The Generosity of Children

Berkeley, August 28, 2019—

LANGUAGEHAT TELLS ME that Alexander Gavrilov, in an interview, told a Russian blogger

It was at that moment that I grasped the difference between the reading of children and adults. Children are generally much more generous readers. I have the fixed idea that a book is created by its reader almost to a greater extent than by its writer. I have often heard adult readers say something like “There are no really good books left, it’s all crap, it was a lot better before.” At that point the reader is admitting that he no longer has the substance that makes all books magical in childhood.

As usual, a lengthy stream of interesting comments follows LanguageHat's post, many of them suggesting that what happens is that as they grow older children learn critical discrimination. Perhaps that "substance" (a word LanguageHat considers carefully in his translation [from Russian] of Gavrilov's comment) is in fact innocence.

This brought me back to last night's after-dinner conversation, when I was asked why I no longer care to write criticism. Criticism, well practiced, enlarges its subject — but at the expense of framing it within a construct built of the critic's accumulated experiences. And, let's face it, taste. When I write about a Mozart opera the opera Mozart composed begins to disappear behind the opera I have just seen performed, as my mind rambles from it within a landscape of other Mozart, other opera, other even further experiences that come to my mind, all of them wanting attention and needing shepherding if they're not to clutter the view entirely.

And, of course, the older I get, the more experiences and memories, even if the memories come less readily to mind when wanted.

I have tried always to be two people: a critic and a child. The critic thinks, reads, listens, discusses, expresses. The child looks, listens, asks questions. Too soon he becomes himself critical.

So a critic's farewell to criticism is a step in the process of restoring childlike generosity, or innocence. As we prepare to go elsewhere let us efface our presence here. I don't mean entirely: I'm taking care to leave a record behind. But I'm eager to give up the active pursuit of framing reality, thus lessening it, by insisting on my own view of it. It's time, instead, to empty my mind.

Approach to the thirteenth heptad

Small anx dr. Tim, L-judy rr- Cheryl, packing leave cabin.

 

letter to Bhisbma re disappear ink   

Duchamp stuff ; early mss. 

A dozen sevens on the dissolution of the mind 

Cold December evening in Rovaniemi rainy morning in Amsterdam sunny afternoon at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port etc

A. T. on the floor

Bronze Age coprolites

Epicurus Mozart and Cage my guys

Faville on birth by helicopter over desert, and amazing comment

La Finta giardiniera, In the Penal Colony in Portland

Eastside Road, July 30, 2019—

[as posted to San Francisco Classical Voice today]

PORTLAND OPERA neatly framed the human condition with two perfectly satisfying productions over the weekend. Mozart's first great comedy, La Finta giardiniera (1774, at 18!), a zany exposure of human folly, and Philip Glass's In the Penal Colony (2000), profoundly frame the Age of Reason. Mozart, a humanist, often hilarious, celebrates with spectacular and witty vocalism; Glass, a philosopher, troubled, examines with persuasive declamation.

In the Penal Colony, based on Steven Berkoff's play adapted from Franz Kafka’s 1914 short story, describes a neutral official visitor’s observation of preparations for the execution by a uniquely cruel torture machine of a prisoner who had failed at his guard post. The entire 80-minute opera, set on only tenor, baritone, two mute actors, and string quintet; and it proceeds unerringly and devastatingly.

Portland Opera produced it in the round: audience surrounding the unit set on four sides, perhaps eight rows to the side, the strings tucked into one of the four diagonal aisles. Jerry Mouad’s set beautifully suggested the bleak setting, the infernal machine — which kills, over twelve hours, by carving the prisoner’s offense into his skin.

Tenor Martin Bakari was clear, calm, objective, and in beautiful voice as The Visitor; baritone Ryan Thorn grew steadily and deeply into the role of the Officer. Kafka’s story is ultimately, I think, a denunciation of Faith and Authority as controllers of human society; the machine symbolizes the inadequacy of their reliance on technology, indeed of instrumentality. Thorn expressed all this with pathos and beauty, and Bakari’s witnessing was equally poignant.

Nicholas Fox conducted with supple support. Glass’s music is still controversial after all these years; the orchestra energizes the score with repeated rhythmic action, often on sustained harmonies occasionally shifting subtly to guide the dramatic argument. The vocal cantilena floats over this, generally following Kafka’s text, very clearly set and expressed in this production, almost not needing the effectively displayed supertitles.

La Finta giardiniera

The bad taste, but not perhaps one of the sources, of the Glass-Kafka contemplation was overcome, next night, by the adolescent Mozart’s marvelous view of Rationalist (European) attitudes toward love, class, and the war between the sexes. The Baroque symmetries of French classicism collide with commedia dell’arte; the mannered control of fashion and etiquette tangle with animal human drives. As I’ve written elsewhere, the opera is preoccupied with madness. Insanity, both feigned and temporarily real, permeates many arias and ensembles; it's remarked on by the characters; it's even reflected in some of Mozart's orchestration. (Haydn had treated the subject similarly the year before, in incidental music to his play Il Distratto.)

Chas Rader-Shieber directed the action with clear outlines on Michael Olich’s handsome three-level unit stage, the stone terraces of an 18th-century Italian garden. A lawn mower, a topiary, and four mute gardeners often carrying ridiculous garden gnomes punctuated the action, which well defined the social levels — political, military, servant. Olich’s costumes were rooted in historical accuracy yet very funny and effective.

The complex plot essentially rests on Count Belfiore, who has nearly murdered his beloved Violante in a fit of rage, driving her into disguise as a “feigned gardener-girl.” Now, though, he is visiting the Podestà to meet his niece Arminda, whom he is arranged to marry. In a parallel plot, Violante’s manservant, disguised as a gardener Nardo (these names have extended resonance we can’t go into here), lusts for the Podestà’s servant Serpetta, who in turn has eyes on her boss. And behind all this, a seventh figure, Ramiro (originally set on castrato), comments on the follies and reversals of all this amatory business.

Mezzo Camille Sherman was affecting as this Ramiro, managing a balance of character and dramatic function with clear, accurate voice and fine presence. Soprano Helen Zhibing Huang was the pert, clear-voiced Serpetta. As Arminda, soprano Antonia Tamer, in a hilarious fat-lady get-up, alternated convincingly between pathos and fury — Pamina and Queen of Night in one.

Baritone Geoffrey Schellenberg was an unusually thoughtful Nardo transported with amour, perplexed at its difficulties. And tenor Thomas Ciluffo was wonderful as Belfiore, funny in his parade of national-type lovers, quick and pointed on his feet, flexible, strong, and accurate of voice.

Tenor Mark Thomsen, while in good voice and effective as the Don Alfonso-like Podestà (for Così fan tutte keeps coming to mind), seemed hampered by too often being set at the center of the large stage; even his oversized Panama brim did not amplify his pleasant voice.

As Sandrina-Violante, the giardiniera, Lindsay Ohse rightly dominates the show. Physically supple and graceful, vocally bright yet modulated, her acting convincing and affecting, she took place well in ensembles, responding well in duet, emoting persuasively in a wide range. Her mad scene closing Act II, with Ciluffo, — they become bestial Greek gods, bewildering the rest of the cast — was hilarious yet insane enough to be a little scary. Like many of the cast, she has coloratura, trill included, and beauty of tone.

In the Penal Colony was given in the black-box Hampton Opera Center, serviceable in a neutral style; La Finta giardiniera in the 870-seat Newmark Theatre, an intimate rather luxurious downtown venue. Like the choice of repertory, production, and cast — and the thoughtful yet sumptuous program booklet — this reflects care and intelligence on the part of Portland Opera. It’s an impressive undertaking.

Nagano: Classical Music

Eastside Road, June 1, 2019—

Kent Nagano, with Inge Kloepfer: Classical Music: Expect the Unexpected Tr. from the German by Hans-Christian Oeser McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019 ISBN 9780773556348 pp. 248     read 5/28/19

MORRO BAY, the early 1950s. A fishing village and farm town, relatively isolated on California's central coast, far from the nearest city. An aging Japanese immigrant is in poor health and his young son returns from Berkeley, where he has been studying architecture, to take over the family farm. With him, his wife, a promising pianist, and their infant son.

Another immigrant appears: a Russian, passionately musical, who has survived Stalinist terror in the 1930s and the German front in World War II. Determined to encourage music, he asks for a teaching position in an elementary school far from musical centers. He soon has young children playing in ensembles, even an orchestra, and singing in choruses.

This is the inspiring story of Kent Nagano's introduction to music: small town; rural surroundings; a quietly firm family; music as natural as speech, as social as play.

Classical Music: Expect the Unexpected reads like a conversation, or one side of a conversation — perhaps that's how it was written, in conversation with the German journalist Inge Kloepfer, listed as co-author. (The book appeared first, in 2014, in German, published by Piper Verlag. The subtitle is interesting: in German it was Erwarten Sie Wunder! In French — the book is translated by Isabelle Gabolde — Sonnez, merveilles!)

I am not writing a review of the book: a good one, written for the Montreal Gazette by Arthur Kaptainis, is available online. I want only to direct attention to the book, an unusual combination of authorial modesty and self-introduction, of cultural optimism in a critical moment.

I met Nagano in 1980 or so, when he became assistant conductor at the Oakland Symphony Orchestra. In that position he was also conductor of the Oakland Symphony Youth Orchestra, and he offered to program an orchestral piece I'd written a dozen years earlier, Nightmusic. He studied the difficult score carefully, rehearsing its six instrumental units separately through the fall of 1981, premiering it at the Paramount Theater in January 1982 and releasing a recording soon afterward. (1750 Arch S1792, with Daniel Kobialka's Echoes Of Secret Silence, perhaps the first of Nagano's commercially released recordings.)

I retired from daily music criticism (in the Oakland Tribune) at the beginning of 1988, and Kent asked me for a new piece for him to schedule with Beethoven's Ninth on a subscription concert of the Berkeley Symphony, which he had developed out of the former Berkeley Promenade Orchestra. This turned out to be my Symphony in Three Movements, a title he gave to the work. Here too he analyzed the score carefully, and though we disagreed about tempi — he led the second movement much slower than I'd intended it — our collaboration was pleasant and businesslike.

(I remember a conference we had on the piece in Monaco, in the lobby of his hotel; Lindsey and I were vacationing in Nice, he was working with the Ballet de Monte Carlo, I think. Please, he said, let's not discuss anything but the score. I think he knew we had many enthusiasms in common, and his schedule never permitted distractions.)

Perhaps the most unusual thing Nagano ever did with my music: he borrowed the full score of my opera The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, sat down with it at the piano — which instrument he plays very well — and played the orchestral material only, more or less at sight, recording it so that the singers would have a tape with which to learn their roles. I did not ask him to do this; I don't know whose idea it was. I was surprised when he gave me the cassette tape. He asked me never to listen to it, and I have always respected his request.

(He was not otherwise involved with the production, at Mills College in 1984; but he did get in touch with me years later to ask if I were interested in pursuing a production in France, I suppose at Lyon, where he was music director of the Opéra National de Lyon from 1988–1998. He did not want to retain my original choice of stage director, the dancer-choreographer (and, since, scholar) Margaret Fisher, suggesting a better-known name would be important to the venture, and what did I think of Salvador Dali? Unwisely, perhaps, I retained loyalty to Margaret, and the offer was dropped.)

All these experiences fall into place, in a newly understood context, after reading Nagano's book. He emerges from it as a unique mind, disciplined and focussed, sensitive to politics, literature, philosophy, and languages but overwhelmingly dedicated to — consumed by — music. Music fills the world, the universe he lives in. There are other important components of his life, of course; he is married to the pianist Mari Kodama and they have a daughter, also a pianist, Karin Kei Nagano; he loves fast cars (or did, when I knew him); he loves San Francisco and Paris. But all these, judging by his book and his career, are contained in a transcendent fixation on music.

He returns frequently, in his book, to a small number of Big Questions: Why is music so powerful? Is it not indispensable to the human experience? Is "classical music" in danger of losing all audience? Will the primacy of quantitativeness, and particularly of dollar value, displace it utterly?

Nagano's contemplations touch on politics, philosophy, marketing, education… he converses with a retired Chancellor of Germany, an astronaut, a basketball star, a psychologist, a neurologist (and is not shy about their disagreements with him). He discusses Bach, Messiaen, Schoenberg, Bernstein, Ives. He is realistic about the crisis "classical music" seems to confront — but optimistic that it will survive. The crisis is general, far bigger than the problems of the orchestras. What's needed, Nagano argues, is music for a world in crisis, and he believes strongly that it stands ready.

Symphony in Three Movements

I HAVE UPLOADED the orchestral score of my Symphony in Three Movements (1989) to http://www.shere.org/pdfs/Symphony3Movements.pdf . The score is 112 pages; the file, 1.8 MB.

The score was requested by Kent Nagano and premiered by him, with the Berkeley Symphony, thirty years ago come Sunday, April 28 1989, on a program that went on, after intermission, to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Kent had advised me of this, but assured me there'd be no lack of sufficient rehearsal, and on the whole the performance went well. The concert was given in Berkeley's First Congregational Church, the usual BSO venue in those days.

I remember two reviews: a little old lady came up to me during the intermission and asked "Did you write that music?" "Yes, I did," I answered. "You can do better," she said. "Perhaps I will," I replied.

But I don't think I did until 1996, when I broke a long dry spell with my Trio for Violin, Piano, and Percussion. Why the long dry spell? In part, reaction to another review the Symphony had received:

The San Francisco Chronicle review took issue with my program note (appended to the score online), in which I approved Kent's commitment to "the continued virility of contemporary music." JK took "virility" to mean "chest-thumping" and complained about a macho quality he heard in the performance. I suppose I could have used "fecundity" instead, but the image in my mind was of thee male contribution to generation; the vast repertory of "classical" music in general occupying the female, receptive half.

So it goes. Gender politics and political correctness have vitiated the expressive power of rhetoric — I hope not permanently.

I have been advised more than once never to criticize a performer's execution of my music: the performer in question will be hurt and possibly resentful, and any potential future performer will justifiably wonder if he or she will be similarly criticized for playing my music. At this point in my life I'm not thinking of future performances, so I'll mention a disagreement I had with the conductor, who did not follow my tempo instructions.

As I wrote in the program note,

the Symphony is “about” terror, calm and compulsion. Each of the three movements is in fact a motion within one of these states, and from one state to another. Their context — the area of action, if you like — is natural in the first movement, personal in the second, social in the third. The three movements participate in a formal structure. The tempo steadily increases. Key structural points are marked as special events. Each of the three large sections is composed of three smaller ones in turn. The score is not free from errors, but I'm through with tweaking it for the present.

The tempo indications were crucial to my design, but the conductor suggested I had no idea the effect of the hall's acoustics would have on the performance. In my design the three movements ran a little over six, seven, and six minutes long (6:15, 7:30; 6:15); in the performance they ran eight, ten and a half, and six:thirteen (8:05, 10:36, 6:13). The result was to make the first movement lag and the second ponderous, even hectoring. I think this contributed to the Chronicle opinion.

I gave the score to another conductor after the performance — although he lived in the area, and was a composer himself, I don't think he had heard the premiere. He kept it for a few weeks, but when I asked him what he thought, he asked, rather wistfully, why my music was always so difficult. (I could have asked, but didn't, why his, and that of other composers who wrote in similar styles, was always so simple.)

He may have been referring specifically to the passage beginning at m. 65 in the first movement, where high woodwinds are asked to play fast, rhythmically complex material. (See photo above.) The effect I have in mind is of demented birds. I think I encouraged the musicians involved to fake the passage if necessary; perfect accuracy is less important than the general effect.

Or, who knows, he may have been referring to something else. I suppose I should have asked.

You can hear the music, fairly correct in terms of tempo, here:

First movement	[6:30]	7.8 MB
Second movement	[7:45]	9.3 MB
Third movement	[6:13]	7.5 MB