Summer Internet (updated)
(Photo from The Monster Blog.)
---
Updates: clarifications, tense corrections, another link, a thrown-down gauntlet, a list in the works?
---
A wonderful Terry Teachout obit for the late Jo Stafford. Stafford was one of Charlie Haden's favorite musicians. (Haden also idolizes her husband Paul Weston and the stunning Weston arrangements that cushion many Stafford records.)
Soho on classic ragtime, Schumann, and many other interesting things.
DJA's excellent "Dispatches from the End of the Jazz Wars" for New Music Box.
---
NYTimes Politics: Obama's 300 and an unsurprising poll.
---
Alex Ross is pro and David Bryne is con in re: Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten. (I couldn't go, but I certainly would have enjoyed it.)
Byrne (an undeniable musical genius), makes some fair points, but I unimpressed with how he lumps all dissonant 20th-century classical music into the "horror movie score" category. There is more variety and passion in the modernist canon than that!
Zimmermann wrote down the music he heard in his head. Some would say he gave his life to do so. (Wikipedia.) There are other 20th-century composers who would be better examples of those who "willfully sought to alienate the general public and create purposefully difficult, inaccessible music."
And Zimmermann's voice does resonate: The very fact that Ross has seen no less than three productions -- and that the Armory shows were sold out -- argues that there is a real audience for this opera, not just the "Met patrons" Byrne claims. (The first person who told me about Die Soldaten was a broke college student.)
After all, how many other operas from the 1960's are still being staged? Zimmermann is proving to be a victor, not a loser.
---
Joe Queenan and Tom Service have just faced off on this general topic in the Guardian. I'm with Service, although Queenan scores heavy points when criticizing the atmosphere of a mid-brow orchestra concert.
Their "home counties" comparison to Zimmerman, Harrison Birtwistle, is mentioned by both. I have just recently been exploring and reveling in Birtwistle's recondite but magnificent music. Watch this space.
Update: Terry Teachout has responded to Queenan's piece -- and my beloved Birtwistle is once again attacked! Ok, guys, you are asking for for it...I shall blog about Birtwistle!
Anyway, I like Terry's piece, except that the list Terry suggests of likable twentieth century music is pretty old stuff, all obvious masterpieces from pre-1950:
Benjamin Britten's "Ceremony of Carols," Aaron Copland's "Billy the Kid," Maurice Ravel's G Major Piano Concerto, Dmitri Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, Igor Stravinsky's "Symphony of Psalms" and Ralph Vaughan Williams's "Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis."
(Even though Terry hates 12-tone music as a rule, he has also praised Alban Berg's Wozzeck and the Schoenberg Violin Concerto in print.)
Here's an open invitation to Terry - who, after all, is a current collaborator with modernist composer Paul Moravec: what about a list of classical music since 1950 that he finds interesting? It should be a list of music that is neither twelve-tone or minimalist, nor particularly "crunch and thump."
I would want to hear everything he recommends. I might work on such a list myself...
