Thomasina’s last waltz

Classical music – but not dance music

Some old news from the AJN online…

ORTHODOX rabbis have given congregants the green light to attend performances by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) in late July, despite the concert clashing with a period of mourning in the Jewish calendar … [during which time] playing and listening to music is generally prohibited.

The matter having been raised with the Australian Friends of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and rabbinic advice sought, a week's deliberation resulted in the conclusion that it was "acceptable to follow [American scholar] Rabbi Soloveitchik's ruling".

The ruling advises that during the “first two weeks of the three-week period, it is acceptable … to listen to classical music – not dance music – but classical music”.

Somebody had better tell Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, and Mahler for that matter.

 

A different crowd – or just a different mindset?

The comments on Greg Sandow's post last week about a recent concert experience of his edged their way, perhaps inevitably, around to the matter of audience response and how performers and presenters can encourage or nudge audiences towards particular kinds of responses, including responses that might not be normal for a particular concert mode.

My response is no longer timely and takes a discursive (and old) tangent, so I post it here – perhaps not so much a story for the composer as for the Juilliard violinist Greg invokes:

My orchestra a few years ago invited Christopher Hogwood and Robert Levin to perform a Mozart piano concerto. Levin, as he does, was going to improvise fresh cadenzas in each performance. Also on the program was Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony, which I found interesting since I blame Mendelssohn (in his roles as composer, conductor and administrator) for helping to remove spontaneous applause from concert practice. He hated applause between movements, said it "murdered the mood", and the Scottish is deliberately written with segues to remove the opportunity for between-movement applause altogether. So that became one of the themes that I raised in my  pre-concert talk, especially as a foil to Mozart and the improvisation culture of the 18th century that Levin was evoking. I think I ended up saying something like:
"If you really like Robert Levin’s cadenza in the first movement of the Mozart, try clapping. And if you find that you simply can’t bring yourself to disturb the sacred silence, remember Mendelssohn."

Now this was all outside the auditorium, separate from the concert, and it was important to me that I communicated permission to clap or to remain silent according to the listener's choice. What was beautiful in the concert was that our usually "well-behaved" subscription audience (quite possibly led by the 200 or so who'd been at the talk) did burst into applause after the first movement of the Mozart. Not half-hearted, uncertain, apologetic applause, but genuine, enthusiastic clapping. And better still, on the first night Hogwood (and perhaps only he could do something like this) turned around and told us all that we'd "all just done a very authentic thing". It felt really good to be a part of that performance.

But I don't think a line in the printed program or a prior instruction from the stage would have had the same effect (as another comment also suggests). No one much likes to be told what to do; but it's satisfying to come into a concert already knowing that you have permission and justification to respond in a way that your ears and heart might be telling you you'd like to. (And also, in the case I've described, knowing that enough of your companions have that knowledge too, so you won't feel like a complete dork when you pipe up with applause, foot-stamping, whatever.)

Ironically, that's precisely the same dynamic that also stops people clapping spontaneously: there's a critical mass of people who arrive knowing that applause between movements is the "wrong thing" and who know that the majority of those around them know this also. That's what gives them the confidence, you might say, to sit on their hands. When you can shift the dynamic such that a critical mass knows that there are places where applause is ok and to be celebrated and that there are other listeners who are aware of this also, then of course you have an audience that has the confidence to clap.

It's not just the exceptional experience at the Hogwood/Levin concert that leads me to this conclusion. At the ballet, where there is a continuous tradition of acceptable applause within works and therefore the audiences recognise with confidence when in the performance those moments are occurring, there is none of the angst about clapping that's encountered in classical concerts. And we're not completely discrete groups, either.

Peeve

The Blogger/Blogspot format of displaying a brief profile on the front page, together with a link that says "view my complete profile". Except when you click through to the "complete profile" there is no more information! And sorry, answers to whimsical questions, astrological star signs and lists of "Favorites" do not count. I don't mind there being no additional information – bloggers are free to remain as anonymous or obscure as they wish — it's the false promise of a "complete" profile that I object to.

An enlightened invitation

Supper doesn't get much cleverer, or more carefree, than this.

Unread Books Meme

This one comes from LibraryThing. Members are taking the current top 106 unread books and marking it up according to their own reading. Here's mine:

* = I own the book
Bold = I’ve read the book
# = I read the book for high school or university
Italics = I’ve started the book
Stricken = I hated the book
Underline = on my current to-read list

1.     The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide by Douglas Adams
2.     Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
3.     The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini
4.     Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy*
5.     The illearth war by Stephen R. Donaldson
6.     Life of Pi: a novel by Yann Martel
7.     Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra*
8.     Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
9.     One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
10.    Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray*
11.    The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien*
12.    Ulysses by James Joyce
13.    War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy [abridged edition]
14.    Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert*
15.    Elantris by Brandon Sanderson
16.    The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
17.    Catch-22 a novel by Joseph Heller
18.    Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
19.    The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood*
20.    Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
21.    A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens*
22.    The satanic verses by Salman Rushdie
23.    Middlemarch by George Eliot
24.    Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi
25.    The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco*
26.    The Kor'an by Anonymous
27.    Moby Dick by Herman Melville
28.    The Odyssey by Homer*
29.    The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
30.    Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
31.    The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
32.    The historian: a novel by Elizabeth Kostova
33.    Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco*
34.    Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand*
35.    The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding
36.    The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas*
37.    The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas*
38.    The Iliad by Homer*
39.    The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner*#
40.    Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
41.    Emma by Jane Austen*
42.    Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
43.    Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
44.    Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift*
45.    The house of the seven gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
46.    Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies by Jared Diamond
47.    Dracula by Bram Stoker
48.    Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
49.    A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers
50.    Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
51.    The once and future king by T. H. White
52.    Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe*
53.    To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
54.    Mansfield Park by Jane Austen*
55.    Oryx and Crake: a novel by Margaret Atwood*
56.    Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
57.    Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
58.    Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy*#
59.    Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond
60.    The corrections by Jonathan Franzen
61.    Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
62.    Underworld by Don DeLillo
63.    Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
64.    The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck
65.    Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
66.    Count Brass by Michael Moorcock
67.    The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake
68.    The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
69.    Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy
70.    The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
71.    Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
72.    A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce
73.    A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain*
74.    The divine comedy by Dante Alighieri
75.    The inferno by Dante Alighieri
76.    Gravity's rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
77.    The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
78.    Swann's way by Marcel Proust
79.    The poisonwood Bible: a novel by Barbara Kingsolver
80.    The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay: a novel by Michael Chabon
81.    The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James*
82.    Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen*
83.    Silas Marner by George Eliot
84.    The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
85.    The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas
86.    The god of small things by Arundhati Roy
87.    The confusion by Neal Stephenson
88.    One flew over the cuckoo's nest by Ken Kesey
89.    The book thief by Markus Zusak
90.    Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
91.    The system of the world by Neal Stephenson
92.    Bleak House by Charles Dickens
93.    The elegant universe: superstrings, hidden dimensions, and… by Brian Greene
94.    Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
95.    The known world by Edward P. Jones
96.    The time traveler's wife by Audrey Niffenegger
97.    The mill on the Floss by George Eliot
98.    The English patient by Michael Ondaatje
99.    Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
100.   Dubliners by James Joyce
101.   The bonesetter's daughter by Amy Tan
102.   Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
103.   Infinite jest: a novel by David Foster Wallace
104.   Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
105.   Beloved: a novel by Toni Morrison
106.   Persuasion by Jane Austen*

Needless to say, I have also gained much amusement from this volume*.

Vox Hunt: Freaky Friday

Show us the person you'd most like to switch bodies and lives with for one freaky Friday.

Audrey Hepburn

Ok, she's dead, but the gorgeous Audrey Hepburn would be my choice. She was beautiful and elegant and, as this set of pics shows, she aged gracefully.

And I've not drunk any!

Mostly I prefer to smell good coffee than drink it, but this was fun anyway.
Created by OnePlusYou

EDIT: Disclaimer: No implicit association should be made between my phrase "good coffee" and the blatant visual reference to the Charbucks logo.

The Privilege Meme

There's a privilege meme circulating the blogosphere. Its initial source: the work of doctoral students of Dr Will Barratt at Indiana State University.

The original authors of this exercise are Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, and Stacy Ploskonka at Indiana State University. If you participate, they ask that you acknowledge their copyright. Hereby acknowledged! ©

***

FOOTNOTE: I discovered this meme here, via NaNoBloMo; there's an interesting post about its viral journey here.

Confession

No time to report in detail at present, but this week, on consecutive nights, I have been to the theatre (STC's production of Stoppard's Rock ’n’ Roll) and the ballet (The Australian Ballet's Jerome Robbins Celebration). And there will be no concerts. In fact, I haven't been to a concert for a whole seven days, and it will have been a fortnight when I next step foot in a concert hall. Far from feeling deprived, I'm actually feeling quite refreshed. I find it next to impossible not to "work" at a concert, and I have been reminded this week just how much I adore my first loves: dance and theatre. Now all I need to do is find a good musical (anyone recommending Billy Elliot?) and my rejuvenation will be complete.

Vox Hunt: Tool Time

Show us your favorite tool.
Submitted by Maraschino.

Rotring 600

Rotring doesn't make the 600 series anymore. In fact Rotring (as a top quality German maker of pens) doesn't really exist anymore. I love the heft of the brass case, the hexagonal cross-section and the knurled grip – it reminds me of my father's workshop and learning how to work with wood and tools as a kid. And they're great to write with too!

Hear, hear

Kristjan Järvi “has made it a mission to reconnect audiences with classical music. His strategy is not to push orchestras into embarrassing crossover concerts but to give performances that are genuinely engaging.” And the conductor himself continues:

“Isn't it the truth that classical music has never been more detached from the mainstream than it is now?” he asks.

“There is certainly a change coming about, at least from my side of the spectrum. I see that through my work with different orchestras and my Absolute Ensemble.

"And it's not this kind of stuff (that) is dumbing down into pop, where (audiences) are just going to hear some nice tunes. Audiences are never actually like that, they are never that stupid. Audiences are super discriminating, (that's) what I've learned. You have to challenge them, but at the same time give them something new and of the utmost quality. It can't be cheap in any way.”

Read the rest of Matthew Westwood's piece in The Australian here.

Do I smell a conflict of interest?

Today's New York Times reports yet another newcomer in the classical download fray (although "newcomer" is perhaps not the right word):

Gramophone — the leading classical music magazine in the world, 85 years old and based in London — plans to allow readers to buy CDs and downloads from its Web site. This means that it may profit from recordings on which it is passing critical judgment.

The plans are part of a broad expansion of Gramophone’s online presence. In the first phase, expected by the end of the summer, it will make its entire archive, including some 100,000 recording reviews and articles, available free.

By early next year the magazine’s editors and owner say, readers will be able to shop from the Web site. Gramophone will collect a commission on each sale, said Michael Heseltine, the chairman of its parent company, Haymarket Media Group. Haymarket, which owns about 100 magazines, has roughly $500 million in annual revenues.

The principal theme of the piece is conflict of interest. There's an unfortunate quote ("completing the food chain" - whose food chain exactly?). But Gramophone is given an opportunity to point out the "huge Chinese wall" that sits between its independent-minded freelance reviewers and the business side of the magazine, and at least the chairman seems to realise that compromised reviews will damage the magazine's reputation.

Of more immediate interest is the idea of the entire archive of the magazine's print content being freely available. Very attractive.

And I have to admit that – given the inadequacy of the cataloguing and searching for classical music in iTunes, Amazon, and many of the other download sites that also offer this repertoire – it's nice to see another specialist in this realm, even if they are reviewing the stuff they sell.

Applause in “church”

I don't clap between movements for the same reason I genuflect in "high" churches and don't genuflect in "low" churches. (Much in the spirit of Letter XVI.)

Alas, you could say that most concert halls share this with C.S. Lewis's Church of England: they are not hotbeds of charity and humility. I was thinking the other night:€“ if only the earnest "shushers" of applause could do so with a smile of anticipation at the music to come (i.e. Don't clap yet –€“ there's more to enjoy!) instead of a glare of disapproval.

(There are occasional moments in concerts when I wish that this modern business of never clapping between movements would simply go away. A pox on you, Mendelssohn.)