ComposerLaFave: News and Views from an American Composer/Writer

The 1950s as high-water mark in American arts

From my current column for The Desert Advocate:

"In the myth that has been created to assure us we must be living in the culturally most exciting of times, the 1950s are generally portrayed as dull, unadventurous and unimportant, except for the first stirrings of rock ‘n’ roll.

"Maybe small‑town America was asleep then, but her urban artists weren’t. The 1950s were a peak time for the American arts. In the years following our country’s emergence as a superpower after World War II, we produced advances in music, theater, literature, painting and dance we never equaled, before or after. In music, jazz burst into bebop, stretching the musical language in previously undreamed‑of directions, while in the concert hall, works by the pioneering Charles Ives at last were allowed to enter, and to influence, a new generation of composers. Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams arrived on the theater scene to tell us more about ourselves than some wanted to know, and the musical, born as cheap entertainment, attained maturity.

"Jackson Pollock decided to drip paint on canvases and helped spark the brazen new aesthetic of abstract expressionism. George Balanchine reinvented European ballet with new, sharp, American accents, while Martha Graham took modern dance technique to its furthest reaches. The “beats”– Jack Kerouac among them, but also including the poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsburg and Gregory Corso ‑ emulated jazz in the written word and spun whole new galaxies of experience.

"For invention and innovation, no other time in our country's artistic history even touches the era from 1946 to 1963."

To read the entire column, go to:

http://www.thedesertadvocate.com/082207/arts/foothills.htm

Ballet Arizona's "Play" -- a preview of my review

The waiting period between a performance and the publication of a review of that performance can be an unbearable stretch, particuarly if the publication in question is a traditional monthly magazine. Newspapers at least can get a review on their pages overnight (if they choose to do so!), and the Internet can do it instantaneously. But monthly magazines? Let me put it this way: I saw Ib Andersen's extraordinary new full-length ballet, Play, in early June in Phoenix. I filed a review of it to Dance Magazine on June 12. And in about 10 days from today (Aug. 20), you'll finally be able to pick up a copy of Dance Magazine's September issue and read it. It will not run on the magazine's website, but here's a teaser:

"On a black stage sparkled with points of light, an ensemble engages classical vocabulary, starting with the simplest of school steps and moving on to intricate, athletic combinations for ten solo dancers: Kenna Draxton, Kanako Imayoshi, Natalia Magnicaballi, Michelle Mahowald, Christina Noakes, Joseph Cavanaugh, Ross Clarke, Robert Dekkers, Ilir Shtylla and Astrit Zejnati. Everyone finds the air in some way peculiar to them; the men in bravura jumps, the women in elegant and unforced pointe work. As Mozart’s music transforms into meditation, the dancing morphs unexpectedly into two gymnastic turns: A man held aloft by two other men in splits position, and a woman in an unsupported headstand in reverse splits. Masculine and feminine, bonded in heavenly classical language, have divided – split – into two directions: Man being lifted upward, woman headed into the earth."

Read the rest in the September Dance Magazine.

- KLF

Mark Morris Meets Mozart

If you don't yet know the work of choreographer Mark Morris, I envy you the thrill of discovering it for the first time. Morris is arguably the best American choreographer since Balanchine (who died in 1983), though that invites a pointless comparison with Balanchine's style. Morris' style is his own -- indefinable, incomparable. In 2002, I wrote this in the Arizona Republic about his Peccadillos, as performed by Morris at Scottsdale Center for the Arts:

"A bulky, middle-age man dances fluently to the music of a tiny toy piano as childhood fantasy meets adult reality. The tunes are Erick Satie's innocent airs; the gestures are big and wide, yet measured and exact.

"The contrast of scope -- between toy piano and big man, tiny sound and large dance -- is oddly touching. The air is stained with poignancy.

"The dancer, the choreographer, could only be Mark Morris."

Morris has a new work, loudly praised by all those who have seen it. It's called Mozart Dances, and on Thursday night, Aug. 16, PBS will telecast it as part of the Live From Lincoln Center series. Watch it, tape it, Tivo it, do whatever you need to do in order not to miss what promises to be one of the most exciting new dance works of the decade.

Given my admiration for Morris' artistry, you can imagine how deeply pleased I was when Lincoln Center asked me to write program notes about the music Morris chose for Mozart Dances. To read my notes, go to:

http://lincolncenter.org/programnotes/mm-mozartdances-081507.pdf

- Kenneth LaFave

Rhyme Time

Writing lyrics for Diet! The Musical, I came face-to-face with that greatest of English-language challenges: Rhyming while still making sense.

It's harder than you think. Hip-hop, which supposedly thrives on rhyme, fudges rhymes left and right. You'll hear "water" rhyming with "harder," "change" with "same," and words or syllables "rhyming" with themselves. This is largely true as well in contemporary pop and alternative rock. Old pop demanded exact rhymes (see the lyrics of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, Oscsr Hammerstein II, etc.), and the one place where that's still the case is the musical theater.

I remember attending one of the ASCAP/Disney musical comedy workshops in Burbank a few years back, where portions of new musicals were performed a panel of professionals. Among the panelists was Alan Bergman, co-lyricist (with his wife, Marilyn Bergman) of such standards as "Windmills of My Mind" and "The Summer Knows." When a song in one of the new musicals tried to rhyme "time" with "nine," Bergman stopped them cold: "'Time' doesn't rhyme with 'nine,' no matter how many times you've heard it on the radio." Exposed for decades to fudged rhymes and non-rhymes, most people wouldn't understand that. But in point of fact, to rhyme, two words must end in the same sound, and "m" and "n" are different sounds.

I've written a column about this for The Desert Advocate. Below is an excerpt. For the whole thing, go to www.thedesertadvocate.com/080807/arts/foothills.htm.

"I’ve been thinking of rhyme lately, and how in popular song it has largely disappeared, or has been so altered as to be unrecognizable. My teenage son shares with me songs by Radiohead and Incubus and other contemporary groups, and for the most part, rhyme is absent. There are exceptions (White Stripes relies heavily on rhyme), but most recent rock lyrics treat rhyme as strictly optional. As for the admittedly small amount of hip‑hop I am exposed to, either the rhymes come quick and easy, rhyming for their own sake and without relationship to the story being told; or they aren’t real rhymes at all, but fudged approximations.

"Rhyming in English is tough because the language isn’t well suited to it. Think of 'love,' certainly one of the more important words for a songwriter. It has exactly five possible rhymes: 'of,' 'shove,' 'glove,' 'dove' and 'above.' (With the current use of 'gov' as short for governor, I suppose there’s now a sixth.) That’s why you’ve heard so many songs that include, 'You’re the one I’m thinking of' or 'You were sent from heaven above.' They are there to set up the rhyme.

"But 'glove' and 'shove?' I’m sure there are lyrics using these, but the words don’t exactly lend themselves to high romance. Envy lyric writers in Spanish, Italian or French, languages where appropriate rhymes flow like wine. As the Canadian critic Hugh Kenner observed, 'The Romance languages are romantic because love rhymes with heart rhymes with flower. The English language is English because love rhymes with shove and heart rhymes with fart and flower rhymes with power.'”

- KLF

Is This Any Way to Run a Culture?

From my weekly column for The Desert Advocate (the whole thing can be found at www.thedesertadvocate.com):

The director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, England, reprinted thinly disguised versions of Austen’s novels, including the perennial Pride and Prejudice, and submitted them to 18 different UK book publishers. The result: 18 rejections. Writing in London newspaper The Independent, publisher Andrew Franklin frankly stated the reason. Was it the changing taste of the reading public? Nope. “Publishers turn down masterpieces every day,” Franklin admitted. Why? Because there are just too many submissions for readers at the various publishing houses to deal with. Some 200,000 books are published every year, Franklin stated, and for every one of those, “20 to 30 others” are rejected.

“It’s a numbers game,” he concluded.

“No one can be surprised to learn that not every manuscript gets the careful attention it deserves. It should not come as a shock that many manuscripts are returned unread to the sender. We need to clear our desks in order to look after the authors whom we do sign up, and the unsolicited manuscripts are often a chore to be dealt with at the end of the day by an overworked intern.”

In other words, getting published is largely a matter of luck.

I can attest that, in the much smaller world of symphonic composition, a very similar phenomenon holds sway. If you were to list the most performed living composers, you would be shocked – as I was, when a friend in this dubious “business” informed me – that more than half of them are supported by seven‑figure trust funds. To be a composer takes such an enormous amount of time for such little financial reward, that to be successful at it heavily favors the wealthy. After all, they can spend all their time soliciting publishers and performers, and if they fail, what’s the difference? They don’t have to go back to their day jobs. They don’t have any!

In other words, the new books and the new classical compositions that reach your eyes and ears have at least as much to do with the sheer good fortune of being born to wealth and/or the dumb luck of having your manuscript one of the few that actually gets read.

I ask you: Is this any way to run a culture? If practicing medicine was a profession available only to those born rich or those whose applications just happened to be picked up from among the thousands otherwise discarded unread, wouldn’t medicine suffer? How can we care so little for culture as to leave it to anyone but the most talented, whatever their bank account or luck quotient?

- Kenneth LaFave

Culture vs. darkness

From Roger Scruton, the British philosopher, comes this (at roger-scruton.blogspot.com):

"From culture we acquire a sense of what is intrinsically worthwhile in the human condition and a recognition that our lives are not consumed in the pursuit of power and profit, but devoted to intrinsic values.

"Readers of Wordsworth’s The Prelude learn how to animate the natural world with hopes of their own; the spectator of Rembrandt’s Night Watch learns of the pride of corporations and the benign sadness of civic life; the listener to Mozart’s Jupiter symphony is presented with the open floodgates of human joy and creativity; the reader of Proust is led through the enchanted world of childhood and made to understand the uncanny prophecy of our later griefs which those days of joy contain."

Yes to all. And of course the list could go on and on, and include more recent work and more contemporary forms. From Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 we learn what it is to experience personal feelings in an atmosphere of public repression. From Anthony Burgess' Earthly Powers, we understand the sterility at the base of certain 20th-century trends. Through Citizen Kane we know the irredeemable ugliness that power brings. In Charlie Parker solos, we feel the unlimited potential of intellectual escape, and how the mind speaks to the heart.

People closed to so-called "high art" don't know what they're missing. The human experience is so much vaster, so much deeper and richer, than reality TV, video games and the latest pop songs. Those who make and consume the latter currently seem to have a corner on "the pursuit of power and profit," Scruton's all-too-accurate words for the Zeitgeist. But do they have any idea how dark their world is made by this pursuit?

- KLF

Adam Guettel, songwriter extraordinaire

In May, the national tour of "The Light in the Piazza" came through the Phoenix area, and I was pleased to see the show for the second time -- the third, if you include the TV broadcast as well as the original Broadway production. I had followed the profoundly gifted songwriter Adam Guettel since stumbling happily onto "Myths and Hymns," a score I'd give my eye-teeth (whatever those are) to have written, and the tour was a wonderful excuse to interview Guettel and the writer whose novella inspired his show, Elizabeth Spencer.

The resulting article ran in The Desert Advocate here in Phoenix. Since the "Light in the Piazza" tour is still running (it closes its Chicago run today - July 22 - and plays San Francisco next month), I thought I'd copy part of the story here at the blog, for any and all to read:

I first became aware of songwriter Adam Guettel in 1997, when I traveled to New York to see a friend and stumbled upon Guettel’s second theater score, “Saturn Returns.” Based on his first show, “Floyd Collins,” Guettel was being talked about as one of the better young composer‑lyricists.

“Saturn Returns,” I was told, was to be an examination of Christianity’s intersection with ancient Greek mythology–not the usual grist for a musical mill. But the ticket was free, and if my newspaper back in Phoenix let me, I could always write a little something on the show.

I hopped the No. 1 train for NYU land and walked into the Public Theatre expecting nothing in particular. I had never before been so completely stunned by an evening of musical theater. There was no dialogue, no story, and no continuing characters. Yet here was deep feeling embodied in rich, varied music, and lyrics of unapologetic intelligence.

There was a song about Icarus’ hubris that strutted boastfully, then fell pathetically. Another song embodied Christian belief in its endlessly rising melodic line. At the heart of the score was a duet about ... abortion. It never mentioned the word “abortion,” yet the audience gasped when it understood what the song concerned.

This was–and I rarely use the word–genius. Its title now changed to “Myths and Hymns,” the piece is only rarely staged. You can find the score, or most of it, on a Nonesuch CD (“Myths and Hymns”) with several of the songs sung by none other than the songwriter. But your misfortune in not being able to see “Myths and Hymns” is balanced by your very good luck in being able to see another, more recent musical theater experience that left me with my mouth wide open and my heart singing like crazy.

“The Light in the Piazza,” the story of a young woman who finds love while touring Italy with her protective mother, is coming to ASU Gammage next week. The composer‑lyricist: Adam Guettel.

We are blessed right now with an abundance of songwriting talent in the theater. William Finn, Jason Robert Brown, the team of Ehrens and Flaherty–all kinds of great writers are making contributions. For that matter, Stephen Sondheim, whom I suspect is a model of sorts for Guettel, is still writing.

Guettel stands out among them for his amazing sense of harmonic subtlety. Melodies shift on tiny changes that prove to be big ones later on in the way a barely perceptible adjustment of light can cause a picture to change shape radically. The ear hears the result as a refreshing fountain of melody.

“The Light in the Piazza” is a traditional musical with dialogue, characters and a story. The story is based on the 1959 novella of the same name by Elizabeth Spencer, a writer who did not know Guettel before the project began, and who does not consider herself particularly musical. I recently talked by phone with Spencer and Guettel, during a visit Guettel made to Spencer’s home in North Carolina.

“I was quite gratified that anyone would want to explore the possibilities,” Spencer recalled of her first meeting with Guettel.

She recognized his talent at once, and gave her blessing to the adaptation. Playwright Craig Lucas was brought on board to write the book (or dialogue) of the show, and according to Spencer he stuck very closely to her novella, even transposing several of her phrases directly into the script.

“The musical has been a boon for me. I thought of myself as in decline, that my main work was over. Suddenly, everyone realized I was there.”

Guettel chose the story for its passion: “You look for characters who want something really badly, very intensely. In this story, everybody wants something, even if they don’t articulate it directly. That makes it a lot easier to embroider with music. You can go from dialogue to music, riding on the intensity of desire.”

- KLF

Culture: More than food and trinkets

This is another column written for The Desert Advocate early in 2007. I'm putting some of the better ones here to get more readership for them:

I just returned from Kaua’i, the farthest west of the major Hawaiian Islands and, some would say, the most beautiful of the lot. (Don’t ask me: Kaua’i is my only experience of our 50th state.)

On the first night there, I had a disturbing dream, a nightmare vision of sorts, which seemed all out of sync with the idyllic languor of the place. I fell asleep with the smell of salt‑sea breezes in my nostrils and the glow of strange gold and vermillion flowers in my memory. So, why did I dream of angry Hawaiian warriors rushing toward me in a kind of hypnotic trance? In the vision, they pushed passed me violently, and I felt their power as I fell downward into some empty place beneath them. I don’t usually remember my dreams. This one woke me up. And I remembered it.

As I discussed my nocturnal encounter the next day over lunch with my wife, our waiter felt it apt to interrupt.

“The Night Marchers,” he said.

The what?

“You saw the Night Marchers, the spirits of Hawaiian warriors killed in battle. They died too quickly to know they are dead, so they keep marching.”

Apparently, they are all over the Hawaiian Islands, a place that has seen as much violence as any other less paradisiacal place–and not just after the white man came. There, where fruit drops freely from the trees and fish fill the warm ocean waters, where year‑round tropical mildness means shelter and clothing may be minimal, and therefore cheaply provided, tribes battled bloodily against each other for centuries. Over what? Never underestimate man’s ability to find excuses for war.

So, what does this have to do with the arts? Nothing, by itself, but it made me wonder just what we are doing when we talk of a country’s “culture,” and by that mean its food, its crafts, and maybe some of its more pleasant music. You know: Japan is sushi, bonsai and some strains on the koto; Ireland is corned beef, step dancing, and maybe a crocheted leprechaun. Hawaii, of course, is all flower leis, kahlua pork and the ukulele (which, incidentally, is Portuguese).

We do it to ourselves, too. America is hamburgers, cool cars and rock ‘n’ roll, right? We reduce culture to things we can consume, and in doing so, we gloss over the purpose culture has of connecting us to the realities of human love, human joy and human failing. I don’t know if the Hawaiian people ever developed a theatrical or poetic form into which they might pour the saga of the Night Marchers, but if that were done, it would go far to dispel the Hallmark image of the luau and the hula.

Every time a people looks at itself plainly and honestly in the mirror of art, great things happen. In the 19th century, a group of Italian composers, Verdi chief among them, stared down the violence and the intrigue of the Europe around them and put those elements into the music they wrote for the operatic stage. Long before that, the ancient Greeks found the rhythm of tragedy and composed dramas that live to this day as embodiments of human feeling at its most profound.

When one people oppresses another, it invariably makes the oppressed culture look cute through cheap art. While England beat up the Irish with one hand, they created silly music‑hall ditties like “My Wild Irish Rose” with the other, songs that no more resemble real Irish music than Playboy pinups look like real women. Notoriously, the American South created blackface entertainment to keep the slaves looking less than dangerous.

The oppressed eventually get theirs back, and when they do, it’s through art. The Irish produced Joyce and Yeats, a literature that beat the English at their own game. The African‑American experience compressed suffering into blues and jazz, still the most distinctive forms of American art. Some people would call this art’s “political” function, but it’s not that, really. Rather, it’s artists breaking through political (and economic and social) restraint to get to what politics and economics and society consistently try to guard us from: Reality, in the form of human experience. If anything, art is anti‑political.

- KLF

Finding high culture on YouTube

Earlier this year I wrote the following for The Desert Advocate as a sort of primer for classical arts types wanting to find cool stuff on YouTube. It's still pertinent:

YouTube.Com, the online treasury of video clips, is thought of as a largely juvenile phenomenon, possibly because its most‑viewed videos include a farting baby and something called "The Most Awesome Makeout Montage."

But you can find grown‑up things there, too. Lovers of classical music, theater and the dance may be delighted to know that there is a great deal for them on YouTube, so much so that it is all too easy to spend a day–or days–searching for (and finding) video of favorite artists from today and yesterday. Here's a quick glance of some of YouTube's fine arts treasures, available at the click of a mouse.

Glenn Gould

There are all kinds of video clips of the late, great Canadian pianist, mostly playing Bach (of course), from his skinny twenties until his prematurely aged forties. An early clip of Gould playing a Bach partita on an out‑of‑tune piano is especially winning for the pure energy young Gould brings to the piece–not to mention his vigorous singing‑along.

Gould talked almost as much as he played, and there are myriad postings of Gould observations on this and that. He recalls wanting to compose, at age 12, an opera about "the taking over of the planet by morally enlightened frogs, fish and associated reptiles."

Speaking of Gould the composer, there are two videos of people singing his "So You Want to Write a Fugue." One of them is in Japanese.

Rudolf Nureyev

There are not as many performance clips as you'd like of the ballet icon from the late 20th century, but there is a delicious one of him in his prime dancing "La Sylphide" with Carla Fracci in 1972. The poster has mistakenly labeled this as "Les Sylphides," a completely different ballet. It is "Viewer Beware" in the world of YouTube, just as it is over the Internet in general. Mistakes are common.

There's also plenty of footage of Nureyev's appearance on the "Muppet Show," including his pas de deux with Miss Piggy called "Swine Lake."

Leonard Bernstein

There are thousands of clips showing Bernstein's gifts as conductor, composer, pianist and educator. Check out the haunting last minutes of Mahler's Eighth Symphony as conducted by Lenny (posted as "M8 finale conducted by Bernstein").

Lenny the composer is represented mostly by his Broadway scores. There are moments of Jose Carreras recording the "West Side Story" album in which he sang Tony, and there are at least a dozen performances of "Glitter and Be Gay," the great soprano tour de force Bernstein penned for "Candide." The sopranos performing range from the likes of June Anderson and Natalie Dessay to young hopefuls; one even sings it in a nightclub to accompaniment from a Casio keyboard. You can also find footage of Lenny playing a portion of the Ravel G‑major Piano Concerto–his signature piece as a pianist–and various tributes to him by numerous colleagues.

Maria Callas

The Greek soprano is all over the place, including a complete posting of her 1958 Paris concert, frustratingly broken up into 10 parts to fit YouTube's demands. Check out Part 9, her signature role as Tosca. It's the scene in which she confronts Scarpia and sings "Visi d'Arte." It's somewhat sad to see her later clips, such as the one of her singing "O mio babbino caro," as she seemed to have lost the energy she brought to music early on.

Merce Cunningham

The avant‑garde choreographer is represented sparingly, but there is one choice 2‑minute bit from 1964 of Cunningham performing his "Septet" with members of his company. It's an instant lesson in how to make human shapes into emblems of feeling.

Stephen Sondheim and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber

Search for these two and prepare to spend a few minutes laughing your face off as they engage in "dueling pianos." Seated at the same keyboard, they accompany themselves as they sing parody lyrics to their biggest hits. I never knew "Send in the Clowns" could morph so smoothly into "The Music of the Night."

Of course, acoustics over the Internet are no better than visuals over the Internet, though this may change with technological advances. Who knows? If kids logging on to see a farting baby stumble onto Callas singing Tosca, YouTube may become a great educational tool.

- Kenneth LaFave

Scattered, but I hope not too cloudy....

I blogged, I turned around...and suddenly I hadn't blogged for ten days. So it goes, as the time slams by at a merciless pace.

Thing is, I do more things than can sometimes be tracked. That's no brag. It's more like a confession: Scattered am I. And yet, sometimes I remember to connect the dots, even if I'm late getting to them. I've been meaning for weeks to mention an article posted in May at www.NewMusicBox.org. Long gone from the site's front page, it's archived here:

www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=5081

It's all about writing music for the stage, as opposed to the concert hall. I was high in the success of "Diet! The Musical" at the time, and willing to say, in essence, "To hell with symphony ochestras, give me musical comedy." "Diet!" is now well post-premiere, and Susan (wife and collaborator) and I are considering the next step for our little show. The premiere was a limited-run affair (three weeks) at a tiny theater (55 seats) but, oh my, did tickets sell well! We mostly sold out, and the feedback was excellent. So I feel confirmed in the truth of the article's claim: There is a much greater need for, and acceptance of, new composers in musical theater than in the so-called "classical" world.

Even so, someone has written to say he's interested in adapting my "Echoes of New York" (for clarinet and piano) for saxophone and piano, and I am ready to get to work on that. If someone, somewhere, wanted to commission me another installment in the "Muses" series of orchestral pieces I started years ago, I wouldn't say nay.

And on a totally different front -- neither classical nor musical theater -- there are the songs I've written over the past three years with country-music legend Jessi Colter. (What, I hadn't told you about that?)

Stay tuned for more on Jessi and the "Psalms Project."

Hope you had a great Bastille Day.

- Kenneth LaFave