The writing was on the wall: there was no more room for “the profitless niceties of the home-away-from-home of the prewar gentleman-scholar.”  There were hints as early as July ’08, when I was part of the performance now known as “The Last Stand of the Old Q Club”.  It was one of my finest cabaret performances, and played to a packed house.  There was no Bilbao Song then, but let’s just say, it’s now a sort of unofficial anthem of the place, as far as I’m concerned.  As the song says:

Now they’ve cleaned up and made it middle class

With parted hams and iced cream

Very bourgeois, very bourgeois,

Just another place to put your ass.

They’ve cleaned up all the booze and broken glass

On parquet floors, you can’t grow grass

They’ve shut the green moon out because of rain,

And the music makes you cringe when you think of what you pay.

Hey Joe, play that old song they always used to play:

me singing


More Drama

With little time between overeating engagements in Chicago, and in spite of my bloated, fat-filled stomach, I courageously present News of two even newer Opera Productions:

Steven Schwartz’s “Séance on a Wet Afternoon”

and Jacob Cooper’s Timberbrit: The Story of Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake:

Not to mention these schannanigans at Milwaukee’s Skylight Opera, which, it turns out, seem to be affecting every Chicago musician I know in one way or another.

Drama

Recent additions to the musico-dramatic stage include the eagerly anticipated Moravec-Teachout collaboration The Letter as well as Rufus Wainwright’s Primma Donna [discussed in some detail on this blog already].

Life is so hard for an avid young devourer of high art — I feel a vital need to experience these pieces for myself, yet they are so far away.  I read reviews, but even the reviewers that I trust the most, I trust only so much.  It’s not just opera either — I’m practically tearing my hair out waiting for Los Abrazos Rotos to come out this side of the Atlantic.

Luckily though, there is the internet.  Because of the internet, I can indeed listen to and view scenes from The Letter and so can you.  The authors bill this as an “Opera Noir”.  Hmm… from the scenes on the web site, I’d have to say not quite.  Wouldn’t that be grand though?  My Kingdom for an Opera Noir!!  I had always secretly hoped that Bernard Herrmann’s Wuthering Heights would be just that, but after a few days with the score, I think it’s not.

Then there’s Primma Donna, about which I can make no judgement, because there is a distinct lack of media available on the internet.  Ruf — can a brotha get an audio clip up in here??  The only thing I have to go by is this:

My apologies for the embarrasingly long (and grammatically poor) French introduction.  Anyway, based on this, I would say that the opera may be pretty, but there ain’t much there.  Not to mention that it doesn’t sound like Mr. Wainwright is really making use of the full range of the operatic voice in this particular aria.

Now for some Drama much closer to my neck of the woods: Mario Venzago is outta there!  The Indianapolis Symphony dun fired him.  He was supposed to come conduct at my school a bunch this year… I wonder if that’s still on.  I’ve only seen the man conduct once, but admittedly, I was paying more attention to the piece (Jennifer Higdon’s Violin Concerto) than to his conducting thereof.  I stupidly left at the intermission, right before Schumann 4, which I hear is one of his staples.  Whoops.

Ooh, maybe Pedro Almodóvar and Alberto Iglesias will write an Opera Noir.  No… that’s probably asking too much.  Looks like I’ll have to do this one myself.  Perhaps it will be my Reservoir Dogs.