Natural selection my ass!

I would think it takes very little mental RAM space to figure out that sidewalks in Manhattan get copious daily deposits of urine, feces, vomit, spit, garbage, soot, grime, and God knows what other unpleasant stuff from millions of people (residents, commuters, tourists), dogs, birds, rats and other members of the local fauna.  So when it rains hard enough to create bubbling streams of water running along the curb toward the nearest storm drain, even borderline retards among us should know that this is not the kind of water you want to make contact with your skin, let alone your face and/or genitalia.
      Any adult who does not know this is a living proof that something may be wrong with the concept of evolution by natural selection.  The genotype of the two happy twenty-somethings in this photo - taken in Times Square shortly after the hurricane Irene passed through Manhattan - should have been "de-selected" long time ago because it produces such staggering stupidity at the phenotype level.

I wonder where these two will be 28 days later?

Three things I hate to see coming my way

#3:  Minor neurological damage is likely from prolonged exposure to the loud and obnoxious jingle played over and over again:

Mr Softee Ice Cream Truck

#2:  Moderate property damage is possible, including lost roof shingles, shattered window panes, and disappearance of unsecured outdoor furniture:   

Hurricane Irene

#1:  Catastrophic damage to one's aesthetic standards is nearly certain.  Shattered faith in the future of serious music is highly probable.  After-effects may last for months, and may include such typical signs of post-traumatic stress disorder as bouts of nausea, recurrent nightmares, and panic attacks:

Where to sit in the concert hall for a piano recital

1.  With pianists whose playing is extroverted, powerful, and strongly projected, I would sit toward the back of the hall:

2.  With pianists whose playing is introverted and highly nuanced, I would sit next to the stage:

3.  And then there is one pianist who recently proved that the best place in the hall can actually be under the piano itself:

   

Whaddayawant!?!?

Four times (on three different days) I tried to listen to my favorite recording of Helmut Lachenmann's music.   And each time Lachenmann's rarefied, otherworldly orchestral textures were shattered by incessant ear-piercing shrieking of a bluejay sitting on a tree next to my house.  Naturally I hated the bird for its anti-Lachenmann heckling.  But I hated it even more for bringing back memories of another creature which once had annoyed me this much: a middle-aged subway psycho on a half empty mid-afternoon train I was riding back into the city some years ago.

The psycho's routine was to stop in front of a passenger, bark Whaddayawant! at the top of his lungs, wait for a second or two with his head bobbing slightly, then move to his next target and repeat the whole thing all over again.  And again.  And again...    
 
I am neither a patient nor a friendly man, but on that subway train I had extra reasons not to feel chummy.  I was hungry because I missed lunch.  I had not smoked for a couple of hours.  I still had the rest of the day ahead of me, filled with waling sirens, screeching buses, roaring helicopters, bone-rattling jackhammers, and – the curse of curses – all those people stacked on top of one another in their tiny, perpetually dark, poorly ventilated apartments.  And in addition to all that I had to endure the psycho's endless Whaddayawant!...  Whaddayawant!... Whaddayawant!...

 
At first I was absolutely certain about what I want:  I want to rip the fucking larynx out of the guy’s throat and shout “Hello there!” into the open end of his windpipe.  That felt good, but not for long because my next thought was: You want to perform involuntary tracheotomy on a stranger, and you call HIM a psycho?

 
By the time the psycho worked his way to where I was sitting, I wasn’t angry anymore.  It was obvious that the man was exactly where he belonged, that this city was his, not mine.  I even briefly wondered what would happen if I were to respond to his Whaddayawant! by telling him the truth:  A cigarette and a shot of bourbon.  Would his gaze suddenly go far, far away, to the time when people actually talked to him instead of only asking him questions like Have you been taking your medication? or Can I see some ID?  Would he return from there as a dignified, cultured man on his way to see the Lucian Freud exhibition at the Acquavella Gallery?  Or would he more likely pull a screwdriver from his pocket and stab me in the head?

 
In the end I did what every subway rider does in such circumstances, which is to become intensely interested in the topological properties of empty space just in front of one's knees.  The psycho stood next to me for a second, then moved on, barking Whaddayawant! at a few more passengers before taking his survey of humanity's desires to the next car.  As the sliding door closed behind him I realized that what I really want - more acutely, more desperately than anything else - is to pack my things and get the fuck out of this noisy, smelly, grimy, miserable city.

Two years later I did just that.

   

Schoenberg, Boulez, and the Schrödinger's cat

SCHOENBERG'S GRAVE

By now the story is old and tired: Soon after Schoenberg-the-man was buried Pierre Boulez proceeded to bury Schoenberg-the-composer in the infamously cold-blooded pseudo-obituary entitled Schoenberg is dead.  Temperamentally Boulez's unceremonious postmortem of Schoenberg's creative legacy was the work of a pathologically ambitious scoundrel, if not a borderline sociopath.  Intellectually it was an exercise in musicological triviality and ideologically motivated nonsense.
     The triviality is the essay's "central message" - that much of Schoenberg's supposedly revolutionary music is essentially 19th century music in which the tonal organization of pitch had been replaced by serial organization.  Big fucking deal!  As if without Boulez's help experienced listeners could not have recognized Schoenberg's decidedly old-fashioned rhythms, his traditional orchestral palette, and (to paraphrase the composer Iain Hamilton) his continuing submission to "the tyranny of the theme".
     The nonsense is the essay's underlying suggestion that these traditional aspects of Schoenberg's music justify a deflationary view of the historical significance, aesthetic merits, or the continuing influence of Schoenberg's oeuvre.  Denigrating Schoenberg's achievements because they fell short of total serialism makes as much sense as chastising Euclid for failing to extend geometry to spaces with arbitrary number of dimensions, or dressing down Einstein for failing to apply quantization to gravitational fields. 

I recalled this sordid bit of musical folklore because one of the two live broadcasts of Schoenberg's Op.42 I listened to recently was conducted (of all people!) by Boulez.  With Barenboim as the soloist, the performance proves that Schoenberg is very much alive, and it does so by presenting the music exactly as it was described by Boulez half a century earlier: as a 19th century concerto in every respect except for its serial organization of pitch.  Barenboim's achingly arched phrasing, nuanced dynamics, and pellucid, silvery tone would be wholly appropriate in the Chopin E-minor concerto.   And the orchestra under Boulez - the supposedly austere, analytical, detached Boulez - radiates as much autumnal warmth as I would expect from Brahms' E-minor symphony.  Performed so affectionately, as a nostalgic, wistfully lyrical dodecaphonic homage to the late 19th century, Schoenberg's concerto is an irresistibly charming piece of vintage modernism. 

The second live broadcast, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard as the soloist,  de-emphasized as far as possible the music's 19th century roots and, as a result, offered no less convincing a proof that Schoenberg is very much dead.  With Aimard's steely and serious handling of the piano part, backed by refined but coolly impersonal playing of the Berlin Philharmonic, the tonal allusions of Schoenberg's tone row sound contrived, the themes sound amateurishly awkward, the old-fashioned Viennese rhythms have a limping quality, and the overall effect is that of faux modernism which is as hopelessly dated as the schmaltziest of Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte.

Both performances, however, involved musicianship and instrumental craft of the highest order, and both (as far as I can tell) were fully consistent with Schoenberg's instructions given in the score.  Which leads me to suspect that Schoenberg-the-composer, like the poor Schrödinger's cat, is both dead and alive, and that this paradoxical superposition of states collapses into one or the other definite state only when Schoenberg's music is experienced through an actual performance. 
      I don't mean this quantum mechanical metaphor as a some musicological or metaphysical thesis.  (There is enough scientifically illiterate lunacy in the humanities as it is.)  I only want to illustrate the fact that no other composer's music strikes me as being capable of such schizophrenic duality when heard in different performances.  The music of some composers simply leaves me intellectually and emotionally cold no matter how it is performed.   With other composers, the music remains intellectually and emotionally absorbing in all high quality performances, however different their treatments of the music's formal elements may be.  But with Schoenberg's music (beginning with Op.4) one and the same composition can make me hold my breath in awe or fall asleep from boredom.

So perhaps the young Boulez wasn't completely wrong in his terse assessment of Schoenberg's music, but only half wrong.  Or should it be half right?...


    

RICHARD WERNICK, FRED LERDAHL: recent string quartets

GORDON HALL, Falls Village, Connecticut

RICHARD WERNICK

String Quartet No.8 (2010)

FRED LERDAHL
Third String Quartet (2008)

Daedalus Quartet

Music Mountain Festival

VII.16.2011

Gordon Hall

Falls Village, Connecticut

320 kbs VBR mp3 (no re-encoding)

This must hurt: An American composer writes music for half a century, receives many prestigious awards (including the Pulitzer Prize), holds an endowed professorship at an Ivy League university ... and today, at the age of 77, he is nearly invisible in the music world.  It was only a couple of days ago that I came across my first live recording of Richard Wernick's music.  And I have been enthusiastically collecting live recordings of contemporary music for quite some time.  (Of course there are some commercial studio recordings of Wernick's music, but these recordings are poor indicators of the composer's visibility.  After all, the music of such archeological curiosities as Fasch and Locatelli had been commercially recorded too, but I probably have a better chance of bedding Megan Fox than encountering a Fasch symphony or a Locatelli violin concerto in the concert hall.)

In any case, I think Wernick's atonal (but not athematic) string quartet is attractive, even if it never ventures far from the sound world of Schoenberg's String Trio and the last two quartets.  I simply happen to like the (admittedly old-fashioned) style of "atonal romanticism", so it matters little to me that Wernick's string quartet - like those of other "atonal romantics" Artur Schnabel, Leon Kirchner (one of Wernick's teachers), and Henri Lazarof, to mention some - is neither especially innovative nor particularly individual.