Rue the day

Unfortunately, it’s time for a Rue McClanahan tribute.  When Bea Arthur died, I mentioned her character Dorothy was really the heart of the show.  Well, if that’s the case, then Blanche was the show’s libido, the backdrop for the vital sexual essence that made “The Golden Girls” so very risque and continues to do so.  In that post, I provided a list of what I considered to be the top 3 “Dorothy” episodes of The Golden Girls, so here is my list of the top 3 “Blanche” episodes:

End of the Curse [1] [2] [3]

Many of the “Blanche” story lines center around Blanche’s obsession with preserving her looks and sex appeal into old age.  She considers plastic surgery, dates younger men, and wrestles with her past as a beautiful Southern Belle.  In this episode, the first of the second season, she deals with the onset of menopause.

Blanche’s Little Girl [1] [2] [3]

“The Golden Girls” invariably portrays Blanche’s relationship with her own children as fraught: she relied heavily on a nanny to raise them and feels emotionally distant from them.  One daughter (back in the 80’s, there were rarely consistent storylines on sitcoms – Blanche’s children come into existence on a writer’s whim and disappear just as easily) birthed a child through artificial insemination, leading to a mini-story arch within the show.  However, I have chosen this particular episode to represent Blanche’s parental redemption, in which Blanche’s daughter “Rebecca” returns from being a model in Paris, no longer slim and beautiful, but now grossly overweight.  Joey Regalbuto of “Murphy Brown” fame plays Rebecca’s abusive fiancé.

Journey to the Center of Attention [1] [2] [3]

In this episode, Blanche tries to expand Dorothy’s social horizons by taking her out to the Rusty Anchor.  At first awkward, Dorothy ends up becoming the favorite of the bar’s patrons, winning them over with her manly baritone.  This late episode reveals a great deal about the complicated Blanche-Dorothy relationship.  One might consider this episode a “Dorothy” episode, in that it allowed Bea Arthur a golden opportunity to show off her musical theater chops.  However it also allowed Rue a unique opportunity (in the entire series) to show off her amazing talents as a physical comedienne.  “The Golden Girls” is a show that is pervaded with the spirit of “I Love Lucy”, and I think it is no stretch to say that Rue was the most Lucy-esque of the four actresses.  The singing revenge scene ranks right up with the best of Lucy’s disastrous night club turns at the Tropicana (it starts around 7 minutes into the second clip.)

In closing, here are two of Rue’s finest moments from the entire series, neither of which come from the above listed episodes:

On Style(z)

I just finished reading Orhan Pamuk‘s 1998 novel My Name is Red, a superlative piece of literature set in late 16th century Istanbul concerning a murderous group of Ottoman miniaturists.  Pamuk interweaves his brilliantly constructed murder mystery with extensive discussions of art, style and apprenticeship.  I found this quote particularly interesting:

“Nothing is pure,” said Enishte Effendi.  “In the realm of book arts, whenever a masterpiece is made, whenever a splendid picture makes my eyes water out of joy and causes a chill to run down my spine, I can be certain of the following: Two styles heretofore never brought together have come together to create something new and wondrous.  We owe Bihzad and the splendor of Persian painting [above] to the meeting of an Arabic illustrating sensibility and Mongol-Chinese painting.  Shah Tahmasp’s best paintings marry Persian style with Turkmen subtleties.  Today, if men cannot adequately praise the book-arts workshops of Akbar Khan in Hindustan, it’s because he urged his miniaturists to adopt the styles of the Frankish masters.  To God belongs the East and the West.  May He protect us from the will of the pure and unadulterated.”

What a wonderful description of the relationship of artistry to craft – new art arises when someone masters craftsmanship in multiple styles and figures out ways of combining said styles to illuminate and enhance each other.  I bring it up as part of my ongoing diatribe against those artists, musicians in particular, who seek to purge their work of all perceptible influences.  A) good luck and B) it seems to me that in so doing all they end up with is a bunch of voiceless muck.

I know that this was a trend in many artistic spheres, but as far as I can tell, this blight – that is, the aesthetic wherein novelty was prized over artistry – seemed to have hit Music (i.e. Western Academic Art Music) worse than other disciplines in the 20th century.  But I am continually heartened that this generation of, shall we say, “classically trained” composers takes music quite seriously and realizes that we are competing with popular genres (whose musicians are increasingly devoted to music as art), with other artistic media, and with the larger world of entertainment.  [Ed: I think that competition among musicians is a wonderful, healthy thing.]

It is in this regard, and many others, that I would like to offer my highest praise for Timothy Andres‘ new album, Shy and Mighty, released by Nonesuch.  I bought it just a couple of days ago and have been glued to my speakers ever since.  What a debut album!  This is really an album, both in the classical sense and in the contemporary sense of a recorded-album-cum-artistic-work, consisting of ten single movement pieces.  I hesitate to call them miniatures – most of them are quite substantial pieces, with only two serving as brief interludes, but even these are part of a larger framework.  This is really first-rate writing, and what’s more, it is a brilliant melding of influences as diverse as Steve Reich, John Adams, Olivier Messiaen, Dave Brubeck, Aaron Copland, Claude Debussy and a coterie of popular artists (“Out of Shape” really sounds like a pop song).  To my ears, one of the strongest influences is Stravinsky’s Petrushka.

From a sort of dogmatic approach, one thing that I really admire about this work is that Mr. Andres speaks in his own voice and delivers a personal artistic message, but he never hides any of his influences.  And yet, it’s not like they’re awkward or hovering on top of the writing or anything like that – rather, they’re beautifully interwoven.  To me, his music proves my previous point: an individual voice is a product of taste, assiduously cultivated and ultimately refined.  And to make things even better, in listening to this album (which I have done several times over the past couple days) one never stops to think about any of this – the influences move in and out organically – listener simply relinquishes himself to pure aural enjoyment.

Back to the opening idea of style, however, I often find myself wondering the job of uniting different styles is more difficult for composers today than in previous eras, for the obvious reason that there is a has been such a proliferation of musical styles in the past century.  Not only that, but we now have access to recordings of all of these styles.  It’s hard to say whether or not it’s harder or easier though.

Take Bach for example, who diligently learned and interpolated so many different stylistic strains in his music (look at any given Cello Suite for the range of nationalities and historical eras that informed his approach).  From his youth through his maturity, Bach copied out manuscript after manuscript by hand so as to familiarize himself with the music of his forebears and contemporaries.  He traveled incredibly long distances to meet musicians and learn their music.  But was his job of rendering his discoveries into a new and unique voice more difficult than ours is today?

I haven’t the faintest clue, but I often wonder, because every time I compose a piece, it seems so difficult.  The truth is probably that it’s always been incredibly difficult, but Bach was just such a master that he left no traces of its difficulty!

“Actus Tragicus“

Items!

As I’ve been busily wrapping up graduation requirements for my master’s at IU, I’ve been taken away from the blog, which is such a shame because there are so many things to talk about:

1) You too can inherit the World of Music, because Pierre Boulez has sanctioned it, and he has been filmed walking around European woodlands [see 1:41, below], obviously communing with nature in the great tradition of the great composers who came before him:

Boulez is such a strange bird, and definitely a genius on many levels, not least of which is the art of self-presentation.  I can think of very few other public figures who have seamlessly crossed the boundary from enfant terrible to conservationist of traditional society.  Not even Stravinsky, really – he was always sort of off in his own little world.  Boulez got the attention of classical music society early on and proceeded to cast a spell over it, backing down from his hostile positions (no opera, no Mozart, no this, no that…) according to a clearly structured time line.

Interesting, his development as a conductor though, no?

I might have to take back that whole “genius of self presentation” thing I said before… wow.  What exactly was he going for here?  I think it would be safe to describe the above as a combination of Stevie Wonder, Al Bundy and Asimo, the robot conductor.  It must have been all that electronic music he was writing at the time.

2) Another season of opera means another season of famous movie directors directing operas. This time it’s Terry Gilliam’s Faust and Mike Figgis’ Lucrezia Borgia.  Perhaps its a bit passé by now, but do feel free to chime in with your favorite ideas for movie/tv director – opera pairings.  Perhaps Roman Polanski’s Little Women?  Or how about Quentin Tarrantino’s Tosca?  Or perhaps James Cameron’s Ring Cycle?

3) Jennifer Higdon wins the Pulizter Prize in Music.  I’m generally OK with this, as I’m generally a fan of Ms. Higdon’s music, particularly blue cathedral and Zaka. One caveat though, is that I drove up to Indianapolis last year to hear the Violin Concerto, and to me, Higdon winning the Pulitzer for that piece is like Scorsese winning the Oscar for The Departed – right person, wrong piece.

[P.S. How about Martin Scorcese’s Gianni Schicchi??]

The New York Times article on this event includes a quote from Marin Alsop upon which I’d like to rhapsodize:

“I’m not sure when ‘accessible’ became a dirty word,” Ms. Alsop said. “I’m not of the belief that something has to be inscrutable in order to be great.”

And I’m with you, Marin, sort of.  Frankly, I do think that “accessible” is the most heinous term in the contemporary musical lexicon.  Because what does “accessible” really mean, the way that contemporary music commentators use it?  Non-offensive.  That’s really it.  Not “attention grabbing”, not “compelling”, not “potent”, “irresistible”, or even “powerful”.  All that “accessible” means is that a given piece of music lies above the x-axis on the scale of listenability to the “untrained ear”.  It usually amounts to some kind of watered-down fusion piece that is palatable enough for a large group of older-middle aged listeners to occasionally tap their feet to and proclaim, “oh, I liked that”.

Not that that’s what Jennifer Higdon’s music is, at all (I think it’s often many of those other things that I listed above).  But speaking of other buzzwords that I can’t stand in relation to music, I am sick and tired of hearing, mainly in academic circles, compositions referred to as “successful pieces”.  As in, “Composer X’s quadruple quartet for mixed pitched percussion ensemble is a really successful piece.  It works really well.”  Usually spoken with half closed eyes and half-flared nostrils.

The thing I can’t stand about that term is that it makes music sound like it’s a banker or something.  Which, again, is about the most that we can expect out of much of this music.  If it was really so successful, far richer vocabulary would come to mind when describing it.  The deliciously ironic thing is that, in the popular realm, this term possesses an entirely different meaning: a “successful” song means a big hit – and big money following.  I can assure you that people in academic music circles would never infer that meaning about a piece that they deemed “successful”.

As if it weren’t bad enough already

now conductors get to be visual artists by proxy:

There’s this great quote from a letter by Verdi sent to Ricordi:

… these blessed conductors always have something to do; and their vanity isn’t satisfied unless they undo even what is going well! It’s not enough for them to accept the applause on stage like other prima donnas, and to thank the audience from the podium if it applauds four bars of the prelude, as if they had written them! All of this is ridiculous!

And of course, there is that.  It’s naturally a symbiotic relationship, that one between composers and conductors (and performers in general).  I mean, how few of history’s (well, let’s at least say the 20th century’s) great composers have been as capable as their counterparts in the world of professional conducting?  This works out fine until you come across those conductors who really do hold the belief that they were the true CREATOR of the work playing in front of them.  Without even playing a single note of course, but that’s almost besides the point.

Conductors are sort of like mid-wives.  A composer could give birth to his/her creation without their assistance, but it just tends to be a whole lot messier.

Please note, I do not hold the above against Maestro Dudamel.  Clearly he is quite modest about this project, which he should be.  But to the people who came up with this schwindl: Really?  At least the money will go to a good cause.

Meanwhile, how often do you see a video that cuts between a serious Swedish language interview and a crazy Scandinavian woman full-out belting “This is My life”?