Podcast | Robert Greenberg | Speaker, Composer, Author, Professor, Historian

The phrase “one of a kind” would seem fairly useless when applied to the arts in general or music specifically. Really, aren’t all great musical artists – by definition – “one of a kind?” Monteverdi, Purcell, Sebastian Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky, Springsteen, Weird Al?  Yes: these good folks (and many, many, MANY more) are indeed all “one of a kind.”  But then But then there are those very few who are SO truly weird (sorry Maestro Yankovic; you are not really that weird), SO far out, SO iconoclastic, so radical, subversive, and idiosyncratic that they stand utterly solitary, disconnected from anything and everything but themselves; singular, detached, ALONE: truly, one of a kind. Such a person was the American experimenter, instrument builder, guru, high priest and “composer” – and that’s “composer” in scare quotes – Harry Partch, who died on September 3, 1974 – 44 years ago today – in San Diego, California, at the age of 73. Harry Partch sitting among a few of his instruments Harry Partch was one of a kind. He rejected the entire Western musical tradition and created, in its place, an alternative musical universe for which he proselytized and composed. He created a tuning system that divided the octave into 43(!) different pitches. He created a complicated, tablature-based notational system that remains almost indecipherable to anyone but one of his disciples. He designed and built a wide variety of stringed and percussion instruments capable of playing his complex tunings. A brief word about these instruments. Whatever we think about Partch’s ideas and his music, he was an inventor and builder of genius. The instruments are strikingly beautiful, sonically gorgeous and so exotic as to make the Cantina band in Star Wars look like a drab old string quartet by comparison. In a letter to a friend, Partch described a bamboo marimba he called the “Eucal Blossom” this way: The “Eucal Blossom” “This is the third instrument in which I have used the contorted boughs of eucalyptus as part of the base structure. A branch with an appropriate crotch extends from a redwood base; one arm above the crotch is cut at the top and the angle desired for the disk holding the bamboo, and is there bolted to the disk; the other extends upwards through a slot in the disk and holds the music wrack.”  Partch sitting in front of his “Cloud Chamber Bowls” Partch – like so many percussionists before AND AFTER HIM – built his percussion instruments using found objects. In the case of an instrument Partch called “Spoils of War”, the “found objects” are seven artillery shells, cut to different sizes. The “Mazda Marimba” consists of 24 gradually larger light bulbs with their guts removed. (Best to play this instrument very carefully, as a heavy hand will result in a lot of broken glass!)  Then there are the “Cloud Chamber Bowls”, one of Partch’s most famous creations. These are large Pyrex gongs that began their lives as Pyrex carboys: big rounded jugs with narrow necks, used for holding corrosive liquids. Partch discovered them while dumpster diving outside the radiation laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. My Goodness, What a Life! Harry Partch was born on June 24, 1901 in Oakland, California at 5861 Occidental Street (the house is still there; according to Google maps it is a 14 minute drive from where I am writing th...

Today we recognize the birth and the death of two musical masters from entirely different times and places who nevertheless, by the most extraordinary of coincidences, share the same nickname: the jazz tenor saxophonist Lester “Prez” Young and the Franco-Flemish composer Josquin “des Prez” Lebloitte. Lester “Prez” Young Lester “Prez” Young Lester Willis Young was born on August 27, 1909 – 109 years ago today – in Woodland, Mississippi. He was the consummate jazz hipster, who played “cool” long before “cool jazz” was recognized as a genre of jazz. Known in particular for his long association with Billie Holiday, Lester Young died on March 15, 1959, at the age of 49. Josquin des Prez Josquin des Prez (or “Desprez”; we will talk about the surname Lebloitte in a moment) was born circa 1450 and died on August 27, 1521: 497 years ago today. He was, simply, the greatest and most respected composer of his time. That he is not still a musical household name speaks to the fickleness of history and not to his music, which is superb. Josquin was the first composer to become a legend after his death, the first to have his music widely disseminated thanks to the newly invented printing press, and thus the first composer to have his works ranked as “classics” and his oeuvre as a “canon”. Let’s back that statement up. Martin Luther, no mean musician himself, wrote: “Josquin is master of the notes, which must express what he desires; on the other hand, other composers must do what the notes dictate.” Writing in 1567, 46 years after Josquin’s death, the Florentine diplomat, philologist, mathematician, and humanist Cosimo Bartoli wrote: “Josquin may be said to have been, in music, a prodigy of nature, as our Michelangelo has been in architecture, painting, and sculpture; for, as there has not thus far been anybody who in his compositions approaches Josquin, so Michelangelo, among all those who have been active in the arts, is still alone and without peer.” The few accounts of Josquin the “man” that have come down to us describe an arrogant and self-absorbed curmudgeon whose personality defects were forgiven because of his extraordinary talent. Like the popular image of Beethoven today, he was perceived – in his lifetime – as someone apart, a composer into whose ear whispered the divine. His fame notwithstanding, huge gaps in our knowledge of Josquin’s life and music remain. We’re still not sure in which decade he was born. Until the late 1990s, his date of birth was pegged as being around 1440, based on what was considered the earliest known documentary record of his existence, a roster of singers at the Cathedral of Milan dating from 1459. The roster lists one “Jodocho de frantia biscantori”, which translates “Josquin of France, young adult singer”. But recent scholarship has revealed that the singer so named was not our Josquin, but rather, someone named Josquin de Kassalia, who had been born circa 1440. As it turns out, Josquin des Prez did not arrive in Italy until the late 1480s, and today his birth date is usually given as being circa 1450, though it was probably sometime in the early to mid-1450s. Neither are we precisely sure where Josquin was born. It might have been in what today is Belgium, in the province of Hainaut, or just across the border in or around the town of Saint-Quentin [San quen-TEN], in northern France. Both of these areas were, at the time, part of Burgundy, qualifying Josquin as being, generically, “Franco-Flemish”. Based on various legal documents – including his will – Josquin identified himself as being a Frenchman, although there is some question regarding that as well. His name, Josquin des Prez (or Desprez; both spellings are used) is a French rendering of the Dutch “Josken van de Velde”.

A little inside information about me. Since I was a kid, I have loved architecture and home design magazines: house porn, to be honest. The one constant in my reading has been Architectural Digest, to which I’ve been addicted since I was a teenager. Other mags have floated in and out of my consciousness over the years, including one called “Metropolitan Home”, to which I subscribed for many years (but no more; there’ just so much time for mags, I’m afraid). “Is this going somewhere” you ask? Yes: bear with me… “Metropolitan Home” had a regular feature (perhaps it still does) in which a designer would be asked to identify “the 10 things you cannot live without;” basically “your favorite things”. These good people would vie with each other to come up with the coolest, hippest, most sophisticated things-they-could-not-live-without: the caviar and lobster frittata at the Revo Café in Dubai; “my platinum Faberge cuticle scissors”; vicuna cashmere scarves: “my Swarovski crystal-studded Lixil Satis Smart Toilet” (this can be yours as well for just 130k);“my solar-powered Black & Decker Nose Hair Trimmer”, and so forth. (As best as I can recall, not one of those questioned ever came up with any of those things that we really can’t do without, like a good night’s sleep, clean water, hydrocortisone cream, a sympathetic therapist, a refrigerator, lube, a decent cocktail shaker, etc.) “Is this going somewhere?” Yes, yes: just hang in there a moment longer. As the editors of “Metropolitan Home” are unlikely to ever ask me to identify the “10 things I cannot do without” I’ve decided to ask myself. To avoid being gratuitous, I have in fact listed the nine things I cannot do without. Numbers 1 and 2: my essential fluids (Peet’s Mocha Sunani coffee in a French press in the morning; a Mojave-dry Bombay Sapphire martini with a twist, shaken – thank you very much – in the evening). Number 3: my piano (I have a very nice piano that I treat like the princess she is and which has, over time, developed a grudging if not frequently demonstrated affection for me); number 4: Passantino No. 85, 12-stave music notebooks and, number 5: Pacific Music Paper No. 1 pencils (I still compose analog: pencil on paper); number 6: my 27-inch iMac desktop, on which I am writing this post; number 7: my Varidesk, which allows me to work standing up (sitting is indeed the new smoking, and working standing up has been a revelation); number 8: my studio sound system; and number 9, the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, without which my life as a musician and music historian would be inconceivable. Sir George Grove And there we are, finally! Please: a birthday greeting to the extraordinary polymath Sir George Grove – creator of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians – who was born on August 13, 1820, 198 years ago today. Grove was trained as a civil engineer, and it was in that capacity that he engineered lighthouses in the West Indies and bridges in England and Wales. Successful though he was as an engineer, his love for music drew him to arts administration: he moved to London in 1849, at the age of 29, where he became secretary of the Society of Arts. His timing was perfect. “The Great Exposition” – Britain’s world’s fair in honor of its industrialization and modernity – was in preparation. It was held in London’s Hyde Park from May 1 to October 15, 1851, during which it was attended by an incredible 6,039,722 visitors!

On this day 58 years ago – August 6, 1960 – the 18 year-old singer and dancer Chubby Checker performed The Twist on American TV for the first time on the rock ‘n’ roll variety show American Bandstand. Dick Clark in 1961, looking young For reasons we will discuss, American Bandstand was, both artistically and socially, one of the most important programs ever broadcast on television. It aired for an incredible 37 seasons, from October 7, 1952 (when Harry Truman was President of the United States) until October 7, 1989 (three years before the election of Bill Clinton). (In case you were wondering, the longest-running television show of any kind, anywhere, is NBC’s Meet the Press, which made its debut on November 6, 1947; it has run continuously for 70 years and 9 months!) In its 37-year run, some 3000 episodes of American Bandstand were produced.  From 1952 until 1964, the showwasfilmed in Philadelphia at the studios of WFIL, the local ABC affiliate. (That would have been channel 6; having grown up in South Jersey watching Philadelphia TV, it was one of the three network channels we received, along with WCAU – channel 10, which was then the CBS affiliate – and KYW, channel 3, which was then the NBC affiliate.  Three channels.  Deciding what to watch in those days was rather easier than today!)   The list of performers who appeared on American Bandstand over the years – rock, pop, soul, and country musicians – absolutely beggars our belief; you can look that list up on Wikipedia.  We are left breathless as well by the list of musicians who made their national television debuts on the show, a list that includes Prince, Sonny and Cher, Ike and Tina Turner, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Stevie Wonder, the Talking Heads, the Jackson Five, the Beach Boys, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Johnny Cash, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, Aerosmith, Simon and Garfunkel, Madonna, Iggy Pop (who was known to his parents Luella and James as James Newell Osterberg Jr.), and yes, Chubby Checker.  American Bandstand became the prototype for a generation of musical TV shows, from Soul Train (which ran for 1117 episodes from 1971 to 2006) and Hee Haw (which ran for 655 episodes between 1969 and 1993), to such shorter running shows as Shindig (1964-1966) and Hullaballo (1965 to 1966).   It has been argued that American Bandstand set the stage for Fox’s American Idol, (which first aired on June 11, 2002) and the cable channel MTV, which was launched on Saturday, August 1, 1981 at 12:01 am Eastern Time.  (The first music video broadcast on MTV – available only to homes in New Jersey – was Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles.  The video and the song – both popular in their day – are, respectively, magnificently dated and perfectly awful, and their presence in the homes of New Jersey on August 1, 1981 explains – to me, at least – many subsequent and unsavory events in that oft-beleaguered state.  As a public service, a link to the The Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star has been provided. For 33 years of it’s 37-year run, the host of American Bandstand was the seemingly ageless (though unfortunately not deathless) Richard Wagstaff Clark (1929-2012).  “Dick” Clark was born and raised in Mount Vernon, New York.  He attended Syracuse University, and in 1952, at the age of 24, he moved to Philadelphia and took a job as a disc jockey at WFIL radio.  On July 9, 1956, after Bandstand’s host Bob Horn was arrested for drunk driving and consequently fired, the not-quite 27 year-old Clark became the show’s new host. From both a musical and social point of view, Clark’s ascension was a spectacularly important event, taken as widely as we please.  Soon after he took over, Clark ended Bandstand’s segregated, all-white policy and began featuring black performers, starting with Chuck Berry.

Today we mark the birth – 267 years ago, on July 30, 1751 – of the “other” surviving Mozart child. Four-and-a-half years older than her brother Wolfgang, her full name was Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia Mozart; she was known as “Marianne” and went by the nickname of “Nannerl.” Nannerl was something of a musical prodigy herself, and by an early age she had become a formidable harpsichordist and pianist, to the degree that in the earliest of the Mozart family musical tours, she often received top billing over her brother. But her life as a performer came to a screeching halt when she turned 18 in 1769. Having reached a “marriageable age”, she was no longer permitted by her father to publically “exhibit” her talents. Yes, Nannerl could have gone renegade like her brother and defied her father, but such a thing would have been inconceivable to her. From her first breath to her last, Maria Anna/Marianne/Nannerl – whatever we choose to call her – was her father’s daughter, and she could no more have gone against his wishes than I can pole vault 19 feet (or 4 feet, for that matter). She did not marry the man she loved because Leopold forbade her from doing so. Instead, at the age of 32, she married the man Leopold told her to marry. She happily continued to promulgate the Leopold-created Mozart family myth that Wolfgang was but a child in a man’s body long after both Leopold and Wolfgang had died. When Leopold disinherited Wolfgang for marrying without his blessing, Nannerl inherited not just the money Wolfgang had himself earned touring as a child but also all the music manuscripts he had left behind in Salzburg. (In my “Music History Monday” post of May 28 of this year I discussed the origins of the Mozart family myth and the issue of Wolfgang’s disinheritance, during which I went so far as to refer to the adult Nannerl as a “weasel” which, when it came to the way she treated her adult brother, she was.) Okay; name-calling is immature, but in this case, it is richly deserved. WEASEL! Moving on, let us contemplate the genetic inheritance of the Mozart children. The Mozart Parents Leopold Mozart Leopold Mozart – Dad – was born in Augsburg (in what today is southern Germany) on November 14, 1719; he died in Salzburg (in what today is northeastern Austria) on May 28, 1787. On November 21, 1747, Leopold married Anna Maria Walburga Pertl in Salzburg. She had been born nearby, in the village of St. Gilgen; she died on July 3, 1778, in Paris. According to the Mozart scholar Hermann Abert, at the time of their marriage, Leopold and Anna Maria: “Were regarded as the handsomest couple in Salzburg, and surviving portraits certainly confirm this assessment.” Leopold Mozart was a musician of not inconsiderable talent. He was a skilled violinist and organist, and a competent conductor and composer. He wrote a book on playing the violin – published in 1756, the year of Wolfgang’s birth – that was extremely influential and was translated into Dutch and French. However, he all but gave up composing, performing, and teaching in order to focus almost entirely on the musical training of his children (much to the unhappiness of the authorities in Salzburg, who expected him to actually earn his salary). Anna Maria Mozart Anna Maria Mozart – Mom – had “an ear for music”, but that’s about it. Her interests were varied; she enjoyed attending the opera and plays, and we read that she was equally interested in the political events and the military conflicts of her time. Were she alive today, we’ve little doubt that her iPhone would be belching out NPR all day (no; not Fox “News”; Mozart’s mother would not have listened to Fox “News”; you’re just going to have to trust me on this). The only genetic proclivity she seems to have passed on to her son (though certainly not on to her daughter),

We mark the death of the composer Domenico Scarlatti 261 years ago today, on July 23, 1757 in the Spanish capital of Madrid. The year 1685 was something of an annus mirabilis – a “miraculous year” – in the history of Western music as it saw the births of three of the greatest composers ever to grace our planet. On February 23, 1685, George Frederick Handel was born in the central German city of Halle. Thirty-six days later, on March 31, Johann Sebastian Bach was born some 60 miles away, in the central German city of Eisenach. Just under seven months after that, on October 26, Domenico Scarlatti was born in the Italian city of Naples. What a year! Some would take me to task for lumping Scarlatti together with Handel and Bach. (And in truth, we must be careful about lumping anyone together with Sebastian Bach, Handel included.) But having said that, we are not going to diminish one composer’s greatness by cudgeling him with that of another, because any way we spell it, Domenico Scarlatti was, bless him, a great composer. We would further observe that musically, Scarlatti did something that neither Bach nor Handel did: neither Bach (who died in 1750) nor Handel (who died in 1759) transcended the musical syntax of the “High (or late) Baroque”, irksome though it might be to employ such a period designation. Whatever; Scarlatti – who died in 1757 – did indeed transcend stylistically the High Baroque, and his music is a brilliant example of a new, more populist compositional style that emerged in his hometown of Naples in the 1720s and 1730s, a style that would eventually come to be known as the “Classical style.” Maestro Scarlatti came by his musical bona fides honestly. He was the sixth of ten children born to the composer and teacher Pietro Alessandro Gaspare Scarlatti (1660-1725). The elder Scarlatti is considered to be the padrino – the godfather – of Neapolitan (meaning Naples-based) opera. Paul Henry Lang, writing in his magisterial Music in Western Civilization sums up Alessandro Scarlatti’s importance this way: “The great personality who virtually made Naples the Mecca of musicians was Alessandro Scarlatti. He composed more than 100 operas; the number of his oratorios is approximately 150, while the cantatas (600) and various types of church music, together with his keyboard music, complete a truly impressive oeuvre. This astounding productivity does not mean superficiality or patchwork, for his compositions show a mastery of workmanship and an abundance of original musical ideas. In his dramatic works he professed an unconditional worship of the beauty of melody [and] a complete abandonment to the sensuous charm of the singing voice. Modern Italian opera begins with [Alessandro] Scarlatti. Handel, who met him in 1708, remained a devoted admirer of the Neapolitan master throughout his life, studying and imitating his works with loving care.” But Handel was not Alessandro Scarlatti’s greatest disciple. That would, of course, be Alessandro’s son Domenico. It wasn’t that Alessandro took Domenico’s music education into his own hands in the manner that Leopold Mozart did with his son Wolfgang 75 years later (while Alessandro did oversee Domenico’s instruction, it was a music education provided principally by others). No, Alessandro’s greatest gift to his son was raising him in the immersive, theatrical musical environment of a successful opera composer. Young Domenico’s music education was of the most practical sort: music was the family business and he was expected to contribute. As he got older he performed all sorts of jobs for his father: he arranged and copied music; he tuned instruments; he accompanied singers at rehearsals; he assisted his father in whatever was necessary during productions, acted as a gopher; we can imagine him making the coffee, corking the wine; if he could have, he’d likely have shaken the martinis. Writes Ralph Kirkpatrick in his biography of Domenico Scarl...

We mark the birth – on July 16, 1901, 117 years ago today – of the Austrian composer and conductor Fritz Mahler. While we might not recognize his first name, we surely recognize his surname, and Fritz’ father was indeed a cousin of the great composer and conductor Gustav Mahler. His present obscurity aside, Fritz Mahler was a well-known musician in his time. He studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. He emigrated to America in 1936, where he taught at Juilliard and conducted the Erie Philharmonic and the Hartford Symphony. For us, for now, the key phrase is “he emigrated to America in 1936”: Fritz Mahler was one of the hundreds – the thousands – of artists, scientists, writers, and intellectuals who managed to escape Europe in the 1930s. And thereby hangs our tale. Catastrophe On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was appointed Chancellor of Germany: head of the German government. Until April 30, 1945, when a palsied and defeated Hitler put his 7.656 mm Walther pistol against his right temple and scrambled his diseased brain, he presided over as malignant and criminal a regime as modern Europe has ever seen. Once in power, Hitler and the Nazi party quickly destroyed the democratic process that had brought them to power. At the same time, the racial and ethnic hatred that lay at the heart of Nazi doctrine became law, and the persecution of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the mentally ill began. With the annexation (the Anschluss) of Austria into the German Reich in March of 1938, German racial laws were applied to Austria as well. The brain drain began immediately upon the Nazi rise to power in 1933 and continued for the remainder of the 1930s. Across the continent writers, intellectuals, scientists, philosophers, physicians, Jews and non-Jews alike took to their heels. It was an exodus of talent unlike any other in history. The short list of composers who fled Europe is itself extraordinary. The Vienna-born Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) resigned his professorship at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin on March 1, 1933, just before he was to be fired. He eventually became a U.S. citizen and lived out the remainder of his life in southern California. The French-born Jewish composer Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) almost waited too long to get out of Europe; the Germans had already occupied Paris when he and his family managed to escape through Portugal to the United States. The German-born Jewish composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950) – whose Threepenny Opera contains one of the most famous songs in the theatrical repertoire, Mack the Knife – left Germany in March 1933. He became a U.S. citizen along with his Viennese-born wife, the Tony Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated singer and actress Lotte Lenya (1898-1981). (Because we need to know: Lenya is best known to American movie audiences as the Russian counter-intelligence SMERSH agent Rosa Klebb in the James Bond film From Russia With Love. Klebb killed her victims with a poisoned knife blade hidden in the tip of her right shoe. Following the appearance of the movie, Lenya recalled that whenever she met someone new, the first thing they’d look at were her shoes.) Not everyone who skedaddled Europe did so because he or she was Jewish. Some left out of pure moral outrage, like Béla Bartók. Others, like the Austrian-born Ernst Krenek (1900-1991), fled because their music was declared as being “degenerate” and was banned. For Igor Stravinsky, serendipity played a role: a French citizen since 1934, he was in residence at Harvard when Germany invaded France in May of 1940. By necessity rather than by design, Stravinsky ended up staying in the United States and became a U.S. citizen in 1945. The German-born Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) had a controversial relationship with the Nazis.

As events in music history go, July 9 is definitely on the lighter side. (Although, for me – personally – it is an important day, and I would use this opportunity to wish the happiest of birthdays to my beautiful daughter Rachel Amy, who was born in Berkeley, California 32 years ago today!) But back to musical business. We will indeed recognize the birth on July 9, 1879 – 139 years ago today – of the Italian composer, musicologist, and violinist Ottorino Respighi in Bologna, the city of lunch meat and red sauce fame. Respighi’s fame as a composer rests on four works: his three orchestral tone poems Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome, and Roman Festivals; and the eighth of his nine operas, a work entitled La fiamma (meaning “The Flame”), which received its premiere on January 23, 1934 in Rome. Fancy that: an Italian composer writing opera! In fact, there’s nothing more natural in the world. Opera was invented in Italy for the same reason that surfing was invented in Hawaii: Hawaii is surrounded by warm ocean water and perfect waves and Italians are surround by the musical warmth and beauty of the Italian language: that seemingly perfect amalgam of vowel and consonant. Oh opera! How we love thee! As I pointed out in last week’s Music History Monday, opera was invented in Florence Italy around 1600 as a courtly, aristocratic entertainment. And though it quickly became a popular entertainment in Italy, it remained, for many years – particularly in France and England – an aristocratic entertainment. An “aristocratic entertainment.” Again: last week’s post observed how the great Jean-Jacques Rousseau disparaged French court opera in the 1740s and 1750s for the elitism he believed it represented. And according to various arbiters of PC today, the great bulk of the operatic repertoire should be rejected as being irrelevant, as it represents an antiquated, elitist Euro-world at odds with the global equality and diversity of the twenty-first century. Oh. My. God. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard some version of this screed, I’d be a very wealthy person. Twenty-one years ago – in my Great Courses/Teaching Company survey entitled “How to Listen to and Understand Opera” – I ranted about this. I have updated that rant, because it is even more relevant today as it was in 1997. The rant was triggered by the introductory paragraph of a proposal for a world music course that I received from a high-end violinist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Here is that paragraph: “The ‘classical’ tradition in Western music, in Eurocentric culture, is a dying if not dead tradition. The musical style of the standard repertoire grew out of a relentlessly dominating minority culture known as imperialist Europe. Audiences and players are drawn to this essentially dead tradition as an escape from interactive values, interactive values which can properly be found in popular and world musical cultures. We must reject the dead tissue of our elitist past and embrace the living traditions of the present if we, as musicians and audiences, are to be relevant to our times.” Okay; this is complete nonsense. Questions * When we marvel at the Parthenon in Athens, do remind ourselves that it is a product of a patriarchal, femaphobic, faux-democratic boys club regime? * When we stand, awestruck, before Michelangelo’s Pieta at St. Peter’s in Rome, do we ruminate upon the elitist, oppressive, Machiavellian robber-baron mercantilist ruling class that commissioned it? * When we move and groove to really good, down and dirty rock ‘n’ roll, do we pause to reflect upon the grimy, stinking, tattooed, psycho-sexual drug-inspired environment that was its original milieu?

240 years ago today – on July 2, 1778 – the Swiss-born philosopher, novelist, educator, music theorist and critic, and composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau died at age 66 in the township of Ermenonville, roughly 25 miles north-east of Paris. Rousseau was one of the greatest and most significant thinkers ever born to our species. According to Will and Ariel Durant, writing in their book Rousseau and Revolution, Rousseau: “transformed education, elevated the morals of France[!], inspired the Romantic movement and the French Revolution, influenced the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer, the plays of Schiller, the novels of Goethe, the poems of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, the socialism of Marx, the ethics of Tolstoy, and, altogether, had more effect upon posterity than any other writer or thinker of that eighteenth century in which writers were more influential than they had ever been before.” Rousseau also helped to redefine the role and substance of opera at a time when opera – like movies and television today – was not just a form of entertainment but both a reflection and a driver of the political and social values of its time. A little background Opera was invented in Florence Italy around 1600 as a courtly entertainment. Its inventors were convinced that they were recreating, in modern guise, ancient Greek drama, which they believed was entirely sung. In 1639, the first public opera house opened in Venice. By 1670, there were seven opera houses in Venice, pumping out over 50 different productions a season. Sadly, Venetian opera’s growing popularity resulted in operas of ever-lower literary quality: dog-and-pony shows that featured insipid stories, visual spectacle, and over-the-top virtuosic singing. In the words of Joseph Kerman: “Venetian opera had thrown dignity into the canals. It was the worst period of Italian opera.” And so ensued the first of many operatic reforms, during which serious writers and composers periodically attempted to rescue and re-elevate opera from puerile entertainment to high art. By the mid-eighteenth century, the dominant style of opera was opera seria, or “serious opera”: a formulaic operatic structure that alternated arias and recitatives, peopled by gods and heroes drawn from ancient history and myth singing music as overblown as the characters themselves. Opera seria was embraced by the royalty and nobility of Europe, who perceived its heroic plots centered around ancient gods, kings, and warriors as a reflection of their own magnificence. Ultimately, the absolutist rulers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries co-opted opera seria; in France, opera actually became a powerful propaganda tool of the state. However, by 1750 opera seria’s days were numbered, and what would drive it to its doom was the rise of an ever-growing middle class. Yes: a small-to-middling middle class of some sort had existed in Europe since the High Middle Ages: merchants who traded in capital and goods; bureaucrats; and skilled artisans who served the mercantile and administrative needs of the towns and cities. They were the “bourgeoisie”: literally, the “town-dwellers”. However, by the early eighteenth century they were much more than that. Tremendous population growth and urban development had created entirely new patterns and methods of trade, manufacturing, ownership, and banking, all of which served to create a large and ever-growing bourgeoisie whose wealth was based on cash. A dynamic, entrepreneurial spirit had come to characterize the life of Western European towns and cities, as a large segment of the population strove to make money and perhaps even buy a title and some land. According to the contemporary Scottish novelist Tobias George Smollett (1721-1771): “Without money, there is no respect, honor,

On June 25, 1910 – 108 years ago today – Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird received its premiere at the Paris Opera House, in a ballet performance produced by Serge Diaghilev, staged by the Ballets Russes, and conducted by Gabriel Pierné. With choreography by Michel Fokine and the Firebird herself danced by the great Tamara Karsavina, The Firebird was a smash, a sensation, a runaway hit from the first. The not-quite 28-year-old Stravinsky was hailed as the successor to the Moguchaya Kuchka, the Russian Five, the group of nineteenth-century composers who put Russian nationalist music on the international musical map: Mily Balakirev, Cesar Cui, Modest Musorgsky, Alexander Borodin, and Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Writing in the Nouvelle Revue française, the critic Henri Ghéon called The Firebird: “the most exquisite marvel of equilibrium that we have ever imagined between sounds, movements, and forms: [a] danced symphony.” There’s no need to quote additional reviews, because one after the other, they echo the one just quoted. Thanks to The Firebird’s triumph, the young Stravinsky instantly became the star composer of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, in which capacity he would turn out the magnificent Petrushka in 1911 and the seminal The Rite of Spring in 1913. The Firebird is indeed a beautifully crafted, gorgeously orchestrated piece. And if in truth much (if not most) of it sounds as if it could have been composed by Alexander Borodin or Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov 40 years earlier, there are still enough moments of genuine modernism in it (for example, “The Infernal Dance” and the asymmetrical phrases of the Finale) that the piece sounds suitably up-to-date. At that triumphant premiere 108 years ago today, no one in the audience would have guessed that a scant few years before Stravinsky was still but a compositional amateur. We hear and read all the time about musical child prodigies but rarely about adult prodigies. Stravinsky was among the greatest adult musical prodigies of all time, and his story bears telling, if for no other reason to remind us that we can accomplish great things at any point of our lives provided we’re determined and not hard work-averse. Igor Stravinsky Igor Stravinsky was born on June 17 (Gregorian calendar; June 5th according to the Russian, Julian calendar), 1882, in the town of Oranienbaum (today known as Lomonosov), on the Gulf of Finland about 35 miles west of St. Petersburg. Stravinsky’s family was considered minor nobility: his mother Anna came from the landowning, governing class of 19th century Russia, and his father Fyodor was one of the great operatic bass-baritones of his time, a singer whose career coincided with the golden age of Russian opera. In 1876, Fyodor became a member of the Imperial Theater in St. Petersburg. It was there that Stravinsky grew up, with his three brothers (two older, one younger), his mother and father, and the servants (as many as five or six), in an eight-room, second-story flat in the center of town. The St. Petersburg in which Stravinsky grew up was an amazing mix of Western and Eastern Europe, of rich and poor, of city people and country peasantry. The impressions made on the young Stravinsky were indelible; the exotic confrontation and synthesis of East and West that he witnessed on a daily basis cut through to his very soul. It was a confrontation and synthesis that would come to lie at the heart of his music. Stravinsky’s hated school, made few friends, and was a poor student; in his own words, a student: “Who studied badly and behaved no better.” Precisely when Stravinsky began taking piano lessons is still unclear; it was probably around the age of ten. At about the same time he began attending the opera and concerts. As far as his music education went, that was about it: by the age of 17,

Today we celebrate the birthday of the piano builder and composer Ignaz Joseph Pleyel, who was born in Ruppertsthal, Austria on June 18, 1757: 261 years ago today. It’s entirely understandable if you’ve never heard of Pleyel or his music, because his music – despite being extremely attractive and technically sound – has fallen into almost total obscurity. But if one had to pick a single, “most popular composer” in the years between 1800 and 1820, it would be Pleyel: more popular than Haydn, than Mozart, and yes, most certainly more popular that that curmudgeon Beethoven. A review published in 1791 in the Morning Herald of London states that Pleyel: “is becoming even more popular than his master [Haydn], as his works are characterized less by the intricacies of science.” (The reviewer is saying that because Pleyel’s music was easier to play and less complicated – less “scientific” – than Haydn’s, Pleyel was attracting a wider popular base than Haydn.) In Brussels, the contemporary and most influential music critic, musicologist, composer, and teacher François-Joseph Fétis outright marveled at Pleyel’s popularity, writing: “What composer ever created more of a craze than Pleyel? Who enjoyed a more universal reputation or a more absolute domination of the field of instrumental music? Over more than twenty years, there was no amateur or professional musician who did not delight in his genius.” The citizens of the town (and island) of Nantucket, Massachusetts – which was then a small whaling port – established a “Pleyel Society” in 1822. According to the newspaper article announcing the creation society, it was created “to chasten the tastes of auditors”, meaning “to improve the tastes of listeners.” Ignaz Pleyel’s enormous popularity was matched by his enormous compositional output; among many other works, he composed 41 symphonies, 70 string quartets, 62 piano trios, 69 duos, 17 concerti, and 10 quintets; he composed operas, masses, overtures, hymns, and a tremendous number of works for piano solo. What makes the size of this output all the more impressive – scary, even – is that Pleyel composed the great bulk of it in just eight years: between 1787-95, between the ages of 30 and 38. Quite a busy compositional bee, Herr Pleyel. But all for naught if posterity is to be the judge. So why should he be remembered here on Music History Monday beyond being a cautionary tale of what happens when you compose too much facile, easy-to-play music all too quickly? Because Pleyel was also a businessman: a music publisher and the founder of a piano building company called – not surprisingly – Pleyel et Cie (“Pleyel and Company”). It was as a businessman that Ignaz Pleyel affected the course of Western music. In 1795, at the age of 38, Pleyel settled permanently in Paris. He opened a music shop and started a music publishing business. In its 39 years of existence, Chez Pleyel (“House of Pleyel”) published over 4000 works, including works by Haydn, Clementi, Beethoven, and Rossini. In 1802, Chez Pleyel revolutionized the music publishing industry by issuing the first miniature scores. Beginning with Haydn’s symphonies and string quartets, Pleyel printed miniature scores of chamber works by Beethoven and others; the last such miniature score was issued in 1830, a year before Pleyel’s death in 1831. But most importantly was Pleyel’s founding of his piano company Pleyel et Cie in Paris in 1807. Improving on English technology, the company came out with a line of so-called “cottage pianos” or “pianinos”: small, vertically strung upright pianos, the first to be manufactured and sold in France. In 1815, Ignaz Pleyel’s son Camille joined the firm, setting the stage for the technological breakthrough in the 1820s that would establish forever Pleyel’s place in music history. According to the piano historian Edwin Goode, the 1820s saw:

We celebrate the birth of the composer Richard Strauss, who was born on June 11, 1864, 154 years ago today. I will pull no punches here: in my humble (but happily expressed) opinion, Richard Strauss was one the greatest composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was a melodist and musical dramatist on near par with Mozart, which is, I think, just about the highest compliment any composer can be paid. His brilliant (though, admittedly, sometimes sprawling) tone poems – From Italy, Don Juan, Macbeth, Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Don Quixote, A Hero’s Life, Domestic Symphony, and An Alpine Symphony – constitute, virtually, a genre of experimental music of their own. His superb operas pick up from where Richard Wagner’s “music dramas” leave off, which inspired the wags of his time to call Strauss “Richard II”. He continued to turn out masterworks until the very end of his long life; his exquisite Oboe Concerto (1945) and Metamorphosen for strings (also 1945) were composed when he was 81; his Four Last Songs (1948) was composed when he was 84. In 1947, the 83 year-old Strauss declared with typical self-deprecation: “I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.” We beg to differ; Strauss was, in fact, a first rate composer all the way around: a consummate technician; a dazzling orchestrator; a superlative harmonist who managed to be a modernist (in terms of his expressive content, his use of time and chromatic counterpoint) and a traditionalist (in terms of his use of traditional tonality) all at once. Despite his brilliance as a composer (and competence as a conductor), Strauss’ reputation continues – to this day – to be sullied by his perceived association with the Nazis. Let’s do what we can to set that record straight. A Story Richard Strauss didn’t care a fig for politics; he wanted to be left alone to write his music, play cards, and count his money. (Strauss loved his creature comforts and made no bones about it; he wrote music for a living and not for some higher artistic ideal. A great story. In 1901 Gustav Mahler conducted the Vienna premiere of Strauss’ opera Feuersnot, or “The Need for Fire.” Mahler’s wife, Alma, sat next to Strauss during the rehearsals. She wrote in her diary: “Strauss thinks of nothing but money. The whole time [during the rehearsals] he had a pencil in his hand and was calculating the profits down to the last penny. It was disgusting.”) Earth-to-Alma: everyone has to make a living. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Strauss did business with them and appeared to turn a blind eye to the developing catastrophe around him. But in fact – in private – he was mortified; in 1933 he wrote: “I consider the Jew-baiting as a disgrace to German honor, as evidence of incompetence—the basest weapon of untalented, lazy mediocrity against a higher intelligence and greater talent.” For their part, the Nazis were publically thrilled to have the single most important living German composer working with them. They showered Strauss with honors and titles and Strauss took everything they offered. But in private the Nazis felt no more affection for Strauss than Strauss felt for the Nazis. The Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: “Unfortunately we still need him [meaning Strauss], but one day we shall have our own music and then we shall have no further need of this decadent neurotic.” Strauss managed to maintain his pretense of accommodation with the Nazis until the time came when even Strauss – who was called by his friend, the conductor Hans Knappertsbusch, an “[opportunistic] pig” – until even he – Strauss – could no longer pretend to turn a blind eye. The catalyst for Strauss’ change of heart was Kristallnacht – the “Night of Broken Glass” – that took place on the night of Nov...

If I were a rich man, yabba-dabba-dabba yabba-dabba-dabba-daba-doo… Now look, I will be the first to acknowledge how lucky I am: in a world filled with want and poverty, my family and I live in the greatest of comfort. (The old joke must be told. The flight attendant settles an elderly gentleman into his seat and asks, “are you comfortable?” He replies with a shrug, “I make a living.”) 
 My domestic comfort notwithstanding, my wife and I work very hard, and as neither of us has a pension beyond our self-employment IRAs, and as we have relatively young children (7 and 11 years old) who (or so I’m told) need to be fed, clothed, and educated, we worry about money. Yes, we are aware that “money can’t buy you love.” But it can buy you just about everything else, including freedom from worry, and that – in a nutshell – is 50% of my definition of what it is to be monetarily rich: never having to worry about money. The other 50% of my definition of what it is to be rich is to have so much money that it becomes imperative to give it away. I am about to cross into the realm of fantasy, and if there’s anyone out there who would like to turn that fantasy into reality, be my guest. Because when it came to giving money away, I’d be a great rich person. I know we would all have our causes; here’s what I would do. I’d set up a foundation dedicated to the creation, performance, publication and recording of new music by established but under-exposed American composers, meaning the vast majority of living American composers. (Why just Americans is another conversation, though for now let’s just observe that funding new music is not presently a high national priority in the United States.) Why do we need such a foundation dedicated to such a cause? It’s personal. As an established but under-exposed composer myself, I will gladly admit to being just a bit cranky about all the funding provided for “emerging composers”, and even more irritated about the tiny proportion of living composers whose works are performed and recorded by nationally visible organizations. This is a classic “don’t get me started” topic, and I’m not going to name names, but now that I am started, here you go. You have no idea how many truly wonderful composers there are out there who never ever get a high-visibility performance and/or recording, while the same dozen-or-two composers get the vast majority of the prizes, commissions, performances, and recordings. The issue is most assuredly not one of quality or ability – I would tell you that my friends Frank LaRocca and Marty Rokeach, for example – are as good if not better than the composers presently winning the Grawemeyers, the Pulitzers and getting commissions from the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony. Talent is not the issue; as is so often the case in our lives, luck, connections, luck, location, luck, timing, and luck have more to do with it than anything else. So. My rich-person philanthropic fantasy is to increase the size of the “luck pool” by finding and commissioning worthy American composers. Once composed, my foundation would then see to the performance, publication, recording and promotion of those commissioned works to the community at large. In doing all of this, I would have two models in mind: the composer and pianist Henry Cowell and the virtuoso double-bassist, composer and conductor Serge Koussevitzky. Cowell was a remarkable man and artist; sooner or later I’ll have the opportunity to feature him in a blog. But for the remainder of today’s post we turn to Serge Koussevitzky, who was born on July 26, 1874 in Vyshny Volochek, in Russia, and died 67 years ago today, on June 6, 1951, in Boston. There was never much doubt about what Koussevitzky was going to “do” when he grew up; he was born into a Jewish family of musicians and groomed from the beginning for the profession. Along with the bass, he studied the violin, cello,

On this day in 1787 – 231 years ago – Leopold Mozart, the father of Wolfgang Mozart, died in Salzburg at the age of 67. For all of his talents as a violinist, violin teacher, conductor and composer, history would have forgotten Johann Georg Leopold Mozart almost entirely had he not fathered and trained one of the greatest members of our species ever to have lived, his son Wolfgang. Leopold Mozart gave his son what was – very possibly – the greatest music education ever given anyone, for which posterity must be grateful. But more than just his son’s teacher, Leopold became his Dr. Frankenstein, his creator: Wolfgang’s ghost-writer, concert producer, travel agent, booking agent, public relations huckster, investment councilor, valet, and, in the end, oppressive tyrant. In the process, Leopold crafted one of the most troubling parent-child relationships since Oedipus and his mother Jocasta. In the long history of excessive parenting, of tiger mamas and tennis fathers, Leopold Mozart must be considered among the very greatest of the type. The History He was born on November 19, 1719 into a family of artisans that had for generations lived in the city of Augsburg, in southern Germany. Young Leopold was a talented singer and violinist, and as such he participated in performances at school and in church. Intelligent though he was, it took him seven (or eight) years to complete the six-year program at the gymnasium. Leopold Mozart was held back once, perhaps even twice. Why? We don’t know for sure, but it seems likely that his lack of academic enthusiasm was in response to his father’s insistence that, as the first-born, he become a priest. In February of 1736, Leopold’s his father unexpectedly dropped dead, leaving the sixteen year-old Leopold with some real choices. He could stay in school, go to work in his father’s bookbinding business, or pursue music, for which he’d already shown a great talent. If you guessed that Leopold opted for the career in music, you’d be absolutely … wrong. Leopold decided in school. Perhaps he was trying to please his family, honor the memory of his father, keep his options open, who knows. What we do know is that, one, in November of 1787 Leopold matriculated at the Benedictine University in Salzburg as a student in philosophy and jurisprudence and that, two, in September of 1739 he was tossed out on his keister for “want of application and poor attendance” and thus, according to the authorities, “has clearly rendered himself unworthy of the name of a student.” Rather than go home and face the music over his expulsion, he stayed put and took a job as chamberlain and court musician in Salzburg. In doing so, the 18 year-old Leopold Mozart – eldest son and presumptive male head of his household – abandoned his recently widowed mother and five younger siblings, his family’s business, and his country of birth. His actions scandalized his native city of Augsburg and brought great shame to his family. With this information as a backdrop, it should come as no surprise that Leopold’s family did not approve of his marriage to Anna Maria Pertl in November of 1747. Leopold’s mother refused to award her first-born the 300 Florin dowry that she had given to his siblings when they were married. (That really rubbed Leopold’s rhubarb wrong. He wrote a friend: “All of my brothers and sisters have now married; and each received 300 Florins as an advance upon my mother’s future legacy … and I have received nothing … [if she fails to give me the money] she can go to Hell today or tomorrow.” The dowry was never paid, which led to a bitter and permanent estrangement between Leopold and his mother. He never wrote to her, saw her, or spoke to her again even though she lived for another 19 years, until 1766, by which time Wolfgang was 10 years old. For Leopold,