A hugely succesful failure

ELLIOTT CARTER and PIERRE BOULEZ at Avery Fisher Hall before the 'Informal Evening' performance of Carter's Concerto for Orchestra on 11 February 1974

From most New York Philharmonic subscribers there was a sigh of relief when Pierre Boulez left the orchestra.  ...  [R]eliable reports have it that nobody was happier than the front office when Mr. Boulez went to Paris for good.
HAROLD C. SCHONBERG, Facing the Music, Simon and Schuster, 1981, p.362.
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What could have so upset the front office folks about Pierre Boulez' tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic?
     Was it Boulez's introduction of Rug Concerts and other unconventional concert formats such as Informal Evenings?  Not likely given that Boulez's Rug Concerts "played to a full house that greeted each piece with unrestrained enthusiasm"[1], and the series proved to be "enormously successful"[2].
     Was it because of decreased attendance due to Boulez's insistence on performing a substantial amount of 20th century modernist music?  Again not likely because the attendance rate at the Philharmonic was at 96% of capacity in Boulez's third year[3], rising to 99% in his last year, with the average over his entire tenure (1971-1977) being 97% [4].  This is slightly better than the 96% attendance rate under Boulez's successor Zubin Mehta[5], and vastly better than the 78-88% attendance rate during the tenure of the ridiculously overpaid Lorin Maazel three decades later[6].

With this in mind, I'm inclined to think that Harold Schonberg was simply full of shit, and his allusions to (unnamed) "reliable sources" and the (statistically invisible) aggrieved majority of Philharmonic subscribers are nothing more than a feeble attempt to camouflage his own intense dislike of post-war musical avant-garde and of Boulez as its most influential spokesman.  If I'm right, this is one example to support my view of Schonberg as a superb music writer - one whose books I re-read periodically for the sheer pleasure of their Hemingwayesque directness and powerfully projected personality - who also happened to be a spectacularly limited and biased music critic.

Yankee ingenuity!!!

U.S. Ranked Low in Math Literacy

ABC News Dec. 11, 2004

In a study of how good 15-year-olds are in math, the "big, bad" USA ranked 24 out of 29 countries.

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A serious problem, indeed.  And this is how American parents have dealt with it:

Then again, maybe not...

In an earlier post about Yo-Yo Ma's involvement with Elliott Carter's Cello Concerto I claimed to know - based on the live recording of one of Ma's performances - that Ma had no difficulties with the technical challenges posed by this concerto.  A couple of  days ago I received an email from the composer Wei-Chieh Lin (a student of Milton Babbitt) which considerably diminished my confidence in the above claim.  Here is the pertinent excerpt:

No place for amateurs...

Dozens of professional goats briefly took over a neighborhood in Boise

by Karin Brulliard August 3 at 11:18 AM (URL)

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Clearly the days of amateur goats are over (as are the days of literate journalists).  Today's world is a highly demanding and dangerous place where only a team of professional goats can get the job done.

A one-night stand to remember...

ELLIOTT CARTER with Daniel Barenboim and members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Orchestra Hall in 1994.

I can't think of a more appropriate way to describe the cellist Yo-Yo Ma's brief involvement with Elliott Carter's Cello Concerto.  Having had some experience with Carter's music in the past (he had played Carter's cello sonata brilliantly according to the composer), Ma must have had a pretty good idea of what to expect when he agreed to have a Carter concerto commissioned for him by the Chicago Symphony.  And the initial perusal of the finished score should have been enough for a musician of Ma's caliber to decide if he finds the music attractive enough to invest time and effort in mastering its numerous challenges.  Whatever went through Ma's head back then, he did learn the concerto, played the world premiere with the Chicago Symphony under Daniel Barenboim in September of 2001, then, a few weeks later, performed it again with the same forces at Carnegie Hall.

And that was it.  As far as I know, Ma has not played the Carter concerto ever since.

Perhaps engagements to play this concerto weren't sufficiently lucrative compared to those where Ma could play the numbingly familiar crowd-pleasers (Schumann, Dvorak, Shostakovich) he had played for decades.  Or maybe Ma decided that public performances of challenging modernist music were incompatible with his status as a beloved 'People's Cellist'.  One thing I know is that Ma had no difficulties with the technical challenges posed by this concerto.  I know this because one of Ma's performances was recorded for broadcast, and the recording documents a performance that is simply stunning not only for the ease and confidence with which Ma dispatches the solo part, but also for his (and Daniel Barenboim's) understanding that, despite its rhythmic complexities and non-tonal harmonic language, Carter's piece should be played as a modernist version of an emotionally turbulent Romantic concerto.