Deceptively Simple

Great minds, blah blah blah

"We regret the past, do what we can with the present, and keep looking towards the future."—Peter Matthiessen, unpublished address in Indianapolis, Indiana, 1998.

"But still, I think that, in life, it's important to know your limits, decide what you want and go for it, and try not to regret things afterwards."—Charlotte Gainbourg's Marie, in the screenplay to Love, Etc., by Dodine Herry and Marion Vernoux, 1996. Based on Julian Barnes's novel, 2000.

Where it gets really fun is when you learn that the characters in Love, Etc., originated in 1991's Talking It Over, and then you stop scratching your head over how a movie from 1996 can be based on book from 2000.

Blog hiatus

     

This blog's summer hiatus (which I don't recall formally beginning) will end soon. I've been having a fine old time of it, and I hope you have, too.

Above: Ducks at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Luddite techno-nightmare

This can't help but remind me of this. Maybe we can have professors be allowed to teach from their iPhones at the front of the lecture hall?

Tybalt done died

Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic do their worst to poore Tybalt here, with fierce violins of greatest accuracy and the most poker-facéd timpanist you've ever seen, in the "Death of Tybalt" music from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet.

Hectoring

I have a love/love relationship with Symphonie Fantastique. Some of my fondest concert memories are of this piece, and it takes a seriously lousy performance for me to get bummed out about it. (Which does happen.) Summer is winding down, there's not a lot to write about (well, there is, but I'm lazy), so I might as well dust off this story about me, the Symphonie, and a Berlioz scholar.

But first, a bit about the Symphonie. The most immediately appealing movement is the fourth, a march, and a march to the scaffold, at that. But this is no ordinary march, because the person envisioning it is dreaming, or hallucinating. It isn't real. The entire procession is inside our protagonist's head, so this is a psychological march as much as an actual march, with soldiers and drums and flags.

Right after one of the bigger outbursts, after the brass come in for the first time, there's a repeat sign and it returns immediately to the march's beginning,and the soft burst of timpani. The brakes get applied to this procession, and the effect in concert is similar to moving the runners back to the starting line after a false start.

Berlioz doesn't mention this in his Memoires, David Cairns doesn't mention it in his exhaustive two-volume biography, and no musicologist steps up in the Cambridge Companion to Berlioz to say that the repeat sign dates from 2:30 one afternoon in 1827 and therefore cannot possibly be ignored. My take on this puzzling excursion back to the beginning is that we're in psychological territory, and the protagonist is hallucinating, so naturally reality is going to be a bit bent. Seems reasonable to me, and lord knows sitting in the trumpet section during that symphony's third movement gives you a long time to come up with theories.

Conductors who don't observe the repeat earned my scorn for a while, therefore, since they were clearly simple-minded idiots who hadn't done any serious thought about the background of the piece. Hadn't they thought about what this could mean? Why must they so casually discard such a strange feature?

Then, in 2003, the year of the Berlioz centennial, several Berlioz scholars came to Bloomington for a three-day festival of lectures and concerts, and one of them was Julian Rushton (scroll down for his biography). I buttonholed him after one of the sessions, and put this theory to him. "What do you think about that repeat? Isn't it important? Don't you think it should be observed?" (I like to think I'm slightly more tolerable to be around today than I was then.)

"I don't really think about it," Rushton replied. Symphonie Fantastique was the focus this evening on Exploring Music with Bill McLaughlin, and McLaughlin played the March to the Scaffold, and I can't recall whether that repeat was taken. Sitting back, I followed the melody I've heard a million times, and didn't even notice whether we went back to the beginning. Maybe they did, and the conductor respects the validity of the score, or maybe Rushton is right and it doesn't really matter.

Found in translation

"There is a Frisian folktale about a young man whose father sent him into the world with an oar over his shoulder, and who was only allowed to stop roaming when he came to a land where people would ask him: 'What is that strange stick you've got there?' "—Geert Mak, In Europe, 2004, translated 2007 by Sam Garrett.

Reading the World 2008 kicked off recently. The celebration of translated literature draws attention to books that deserve it, such as Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses and Victor Serge's strange Marxist-existential-mystery Unforgiving Years. Check out the rest of the list here (PDF).

Oh, the new old formats

For his new novel, It's Not Me, Really, Philip Roth will read it aloud and allow readers to take down dictation. They will then be able to go back to the text, print it out, download cover art from the publisher's website for a dustjacket, and then have their new Philip Roth novel.

Or no, hang on, I've got that backward. Deerhoof, whose appeal has thus far passed me by, has released their new single as sheet music. Musicians are invited to upload their own version of "Fresh Born," followed by the 'Hooves' (I suppose) own version on October 7. (Via)

Why did they notate the intro as 4/4 - 3/4 - 2/4 - 1/4, and not 4/4 - 3/4 - 3/4? I'm not sure.

Swanee River

The Berlin Philharmonic's Cello Challenge (Der Blitzkriegcello) got a fair amount of mention when it debuted, all of which I managed to miss. (See posts here and here.) For the rest of you who also missed it, the challenge is sort of like Guitar Hero, but with a cellist, a mouse, and Saint-Saëns. You win points by keeping the mouse in time with the cellist's bow strokes. It's funnish, and the fact that my score of 3597 landed me in in the mid-14,000s of those who've played it shows that it's been fairly popular.

Two objections crop up to the game: 1) That it isn't educational, and 2) That it isn't enough like Guitar Hero.

To 1), I say, "So?" Orchestras can't teach all the time. To 2) I say, "Go play Guitar Hero."

All hail Olivier

The Messiaen recordings of conductor and pianist Reinbert De Leeuw on the Naïve label have long been touchstones of my record library (by which I mean seven or eight years), and his Messiaen has been praised in other esteemed quartiers, as well. Naïve has bundled them all together with Pierre Boulez's own Messiaen disc, with Yvonne Loriod in Oiseaux Exotiques and more, for six CDs that are on sale here for $29.99 this weekend only. Not to downplay the Boulez/Loriod/Ensemble InterContemporain, since it was recorded live at an 80th birthday tribute to Messiaen.

Get your Messiaen Centenary off on the right foot with a host of musicians with names liek De Leeuw, De Zeeuw, De Vlieger, Van Gisjegem, and Maarten, all recommended by Geelhoed. (I meant "like" in the last sentence, but it fits so well with the Dutch that I decided to leave it unchaanged.)

More De Leeuw 20th century goodness is on YouTube, with this tight, incisive performance of the Netherlands Wind Ensemble playing Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments. What's this to do with Messiaen? Stravinsky dedicated it to Debussy, and Messiaen learned stuff from Debussy. The circle it do closeth.

Week end

On to the weekend. And that means Dizzy Gillespie, who never forgot to give the audience a good time even as he was breaking new musical ground and advancing trumpet technique. Here he is, on the Muppet Show, with a funked-up version of the "St. Louis Blues." Don't miss the scatting and the dancing.