ComposerLaFave: News and Views from an American Composer

Don Giovanni, man or idea?

Written last month for the program booklet of Arizona Opera's production of Mozart's Don Giovanni:

Mozart was born in Salzburg and lived most of his adult life in Vienna. But the city that embraced his music with the greatest openness and joy was the capital of what was then Bohemia, Prague. “The Prague people understand me,” Mozart effused in a letter to a friend. Prague's love of music was pure, uncorrupted by the politics and fashion of Vienna. The city's love for Mozart continues to this day; Prague was an important part of the recent 250th anniversary celebrations in Europe.

Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro was produced in Prague in the fall of 1786, following its world premiere in Vienna earlier that year. Audience response sparked a love affair between composer and city.  According to accounts from journals of the day, applause at every performance was “unlimited,” and tunes from the opera were sung in he streets. Citizens of Prague raised money to underwrite the composer's visit, and Mozart arrived Jan. 11, 1787. He brought with him a new symphony in three movements (later nicknamed “Prague”), which was performed Jan. 19 in the composer's honor and for his benefit. Mozart also improvised on themes from Figaro. He later called it “one of the happiest nights of my life.”

The love affair didn’t end there. Figaro’s success in the Bohemian capital had been so tremendous that Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, decided to premiere their next opera in Prague, rather than Vienna. This was Don Giovanni, the tale of Don Juan filtered through the arch wit of Da Ponte and the compassionate realism of Mozart. Why did Mozart choose the subject of Don Juan? The answer may be that he did not so much consciously select it as allow himself subconsciously to be drawn toward it, for it is the second opera of three to deal with the complexities of man-woman relations. If we look at the three Mozart-Da Ponte collaborations as a whole, they together address three distinct aspects of sexual love: pure sexuality (Don Giovanni), relationship (Cosi fan tutte) and marriage (The Marriage of Figaro). Don Giovanni, composed second in the series, is first in the ontology: Without sexual spark, there is no relationship; and without relationship, there can be no marriage.

And yet, the character of Don Giovanni, who embodies the necessary ignition for the sublimities of relationship and marriage to come, is portrayed as a cad. He is a shallow seducer lacking enough depth even to be given a major aria (a point that drove that drove the first man to sing the role into fits of fury), aside from his three cute little songs. Philosopher Bernard Williams puts it this way:

“(Don Giovanni) is in a deep way the life of the opera, yet the peculiarity is that (he) is not really as grand as that implies….  He expresses more than he is.” (Emphasis mine.)

After contemplating this for a while, Williams concludes that Don Giovanni is not so much a character as he is an idea. “Don Giovanni,” he concludes, “is the spirit of sensuous desire.”

If we look at the Don as an idea, certain perplexing things about the opera make more sense.  An idea cannot have a big aria in which to express itself – there is no self to express. An idea cannot repent; that would be to extinguish itself. When the Commendatore sends Don Giovanni to hell, he sends, not a man, but the very notion of sexual license. And he must do that, for the Commendatore is also an idea: the idea of mainstream social values that opposes sexual license.  Lust can, momentarily, “kill” social morality. But at length social morality will rise again and “kill” lust; if it doesn’t, there can be no social constructs – no relationships, no marriages, only license. Ironically, it is lust that makes relationship and marriage possible. Once its spark is used to light their flame, however, it must be calmed.

As “the spirit of sensuous desire,” Don Giovanni exists as much in the hearts of the female characters as he does in himself. When Zerlina asks Masetto to beat her and tear her hair out (Batti, batti), it is seemingly a coy request for punishment, but it is actually an invocation of the character/spirit of Don Giovanni. Don Ottavio may sing to his beloved that she is a treasure and all that (Il Mio Tesoro), but the biggest wimp in the opera repertoire wouldn’t get anywhere with Donna Anna had she not previously been sparked by the Don’s passion.

Convention tames sex into social norms. But before it does, sex itself – Don Giovanni – has its day.

- Kenneth LaFave

Music, American

The Copland-flavored piece John Williams composed for Pres. Obama's inauguration prompted me to look back over the archives for a short article I wrote some years ago on the eternally elusive subject, "What is American music?"  Posted below.

AMERICAN MUSIC: a brief appreciation

(Written for The New York Philharmonic, fall, 2005)

 In 1838, English actress Fanny Kemble, visiting a plantation in Georgia, looked out on the slaves in the fields and heard the birth of American music.

 “That which I have heard these people sing is often plaintive and pretty, but almost always has some resemblance to tunes with which they must have become acquainted through the instrumentality of white men,” Kemble wrote in her diary, quoted in Gilbert Chase’s America’s Music: from the Pilgrims to the Present.

 One of the tunes Kemble heard the slaves sing was “a distinct descendant of ‘Coming Though the Rye.”  Yet it had changed. Through the agency of new ears and new voices, what had started out a Scottish melody ended up an American song. Here was our native music’s present and future: a mutual assimilation of disparate sensibilities, a democracy of sound that anticipated the fulfillment of a deeply flawed and incomplete political democracy. 

 Which brings us to New Orleans. No place was more conducive to the cultivation of such music. Its mix of French, Spanish, African and Italian cultures in the 19th century formed the nexus for a new culture. Jazz started there in about 1895, and as Leonard Bernstein noted in his 1958 Young People’s Concert, “What is American Music?,” the arrival of jazz finally provided American composers with a common language. In the 1920s, the new art spread all over the world. Not only did George Gershwin adapt its gestures to concert purposes, but so did European composers such as Ravel and Milhaud. More than any other single music, jazz came to mean America around the world, possibly because the voluntary compromises of its improvisations made it “the only music that objectifies democracy,” in the words of Wynton Marsalis.

If New Orleans was the seedbed, then American music is a garden where every weed is a potential flower, where new growth blows from every corner of the earth and countless individual plants blossom. These may be as varied as works that pay homage to European forms (Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto), or scores that emulate in sound the great, wide-open spaces of the American plains (Aaron Copland). The blossoming Kemble witnessed was of the spiritual. But there have been countless other births of American music. Chances are, you’ve witnessed many of them yourself. When you attend a new musical, hang at a jazz club, tune in an alternative rock station or hear the premiere of a new work by an American symphonic composer, American music starts all over again.

 There is no historical development in American music in the sense of new trends building on previous trends. The syncopations of jazz might be taken to an extreme over time, culminating in bop, but that doesn’t explain a subsequent shift to rock ‘n’ roll’s unsyncopated, backbeat heavy framework. Because of this wild and unkempt eclecticism, American musical artists are free of historical burden; their only responsibility is to their art. Contemporary songwriters like Randy Newman can draw on the past without being out of date. A concert composer such as John Adams can emulate popular style by wrapping a set of bubbling harmonies around a steady pulse in Short Ride in a Fast Machine. Music theater composers may refer to Latin rhythms (Bernstein in West Side Story) or to bluegrass (Adam Guettel in Floyd Collins). All these composers, no matter the musical language they use, sound distinctly American, but do so through their own individual dialects, remaining unmistakably themselves.

 n     Kenneth LaFave

Words to live by

“I hope to add some measure of grace to the world. . . . Whether I win or lose does not matter, only that I follow the quest.”

- Don Quixote in Dale Wasserman's "Man of La Mancha"

Dale Wasserman

Dale Wasserman, who wrote the book for "Man of La Mancha" (as well as the original TV drama on which the show was based) and the stage adaptation of Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," has died at his home in the Phoenix suburb of Paradise Valley, AZ. He was 94, though he told all who knew him he was a mere 91.

 I knew Dale very slightly from when I interviewed him 12 years ago for The Arizona Republic. This was shortly after he and his wife Martha relocated to the Phoenix area. I say "relocated" rather than "retired" because Dale never stopped working. It was what kept him going strong well beyond the average three-score-and-ten.

 After not having seen him for several years, I reconnected with Dale just three weeks ago through a mutual friend, playwright Richard Warren, in order to interview him afresh for the radio show I co-host with my wife, Susan, "Arts on the Town." The reason: The upcoming premiere of Dale's newest play, "Premiere!" next month. "Premiere!" was one of several projects Dale worked on until the end.

 Susan and I conducted the interview, unaware that Dale knew he had only a few weeks to live. Congestive heart failure was shutting him down. But you wouldn't have known it to talk with him about the theater, his life, life in general and the Grand Scheme of Things. "I think," he said to me with eyes sharply focused, "that we are an existential joke."  The meaning of things?  "There is none."  Then, why work so hard to bring meaning to the characters and situations that inform your plays?  His answer (which I do not recall verbatim): To bring some order to the chaos; to make humanity a little less of "an existential joke."

 This, to me, is the essential difference between the modernist (which Dale was) and the post-modernist: The latter revels in the chaos; the former strives to imbue it with human value. My own sensibilities are ardently modernist, though that puts me among a minority of artists today.

 Dale began life as a hobo in the Great Depression, hopping trains and working at odd jobs. He drifted into theater, where he worked first as a lighting designer. In the early '50s, he looked at his life and decided that his true vocation was writing for theater, not lighting it. This man who'd never graduated high school spent a year studying writing ("I nearly starved") and at the end of his study, he sold his first script. Lucky for Dale, New York in the '50s needed writers for the new medium of television. And so Dale Wasserman joined the ranks of Paddy Chayevsky, Neil Simon and the other burgeoning talents who cut their teeth writing TV scripts.

 It was one of those scripts, "I, Don Quixote," that eventually became the musical, "Man of La Mancha," a show hugely successful in every corner of the globe throughout the four-plus decades since its premiere in 1965. The famous phrase, "To dream the impossible dream," actually came from Dale's TV play, not from lyricist Joe Darion.

 While working on "La Mancha," Wasserman was asked to adapt "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for the stage; the result was a script so lyrical and so powerful that it is still produced every season around the world. (Wasserman did not write the movie. The film version was considerably updated from the novel by a different screenwriter.)

 Those two works remained Dale's mainstay throughout his life, and while he never said anything about it, I always suspected it stuck in his craw a little that none of his subsequent plays achieved anywhere near the fame of "La Mancha" and "Cuckoo's Nest." At the time of his death, there was a good deal of interest in a project that had been dear to his heart for years: A restoration and revision of the 1946 Duke Ellington-John LaTouche musical, "Beggar's Holiday." Postmortem, Dale may yet gain a third perennial for his catalogue.

 Our interview with Dale will be broadcast Sunday, Jan. 4, at 6 p.m. over Phoenix radio station KFNX, 1100 AM. Shortly after that, it will be posted as a podcast to our website, www.artsonthetownaz.com.

 "Premiere!" premieres Jan. 9 at Theater Works in Peoria, AZ, just west of Phoenix. Go to www.theaterworks.org for more info.

- Kenneth LaFave

Elliott Carter and "the genius of place"

Elliott Carter turned 100 today (Dec. 11, 2008). Love his music, hate it, or remain willfully ignorant of it, this much must be said for Carter's output from the time of his First String Quartet (1950): It embraced currents in music history with a completeness not found in the works of any other American composer. Carter has said that the music which first gripped him was Stravinsky and Schoenberg, which makes one wonder about the music he wrote up until age 40 or so, tonal (if sometimes difficult) music like the Symphony No. 1 and the Cello Sonata, works not like Stravinsky and Schoenberg at all. Only beginning in 1950 did he write music clearly influenced by those twin giants; only then did he become "Elliott Carter."

It has always interested me that this Big Change in Carter's music came while he was living in Tucson, Arizona, my hometown. That's where he wrote the First String Quartet, in which he set out in the direction of serialism and the avant-garde, a direction the composer maintained and still maintains after all these decades. In an interview in 2002 for National Public Radio, Carter said: "I got my second Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950 and I went with my family out to Tucson Arizona deciding that I would return to the kind of music I had been very interested in when I was young.... So I decided I'd write a string quartet that did the kind of things that I was hoping I'd do when I was very much younger. It was like the modern style of the early times. I had had all of these ideas in my head for a long time, but finally I began to make them all into a shape."

To read this, it would seem the location (Tucson) was coincidental; the important thing was Carter's readiness to go back and explore the sounds of his youth. And yet, the question in my mind persists: Why did this happen in Arizona? I have a theory, which relates to the ancient Roman idea of "genius of place." This idea is simply that every place on earth has a kind of spirit, just as each era in history has its own "zeitgeist." The spirit of Arizona is as different from the New England and New York Carter knew as the 20th century was different from the 19th. Where the East Coast is green, Arizona is brown. Where East Coast vegetation thrives, Arizona's is spare. Where the skies are small in New England, they are enormous in Arizona, somehow spanning much more space. And so forth. The dryness and the heat, the lack of seasons -- all these things contribute to an Arizona genius that is much more in alignment with the dry, spacious, dissonance of Stravinsky/Schoenberg than anything found at Harvard, where Carter went to school.

My suggestion is that the genius of place had its effect on Carter, perhaps not directly, but certainly indirectly. I'll probably never know the composer's own thoughts on this, since I don't know him and have no access to him. But I'd like to think that artists, while not at the mercy of their surroundings, are somehow subtly in tune with them.

- Kenneth LaFave

Writing about dance

I never write reviews anymore, save when something affects me so strongly that I cannot help but say something about it to someone. So it was with Ballet Arizona's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," produced earlier this month here in Phoenix. I wrote about it for Dance Magazine, which published it online. Check out the review at www.dancemagazine.com/reviews.

Even as I chose to write one more dance review, our greatest living dance critic, and certainly one of the greatest critics of dance (or anything else) of the last 30 years, passed away. Clive Barnes worked almost up to the end, filing his final reviews for The New York Post in the last days of October. I never met him, but I recall his entrance to his box at the New York State Theatre in 1982 when I was there to  see George Balanchine's final masterpiece, Mozartiana, danced by New York City Ballet. "Barnes is here!" was whispered among the people in the orchestra section where I sat, and we all looked back to see a majestic looking man glide into a center box, a lovely female 25 years his junior on his arm.

The regard in which Clive Barnes was held was not merely on account of his power as a critic, but because of the profound knowledge, sharp observational skills and thorough honesty he brought to his work. One Balanchine biographer relates that the great choreographer made a certain complex combination in one of his late ballets just to confound Barnes' skill at disentangling individual steps. Barnes' reviews were what reviews are supposed to be: Not "thumbs up/down" judgments, but informed reports about the works he saw and the people who made them, reports driven by a deep love of the art form and a vivid sense of prose style. If the people who run newspapers in America had any brains, they'd know the value of such work and hire scads of good critics, instead of laying them all off.

- Kenneth LaFave

American composing icon Ned Rorem turned 85 Thursday. I live in Phoenix, Arizona, where, unsurprisingly, Ned''s birthday wasn't exactly headline news. Yet, sadly, New York didn't pay all that much attention, either. A single concert tonight (Friday, Oct. 24) on the Upper West Side - at the Church of St. Matthew and St. Timothy - marked this landmark anniversary for one of America's most important composers. I was unable to be there, but was honored to contribute to a festschrift that was to be given to Ned at the conclusion of the concert. (A festschrift is a volume of tributes written by friends, associates, students, etc.) Ned's No. 1 Student and heir apparent, Daron Hagen, was kind enough to ask me for a few lines, as I was one of Ned's students at Florida's Atlantic Center for the Arts way back in 1984, when the world was indeed much, much younger. I wrote this:

"The first piece of Ned’s I ever heard was Lions, which shook me to the core. I hadn’t known music could reach down that deep. Later, Donald Gramm’s recording of Ned’s early songs consoled me when someone I loved turned out to be a fraud. I hadn’t known before that music could be so personal without being sentimental. Finally, in 1984, there was the miracle of studying with Ned at the Atlantic Center for the Arts with Daron Hagen, Bill Coble, and others. Ned would give each of us a poem in the afternoon and expect it to be set to music by the following morning. No one slept. When we brought our songs to him, Ned would throw them on the piano rack and sing and play them at sight, making comments along the way. 'This is strong,' he’d say, pointing to a certain passage, or 'This is weak.' And he was right, every time. Once, after reading my setting of a Hopkins poem, Ned said simply to me, 'You are a composer.' It was the greatest gift I'd ever been given. Thank you, Ned."

- KLF

"Closing Time" - a cabaret opera in one scene

Ten years and seemingly half a lifetime ago, I composed a tiny, one-scene opera on a libretto by Robert Kastenbaum called "Closing Time."  Unrelated to the pop song, the Tom Waits album, or the Joseph Heller novel of the same name, our little opera was a 25-minute jazzy riff on the idea of two guys -- a bartender and his last customer of the night -- who meet and decide to commit double suicide.

The piece was staged in 1999 by Pima Opera in Tucson, Ariz., where it garnered an audience of, oh, 12 people. But we video-taped it, and now you can check it out at www.YouTube.com/composerlafave.

It's in three parts (YouTube doesn't allow videos loger than 10 minutes), the first of which has the following address:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBK2gmdI6LA

Copy and paste that in your search engine and you'll get Part One. Parts Two and Three will be made available in the menu to the right. Don't be put off by the fact that the videographer used a wide angle for the first 4 minutes. After that, he starts to get close-ups, and the piece makes better sense.

The first thing you'll hear is a pop song on the bar's juke box -- well, Bob's and my idea of a pop song, anyway. Then the live singers take it up.

Enjoy.

- KLF

"American classical music" -- Is it a realistic label?

From my latest contribution to www.NewMusicBox.com:

"The core story of Western art music is the invention, development, and disintegration of harmony, the progress from plainsong to modal harmony to tonality to post-tonality. America had no role in that history. Harmony went from Perotin to Palestrina to J.S. Bach to Wagner to Webern entirely without American input. Of course, the European invention called harmony is now globally ubiquitous. And that means that, in some sense, classical music is also global and therefore (nominally at least) American. But it's also Indian, Afghani, Indonesian, Egyptian, Japanese, etc. It's everybody's and nobody's.

"Examples can be found throughout the United States of iambic pentameter, Sufism, polo, and Korean food. That doesn't make any of them American. Soccer is played in America, but no one calls it an 'American' sport. So, why do we keep insisting there can be such a thing as American classical music, as opposed to classical music that happens to be made in America?"

To read the entire thing, go here:

www.newmusicbox.com/article.nmbx?id=5703

- KLF

Let's face it: New music isn't welcome in the classical mainstream

Journalist William Weir, writing in the Chicago Tribune yesterday (Sept. 3, 2008), makes a succinct case for marketing the music we generally call "new classical" just about anywhere except among the consumers of classical music's usual product: music composed before 1910. After citing the money and energy expended by one living composer in pursuit of performances by symphony orchestras and their chamber-music brethren, Weir makes his point by way of a quote from Greg Sandow:

"It might be easier if you ignored the mainstream classical world, where new music is not particularly welcome," says Greg Sandow, a composer and classical music blogger writing a book about the future of classical music. "The mainstream audience is the wrong audience, just like you wouldn't show art films at the cinema at the mall."

There's no reason people who listen to Beethoven can't listen to newfangled classical, but there's also no reason to necessarily expect them to. It's a little like expecting someone who listens to Hoagy Carmichael to listen to Radiohead, just because they both fall under the category of "pop."

I once addressed a group of classical music presenters on the importance of performing new music as a way of continuing a tradition that might well die without fresh creative input. I pointed out that in the pop world, the new was expected, that "covers" of earlier music were considered secondary to the primary importance of new creations. Asking for questions from the audience, I expected vivacious debate on the relevance of new classical music. Calling on the first eager hand raised, I got this instead: "Tell me, how can we get more attention from the press?"

It sometimes seems classical-music fans don't even understand the basic ontology of how music is made. Performers are elevated to primary music-makers, while composers are relegated to people who supply some notes for the real musicians onstage. A few years ago, I attended the audition concert of a young conductor for the music-director post at a major orchestra. The first half of the program was devoted to music by a semi-well-known living composer. The crowd loved it, applauding wildly, yet at intermission all I heard was how great the conductor was - not a word about the compositions. The orchestra hired the conductor as its music director, but not a note of the composer's music has ever been played again. Did the audience really not understand that a good 80 percent of what made the music what it was had been determined by the composer, not the conductor?

- KLF