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Donald's Blog
August 11, 2010 Sometimes a Job is Done Properly, Sometimes Not This week I received a parcel from Ted Hodgetts at JazzFirst Books in Canada, containing a pristine copy of the first USA edition of my book about Billie Holiday, then called Wishing On The Moon (1994). This was my favorite edition, as far as the actual printing and manufacture of the book went; Viking in New York did a job that could not have been bettered. And Ted had packed the book in a sizeable box, wrapped in tissue paper, with some packing peanuts and bubble wrap fore and aft, so that it was going to stay pristine. My job was to inscribe the book asnd send it on to a mutual friend. August 11, 2010 Modern Music Conductor Leon Botstein is a co-founder and an artistic director of the Bard Music Festival in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where for 20 seasons adventurous programming has made sense and has been successful. This month the annual event is featuring the music of Alban Berg (1885-1935), and music by contemporaneous composers. Barrymore Laurence Scherer in today's Wall Street Journal writes about the Fest, and quotes from this year's festival book, Berg and His World, by Christopher Hailey.
But it seems to me that this is just as true of a lot of other "difficult modern music that makes us ordinary listeners feel stupid." It has taken a century for musicians and critics alike to allow a performing tradition of the music in its context. Play it as though it is beautiful, and guess what: it's beautiful. Compared to Berg, Schoenberg's other star pupil, Anton Webern "embraced atonality by creating a new compositional framework to justify it," Scherer writes; but I have heard Weben's music for string quartet played with such affection that a church full of ordinary concert-goers in Austin Texas were rapt. And listen to Alfred Brendel's different recordings of Schoenberg's piano concerto, made over a period of decades, two or three of them with the same conductor: as the piece becomes part of the repertoire, it is more and more fun. The recordings of Schoenberg's string quartets made by the Kolisch Quartet on a Hollywood soundstage many decades ago are almost drenched in chicken-fat. August 9, 2010 Unintended Consequences? You Bet California Crackup is a new book by Joe Mathews and Mark Paul, reviewed in the Wall Street Journal last week by Troy Senik. Among California's problems, writes Senik, is that it is 'hamstrung by direct democracy'. A good example, it seems, was Proposition 13 in 1978, that capped property taxes, and had 'unintended consequences'. Since the holes in the road have to be mended and the schools have to be kept open, capping local taxes meant that responsibility devolved onto the state legislature, effectively giving it more power... Hold on. Citizens voting against taxes might have unintended consequences? Well, who would have thought it. August 5, 2010 Who's a Radical? (3)
There are two columnists who are distinguished for their complete uselessness. Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal I do not even bother to read any more; his work reminds us of his own failed career, and it's just too bad that he didn't fail sooner. But Cal Thomas, syndicated by Tribune Media Services, is so bad he's funny. August 5, 2010 Poulenc's Music for Solo PIano I have been trying to find a listing from a Schwann catalog of 1971 or so of all the recordings of Francis Poulenc's solo piano music that were then available, because I had one that brought out the humor in the music so well that it made me chuckle out loud. David Hurwitz has recommended more recent recordings by Eric Le Sage, and I am going to try those too, but the LP that I had nearly 40 years ago had such bad surfaces that I though it must have had smallpox, and I have long since lost it, and I can't remember the name of the label or the pianist. August 5, 2010 Hitch-22 Writing about the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland in his memoir Hitch-22, published this year, Christopher Hitchens observed:
August 5, 2010 My Invisible Friend Unable to sell our house in Iowa, we have decided to try to rent it, which requires a city inspection, which has uncovered termites. While I've got this new and additional expense on my mind, I have to take the dog to the vet, because he's been biting his butt, which means he needs his glands expressing. Preparing to back out of the garage, I keep my finger on the button that operates the garage door, because otherwise it might stop before it is open all the way. Meanwhile the CD player roars to life, the pianist and the orchestra arguing in Elliott Carter's piano concerto. This is what Ethne calls 'bing-bong-plink' music, and Louis doesn't care much for it, either. August 4, 2010 Who's a Radical? (2)
Today in the Morning Call, Sen. Patrick Leahy (a Democrat from Vermont) says 'This radical Conservative agenda is a threat', referring to opposition to Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court. In the Wall Street Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz refers to 'another terrorist attempt by a soldier of radical Islam'. Actually, conservatives are quite open about what they think is opposition to 'judicial activism'; and the Islamofascists are likewise open about turning the clock back 1,600 years. None of these are radicals; they are reactionaries. August 4, 2010 The True Cost of Doing Nothing
Also in the Morning Call, it's reported that Governor Rendell made a plea for increasing the gasoline tax, raising the fee for vehicle registration, and a net-profits tax on oil companies, all to pay for infrastructure repairs. He was standing beneath the crumbling Tilghman Street bridge in Allentown when he made his plea. Pennsylvania has more bridges, culverts, sewers, roads etc that need repairing than any other state, and the repairs to just the Tilghman Street bridge were estimated at $5m a few years ago, $13m now. August 4, 2010 Mitch Miller
One of my complaints about the Wall Street Journal would be that it prints very few obituaries, but when it does, the result is worth reading. Mitch Miller's obit in the New York Times starts out with that paper's trademark convoluted obit intro, which leaves you with the impression that Miller's greatest accomplishment was his singalong albums and TV shows; Will Friedwald's obit in the WSJ starts with a quote from Tony Bennett: 'Mitch Miller was the guy who showed everybody how to be a record producer.' August 4, 2010 'Jolly Peter' by Jan Savitt?
In Will Friedwald's obit of Mitch Miller, he says that Miller was one of those rare classical musicians who listened to everything:
This reminds me of something. I have spent a lot of time tracking down stuff that I loved when I was a kid that has never been reissued: I have found Hugo Winterhalter's recording of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue with Byron Janis at the piano; a Dave Brubeck track called 'Makin' Time'; a recording of Schumann's piano concerto played by Noel Mewton-Wood. But one item still eludes me: Lee and Rose Perry once operated a roadhouse on old Highway 41 in Kenosha County, and when I was a kid they still had a box of ex-jukebox 78s, and among them, I was certain, was a blue-label Decca of 'Jolly Peter', by Jan Savitt. Savitt was a Russian-born violinist who led a dance band from the late 1930s. 'Jolly Peter' was a bouncy folkish tune played by a small group, and the record had a swinging violin solo on it. I finally found a CD reissue of Savitt's Decca 'Jolly Peter'... and it was a conventional big band arrangement, with no violin solo at all. August 4, 2010 Do We Want a Police State?
On the letters page of a certain newspaper today, George S. Taylor of Los Altos California wants Congress to 'finish building a real wall on the southern border...I do not believe that people will walk through or drive over a 20-foot-high, one-inch-thick steel wall...' Will someone please explain to me why employers are compelled by law to demand proof of citizenship, while law enforcement officers (police) are forbidden by law to request it. I think I can answer that. Employers are required to collect income and Social Security taxes and forward them to Washington (the Social Security card ought to be proof of citizenship), as well as state taxes, and employers are also conduits to other costs and benefits, such as unemployment insurance and health care, which we wouldn't want illegal immigrants to to be able to collect, would we. Whereas law enforcement officers do not have any of these responsibilities, and should not be able to demand proof of citizenship from you or me, Mr VanderBrug, because this is not the old Soviet Union. We are not required to carry internal passports. Or as we used to say when I was a kid, 'It's a free country, innit?' August 3, 2010 Polls and Polecats Joseph DeSantis is the co-author with Newt Gingrich of a book called To Save America. He writes in a letter to a newspaper today, "Fifty-five percent of likely voters describe President Obama's policies as 'socialist' (Democracy Corps, a Democratic polling firm)." August 3, 2010 The New Tory Prime Minister Hugh Rifkind, of The Times of London, has written an amusing article in today's Wall Street journal about James Cameron, the new Conservative Prime Minister in Britain. Cameron has been speaking in various world capitals, and dropping a few clangers. For example, in Washington last month, he described his own country as the USA's "junior partner in 1940 when we were fighting the Nazis." In 1940 the USA wasn't even in the war yet, Russia was still on the wrong side, and Britain famously stood alone, with no partners at all, its national pride unbowed; and as Rifkind did not point out, the Royal Air Force won the Battle of Britain that year, forcing Hitler to abandon his invasion plans. August 3, 2010 Dropping the Ball in Afghanistan Bret Stephens in today's Wall Street Journal writes that "The U.S. cannot remain a superpower if the suspicion takes root that we are a feckless nation." I agree with him that we should not drop the ball in Afghanistan again. Without starting an argument about whether our aim is to remain a "superpower", the trouble is that we are already viewed in some circles as feckless. The reason the Taliban are so tenacious in Afghanistan is that two of the Wall Street Journal's heros, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, have already dropped the ball there, and our enemies are betting that we will do it a third time.
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