Florence Foster Jenkins

Music students who are fans of opera - or who, like me, were friends of fans of opera - inevitably get exposed to the singing of Florence Foster Jenkins.  Imagine a late night, a group gathered in someone's dorm room, everyone's well stoned listening to all kinds of music.  Eventually, without explaining, someone plays Florence's album.  Hilarity ensues.  It's better when you don't know what to expect.

If you aren't familiar with Florence's work, here's a recording.  Enjoy:

It's natural to wonder whether Florence Foster Jenkins was having a little joke on her audiences.  No, apparently not.  All evidence suggests that Florence was completely serious.  I mean, she was no Darlene Edwards.  Florence was, at least in her own mind, a serious artist.

And that's just the beginning of her tale.  The whole story would make a good movie.

Oh right.  That movie is out now.  It's entitled Florence Foster Jenkins and stars Meryl Streep as the eponymous prima donna.  Since Florence seems like a perfect patron saint of Illusory Superiority (which is the pop psychology trope I have recently adopted as a feeble excuse for not fulfilling my own lofty career expectations), I was tremendously anxious to see it.  I dragged Leslie off to a local theater last week.   Here's the trailer.

I think the essential point is that Florence Foster Jenkins is a love story.  Bad singing is just the hook.  Florence and her husband, St. Clair Bayfield (played by Hugh Grant) had a non-traditional marriage.  Theirs was clearly a loving supportive relationship.  Co-dependent even.  I ended up rooting for Bayfield to help Florence succeed.

It's a good movie because of the acting.  Streep makes you feel that this might have been what the real Florence was like.  And she mimics Florence's singing exceptionally well.   Grant is perfectly cast.  Simon Helberg, who plays the accompanist Cosme McMoon, escapes his Big Bang Theory persona and holds his own against these two formidable talents, although I found his high voice annoying.  On the other hand it was a pleasure to watch an actor actually playing a piano instead of faking.

I even liked the sound track by Alexandre Desplat - especially the Rota/Fellini-esque cue as the crowd streamed into Carnegie Hall.   The best musical moment, in my opinion, happened just after the scene where Florence and Cosme play a Chopin prelude together.  The scene cuts outside while the music transforms perfectly into the John Kirby arrangement of that same music; sad, mournful and very 40's. 

Another oft-mentioned moment shows Florence singing while we hear her presumably as she heard herself.  It's excellent singing, also sung by Meryl Streep.  Here's where I suspect the common perception of Florence Foster Jenkins goes slightly awry. 

It's been suggested that Florence's hearing was affected by the mercury treatments given for her syphilis.  The movie shows her enjoying Lily Pons' excellent singing.  It's possible that what Florence actually heard when she herself was singing was the same thing she heard when she listened to Lily, both performances would have been scrambled by a maladjusted auditory system.

In my twisted version, we would have heard Lily Pons in concert through Florence's ears rather than hearing Florence through Florence's ears.  And in Florence's ears, Lily Pons would have seemed (to us) just as distorted and out of whack as Florence actually sounds.  Maybe everything sounded different to Florence - her own audio universe.  Florence set her own standard for excellence.  Music sounded like that to her and she loved it.

It would be fascinating to learn the results of whatever audiometric tests Florence might have taken.  (I've not heard of any.)  You can anonymously test your own hearing right online - pitch acuity or tone deafness.  Give it a whirl.

Like most movies Florence Foster Jenkins has a villain - a critic from the New York Post named Earl Wilson, portrayed by actor Christian McKay.  His big line is "Music will not be mocked."  On the other hand, maybe the real villain is any classical music fan, professional critic or not, who is just too serious about this stuff.  (And, I've never understood how newspapers in the 1940's could run reviews of concerts the next morning - while newspapers of today can't.)

If you're interested in the real story behind the movie, here are two good sources I've found.  The first is at a site called History Versus Hollywood.  Also watch this documentary "Florence Foster Jenkins: A World Of Her Own" by Donald Collup.  It's excellent.  I enjoyed all the first person reminiscences about Florence and the real life confirmations of some of the stranger scenes in the movie.

Also don't miss the picture of Cosme McMoon with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In this documentary, starting at about 1'14", several actual reviews of Florence's Carnegie Hall recital are read.  I've transcribed them here:

NEW YORK POST by Earl Wilson  Hey you music lovers, I heard Madame Jenkins.  Mrs. Florence Foster Jenkins, 76, a widow lady of our town, has a great voice.  In fact she can sing anything but notes.  Lady Florence, or Madame Jenkins, as she likes to be called, if you are thinking of her as an artiste, indulged last night in one of the weirdest mass jokes New York has ever seen.  I witnessed it.  She gave a quavering recital at Carnegie Hall on a stage filled with flowers to resemble an expensive mortuary.  She hired the hall.  She filled it with three thousand people with an acute sense of humor who paid about $6000 for the privilege of snickering squealing and guffawing at her singing, which she took very seriously.  

I sat in row T and around me I heard people saying "Shh.  Don't laugh so loud." "Stick something in your mouth."  "We were jackasses for coming."  "She didn't hit three notes in that one."  "Now that one wasn't bad at all."  But Mrs. Jenkins today can brag that she probably packed in more than Lily Pons could.   "Bravo!" roared the playful listeners.  She heard some of them laughing.  It came, she said, from those hoodlums.  Which hoodlums?  The hoodlums planted in the audience by her enemies of course.  When she walked onto the stage in white and with a large white ostrich fan, she looked like a plump apparition.  The mirth exploded when she took her place beside some flowers as big as a small tree.  From all over the house came the laughs - at the wrong time.  "I'm no music expert," Irving Hoffman (who isn't, either) remarked, "She hit only a few notes."  The rest were promissory. 

It was a great show she gave.  Her accompanist, Cosme McMoon, leaped up and kissed her hand in courtly fashion after several numbers. She got herself mixed up flinging some rose petals and singing Clavelitos.  The first one she undertook to throw stuck to the end of her finger.  She kept trying to pitch it off and it was like some one frantically trying to divest oneself of some flypaper.  Even the rose petals were playing.  And, incidentally, she walked away with about four G's last night.  Maybe the joke's on us.  None of us walked away with anything except dizziness, a headache and a ringing in the ears.  

          =-=-=-=

NEW YORK SUN by Chester Thompson -  It was largely a recital without voice.  For the tones Madame Jenkins produced were tiny to the point of disappearing.  Most of her singing was hopelessly lacking in a semblance of pitch.  But the further a note was from its proper elevation, the more the audience laughed and applauded.  And the upper notes, when they could be heard, had an infantile quality.   But the audience always backed up its laughter with thunderous applause and everybody had a pleasant evening.  

          =-=-=-=

WORLD TELEGRAM by Robert Bagar  The quarter tone touch.  Of all the singers appearing before the public today, only Madame Jenkins has perfected the art of giving added zest to a written phrase by improvising it in quarter tones, either above or below the original notes.  Think of the difficulties involved in making this possible.  She was exceedingly happy in her work.   It is a pity that so few artists are, and the happiness was communicated, as if by magic, to her hearers, who were stimulated to the point of audible cheeriness, even joyous laughter and ecstasy by the inimitable singing.  A night of nights in the musical annals of this fair city.    

So, what's the moral of the story?

It would appear that Florence Foster Jenkins was, as so many of us are, a devotee of the magical power of music - there's a strong positive psychic payback for listening, creating or performing music.  She had ample determination and resources to overcome any obstacles to participating in music making.  It was her right to pursue something that made her feel good.

As long as she followed her bliss in private, for her friends, things were okay.   Florence's problems really began when she opened herself to public criticism.  It can be difficult to accept the negative judgements of others.  The public simply does not hear things the same way you do.  Discovering this could kill you.

And yet, decades later, Florence is still fondly remembered.  Her recordings still give us pleasure - much in the same way the audience got pleasure, as reported by these music critics, at Carnegie Hall.  Besides this movie there are books and plays about her.   Despite her naive cluelessness, her alternative musical interpretative style represents a very real, very unique talent.  And that talent has been clearly validated by her audience over the years.  Hers was the power to transmit happiness.  The danger, either for music critic or coloratura soprano, comes when you take yourself just too seriously.

It's not impossible that Florence's fame will continue to grow.  That has happened to other great musicians.  J.S. Bach comes to mind.  The question is not so much what they accomplished during their lifetime but how we, the listeners, regard those accomplishments right now.

the happiness was communicated, as if by magic, to her hearers, who were stimulated to the point of audible cheeriness, even joyous laughter and ecstasy by the inimitable singing.

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Here's a photo of the crowd at Florence's Carnegie Hall recital:

As far as I can tell, this movie actually looks like the 1940s in New York City - in full color yet. Yeah, a few bloopers are listed on IMDB, the biggest being (I think) that parts of the story were compressed into a much shorter time span.  The bustling New York street outside Florence's hotel is actually in Liverpool and who knows how much digital cleanup was required to send the exterior of Carnegie Hall back in time.   Period costumes and technology and set design - all good.   I laughed at Florence's battle with a roll of old-fashioned cello-tape.

In this video Meryl Streep mentions that the she recreated Florence's entire Carnegie Hall recital for a live audience and that it can be found in the extras section of the DVD.  I'm looking forward to that. Also, in the same video Donald Collup talks about Florence's hearing problems, including tinnitus (a ringing in the ears.).

The actors Nina Arianda and Stanley Townsend who played the comic characters Agnes and Phineas Stark, real "New Yawkers", deserve a mention.  The least musically "authentic" scene in the movie - in my opinion - was Florence's singing lesson with vocal coach Carlo Edwards played only for laughs (by actor David Haig).  One wonders if, in real life, anyone ever suggested to Florence that she might want to practice matching pitches.

In this program of Florence's recital, note the name Pascarella Chamber Music Society.  When I was studying at CalArts (in the 70s) there was a gentleman on the faculty named Cesare Pascarella.  He and his brothers apparently performed quartets while Florence changed costumes.  I guess those of us who knew Cesare were only one handshake away from Florence herself.

You can see other pictures of Florence here

Worst Sounding Clarinet Playing Ever

Long ago, SO long ago that I don't remember when or where it happened, someone told me that the most important thing about getting my music or performances reviewed was not whether the comments were good or bad, but whether my name was spelled correctly.

For twenty years I was a freelance clarinetist around Los Angeles, mostly playing chamber music and creative music gigs (meaning my own recitals and improvisations.)  Contractors in Los Angeles all seemed to agree that I was not the sort of player they wanted in their orchestras or studio sessions.  Their logic was sound.  I was more interested in the creative aspects of my instrument than in the re-creative.  The reviews I did get were usually positive and my name was always spelled properly.

The highpoint of my career as a clarinetist, as many readers of Mixed Meters will know, was playing Frank Zappa's Mo 'n Herb's Vacation with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Early in the 1990s it dawned on me that I wasn't getting much pleasure from the keyed beast any longer and it certainly wasn't contributing to my income.  I decided to give up playing the clarinet.  I've never regretted the decision.

The last time I played the clarinet in public was nineteen years ago today - April 15, 1994. when Xtet, the flexible chamber ensemble which I helped found, performed a South Bay Chamber Music Society concert at Harbor College.  The last piece on the program, hence the last piece I ever performed, was Aaron Copland's Sextet.  (Full program is here, scroll down.)

In spite of nearly two decades of being a "former" clarinetist, it's not uncommon for me to meet people who think I still play.  It's happened twice this month already.  Last fall a well-known musician of my acquaintance reminded me of a concert he had conducted in the early 80s for which I was NOT hired to play the bass clarinet although I apparently had been requested.  He told me that the performance back then would have been better had I been performing.  I scratched my head wondering why anyone would remember a detail like that after half a lifetime.

Anyway, this post is really about Mo 'n Herb's Vacation.  It's not Frank's greatest piece of music by far.  It isn't really a clarinet concerto and has never been advertised as one.  It simply has several sections of blindingly difficult music for the first clarinetist.  And there is also blindingly difficult music for the other three clarinetists - just not quite so much.   Frank was never terribly happy with the LSO recordings and he spent lots of time trying to fix them.  I doubt he improved them much.

Here's a recording which someone posted to YouTube, not of a performance but of a test recording done in Frank's studio before the London concert and recordings.  All four clarinets are me.  The bassoons are performed by John Steinmetz and Chad Wackerman is the drummer.

It was my impression that I was the only clarinetist who had ever performed this music.  But yesterday I learned that there had been another performance in 2005 in Venice Italy.  I'm anxious to hear that recording.

As I perused the web for information about this other Mo 'n Herb, I came across a 2007 discussion of the piece on Sherman Friedland's Clarinet Corner blog.  I had never heard of Sherman Friedland.  Apparently he was a clarinetist and pedagogue and professor at Concordia College in Canada, now retired to a life of blogging.

Sherman starts by saying some negative things about Frank and his music.  But at the end of the post he gets around to me.  Wow!

Of the work for solo clarinet and orchestra, called “MOE [sic] n Herbs Vacation” and played by David Ocker, solo clarinet, I can only say that is is the worst sounding clarinet playing I have ever witnessed, not being able to say “heard”.

So, to the young person who wrote and asked me what I think, I can only reply “very sadly”.

I wonder what an English teacher would think of Sherman's syntax.  How does one "witness" a piece of music without hearing it?  Fuzzy grammar or not, it's clear what he thinks.

This guy has a lifetime of clarinet experience.  For him to say that my playing is "the worst sounding clarinet playing" he ever heard is certainly intended as a major put down.  Since I played Frank's music accurately, we can assume that Sherman's complaints are about something else, my tone or my style or my enthusiasm or about some other subjective issue of how he thinks the clarinet is supposed to sound.

On that level I can take some pride in Sherm's defamation.  At a certain point in my clarinet studies I made the conscious decision that I would not imitate conventional clarinet playing, meaning the standard, omnipresent, wimpy, unadventurous, never-use-vibrato playing style produced by so many classical clarinetists.  Colleges and clarinet teachers, such as Sherman, must still be turning those clones out in exceedingly large numbers.  All of them hoping, no doubt, to score an orchestra job.  Any of them interchangeable with the others.  None of them the slightest bit distinguishable by their sound.

I listened to samples of Sherman's own playing on the web.  He seems to fit the mold himself.  I also found a short New York Times review of his recital at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1986.

Mr. Friedland is a competent player and seemed sincerely in love with his material. Still, one could have wished for a sharper technical edge in the Bernstein and the fulsome tone that might have invested Berg and Reger with more vivid colors.

Sherman would have gotten more notoriety from his performance if the reviewer had said "this is the worst clarinet playing I've ever heard".  People remember when something is described as the "worst ever".  "Competent"?  Could that be another word for tepid?

When I played I tried to make the clarinet something more than mono-timbral, to play with a variety of tone colors and styles and attitudes, the very thing, the fulsome tone, which the New York Times found lacking in Sherman's recital.  I wasn't always successful in my goal of aural variety but always I gave it my best shot.  Sherman, apparently, doesn't think along those lines and disparages those who do.

Sherman's comment makes me wonder if he often blogs his mouth off without thinking, like some sort of online jerk.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  More likely he's just someone with an exceptionally well-defined unchangeable set of musical assumptions which he has trouble stretching to account for the myriad varieties of other music in this world.

All in all, I would rather not have had my playing, even a 30-year old performance, called "the worst sounding clarinet playing I have ever witnessed" by anyone.  But, considering the ivory tower source of the remark, I'm happy to wear this comment proudly.

Plus, I do thank him for spelling my name right.

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Here's a picture of Sherman Friedland in March 1965, part of a group performing György Ligeti's Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes, when he was a member of Lukas Foss's Center for Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo.   I found this in the book by Renee Levine Parker, This Life of Sounds. Evenings for New Music in Buffalo. (available as a pdf)

Other reading: Two Marks of Good Music Criticism  - a 2007 Mixed Meters article about music critics, including a full review of my New Music America recital by Mark Swed.  Here's a quote:

Ocker, as both a performer and composer, brings to music the kind of personal quality that most professional musicians have had trained out of them.

A number of my historical clarinet performances are available for listening here.

Here's a photo taken in Zappa's studio the same day the overdub recordings were made - plus discussion about whether it's a real photo or not.  (It is.)  I'm the one with both beard and clarinet, on the right.

In the Clarinet Corner blog posting, the "young person who wrote and asked me what I think" named Martin, is this person.

If you click the Xtet flyer picture, it should enlarge enough for you to read the press quotes which the ensemble received.  Xpect Xpuns.

Yeah, I'm living in the past. I can think of worse places to be.

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ADDENDUM: I thank everyone for their comments.  More discussion of this topic happened on Facebook.

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Worst Ever Tags: music reviews. . . nasty blog comments. . . David Ocker clarinetist

Ten Most Influential Classical Composers

A New York Times music critic is spending his time picking the "ten top Classical composers of all time."  He's seeking the "greatest" composers.  The essential criterion will be, I suppose, the opinions of classical audiences.  After all, composers become great because people keep listening to their music. 

This idea got me thinking about which classical composers have the most influence on living composers.   When living composers are lucky enough to get performed they often must share the bill with the honored dead ones.  Those dead composers bring us musical ideas from the past.  Some of those ideas, but not all, still have life to them. Presumably living composers are commenting, in some fashion, on what has come before.

I suspect there are plenty of contemporary composers like myself who were inspired to take up the craft by the musical classics.  Most likely we still feel the weight of that tradition, along with other influences, when we sit down to write.  This is true even if we are not as interested in classical music now as we once may have been. 

Please note that the reasons I'm about to give for including these particular names won't seem particularly positive.  Regular readers of Mixed Meters will not be too surprised by this.  If you happen to be a composer (and who isn't) I'm sure your opinions will differ.  If you're not a composer, this might make no sense at all.  There's a comment form where good natured responses will be published.

Here's my list.  The links all lead to earlier Mixed Meters articles.

Johann Sebastian Bach   Finding a balance between beauty and technique, between inspiration and academicism is always an issue for composers.  It's a matter of simplicity versus complexity, freedom versus control.  Bach used dry, complicated musical rules and produced perfect elegance with them.  It's an unattainable standard.  How depressing.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart  Yes, he wrote some of the greatest pieces ever.  He's possibly my favorite composer.  But the real burden of Mozart for modern composers is that he was so blasted young.  The cult of the young genius lives on strongly.  These days a 30-year old composer who hasn't made it yet, won't.  We may well ask whatever happened to Jay Greenberg (who isn't even 20 yet.)
x

Ludwig van Beethoven He wrote some great music.  But he did two things wrong.  First, he invented the tormented composer, the Great Artiste who pours out his stormy inner life through music.  These days that idea seems really old.   Second, he went deaf - which by rights ought to be a compositional kiss of death - but Ludwig wouldn't stop writing.  Worse yet, once deaf, he wrote an unendurably grandiose symphony with one hummable tune and a few lyrics of desperate hope.  Modern audiences still can't get enough of that one.  How's a modern composer going to compete?

Richard Wagner  Mixed Meters has been bashing Wagner for over a year now.  He deserves it for the villainous political ideas which have so easily shackled themselves to his work.  But his musical innovations, possibly the most influential ever, still cloud contemporary music.  And the vast scope of some of his works, especially the Ring, ought to provoke us into keeping our music on a more human scale.     

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky  Maybe a surprising choice.  He's never been one of my favorites, but he has symphonies, concertos and ballets that audiences can't get enough of.  It's not just about shooting off canons.  I think it's about his melodies.  Contemporary composers don't seem to write melodies.  We might have lost the ability.  More likely, however, we know that if we try to compose hummable tunes, the audience will reject them in favor of ones they already know and love.

Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel  These two count as one.  (They both wrote the same string quartet.)  Audiences have come to love their lush sound worlds.  Some contemporary orchestra composers  have recognized that they can't go far wrong by imitating the colors and textures of Impressionism.  In other words, when a new piece restricts itself to musical techniques at least 100 years old, ones that Ravel and Debussy would have understood, the audiences will go home happy.  

Arnold Schoenberg Audiences still revile Schoenberg's music.  I don't blame them.  But as the spirtual inspiration behind the serial tradition and the technique of pre-composition and the emancipation of the dissonance and the notion of "composer as professor", he's still a potent nagging voice inside any composer's head.  Also, it never hurts to reflect on how Schoenberg's career (but not his influence) was ruined by the politics of his countrymen.

George Gershwin Along with Sondheim and Ellington, Gershwin was specifically disqualified from the New York Times ten greatest competition.  While the first two don't seem like classical composers to me, George most certainly does.  Think about the popularity of his rhapsody, his concerto and his opera in concert halls.  This popularity manifests itself in ever so many pleasantly upbeat Pops concerts.  The notion of harnessing vernacular music to make a serious piece more accessible is very alluring to any composer.

John Cage His music is a long long way from the standard repertory.  Infinitely far away.  He has absolutely no chance of getting on the New York Times list.  But a serious composer has to come to terms with Cage's ideas.  And that's what his music was about: ideas.  Ideas and not much else - in my opinion.  A decent composer's education should fry the brain with Cagian philosophy.  After that you can ignore him, but he won't really go away.

Philip Glass  He's also disqualified from the Times list because he's still alive.  But I think many other composers look at him with a combination of awe and disgust.  Awe because he's so successful - with a steady string of commissions for symphonies, operas and film scores.  Disgust because we can't find a simple compositional style of our own, the way he has, one that's both direct and elegant and will bring some of our own listeners into the concert hall so we don't have to worry so much about what the Beethoven and Tchaikovsky fans think.

Don't be fooled into the notion that the great classical composers are the only influences on us lesser lights.  There are hundreds of semi-greats who can also look over a composer's shoulder if we let them.  Composition is an old art, highly developed.  There have been countless branches and offshoots.  The heavy weight of this past can be stifling if it is taken too seriously.

And any half-way decent composer is also influenced by many other types of music besides classical.  But this article was inspired by a purely "classical music" project - a futile effort to quantitatively rank composers on what must be, in the end, purely subjective judgements.  To me it sounds like a fools errand.

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ADDENDUM:

Due to multiple comments I'm adding a bonus selection, a runner up.

Igor Stravinsky  He made it clear that staying current and staying famous is the most important thing for a composer.  During his career he was three different composers,  radically changing his musical style twice, both times taking ideas from others.  It would have been a gracious gesture on his part to adopt serialism before his neighbor Schoenberg died.   But had he been a really nice guy he would have stopped composing in the 1920s and given two other composers a chance to be famous in his place.

Ten Greatest Tags: ten best lists. . . greatest classical composers. . . Anthony Tommasini

Wagner Invades Poland

I've recently read a few descriptions of the music of Richard Wagner which struck me as true. Although these were not actually intended as arguments against Wagner's music, I think they work pretty well in that regard as well.

First is one of several reviews of L.A. Opera's Ring cycle by L.A. Times music critic Mark Swed. The title of this one is Mission Accomplished: L.A. Opera's 'Ring'. 

"Mission Accomplished" itself is arguable.  While the Opera's mission of producing a complete Ring was obviously accomplished, their goal, as stated in an early press release, of creating "a defining moment in the cultural history of Los Angeles" was not.  Los Angeles is no more of a Wagner opera town post-Ring than it was before.

Anyway, here are the first two paragraphs of Swed's review:

Sunday, midnight, Los Angeles Ordinance No. 181069, which is meant to close down numerous medical marijuana dispensaries around town, went into effect. No police, however, needed summoning to the Music Center. Los Angeles Opera shooed away its regulars by 11. Nine days earlier, the company had begun dispensing a drug with the street name of the "Ring" (short for its pharmaceutical appellation, "Der Ring des Nibelungen").

This opiate, invented in the 19th century by one Richard Wagner, is not, strictly speaking, a chemical substance. But it operates on the central nervous system like any other narcotic, altering perception, consciousness and sense of time. And, yes, it is highly addictive.

The comparison of Wagner's Ring to an opiate is apt.  Morphine and codeine are opiates you might have heard of; both are carefully controlled substances, dangerous in the wrong hands.

I've recently watched the effect of morphine on two terminally ill patients.  Although they seemed to feel no pain under its effect, it was not pleasant to observe them as they struggled to breathe their last breaths.  We wondered what dreams could penetrate such a drug haze.  From the objective external evidence it was difficult to convince ourselves that the drug had put these dear people into the pleasant, quiet reverie we wished for them.  It would be easier to imagine those drugged dreams came with a churning Wagnerian sound track.

Judging by stories of Ringnuts who attend uncountable numbers of Ring productions, Richard Wagner's Ring does seem to be "highly addictive".  Maybe the government should consider protecting its citizens from such a dangerous substance.

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The Times theater critic Charles McNulty reviewed the Ring as well.  One of his articles was entitled Critic's Notebook: Götterdämmerung’ -- twilight of a hypnotic spectacle.  Here's his first sentence:

The end of the first complete cycle of Achim Freyer’s staging of the “Ring” for the Los Angeles Opera left me simultaneously energized and exhausted late Sunday night, as though I had just undergone intense hours of dreaming without the restorative benefit of sleep.

I wonder about the phrase "without the restorative benefit of sleep".   It makes me think that listening to this Ring was not an entirely pleasant experience for him and that he found himself uncontrollably and unpleasurably bouncing off the walls.

I do think the word "hypnotic" is revealing.  Hypnotism is a state of mind in which a subject is made to strongly focus on outside suggestions.  These suggestions might overwhelm their own  natural protective inhibitions.  Some people are more susceptible than others.  I've always felt that those who enjoy immersion in Wagner's music must be very accepting of his constant stressful flow of suggestive musical tensions and emotions.  Who knows what crazy ideas might come to mind from Wagner's unrelenting stream of innuendo.

I'm reminded of Woody Allen's hysterically immortal line:

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

I'm now going to explain this joke in detail because I suspect some people take Wagner far too seriously to appreciate its humor.

You must first remember that Hitler, who was more strongly influenced by Wagner than any other evil military dictator in history, actually did conquer Poland, committing the most unspeakable atrocities along the way.  But Woody Allen is not Hitler.  He's the poster boy for underweight, meek neurotics everywhere and Jewish to boot.  It's completely impossible for him to invade Poland.  Like the Pope, Woody has no divisions. 

His absurd suggestion that he too might try to overrun Poland simply because he had heard too much Wagner creates a tension in the mind of a person who hears the joke.  Woody juxtaposes the silly with the horrific.  Many people find this jarring - and they spasm involuntarily in response. That strange human spasmodic behavior is called laughter.  Things which produce laughter are called funny, hence this joke is funny.  But it has a tinge of human suffering and catastrophe about it as well.  Laughter seems like a callous response.

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I recently found a Facebook page named loosely after Woody's joke.  It's called When I Listen To Wagner, I Get The Sudden Urge To Conquer Poland  It's a public page which anyone can visit - but few people have left comments and as of this writing the last activity was eight months ago. 

There are a number of droll suggestions about using the joke as a motto for German language clubs in high schools.  And several people mention how they use Wagner's only authentic cultural meme, The Ride of the Valkyries, as a highly amplified inspirational soundtrack for driving dangerously.

But one quote struck me as unintentionally revealing of the true nature of the music of Richard Wagner.  In September 2007 someone named Nick Jacobs wrote:

I conducted selections from Der Ring des Nibelungen last semester at my college...you have no idea that power trip I was on at the time. It was wonderful.

A wonderful power trip from conducting Wagner?  Obviously conducting Wagner is an experience I'll never have, but Nick's comment seems quite revealing and believable.  Anyone could test this idea by turning up the volume on a recording of the Ring and pantomiming conductors patterning in front of the speakers.  It must be dangerously thrilling to control such a stream of powerful energy.  I bet James Conlon would understand completely.

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To review:

• Wagner has been described as an opiate.  
• Wagner is revealed as a source of hypnotic suggestions.  
• Wagner sends orchestra conductors on a power trip.  

All these notions fit with my own impressions of the music.  None of them would ever make me think producing Wagner's Ring is good for Los Angeles.  Or even that listening to Wagner's Ring is a positive thing to do.

In my wildest imagination Wagner would be regulated.  You would not be allowed access to Wagner without a prescription from a pyschiatrist and a clearance from a Doctor of Music.  Wagner recordings would be locked up behind the counter in record stores (if any record stores survive).  There would be an age limit like for attending certain movies.

None of this is likely to happen because no one pays attention to what I think.  But if they did, I'm sure the people of Poland would be eternally grateful.


Opiated Tags: Richard Wagner. . . Ring of the Nibelungs. . . drugs. . . opiates. . . hypnotism. . . Ring Festival LA. . . LA Opera

Everybody Loves Beethoven (Probably)

Timothy Mangan, the last full-time newspaper music critic in O.C., has a blog. (which is not true of the last full-time newspaper music critic in L.A.)

Tim posted an excerpt written by H.L. Mencken at the time of the Scopes Trial, 1925. It's about Beethoven. Go read it now: Beethoven and the Scopes Trial. Reading it is important because Tim's bosses probably peg his salary to how many hits his blog gets.

The excerpt really pushed my buttons. It smacks of vile cultural elitism coated with that sickeningly childish Beethoven worship which I hate so much. It made me want to rant.


Of course it's entirely possible that Mencken has his tongue firmly in his cheek. How am I to be sure - with no smiley faces in the text?

It starts out like one of those "There are two kinds of people..." jokes. For example: "There are three kinds of people - those who understand math and those who don't." Warning: certain mathematical concepts will be abused in this post.


Here's an excerpt from Mencken's excerpt:

The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only ... That is why Beethoven survives. Of the 110,000,000 so-called human beings who now live in the United States ... it is probable that at least 108,000,000 have never heard of him at all.

I have no clue how many people in the US in 1925 had actually heard of Beethoven. Neither did Mencken. He was making up his facts ("it is probable"). That's an old journalistic tradition now preserved mainly by us bloggers. These days real journalists are into "fact checking". (Quick, name the capital city of Mongolia. )

Let's take Mencken at his word and stipulate that in 1925 about two percent of Americans actually knew who Beethoven was and the rest would have lynched him in the street for the crime of being meaningful and for coming back from the dead.


But times have changed. Allowing for the three-fold increase in U.S. population, no one could claim in 2008 that only 6 million Americans have ever heard of Beethoven. Any other composer (except Mozart), maybe, but not Beethoven.

I wanted to shout back at the excerpt: "Hey, H.L. Now-a-days, thanks to our limited choices of infotainment conglomerates, the U.S. is homogenized pretty thoroughly. We've all heard of the same stuff - including Beethoven."


We here at Mixed Meters set out to prove the point that everybody knows Beethoven by conducting a poll. The sample was small (9 responses) but the results prove the hypothesis so why bother going on. (Call that going, call that on.)

METHODOLOGY: I told each person that I had a question and asked for the first answer that popped into their head. No thinking, please. The question was: "Name a classical composer." (Not really a question, but hey.)

DATA: Here are the answers listed in descending frequency together with the first names of the respondents:

• Beethoven (Kevin, Sean, Claudia and Tom)
• Mozart (Rose and Lucy)
• Bach (Sandra)
• Brahms (Kristina)
• Takemitsu (Daniel)

Most of the answers were immediate, almost joyful. The exception was Claudia, secretary at an auto repair shop, who needed nearly a minute of her deepest cogitation before she came up with an answer, any answer (which she mispronounced.) But she knew "Beethoven".

Daniel's unexpected answer stems from the fact that he's a professional composer, the only trained musician in the sample. He cheated by thinking for several seconds before answering.

My poll has a probable margin of error of 25%. Remember: the "probable" - like Mencken I make up facts too. Please attempt to reproduce my results with polls of your own and post the probable results as comments below.


CONCLUSION: Forty-four percent of all Americans think of Beethoven first when they consider classical composers. If the question instead had been "Who is Beethoven?" my poll would have shown name recognition of 100% or more. That's because anyone who knows of Bach, Mozart, Brahms or Takemitsu probably knows of Beethoven too.


Poor Ludwig is now a cultural icon considerably separate from the appreciation of his music. Beethoven, who could still write music even after he went deaf. Beethoven, who overcame insurmountable obstacles. The Beethoven of Disney movies, disco hits, dog movies, strange rock band names and the John Thompson arrangement of Ode to Joy, among others.

We have made Beethoven's life's lemonade into a cultural kool-aid so diluted that everyone has tasted it but no one need be affected by it. The more diluted he becomes the less meaningful he gets. If people don't know why Beethoven is famous, they still know that he IS famous. Famous for being famous. Zsa Zsa Gabor.


Mencken goes on to tell us what would happen if the 1925 unwashed did take notice of our hero composer. He doesn't even say "probably".

If [Beethoven's music] could be brought within range, it would at once arouse hostility. Its complexity would challenge; its lace of moral purpose would affright. Soon there would be a movement to put it down, and Baptist clergymen would range the land denouncing it, and in the end some poor musician, taken in the un-American act of playing it, would be put on trial before a jury of Ku Kluxers, and railroaded to the calaboose.

Okay, I get it now. Beethoven is really a stalking horse for Mencken's real target - the anti-teaching-of-evolution crowd. He wants to show us how stupid those people really are by telling us about the bonehead stunts they would pull if they catch up with the poor unsuspecting Ludwig.

How much have things changed since 1925?

Suppose that in 2008 a teacher were arrested somewhere in America, just as John Scopes was in 1925, for telling his class about evolution. Could it happen? Would you be surprised? I wouldn't. The battle over teaching the idea of evolution continues to this day.

Could a contemporary journalist attack the opinions held by creationists (or neo-cons or right-to-lifers or some other deserving group) by describing their probably hateful retribution on a ... composer? A composer of music? I doubt it. A blogger might try it, but not a real journalist.

Which composer's villification at the hands of the cretinous masses would arouse the most sympathy among us - the good people? Copland? Carter? Leiber and Stoller? Keith Burstein? Richard Thomas? In the wildest journalistic imagination could any composer be plausibly turned into the next Andres Serrano or Robert Mapplethorpe?

In a word, no. That is because it is probable that 98% of all Americans these days don't know any contemporary composers at all, and if they did - unlike in Mencken's hypothesis - their reaction to finding out about them would be the shrugging of shoulders and the changing of channels.


And what of Poor Beethoven in all this? Suppose he did come back from the dead, hearing restored, to observe the holy adulations he so regularly receives. What would he think of his universal name recognition? Would be giggle nervously when asked about Immortal Beloved? I don't know.

But it is probable that if he actually listened (for the first time ever) to a performance of his own Ninth Symphony he would say "That's awful. I must completely rewrite it."


=-=-=-=-=-

The picture of John Belushi as Beethoven channeling Ray Charles on Saturday Night Live comes from here.

The Beethoven figurine picture comes from here.

The picture of Beethoven's skull comes from here.

The picture of John Cleese as Beethoven comes from here which also has a story about how poor Ludwig might have died. The script to Beethoven's Mynah Bird, a sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus, is here.

The Beethoven action figure pictures come from here and here.

The picture of Beethoven's ear trumpets comes from here.

I took the pictures of the Ludwig sticker (which looks like Johnny Depp) on the traffic box in Civic Center, downtown Los Angeles.

Click any picture for an enlargement.

H.L. Tags: Mencken. . . Beethoven. . . Scopes Trial

30 Second Spot - Ojai Music Festival - Important Outdoor Concert

Weeks ago I got an email from the Ojai Music Festival inviting me to "Bloggers Night" on June fifth. The invitation didn't actually make it clear that I was being offered a free ticket but it did stress that this event was in honor of music critic Alan Rich's new blog.

Mixed Meters has ragged on both Alan and the festival in the past. You might want to read my posts: In Which Wealth Has Its Privileges and Rich Critic, Poor Critic. I would like you to read them.

The invitation touted before and after concert receptions and a "special bloggers section with wireless capabilities". How cool is that? We bloggers could instantly report on every wrong note as it happens.


Mixed Meters announces rather prominently (at the top of "Hey Over Here on the Left") that "This is not a music blog" but it does not stress that Mr. Mixed Meters (that's me by another name) does not fancy himself a music critic. I do like to quote silly things critics write. But that's different.

Mr. Meters does fancy myself a sort of composer - actually a "failed composer" - but still a composer, you know a person who creates music. And he/I believes that his/my time is better expended actually creating music than attending concerts especially those which portend long drives, bad acoustics and music of low interest to me or low relevance to my actual career (as a music copyist/engraver/editor).

In other words, a year from now (and forever after until my memory forgets), I will consider the evening of June 5, 2008 better spent writing one minute of my own music than attending Bloggers Night at the Ojai Festival. I've done this sort of thing before: read this and that.

So ... instead of attending Bloggers Night, I hiked up to my local Starbucks, laptop in messenger bag, and composed music. I entitled the piece "Ojai Music Festival - Important Outdoor Concert". Musically it has nothing to do with the music presented in Ojai. Or the Ojai Festival. Or anything really. I enjoyed writing it. People kept interrupting me to talk about music.

"Ojai Music Festival - Important Outdoor Concert" (c) June 5, 2008 by David Ocker, 67 seconds.

Let me explain the word "important" in the title. It refers to my Theory of Musical Importance. A composer gains a bit of Importance from each commission, performance, recording, prize, award, news article, interview etc.

A composer's pieces are programmed because of the composer's importance not their talent. (Okay, if your blood pressure just soared reading this please go read the MM post which includes my musical manifesto and Flight of the Rhino. Whatever that means.)


Here in Southern California the Ojai Festival is now second only to the LA Philharmonic in its ability to award importance to composers or reward them with increased importance. Until recently Ojai probably was neck and neck with the Monday Evening Concerts for second place. (I believe both Ojai and MEC have a common origin in the person of Lawrence Morton - and possibly others.)

Read Lawrence Morton's obituary at the NY Times.

Read about 30 Second Spots.

The picture of Libby Bowl comes from Gamma Infinity.

Oh ... one more thing:

Dear Ojai Music Festival -
Thanks for the invitation. I can't make it that night. I've got other things to do.
David.

Post Script: Here's a link to a blog post about this very concert at Ojai by Brian of Out West Arts (an opera blog). He must have gotten the same invite I did. Brian also talks about importance - but of blogs not of composers. Unlikely that he reads MM.

Important Tags: musical importance. . . Ojai Music Festival. . . Bloggers Night. . . Alan Rich. . . music critic. . . Steve+Reich. . . 30 Second Spots. . . David Ocker

The Second Second Story Series - Concert Four

(This is the 5th article in a series. Skip back to the first article here.)

As a society we decide what pieces of music will become "classics". Most so-called Classical Music was chosen by people long dead but we living humans get to sneak new pieces into the canon occasionally.

These days one of the pieces we the people are making "classical" is Terry Riley's In C - an orchestra piece of utter simplicity and massive power. It speaks to us of musical patterns and formal structures, it hints at changes in social relationships and organizational hierarchies. There ought to be no podia in In C. Every performer in In C has to be creative. It marks the passage of time (about the only thing every single piece of music does one way or another) in a way no other piece ever had before. Written in 1964, it is clearly one of the most talented children of the sixties.

On May 28, 1978, (30 years ago today) In C was the centerpiece of the final concert of the Second Second Story Series. Without it the entire series would have merited little attention back then - and even less now. But the energy generated by this one performance became a kind of landmark for the ICA, an inspiration in seasons to come. It was the sort of success every beginning arts organization needs.

Here is a portrait of Terry Riley taken by Robert Jacobs back in 1978. At the end of this post is a picture of Terry today and some links to information about him and his music.


SECOND SECOND STORY SERIES PROMOTION ARTICLE

In C was already well known by 1978. It had been released on a Columbia album - which had been a personal inspiration and refuge for me in my graduate student years at the Herb Alpert School of Music, a musical relief that I might listen to twice or three times after many a hard day studying ugly comtemporary music. But In C had had few performances in Los Angeles (actually none that I'm aware of).

We tried to get as much publicity for our concert as we could. I ran across a promotional article that I had saved from a magazine called Neworld (about which I remember nothing). This article ran prior to the entire series. It was written by Jo Ann Smith. Here's a quote describing the plight of independent composers:

...it is difficult for composers to get their work performed. Especially if they are young and unknown. (Perhaps if they were very young - twelve or thirteen - it would be different. Audiences tend to put up with a lot of nonsense from pre-pubescent musicians.) The ways around this are not legion. You can have your parents buy you an orchestra; you can stay in school forever, being performed on the obligatory student composer concerts and heard by practically nobody; you can threaten to hold your breath until Zubin Mehta agrees to perform your piece; or you can organize and try for a frontal assault.

Click here to read the entire article about the Independent Composers Association written by Jo Ann Smith in Neworld 1978, No.2


SECOND SECOND STORY SERIES RADIO INTERVIEW

I also discovered an aircheck of a regular Saturday night KPFK radio show called Zymurgy. It was hosted by Carl Stone and Leni Isaacs (now Leni Boorstin, an important honcho of the Los Angeles Philharmonic). The night before the In C concert the guests on Zymurgy were Anna Rubin, Robert Jacobs and myself, "Dave" Ocker. We sounded very young and earnest. I've extracted a few quotes from the interview down below somewhere.

I've uploaded the show as an MP3. I probably made this tape myself using some sort of automatic timer to record off the air onto two crappy cassettes. I've cut all the music selections down to one minute or less. The recording quality was not good enough for music. The two hour show lasts about 50 minutes, including a commercial for a strident Helen Caldicott in a futile effort to speak truth to power at the end.

The musical snippets will give you a vague idea of the diversity of music on this series - with the emphasis on "vague". As this is the only Second Second Story Series audio document which I'll be posting to Mixed Meters you'll just have to make do with vagueness.

Click here to listen to Leni Isaacs Boorstin interview Anna Rubin, Robert Jacobs and David Ocker on KPFK radio Zymurgy program, May 27, 1978.



SECOND SECOND STORY SERIES PRINT REVIEWS

The final concert received four separate print reviews. The most amazing was by the late Daniel Cariaga of the Los Angeles Times. I once heard Ara Guzelimian (who now rules much of the music world somewhere in New York City) express amazement at Danny's "revelation" at this concert. Recently Mark Swed recalled watching Danny sitting Buddha-like under a statue of the Buddha during In C. Wish I had a picture of that.

Danny wrote:

Under half-dimmed lights in a second-story yoga classroom, between a Safeway and a Baskin Robbins, this extraordinay event took place. To one observer, the impressive closing of a second series cosponsored by the Independent Composers Assn. and Larchmont Center (the yogic connection) cause regret that earlier visits to an obviously enterprising impressarial entity had not been made. Clearly, ICA is making some things happen.

Read the entire review by Daniel Cariaga "ICA Series Ends with Riley's 'In C'", Los Angeles Times, May 31, 1978

Read Mixed Meters obituary of Danny Cariaga here (including the story about the second ICA concert Danny attended.)


Mark Swed, the current Martin Bernheimer of the Los Angeles Times' music criticism department, also covered the concert for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, now the perfect example of a second newspaper in a large city. Mark is a long-time Terry Riley fan. Here's part of what he wrote:

For the first time in recent memory, there was a real sense of occasion at a new music concert. The Independent Composers' Association pulled off this minor coup in the unlikely but pleasant Larchmont Center for Yoga at the final concert of their second season Sunday night. The uncommonly large and excited crowd came for a rare local appearance by Terry Riley, who led a performance of his "In C."

Read the entire review by Mark Swed "A rare taste of Terry Riley 'In C'", Los Angeles Herald Examiner, May 30, 1978


Even more amazing to a an old new-musician with a bad attitude (such as myself) 30 years afterwards, this concert was reviewed by a newspaper from Long Beach, California, a large suburb of Los Angeles. Someone named Bill Arthur wrote:

I saw that the '60s never ended, and in fact began a creative musical tradition, at a concert put on by a group of young musicians called the Independent Composers Association in Los Angeles Sunday night. That the program took place in the Larchmont Center for Yoga suggest how the avant-garde (this part, at least) has matured beyond the need to be outrageous. Despite the outrageous heat, the young, hip listeners (some with infants in arm) displayed as serious musical concerns as the very committed musicians.

Read the entire article by Bill Arthur, "Independent Composers performs in Los Angeles", May 30, 1978, in the Long Beach Independent and Press-Telegram (a newspaper with both morning and evening editions).


Months later a magazine called Synapse published this review by Colin Gardner. It was entitled "Terry Riley, In C".

This particular performance was something of a revelation. The excellence of the musicianship was aided by the receptive condition of the audience, our sensual perception having been heightened by the incredibly hot evening and the absense of air conditioning in the hall. Most people were beginning to feel groggy by the beginning of In C and the perpetual pounding rhythm of the pulse and repetitive overlays of the 53 figures produced an intense experience as if being pounded into submission all the more effectively to appreciate the nuances of the orchestration. One's mind drifted into a dreamlike state for long periods, overwhelmed by the totality of the piece while at other times on could concentrate on the rhythm or on each indivicual instrument. In C is not an electronic piece, yet it somehow seems electronic, conjuring up the electronic pulses of the German sequencer-dominated music of Hoenig Schulze and Tangerine Dream.

As you can tell, Colin was writing for a different type of reader than the three newspaper critics. You can read Synapse back issues here.


SOME QUOTES AND THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ICA

Being exposed to my 30-years-ago self is a bit of a shock. But a few things said in the KPFK interview got me thinking.

Leni asks us several times whether the members of the ICA have any artistic discussions among ourselves or musical influences on one another. I suppose she was thinking that a group of composers might have some artistic commonality or requirement, possibly even a specific manifesto.

Question: "Do you find that you have to have any common agreements of new music?". Anna replies:

My experience of the group is that what seems to bind us together is the desire to produce our music, to put our music out. And we have endless informal discussions on aesthetics and whatever, but it hasn't had to be a part of our formal process. We haven't had to battle out a lot around new music.

Leni asked each of us "What has been the biggest change in your compositions?" Here's my answer:

I learned to be dissonant, I think. I started off with a fairly melodic, harmonic idea, conventional thoughts about music. Gradually learned that there were really no rules.

At another point I said:

It's in the nature of independent composers to be obscure.

Now, 30 years on, many of us have found ways to continue composing somehow or at least we've found ways to wish we had more time to start composing again. A few have become composition teachers - thereby, to my mind, losing their "independent composer" status.

We are all still really good at being obscure. And we now live in a musical world where "no rules" is even more "the rule" than it seemed to be in 1978. In other words, things haven't changed much.

And I gather that, these days, composers 30 years younger than I am are still thinking they might form ICA-like groups. The purpose now, as then, would be "to produce our music, to put our music out" (as Anna said.) My advice - "Guys, don't expect to lose your obscurity. That will just make you frustrated and unhappy." (Read an earlier Mixed Meters rant on this subject.) (Be sure to read the wonderful comments.)

I'm not sure I can remember any more why we expended all that energy to create concerts of new music. There must have been lots of hopes and dreams and ego and a sort of criminal naivete about the place of modern music in society. But in spite of all that I am completely sure that I'm glad I did it.

By the way, these quotes from the radio show have a large number of "uhs" and "ums" edited out. You're welcome.

TERRY RILEY LINKS


Terry's Homepage terryriley.com

Terry Riley entry on Wikipedia (source of the recent photo)

In C entry on Wikipedia

Download the score and instructions to In C from Other Minds
(there were no written instructions in 1978, just one page of music and a performance tradition passed verbally.)

Read about In C, Chinese Version

You can download a free long version of In C here (recommended, but there's no info on who's performing. after a few minutes research I can tell you that bad performances of In C are easy to find on the Internet)

Buy a copy of the original In C LP

Terry recently gave a solo organ recital in Walt Disney Hall. For a few days you can read Mark Swed's review here for free. Predictably, Mark liked it.

Read all Mixed Meters posts about The Second Second Story Series here.

Read all Mixed Meters posts about the Independent Composers Association (including the S.S.S.S) here.

Only the first picture (Robert Jacob's picture of Terry Riley) was taken the day of the In C concert. Click on any picture for an enlargement. The other pictures were taken by "we don't remember who". Special thanks to that person.

In C Tags: Independent Composers Association. . . ICA. . . concert series. . . composers association. . . new music. . . Center For Yoga. . . In C. . . Terry Riley. . . second story. . . Daniel Cariaga. . . Mark Swed. . . KPFK. . . Zymurgy. . . radio show. . . Leni Isaacs. . . Leni Boorstin