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
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
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.'
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 |
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
 |
| Photo taken of Elm Street, Dallas, by Arthur Rothstein of the Farm Security Administration in 1942 |
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)