MUSICOLOGYMAN

Buyer's Remorse

2010-05-17T09:35:00.002-04:00

I should have known better. More often than not, I get burned when I buy von Karajan recordings. Here, the characteristic Karajan smoothness struck again and rendered the music almost lifeless. What was I thinking? Was I smoking something without knowing it?

Sarah Palin's Lack of Qualifications

2008-09-23T22:54:00.002-04:00

It doesn't get any better than this terrific column by Maureen Dowd.

Teaser:

Carly Fiorina, the woman John McCain sent out to defend Sarah Palin and rip anyone who calls her a tabula rasa on foreign policy and the economy, admitted Tuesday that Palin was not capable of running Hewlett-Packard.

That’s pretty damning coming from Fiorina, who also was not capable of running Hewlett-Packard.

Sarah Palin's Qualifications to be VPOTUS

2008-09-23T22:53:00.002-04:00

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More on Jason Ng

2008-08-17T14:32:00.005-04:00

Kudos to the New York Times for keeping the story of Jason Ng alive.

How Americans Treat the Foreigner within Their Gates

2008-08-13T07:33:00.002-04:00

Read this. Then pray and work for justice.

My Shostakovich Problem

2008-07-31T13:58:00.003-04:00

I once had a friend, an emigré musician from the Soviet Union, who insisted, "Listening to Shostakovich played by a non-Russian is like listening to a monkey reciting Shakespeare." While he was exaggerating (I think)--there are some fine performances of Shostakovich by Western perfomers, even if they might not strike Eastern Europeans as idiomatic--I wonder if there's not some merit in his claim. The Shostakovich afficionados I've encountered insist, for example, on the superiority of recordings by conductors like Kirill Kondrashin, Yevgeny Mravinsky, and Rudolf Barshai, by the Borodin String Quartet, and by soloists like David Oistrakh and Mstislav Rostropovich. Mention, on the other hand, the symphony recordings by Bernard Haitink, and one will often receive withering dismissals.

I'm not sure how Shostakovich die-hards regard recordings by the likes of Bernstein, Slatkin, or the Emerson String Quartet that have received some acclaim in the U.S. I will admit, though, that some of the Shostakovich recordings I find most compelling are by performers from Western Europe and the United States. (Yes, I even like Haitink in some of this repertory.) Recordings that stick out in my mind include Ormandy's classic account of the Fourth (which, alas, I've not heard in about 25 years, so my opinion today might be less favorable), Bernstein's Seventh with the Chicago Symphony, Previn's first recording of the Eighth (with the London Symphony), and both of Karajan's recordings of the Tenth. I've also been happy with the Emerson's recordings of the quartets, which I actually prefer to the Borodin's. But I've not had that much experience with the Eastern European recordings. Certainly I'm in no position to make recommendations.

I've brought up this topic because I've been thinking about recordings I've heard of the long, often texturally sparse slow movements in a number of Shostakovich symphonies (especially nos. 5-8 and 10). These movements puzzle me. I just don't get them. (I note, however, that the slow movements in the later symphonies, especially 11, 13, and 15 don't pose the same problems for me.) Perhaps I've not heard the performances that will unlock them for me: maybe I need to hear some of the classic recordings by Kondrashin and Mravinsky. Or maybe the movements themselves presume listening practices other than that with which I'm familiar. Are there listening practices characteristic of Eastern European audiences that Western listeners tend not to share and that make works by composers like Shostakovich more challenging? Or it it just me?

L'Homme armé

2008-07-30T19:31:00.003-04:00

My son, ready for medieval combat:

[Double-click the image to enlarge.]

Be comforted: at least someone's keeping watch

2008-07-14T21:49:00.003-04:00

Woo-hoo!!!!!!!! A cool million!!!!!!! I wasn't using my civil liberties anyway...

National Defense

2008-07-13T22:49:00.002-04:00

I am a simple man, and complex historical events elude my feeble grasp. So I'm confused by the following:

In the 1950s, Eisenhower pushed for the interstate highway system on grounds of national defense. (He had been impressed with the German highway system during WWII and its effectiveness for transporting materiel.) So the U.S. built the interstate system, and auto companies built and sold lots of lots of cars to drive on them, and oil companies sold lots and lots of gas for the cars.

In the early years of this decade, some people who were mightily pissed off about the U.S. meddling in their oil-rich lands committed some acts of horrific violence on some prominent American targets. The loss of life was, by U.S. standards, staggering.

Now, what was that about building highways in support of national defense?

Schadenfreud

2008-07-11T20:46:00.005-04:00

Ah! The futility of envy!

Dobsonian Democracy

2008-06-26T22:47:00.010-04:00

On his radio show this past Tuesday, Dr. James Dobson discussed Barack Obama. In the course of the show, he uttered the following (as reported by the New York Times):

I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology.

I’m confused: is Dobson recklessly shifting between first and third person as he describes his own theology? Later, Dobson complained about McCain and Obama, charging, “They don’t give a hoot about the family.” I guess that puts the two candidates in pretty good company. I recall a certain rabbi with leadership--nay, messianic!--aspirations who declared

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. (Matthew 10:34-38)

Let us thank the good Lord that we have Dr. Dobson to blow the whistle on this mischief!

Second Life

2008-05-30T11:43:00.001-04:00

Is it just me, or is Second Life simply a huge waste of time?

I can’t believe my eyes!

2008-02-21T15:03:00.004-05:00

Hillary Hahn--yes, that Hillary Hahn, the violinist--has recorded the Schoenberg Violin Concerto. Nobody else with her amount of star power has ever recorded the Schoenberg. How did she get this past the marketing pea-brains at Deutsche Grammophon? I dunno, but I’m looking foward to hearing the recording (scheduled for release on March 10 in the U.K.). Oh, the other piece on the disc is a little-known concerto by a guy named “Sibelius” or something like that.

So it's not about issues, eh?

2008-02-19T22:32:00.006-05:00

The news media, not to mention the Clinton campaign, have been reiterating the line that Obama’s appeal is rooted in that candidate’s superb oratorical skills. At the same, Obama’s adversaries claim that he offers nothing more specific than “change” to his prospective voters. Some commentators (Rush Limbaugh, for example) go so far as to suggest that Obama is a political tabula rasa, upon which voters inscribe their own idiosyncratic policy preferences. So I was surprised to read the following in tonight’s New York Times story on the outcome of the Wisconsin primary:

Almost two-thirds [of polled Wisconsin Democratic primary voters] said Mr. Obama would be more likely to unite the country and about 55 percent considered him more likely to improve foreign relations.

Uniting the country is no small thing, even if it is not, strictly speaking, a policy issue. Few presidents have changed the tenor of public discourse--Reagan was arguably the last--a not insignificant accomplishment in a deliberative democracy such as ours. Further, as an African American, Obama may be uniquely suited among current American elected officials to bridge some of the racial divisions that still exist in this country. Yet the poll results do demonstrate that Obama’s appeal extends to the area of hard policy. That 55 percent who expressed confidence in Obama’s approach to foreign affairs may be more in tune with the candidate than many pundits are willing to admit. After all, Obama has expressed his willingness to open high-level talks with some of the country’s adversaries in the Islamic world, a gesture that, if realized, will express a renewed attitude of American humility in world affairs. Nor can anyone doubt the steadfastness of his opposition to U.S. saber rattling in the Middle East. The same cannot be said for Clinton, who remains much more hawkish on Iran than the situation may warrant.

The News of the Day: February 7, 2008 Edition

2008-02-07T16:25:00.001-05:00

I'm soooooo exasperated!!! Britney Spears left the hospital today against the wishes of her psychiatrist, and all the news outlets want to talk about is Mitt Romney dropping out of the presidential primaries. How warped can the mainstream media be??

The Dems' delegate race

2008-02-06T11:59:00.001-05:00

It's the morning after Super Tuesday. Do you know where your delegates are?

Estimates this morning by major news organizations of the total number of delegates Obama and Clinton are all over the place. Some give Obama the lead, others, Clinton. But does it matter at this point?

The earliest estimates I saw this morning (circa 6 a.m., Eastern Time) gave Clinton about an 80 delegate edge over Obama. That's not the big victory Clinton needs to gain more momentum, and, I think, any deleterious effects on Obama's momentum are minimal and reversible.

Obama may have an advantage going forward. Super Tuesday favored Clinton because she is better known than Obama (or, at least, voters think they know her better). It's not surprising that, at this stage in the campaign, she's going to do better when competing in many states at once rather than one or two. Yet the next four weeks, that is, until the March 4 primaries in Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, and Vermont, there are fewer simultaneous primaries each week in vote-rich states. If South Carolina is a reliable guide, Obama may do better when he and Clinton are both focusing on a small handful of states holding simultaneous elections. (I'm assuming that, since Obama and Clinton were both already rather well known in New Hampshire, the former's Iowa victory did little to change the minds of voters who may made their minds long before.)

In short: Super Tuesday was a wash for the two Democratic candidates. Now the race begins in earnest.

Too good to be true

2007-12-21T13:43:00.000-05:00

I dunno, but if I were Larry Craig, I think I'd ~~bend over back~~ go out of my way to avoid double entendre. From today's New York Times:

One senator who is leaving for the holidays and not coming back is Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, who retired on Tuesday night. Mr. Lott was celebrated in numerous speeches by senators, with one of the most personal and affectionate from Larry E. Craig Republican of Idaho.

"It was not until both of us left the House and came to the Senate that we developed a different kind of relationship and friendship that, frankly, most senators don't have the opportunity to do," Mr. Craig said of Mr. Lott...."Trent Lott," Mr. Craig said. "A great senator from Mississippi and a guy with a pretty good bass voice."

What I'm Listening to Today

2007-12-17T17:02:00.000-05:00

Stravinsky: Various miniatures (Greeting Prelude, Suites for Small Orchestra, "Dumbarton Oaks") Concerto; Mavra, Stravinsky conducting (from the SONY box)
Mahler, Tenth Symphony (Cooke "Performing Version"), Gielen, SWR Symphony
Beethoven, First and Second Symphonies, Barenboim, Staatskapelle Berlin
Mahler, Seventh Symphony, Barenboim, Staatskapelle Berlin

Beethoven at 237

2007-12-17T10:48:00.000-05:00

Today is Beethoven's birthday. He's 237 years old. And to think, it seems like only yesterday that he was a cute, cherub-faced little toddler, trundling his playthings around the Bonn apartment. My, how time flies.

Damn! I forgot to send a card!

Half Empty or Half Full?

2007-07-27T11:33:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's New York Times carried a story about the Showtime series The Tudors. The article focussed on Peter O'Toole, who plays the role of the sixteenth-century pope, Paul III.

The story's author, Anita Gates, notes, "Even out of character [O'Toole] seemed happy to discuss religion." The actor describes himself as "a retired Christian," one who lost his faith after "his altar-boy childhood."

Or did he? The article continues

“No one can take Jesus away from me,” he said, having just expressed an affection for the Sermon on the Mount (“Blessed are the meek,” etc.). “There’s no doubt there was a historical figure of tremendous importance, with enormous notions. Such as peace.”

Alright, O'Toole doesn't express a belief in the resurrection of Jesus or one of its major consequences, the declaration that Jesus is Christ and Lord (Rom. 1:1-4). Yet far too many, if not a sizable majority of American evangelicals, tend to dismiss statements like O'Toole's. They object, for example, that the actor's affection for the Sermon on the Mount represents little more than ethical mumbo jumbo. Rather, O'Toole has secularized of the text's message. To be sure, few find such messages unpalatable, but, the evangelical argues, neither does it possess any worthwhile religious significance.

Even worse, from some evangelical perspectives, is O'Toole's invocation of "peace," which comes from a presumably secular liberal. So (some might argue) the "peace" to which he refers is of a banal sort, that is, the opposite of war. Surely, according to this attitude, he doesn't have in mind the most important kind of peace, that is, peace with God. (The argument for O'Toole's liberalism goes something like this: He is a well-known television and movie actor, after all, even if he's not cut from the Hollywood cloth. He's also a European which, in worldview of many American evangelicals, makes him post-Christian and liberal.)

Is this a caricature of the evangelical position? I don't think so. I myself long harbored similar attitudes, and I used to have conversations along these lines with many evangelical friends. Such views, in fact, are deeply entrenched in contemporary American evangelical culture.

One of the most egregious aspects of the evangelical position is the dismissive attitude towards peace as the opposite of physical violence, particularly among nation-states. Does not such an attitude render claims about personal "peace with God" meaningless? This is one of the more noxious consequence of the often unwitting embrace among many American evangelicals of the split between the public and private spheres.

In conclusion, I find Mr. O'Toole's admiration for Jesus (whom he recognizes as a real historical figure) an indication that the glass is half full. By seeking to honor Jesus by name and taking aspects of his message seriously, Mr. O'Toole also levels, albeit implicitly, an indictment of the church which, alas, has spent too much of its time in complicity with the powerful in government, business, and so on. Perhaps widespread repentance within the church will persuade Mr. O'Toole to come out of his ecclesial retirement.

About Writing

2007-07-16T13:31:00.004-04:00

I've been a good writer as long as I can remember. To be sure, I've also had my share of bad habits, some of which I probably still have. Usually, I'm able to catch most of the problems as I edit: perhaps 50 percent of being a good writer is being a good editor. The trick for me has been that I've always been conscientious-- and that's a trait that I think many people who are mediocre (or worse) can cultivate and thereby improve the quality of their work. In the process of helping my eldest daughter (who will be entering tenth grade this fall), I've come up with a list of a few of the principles that guide me as I write--or, better yet, as I edit.

1. Eliminate passive constructions.

2. Reduce usage of forms of "to be" to the minimum.

3. Eliminate as many modal constructions as possible. (would, could, should)

4. Break compound sentences into two or more.

5. Shorten long sentences.

6. Cull out as many adverbs as possible.

7. Avoid noun plague, that is, the use of a noun where a verb exists. For example, instead of "It is my expectation," write, "I expect."

8. Expand all contractions.

9. Vary syntax.

10. Eliminate unnecessary word repetition.

11. Always proofread your work by reading it aloud. Re-read your work aloud from start to finish until you have made all your corrections.

12. After you have done all the above, share you with a friend who is a good writer and editor and ask for constructive criticism.

13. Don't be afraid to cut, cut, cut! Yes, you put a lot of work into those paragraphs and pages, but if you've approached your writing in a disciplined manner, then your labor hasn't been in vain. The point is that you did write when you had to do so.

Don't try this if you're over 40!

2007-06-25T11:11:00.000-04:00

Friday evening, we took our kids to a local carnival. As the time approached for us to leave, we still had too many unused ride tickets, but enough for three to ride the tilt-a-whirl. Allison, our oldest (15), rode none of the rides, fearing that her susceptibility to motion sickness would manifest itself. Meanwhile, Elliot (11) had gotten his fill of rides: his stomach was too unsettled, he said, to go on the tilt-a-whirl. That left Madeleine (13) and Clara (9). What were we to do with the extra tickets? I foolishly stepped forward and told my family that, yes, I would ride with the girls. It was hell. The five minutes we spent on the ride were the longest two hours of my life. For me, it was like having another panic attack--except a panic attack is a lot more fun.

Fundamentalist Film Criticism

2007-06-25T10:51:00.000-04:00

The web site Crosswalk.com has posted a somewhat warm review of Evan Almighty, a movie that, I think, most critics outside the conservative religious media have roundly panned. Nevertheless, Crosswalk's recommendation comes with an interesting caveat (summarized as a bullet point at the end of the review):

Though not preachy, the film has a mild pro-environment message that distorts the biblical idea of man's dominion over creation.

Huh? Where does one find such a distortable biblical idea? Is this another way of saying,"We wouldn't want our children to think that it's not okay to rape the earth, would we?"

A President That Christianists Can Support

2007-06-20T16:22:00.000-04:00

Exhibit A:

Baptist theologian Wayne Grudem expresses fawning admiration for the presidency of George W. Bush: http://www.baptistpress.net/bpnews.asp?ID=24423

Exhibit B:

Sydney Blumenthal reports on Abu Ghraib and who might have known what when: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/25/070625fa_fact_hersh

Makes one wonder, huh, why the Christianist right is so unpopular?

Listening for Today

2007-06-11T09:38:00.001-04:00

Schumann, Symphony No. 4 in D minor, Op. 120, arranged by Mahler. (Leipzig Gewandhaus, Riccardo Chailly)

Shostakovich, Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 35 (Ronald Brautigam, piano; Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Riccardo Chailly)

Schubert, Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959 (Maurizio Pollini)

While I was already familiar with the piece, it became emblazoned in my psyche on seeing Robert Bresson's profoundly moving film Au hasard Balthasar, in which the only music is the slow movement of this sonata.

Beethoven, Diabelli Variations, Op. 120 (Maurizio Pollini)

I Was Right

2007-02-26T00:25:00.001-05:00

Yep, I called it. Once again the Academy conferred top honors on a less-than-outstanding picture that nevertheless was the sentimental favorite.

I gave up following the Oscars in the early 1980s after Terms of Endearment took the Best Picture Oscar. Alas, I'm like an alcoholic: I even watched much of tonight's show (more, I think, than I probably have since the early '80s). Now I feel like I'm having a bad hangover. When will I ever learn?

Oscar Time ... Ugh!

2007-02-18T00:36:00.001-05:00

When Titanic won the Oscar for Best Picture some years ago, the Academy of Motion Pictures lost its last smidgen of credibility with me. Or did that happen in the 1980s, when Terms of Endearment, a film I found unfunny and overly sentimental, likewise took top honors?

For some strange reason, though, I continue to pay attention to and even care about the verdict of the Academy. Some years I think the choices are spot on: Crash and American Beauty, for example, I thought deserved that level of recognition. Other years, their choice elicits a yawn, and in still others, I find myself stricken with disbelief.

Tonight I watched one of the sentimental favorites for this year's Best Picture award, Martin Scorsese's The Departed. Scorsese and company deliver a good, suspenseful tale about organized crime in Boston. But is it Best Picture material? I think not. Nevertheless, the film may win Best Picture with Scorsese as Best Director because, well, he's Martin Scorsese.

How I Know That Monsters Exist

2007-02-15T11:41:00.001-05:00

My favorite deli serves monster sandwiches.

I have a few questions, though: what does monster meat taste like? Are the monsters that Michael's serves wild or domesticated. If the latter, do the practice humane methods of raising their monsters?

My dilemma

2007-02-09T12:29:00.000-05:00

I have a friend. We’ll call him Jake. Jake’s a nice guy. I see him once a week, and I almost always have a nice, friendly conversation with him.

But Jake has a problem: halitosis.

This raises an obvious issue: how do I convey to him that he has this problem without offending him?

There’s an easy solution. As our weekly conversation gets underway, I could pull some breath mints out of my pocket, take one, and offer one to my friend.

But what if he says, “No, thank you?” or “What flavor? . . . Oh, I’ll pass, thank you.”

Not so simple, eh?

Well, consider a rosier scenario: Jake accepts the breath mint. Hurrah!

Problem is, my triumph will only be temporary, because, when I next see Jake, I’ll probably have to go through the same ritual. And it won’t be long until Jake is onto me. He may become offended, thus introducing an element of stress and anxiety into our relationship.

Of course, I can only hope that Jake would be grateful to know that he has bad breath and that he should take some action to mitigate its deleterious social consequences.

See how hard it is to be me?

iRows Absorbed by Google

2006-11-20T08:40:00.000-05:00

Here we go again. Great big Google has hired the creators of iRows, a wonderful online spreadsheet. Consequently, iRows will shut down on December 31. A message on the iRows site urges users to save their spreadsheets and upload them to Google Spreadsheets. Fair enough, I suppose. Here's the problem: Google Spreadsheets are currently technically inferior to iRows (although that will eventually change). I noticed this today when I went to update a spreadsheet I used to track the gas mileage I'm getting in my car. When the user opens an existing spreadsheet in Google, instead of presenting a complete grid, Google only displays the smallest rectangular region bounding the cells that contain data. In order to add a row or column, then, the user has to right click on the mouse button and select the appropriate item from the popup menu. Next, I discovered that Google Spreadsheets won't accept my preferred date format (MM/DD/YY) when I enter a new date. The Formatting options don't even offer this format. Instead, the best Google can do is to affix the century on the year (MM/DD/YYYY). Google also has not implemented a feature to enable users to use the mouse to select a group of cells and drag to a new, adjacent group of cells, filling the new cells with incremented cell formulas. To be sure, one can achieve the same result by cutting and pasting, but that's a more cumbersome process than the old drag-and-drop method. Finally, Google offers no options for freezing panes (that is, rows and columns), enabling the user to scroll the rest of the page while maintaining, say, column and row headers. Perhaps Google will substitute iRows code for its own. In the mean time, however, Google Spreadsheets is, compared to iRows, a second- or third-class application.

Mahmoud Who?

2006-08-14T14:45:00.000-04:00

Quick! Who's the President of Iran? Mahmoud "I'm a dinner job." Who says it's hard to say "Ahmadinejad"?

Post-Wagnerians on Prozac

2006-08-08T12:16:00.000-04:00

Franz Schmidt

What I'm listening to today

2006-07-31T08:48:00.000-04:00

Liszt, Mephisto Waltz No. 1, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Fritz Reiner conducting

Reiner's performance almost makes devil worship seem attractive.

Brahms, Tragic Overture, New York Philharmonic, Kurt Masur conducting

This performance strikes me as a real yawner. But I've never been a big fan of Masur anyway.

Brahms, Piano Trio in C minor, Nicholas Angelich, Renaud & Gautier Capuçon

My favorite Brahms piano trio. Unfortunately, this performance is too sedate, too cautious. They do deliver a nice reading of the wonderful third movement (written in alternating measures of 3 + 2 + 2, as I recall). Nevertheless, I still prefer the old Beaux Arts Trio recording.

Veering Uncontrollably into Banality

2006-05-04T06:54:00.000-04:00

The cadenza in the second movement of Benjamin Britten's Violin Concerto, Op. 15.

Metablog

2006-04-17T13:49:00.000-04:00

Find it here.

Christianity as an American Ideology

2006-01-07T01:05:00.000-05:00

Here's some food for thought: why doesn't the government of the United States engage in the systematic persecution of Christians? There was a time when I considered this a no-brainer: between the rights guaranteed in the Constitution and the (allegedly) Christian roots of American civil society, such actions would be inconceivable. I am no longer convinced, however, that these reasons are accurate. Rather, I've begun to think that the reasons are perhaps more sinister. Let me suggest an alternative hypothesis: to persecute Christians (or religious people in general) in America, particularly those who espouse an individualistic piety, would be to attack one of the legitimating ideologies of American capitalism. Perhaps in future posts I'll explore this more. For the time being, though, let me suggest that, if this hypothesis has any merit, then perhaps we ought to reopen the question, Is capitalism Christian? To answer "yes" to the question might suggest that American capitalism has been extraordinarily successful in co-opting Christianity as a legitimating ideology--not least because Christianity's character as ideology has been masked so well.

Extraordinary Album

2005-12-15T13:51:00.000-05:00

Fiona Apple, Extraordinary Machine (2005)

Haitink vs. Shostakovich

2005-12-08T10:57:00.000-05:00

A Soviet émigré pianist I once knew contended that "listening to a non-Russia playing Shostakovich is like listening to a monkey reciting Shakespeare." While I'm not sure that I would always agree--I don't think I could live without some of Bernstein's recordings of the symphonies--the pianist's claim came to mind while I was listening to Haitink's recording of the Fifteenth Symphony. I've come to hear the work, notwithstanding its surface playfulness, as mordantly serious (much in the vein of Nielsen's Sixth, to which Shostakovich seems to allude from the beginning and perhaps throughout the entire piece). Haitink, however, seems to miss all this, especially in the last movement, which he plays for depth. Nowhere does this strategy fail more miserably than following the climax of the chaconne: the section concludes with a loud, dissonant brass chord set against the chaconne rhythm played by the snare drum. There follows the lower strings playing the beginning of the chaconne theme in inversion, at which point Haitink broadens the tempo to the point of near stasis. This is a problem, I think, because this music works best if one plays it for its "misdirective" tendencies: that is, on the surface, the music should rush by without giving the listener (or the performers) a chance to ruminate (that comes after the performance).
As I hear it, the chaconne has built up to the point that we find ourselves staring in the abyss. Its collapse is no less horrific than what follows: we find ourselves absorbed back into the course of everyday life as if nothing happened. The clicking and clacking of the percussion (that we also heard in the scherzo--not to mention in the Fourth Symphony) against the sustained major chord in the strings doesn't strike me as some sort of cheerful redemption of what had gone before: rather, it's an unsettling reminder of, well, the lives to which we're going to return when we leave the concert hall.

A Brahms allusion in Mahler?

2005-11-28T13:14:00.000-05:00

Listening today to Brahms's Lied "Feldeinsamkeit," Op. 86, No. 2, I was struck by the resemblance of the phrase setting "Von Himmelsbläue wundersam umwoben" (and, in the second strophe, "Und ziehe selig mit durch ew'ge Räume") to the second phrase of the first theme in the last movement of Mahler's Third Symphony. Is it an allusion? I'll have to think about that.

The best thing about postmodern theory

2005-11-07T14:51:00.000-05:00

Sitting in a coffee shop with your friend who's written a book on Foucault, you enjoy the looks of sheer terror on the faces of other customers who've just overheard you loudly asking "So,what did you do with the body?"

More Schnittke

2005-10-15T09:46:00.000-04:00

I recently celebrated a birthday, and among the gifts I received was the recording of Gidon Kremer playing the Schnittke Violin Concertos. This is a wonderful set, the highlight of which (as the editorial review on Amazon.com points out) is the Fourth Concerto. Unfortunately, Amazon.com no longer carries it (which suggests that Teldec's U.S. distributors have dropped it from their catalogs), but it remains available both through some of Amazon's third-party sellers and from European retailers.

The Ultimate Trump Card

2005-10-06T19:46:00.000-04:00

The Guardian reports that, in a meeting with Palestinian officials, "George Bush ... claimed he was on a mission from God when he launched the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq." Read about it here. So why doesn't Bush mention this whenever he's defending his record to the American people?

Tom Delay Indicted

2005-09-29T15:04:00.000-04:00

Please be patient while I attempt to contain my glee.

Some more blog revisions

2005-09-10T10:24:00.000-04:00

I've posted a number of examples of computer code that I've work out on this blog. My primary motivation for doing so has been personal: I want to have the code in one place so that I can refer to it again in the future when I need it. Problem is, most members of the ideal readership of this blog probably don't care about the code snippets. I've decided, then, to move all the discussion of software development issues to my other blog, which nevertheless bears the Schoenbergian name "Developing Variations."

Warming up to Schnittke

2005-09-07T08:07:00.000-04:00

Recently I've been warming up to the music of Alfred Schnittke. I'd long been wary of Schnittke, having regarded the enthusiasm for his work as just another manifestation of a vain longing for classical music's savior. My mind began to change about a little over a year ago when Gidon Kremer (perhaps my favorite living violinist) came to town and performed, among other things, Schittke's Second Violin Sonata (1966). I found the work, the composer's first essay in his trademark "polystylism," fascinating and intriguing, and I proceeded to pick up recordings of it by Kremer, Mateja Marinkovic, and Levon Ambartsumian. (Incidentally, the latter two are still available at low, low prices through Berkshire Record Outlet; you can also search on Schnittke.) More recently, I've had the opportunity to hear more of Schnittke's works via the Naxos Music Library to which the institution where I teach part-time, La Salle University, subscribes. The BIS label has made many of their recordings available through this service; their catalog includes a large selection of Schnittke's major works (including all four violin concertos and all eight completed symphonies). I've also found helpful two enthusiastic essays by Alex Ross, one an appreciation of the composer from 1992 and the other a memorial from 1998. I hope to write more about Schnittke in due course. Right now, though, I can't seem to get the Third String Quartet and the String Trio out of my head.

Little House in the Burbs?

2005-08-27T11:47:00.000-04:00

Thursday's broadcast of NPR's Morning Edition included a fascinating story about tiny houses. The report focused on Jay Schafer, who has built and lives in a 70-square-foot dwelling. Mr. Schafer also owns a company that specializes in tiny houses, the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. The highlight of the report came near the end, during which Mr. Schafer expressed his desire to build a community of tiny houses. (Incidentally, some communities like this already exist; see the links on Schafer's web site for more information.) It's easy to see how such communities challenge the modern split of public and private, a split that is clearly built into the architecture of so much Western middle-class housing since at least the eighteenth century. I recall a discussion of just this phenonemon in Jürgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: if I recall correctly, Habermas discussed the emergence of houses designed to have areas for public entertainment (salons, for example) and for private dwelling. This division is still a fixture of most dwellings of the American middle class: when was the last time you were not in a house that didn't have a dining room. Mine even has a small foyer where the rituals of welcoming and bidding farewell take place and where visitors in a hurry to their next appointments stop briefly to conduct some small piece of business or to engage in a short conversation. Nothing else really happens there.

And one more thing

2005-08-23T23:28:00.000-04:00

This post has been moved to my other blog.

Music Tag

2005-08-16T23:02:00.000-04:00

My friend Joel tagged me, so here goes: Amount of music on your computer I don't really keep much music on my computer. When I rip CDs, I usually intend to place them on my jukebox (an iRiver iHP-120). I like to amass enough to fill a single-sided DVD, burn the disc, and then remove the music from my hard drive. Currently listening to? Hmmm. I've not been doing that much listening lately--that is, that much for me. That's not to say that I haven't had a lot of tunes in my head. These days, I'm just as likely to be thinking about music as I am listening. That said, today I listened to Klemperer's celebrated recording of Beethoven's Missa solemnis, a piece that I find as fascinating as I find problematic. The sheer musical and technical demands of the piece tend to shift attention to its performative aspects and away from the way that the texts of the Mass ordinary function in their liturgical contexts. Indeed, I'd suggest that performing the Missa solemnis during the eucharist is like allowing modernity to colonize the church. Five songs that mean a lot to you That's a hard one for me to answer, because, having lived with the Western art music tradition since I was six years old, I'm not accustomed to thinking in terms of songs but in terms of "works" or (to use a less loaded term) "pieces." I am fascinated with the way the pieces end; yet not simply the endings themselves appeal to me, but the the relationship of the conclusions to everything that comes before. So some of that mean a lot to me are those where I'm particularly attract to their endings. One piece that's really stayed with me since I first heard the recording in the early 1990s is Pierre Boulez's ...explosante-fixe.... Dedicated to the memory of the flautist Laurence Beauregard, the concluding section, Mémoriale remains one of the most moving pieces I know (especially after the brilliant thirty-some-odd minutes that precede it). In a similar vein, I've long been fond of Elliott Carter's string quartets, particularly the First, Second, and Fourth. The First ends with the first violinist recapitulating the theme that the cellist had played some forty minutes earlier to open the quartet; in the Second, the music builds up to an enormous explosion before precipitously unravelling at the end; and the Fourth ends with an extraordinary coda that alternates between brief violent outbursts and music of profound serenity. Finally, I'm a sucker for pieces in which the openings come back at the end in augmentation (that is, slowed down--way down, in the cases I have in mind). In fact, the two works that stand out in my mind are Elgar's Second Symphony and Stravinsky's Symphony in C. I don't know what it is about those endings, but they frequently leave me in tears. Top Five Albums For my top five recordings, I've chosen some that have played some major roles in my life. Each of them comes with a little story. I don't listen to any of them frequently any more, but I'm still fond of each them. Most of them I became familiar with in adolescence. All, it turns out, are recordings of works that played prominent roles in histories of musical modernism that were prevalent during the Cold War. (Perhaps needless to say, these are historical narratives that I no longer buy.) Of course, my listening interests are far broader than this list, but the recordings that didn't make it, as fond as I might be of them, haven't had the enduring significance in my life that these have had. 1) Alban Berg, Violin Concerto. Isaac Stern, violin, Leonard Bernstein, conductor, New York Philharmonic. I first heard this recording in 1973 when I was 12 years old. The music library at the university where my parents taught (and where I used to hang out after school and on summer days while my parents were teaching) had about a half-dozen copies of the score. "Who is this Berg fellow, and why are there so many copies of this score?" One day I pulled out the score and put on the recording that the library had. I was hooked. My father had the same recording at home--unopened, as it turned out--and I put it on and listened to it over and over and over for years. This recording catalyzed my desire to pursue a career in music. It also drew me into the world of the Second Viennese School. Consequently, I began to develop a sense of music history (albeit a Germanocentric one skewed toward musical modernism). From Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern, I began to work backwards and forwards. Within a year or two, Mahler, Strauss, Wagner, Beethoven, and Bach were clearly within my intellectual purview, as were Stravinsky, Bartók, Hindemith, and even Carter and Penderecki (in the latter's avant-garde phase). 2) Elliott Carter, String Quartets Nos. 1 and 2. The Composers Quartet Strangely enough, I do not currently own a copy of this recording, although it was another profoundly important piece for me during my adolescence. The cellist on this recording, the late Michael Rudiakov, came to town to play the Dvořák concerto with the orchestra my father conducted. He also gave my father a copy of this recording. Again, the record stayed unopened until I discovered it. I suppose that between ages 14 or 15 and 18, I must have listened to that record three or four hundred times. 3) Mahler, Symphonies Nos. 1-9.Leonard Bernstein, conducting. Those who claim that Bernstein was responsible for rescuing Mahler for the standard repertory are frequently challenged by those who point out the work of his illustrious predecessors-- Mengelberg, Walter, Klemperer, Horenstein, Mitropolous, Scherchen, etc.--and contemporaries--Solti, Barbirolli, Haitink. Whatever the case, there's little doubt that the cycle that Bernstein recorded for Columbia in the early 1960s was a milestone in the history of classical recording. My father had the complete set on LP. Ill never forget the deluxe black slipcase with the gold-colored metallic seal on the spine bearing the composer's head in profile. Again, it was I (and not my father) who listening to these recordings most (by a long shot, in fact). Through them I became familiar with all the symphonies. Nevertheless, I turned against Bernstein's recordings in the late 1970s. Impressionable teen that I was, I absorbed most of the standard epithets applied to his readings, among the most frequent of which was "self-indulgent." (Curious side note: Why did one seldom if ever hear Karajan's recordings described as "self-indulgent"? Is there a really difference between the megolomania of an Apollonian and that of a Dionysian?) By the mid-1980s, though, I had come back around to Bernstein's Mahler. I'll never forget hearing him conduct the New York Philharmonic in the Seventh the day after Thanksgiving, 1985, part of a series of performances that launched his live recorded cycle for Deutsche Grammophon (which, alas, he did not live to complete). To this day, I cherish both Bernstein's early and late Mahler sets. 4) Alban Berg, Wozzeck. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Wozzeck), Fritz Wunderlich (Andres), Evelyn Lear (Marie), Alice Oelke (Margret), Gerhard Stolze (The Captain), Karl Christian Kohn (The Doctor), Karl Böhm, conductor, Orchestra and Chorus of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. My parents gave me this recording for my fourteenth birthday (October 9, 1974). Prior to that, I had spent the summer listening to the music library's copy of the Mitropolous recording. In fact, I listened to that recording almost every afternoon that summer. Unfortunately, the library's copy lacked a libretto; only a synopsis was available. At the end of the summer, the library obtained this recording, and, for the first time, I was able to follow along with what was being sung. (I had a rudimentary understanding of German, so I hadn't been entirely clueless.) For the same birthday, my parents also gave me the Lear/Fischer-Dieskau/Böhm Lulu, which I took to immediately. In fact, my affinity for Lulu came to overshadow that for Wozzeck. In terms of sheer tonal sensuousness, the appeal of Lulu easy trumped that of Wozzeck, particularly for the raging cauldron of hormones that is a fourteen-year-old boy. (And, truth be told, I was getting a bit weary of Wozzeck--not surprisingly, of course, considering that I allowed it to dominate my listening for two or three months that year.) Still, because the opera hadn't been completed as of that time (and Helene Berg was still alive), the Böhm recording of Lulu was bound to be eclipsed by ... 5) Alban Berg,Lulu. Teresa Stratas (Lulu), Yvonne Minton (Countess Geschwitz), Kenneth Riegel (Alwa), Franz Mazura (Dr. Schön/Jack the Ripper), Robert Tear (The Painter), Toni Blankenheim (Schigolch), Gerd Nienstedt (Animal Trainer/The Athlete), Pierre Boulez, conductor. This was a recording for which I had waited for what seemed like ages, so obsessed (and disappointed) was I with the fact that Berg had left Act III unfinished at the time of his death. I got my copy early 1980, just a few weeks after the Metropolitan Opera's telecast of the U.S. premiere of the Cerha's completion of Act III. While I don't listen to Lulu too often these days, returning to it--as perverse as this may sound with respect to such a work--is like seeing an old friend of which one has nothing but fond memories.

I surprised myself at how narrow my top five albums list turned out to be, focussed as it is on recordings of music by three composers. In fact, I don't spend much time with my ears in Mahler, Berg, and Carter. Lately, I've been more likely to be listening to Verdi, Puccini (especially La fanciulla del West), Shostakovich, Cake, and They Might Be Giants. Go figure.

And the madness continues

2005-08-16T22:47:00.000-04:00

This post has been moved to my other blog.

More Iteration

2005-08-08T23:46:00.000-04:00

This post has been moved to my other blog.

Cool Icons

2005-08-06T08:48:00.000-04:00

I found a great site with lots of cool icons--all royalty-free for commercial use and free for personal use. Go here=> FOOOD'S Icons.

How do they know?

2005-07-31T20:05:00.000-04:00

From some advertising copy describing the superiority of a CD of 14 hymns sung by a professional opera singer:

Good music is difficult to find these days, especially music that is not offensive to God. This is one reason we are peased to present the first musical recording produced by [a ministry that will go unnamed].

How do they know that this music isn't offensive to God? Could not the very act of listening border on idolatry? How do we know that the comforts that the music brings aren't those of a counterfeit spiritual serenity? Might these performances meet little more than modern, consumerist demands? Is this even "good music"? Who decides? Is it possible that the music of the likes of Boulez and Schoenberg is more truthful--at least in a critical (prophetic) sense--than the music on this CD?

How Should We Then Live?

2005-07-29T19:58:00.000-04:00

I'm about three-quarters through Rodney Clapp's Border Crossings (Brazos Press, 2000), an excellent collection of articles and essays described in the book's subtitle as "Christian Trespasses on Popular Culture and Public Affairs." Yesterday, I was reading the essay, "The Theology of Consumption and the Consumption of Theology," in which Clapp attempts to trace the theological roots of American consumerism. While parts of his argument are contestable (for example, I'm skeptical of his reliance on Max Weber's account of Calvinism's role in the formation of market-ready humans), I'm sympathetic to the broad lines of his presentation. In a nutshell, he argues that American Protestantism, especially as it assumed more populist guises in the nineteenth century, played a significant role in the formation of the modern American consumer. I was particularly struck by the influence of revivalism with its emphasis on conversion as a choice. Clapp writes,

By underscoring the importance of making a decision for Christ, Charles Finney and other revivalists helped along the sanctification of choice. Revivalism encouraged rapturious feelings and a liquid self, open time and time again to the changes of and the choice for conversion and reconversion. This became translated int a propensity toward "conversion" to new products, a variety of brands and fresh experiences.

Or to put it another way, Finney and Co. were in the business of creating "pro-choice" individuals--little Cartesian egos running around deciding on their own what they want the world to be like. The rewards could only grow--or so it seemed. The portion of the essay that most impressed me, however, lay in the concluding pages. There Clapp surveys three efforts to resist consumerism in contemporary American life. The second of these involves the historian Lendol Calder and his wife:

Lendol suggests one of the best analogues to resistance of consumer culture is the challenge of Eastern European Christians and intellectuals to communism. They did not, in the apparently "small" and mundane actions of their lives, set out to overthrow communism. In fact, many have since said they expected to live the rest of their days under the sway of communism and recognized that they were a part of a system they considered the Big Lie. Yet they stood against it when and where they could, and one thing eventually led to another.

Likewise, we Western Christians cannot escape consumer culture. We are part of it and in many ways (again, not all for ill) molded by it. The Christians of the East remind us that even small exercises in resistance are significant. They open our imaginations, and who knows where that will take us, or our children, or our children's children?

Alas, I can only hope that the memory of the Cold War as a battle between God-fearing capitalists on the one side and atheistic communists on the other will fade in minds of today's American evangelicals.

Really Geeky, but ...

2005-07-29T16:38:00.000-04:00

This post has been moved to my other blog.

Okay ... yeah, right ... whatever

2005-07-27T22:57:00.000-04:00

Taking a cue from my fellow blogger at sacradoctrina, I took this little quiz on my "theological worldview." Here are the results:

You scored as Neo orthodox. You are neo-orthodox. You reject the human-centredness and scepticism of liberal theology, but neither do you go to the other extreme and make the Bible the central issue for faith. You believe that Christ is God's most important revelation to humanity, and the Trinity is hugely important in your theology. The Bible is also important because it points us to the revelation of Christ. You are influenced by Karl Barth and P T Forsyth.

Neo orthodox

79%

Emergent/Postmodern

68%

Roman Catholic

61%

Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan

54%

Reformed Evangelical

46%

Charismatic/Pentecostal

39%

Fundamentalist

18%

Classical Liberal

Modern Liberal

What's your theological worldview?
created with QuizFarm.com

Shostakovich on Autopilot

2005-07-27T15:29:00.000-04:00

I think that today few people will debate the question that Dmitri Shostakovich was one of the most important art music composers of the twentieth century. He was certainly one of the most prolific--for better or for worse. These thoughts occur to me as I revisit the Emerson Quartet's fine 2000 traversal of the complete string quartets. In listening to all 15 quartets, I find myself confronted with a number of movements and, indeed, entire works in which either I'm missing something or else Shostakovich was simply writing on autopilot. The weakest movements show up the first six quartets. These include the first movements of the Second and Fourth Quartets and the entire Sixth Quartet. Beginning with the Seventh Quartet, Shostakovich seems to have hit his stride: I wouldn't want to be without any of the latter nine quartets. In short, Shostakovich's 15 quartets together form a remarkable if flawed achievement. In due course, I hope to blog about these pieces, as well as about some of the aesthetic and historical problems that surround the performing and recording of cycles of works by a single composer.

What I'm Listening To Right Now

2005-07-27T08:56:00.000-04:00

It’s 8:58 A.M., and I’m listening to Cake’s album, Comfort Eagle.

Reruns

2005-07-20T14:37:00.000-04:00

Well, it's happened yet again. The board of a major American symphony orchestra has gone against the players and has imposed its choice of a music director on the ensemble--and, ultimately, the audiences and critics. Last time around, it was our local band, the Philadelphia Orchestra, who got Christoph Eschenbach. This time it's the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. These sort of snafus tend to bother me, because they suggest that there's something of an inverse-square relationship between board's understanding of the artistic issues and their understanding of sales and marketing, or to put it in geekspeak: (understanding of marketing) = 1 / ((understanding of artistic issues) * (understanding of artistic issues)) My suspicion was fueled by a statement by the orchestra's president, James Glicker, whom Daniel Wakin of the New York Times quotes as saying, "She's a great communicator, a great leader, a great programmer, and she's got star quality." Yet the artistic reservations concerning Ms. Alsop that have been expressed are considerable. Tim Page of the Washington Post writes:

A letter dated April 21 from Anthony S. Brandon, a board member who has been outspoken in his opposition to Alsop's appointment, to Philip English, the chairman of the BSO board, is specific. It was drafted with the help of other board members, with input from a number of musicians, and copies have circulated freely in circles close to the BSO. English has previously refused to comment on the appointment and he did not return calls yesterday afternoon. "The overriding justification for eliminating Alsop is that 90 percent of the BSO musicians oppose her appointment," the letter states. "In her appearances with the orchestra, the players say, Alsop has not produced inspired and nuanced performances of standard classical repertory. They cite 'dull,' even 'substandard,' performances of Brahms's Symphony No. 3, Mendelssohn's music for 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 2. "They say that she either does not hear problems or -- because her technical limitations prevent her from fixing them -- that she ignores them. Her musical sense is inhibited by her own lack of depth as a musician and she becomes frustrated when what she hears in her head does not come out from the players. Upon finding something wanting in rehearsal, she responds with vagaries such as 'I'm not feeling it' (Mendelssohn's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream') or exhorts them with abstractions such as 'make magic' (Brahms's Symphony No. 3). "When an orchestra believes it is being pushed by unmusical ideas, tempos and phrasing and being told that the orchestra itself lacks imagination, musicians feel they are dealing with a conductor who lacks ideas, conviction and technical skill."

This is not, of couse, the final word on Alsop's competence to lead the Baltimore Symphony. But it does contrast strikingly with the public statements of support that the media have picked up on. Finally, I have no objection to women conductors. I do, however, have objections to conductors--and orchestral boards--who turn blind eyes to the challenging, high modernist efforts of composers like Elliott Carter and Pierre Boulez and to their Second Viennese School forebears. Until orchestras and opera companies begin to program such works that challenge the patterns of cultural consumption that characterize so much of present-day musical life, especially in the United States, such institutions will continue to fade into irrelevance. While Ms. Alsop's record suggests that she's deaf to such concerns, it's worth noting that it was a woman--Sarah Caldwell--who premiered Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aron in the United States. Perhaps someone can persuade Ursula Oppens to take up conducting.

You mean there are other recordings of Die schöne Müllerin?

2005-07-18T17:43:00.000-04:00

After twenty-five or thirty years of acquaintance, I still love this recording of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Die schöne Müllerin with Gerald Moore. Indeed, I have trouble hearing anyone else singing it.
(Of course, I could probably make an exception for Fritz Wunderlich. But I haven't heard his recording.)

More Schoenberg Fun

2005-07-18T14:49:00.000-04:00

I'll bet you never imagined you see "Schoenberg" and "Fun" in the same phrase without a negative of some sort. Seriously, as much as I love the Arnold Schönberg Center Jukebox, I'm frustrated that the site doesn't provide credits for many of the recordings that are there. Among the recordings on the site is a wonderfully lucid reading of Pelleas und Melisande. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard such a transparent account of the piece on record--including Boulez's recording with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from the early 1990s. (I don't think this is the Boulez recording, but I haven't listened to it in several years--so perhaps my memory fails me.) I'm curious as to whether any of the readers of this blog recognize the recording.

Separated at Birth?

2005-07-12T15:26:00.000-04:00

Blog Makeover

2005-07-11T21:32:00.000-04:00

I'm blogging more these days, so I've decided to give my blog a makeover. Over the next few weeks, I plan to enhance its appearance. I've also gone through and culled some of the entries (but, I hope, none of your favorites).

Mackerras's Idomeneo

2005-07-11T10:51:00.000-04:00

I'm listening to Mackerras's recent--and celebrated--recording of Mozart's Idomeneo. I confess that I can't understand critical the acclaim this recording has received. I find his approach extremely tepid: it sounds as if he and his orchestra is walking on eggs. "Careful! We don't want to break anything! We don't want to anger the authenticity gods! Idomeneo may have done a poor job keeping his promise to Neptune, but we're sure not going to make the same mistake."

Strangely enough, I'm finding myself much preferring Levine or even Gardiner in this opera.

Free Tunes!

2005-07-08T13:36:00.000-04:00

The web site of the Arnold Schoenberg Center is making available streaming audio of many of Schoenberg's works. From the"Arnold Schönberg Center Jukebox" page, one can access performances of most of Schoenberg's major works--and a lot of not-so-major ones as well. Most (if not all) of these performances are uncredited on the web site, but die-hard Schoenberg recording collectors will recognize many of them. The highlight of the site is a page linking to historical recordings. These include a 1927 performance of Schoenberg conducting the last three movements of the Suite, Op. 29 as well as perhaps the finest recordings ever to appear of his solo piano music. The Op. 29 performances remind me of Schoenberg's quip that his music isn't bad music: it's just badly played. Well, the Op. 29 played pretty well, and, moreover, captures how witty this music can be in capable and sensitive hands (if I may be allowed a cliché). T The solo piano recordings are those made for Columbia by Edward Steuermann in 1957. These recordings, meanwhile, form an extremely important yet oft neglected or even forgotten document. Steuermann brought a Brahmsian sensibility to these pieces. His performances demonstrate better than any words that have been written on the subject how these pieces inhabit an expressive world that is closer to the nineteenth century than the twentieth. Dare I say that Steuermann almost makes one forget so many of those pesky polemics against atonality? Still, I doubt that the site will ever have any bandwidth problems. I guess that's a cause for simultaneous rejoicing and hand-wringing.

Doesn't intonation matter?

2005-07-08T11:33:00.000-04:00

It seems that of late, every time I listen to a recording by Yvonne Minton, I find myself extremely frustrated with her frequent lapses in intonation.

I first became aware of my Minton problem while listening to with her performance of Sesto in Colin Davis's acclaimed recording of Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito. Most recently, I've been listening to her recordings of Berlioz's La mort de Cléopatre and Les nuits d'été with Pierre Boulez.

I can't believe that so few people--including Boulez (with whom she recorded again and again)!--aren't bothered by her intonation problems. Or maybe the problem is mine: in my book, good intonation belongs to Musicality 101. In fact, under some circumstances I can endure rhythmic sloppiness, coarse attacks, a tone that flirts with ugliness, and the like, if other aspects of the performance are strong enough to counter such shortcomings. But intonation ... well, that's another story.

Or is this merely my super-ego talking? I remember when I was 13 or so that my father got all over me about my careless intonation, not least because he knew I could hear when I was out of tune: I just wasn't bothering to get things in tune. So I became a fanatic about intonation, and it became my strongest suit--so much so, in fact, that all my teachers worked at getting me to focus on tone and phrasing, and it really took me several years to "get" it.

I'm also reminded of watching the televised documentary The Great Violinists. The program included a clip of Yehudi Menuhin and Nathan Milstein playing the Bach Double concerto. I was rather astonished at the contrast between Milstein's elegant tone and Menuhin's comparatively ugly tone. Yet Menuhin nevertheless brought other things to the music that made it easy to overlook a lack in tonal beauty.

This isn't to say that I'm not turned off by ugly playing. I recall hearing the Juilliard Quartet's 1990s recording of Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht and String Trio which, in my opinion, suffered grievously, even fatally, from first violinist Robert Mann's playing. (It was a pity, too, because Mann's playing had been so strong from the then young ensemble's first Bartók Quartet recordings of the early 1950s through their [admittedly inferior] third traversal of the Bartók cycle in the early 1980s). Still, I find their early 1990s recording of the Carter Quartets among the most compelling recordings I've heard of these pieces, even if ensembles such as the Arditti Quartet and the Composer's Quartet technically surpassed them.

Today, it seems that the consensus among major (and not so major) record companies favors both good intonation (which I applaud) and a warm tone (especially among string players) to which, alas, performers must subordinate any sort of distinctive approach to phrasing. The result, more often than not, I believe are incredibly tedious.

Another bookmarklet

2005-07-04T11:03:00.000-04:00

Here's a bookmarklet that will shrink the display area of a web page to 6.5 inches. It's useful if you're reading a page on which the text extends all the way across a very wide screen.

javascript:innerHTML="<div style='width:6.5in'>"+document.body.innerHTML+"</div>";document.body.innerHTML=innerHTML;void(0);

"If I only had a brain"

2005-04-30T17:55:00.000-04:00

Today has me feeling like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. I'm coming off a week in which I took the train up and back to New York every day to attend classes on a product we use in my work, InstallShield. The class was well worth it, and I always enjoy being in New York, but today I'm so exhausted it's not funny. My efforts to read more than a few pages of a book or listen to more than a few minutes of music have proven fruitless. Perhaps I'm listening to the wrong music: not a good day to listen to Wagner, but maybe it is a good day for Webern.

The Met's New Season

2005-03-17T07:14:00.000-05:00

The Metropolitan Opera announced their 2005-2006 season yesterday. It's good to see that Wozzeck, will return to the house's repertory, but isn't it time for a new production both of this opera and of Lulu? The house is also offering the world premiere of Tobias Picker's An American Tragedy. The news here is that James Conlon, and not James Levine, will be leading the premiere. There had been some talk that Levine had been disappointed with Picker's Therèse Raquin, which received its premiere in San Francisco a few years ago. That Levine will not be at the helm somewhat diminishes the prestige of the premiere. Potential highlights include the revival of Jürgen Flimm's production of Fidelio with Karita Mattila and Ben Heppner. This production was telecast a few years ago, and Deutsche Grammophon subsequently released it on DVD. Flimm transports the setting of the opera from eighteenth-century Seville to twentieth-century America--and with astonishing success. (Unfortunately Rene Papè will not reprise his superb Rocco, nor Falk Struckmann his Pizarro, but the latter will find a worthy replacement in Alan Held.) The season also includes repertory staples by Mozart (Figaro, Così, and Zauberflöte), Puccini (Bohème and Tosca), Verdi (Aida, Falstaff, Forza, Luisa Miller, Rigoletto, Traviata), Wagner (Lohengrin and Parsifal), Donizetti (a new Don Pasquale as well as and L'elisir d'amore and Lucia), and Richard Strauss (Ariadne auf Naxos). Then you have your Carmen, Manon, Samson et Dalilah, Fledermaus, Roméo et Juliette, and so on. All in all, it's not a particularly challenging repertory, and this speaks to the need, I believe, of more government funding for the arts. It's not a good situation when to perform a single moderately challenging work--such as Wozzeck--one has to piggy-back on the revenue that's brought in by the repertory staples. The Met is certainly capable of performing more challenging works--as their brilliant production of Moses und Aron demonstrated--but such works are condemned to disappear from the repertory apart from the recognition by policy-makers that market failure in the realm of culture is a serious problem.

Everything Operatic

2005-02-27T21:13:00.000-05:00

Well, not everything. But I did learn about Operatoday.com, a wonderful site that presents links to operatic news all over the world. The site will undoubtedly receive many visits from me in the future.

A New Blog

2005-02-14T14:52:00.000-05:00

Robert Judd, a friend of mine (and fellow musicologist), has started a new Christian anti-war blog. I certainly welcome such a blog, because I hear far too little criticism of the Bush administration's bellicosity among America's orthodox evangelicals. I also happen to agree with Bob (which should come as no surprise to readers of this blog). I hope and pray, above all, that Bob's blog will help catalyze a serious, charitable, and theologically-informed discussion among people both in and out of the church, at least in the virtual corner where people gather to read this and other, related blogs.

Another bookmarklet

2005-01-06T11:10:00.000-05:00

Okay, here's another bookmarklet. I often perform Google Groups searches for technical information. Usually, my search results include a number of threads that contain only one message. In most of these cases, a user has posted a question and not received an answer. To save myself time while I browse the results, I wrote this bookmarklet to hide all the single-article threads. That way, I only have to look at the threads that may contain an answer to someone's technical problem.
Hide Single Article Threads
Source code (remove line breaks and prepend "javascript"):

tds=document.getElementsByTagName("TD");
s="";
for(i in tds){
  ih=tds[i].innerHTML;
  if(ih!=null&&ih.indexOf("1 message")>-1){
    node=tds[i].parentNode;
    while(node.tagName!="TABLE"){
      node=node.parentNode;
    }
    node.style.visibility="hidden";
  }
}
void(0);

I've tested this in Firefox and Internet Explorer, but I don't know if it will work in other browsers without modifications.

Bookmarklets

2005-01-02T14:44:00.000-05:00

What are bookmarklets? They're little snippets of browser scripting code that enabled you to click on a bookmark (or "Favorite" in IE) and obtain some bit of custom functionality. Here's one that I like to use in Netscape and Firefox to perform a Google search:

javascript:p=prompt("Enter a search string");if(p!=null){q=null;while(true){q=p.replace(/\s/,'+');if(q==p){break}else{p=q}}location.href="http://www.google.com/search?q="+escape(p);}void(0);

To use this bookmarklet, copy the line above, create a new bookmark, paste the text into the location field, and save your bookmark.

Paris Tannhäuser in Modern Sound

2004-12-01T09:06:00.000-05:00

I'm sitting here coding with the Solti recording of the Paris version of Tannhäuser coming out of my jukebox. I have three recordings of Tannhäuser, two of which use the Paris version (which I prefer, chiefly for the revised Venusberg scene). The other Paris recording is the Sinopoli; the Dresden recording I have is conducted by Haitink.

I confess that I'm not really thrilled about either of these recordings of the Paris version. For some reason, the orchestral winds and some of the singers' intonation on the Solti recording is frequently off. I find this particularly annoying in a studio recording--and by no means what one ought to expect from the Vienna Philharmonic. The Sinopoli recording, meanwhile, is unenergetic and simply dull in too many places (especially in the first half of Act II), and this shortcoming is hardly mitigated by Sinopoli's better singers (Domingo, Andreas Schmidt, and Matti Salminen).

Unfortunately, I think it's probably useless to hold my breath waiting for a better, commercial recording of the Paris version.

Soundtrack for 14 November 2004

2004-11-14T14:53:00.000-05:00

Puccini, Il tabarro
Pierre Boulez, Sur Incises

In Defense of Passive Listening

2004-11-14T14:27:00.000-05:00

I recall an acquaintance of mine--a professional singer, in fact--mentioning that he never listened to music (by which he meant classical music) in the background. In fact, he objected to this practice. Music, he maintained, was for active listening. It was an offense to the artwork to let it simply play in the background without giving it one's full attention.

I must admit that probably as much as 90% of my listening is done passively. At one time, I allowed myself to feel guilty about this. In my music history studies, though, I learned that the mode of listening that my singer acquaintance practiced and advocated is a relatively recent phenomenon. (His severe attitude is likewise a recent phenomenon.) Two factors drove the development of this view of listening. First, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries emerged the concept of the musical work of art in the form in which we know it today. Active listening--and particularly the engagement of musical memory--was capable, so the argument went, of coping with music's ephemeral character. By progressively assembling the work in the mind, one was able to endow the piece with a quasi-concrete form that rescued it from its incipient evanescence. In this way, a musical artwork could stake aesthetic claims comparable to those that critics had lodged for physically permanent works of painting, sculpture, literature, and architecture. (For a wonderful example of this attitude, see Salomon Jadassohn's Lehrbuch der Harmonie, 2nd edn. [Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1887], pp. 213-19.) Second, the technologies of radio and the phonograph have made it possible for almost anyone to live surrounded by music--even, in fact, against one's will, as the presence of Muzak testifies.

So is passive listening an offense to the musical artwork? Only if the artwork is invested with a quasi-theological significance. But to do so would be to commit idolatry.

Election results

2004-11-13T07:49:00.000-05:00

It's been more than a week since the election, and even longer since I last blogged. In the end, I voted for neither Kerry nor Bush: rather, I wrote in Stanley Hauerwas. After all, I reasoned, why let a perfectly good vote go to waste? I could at least do something fun.

Biggus Diskus

2004-10-10T22:35:00.000-04:00

I just had a birthday. Among the gifts I received was a 200 GB internal hard drive. I lost no time installing it in my Dell desktop. After all, the 40 GB drive that came with the system was filling up with MP3s I'd ripped. Meanwhile, I'd been planning to set up my box to dual-boot into Windows XP and Suse Linux. I'm sure this will get me past any otherwise imminent space crunches.

Music in the Bible

2004-10-07T09:56:00.000-04:00

There is no music in the Bible. There is singing, and there are lyres, flutes, and the like. But there is no music. To argue the opposite is to impose modern Western concepts on a culture to which these notions would have been foreign. It is an act of hermeneutical violence against Ancient Near Eastern others. It is eisegetical.

How to Keep a Blog Alive

2004-10-04T15:21:00.000-04:00

When I don't have anything particularly interesting to say on my blog, I turn to living vicariously through the U.S. Geological Survey.

Your Task for October

2004-10-01T15:57:00.000-04:00

Develop a sentimental attachment to people you don't know, have never met, and never will meet.

It's all coming back to me now...

2004-10-01T14:28:00.000-04:00

TMBG also performed a song fron a DVD project for children they're currently working on. The title of the song (IIRC) is "The Alphabet of Nations." They sang through the alphabetically-arranged name of twenty-six nations (or was it twenty-five? it sounded like they stuck in "xylophone" for the letter "X") and ended with "Zimbabwe." A through D sounded garbled to me, but I did pick up "Egypt," "Surinam," and "Turkey."

They are Actual Size!

2004-10-01T11:02:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure how big they look, though. I went to hear They Might Be Giants last night at TLA on Philadelphia's South Street. Perhaps I'll blog more about the concert later (time permitting). For the time being, here's a list of what I remember that they played:

Experimental Film
How do you spell "TLA"
New York City
The Spine
Ana Ng
Birdhouse in Your Soul
Older
Fingertips
Particle Man
Clap Your Hands
Robot Parade
Violin
Damn Good Times
Bastard Wants to Hit Me
Dr. Worm
She's an Angel
The End of the Tour
Boss of Me
Meet James Ensor
James K. Polk
Letterbox
Thunderbird
Memo to Human Resources
Drink!

They also played a couple of songs I didn't know and an instrumental number that I did know, the title of which escapes me at the moment.

Evening with the Orchestra

2004-09-27T14:51:00.000-04:00

Attending Thursday night's concert was an unforgettable experience, but not necessarily because of the quality of the performance (which was nevertheless excellent). Until we walked into the concert hall, we were unaware that our seats were not only in the Orchestra Section, but on the first row, right in back of the conductor! It was rather odd, because we sat there attempting not to make eye contact with the first desks of the string section. This proved mildly embarassing when, at the end of the penultimate variation of Don Quixote, I instinctively winced at a horribly out-of-tune woodwind chord. Of course, as cellist friend in the orchestra told me later, this was what everyone in the orchestra was thinking as well. The orchestra opened with Augusta Read Thomas's Trainwork (a rather unfortunate name, by the way, as I discovered when my wife persisted in referring to it as "Train Wreck"). Thomas is one of the few major young American composers of whom I'm aware that have been strongly influenced by Luciano Berio. Berio's influence showed in the first and last few sections of the piece. These were brilliant, exciting sections, full of the kind of nervous energy one associates with so many of Berio works (for example, Formazioni, the Concerto for Two Pianos, the first and last movements of Sinfonia, and the Sequenza for viola). Still, I had trouble making sense of the middle section, which contained feints towards early twentieth-century harmonic practice (and perhaps Debussy in particular), in the context of the whole piece. Still, I have little doubt that Thomas is one of the finest, if not the finest, of major American art-music composers under the age of 50 or 60. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that her music, which is clearly more challenging than that of her pabulum-dispensing contemporaries, won't be heard as much as it deserves. The cellist in the performance of Don Quixote was the young German cellist Daniel Müller-Schott. His was a technically assured, deeply involved performance. Eschenbach delivered a reading of the score that was much lighter than I expected it would be: I was pleasantly surprised. The concert closed with Dvořák's Eighth Symphony, a piece that I really do not care for, so we left at intermission. After all, our tickets for this concert were free, so we certainly had gotten our money's worth.

Bernstein Conducts Hindemith

2004-09-25T13:13:00.000-04:00

Recently I've been listening a recording of Leonard Bernstein's conducting the Israel Philharmonic in three of the Hindemith's major orchestral works, Mathis der Maler, Concert Music for Brass and Strings, and Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber. In this recording, one of his last, Bernstein provides what are probably some of the finest readings that these pieces have received. Unfortunately, the recording (published by Deutsche Grammophon) is no longer in the catalogue. One can only hope that it will reappear in the not-too-distant future.

The Incomparable Rudolf Kempe

2004-09-21T17:35:00.000-04:00

I have tickets to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra's concert this coming Thursday night. Along with Trainwork by the brilliant young American composer Augusta Read Thomas--arguably the finest living American composer under 60 (and one of the few who hasn't sold out)--and Dvořák's Eighth Symphony, the orchestra is scheduled to perform Strauss's Don Quixote. In advance of the performance, I'm listening to the Strauss so I can get my mind back on the piece. In particular, I'm listening to my favorite recording of the piece, Rudolf Kempe's famous recording with the Dresden Staatskapelle, cellist Paul Tortellier, and violist Max Rostal.

Returning to the Kempe, I'm again struck from the very first measures at what an amazing Strauss conductor he was. Kempe made his famous Strauss recordings with the Dresden Staatskapelle, if I recall correctly, in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Strangely, his approach has been eclipsed by those who, following in the footsteps of Herbert von Karajan, seemed to have been concerned more with the cultivating a lush sound than with such old fashioned musical virtues as elegant phrasing. Perhaps the recordings made by HvK make great stereo systems sound more impressive, but once the listener gets past the shimmering surface, she may find herself confronting a musical cadaver. Kempe's performance, however, is lively throughout--and it's not so much because his tempi are faster but because he focuses on making the music breathe--or better yet, live. (And if that description seems overly vague, chalk it up to the limits of language and the lack of time I have to search for les mots justes.)

There is a historical point to be made here as well: the quick tempi that Strauss prescribes in his scores (and which few, including the composer actually committed to record) remind us of the degree to which he was intent on dismantling Wagnerian metaphysics. Strauss, as is well known, ran afoul of the Wagners at Bayreuth because of the quick tempi that he adopted (most notoriously during performances of Parsifal in the early 1930s). Slow tempi for many of Strauss's works, then, tend to obscure one important aspect of the iconoclasm that thrust the composer into the limelight and kept him there in the years before the First World War. Furthermore, today's slow tempi in Strauss tend to relegate his music to the status of "late romantic" music--a notion which Carl Dahlhaus famously pointed out originated in the polemics of the 1920s against the bad old nineteenth century.

Unfortunately, I suspect that Eschenbach, who is slated to conduct on Thursday night, will deliver a reading of Don Quixote in the vein of von Karajan. I'm not sure that it's going to be worth staying awake for it.

Simply Amazing

2004-09-20T10:30:00.000-04:00

I'm playing through the 1943 Furtwängler Bayreuth Meistersinger for a second time, and, well, I'm realizing that this is a performance that simply takes your break away. I'll dispense with any more comment: just go out an buy this recording (http://musicandarts.com/CD1153hc.html).

Still, the circumstances surrounding this recording make it seem all the more bizarre. It's generally agreed that Furtwängler was at the height of his powers during the war years, a fact that already makes recordings from that period rather troubling. How many fine performances with the Berlin Philharmonic have been preserved in which the top National Socialist officials were in the audience? Yet the preformance from the Wagner shrine in Bayreuth is obviously an even more troubling case. I do not know offhand whether the Führer himself was present at the performances that have been preserved on record (although this information is probably not hard to obtain), but that may ultimately only heighten the difficulties that this recording poses.

I'm having a bad day

2004-09-17T12:15:00.000-04:00

Man, I must have gotten out on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I had this bag of weapons-grade plutonium with me when I got to the office, and now I seem to have misplaced it. Damn! I hate when that happens!

I Killed the Omniscient Narrator

2004-09-17T12:08:00.000-04:00

Finding him wasn't easy job, but after hours of driving, I finally saw him. There he was, sitting in front of a South Philly restaurant. I pulled out my newly purchased assault weapon and let 'er rip! No more Omniscient Narrator! We're free! We're free!

Do you believe in the omniscient narrator?

2004-09-17T01:08:00.000-04:00

Boy, I sure do, and it's driving me nuts!

You haven't heard the Preislied in Meistersinger until

2004-09-16T11:39:00.000-04:00

you've heard Max Lorenz sing it!

I've been listening to the Furtwängler performance from the 1943 Bayreuth Festival, and it's pretty amazing. John Ardoin, in his survey of the conductor's recordings The Furtwängler Record, contends that this performance doesn't show Lorenz at his best. While this may be true, Lorenz really delivers in his performance of the Preislied. Of course, Furtwängler's conducting is thrilling.

Still, listening to a 1943 performance of Meistersinger from Bayreuth is a bit bizarre, not least because Sachs encourages his audience to "Honor your German masters" in the last scene (during which he also paints a picture of Germany under siege). For the apolitical Furtwängler, meanwhile, the show had to go on. Yet surely conducting Meistersinger under the Third Reich was a political act. Furtwängler's political naiveté (if that's what it was) is stunning.

Classical Music Must Die--And Peter Gelb Is There to Kill It

2004-09-14T13:58:00.000-04:00

Today's New York Times carries a piece by Times music critic Allan Kozinn about the merger of the music businesses of Bertelsmann (BMG) and Sony. It appears that one major consequence is that the labels' neglect of their substantial back catalogs of classical recordings on the RCA and Columbia labels will not only persist but, in fact, deepen. This is due in large part to the combined ignorance and disdain for the art-music tradition among the management. One of the chief villains in all of this is Peter Gelb (whose managerial style, according to a friend of mine who used to work at Sony Classical, has among underlings earned him the moniker of the "little Hitler").

One would hope--probably in vain--that the new megalabel would see the wisdom of licensing their back catalogs to other labels who might be interested in reissuing the recordings. Sony had already done this to a limited degree--well, a very limited degree, in fact. The Retrospective label re-released roughly 30 recordings (I think) from the Columbia vault--including two of my favorites, the early 1960s recording of the Juilliard Quartet playing the complete Bartók quartets and Stravinsky's own recording of Agon (combined on CD with Jeu de cartes and Le sacre du printemps).

My own capacity for experiencing depression when reading an article like this has long since past. I've entered, rather, a state of perpetual numbness.

Gérard Mortier Gets It

2004-06-10T12:58:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's New York Times included an article on Gérard Mortier, the incoming director of the Paris Opéra. Previously, Mortier had attracted the ire of regulars at the Salzburg Festival. His crime? Introducing innovative stagings and a modernized repertory to Salzburg. During his tenure there, for example, Mortier oversaw productions of Messiaen's St.-François d'Assise and Schoenberg's Moses und Aron. Of course, these are not exactly works that one would associate with the milieu of the festival's founder Richard Strauss or even that of a more recent guiding figure, Herbert von Karajan.

Upon reading this article, I had the sense that Mortier brings an artistic conscience to the Opéra that would be unwelcome in more conservative European quarters (not to mention almost all opera houses in the United States--with the possible exception of the Met). This is probably not that unusual in Europe. More impressive, though, is his sense of history. When discussing planned commissions of new works, Mortier averred, "We must acknowledge that these new pieces will probably not enter the repertory." He backed this up with the following insight:

Opera is a genre linked to a certain period, between the end of the Renaissance and `Wozzeck.' We must forget our vanity and stop pretending we are going to find the great new opera or composer. It's not going to happen.

This wouldn't be an unusual thing for a music historian to say. To hear it from an artistic director of a major performing institution, however, may bode well (paradoxically) for its future.

Green Beer?--Get a life!

2004-03-17T11:18:00.000-05:00

I'm sorry, but you can't convince me that drinking green beer on St. Patrick's Day honors the Irish. I mean, really: a cheap lager with some food coloring? If you're serious about honoring the Irish through your beer consumption, you should be drinking a stout--Guiness or Murphy's.

What's on my mind

2004-03-16T17:14:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to reclaim my brain from the space aliens who abducted it.

I'm not having much luck: negotiations are not proceeding as smoothly as I'd hoped.

What I'm Listening to Today

2003-12-02T12:35:00.000-05:00

Elliott Carter, What Next and Asko Concerto
Beethoven, String Quartet, Op. 59, No. 1
Henri Vieuxtemps, Music for Viola and Piano (Roberto Diaz, Viola; Robert Koenig, Piano)
Schoenberg, Moses und Aron (Boulez, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra)
Schoenberg, Moses und Aron (Gielen/Reich/Cassily)
Monn-Schoenberg, Cello Concerto
Mozart, Idomeneo (Mackerras)

The Dirty Deed

2003-12-01T23:07:00.000-05:00

I did something terrible. I bought a viola. Now I'm going to be the butt of all sorts of jokes.

Actually, I'm very happy with the instrument. I bought it from Paul E. Stevens Violins in Ardmore, PA. The instrument is a 16-1/2" viola, and it has the deep, rich tone that I like from a viola. Now if I can only find time to practice!

The Bible for Readers, continued

2003-11-27T09:46:00.000-05:00

Before the ESV's publication, two of the most popular translations among evangelicals had been the New International Version (NIV) and the New American Standard Bible (NASB). One of the NIV's cardinal virtues has been its readability, an aim which its translators realized while simultaneously striving for accuracy. The results were decidedly mixed. For while the NIV is relatively easy to read, the pursuit of this goal resulted in a translation that, as I understand a common criticism of this translation, tended towards a "dynamically equivalent" or "thought-for-thought" rendering of the text. (Incidentally, the entire idea of translating "thought-for-thought" is itself problematic. I plan to take this up later on this blog.) In other words, while the translation's affinities with, say, the New Living Translation, might make it suitable for getting the big picture of the text, the NIV is wanting as a version to be used for close study. Further, the translation's style, as I noted earlier, is rather flat.

The NASB, by contrast, has offered accuracy where the NIV offered clarity. As such, few evangelicals (as far as I am aware) have disputed its suitability for careful study. Yet it is, arguably, a more difficult--or at least, less satisfying--translation to read. Consider a brief example, the beginning of Romans 8, in the NIV and NASB translations:

NIV

NASB

¹Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, ²because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. ³For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, ⁴in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.

¹Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. ²For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. ³For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, ⁴so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

Next to the NIV (or perhaps even by itself), the NASB seems clumsy. The break between verses 1 and 2 makes the passage sound choppy, as does the colon in verse 3. Similarly, with the repetition of "for" at the beginning of verses 2 and 3, the passage begins to veer towards monotony. In fact, in the first 25 verses of this chapter, not only did the translators begin nine verses with "for," but they also began two consecutive verses with the word in two cases (vv. 2-3 and 5-6) and three consecutive verses with the word in two more cases (vv. 13-15 and 18-20). (Incidentally, the ESV is only slightly less repetitive than the NASB here.)

The Bible for Readers

2003-11-25T07:56:00.000-05:00

This is the first of what may turn out to be a series of Blogs on the new English Standard Version translation of the Bible. A number of prominent evangelical pastors and scholars have commended this translation for its accuracy and readability. I have neither the interest nor the competence to dispute the claims for the accuracy of the translation.

I will vouch for the ESV's readability (a loaded term, I'm aware, about which I may have more to say later). I recall listening to a sermon in December 2001, a few weeks after the translation had been published, in which the preacher read his passage from the ESV. I followed along in the NIV, and I was immediately struck by the unaffected elegance of the ESV. The style of the NIV, it struck me at the time, resembles the way I learned to write as a scholar: an accurate, streamlined prose that's easy to read but can often lack the qualities that allow a reader to warm up to the text. The ESV, by contrast, seemed to me to breathe. In short, from the standpoint of literary style, it is a marvelous translation.

Yet the stylistic strengths of the ESV also seem to me to be among its most problematic features. For what the ESV offers us is a Bible for "readers" in the modern sense. Indeed, the entire notion of "reading" the Bible is a complicated and, as far as I'm aware, underexplored territory among evangelicals. So while literary craftsmanship may lead to a satisfying encounter with the text, the sheer "literariness" of the ESV opens up a wide range of issues that merit serious consideration--and which I hope to take up in subsequent blogs.

Bernstein's Late Recordings and Other "Perverse" Performances

2003-11-05T10:43:00.000-05:00

I've long maintained that the criticisms of Bernstein's slow tempi in his later recordings are somewhat exaggerated. His late recordings have always struck me as appeals to listeners to hear or experience these pieces quite differently, and the slow tempi seem to be in line with this aim. What they may lack in immediate appeal (or may continue to lack even after repeated hearings) may tell us a lot about our own listening practices: to what extent are we willing to indulge the performer and allow him or her to bring out aspects of a score that we might otherwise take for granted? In Bernstein's case (and I think similar arguments could be made about other performers routinely excoriated for idiosyncratic performances--Boulez, Gould, and even Furtwängler immediately come to mind), perhaps the way to listen to these is to recognize the "otherness" or strangeness of these performances from the outset an then to begin asking the questions that allow us to grasp them.

That said, I'll admit that I've vacillated between admiration and exasperation over the later Bernstein performances. Sometimes the slow tempi are simply dull. I've never cared much for his late Sibelius 2, but I think his Sibelius 1, 5, and 7 are among the most compelling interpretations I've ever heard of these works. I've also been quite fond of his Tristan and late Bruckner 9th, but recently I've grown somewhat lukewarm towards these recordings (perhaps because I've recently been drawn to somewhat more fleet readings? I'm not sure. Right now Furtwängler's Bruckner 9th ranks as my favorite.)

And, while I'm at it, let me bring in other performers: I've found that Boulez's Mahler recordings frequently appeal to me when I listen to them according to the premises he seems to bring to his interpretation: a marked tendency in favor of Stravinskian "execution" (as opposed to "interpretation"--a false dichotomy, BTW) and "ontological time." This has been particularly true of my hearings of Boulez's DG Mahler 7th recording. As an acts of historiography, these performances strike me as Boulez's representations of the pre-history his own activities as a performer and composer (and, for that matter, perhaps the same argument could be made for Bernstein's recordings). Likewise, I'm drawn to Gould's "perverse" recordings of the Mozart sonatas (perhaps because of their "Entfremdungseffekt").

I suppose one could argue that some of these performances "fail" because the performer isn't adequately putting his point across. But few performances are total failures are they?

Democracy in Action, a/k/a What I Did Last Night

2003-11-05T08:05:00.000-05:00

Election day in Philadelphia. Going into it, Mayor John Street held a commanding lead over his challenger, Sam Katz, in the polls--as much as 20+ percentage points in some. With 93% of precincts reporting close to 11 p.m. last night, Street had triumphed handily, garnering 58% of the vote to Katz's 42%--a near landslide, the reporter on KYW, Philadelphia's AM news station, reminded us.

Yes, I voted. I arrived at the polls at approximately 7:45 p.m.--thus, 15 minutes before closing time. I stood in line for three hours waiting to cast my ballot. Why did I do it? Well, I certainly wasn't motivated by an irrational commitment to the democratic process. Let's just say that I was motivated by, er, social pressure--from family, neighbors, and the like, many of whom would be attempting to hold me accountable for being a "good" citizen.

At any rate, I'm thoroughly disgusted with the American obsession with the democratic process. The goal of the process, it seems, is the social legitimation of political leadership. In the ideal scenario, voters cast their ballots for potential leaders who agree with them. The assumption from the outset--probably a safe one--is that the leaders they choose are going to be relatively inflexible in their deviance from a certain set of principles to which they give voice during the campaign.

Should we saddle the electoral process with so much importance? Do we really want political leaders to make decisions based on future electoral outcomes?

If we want to reform the process, perhaps we should shift our concerns away from making the system work more efficiently and representatively in attempts to balance various interests. Instead, perhaps we should focus on electing leaders who are more open to persuasion, even when in office, than our current left-right system allows. Alas, neither the intellects of most current politicians nor the pressures of the two-party system give me much hope. (Thus, for example, many Democratic pro-life politicians, embarking on national, presidential campaigns, switched their positions--firmly, even--in order to satisfy vociferous and powerful pro-choice constituencies in the party. Names that come to mind are Jesse Jackson, Dick Gephardt, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton.)

Don't get me wrong: I'm relieved to live in a democracy. Democracy sometimes provides effective means for curbing the arbitrary exercise of political power. But I think Churchill may have been wrong, a prospect that most Westerners are loathe to consider: democracy may not be the worst form of government except for all the rest. Could there be other political systems that are just as bad as democracy?