Friday, June 29, 2012

A Star and his Stripes – Bernstein, the populist


Continuing a series of articles about American composers, I reprint this piece from 2002 which asked if there was more to Leonard Bernstein than West Side Story

Photograph by Al Ravenna, World Telegram
As American conductor William Eddins once said to me in an interview published in a Symphony Australia program booklet about ten years ago: ‘This was always the big rap against Leonard Bernstein. I still hear composers go, “Oh he wasted so much energy on Broadway”, and I look at them, I’m like: “You are nothing. You are less than nothing. You are a musical amoeba compared to Leonard Bernstein. They’re still going to be doing West Side Story 300 years from now, long after you are a footnote to a footnote, so get over your bad self”.’

Even after reading Humphrey Burton’s biography – as comprehensive as it is – you feel as though you haven’t even come close to half an understanding of the man. Don’t believe me? See below.
Not only was he chief conductor and then laureate for life of the New York Philharmonic; he helped establish the Israel Philharmonic, the Sapporo Music Festival in Japan, and Europe’s Schleswig-Holstein Festival, replicating there the mentoring work he’d done with young people at Tanglewood. Some of Australia’s favourite musicians were beneficiaries of Bernstein’s musical beneficence – Edo De Waart, Markus Stenz, Marin Alsop, Daniel Mendelow… He championed American composers, and on his first State Department tour conducted (in the same program) William Schuman’s American Overture, Barber’s Second Essay, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Roy Harris’ Third Symphony and Copland’s El salón México.

The relationship with Copland is important. They were like a duumvirate of American music, jointly responsible for creating an American orchestral sound, with ‘Lenny’s’ popular instincts creating a snappier edge. They first met when Bernstein turned up at a party at Aaron Copland’s apartment, and boasted that he could play Copland’s Piano Variations. ‘Play it’, said Copland. ‘It’ll ruin your party,’ said Bernstein. ‘Not this party,’ said Copland. And Bernstein played. Later, Bernstein prepared the piano reduction of Copland’s El salón Mexico, and conducted Copland’s work around the world. He gave the European premiere of Copland’s Symphony No.3, and reported back: ‘Too long, said some. Too eclectic, said Shostakovich (he should talk!). It lacks a real Adagio, said Kubelick. Not up my street, said Wee Willie Walton. And everyone found Chaikovsky’s Fifth in it, which only proves their insanity…’

Towards the end of his career, Bernstein leaned towards Europe. He enjoyed a close relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic, created a legendary Fidelio, Rosenkavalier and Falstaff, and was the first conductor to record the complete symphonies of Mahler, but he continued to create spectacular landmarks on the American musical scene. His performance of Haydn’s Mass in Time of War at the height of Vietnam drew 15,000 people to Washington’s National Cathedral, massively snubbing Richard Nixon’s inauguration night.
Bernstein was an icon of American life. When Felicia Bernstein threw a cocktail party to raise funds for Black Panthers illegally detained, Tom Wolfe chipped out a place in social history for Bernstein and his wife when he described them in New York magazine as ‘radical chic’. Bernstein hung out with presidents (‘Come and see us anytime,’ Jimmy Carter wrote on his place card at a White House dinner). Bernstein the giant wanted to make giant contributions to the symphonic repertoire. Yet how often does anyone listen to Kaddish, Jeremiah, Facsimile or A Quiet Place, Concerto for Orchestra, Songfest or Arias and Barcarolles? Is there a problem with his music?

Towards the end of Bernstein’s life, when he was struggling with projects of great import (at one stage he wanted to write a Holocaust opera), his friend and sometime lover Tom Cothran wisely said:

It’s clear to one and all, and should be clear to you as well, that you should be writing first-class quick musical comedy that borrows from everywhere (including Wagner, if you want) but that throws out the heavy plush…Your way is to play one thing against another, and when you are to glide along just above the edge of irony, the result is good. You get so serious. It’s the knell.

Bernstein didn’t need this advice in those pieces inspired by New York, West Side Story, Fancy Free or On the Town. But he had so much energy, and so much to say. He’d saddle himself with the need to ‘be significant’. In Symphony No.3 Kaddish (1963), a human being, the narrator, calls God to account, consoles Him, disillusions Him and then invites Him(!) to a more mature relationship. We probably wouldn’t mind the tortuousness if we didn’t hear any words, as in the psychological ballet Facsimile, or if the words were in Hebrew as in Jeremiah (Symphony No.1), but in Bernstein’s English you wonder if the Job-like railing is from someone with no more cause for complaint than a suburban mortgagee. Perhaps Bernstein could have heeded the advice sometimes given to playwrights: let the characters drive the work and the subtext take care of itself.

‘Bernstein’s music is “conductor’s music”,’ say those who try to find a reason why the ‘serious’ pieces ‘don’t work’. He’d pull an appropriate trick out of the ragbag of conductor’s repertoire whenever he needed to convey depth, say the detractors. A conductor who specialised in Mahler would have no shortage of these. But eclecticism is not really the problem. Mass, once described as ‘the greatest mélange of styles since the ladies’ magazine recipe for steak fried in peanut butter and marshmallow sauce’ is one of his most successful pieces (performed somewhere in the world each month). It works because it knows what it is: a musical. Commissioned by Jacqueline Onassis for the opening of the Kennedy Center in 1971, Mass is a hippy-era comment on faith, complete with Godspell-type characters (the librettist was Stephen Schwartz, later to write Wicked), within the context of the Latin mass, but if you’re not offended, it’s catchy and coheres. Its eclecticism is part of a time-honoured American tradition.

Another work that started life as a musical, Candide (1954), tells the story of a young man who struggles through life to maintain his mentor’s philosophy that ‘all is best in this best of all possible worlds’. The overture will always be an effective concert opener, but Bernstein and the original co-writer, Lillian Hellman, wanted Candide to carry a critique of Eisenhower’s USA, a land of House Committee investigations into Un-American Activities. Candide, it seems, ended up between stools, not quite musical, not quite opera. Three writers and six lyricists later, and it seems no-one was any closer to a definitive form. The ‘final version’ of 1989 put back more music, and perhaps it fixed the frame. But no-one had sat down at the start and worked out what sort of piece it should be? Perhaps not, since the music had apparently just gushed out of Bernstein.

As a child visiting relatives in Connecticut and listening to Uncle Harry Levy’s phonograph, Bernstein made no distinction between the ‘Suicidio’ aria from La gioconda and Barney Rose’s Barney Google (‘with the Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes’). As an adult he would’ve given ‘my balls to have written four bars of [Mozart’s Così fan tutte]’. Sure Bernstein had serious concerns: psychoanalysis and the condition of modern man, the crisis of faith in a violent century, his Judaism and patriotism. He could certainly ‘do’ uplifting, as when Marlon Brando walks up the gangway, bleeding but triumphant, at the end of On the Waterfront.

But was he better off when these things crept out of his unconscious. Bernstein was proudly patriotic when it was patriotic to be proudly liberal, but his Bicentennial gift to the nation, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, written with no less a collaborator than Camelot’s Alan Jay Lerner, was a flop. ‘School pageant,’ said one critic. ‘Only two titans could have had a failure like this,’ said West Side Story collaborator Jerome Robbins. Songfest (1977), on the other hand, the other bicentennial gift, is sadly little known, a moving tribute to Bernstein’s favourite American poets while aiming to be no more than a song cycle.

Left to his unconscious Bernstein’s music could throw up interesting conjunctions of pet themes. Voltaire closes Candide with a throwaway line: ‘“There is a chain of events in this best of all possible worlds…” “That’s true enough,” said Candide, “but we must go and work in the garden.”’ Bernstein turns this ending into a virtual anthem, ‘Make Our Garden Grow’. But if you compare it with (ie. listen to it against) ‘To Burn With Pride’ from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the family resemblance of musical phrases at key points of the two texts reveal interesting parallels:

Candide

You've been a fool
And so have I...

We're neither pure nor wise nor good...

And make our garden grow.


1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

To burn with pride
And not with shame...

Not hide my head when the flag goes by…

I love this land. It will prevail.

And then there is an additional poignancy when you hear the opening chords of ‘To Burn With Pride’ opening Bernstein’s setting of Whitman’s poem ‘To What You Said…’ in Songfest, arguably his only, tentative, public declaration of being gay.

American music adds important strands to our orchestral repertoire, orchestral expressions of feelings that are common to many people in this day and age, when we have passed by the ‘dark-brown Angst of Vienna’ (in Steve Reich’s words). As only an American could, Leonard Bernstein bridged the divide between pop and classical. But he could provide perfect examples of those other American qualities – sentimentality of a ‘Barber’s Adagio’ kind, pep, power, big ‘lump in the throat’ pride. Brando’s walk up the gangway occupies similar emotional territory to the pioneers crossing the prairie in Copland’s Billy the Kid. Bernstein should never have gotten hung up over whether his European mentors and models would have approved.

Did Bernstein ever do as well as he hoped? Perhaps when he least expected it. In 1981, writing A Quiet Place, which he hoped would be the great American opera (as if West Side Story didn’t count), he incorporated the operetta Trouble in Tahihi, written in 1954. Does A Quiet Place’s further exploration of a dysfunctional family add anything to the operetta it swallows? Trouble in Tahiti is a sad portrayal of a stale suburban marriage. It is the closest Bernstein got, I dare say, to a Mozartean balance between lightness and depth. There is of course arty conceit: a trio of singers designated as a ‘Greek Chorus’, but they sing in the style of those Mitch Miller voices that used to advertise Pepsodent and Kemdex on black-and-white TVs in the Eisenhower era, creating a sitcom-like surface that suppresses self-indulgence.

Bernstein was truly a big American. Not everything he wrote hit the mark, but much of what’s best in Bernstein is the best of American music, and it doesn’t have to be ‘serious’ to be great.

Gordon Kalton Williams
Symphony Australia © 2002/2005

First printed in program booklets for the Symphony Australia network orchestras. Reproduced by kind permission 

If you are interested in other of my articles on composers, please see:

Sousa and the Sioux, 19 August 2011
"...above the canopy of stars..." - Beethoven's Ninth, 28 May 2012
Percy Grainger, the chap who "wanted to find the sagas everywhere", 17 June 2012
Igor in Oz: Stravinsky Downunder, 17 July 2012
Wagner - is it music or drama? 27 July 2012
"Beautiful...sad": Puccini's La boheme, 29 July 2012
Philippa - an opera [blog 1], idea for an opera on Philippa Duke Schuyler, 16 Sep 2012



Wednesday, June 27, 2012

A question

Hi to you all

I'd be interested in knowing what readers of my blog might like more of. I look back over my general categories and they could be considered to fall into various broad areas - US impressions (including an Australian's slant on the political history), the 'feel' of Australia, indigenous echoes, thoughts on opera and other dramatic forms, composer profiles (of which there will be a few more), little street vignettes...Is there anything I'm missing?

As Ferris Bueller's teacher says, 'Anybody? Anybody?'

GW

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

How the wheel might turn

There's a show on TV, a kind of reality show called Death Unexplained. It tracks the daily activities of the West London coroner's office. Each episode follows a number of cases and we might get to hear from the pathologist, Olaf Biedrzycki, or the deputy mortuary manager, Lenny Browse. What comes across mostly, from these people who deal daily with sad death, is unending sympathy. 'No one goes out naked,' says Lenny Browse, 'they are never judged and always treated well.'

One case last night for example looked at the case of a recent Polish immigrant who had fallen under a train. CCTV footage showed him legless-drunk and yet his liver was unaffected by alcohol. Could he have just become disoriented by unfamiliar levels of intoxication?

The coroner is Alison Thompson. She is professional, rational, empathetic. An episode will end with one of her findings. In this case she found there was insufficient evidence to suggest suicide. (Yet, one of the other staff members does say that there was a recent spate of hangings among male Polish immigrants; their new life in the UK doesn't turn out as well as they expected.)

But Alison Thompson is so good at her job and has such poise that you'd think this was what she always wanted to do. It's her vocation; her calling. And that's what the questioner asks her at the end of the episode: 'Is this what you always wanted to do?' No, she says. She always wanted to be an actress and dancer. 'And that still holds.'

'And that still holds'? I felt crestfallen for a while.

Then I realised, 'She's on TV. She's got her own show.'

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Mise-en-scene

The configuration of a scene. I might begin a collection of these.

Observed in Newtown.

A man in his thirties carrying a little girl's schoolcase. He's pounding along, glowering, head pulled back into shoulders. Three metres behind him is the little girl, skipping along, letting Dad carry the schoolcase, and singing, 'I'M not going to TELL you ANY more about MUM anymore.'

The French, I've read, love mise-en-scene, the configuration of the scene. I sometimes think the tendrils leading from one scene to the next could be stronger in their films. But doesn't this little moment hint at quite a lot in the domestic situations (plural)?

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Prelapsarian Sydney

Among the most pleasing aspects of Australian cities is the way the natural world survives in them; the sense that an urban overlay is only recent and a couple of layers of bitumen thin. Of course I love this. I get nostalgic about the 1980s, when you could stand looking out from Mueller Street or Bradshaw Drive in Alice Springs and the desert started from there. Or, as you walked out of Tennant Creek on a moonless night there was a point where the street lights stopped and the dark hood of the desert night fell; where the only way you could tell where you were was from the texture underfoot - bitumen, bitumen, gravel, gravel, whoops ouch spinifex, gravel, gravel...But even in our biggest cities, you can experience the pinprick of nature. Cross the Yarra at East Richmond (in Melbourne), right near the Skipping Girl Vinegar sign, and you're walking through vineyards and remnant bush where signs by the walking paths warn you to watch out for snakes. Sydney has even more impressive fingers of bush reaching deep into the city and its suburbs.

Squat brown blocks of Commission flats have been demolished recently in Glebe and there, revealed for the first time in however many years, are the sandstone terraces that once stood at the head of Blackwattle Bay when the harbour at this point reached up beyond what is now Wentworth Park Greyhound Track.




Once upon a time there may have been aboriginal engravings here. Flat sandstone terraces often served the Cadigal people as galleries. And there are engravings in similar places around Sydney - huge figures of whales at Berry Island Reserve or by the walking track between Bondi and Tamarama. The one overlooking the sea near Tamarama depicts a man inside the whale. What tragic pre-European event does that record?

But this continuing presence of the natural world; the way the natural networks still connect may explain why the place I loved most in New York was that little pocket in the northwest, Inwood Hill Park, which still looks much the same as when Peter Minuit bought Manhattan Island off the Wiechquasgeck Indians.



Sunday, June 17, 2012

Percy Grainger, the chap who "wanted to find the sagas everywhere"

I didn't get up to White Plains when in New York. I really should have. I've long loved Percy Grainger's music - in many respects he was and still is Australia's premier classical composer - and White Plains is where he spent the second half of his life (1921-61). There are places in New York he would have frequented of course. NYU is where he made that intriguing statement about Bach, Delius and Duke Ellington being the greatest composers.

I like to think Grainger went to my school, though. John Bird, in his biography of Grainger, says that if Grainger had any formal schooling at all it was probably at a state school in South Yarra (Melbourne). I went to South Yarra State School and the older building there was a Victorian-era building which might easily have been around when Grainger was a boy.

I do, also, know Albert Park Lake in Melbourne and was there recently.



Concreted now, it was a natural lagoon when Grainger boated here in the1880s and derived inspiration for his later Free Music experiments from the sight of the wave patterns made by his paddle. Grainger would have hated the fact that it's now concreted. He wrote from North Queensland once about a wild river that was being straightened and made navigable, despairing of the shrinking options in this world for real life and adventure; for the 'chap-who-wants-to-find-the-sagas-everywhere'.

But as I say, he was Australia's premier composer. I remember seeing a front page of The New York Times from 1922. 'GRAINGER'S MOTHER IS KILLED IN FALL' said one of the headlines. No first name, or further explanation. Everyone in New York, it seems, would have been expected to know who Grainger was.

Publicity photograph of Grainger from 1921. Public domain
I doubt if any Australian classical composer, even now, could be identified overseas as easily as that.

But 'Grainger's mother is killed in fall'? Makes me think about the dramatisations I've seen (and even conceived myself) of Grainger's life. They might show his eccentricities, like the way he would throw an egg over a house and run down the centre hallway to catch it on the other side or walked the 75 kms (46 miles) from Yarram to Sale between concerts. They might show him dressing up in his towelling clothes. Or they might tell of his London years when, admittedly, he wrote his best music... but no particular biographical arc is described (apart from the fact that the 'chap who wanted to find the sagas everywhere', who was titillated by Nibelungenlied descriptions of men being hewn to the waist by broadaxes, shipped off to the US rather than risk being conscripted for WWI - not much of an ending.)

But the dramatically compelling real story is how his mother became distraught when rumours of incest surfaced and ended up fallen from the upper storeys of a New York skyscraper. Jumped or fell? There was a chair next to the open window.

How about this for a dramatic shape? How Grainger is away on tour as usual (his daily and sometimes several-times-daily letters home to 'mumsy' being some of the most vivid descriptions of mid-20th century American life you'll find). Up to now, his girlfriends have always accepted that they play second fiddle to his mother's 'smother-love', but now 'E' decides that something is not right and she is jealous. She spreads rumours. Grainger, away on tour, can do nothing to assuage his mother's sense of rising panic. His effusive reassurances only make things worse. Signoffs like the one for the telegram which read: 'LONGING CLASP YOU IN MY ARMS' can hardly calm Rose Grainger's anxieties about making the right impression. And eventually she goes to visit Percy's agent and disappears out a window when Ms Sawyer steps out of the office for a moment.

(Percy and his mother's relationship certainly was strange, even if not incestuous. As John Bird says in his biography: 'Percy Grainger was mad. And he was made mad by a mother who never allowed him to grow up.' (I guess there is a place for stories about how he would throw an egg over a house...))

But to go on: Grainger gets the telegram telling him his mother has died after he has come offstage after playing with the Los Angeles Phil. He takes the long, painful train journey home to New York, tells 'E' he never wants to see her again (of course) and throws himself into his work.

Life is not fun however, and he still has to tour to earn an income. Turning around in a customs queue while coming back from New Zealand he sees Ella Viola-Strom and falls in love at first sight. She is his ideal of the Nordic beauty (the kind of beauty his mother brought him up to idealise?). He woos her. They wed at Hollywood Bowl before between 15,000-23,000 people after a performance that has included To a Nordic Princess. Despite comments to the contrary, Ella has already come to know of Percy's violent sexual preferences, his 'blue roses' as Grainger and Rose called them. In Malcolm Gillies' and David Pear's book, The All-Round Man, there is a letter Grainger wrote to Ella from Kansas City some months before the wedding describing how he saw a mother rain a 'sheaf of quick hand blows' on a little boy. 'Can you not,' he asked Ella, 'be sometimes suddenly masterfully cruel to me as that mother was to her child?....(when you are outoftheway-putout) make me strip & whip me thoroly?' And apparently she did.

But how does Ella reconcile herself to all this? The boy Rose had created? What is the process? Surely she thinks about all those other Edwardian-era women back in London obliging his tastes. And how does she (does she?) come to equal his mother in his eyes? What does she think of his mother? It was easy to put a foot wrong if you didn't share his idolisation. What is the process? Because finally she does come to a way of living with it, of loving him, and nurturing his creativity although 'it was hell to be with him; hell to be without him'.

Here is something to explore dramatically but it's an exploration of relationships, not a biopic of a composer's life. Celebrating his music would not be the primary dramatic intention, except that when he 'throws himself into his work', you could bring in his musical achievements; reveal his futuristic Free Music experiments and compare them with his earlier, delightful folksong arrangements.

I suppose it's not to be wondered at that Australians looking to tell 'our stories' light on Grainger's worth as a composer. Grainger was basically a lovely musician, 'a whale of a pianist' (according to New York critic Harold C. Schonberg), musically open-hearted, breezy, refreshingly tolerant, especially for his age. He embraced and was inspired by all sorts of music from Raratongan part-song (long before the fad for World Music) to barbershop quartets (when no-one would have believed it would now be seeing a revival); I'm glad he got to hear (in 1909) Baldwin Spencer's wax cylinders of chants of the Aranda (who do live with their sagas everywhere and ever-present) and considered them 'more melodic than stupid remarks in music histories'. I'm glad he left behind a treasure trove of really beautiful folksong settings. But I do think there was some sort of disconnect between the grand epic life he believed he led and the miniatures he created. Wildness and violence in his music? A certain vigorous folk-fiddling kind of counterpoint, but inspired as much by Bach's Brandenburgs as by any rawness or brutal chill of down-and-dirty life. The gulf between what he wrote and what he thought he wrote provides perhaps another tragic dimension.

Australia's greatest composer? Still the one with broadest and longest-lasting appeal. But I'm trying to figure out what got me onto this. I supposed it was seeing colleagues at the end of the League of American Orchestras conference last week in Dallas heading home to New York, while I went on to Sydney, and thinking that Grainger is Australian classical music's most famous New Yorker. I reflected on his stature. And the fact that Americans are often surprised to learn he is not one of their own.

If you are interested in other of my articles on composers, please see:

Sousa and the Sioux, 19 August 2012
"...above the canopy of stars..." - Beethoven's Ninth, 28 May 2012
A Star and his Stripes - Bernstein, the populist, 29 June 2012
Igor in Oz: Stravinsky Downunder, 17 July 2012
Wagner - is it music or drama? 27 July 2012
"Beautiful...sad": Puccini's La boheme, 29 July 2012
Philippa - an opera [blog 1], idea for an opera on Philippa Duke Schuyler, 16 September 2012


Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Influx: part 4 of initial impressions of Dallas


The Dallas that George Grosz, the German Dadaist, depicted in 1952 may have had a certain charm.


Photo taken of Elm Street, Dallas, by Arthur Rothstein of the Farm Security Administration in 1942
Downtown in those days seems to have been far livelier, even at night. Compare the view above, and all the cars parked kerbside, with essentially the same view in 2012.


You can see The Majestic on the right hand side in both photographs.

But as one of the blurbs at the George Grosz exhibition points out, Grosz would have seen another side to Dallas, had he stayed longer. It was lively yes, but cowboys, Hispanics and African-Americans did not mix in the street as easily as his tableaux depict. Segregation was well and truly alive.

And as I was standing in the Sixth Floor Museum at the former Texas School Book Depository five days ago, I wondered how many of the police accompanying (protecting) President Kennedy on the day he was killed would have been sympathetic to Kennedy's views on Civil Rights.

I came out of the hotel the other day though, and the street was booming with the sounds of an Indian wedding.


I learned that over 100,00 Indians (subcontinental Indians, that is) live in Dallas, it's the fourth largest population of expat Indians in the US. And here were the Dallas police supervising the closing off of the street, protecting the celebration. When did so many Indians come here? Was it in the 1950s and 60s? Or more recently with the development of technological industries? It wasn't until 1946 (four years after Rothstein's photograph, six years before Grosz's visit) that President Truman signed into law the Luce-Celler Act, restoring to Indian Americans 'the right to immigrate and naturalize', so I imagine this influx is more recent than that.

But as I watched this wedding, I couldn't help reflecting on the socially-beneficial, liberalising, aspects of that basic human urge: to migrate. And yet, I did remember, as an invader-Australian can't forget, that the only drumming that would once have been heard on this plain would have been that of the Caddos, and those 'Indians' seem to be a forgotten people in the broad scheme of things.

For a review of the Grosz exhibit, see:

http://www.660news.com/entertainment/article/364287--artist-george-grosz-s-series-capturing-dallas-in-1952-goes-on-exhibit-at-museum



Saturday, June 9, 2012

Marking the spots

The 'X' on the road marks the spot where John Kennedy's presidency ended.


I can't help thinking of how life hurtled on for everyone else beyond this point. In the life of the nation, one presidency ended and Lyndon Johnson's began. It's quite a punctuation mark.


All this happened nearly 50 years ago (50 years ago, next year in fact). It's history. It happened 'before my time', in the words of the majority of people I know. But so much of it seems to have happened in the modern day: Kennedy's motorcade was flanked by police motorcyclists, the story was covered on live national TV, there are colour images...

So often in the US, history is here in the ever-present. It gives me goosebumps. You can still kind of follow the route:






even if some of the buildings have changed.

I remember when I was interviewing Michael Daugherty about his opera, Jackie O. I asked him if he'd had any contact with the Kennedy family while writing it. No, he had said, but at the premiere he was introduced to Nellie Connally, one of the patrons of the Houston Grand Opera (the commissioning company). He said she'd been very moved. 'And she was', he said, or words to this effect, 'the wife of the Governor of Texas at the time.' I held my breath: '...and sitting in the front seat of the car the day President Kennedy was shot.'

As I repeat to myself, it's one of the sombre realisations I had here at Dealey Plaza: History is printed on the present here.

And what makes this even more overwhelming is that in America, the moments in history and the issues they turn on are huge - civil rights, the extent of liberty, the rapprochement between  East and West, the highest stakes... moon landings, for heaven's sake.

This is why I have always thought their stories were ripe for telling on an operatic scale. However, in the past few weeks I've discovered an Australian story which I think is on the same scale. Of that more anon...

Fifth day here in Dallas and the impressions have become more nuanced. Last night walking back, we heard the most ornate birdsong - in the middle of this glassy skyscraper-scape. I love the big advertisements on the blank walls of buildings.








Later on I might walk over the Dallas Museum of Art. They've got an exhibition of paintings by the 20th century German Expressionist, George Grosz. He came to Dallas and painted it in the 1950s. The exhibition is called Flower of the Prairie: George Grosz in Dallas.

http://dallasmuseumofart.org/View/CurrentExhibitions/dma_410984

Fascinating what you see, if you stay and look long enough.



Thursday, June 7, 2012

Day Two - Dallas

Second impressions. We walked into I. M.Pei's Meyerson Center last night for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra concert. I.M. Pei? One of the most famous architects of the past century? There were signs in the foyer mentioning that the Dallas Symphony's Music Director, Jaap van Zweden is Musical America's Conductor of the Year. There are CDs on sale of the DSO's performance (under Zweden) of their commission, August 4, 1964. The piece, by Steven Stucky and Gene Scheer (mentioned also in yesterday's blog), is perceptively set on one of the most poignant days in US history, when the inspirational and tragic trajectories of LBJ's presidency (the passage of Civil Rights legislation and the disastrous Vietnam War) intersected in the discovery of the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers in Mississippi and the Tonkin Gulf incident. I figure this is a great arts city in light of all this. Then, before the concert, the mayor gets up and says that we are in the largest contiguous arts precinct in the world. Dallas is rising in my estimation.

This afternoon I walked with Raff Wilson, a colleague from the Hong Kong Philharmonic, to Dealey Plaza where Lyndon Johnson's presidency commenced (ie, after President Kennedy was assassinated there).


'This is it,' said Raff as we came to traffic lights in Elm Street.  'What, here?' This small, tight area?

It is so much smaller than I expected. The grassy knoll is not that far away and yet in film footage of people rushing it (in the direction of where they suspected they heard the shots), it looks like quite a distance. I also never realised that the road runs downhill here.


or how close Kennedy was to getting onto the freeway and away.

Across the road I looked up at the former Texas School Book Depository and it was eerie to see a guy standing in the sixth floor window from where Oswald was meant to take aim, unless you have formed the impression that he didn't do it, or that there was a second shooter by the grassy knoll.


But the theme of this blog is to question impressions. What is needed is evidence.

Would this be evidence that Dallas is on the up?


That's what I always associate public transport and light rail with.



Wednesday, June 6, 2012

First impressions - Dallas

Arriving in Dallas yesterday, I was struck firstly by how wooded and green it is on the outskirts. This often strikes me about the US. I assume that, as a country that has been settled longer than Australia and with a more rapacious attitude toward nature, it would be over-cleared. No, that is Australia's dubious honour.

Downtown, though, is one of those bleak cityscapes that you'd find in a Jeffrey Smart painting -


carparks, glass towers,


at night: not a soul. How do US cities get to this degree of urban desolation? The people drive their cars into underground carparks and then straight up into their towers?

I crossed Elm Street last night, and there were sequences of charming old Art Deco or 1920s buildings, but it's a bit like a mouth that once had a set of good teeth.

Yet, Dallas is a cultured city. It has a symphony orchestra and an opera. Its opera company commissioned Therese Raquin, the piece by Tobias Picker and Gene Scheer that in some respects is the most successful contemporary opera - because Picker and Scheer figured out that lyricism's true province is the broad depiction of love and death.

It will be interesting to see how my impressions vary over the next few days.