ComposerLaFave: News and Views from an American Composer/Writer

Shostakovich in America?

It's been more than two months since last I blogged. The reason? That I'd have to tell you over a beer -- Fat Tire, perhaps, or a Sam Adams White -- in utmost confidence. (No, I wasn't in the looney bin, though sometimes it felt that way.) In any case, all is well, and here I am again, writing new entries for my readership -- both of you.

Seriously, I am amazed when this site gets as many as 8 or even 10 views on a given day. (The average traffic is two or three views daily.) It does make me wonder, though, just how may readers -- or how few -- I had in the old days when I wrote for major print media. How many people actually read those reviews of mine in The Arizona Republic and The Kansas City Star? More than two or three, certainly. But were those pieces truly read? Or were they only glanced at, skimmed, even misread? I recall talking to a few "readers" and getting the clear impression that they had read the headlines to my stories, but not the stories themselves. (At newspapers, headlines aren't even written by the same person who writes the story.) On the Internet, I at least know that people are looking for what I have to say. That means they probably also read what they find.

Here's a thought or two on Shostakovich, written originally for The Desert Advocate a couple years ago on the occasion of the composer's 100th birthday celebration:

Dimitri Shostakovich lived most of his life under Stalin. So did millions of others, of course, but unlike those millions, Shostakovich had a weapon with which to fight back: music. It’s an unlikely weapon, for sure. You can’t kill with it, you can’t maim with it, you can’t even defend yourself physically with it. For that matter, music without words – and words directed against the state in Stalin’s time would have resulted in the writer’s spending the rest of his life in a very cold place, far from friends and family – cannot express a political idea. You can’t say, in music, “State communism is killing us – stop!” Or…can you? According to no less a thinker than Plato, you can use music alone to shift and even bring down political regimes. In a famous passage, the philosopher wrote: “The introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state, since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.” To rewrite, changing focus without altering meaning: “If you wish to imperil the state, introduce a new kind of music.”

Could it be true? Can tanks and spies and financial corruption be brought low by melody, harmony, and rhythm? While Shostakovich can’t exactly be credited with the downfall of the Soviet Union, he nonetheless managed to reach a disparaged people and give them hope, through symphonies and string quartets. How did he lodge such a protest in music without words?

His Symphony No. 5 is a perfect example. (His most widely praised work, Symphony No. 5 has been recorded many times. Look for the classic CD by Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic.) At the heart of it is a slow movement of unbelievable grief, an unmistakable statement of universal sorrow that listeners would not have taken for anything but a portrait of their country’s condition. That movement is followed by what one critic has called “an MGM ending,” an Allegro of such absurdly high spirits that you think, “How can this possibly follow on the heels that incredible expression of emotional pain we just heard?” As a contemporary of the composer’s has observed, the absurdity is the point. Under Stalin, though things were dreary to horrifying, people were expected, even commanded, to be happy – or else! And so the ending of the Shostakovich Fifth is “a smile with a gun to the head,” as the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich has said. The people heard this – and they got it.

If today, in the United States, the Bill of Rights were to be suppressed, freedom abandoned and justice confounded, would America produce music – or art of any kind – to speak to that condition? The question rests upon an assumption that itself prompts another question. The assumption is that Americans would be aware that such things were happening; only, would they?

Soviet citizens were supremely alert to the destruction of their natural rights, primarily because nearly everyone was affected. Many Soviets slept with a packed bag by the door, in case the KGB should arrive at 3 a.m. and whisk them off to Siberia. This was an audience attuned to the coded messages sent them in Shostakovich’s scores. In Nazi Germany, the tyrant was more subtle, ripping the rights of some (Jews, communists, gypsies, homosexuals) while leaving the majority untouched and, therefore, complacent. No equivalent of Shostakovich arose in Germany to speak to the people, because the people did not want to hear.

Do Americans want to hear the truth? Would we recognize it if we heard it? If the occasion of tyranny arose and a Shostakovich tried to reach us with music, would he have an audience?

- Kenneth LaFave
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'Messiah' and 'Nutcracker' -- unlikely holiday staples

‘Tis the season of Tchaikovsky and Handel, the two classical composers America can’t live without – at least in the month of December. The holidays without "Nutcracker" and "Messiah" would be unthinkable. And yet, the former was a flop initially, and the latter was written for Easter, not Christmas.

Tchaikovsky was a self-tortured homosexual Russian who grew prematurely old with doubts about his own abilities. After he composed “Nutcracker,” he pronounced to a friend his severe disappointment with the score, saying “it contains no melody.” Today, that’s like saying Arizona sunsets have no color. But when something is new, the ears that receive it aren’t always ready to hear what’s truly there – even when the ears belong to the composer.

Tchaikovsky might have been aided in his negativity by what show people call “bad b.o.” – poor box office, that is. The initial “Nutcracker” wasn’t a much of a success. Compared to his earlier ballet hits, “Swan Lake” and “Sleeping Beauty,” it flopped miserably. Critics ravaged it. One sniffed, “For dancers there is rather little in it, for art absolutely nothing, and for the artistic fate of our ballet, one more step downward.” It was more than 20 years after the composer’s death that Russia took fondly to the final ballet score of its most famous composer.

It took even longer for America to catch on. The music was played by American orchestras in the excerpts known as the “Nutcracker” Suite, but it wasn’t until 1940 that Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo brought the actual ballet to American scores. It didn’t really catch on. But then, in 1954, George Balanchine decided the make “Nutcracker” a holiday feature of his New York City Ballet, the company he had founded after emigrating to the United States from Russia in the 1930s. New York City Ballet had become the epicenter of the first wave of ballet mania to hit the U.S. Dancers who graduated from Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, often moved to Oklahoma or Oregon or Arizona to start their own companies. They took “Nutcracker” with them, and by the 1970s, it was firmly established as the cash cow for most regional American dance companies.

If Tchaikovsky was the essence of dour, the composer of “Messiah” was of a different order entirely. If ever a classical composer was a savvy businessman, Georg Frederic Handel was it. Born in Germany, Handel picked up the Italian opera style in Italy and took it to London, where he made a name for himself in a foreign country as the master of a form borrowed from yet another foreign country. When, at length, the Italian style ran its course, Handel found himself without commissions and on the brink of poverty. He switched genres with the alacrity of a salesman dumping an antiquated line for the latest fad. The English loved oratorios – large-scale choral works that relate stories purely through music, without the benefit of staging. He wrote a couple as warm-up, and then launched into an oratorio that summarized the Christian religion in the King’s English: “Messiah,”

Premiered in Dublin at Easter, 1742, Handel’s “Messiah” was an instant success. The King of England was in attendance, and even stood up during the stirring “Hallelujah” Chorus, starting a centuries-long tradition. Over the centuries, “Messiah” became associated with Christmas, at least in America, even though “Hallelujah” is supposed to "happen" at the moment of Christ’s crucifixion.

Handel didn’t stop there. Looking around at London, he noticed a large Jewish population and immediately produced a Hanukkah oratorio called “Jeptha.” It sold huge.

I’ve often wondered how much Tchaikovsky and Handel would be raking in from royalties, were they alive today and their works still in copyright. A modest guess would be several million dollars annually.

Somewhere, the ghost of Tchaikovsky is shaking his head in disbelief at his own music's enormous popularity, while Handel’s ghost is figuring how to increase the cash flow from his stunning global fame.

- Kenneth LaFave

Happy endings, like 'em or not

Here's a chunk of prose about the eternal optimism of the American Musical Theater, pegged to some tidbits on songwriter Jerry Herman. Once more, the original was published in The Desert Advocate.

Jerry Herman’s shows are the epitome of the Broadway keep-your-chin-up attitude. “Hello, Dolly!,” “Mame” and “La Cage aux Folles” are his three best-known shows, but there's also “Mack and Mabel,” known among Herman connoisseurs and the Broadway-savvy as his best score, plus such near-hits as “Dear World” and “The Grand Tour.” Herman grew up around shows with songs by people like Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, and his style reflects that unabashedly. Think of his title tune to “Hello, Dolly!” from 1964 and it’s not too far a musical jump to think of Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” from 1912.

It isn’t only sunshiny songs of that mold that give the musical theater a reputation for never-say-die. Whatever their styles and however tragic their endings, musicals insist on positive messages. The ending of “West Side Story,” with Tony dead on the ground, blooms with the hope of “Somewhere.” The finale of “The Man of La Mancha,” with Cervantes being marched off to prison, assures us it its still possible to dream that impossible dream. “A Chorus Line” seems to end in everyday, real-life cruelty, as half the aspirants to gypsy glory are turned down for the job. Yet, there they all are in the final number, swirling about the stage in top hats and gleaming smiles.

Even newer shows with apparently anti-optimistic agendas can’t escape. The story of “Sweeney Todd” may be grisly, but in the end, evil is punished and young love triumphs. “Avenue Q” is adult and edgy, but it’s also all about being young and struggling and knowing it’ll all come out okay – optimism re-imagined. The grinning cynicism of “Urinetown” is only made possible by the undercurrent of optimism assumed beneath its surface.

As it is in the art form, so it happens to be in Jerry Herman’s life. After hitting huge with “Hello, Dolly!” and “Mame” in the 1960s, the last decade when it was possible to write in his style without special permission from the culture, Herman entered a slump period of nearly 20 years. Overt optimism was out and so were the kinds of songs he was good at writing. Yet he persisted, show after show, until he found a combination that sparked a hit: the warmly sentimental, yet archly humorous story of the French movie, “La Cage aux Folles,” and his old-fashioned, yet crisply made songs.

That was 1983, and the last time Herman had a hit show. Shortly after that, he was diagnosed HIV positive. With resolve that even a Broadway show would find hard to muster, Herman called his diagnosis “a miracle,” because through it he could show people “there can be a second chance, that it (AIDS) can be a manageable disease,” as he said in an interview in 1996.

And here he is, ten years later, managing that disease and still writing shows. (The reason for his absence the night of the show was not AIDS, but shingles.) The latest Herman musical, in progress, is called “Miss Spectacular,” and is being designed as a casino show for Las Vegas.

Like Herman, the musical theater survives and occasionally thrives, despite misfortunes and changing styles. It is a form that will not die, and even as it seeks to reinvent itself, it persists in declaiming the eternal virtue of optimism. To judge from the musical’s longevity, that’s not just wide-eyed silliness. That’s truth-based, survival-oriented realism.

- Kenneth LaFave

A Sgt. Pepper memory

Before it disappears into whatever hole it is that much of my printed work seems to go, here's a "Desert Advocate" column from June this year about the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper.

Forgive the tone of loss -- it's just my honest feeling.

Forty years ago last week, I sat with a group of middle school friends at the home of one of us lucky enough to have purchased a copy of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and listened. The rest had gotten to the record store bins too late and found the Album of Our Lifetimes gone. But it was better this way. A bunch of us together could listen in a way different from the same bunch individually. We all heard the album straight through, and then we listened again, track by track, stopping afterward to comment.

I don’t remember what we all had to say, but I do remember the urgency with which we said it. Perhaps we voiced preference for a favorite Beatle. Maybe we speculated – in the wild, off-center and usually totally non-factual way only those on the cusp of adolescence can -- on the sexual or drug innuendos of the songs. Whatever.

One thing and one thing only remains in memory that makes any difference: The songs had meaning for us. Music and lyrics collided like oxygen and hydrogen to water our souls. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” didn’t need to be about LSD to be a bright collage of color and imagery, worthy of spiriting our thoughts away to some secret, private place. We didn’t need to be on the verge of running away in order to appreciate the girl’s plight in “She’s Leaving Home.” And no knowledge of East Indian music was required in order to experience the freshness of “Within You, Without You.”

Imagination was key. “Imagination” is almost as overused and as misused as “genius,” but I mean it in this plainly defined way: “the formation of mental images not present to the senses.” What we heard in “Sgt. Pepper” was pure imagination. It characterized the album and it even characterized an important aspect of the entire era. “Pure Imagination” was, in fact, the title of one of the songs from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” the first film made of the classic children’s book, from around the same time. John Lennon, with Paul McCartney the principle songwriter of the Beatles, would, on his own, one day write the song that summarized the importance of this ability to envision things other than they seem to be: “Imagine.”

My question, 40 years later – and I suspect it’s the question many, many Boomers have – is: What the hell happened? Where did imagination flee? Today’s popular music scene is so devoid of it that you think it must never have existed. And I’m not talking only about the subjects of the songs; I’m talking about the content of the songs themselves. You can’t write imaginatively without making imaginative use of your writing skills. Think of “A Day in the Life” from “Sgt. Pepper.” This is two songs welded into one – part by Lennon, part by McCartney – that probes the feelings of an average man and his mundane concerns as contrasted with the subtle, ingrained violence of the world around him. It’s doubtful someone writing songs now could write such a thing, and if someone did, it’s almost certain the song would not get produced. Too much imaginative use of songwriting techniques.

Jordin Sparks seems like a nice girl, and she’s cute and all and has the pop music sound down. But have you heard that song she sang to win “America Idol”? If so, have you managed to clear the stench from your ears yet? There are songs that show imagination – the sorts of songs we have been talking about. And then there are songs that are the aural equivalent of watching expensive cars zoom by – pure, dull literalism. No invention, no freshness. Just expertly-produced, celebrity-encrusted emptiness. Sound studio production techniques and celebrity have, it seems, totally replaced imaginative songwriting and skilled performance as requirements for hit music. It didn’t happen overnight, but the change seems to be complete.

Chalk up my rant to old fogey-ism, if you wish. After all, pop music changes and the stuff we hear when we are young is the music that imprints on us; we expect more of same all our lives. I admit I expected music to keep growing back when Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. I assumed pop music would get more and more imaginative as the years went by. “What a time to be alive!” I thought. “Songs will be written that break down borders and set up new standards, songs to coax the mind into thinking new thoughts and the soul into feeling strange new things.”

In my old fogey book, the disappearance of that future is an incalculable loss.

- Kenneth LaFave

The question of "genre"

Where does one kind of music end and another begin? How much do we invest in the distinctions between genres, when the differences between them may not be that great? Someone famously said, “There are only two kinds of music, good and bad.” That the quote has been attributed to musicians as varied in their backgrounds as Duke Ellington and Richard Strauss attests to its basis in fact: Musicians make music from the language at hand. “Genre” has nothing to do with it.

The above opens a piece I wrote about a year ago for The Desert Advocate here in Phoenix. The subsequent article took an unexpected turn and never came back to address further the idea that genre is irrelevant to the enjoyment of, criticism of, and, most especially, the creation of music. I post this as a reminder to myself to explore it further. If anything, I now believe that the entire notion of genre is not merely irrelevant, but in many ways damaging to music.

More anon....

- KLF

Death, Dying, and Music

I write so many things, I sometimes forget what I wrote.

A stroll through the Internet today reminded me that I once penned an essay on classical music's relationship to mortality for the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Death and Dying, edited by my dear friend, Robert Kastenbaum. Bob and I were collaborators on several projects, including the one-scene chamber opera Closing Time, the one-act opera American Gothic, and the musical, Outlaw Heart. (Look for sections of American Gothic and possibly all of Closing Time to appear sometime soon at my YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/composerlafave.) We're hoping to work together on another project, soon.

Below is a link to the piece. In it, I try to make a case for the Western tonal system as an embodiment of the material-world cycle of birth-growth-decay-death, where most other musics "transcend" the material realm through repetition, trance techniques, etc. At the Macmillan site, you can also search for my articles on Gustav Mahler and "operatic death."

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_gx5214/is_2003/ai_n19132233

- KLF

Diet! The Musical at YouTube

There are now three videos from Diet! The Musical available for your viewing at YouTube. Find all three on my channel: www.YouTube.com/composerlafave.

The three are: 1) "We'll Start Tomorrow," a hilarious number about beginning that diet manana, set to a tango tune (original, of course); 2) "Never Enough," the character Lynne's power ballad about her negative self-image; and 3) "Who Needs a Man (When a Gal's Got Chocolate?", the character Pat's ode to candy over sex.

Enjoy. And let me know what you think.

- KLF

A Pierre Boulez memory

Pierre Boulez is one of the great musical figures of our time. As a young, avant‑garde composer, he created works that defied description. After a while, his gifts as a conductor overtook his compositional ambitions, and he came to wield the baton for the globe’s greatest orchestras, winning multiple Grammies. He has always had the reputation of music’s most serious fellow, the “Ice Man” of classical music.

In the summer of 1986, the New York Philharmonic, whose music director Boulez had been, hosted a “Boulez is Back!” festival featuring both his compositions and his conducting. As a publicist for the orchestra, I was asked to coordinate the photography of some Philharmonic musicians involved in a chamber concert of Boulez’s compositions.

I arranged for the musicians to have their picture taken on the steps of Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. As the photographer and I stood facing the musicians on the steps, just as the photographer was about to snap the photo, the musicians broke into uproarious laughter. The photographer and I were confused. What was the source of this sudden eruption of hilarity? We turned around to look behind us, toward where the focus of the musicians’ attention had been, to see ... Pierre Boulez, “Ice Man,” the most serious fellow in classical music, with his thumbs in his ears, waving his fingers.

His tongue was out, too.

Interview with Jamie Bernstein

Jamie Bernstein, daughter of Leonard Bernstein, is in Phoenix to narrate some of her dad's music for "Bernstein on Broadway," presented by The Phoenix Symphony.

In that connection, Susan LaFave and I interviewed Jamie for our radio show, "Arts On The Town" (which can be heard every Sunday ay 6 p.m. AZ time over 1100AM, KFNX).

If you missed it, fear not: The Phoenix Symphony posted the interview at its blog, which can be heard as an audio file at:

http://phoenixsymphony.blogspot.com/2007/10/on-air-bernstein-on-bernstein.html

Check it out and hear Jamie talk about her father as composer, conductor, and human being.

- KLF

Plays About Composers: More Popular Than You Might Think

Classical music in Phoenix has been dominated for the past two weeks, not by a simple concert artist, but by an actor-playwright-pianist. In one-man plays about Gershwin and Chopin, Hershey Felder has captured the imagination of audiences and taken them into the worlds of these composers. This is beyond "Amadeus," because the whole point of Felder's plays is to frame a musical performance of the composers' works in a dramatic context. It suggests an entirely new way to get this music to people who would just as soon see a play. This way, they get both.

Below is an excerpt from a column I wrote about Felder's shows for The Desert Advocate. For the entire piece, go to http://www.thedesertadvocate.com/103107/arts/foothills.htm

"At the close of 'George Gershwin Alone,' Felder comes out on stage as himself and leads a singalong. He explains that, before there was music everywhere–in elevators, on computers, on TV and radio and movies and even cell phones–it was necessary for people to make music for themselves. Everybody had a piano, and everybody took piano lessons. Because of this, there was a musical language in common between the composers and performers of classical music on the one hand, and their audiences on the other.

Of course, today that is not necessarily true. The person who takes piano lessons will surely get more out of hearing a Chopin polonaise than will one who doesn’t, but there aren’t as many of those folks as there used to be. So it’s realistic to expect that fewer people will go to recitals and concerts. That is, they won’t go, unless there is something they can relate to, something like a story or a theme that helps make the music more personal for them. And that, of course, is what theater does.

Theater may very well be the way to reach potential classical music fans without forcibly dragging them into concert halls. Felder’s plays, after all, are essentially piano recitals with stories wrapped around them. Instead of leaving this phenomenon to the theater world, the musical world might think about making its own moves in that direction.

- KLF