Donald Cobb

photo: The Willits News

I met Don Cobb in 1967, when the soprano Carole Bogard sang his Crazy Jane Songs at the Cabrillo Music Festival on August 26, with Gerhard Samuel conducting a chamber orchestra. Over the years since he drifted across my sight very occasionally and I never got to know him well — he always seemed a little guarded. He wasn't the only one; I'd found that a number of composers — artists too — seemed a little guarded in conversation. I worked as a critic at the time, on the Oakland (California) Tribune, and people don't always trust newspaper critics. Nor is there any reason they should.

He and I shared a few enthusiasms, but were divided by others. I'm a committed Modernist; he wasn't. He like the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters and James Whitcomb Riley and Vachel Lindsay; I preferred Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. He was particularly fond of the symphonies of Roy Harris; I was never interested in them. We were both dedicated Regionalists, I think; but for me Regionalism is a matter of terroir, genius loci; for him it had to do with vernacular.

What we had in common, I think, was preference of one's own way, whatever that was and wherever it might lead, to conformity to successful conventions. That, and a fondness for conversation.

Don taught at various places, always rather on the margin I thought. He seemed rootless to me: you never knew when he might turn up. He liked to spend weeks on the road, when he'd crash with friends, I think, or camp out, or perhaps sleep in the car in bad weather.

A year ago a score arrived in the mail: his Crazy Jane Songs, the accompaniment arranged for piano, in a beautifully printed edition. I wrote him congratulating him on the publication, and told him how much I liked the songs; and I sent him four little songs of mine, to poems of Lou Harrison's — I thought he'd like their style, and Lou's poems. But I never heard from him, and thought perhaps I'd offended him by suggesting, inadvertently, that they might somehow stand comparison to his songs.

Poor Don complained of feeling tired last summer. When he visited a doctor — unusual for him — he was diagnosed with acute leukemia. The end came quickly, and he didn't complain. A friend e-mailed me about his death, and then a couple of weeks ago, at the Milhaud concert at Mills, I learned of a memorial service that was planned.

A couple of days before the service I was working through a stack of long delayed paperwork at my desk and ran across the envelope with my songs and letter to Don: I'd neglected to mail it. He never received it; never knew how much I'd appreciated his letter and his songs.

The memorial service was held in a community church in the Mendocino County town he's settled in. It was jammed. A number of his childhood friends from San Leandro were there, with fond and funny reminiscences. An even larger number of recent friends from Willits, where until nearly the end he was used to singing, teaching, playing his various instruments, delighting in folk music, old songs, bluegrass. He was a true Gebrauchmusiker, a maker of music for any kind of occasion, but above all for social occasions, where music provides a lubricant, a glue, a medium whose purpose it is to bind people into a community.

As I've posted on the website that's being prepared in his memory: I liked Don. He seemed like a man who knew how to be boisterously gentle, or gently enthusiastic, while still maintaining a critical and analytical mind. Above all he seemed honest and forthright, in his opinions, his music, and his conversation. He was in every sense authentic. I’m sorry we fell out of touch — my fault — and I'm sorry he’s gone.

An obituary appeared in The Willits News, posted to the Internet on Oct. 3.

Pauline Oliveros at Mills

Canfield in Mills Pavilion. (Pauline's white head in audience, lower right.)        Photo: Lindsey Shere

Eastside Road, October 7, 2012—

ANOTHER QUICK REPORT from Mills College: we returned last night for the second, concluding concert celebrating Pauline Oliveros's eightieth birthday. The program began with Jonas Braasch, a sound artist and acoustician whose work, new to me, is apparently centered on that area involving the physical neurology, you might say, of sound, as it informs and is informed by essentially musical considerations.

In the old days it was enough to be a musician, to sing and play instruments, to know and respect the repertory, and perhaps to add to that repertory, thereby becoming a composer. If instead — or, in some cases, if as well — you also thought about all this, and perhaps studied its history and speculated on its present and maybe even (though this is essentially stupid) its future, why then you were a critic. That was what I did, in a simple-minded, journalistic way, for a number of years.

In or about the 1970s a relatively small number of avant-gardists began to move everything into a much more advanced, complex, even rarified atmosphere, intrigued by the new discoveries being made, largely due to increasingly fine and quickened tools, into what I think of as physics. The physics of natural things may help us consider this: with better rules, lighting, and arithmetical processing we can learn more about, say, the way sound bounces between walls. Clear enough. If you apply the results you may be able to build better concert halls, meaning halls whose surfaces interfere with the hearing of performances in more beneficial ways than disadvantageous ones — particularly if you analyze already present halls, like say the Concertgebouw or Boston's concert hall, already known to be effective.

So far we're dealing with engineering. A generation of musicians became entranced with such matters, thanks no doubt to modern education and increased intercommunication between artists and technicians generally — the "Experiments in Art and Technology," pioneered in the 1960s, were only one of many investigations into such fields — and where in centuries before musicians were primarily mediating between their personal expressive needs and desires and the delights and rewards of dealing with those desires in such social situations as chapels, court orchestras, dance bands, and parlor musicales (or their equivalents in cultural contexts other than European ones), it was now becoming possible to deal with them in laboratories.

At about the same time the grammar of western music had begun to give way. It's something like what happened to language during the Dark Ages: as the complexities and subtleties of Latin fell into disuse, because of geographically widespread centers replacing the monolithic center that had been Rome, other kinds of complexities and subtleties replaced them, largely expressive ones, in the new Romance languages, and entirely new poetic forms and techniques evolved, many of which were adopted over the years.

So the late Twentieth Century: and the wonder is that the process, and the events marking its progression, and the marvelously gifted and disciplined men and women involved, were so little noticed by the general public — including the critical establishment and the press, among whom only their own similar subset seemed either interested or, more significant, provided with platforms from which to announce their interest, to present and celebrate the activity they were lucky enough to witness in so historic a moment.

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The San Francisco Bay Area was at the center of one of these moments, and at the center of one Bay Area phenomenon of the time stood the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which itself centered, at first, on Pauline Oliveros, Ramon Sender, and Mort Subotnick. A few years after its inception at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (though without much support from that institution at the time) the SFTMC set up shop at 321 Divisadero Street in San Francisco, sharing the rented building with the Ann Halprin Dance Workshop and radio KPFA. (I was music director at KPFA shortly after this took place, and am writing most of this out of my memory; I may get a few names and dates wrong.)

A few years later the Tape Music Center received a sizable grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, which required them to have some affiliation with an accredited educational institution, and Mort Subotnick, who was then on faculty at Mills College, helped finesse the installation of the TMC there, with Pauline Oliveros as the director. The centrality of Mills College and especially its music department to the significant history of musical progress in the Twentieth Century can hardly be overstated.

Well: This is why Pauline Oliveros was recognized on this significant occasion, on the same terms as was John Cage whose centennial shared the bill Friday night. Last night's concert began, as I say, with Jonas Braasch, who walked onto a nearly bare stage carrying a soprano saxophone. To his right was a chair next to a trombone on its stand; to his left another chair held a red accordion. He ignored them, standing well upstage, and began to play, his sound picked up and processed electronically.

It's a long time since I've listened to live electronic music — a medium, by the way, with which I first became familiar in this very concert hall, when a group visiting from the University of California at Davis presented its First Festival of Live Electronic Music here in the late 1960s. (In those years UC Davis was one of the few other establishment Bay Area institutions willing to grant such music the time of day.) I found Braasch's performance fascinating, rich, subtle. His tone is very pure and clear, and the processing did not interfere with it. We heard what seemed a perfect balance of acoustical and electronic sound, the latter at the service really of the former. The texture was even, rarely busy, rarely loud. Braasch called this performance System Test, and perhaps systems of some kind — whether technological or compositional — were being tested: but we in the audience were not; we were being rewarded.

Shortly before the end of this Test Pauline Oliveros entered from stage left, Stuart Dempster from stage right; they walked in quietly and gracefully, took their seats, and took up their instruments, listening to Braasch and entering, I think, the "spirit" of the moment — the spirit, or the method, or the quality; I hardly know what kind of word to use.

This is what music is about, among other things; the neurological and psychological network of perceived and remembered and imagined sounds and the "meanings" we attribute to them as they evolve, privately or through the fiction of shared cultural significances. At some moment Braasch was silent; Stu and Pauline had begun their work; he left the stage as quietly and respectfully as they had entered; and the sound of his saxophone was replaced by those of the trombone and the accordion, again processed, quite subtly and magically, by software Braasch had developed for them.

The result, called Returning, allows them to adapt whatever concert venue they are playing in to a simulation of a unique sonic environment they first visited over twenty years ago, the Dan Harpole Cistern in Port Townsend, Washington, whose 45-second reverberation had inspired their recording Deep Listening in 1989. Long, quiet, flawlessly sustained tones on trombone and occasionally accordion provide the structure of this music, articulated or modulated by fluttering gestures in which Pauline's right hand, flicking buttons on her accordion, trigger changes in the computerized sound-processing, sometimes answered by mouthpiece percussive effects from Dempster.

I could have listened to the result twice as long. I turned my head quietly from side to side, cupped an ear now and then, and remarked internally the acoustical responses of the hall itself to this serene, meditative celebration of sound and its physical and mental presence and effectiveness. You don't want to treat an occasion like this without respect and almost reverence, and I don't want to examine it verbally any further.

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From there it was across the road to the Pavilion again, as it had been the previous evening, for a repeat performance of Event with Canfield, choreography by the late Merce Cunningham danced by the Mills Repertory Dance Company, with In Memoriam Nikola Tesla, Cosmic Engineer, the score Pauline Oliveros provided for the 1969 collaboration.

Again, we sat relatively high in the bleachers fronting the performance, this time in the last row audience left. The performance seemed quite different from the previous evening's. The comments among themselves by the sound engineers — John Bischoff, Chris Brown, James Fei, and Maggi Payne — were clearer, more present than they had been as they went about their work of analyzing the pavilion's acoustics with speech, sweep-tones from a slide whistle or the sweep generator, and percussive noises from clapsticks or the popping of balloons. (That latter apparently replaced an intended use of a cap pistol.)

At the same time, the dancers seemed both more relaxed and assured than the previous night but also less precise and crisply effective. The familiar Cunningham repertory of suddenly unpredictable and unconventional gesture and attitude needs objectivity, sureness, and abstraction, I think, even when its "meaning" is inescapably involved with human emotion and social (or couple-based) significance.

Still, the even brought life and energy to Cunningham's bequest. The range of body type, the adaptation of late-Sixties concept to facilities of nearly fifty years later, perhaps above all the new, younger audience — all that seems to restore the bright surprise and awareness of the dance, of Robert Morris's brilliant mechanistic travelling light beam (literally), of Jasper Johns's costumes which reinforce the Degas Spartan Games quality I often associate with Cunningham's work.

The interaction between an artist's privately imagined or conceived visions, the tools and techniques provided him by his art form and its history and repertory, the implications brought to his work by the social and natural context of his life, and the meaning imposed on it by his colleagues and audiences — this is what is at the core of Merce Cunningham's work, and that of the artists and musicians with whom he collaborated. All this remains, for me, the most important, significant aspect of creative art; it explains its function and its relevance, its necessity even, in our time. And I thank Mills College, and its staff and faculty and trustees, for recognizing this and persisting in this important work.

John Cage, Pauline Oliveros

ANOTHER QUICK REPORT: another concert last night at Mills College, this one celebrating two epochal birthdays: John Cage's hundredth; Pauline Oliveros's eightieth. John, of course, was not in attendance; Pauline was, pretty as a button, full of health and quickness.

We heard a fine performance of a pivotal piece of Cage's, the Sixteen Dances he composed in 1951, at exactly the time he was giving up writing music that was "about things," as he explained, and was turning toward music that simply allowed — encouraged, I would say — the sounds to be sounds, to be free to express the sounds they felt like being, rather than something a composer felt they ought, or might, or could be.

These Dances were composed to accompany, and for once this is exactly the correct word, choreography by Merce Cunningham; set for an intelligently chosen instrumental ensemble of piano, four percussionists, and four melodic instruments (flute and trumpet, violin and cello); and made with the help of an elaborate chart generating 64 cells each containing "aggregates" of pitches, intervals, or chords. Sometimes he overrode this precompositional machine, sometimes not. Clearly he was in transition between taste and egolessness, the egolessness that would come to depend on increasing degrees of evasive methodologies — chance, the I Ching, computer routines.

Twenty-five years ago I engaged to write a little book about Cage; it is one of my many major failings that I abandoned the assignment — at the time it seemed unnecessary; plenty of books were appearing about him; another would hardly be missed. I do think there are things still to be contemplated, and one of them is precisely this point, when he moved from "music that is about things" to music that is not. (The phrase set in quotes is taken from a letter he sent me responding to a query: maybe I should simply find that letter, reconstruct its context, post the result here, and let it go at that.)

The Mills Performing Group performed these Sixteen Dances admirably, I thought, dancing around their title-subjects — Anger, Humor, Sorrow, the Heroic, the Odious, the Wondrous, Fear, and the Erotic, the Hindu "eight permanent emotions" that seized Cage's mind in those days, and Tranquility, the fixed center to which they all tend. (The remaining seven dances are Interludes: this composition has affinities with the Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, as well as the String Quartet in Four Parts; and an ideal concert program would present all three works, preferably on a warm afternoon and evening, with good Indian food and beverage at appropriate moments.)

After the Dances the audience, which had completely filled the Mills concert hall, moved across the road to the Dance Pavilion to see a performance by the Mills Repertory Dance Company, who made a persuasive case for Merce Cunningham's Event with Canfield, for which Pauline Oliveros had provided, in 1969, her score In Memoriam: Nikola Tesla, Cosmic Engineer.

Well: the event was to celebrate the composers, after all, and my attention was fixed first on the sound. John Bischoff, Chris Brown, James Fei, and Maggi Payne managed the electronics, the casual speaking, the balloon-inflation-and-popping, the clapping — and, most importantly, researching the resonant capacity of the geometrically interesting pavilion, whose acoustics provided Pauline's equivalent of John's charts.

Within that sound, and alongside the slowly moving lighting sculpture Ethan Worden provided to Robert Morris's original design, the Mills dancers gave a credible account of Merce's unforgettable moves. Sixteen dancers were credited on the program, and I don't know which of them were the two whose duet was the highlight of the evening. It was fascinating to see a company of students and, I suppose, journeyman dancers taking on choreography familiar from the highly disciplined Cunningham Dance Company. It was a particular pleasure to see that the choreography survives the death of the master.

The program repeats tonight, Saturday, October 6, with Jonas Braasch's System Test and Returning by Oliveros and Stuart Dempster replacing the Sixteen Dances, along with a performance of Cage's Variations IV. I don't know if I can make it; it's a busy day today. I will if I can; it's an event that shouldn't be missed.

Other People's Money

JUST A QUICK COMMENT on the play seen last night, Other People's Money, a comic oleo, I think you could call it, on a very topical subject, by Jerry Sterner, about whom I know only what Wikipedia tells me, which is little beyond the epitaph on his headstone: "Finally, a plot."

The play is equally sardonic. You may know it from its 1991 film version, which starred Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck, and Piper Laurie — strange, how long ago that all seems now! I haven't seen the film, but last night's performance makes me curious to.

Not that the production we saw was deficient, crying out for Hollywood's more lavish resources. This was community theater, though one member of the cast is Equity; but the casting was good, the acting persuasive, the production resourceful given the small house and crowded stage facility.

The play's about a villainous New York corporate raider who's after a midsized Rhode Island factory, publicly held but tightly controlled by the family that founded it many years before. The company's small-town owner, whose father had founded the factory, yields to his second wife's pleas to let her daughter, at the beginning of her law career — his stepdaughter — to try to prevent the takeover.

Further complications involve the family dynamics and various interferences by employees, but the main action is in the emerging duel between the smart and idealistic young lawyer, Kate, and the villain, Lawrence Garfinkle. (Interestingly, his surname was changed in the film to "Garfield.") They are played here by Laura Lowry and Keith Baker, and I thought both were superb.

We went to the play at the suggestion of a couple of friends, with whom we often see theater; they'd heard this was very funny, and after the previous night's presidential debate a funny play was in order. Well, of course, corporate raiders are very much in play these days, and it was perhaps too bad that the one in this production is as funny, as darkly attractive, as he is. Oily, rancid, yes; you can almost see him twisting a Simon Legree mustache as he eyes the sweet young daughter. But his frankness, as he discusses the nasty business he goes about, is refreshing, particularly after the less "transparent" explanations Mr. Romney gave the other night.

• Other People's Money, a comedy by Jerry Sterner. With Larry Williams, John Craven, Joan Hawley, Keith Baker, and Laura Lowry, directed by Elizabeth Craven. Main Stage West, Sebastopol, through October 6.

Darius Milhaud

Eastside Road, October 1, 2012—

FOUR AND A HALF years ago I abandoned a project here, a little survey of the eighteen string quartets composed by the 20th-century French composer Darius Milhaud. Just one of a number of half-finished — or, more often, let's be frank, half-begun — projects around here. The Drafts folder in this blogging application (MarsEdit, if you want to know) contains a couple of dozen abandoned posts, and perhaps ten times that many never even make it to the Drafts category. Oh well.

Milhaud was French, Provençal, Aixois, and Jewish, strong of mind and temperament, brisk and alert — deceptively so, for he was confined to a wheelchair for nearly his last thirty years, the victim of brutal arthritis.

Born in 1892, his life coincided with Modernism; but he studied at the Paris Conservatory, where he received solid grounding in conventional harmony and counterpoint. He was greatly influenced by exotic materials, though: from 1917 to 1919 he was in Rio de Janeiro, where he served as secretary to the French Ambassador; in Harlem in 1922, he was overwhelmed by the jazz he heard there.

Milhaud is famous for his polytonal counterpoint. His 14th and 15th string quartets, which though of equal lengths are otherwise quite different from one another, can be played simultaneously as an octet, whose effect is again very different from either of the quartets.

In 1940 he emigrated to the United States, fleeing Nazi-occupied France. He found refuge at Mills College in Oakland, where he joined the music faculty, remaining until 1971, teaching alternate years after his 1947 return to France.

I met Milhaud once or twice, though I can't say we ever had a proper conversation. I participated in a television interview with him on the occasion of his retirement from Mills College — that was in 1970, I think. I recall very little of the interview, conducted principally by Bill Triest, recorded on film, and probably now lost.

In 1995 the Class of 1945 of Mills College established the Darius Milhaud Performance Endowment to mark its fiftieth Class Reunion, and the college continues to produce annual concerts of Milhaud's music. Milhaud was nothing if not fecund: his opus list comprises 443 titles. Further, he composed for every medium, including a number of interestingly configured chamber ensembles. Further than that, his œuvre is remarkably consistent. You get the feeling, listening to his music, that his hand slid effortlessly across the paper, his pen leaving quantities of notes in its wake, each in the right place, though none in a place you'd have predicted.

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Last Friday we heard the most recent of these concerts, with faculty, alumnae and alumni, and students of Mills College performing four compositions and excerpts from four others. I was particularly impressed with the relatively early Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, and Piano, op. 47, composed in Brazil in 1918.

What an interesting piece! It opens with a typical Milhaud pastorale: marked "Tranquil," it begins with a foursquare tune over a droning accompaniment; but in a couple of minutes the three wind instruments begin each to go his own way, staking out aural personalities that will become more sharply individuated as the piece proceeds.

I've read somewhere that Milhaud did not care for the music of Maurice Ravel, preferring that of Debussy: but this opening movement occasionally brings the Ravel of L'Enfant et les sortilèges to mind; clearly each composer processes the influence of Debussy, Ravel perhaps in a more urbane manner, Milhaud — here, at least — in a more pastoral vein.

The second movement, "Joyeux," is busier, full of trills and roulades; even the middle section, with longer note-values in the theme, seems driven, until at the end a quieter, darker element seems to wander past, sucking the energy away. Then comes an amazing two minutes, the third movement, "Emporté," a dense exercise in discord. (Milhaud's "tempo" markings are often interestingly idiomatic: this one is best translated "Carried away."

Polytonal in the extreme, each instrument takes the texture of the movement into his own key in a joyous cacophony that suggests not Ravel but the Rova Saxophone Quartet.

If the opening movement was a pastorale, the finale, "Douloureux," is a nocturne, the steady piano's rhythms occasionally suggesting a funeral march, though the sinuous chromatic voice-leading also pays tribute, I think, to the close dark Brazilian night. (And to Milhaud's best-known piece, La Création du monde.)

Looking back over the eighteen minutes of so of the piece you have the feeling you've been somewhere, a meaningful event of some kind has taken place; you're not sure what it was, what it means, but it has substance and purpose, and things are not what they were before you heard it.

I've typed the preceding six paragraphs while listening to the recording of the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, and Piano by the Ensemble Polytonaal (Channel Classics CCS 13998, available at iTunes); and it's a pleasant recording, a useful reminder of the effect of the piece. But what we heard at Mills on Friday was more intense, stronger, edgier. It was driven, you might say, by the piano work of Lois Brandwynne, who never held back, even when touching the softest of notes (those at the ends of the outside movements, for example).

There was more than power in this performance: there was also a great deal of intelligence, of the sort that can only come from performers who know a wide repertory, and somehow let its sounds, probably subconsciously rather than intentionally, speak through the piece at hand. So I heard Stravinsky, Ives, and Messaien in this performance, not only (or not so much) because Milhaud's instrumentation, rhythms, and aural imagination suggests similar qualities in those other composers, but because their sounds are in these instruments, the instruments being played by these musicians.

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There were other fine moments on the program. Cheryl Seltzer plunged into the marvelous Trois Rag-Caprices, op. 78, of 1922, with the dry muscle, the romance, and the nervous precision Milhaud asks for directly in the indications at the head of the three movements. The Wong sisters, Betty and Shirley, found and transmitted the simple pleasure contained in piano transcriptions of occasional pieces: a scherzo and waltz from Les Songes, arranged from workaday ballet accompaniments, and the "Modéré" from Scaramouche, characteristically saucy and Gallic.

Lesser moments, because of weaker performances, I suppose, in the Élégie for cello and piano; seven movements from the piano suite La muse ménagère; and three songs from Rêves. But how nice to hear songs by Darius Milhaud! I've been too much bent toward instrumental chamber music; studying the French chanson, say from Debussy through Milhaud, would be as rewarding as concentrating on the stupendous 20th-century cordillera of string-quartet masterworks.

The Milhaud concert ended with the Suite for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano, op. 157b, from 1936. Again, a suite arranged from occasional pieces, incidental music for the play Le Voyageur sans bagages, by Jean Anouilh. The Suite was composed almost twenty years later than the Sonata that had opened the concert program, and perhaps for that reason too, and not only because of its occasional nature, it seems less impactful, less historic. I don't know the nature of Anouilh's play; its title suggests something blithe*. The four movements — Vif et gai; Animé; Vif; Modéré, Vif — often sound, especially the quicker ones, like music for a travelogue, one taking us to America as seen by the French. (It's a reminder that Milhaud was commissioned at some point to write an orchestral A Frenchman in New York, to respond to Gershwin's An American in Paris.)

The Suite was played, beautifully, by Tom Rose (clarinet), Christina Stanley (violin), and Betty Woo (piano); and the nature of the occasion was underlined by the observation, in Tom Rose's intelligent program note, that the Suite was played at a dinner tribute to the composer, forty years ago or so, by Rose, Woo, and the late (and lamented) Nathan Rubin. Christina Stanley was a worthy successor to Rubin: the entire evening was a testament to the endurance of music, which overcomes the mortality of its makers.


The Milhaud quartet survey, as far as it got:

Part 1: Introduction, and Quartet No. 1, Op. 5

Part 2: Quartet No. 2, op. 18

Part 3: Quartets No. 3, op. 32; no. 4, op. 48

Part 4: Quartets No. 5, op. 64; no. 6, op. 77; no. 7, op. 87

*Since writing that, I've looked it up. Boy was I wrong. What was Milhaud thinking of?

Commonplace: the sounds of forging (Dunham)

“

THE SOUNDS OF FORGING could be heard coming from every corner of the village — the three-beat rhythm of the hammer swingers striking metal on metal, the "light counterpoint" of the master smith tapping instructions on the anvil, "the muffled plops of the bellows," the scraping sound of the filing and polishing of tools.

—S. Ann Dunham, "Peasant Blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving and Thriving Against All Odds," p.499,
as quoted in Janny Scott, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother (New York: Riverhead Books, 2011), p. 176

”

Commonplace: rural generalists (Dunham)

“

TYPICALLY AN ETHNOGRAPHY of a peasant group will devote a hundred pages or more to describing the agricultural sector in great detail, and then dismiss peasant industries in a few throwaway lines. Peasant industries are frequently characterized as "spare time" activities, low in productivity and profitability, which are carried out mainly by poor women and children, and then only when they can find no agricultural work to do…

[Peasant society] produces rural generalists rather than specialists. By this I mean that nearly every peasant has a repertoire of various skills which can be utilized for productive or income-generating purposes. A Javanese man, for example, may have skills in plowing and land preparation which are related to rice agriculture, but he may also know how to repair bicycles, make bricks, drive a pedicab (becak), raise fish or eels in ponds, make noodle soup and hawk it around the streets of a nearby town, etc.

Similarly, a Javanese woman may have agricultural skills in transplanting, weeding and harvesting rice, but she may also know how to make batik cloth, operate a roadside stall or coffee shop (warung), collect teak leaves from a nearby forest for sale as food wrappers, trade vegetables or spices in a nearby marketplace, deliver babies for her neighbors, make palm sugar or cassava chips, etc."

—Stanley Ann Dunham, "Occupational Multiplicity as a Peasant Strategy," as quoted in Janny Scott, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother (New York: Riverhead Books, 2011), pp. 174-75

”

Commonplace: "where the poetic and the prosaic share space" (Soetoro-Ng)

“

[SHE] WAS INTERESTED in the place where vision meets execution, and where the poetic and the prosaic share space. She loved the way something beautiful could speak about the spirit of both the maker and the owner; the skill and soul of the blacksmith are revealed in the keris, but so too is the desire and perspective of the buyer.

—Maya Soetoro-Ng, foreword to S. Ann Dunham, Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, ix-x,
as quoted in Janny Scott, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother (New York: Riverhead Books, 2011), p. 155

”

A Singular Woman

Eastside Road, September 19, 2012—

WHAT AN APT title: A Singular Woman, a biography of Stanley Ann Dunham, the mother of Barack Obama. Janny Scott has given us a detailed, concise overview of Dunham's formative childhood, her career, and her character: taken together they provide a portrait not only of the woman, but of one important aspect of the times she flourished in, roughly the mid-sixties to the end of the century.

Brought up peripatetically — her father alternated between salesman and student, moving his household from El Dorado (Kansas) to Berkeley to Wichita to Ponca City (Oklahoma) to Seattle during her grammar-school years — Dunham went to high school on Mercer Island, a suburb of Seattle; then moved with her parents to Honolulu, where she attended college, majoring in anthropology.

Scott's biography begins wisely with a full portrait of Dunham's mother, née Madelyn Payne, and even of her mother, Leona McCurry. Indeed one of the unstated subtexts of the book is the persistence of the maternal strain through these generations, the power and influence of the character traits, the "values," formed and transmitted through the maternal side of the family. This gives considerable insight into the personally held values informing President Obama's political agenda: indeed, an important aspect of Scott's book is its identification of the liberal agenda of contemporary social democracy with the timeless values of communitarian society.

The subtitle of the book seems at first unfortunate, purely a marketing ploy: but it reveals the immediate journalistic value of Scott's achievement, which began in the first place with an article she wrote for the New York Times during the 2008 presidential campaign.

But the lasting value of her book will be its double portrait of Dunham herself and the unique moment of her career: Indonesia (and specifically Java), roughly 1970-2000, where she first pursued anthropological field-work, concentrating on small village industry (metalworking, basketry, ceramics, textiles); later worked with NGOs administering microbanking activities.

If the belligerent aspects of the twentieth century could be set aside, another side of it could be seen with greater clarity: its flowering of the intercultural encounters that had begun with the voyages of the fifteenth century, had gone wrong with European colonialism, had further deteriorated with global commercial exploitation, and had reached a climax with World War II. Janny Scott depicts the best possible view of this encounter, when the humanistic aspirations of cultural anthropology join village pragmatism to modern but local technology, whether physical or — as in the case of microfinance — administrative.

Further, her description not only of Ann Dunham but of her parents reveals the presence, during that moment — from the mid-sixties on — of a personal attitude, or orientation, that may be held by only a minority but that has nevertheless significant implications for the future of our society: an attitude that the dollar is not important for itself but as a means of living, working, and effecting personal and societal progress and justice.

Ann Dunham made a number of decisions most would find unwise or rash — if, that is, they were "decisions" in any useful sense of the word. She was apparently swept off her feet by her first romance, with a foreign student from Kenya who she met in Honolulu: the result was her son Barack and her first marriage.

Later, a similar romance led to her second marriage, to Lolo Soetoro, who she met at an "Indonesian Night" reception at the East-West Center, also in Honolulu. Intercultural encounter can be literally generative: this produced her second child, her daughter Maya, now, since her marriage to a Chinese-Canadian, Maya Soetoro-Ng.

Neither of Dunham's marriages worked out in the conventional sense: Obama senior left Honolulu for graduate work on the East Coast, then returned to Kenya; Lolo Soetoro, after his and Dunham's divorce, ultimately remarried an Indonesian woman with whom he had apparently been long involved. Scott's treatment of these narratives is matter-of-fact, illuminating, and sympathetic. In fact the marriages did work out; they worked themselves out, or the partners out of the marriages. Dunham was meant to follow her own way, to pursue her interests and her work.

A Singular Woman is I think a uniquely American story; but America is divided. The liberal side of Kansas; Berkeley and Honolulu; the liberal arts; the world of international NGOs form Blue American: Red America — ironic that a color once associated with Communism now characterizes conservative Republicanism — will hardly approve Ann Dunham's "decisions."

The book has its production problems. There is no index, though the pages teem with people, places, institutions, and ideas. The photographs are for the most part badly reproduced and far too small on the page.

Scott narrates the book as a journalist, not a scholar. This is mostly a good thing: the prose moves forward with considerable momentum, even though outcomes are telegraphed; and the vagueness or, more often, ambiguities of her sources are met honestly with the author's own voice present in her accounts. The tone is often conversational, as friends, lovers, associates of Dunham's step forward either in person or through allusion to offer insights into the motives and interests of this remarkable and, yes, singular woman.

• Janny Scott: A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother. 376 pages. New York: Riverhead Books, 2011

Mount Shasta

Pavel and I traverse the scree (photo: Simon Živny)

I'VE ALWAYS WANTED to climb Mt. Shasta. We drive past it so often; it's so majestic; so serene. In the last couple of years one of my grandsons has taken to mountaineering with a lot of enthusiasm, so this summer I suggested he accompany me — actually the other way round — and last week, on Labor Day weekend, we did it.

It was a strenuous hike, and to tell the truth I didn't make it to the summit, but I'm satisfied. I thought about putting a description of the two days here, but it doesn't quite seem like Eastside View material (correct me if I'm wrong), so you can visit three webpages describing the hike in some detail, with photos, starting HERE.

Commonplace: Judt (Postwar)

“

ON ONE THING, however, all [in Europe at the end of World War II] were agreed—resisters and politicians alike: 'planning'. The disasters of the inter-war decades—the missed opportunities after 1918, the great depression that followed the stock-market crash of 1929, the waste of unemployment, the inequalities, injustices and inefficiencies of laissez-faire capitalism that had led so many into authoritarian temptation, the brazen indifference of an arrogant ruling elite and the incompetence of an inadequate political class—all seemed to be connected by the utter failure to organize society better. If democracy was to work, if it was to recover its appeal, it would have to be planned.

—Tony Judt, Postwar, p. 67 [my italics]

”

Commonplace: Judt, Postwar

“

ABOVE ALL, VIOLENCE became part of daily life. The ultimate authority of the modern state has always rested in extremis on its monopoly of violence and its willingness to deploy force if necessary. But in occupied Europe authority was a function of force alone, deployed without inhibition. Curiously enough, it was precisely in these circumstances that the state lost its monopoly of violence. Partisan groups and armies competed for a legitimacy determined by their capacity to enforce their writ in a given territory. This was most obviously true in the more remote regions of Greece, Montenegro and the eastern marches of Poland where the authority of modern states had never been very firm. But by the end of World War Two it also applied in parts of France and Italy.

Violence bred cynicism…

—Tony Judt, Postwar, p. 37

”

Farewell, my lovely…

MY LOVELY QUEEN, that is: we saw Benoît Jacquot's film Les adieux à la reine yesterday, a very beautiful and quite intelligent film based on the historical novel of the same title by Chantal Thomas.

(I haven't read the novel, which won the Prix Femina when it was published in 2002; it's available translated into English. Another title of Thomas's, The Wicked Queen: The origins of the myth of Marie-Antoinette, sounds quite fascinating and is criticism, not fiction: perhaps I'll look into it.)


The story concerns Sidonie Laborde, an apparently fictional Reader to Marie-Antoinette — a servant, well below the various ladies-in-waiting on the pecking order, but intelligent and observant; and the plot rests on the apparently equally fictional sexual attraction Marie-Antoinette felt to her confidante the Duchesse de Polignac (and, by implication, Sidonie).

(If you read French, the historian Evelyne Lever comments interestingly on the fictional and the historically accurate aspects of the events in an interview with Le Figarohere.)

All this spools along very nicely, ruffled by little subplots involving a larcenous lady-in-waiting, a couple of clerics with healthy appetites, a marvelous librarian, and a randy, handsome young man. But what really animates this film and its hundred quick minutes is the depiction of the claustrophobic Versailles palace in July 1789, as news of the fall of the Bastille arrives, the King is forced to confront history, and preparations must be made to escape.

I haven't seen the inside of Versailles (and haven't until now wanted to), but Jacquot's cinematography seems pretty persuasive. Architectural details, servant's quarters, the courtyard seen alternatingly from the viewpoints of servants and of courtiers — all this, visually, accompanies a sense of accelerating and impending catastrophe. It's a striking and even a memorable movie, well written and acted, beautifully filmed and edited; I could imagine seeing it again.

Commonplace: Judt on collective vs individual rights

“

THE ATTRACTION of the notion that the ethical resides in the individual is that it reduces it to a decision-making process or a set of evaluations of interest, or whatever it might be, that cannot be collectivized and therefore imposed.

But it can lead to another problem, the magnifying upwards of ethical categories from individuals to collectives. We think that we understand quite clearly what we mean when we say that liberty is a universal human value, that the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of choice inhere in individual people. But I think, ever since the nineteenth century, we have moved rather too easily from one man's freedom to speak of collective freedoms, as though these were the same kind of things.


But once you start talking about liberating a people, or bringing liberty as an abstraction, very different things begin to happen. One of the problems with Western political thought since the Enlightenment has been this movement back and forth between Kantian ethical evaluations and abstract political categories.

—Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century, p. 291

”

Commonplace: Yates

“

A COMPOSER'S IDIOM is his own manner of speaking as creative thinker, original as the sound of his own voice. His content is his esthetic consistency, saying what he has to say. A composer is not uniformly aware of the forces which make him what he is; they are a part of him. The consistency he must achieve if he is to become a composer, instead of [merely] a practitioner of his art, will be under his control exactly to the degree that he is able to direct his intuitive conditioning to its creative purpose…

The consistency, as it is achieved, matures within the composer as his content, what he has to say. The subject, not yet married to content, grows within the composer as an irritant, putting him to work; his manner of disposing of it will be his style for that work or that period…

Style follows content, the outward sign of the composer's growing inner consistency; the achieved consistency of the artist extrudes the idiomatic consistency of his style. Together they evolve.

—Peter Yates, Twentieth Century Music, pp. 40-41 [re-paragraphed]

”

Commonplace: Levin Becker

“

QUENEAU'S MOST QUOTED REMARK is probably his declaration, in the 1937 novel Odile, that the true artist is never inspired—he is always inspired. As a counterpoint, recall his dictum from an early Oulipo meeting that there is no literature but voluntary literature, and this begins to come into focus: meaning, such as it is, doesn't exist on its own. Someone has to find it, midwife it, present it to the world as more than just a coincidence. The real artist is always inspired not because he creates things that are unmistakably intentional, but because he is sensitive to the sorts of things that at first seem like accidents. He replicates them on his own terms, as an expression of his own preoccupations or sensibilities or desires, or he just sticks them on a gallery wall and calls them art; even when he's wrong, he's right.

—Daniel Levin Becker, Many Subtle Channels: In praise of potential literature, pp.297-8

”

Stravinsky

WONDERFUL, GETTING OLD; There to the left is Igor Stravinsky at twenty-eight, about the time of Firebird; here I am a few days from seventy-seven, listening with new ears to a composer whose music I detested in my youth . It's the fault of my reclusive friend to the north, who told me last month of having received the gift of the Sony box of 22 CDs containing Orpheus alone knows how many Stravinsky compositions — ballets, operas, orchestral music, music for small ensembles, even some keyboard music: apparently virtually everything the man recorded for Columbia, as composer or pianist.

The first thing to note, I suppose, is that such recordings exist at all. Will the Stravinskys of the future have such means at their disposal, I wonder; and then quickly I wonder how music would sound today were other composers of new music, lacking Stravinsky's ego, certitude, and hustle, to see and hear their scores so immediately accessible. Ah well: better not to contemplate: that way madness lies.

The next thing to note, and it quickly shoulders everything else aside, is how fecund, fertile, energetic, intelligent, tuneful this music is. Thank the gods for Stravinsky, the Picasso of music, who knew and respected his forerunners among composers and, as Bhishma reminds me, knows and respects his musicians as did few other composers of his century.

My problem with Stravinsky, thirty and forty and fifty years ago, was that he was not a radical. I bought into Theodor Adorno's stupid dialectic of Stravinsky vs. Schoenberg, as if you could admit either one or the other but not both. (It's true they both lived in Los Angeles, where they famously ignored one another publicly.)

Late in his life Stravinsky came to terms with the twelve-tone method, having been brought to it by his young acolyte Robert Craft; he even composed using the method; Agon is among my favorite scores of his. It seemed cancelled, I thought then, by an even later piece, the setting of Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat," which struck me as a bit of senescent claptrap, like T.S. Eliot's "Practical Cats" verses. In those same years critics were disparaging Picasso's very late paintings; but when I saw the series of self-portraits a few years ago I found them extraordinarily moving.

Now I'm older, and understand better the octogenarian's indifference to the distinctions that seem so pivotal to a younger man, so epochal. One can only follow one's bent, however curious one may be about other views, other styles, other agendas than one's own.

At the moment I'm listening to Le baiser de la fée — the title's so much better in French than in English — one of the "neoclassic" pieces Stravinsky produced in the 1920s, in a "style" that particularly annoyed me; it seemed so safe, so cynically accessible, such a denial of what seemed to me then to be the undeniably forward-propelled course of music history. But Stravinsky is not re-writing Tchaikovsky, I now see clearly, he is composing music that contemplates the relevance, even the utility of Tchaikovsky in the period of Anton Webern's greatest work. One end of any such dualism is only enriched by the presence of the other; together, an entire historical period is made fuller, more rewarding.

It'll take a while to work my way through all these CDs. Bhishma's ahead of me, and reports that many of the recordings are remarkably fine — Ebony Concerto, Ragtime among them — whereas others reveal the flaws of underrehearsed pick-up "orchestras" which are in fact really only ad hoc gatherings of musicians of varying degrees of skill. Renard, Apollon Musagète, and Jeu de cartes are very enjoyable; ditto this Baiser and Scènes de ballet. And the box is an amazing bargain: I'm glad I bought it, and I'm grateful to have had my ears and mind re-tuned to admit this wonderful body of work.

•Works of Igor Stravinsky: Ballet music, suites, orchestral music, chamber music, minatures, songs, sacred works, performed by various ensembles under the direction of the composer; Sony|BMG 88697 103112 [22 CDs: circa 26:32:00]; available at Amazon; a full account of the contents is surveyed by Rob Barnett, with an indispensable detailed listing of performers, recording dates, etc., here.

[Later: let me add an anecdote from my friend Howard Hersh:

I was a high school student with a part-time job at the Beverly Hills Typewriter Shop, delivering machines, installing ribbons, etc.

One afternoon, I delivered Vera's typewriter to the Stravinsky home in the Hollywood - well, not hills, but foothills - and Igor himself answered the door. (It was a gracious, but modest home...) He was a bit befuddled about what do with it, but I got him to sign the receipt and was off... Yes, I knew who he was, but I did not know enough to be breathless..That would come later. How I wish I could have taken his hand and thanked him for what he had given us, and told him about my own dreams of being a composer...but I was not yet ready to do that.

Life just seemed to bring small encounters with the celebrated. I delivered a typewriter to Orson Welles' home - this was a true mansion in the Hollywood style - and saw the great man, enormous, and sitting, wrapped in some sort of purple dressing gown, in the darkened dining room.



“Taken his hand and thanked him for what he had given us”: Just the right thing to do, I think. I suppose he’d have been a bit befuddled.]

Fun to cadres, cryptic sound

OUR SKINS ISOLATE our bodies from the matter surrounding them, but provide sacks for the uncountable millions of organisms whose unknowable agendas and interactions compose our physical selves. We are each of us a corporation, not an individual.

Our minds, however — they take the other direction, defining each of us as a component, an infinitesimal part of a galaxy of thoughts, memories, concepts, phrases, not-yet-imagined operas, forgotten epics, lost philosophies.

I owe that realization to a book read thirty years or so ago, Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences). I'll have to dip back into that soon; I'll let you know what I find.

Having taken far too long a vacation from other blogs I've enjoyed in the past, and being sequestered in a quiet room in the Sierra with neither computer nor television, and no desire to deal with anything requiring more than a few minutes' attentiveness, I've just visited Dan Visel's magnificent With Hidden Noise, inspiring for its intelligence, invention, and discipline.

Let me draw your attention to one superb invention, his re-statement of Henry James's novel The Sacred Fount. 

(It doesn't hurt that I've just read a fascinating book about Oulipo, which I promise to report on when I've access to a more efficient conceptcatcher than this iPad.)

With Hidden Noise is among other things a blogquivalent of a commonplace book. I take that as a practical inspiration, and add here, as the first in what may prove to be a long string of such items, a paragraph that struck me recently:

"My countrymen," said Mistral, when I saw him in Maillane, "are not slaves like the men of Nice and Cannes who sell their soil to foreigners, or to syndicates from Paris and lose all individuality and freedom. We, on the contrary, have each our own land and home, our liberty and independence from  our own toil, and therefore we have kept the local character of our old Provence. Fools prefer similitudes. They understand them better. When they see differences they try to smooth them down to the monotonous level of their own low instinct. The wiser man loves difference; difference ind dress, in speech, in life, in looks; difference that has given Provence the loveliest women of all France in some other towns, the handsomest men in others."

—Theodore Cook, Old Provence, p. 62; Jan. 18, 2012

reformatted August 17, 2012

Further on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Eastside Road, August 9, 2012—
(minor corrections August 10, 2012)

RECENTLY I WROTE about

the degree of comfort the producing team has with the presentation of [Shakespeare] plays to these audiences. How is Shakespeare relevant, or approachable, or (let's face it) marketable in 21st-century United States of America?

A pair of plays we had yet to see when I wrote that post throws the problem into sharp relief. Shakespeare's histories and certain of the "problem plays" are deep examinations of the motives determining individual behavior in societally pivotal, even crucial moments. They are about political events, never more so than in Troilus and Cressida, a disturbingly deep and bleak psychological portrait.

And Robert Schenkkan's All the Way is a similar portrait, though more narrowly focussed: on the first hundred days of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, when his powerful political determination pushed civil rights and anti-poverty legislation through a recalcitrant legislature.

The relevancy of Schenkkan's play is obvious to audiences of my age, of course: we remember those days, and see parallels between those issues and others facing us today. (In fact, of course, among today's issues are the continuation of Johnson's "Great Society.") We can hope that the near term of All the Way makes its significance clear even to young audiences today, though I suppose we shouldn't take this for granted.

But how make the issues behind and within the Trojan War meaningful to today's audiences? This production of Troilus and Cressida updates the action, as the director, Rob Melrose, explains:

Our production takes inspiration from the looting of the Baghdad Museum during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. We are overlaying a modern perspective on an ancient story. Like the layers of Shakespeare's sources, we are seeing the Trojan War as the beginning of a long history of East-West conflicts: the Persian Wars, the Crusades, the Vietnam War, the Gulf and Iraq Wars. In the detritus of war are reminders of the cultures that were here before.

This is a little confused, I think. Melrose's third sentence needs a bit of unravelling. To be fair, it has its own source earlier in his program note, where he cites Shakespeare's "obscure sources known only to scholars": Homer, Chaucer, Boccaccio.

In many ways, this play is a collaboration among Shakespeare and his three literary equals across time. The result is a richly layered text that constantly revises and comments on its source materials.

But the result is, after all, a Shakespeare play, a finished work of art (as is Chaucer's magnificent psychological novel Troilus and Criseyde); it can stand on its own merits. To add to its already rich store of historical, legendary, and literary references even more — ranging from the Crusades to the pillaging of the Baghdad Museum! — is hardly likely to make the play simpler or more direct.

Except, in fact, by shouldering aside much of the play's content — details revealed in the character's lines — by a constant substitution of contemporary references: machine guns, helicopter chop, sirens, cocaine and drug-sniffing. Pandarus is portrayed as a situation-comedy funny uncle; Helen as brainless sexpot, Cassandra as an inexplicably troubled aunt who shows up in her head-scarf from time to time for no particular reason.

Only Shakespeare's language is truly respected, not his take on the content it expresses. This has its absurd results, as when sidearms that are clearly handguns are referred to as swords, or when GIs look heavenward when referring to the gods. To dismiss these absurdities as unimportant, because after all realism is hardly the point, is to overlook the greater issue they reveal: by making Troilus and Cressida "relevant" to an audience familiar with Afghanistan and Iraq but not Chaucer or Homer, productions like this divest the play of Shakespeare, furthering the cultural illiteracy they want to counter. The look and sound of this production, growing largely out of television and movie portrayals whether of battle or poolside languor, renders the sound of Shakespeare's dialogue quaint and often opaque.

So ultimately this is not Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, but someone else's. The main points of the play are there: war is absurd, there's little honor among these people; we really ought to stop behaving this way. But Shakespeare's complex and fascinating characterizations are little more than caricatures, and so the effect of the play is repetitious and heavy-handed. Shakespeare had more subtle things in mind than a morality play — he always does. If the richness and depth and, yes, subtlety and ambiguity of his work has to be sacrificed to make him understandable by today's audience, it would be better not to present him at all — to consign him to the obscurity which this Festival apparently believes already conceals Homer, Chaucer, and Boccaccio.

---

I'M TEMPTED HERE to investigate some clever branching format to give you your choice: shall we turn next to the mess that is Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella, or the success of All the Way?

All the Way, Robert Schenkkan's play about Lyndon Johnson, is conventional drama, tightly focussed on LBJ as he takes office in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, whose very different style — Massachusetts, glamor, wealth — has until then marked the vice president as little more than a country bumpkin. Or so thinks LBJ, who is/was, in fact, a sensitive, intelligent, apparently sympathetic politician, hampered by his often crude expression but clear-eyed and realistic when it came to the political process. The play…

Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella was so unpleasant a production that we left at intermission, so I really have no business at all writing about it. Once again, then, let me turn you over to the codirectors' program note: Almost 30 years ago, as a college student, Bill wanted to learn more about theatre that speaks to a cross section of society… Taking one example of each of the three great populist movements in Western drama… he laid three texts side by side. With all three plays staged in the sae space at the same time, Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella was born. The trouble with this idea is that…

Oh, the hell with it, clever formatting has no place here — though it shows what happens when a clever idea gets in the way of trying to get to the bottom of something. Let's continue with All the Way, which really impressed me for its skill in keeping a number of parallel lines in balance, continuingly present through the three-hour two-act play, persuasively depicting a large number of familiar, complex, interesting characters: Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, Lady Bird Johnson, George Wallace, J. Edgar Hoover, Hubert Humphrey, Robert McNamara, Walter Jenkins (LBJ's top aide)…

All these men but the last are well-known to those of us who paid any attention at the time; and the time was of course the middle 1960s, at just the cusp between JFK's New Frontier and the cultural revolution attending the rise of the Vietnam War, when the excesses of the youth movement severely compromised the success of the "Great Society" that LBJ was trying to engineer.

It was a time resonating with the current moment, when many of the programs and legislative codes put in place in the 1960s are being attacked, and there's a very real danger that they may even be repealed. I'd hesitate to call Schenkkan Shakespeare's "literary equal," as Rob Melrose refers to Homer, Boccaccio, and Chaucer: but he's a similarly telling and ingenious playwright. I was impressed by his By the Waters of Babylon, staged at OSF in Ashland in 2005; Handler, which centers on a snake handling church in the Appalachians, had played there in 2002. Those plays deal with societal confrontations between groups with dramatically opposed, tightly held attitudes; All the Way is a logical continuation of the theme.

Bill Rauch, the Artistic Director of Oregon Shakespeare, directed both those previous Schenkkan plays, and he directed All the Way as well. I don't see how he could have done it much better. The parallel politics of LBJ's administration, the recalcitrant Dixiecrat-driven Senate Byrd, Thurmond, Eastland, Russell), and the emerging civil rights movement, itself split between judicious elders (King, Abernathy, Wilkins) and the impatient youths (principally Stokely Carmichael) were beautifully balanced, orchestrated you might say; and the fact that many of these supporting roles were double- and triple-cast was no detriment: not only costuming and makeup, but acting and directing kept a complex set of issues on point and abundantly clear.

There's humor here, though one audience member groused that for people of her generation J. Edgar Hoover could never be a sympathetic character, let alone amusing. I found him both, in fact; I thought he was better treated than the hapless Hubert Humphrey, the one historical character who didn't seem quite right.

The frequent humor, concentrated on near-fools like Humphrey and Hoover (the characters, not the real men!); the double-casting to populate a wide gamut of types and classes; the interweaving of political and individual power-juggling — all this is of course very Shakespearean. Of all the plays I've seen so far in the "American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle" series commissioned by OSF, it is the most Shakespearean, resonates best with the historic mission of this theater company.

(We did not attend a second new play commissioned within the cycle, Party People, a performance by the UNIVERSES collective. That was a mistake: I've heard very good things about it. We'd been misled by the title and early publicity; when we ordered our season tickets, we thought to save money on both this and an update of The Merry Wives of Windsor. We were right only half the time: perhaps we'll return for it later in the season.)

All the Way only opened a week or so before we saw it, but this was a solid production and performance. It was so absorbing I could imagine returning for a second look. It should join the repertory, I think; I'd be surprised if it didn't turn up in the Bay Area sometime in the next few years.

---

CAPABLE OF A SUCCESS like All the Way, how could Bill Rauch make a theatrical mistake like Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella? I have no right to "review" it, as I left at intermission — along with five friends with whom we spend a week in Ashland every summer. (The fourth couple had wisely opted to sit this one out.)

The idea was intriguing, a mash-up of characters from three widely different settings somehow interacting in a new context. Euripides'Medea has beckoned me since hearing the Judith Anderson performance, recorded, sixty years ago, and the Scottish play was still in my mind from the beautiful and relentless production at OSF in 2009 (and the oppressive yet compelling production of 2002), and the production of Akira Kurosawa's retelling of it as Throne of Blood in 2010.

I had assumed for some reason — well, for no good reason at all, of course — that the Cinderella would come from a fairly serious staging of that familiar tale: based on, say, Charles Perrault, or the brothers Grimm, or perhaps Jacopo Ferretti's libretto for Rossini's opera La Cenerentola. Wrong: Rauch turned to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, originally produced for television. I've never seen that version, I'm happy to say: judging from the little of it I saw in Ashland in this production, it's annoyingly cartoonish and simple-minded, brash and foolish.

Years ago it occurred to me, while watching a production of Charpentier's opera Louise, that you could make a charming and thoughtful thing of a Paris-themed opera in which Louise and her father, Mimi and the others from Puccini's La Bohème, perhaps Donizetti's Maria di Rohan (which I've never seen or heard), and of course characters from Offenbach's La vie parisienne all bump into one another — in the streets, at a café, perhaps at a dance. They'll have a lot to tell each other, I think. If I were to do it, there'd be pauses and quiet passages. the sources would not merely co-exist, often competitively; they'd intersect, aware of one another, bringing further layers of thoughtfulness and meaning — and, yes, humor along the way, as well as sympathy.

Perhaps that happens in the second act of Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella. If so, perhaps someone will tell me about it. I'm afraid I didn't linger to find out. Instead I left the theater, confused and a little irritated at the money spent by me, the much more money and time and energy spent by OSF, and the implications that the Artistic Director of the theater has taken advantage of the splendid actors and other resources at his disposal to stage what was, in fact, a college student's idea, now, according to his program note, "a lifelong passion project."

---

FINALLY, A PARAGRAPH or three on the ancient Kaufman and Ryskind send-up Animal Crackers, written for the stage in 1928, adapted into film two years later. It's the latter that's well known, of course, because of the presence of the Marx Brothers, who repeated their stage roles.

It's surprising, now, to recall that Animal Crackers is a musical. There are some fine songs, particularly "Watching the Clouds Roll By" and "Three Little Words," and of course both Chico's piano and Harpo's harp were given prominent solo "specialties". The OSF production involves an onstage combo: piano, trombone, reeds, bass, and drums, and they were first-rate. In general I've liked OSF's occasional musical — The Guardsman and She Loves Me come to mind — when it's done fairly straight; this was no exception to that.

But the musical is the least aspect of the show. What Animal Crackers is, in this production, is a zany romp of a comedy, with lots of debt to vaudeville. I don't like to linger on performer descriptions in these accounts, but I have to comment on the actors who, in representing Captain Spaulding, Emanuel Ravelli, The Professor, and Horatio Jamison, have to represent also Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo. Not long into the evening you forgot they weren't the Marx Brothers themselves. The show was hilarious from beginning to end, and I wish I could see it once a month for the rest of my life. Go see it if you possibly can.







• Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare; directed by Rob Melrose): New Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland, Oregon; closes November 4.
• All the Way (Robert Schenkkan; dir. Bill Rauch): Angus Bowmer Theatre; closes November 3.
• Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella (Bill Rauch and Tracy Young, adapted from Euripides, Shakespeare, and Rodgers and Hammerstein; dir. Rauch and Young): Angus Bowmer Theatre; closes November 3.
• Animal Crackers (Kaufman and Ryskind/Henry Wishcamper; dir. Allison Narver): Angus Bowmer Theatre; closes November 4.

Mozart: La Finta Giardiniera

Mozart: La finta giardiniera (The pretend gardener), K. 196 (1774) Nardo: Gordon Bintner Sandrina: Jennifer Cherest Podestà: Casey Candebat Belfiore: Theo Lebow Ramiro: Sarah Mesko Arminda: Jacqueline Piccolino Serpetta: Rose Sawvel conducted by Gary Thor Wedow directed by Nicholas Muni Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, August 2 and 4, 2012 The Merola Opera Program San Francisco Opera

Eastside Road, August 3, 2012—

NO LOVER OF MOZART can afford to ignore La finta giardiniera, an opera at the exact emergence of the Romantic music drama from its Baroque and classical sources. Mozart was a month shy of his eighteenth birthday when he traveled with his father and sister from Salzburg to Munich in early December, 1774. Someone — we're not sure who — had obtained a commission the previous summer for the opera, which Mozart apparently began working on in September.

The libretto, probably by the Roman poet Giuseppe Petrosellini, was taken verbatim from an earlier opera of the same name, by the now-forgotten Pasquale Anfossi. (It had premiered a year earlier, in December 1773, in Rome.) It's in many ways a stock item, with three couples from three social classes (nobility, courtier, servant) and an aging comic majordomo-type animating a plot given to disguises, mistaken identities, tangled courtships. (One recognizes elements from commedia dell'arte, and prefigurations of Così fan tutte and Le nozze di Figaro.)

A significant aspect of the libretto, though, is its preoccupation 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. Irrationality was a frequent subject of attention during the Age of Reason, and while Petrosellini's libretto is pure comedy, and Mozart's setting in his own description pure opera buffa, there's a subtext here that makes me think of, for example, Tom Stoppard theater, where heightened intellection reveals the irrational undertones of otherwise apparently explicable behavior. Let Robert W. Gutman set the scene:

The opening tableau of… La finta giardiniera had already given notice of fatigue with the masquerades and hollow nostalgia of the aristocratic world. The curtain rises upon a seeming Edenic haven of security, a garden in which five protagonists sing together of bucolic contentment. Then, one by one, they reveal their true feelings, dissecting their emotions in a series of short solos telling of hidden sorrow, furious jealousy, and both unrequited and unwelcome love. Having disclosed the pain and eroticism beneath the idyllic surface, they reassume their public postures in a repetition of the beginning ensemble, now revealed to be a fiction… the scene becomes a travesty of the affected and already old-fashioned pastoral opera, a comment upon the nature of so-called reality, and an indication of the growing stress between directness and reserve, between the spontaneous and the formal.

Mozart: a Cultural Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999); pp. 123-4

La finta giardiniera is a portrait of transition: from feudal to republican social orders; from post-Baroque pastoral comedy to the Romantic drama of Mozart and da Ponte; from the symmetries and harmonic simplicity of Classical music to the expressive gestures and tonalities of Romanticism. Little wonder the opera was neglected in its day, disappearing after three performances. Gutman again:

…Wolfgang determined to impress Munich and went astray because at the same time he determined to impress himself no less. In a miscalculation born of divergent desires — on one hand, a desperation to carry the city by storm, on the other, a dizzying hunger to make the most of his freedom from the musical restrictions of Salzburg, so stifling to his inclinations — he fabricated an overambitious score rich in stylistic contrarieties and with finales of a complexity beyond anything a Galuppi, Piccinni, or Gassmann [his rivals] had attempted.

Op. cit., p. 340

Mozart returned to the score five years later, cutting and revising the score to conform to a German translation of the text. It was probably presented once or twice in 1780, and again in 1789, when it was still failed to find favor. "More for the conoisseur who knows how to unravel its refinements than for the dilettante… nearly always difficult… in the highest degree tasteless and tedious", run phrases quoted in Robert Gutman's book.

I've listened to the opera a few times in the recording contained in the Brilliant Classics integral recordings of the Complete Mozart — a box of 170 CDs I wouldn't want to be without. The recording was made live at the Monnaie in Brussels in 1989, and I find it more rewarding than does Robert Levine, for example. I have not studied the score, available online as a free download and (for money) on paper as reprinted by Kalmus: when I get a few days, I will.

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The reason I'm writing about La finta giardiniera this morning is simple: there's one more chance to see and hear this beautiful, complex, rarely performed opera, in a faithful and entertaining production, in San Francisco, where the Merola Opera Program is presenting it, sung in Italian with English supertitles. We heard it last night, and I thought it was superb. The young cast had clearly spent a lot of time preparing their roles, and they sing clearly, musically, with good intonation.

Nicholas Muni's direction seemed both resourceful and uncommonly intelligent, and all seven of the singers can act, facially expressive and gesturally effective. They often have business even when silent; they accomplish this tellingly, filling out their roles without upstaging other characters. Jealousy, despair, tenderness, insanity — all are readily communicated, often with subtlety. There is broad humor, of course — send-ups of stock medical jokes, for example. But nothing is ever uncontrolled; the fun never goes over the top; you can laugh without losing track of more serious (or at least more interesting) subtexts.

Gary Thor Wedow's conducting was energetic yet generous, and he and his orchestra brought out Mozart's rich colors and textures. La finta giardiniera enjoys its own score: in his first aria the Podestà (the comic Don Alfonso-like character presiding over the action) refers to the dulcet flutes and oboes, the somber violas, the violent trumpets and drums: Mozart is pointing up his orchestrational skills here. There are some surprising harmonic transitions in this score: Wedow presented them urgently. Elsewhere he instructed strings to play sul ponticello, underscoring the dramatic tension.

The singers are young, strong, attractive, and nimble. I won't single anyone out: every one of them was utterly persuasive in the role. There's a lot of fioratura in Mozart's score, which recalls vocal writing as distant as Handel's between stretches of pastoral lyricism. All seven singers negotiated quick passagework, leaps across the range, quick alternations of piano and forte, rarely failing to articulate the text clearly.

La finta giardiniera is a long opera: even cut — this production suppresses a few arias — the evening ran over three hours, with one intermission following the first of the three acts. I didn't find it overlong, and the cast didn't show any signs of fatigue either. We ran into them celebrating in a local bar-restaurant after the show, at midnight: a convivial scene. Youth, talent, enjoyment, energy; and Mozart: who can resist?