Music

Giulini’s recording of The Marriage of Figaro was, I think, the first opera CD I ever bought. It remains one of my better choices. He died the other day at 91, and there's an obit in the Guardian .

I finally got to see Steve Earle play live at the Wychwood Festival outside Cheltenham in England. It was a fairly miserable day weatherwise, but the storms held off for his set and (earlier) for that of his current partner Allison Moorer. Since my enthusiasm for all this may not be widely shared at CT, I’m putting the rest below the fold.

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Nearly a week has passed since I endured the finale of Phyllida Lloyd’s Ring for the English National Opera . I wrote up earlier episodes on CT, so I ought to complete the job. Kathleen Broderick was just amazingly good as Brunnhilde and the orchestra — under the direction of Paul Daniels — played very well. But producer Phyllida Lloyd should be shot, or worse.

Wagnerphobes are going to be mystified at the complaint that a production of the Ring was silly. “Isn’t it always?” Kieran might say. Well, up to a point. This production of Twilight of the Gods was really very silly indeed, but also trite, one-dimensional, incoherent and offensive. I have no objection to modern dress productions of opera or Shakespeare, to radical changes of location or period. That’s fine. If a producer can give us a new insight into a work of art, or make it come alive for a modern audience, that is ok by me. But this wasn’t anything like that.

It was gratuitous and exploitative. (This was signalled before the performance even started by the programme, which contained photographs of the Twin Towers burning, a severed hand amidst post-Tsunami debris, and cows being burnt in Britain’s last episode of foot-and-mouth disease.) The culmination of this urge to grab hold of any random news image or bit of popular culture for shock value was the portrayal of Brunnhilde as a suicide bomber in Act 3. In between we were treated to Siegfried as rhinestone cowboy and Brunnhilde as Judy Garland (opening of Act 1) and Hagen as game-show host (wedding in Act 2). Why does Judy Garland metamorphose into a Palestinian suicide bomber?! I have absolutely no idea.

Utter crap.

Last week, Michael Bérubé wrote that “Nick Lowe’s ‘Cruel to Be Kind’ is the most perfect pop song ever written.” A fine choice, I must say. Bérubé heroically rejects a distinction between ‘rock’ and ‘pop’: “We do not think that the former category is inhabited by edgy artists and assorted Culture Heroes whereas the latter is inhabited by Tommy James and the Shondells.” But, he continues: “Still, it remains true that if a song has too much fire and/or grit and/or passion in it, it exceeds the “Cruel to Be Kind” standard in obvious ways.”

Now certainly they often exceed “Cruel to Be Kind” by a considerable margin along the dimensions of fire and grit and passion, but I was still surprised that in some 193 comments – many bringing up excellent contenders – nobody mentioned the premier “hard pop” band of the last decade: Green Day. A few random notes on the concert I saw last night follow below.
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I saw Rufus Wainwright singing on stage in 1984, with Martha and their dad, at one of those free concerts the GLC used to put on. You couldn’t tell at the time that he was going to be a huge star, but I mention seeing him then occasionally when I want my cool students to think that I am not quite as uncool as I usually like to seem. But now Want One

is the featured album on Stuart Maconie’s show. Frankly, I still find it a bit nerve-wracking to hear a voice that is almost Loudon’s singing songs like Rufus’s, and it prevents me from being a true fan. If, though, there’s anyone here who hasn’t yet heard him, he’s brilliant.

I’ve been working my way through the archive of Steve Earle’s radio show on Air America. The sound quality is variable, but the content isn’t and they’re great for burning to CD and listening to when driving places. My favourite so far is with Emmylou Harris as guest. She chooses a variety of political songs including Johnny Cash’s Ballad of Ira Hayes, Joan Baez’s Birmingham Sunday and Woody Guthrie singing Plane Wreck at Los Gatos. Plane Wreck is a good song to hear at any time, but, here in the UK, with the parties competing to stigmatize the “economic migrants” (such as the cockle-pickers who died at Morecambe Bay) it has an immediate relevance. Recommended.

[Update: the server for the archive seems to be down because of exceeded bandwidth. This is probably due to the link here — sorry! I’ve deleted the link, but those who want to should try googling for it in a couple of days.]

It wasn’t my intention to post twice on Wagner in 24 hours, but the Observer's report on the ENO's Twilight of the Gods has me worried:

bq. In what will come to be regarded by opera fans as a moment of bizarre heresy – or of creative triumph – Brunnhilde, the leading character in the ENO’s new production of Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods, was portrayed as a suicide bomber. Clad in a modern jacket packed with explosives, the betrayed lover of Siegfried, played by Kathleen Broderick, obliterated the rest of the cast by detonating herself in the dramatic ‘immolation scene’ that ends the opera.

I have tickets to see this production at the end of the month and, since, I have already attended the previous three in ENO’s cycle, I’m going to go. I hope my worst fears won’t be realized.

From a piece by Andrew Clark in today’s Financial Times:

bq. Until the final scene, the Hamburg State Opera’s November 2002 production of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg had proceeded without comment. Everyone was primed to applaud the hymn to “holy German art” that brings Richard Wagner’s four-hour pageant to a climax. Then came the bombshell. Midway through Hans Sachs’s monologue about honouring German masters over “foreign vanities”, the music came to an abrupt halt. Suddenly one of the mastersingers started speaking: “Have you actually thought about what you are singing?” he asked. No one had experienced anything like it in an opera house. There followed a lively stage discussion – some of it shouted down by outraged members of the audience – about Wagner’s anti-Semitism in the context of 19th and 20th century German nationalism.

There’s much to disagree with in Clark’s piece, both in terms of particular judgements about the relationship between ideology and music and over the claims he makes for the extent of Wagner’s influence. Still, worth a look.

In the April edition of Prospect (subscription required), Roderick Swanston has an interesting review of The Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin. Swanston attributes to Taruskin an agenda that

is conservative, even Hegelian, and implies an evolution of music from the 6th century AD to the present. Key works and composers are included that have in some way contributed to music’s progression.

I haven’t read the book, and at 280stg, I’m not likely to, but the raw numbers are pretty convincing. Of five volumes covering the last 1500 years, Taruskin devotes two to the 20th century, and, according to Swanston, his focus is almost exclusively confined to art music derived from the classical tradition.

This allocation of attention states a doctrine of historical progress in music in a way that is so extreme as to be self-refuting. The 20th century was saturated in music, as is the early 21st, but 20th century[1] art music plays a tiny role on any objective criterion, from popularity to durability to impact on our culture as a whole. If you covered the entire field, from ABBA to zydeco, on any of these criteria, contemporary art music would merit an entry comparable in length and reverence to that on progressive rock (another sub-genre inspired by historicism). Speaking personally, I couldn’t name more than a handful of living writers of art music, and even if I stretched it to include people who’d been active during my lifetime, I doubt that I could name ten. No doubt there are readers here who could do better, but we’re still talking about a marginal phenomenon, unless you assume that cultural significance is heritable property, passed on by classical music to its institutional successors.

Nor could it be said that art music has handed on the baton of progress to other forms of music. The 20th century saw a profusion of musical forms and styles, and these have developed over time, faded away, crossed over and intermingled, but there’s been no obvious movement for the better (or, for that matter, for the worse).

If you want a grand-historical theory for music, Giovanni Battista Vico is your only man. The wheel turns.

fn1. As always, the term “20th century” can’t be used in a strictly chronological sense. For most purposes, as Hobsbawm says, the 20th century began in 1914, and composers with an essentially 19th century approach were still writing well after that. On the other hand, the view that progress manifested itself through formal innovation was around much earlier. A reasonable starting point for the 20th century proper would be Schoenberg’s atonalism.

Because I love them so much, I want to throw the Moore Brothers a little CT whuffie. They are so awesome. Now they’ve gone in a more folk direction, but my favorite album is the rocking Thumb of the Maid album, a one-off from 1998. (I’ve talked to them about it, and for some reason they think of this as a partial failure, when it’s actually their best album. Go figure.) Thom Moore’s Spitting Songs is also amazing, and a few of the best songs are reprised on 2004’s Now Is The Time For Love. I’m trying to think how to describe their style, and it’s difficult. I once read a review that compared them unfavorably to Guided By Voices, and I was like, WTF does Guided By Voices have to do with anything? They have that family member harmony going on, the one that makes the Carter Family send chills up your spine. Funny lyrics: “took her to the beach/she thinks it’s Berkeley Bowl.” Also, the song “Hey Twelve”, which I assume is a joke about Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen”, and is one of the great songs of all time. My friend Daniel had the (I think brilliant) suggestion that they should take over from Phish on the continuous concert circuit, but they don’t actually sound anything like Phish. Anyway, despite my faults as a rock critic, you just have to take my word for it that they are great. You can listen to lotsa streaming mp3’s on their site. Go send them some love. (Also, did I ever tell you that you should love the High Llamas? That seems relevant somehow.)

I’ve not been posting much lately because I’ve been teaching new material, starting a new semester and also been assessing another department as an external panel member. Busy busy busy. Still, life goes on in the insterstices. One of the things I look forward to in my weekly schedule is driving my youngest son to his piano lesson because this co-incides with Bob Harris Country on BBC Radio 2. I’d long have said that the one genre of music I just couldn’t listen to is country. But Bob Harris has always been one of my favourite DJs and I’ve just been sucked in by what is one of the best music programmes on the BBC, to the point where I’ve bought 5 Steve Earle cds in the last month. No doubt everyone else has been listening to Earle for years, but for me he’s a new discovery, a songwriter who managed to summon up a whole world in a few minutes. I confess to listening to the unbelievably poignant “Billy Austin” from his live Just an American Boy several times in a row.

You’ve been hired as the program director at a new satellite radio station. You’ll be playing songs that should have been huge hits, but weren’t. You’re looking for songs from any period that you liked the first time you heard them, songs that are immediately catchy and pleasurable, songs that would please your coworkers rather than the clerk at the local independent record store. The artists could be obscure or famous, but the songs should not be in regular rotation on terrestrial radio stations.

There are a lot of buried “Hey Ya!”s, “Tainted Love”s, “Gin and Juice”s, and “You Shook Me All Night Long”s out there. Help your station find them. Bonus points if you can help us understand why you like your obscure song by connecting it to a more popular song that shares its appeal.

I’ve invited some of my favorite mp3 bloggers to play along, and I’ll update this post with their responses as they come in.

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The Goethe Institute has a really nice animated site on Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. It is aimed at children, but it should appeal to anyone with an interest in the Ring. (English and German). There’s also much more on the Institute’s various web-projects on this page .

In the 1970s, David Bowie released a series of albums that changed the sound, look and subject matter of rock music forever. His 1977 album Low, produced in collaboration with composer Brian Eno, was recently named the best album of the 1970s by Pitchfork. Elvis Costello recently called it one of the greatest albums ever in Vanity Fair. In terms of critical acclaim and popular success, I could compare him to Kurt Cobain, Bruce Springsteen, maybe REM.

In 1983, David Bowie starred in the vampire movie The Hunger. In 1986, he starred in the Jim Henson movie Labyrinth as Jared the Goblin King.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but I know music fans. I was too young to be tuned into indie rock debates at the time, so I’m curious to ask if anyone remembers. How did Bowie fans react to these roles?