an idle thought about Charles Ives

I've always wondered how Charles Ives plays to non-Americans. As a modernist, I'm sure he's sounds as stark and muscular to a European as he does to me.

But what of the 'Americana' aspect of his music? Ives' use of American hymns and simple folk songs evoke a sense of New England at the dawn of the 20th century - not an idyllic vision, but one where the bucolic greenery mixes with the chaos of a young democracy - outspoken, rough, rude and heartfelt - Whitman's 'barbaric yawp'.

Where Bartok seemed to have taken Hungarian folk music and ingested it whole to become part of his melodic voice, Ives never seems to completely absorb early American music into his voice. There's a ongoing process of synthesizing it all into a style - but the process is never complete - the hymns emerge from the darkness and fade back. The throb of Beethoven's 5th keeps emerging from the Concord Sonata only to be absorbed a few bars later.

It's almost as if Ives heard the simple hymn tune, and felt that all the swirls of atonality were implied by the populace that sang the hymn; he saw a complexity to the American character that joined together the roar of the mob, the untamed cosmos and the voice of quiet belief.

The letter to the N.Y. Times that wasn't printed

If you haven’t seen it, there was a New York Times article about orchestration for the theatre and the economics of having orchestras for Broadway musicals. The article was well informed for the most part, but had some errors. Some of these errors were corrected by a letter from the composer, Stephen Sondheim.

But other errors, those dealing with the actual economics, have not been corrected. In the light of some of the author's conclusions, a letter to the editor was written by Local 802 to simply inform the public of the actual economics of paying for music preparation (orchestraters and copyists) and for orchestral musicians.

For some reason, the Times chose not to publish this letter alongside Mr. Sondheim's letter. But I have been informed that it will be published this weekend (8/31/08) on the Letters page of the Arts & Leisure section. Here is that letter (presented with the permission of Local 802)

To the Editor:
NY Times Arts Section
 
Thanks to Susan Elliot (Off the Stage, What’s Behind the Music, Sunday, August 17, 2008) for describing how glorious a full live orchestra sounds on Broadway and sharing with readers the important creative work of Broadway’s talented orchestrators. The cost of creating the wonderful music of shows like South Pacific or Gypsy each night on Broadway, however, are not as Ms Elliot suggests, “staggering.” For a $8 -$10 million Broadway musical (hardly an unusual budget today) the cost of orchestrating and copying; i.e. putting the music on the stands is typically less than $175,000, or barely 2 %. This is a tiny fraction of what is typically spent on sets, costumes, lighting, etc, which quickly runs into the millions.  And the orchestra costs: As a part of a $120 ticket for a musical like South Pacific, the orchestra costs are about $15, a bargain by any standards and a compelling argument for the full “lush” orchestrations that Ms. Elliot and audiences so love.
 
Mary Landolfi
President, Local 802 AFM

Orson Welles - "F is for Fake" - Chartes

(From the Wikipaedia article about Orson Welles' film, "F is for Fake")

In perhaps the most celebrated segment of the film, treating the power of art and the nature of authorship, Welles narrates a montage sequence of the medieval French landmark, Chartres Cathedral:

"Now this has been standing here for centuries. The premier work of man perhaps in the whole western world and it's without a signature. Chartres. A celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man. All that’s left, most artists seem to feel these days, is man. Naked, poor, forked radish. There aren’t any celebrations. Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life... we're going to die. 'Be of good heart,' cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced - but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much."

plot as a knot

Aristotle, in his Poetics, refers to plot as a knot tied by the author (he calls it a dêsis, a “binding up”) out of the manifold strands representing competing wills or desires or ideologies; an ugly and worrisome knot that will, in due course, ultimately come undone in a climactic moment of loosening or release of tension (the lysis, or “undoing”)—a concept that survives in our term “dénouement.”

There can, that is to say, be no theater unless bad things happen, unless there are terrible problems, insoluble knots; without them, there would be nothing for the characters to do. That “doing” gives us the very word by which we refer to what happens on stage: “drama” comes from the Greek drân, “to do” or “to act.” When we go to the theater, we want to see characters doing things. Bad things, preferably.

The inherent dramatic interest of badness helps explain the abiding fascination exerted by bad, or at the very least tormented, characters ....

- from Daniel Mendelsohn “The Truth Force at the Met”, a review of Phillip Glass’ “Satyagraha” in the New York Review of Books