AN APPLE FOR THE TEACHER
My piano teacher at the Paris Conservatory held the record until recently as the youngest First Prize winner in the school’s history. I believe she was 11. A few years later, as a young professional on the rise, she gathered the music of Ravel under her arm, took the train to Montfort à Amaury and sought to learn the secrets of this French master from the horse’s mouth.
This might appear a momentous event but was actually a frequent transaction. One plays the great man’s music to him, receives his wisdom over a day or two and pays him his enormous fee. It’s what we call today a win-win situation. Ravel can pay his bills. My teacher walks away with a new addition to her name “Student of Ravel.”
A great deal of this time, she told me, was spent correcting the myriad misprints and mistakes made by his publisher Durand. Its apparent refusal to make corrections left users of these elegant and tightly copyrighted editions with puzzles to solve. Now in the public domain Ravel’s piano music is more accurate but not half so handsome to look at.
Every time I read of musicians X and Y advertising their studies with important great men and women (say Horowitz, or Liszt or students of Liszt or students of students of Chopin, even of Beethoven) my sense of smell kicks in. I quickly exclude the real teachers such as Nadia Boulanger or Arnold Schoenberg, who by the way taught traditional harmony not his 12-tone variety.
Brief encounters can be valuable. Music is not learned with facts on a blackboard. I found solutions to problems often from a single word or phrase spoken casually by a teacher or the look of the hand on the keyboard. I had four or five teachers over the years. Most of what I got from them turned out worthless but there were aways one or two valuable things from each to squirrel away for the future.
Fortunately, bad piano teachers can waste one’s time but have a hard time doing irreparable damage. Not so with singers. Both arts require the human body to do things nature never quite intended. Pushed the wrong ways the singer’s musculature can easily be stretched and disfigured beyond repair — the fate of many an aspiring young tenor or soprano, Fewer in number but perhaps better known are the pianists done in by overzealousness. A tougher customer, the piano itself absorbs relentless beatings and manages to survive. (see Wilhelm Busch’s famous poem “Ein gutes Tier ist das Klavier”}.
Often the most prestigious teachers are not those who impart the most wisdom but those who attract the best students. Big-time teachers are plugged into the world of agents, managers and publicists. They can be conduits to successful careers. On occasion teachers offer their pupils pure gold. The teenaged Saint-Sae:ns, already precocious in every dimension of music except perhaps depth, presented himself to Berlioz for advice. Berlioz’s reply: “You suffer from lack of inexperience.”
BERNARD HOLLAND
JANICE AND JANUS
Someone I know pursued the violin into her teenage years and as womanhood beckoned she discovered her calling, the Early Music Movement. Lightning progress in almost everything had left history in the lurch. She acquired a violin like the ones the Haydn-Mozart era knew. Brightness and muscle lost favor next to her new-old instrument’s ripeness and intimacy When repairs were needed she made sure, for example, that the glue to put it back together was the 18th century luthier’s recipe.
Our young woman would be happy if the sound coming-out of Mozart’s own orchestra pit was not all that distant from the sounds she was making 250 years later. When Beethoven put that black mark down on paper she wanted to feel that the sound he heard inside his head was the sound she herself was making.
Last night our young woman went to the opera. Puccini’s “La Bohème.” She loved it. Looking up to the stage she was delighted to find a “La Bohème” unchained from its tired centuries-old artist’s loft. No quartet of starving artists in this production rather four astronauts in space gear careering calamitously among the planets. Mimi is on board but only as a hallucination. Goodbye to horse-and-buggy opera. Our young woman was speeding along on art’s cutting edge.
Something is wrong here. One person by day is another by night. God knows what the full moon might do. One who would flinch improving a page of Haydn doesn’t seem to mind launching Rodolfo toward the planets. We may have to fall back on the Groucho Marx Theorem (Who says I have to make sense?).
The view by day: Puccini sits down to compose “La Bohème.” He has a vision of the people in his opera. His opera world is used to heroes, kings, the larger than life. Puccini’s people are little and the subject of his empathy. Music can’t tell stories but it can convey emotional responses to them. Puccini’s vision is the romance of poverty, the shabby clothes, the exuberant gesture. The music is a receptacle for them. Disconnect the two and compromise the art.
The view by night: music and theater both change with the times but at different speeds. Good music is less a victim of ever changing tastes; good acting 150 years ago looks ridiculous today. So why should Puccini’s wonderful music be dragged down with what is now bad theater?.
We could just call our girl a hypocrite and go home. Or in this time of quantum maybe two wrongs are as right as anything else. I saw a “Ring” production in Bayreuth where Wotan carried a spear while dressed in a three-piece suit. I didn’t mind. Early Music scholarship has answered many important questions asked by 21st century musicians but I hope I don’t exaggerate when I compare modern performance of 18th century music to one more
shadow in Plato’s cave. Our ears are different. Authenticity is great but authenticity has two faces.
BERNARD HOLLAND
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STOP THE PRESSES
The classic definition of “journalist” is “unemployed reporter.” I like the word “reporter” better. I am also proud of my connection, however tenuous, to The New York Times reporters who have done so much lately to keep us all from going under.
The man who was The Times chief music critic a generation ago was the first of us to get the reporting bug and add news gathering to reviews and opinion pieces as part of the job. I like to imagine my antecedents sitting idly at their desks waiting for the sun to go down then setting off to their various concert halls and opera houses. Like vampires.
Journalism, the word, is one of those ubiquities we use to make us look wise when we are unable to say clearly what we mean. Existential, intellectual, beauty, truth, avant garde are just a few of these convenient devices. Most of the journalists I have known are people who have ideas for a story, are writing one or haven’t a prayer of selling the story they have written.
There are many more writers in the sphere of journalism than actual stories.
It troubles me when whole schools are devoted to such ephemera. I remember a foreign affairs department at my university where Marx, Engels, Hobbes, even “The Republic” weren’t on anyone’s reading list. I did a fair amount reporting at the paper even to four or five front page stories and still have no idea what journalism is. I did pick up some useful ways of getting information and writing it down.
Journalism is a trade and one not half as complicated as operating heavy machinery. You can learn the nuts and bolts on the job in about three weeks. Most of its principles are self-evident and require little beard-stroking. When I was first at the Times there was a well-traveled path running in both directions between The Times and the Columbia School of Journalism. They would send us their brightest. We would send our professionals to teach them.
In later years the direction changed. It became clearer that both sides were producing people who knew everything about journalism but not enough about the world. The Times started looking for people who first of all knew something, who had what the Germans call a Fach, a field, a skill, passion or territory, a deeper than normal connection with, for example, history, the sciences, hockey, the history of painting. The journalism bit could be taught. Could this help explain the quality of reporting coming from the paper’s current roster working so effectively in our various crises? Anyway this is some of what I learned about getting the news.
INTERVIEWING. Be nice. Combativeness will carry you only so far. If someone says “Don’t quote me” don’t quote them. You can get one great story betraying a trust but you will be marked as untrustworthy for the rest of your career. I have often a fierce stutter. Weirdly it can be an asset. People are eager to help and tend to pour their hearts out. Don’t hurry away. The most interesting information usually comes at the end of an interview and comes unbidden.
CREDIBILITY. Without cynicism, don’t believe anything anyone tells you. If someone tells you what someone else said, check with that someone. Everyone has an agenda. Also, everyone is owed the right to respond though in this imperfect world it is sometimes impossible. Above all check your facts. This is crucial if you are writing a negative opinion. Your adversaries can’t effectively respond to your beliefs but they can go after concrete errors. On my first day at The Times, Donal Henahan said to me “Don’t trust any editor to correct your mistakes. Make your own,”
I must admit that being a reporter for The Times has advantages others don”t.have. Nearly everyone takes your phone call. Joe Lelyveld, shortly after retiring from what was probably the most powerful newspaper job in the world, was writing a piece for a small but influential periodical and had to call the State Department. The people who answered knew little or nothing about this magazine and he was shunted between several offices before landing an interview with a minor official.
NOT ABOUT YOU. Stay out of the story. My colleagues annoyed me by using a music review or a feature piece to push their private socio-political agenda or personal grievances. A review is of course partly about you and your thoughts but make it indirect.
PERKS ARE NOT YOUR FRIEND. When your subjects stand to gain from the attention of the paper they will be nice to you, though often through clenched teeth. Do lunch sparingly, Accept no gifts. Maintain a polite distance from those you write about. The idea of women throwing themselves at your feet for your kind words is an adolescent fantasy. Be assured that if you are replaced by a chimpanzee your local publicist will clap it on the back and ask it out to lunch. When you retire you will be startled at how quickly the phone stops ringing.
Above all be reporters not journalists. News stories and arts reviews used to appear anonymously. That is wrong. Courage and enterprise deserve to have a name attached. and the best of these names are truly reminiscent of knights of old. On the other hand take the news seriously but not yourself. I remember one such inkstained Icarus shoot to stardom, seat himself on the throne of journalism and then fall off. Abe Rosenthal, then executive editor, liked to call him “Galahad.” He did not end well. Give reporters their Roundtable but put it at the back of the room half out of sight.
BERNARD HOLLAND
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TICK-TOCK
Stravinsky was asked “Is music mathematical?” Yes, he said, but every individual piece has its own rules.
An answer to warm the hearts of Einsteinians everywhere. Gone is the celestial metronome sitting atop God’s piano creating a single, perfect beat for all the unruly students of the universe to follow. Newton believed in it but he didn’t have the very, very tiny and the very, very big to measure. However small the difference your watch and a kitchen clock in Des Moines aren’t going to say the same thing.
Metronomes were invented to clear up confusions. You decide how fast you want something to go, you find the number on the tick-tock arm that corresponds and your colleague far away will know precisely what you mean. Not conveyed are a myriad of other things whose absence render metronomes of limited value. Like the lie detector they end up inadmissible in court.
One evening an architect I know gave me his music is math routine and seemed quite pleased with himself. I just looked. What I would have told him is that music not only isn’t math, it is an assault on math.
I doubt my architect’s interest in Italian baroque music but it would give him an argument to work with. My colleagues used to gush over the scrubbed clean symmetry. Those perfect sequences bored me to death. Vivaldi, wrongly accused of writing the same concerto 200 times, has emerged from all the mediocrity around him. Every movement of “The Seasons” is different from every other movement and different from any music outside it. The modern world has beat “The Seasons” nearly to death but it is indestructible.
Theory students at conservatories follow rules. The purpose is not to produce composers who sound like Mozart or Mendelssohn but to help musical minds develop the agility to find solutions, to work one’s way out of paint-surrounded corners and to do so according to rules. The 18th century found certain sounds ugly and to be shunned. Hence tritones (”The Devil in Music”) or maybe two lines traveling a fifth apart, become for our modern Mozarts-to-be targets of professorial red pencils.
There is a great irony here in the person of J. S. Bach. In all things contrapuntal and harmonic, indeed in most things musical, he towers over all of us and yet Bach
sets the obedient student a poor example. He is a bad teacher; he breaks all the rules. In a sequence he will at first respect a musical sentence’s measured proportions, but bored with repeating it he will begin violating its symmetries, shortening, lengthening, interrupting. I think he senses our boredom and wants to keep us interested. It is his violations that excite our interest.
One traditional student exercise is writing four part harmonies for hymn tunes. Bach the church musician wrote a lot of them. The student agonizes over unanticipated conflicts and procedural roadblocks finally arriving at tidy solution. The student looks at what Bach did first saying ”You can’t do that” and then “That’s absolutely amazing.” Mozart at great climaxes assembled and packed tight together dense globs of seemingly conflicted tones (remember royalty’s “Too many notes, Mozart”) that explode into something glorious.`
Given my primitive grasp of mathematic, extending all the way to not really knowing what mathematics is, I still assume than an equation is successful when it works for everybody. Great discoveries come so fast these days that often what we know suddenly isn’t. and that a piillar of consistency and logic may turn out be ambivalent, contradictory, vague, a little crazy, deceptive, hard to control, in other words, very much like music.
BERNARD HOLLAND
___________________________
MELANIA REGINA
“The Melania” — what a splendid idea. Goodbye to the Kennedys and their Center. Sweep away the corruption and decay. Melania Trump has come, borne on a fresh breeze and carrying a purifying broom.
Institutions like names that tell people who they are and what they work at doing. President Kennedy fell asleep when Stravinsky and Horowitz came calling at the White House. That would never happen at the Melania Trump Center for the Arts. Melania’s keen sense of the arts (all kinds, you name it) would grace the banks of the Potomac.
How will she inspire us? First by looking good. To have your name on an institution requires many gifts but foremost is looking good. No one wears a hat like Melania.
Involvement. Melania is involved. She was at the Center, real as life, just a few days ago. She is planning on going again soon. It’s going to take about a year to decorate her new office. After that we shall see her all the time. Think about the Old World sophistication she has up her sleeve. Do you remember her speech at the presidential convention? Too bad Hilary Clinton had to plagiarize it word for word.
Careful, though. Other people want their name up there too. The government is encouraging applications from one and all. The White House will announce the winner. Melania might have some stiff competition.
One interesting entry is :
“I am nominating Mickey Vernon
first baseman for the Washington Senators in the 1940s
As the Senators wallowed near or in last place
Mickey won two batting titles bringing fame and dignity to the city.
The Kennedy Center wasn’t there when he was playing but he loved
a good show and would have gone a lot. “The Mickey Vernon Center for the Arts”
has a nice ring to it.”
From Mary T. Bimbo.
I have the credentials for a Mary T. Bimbo Center for the Arts. A whole load of Christmas “Nutcracker”s for one and the old programs to prove I was there.
For two decades I entertained Washington’s senior citizens as a founding member
of the DC Accordion Quartet. The Center is there to serve the common
man. I am the common woman with enough extra common to put me over the top.
Another applicant:
I recommend Clarence Thomas for the job. He has been the Supreme Court’s strong, silent presence for over 30 years. Thomas became famous for his immense command of all things legal, needing to ask from the bench only one legal question in ten years, so great was his grasp of a decade’s arguments, decisions, and convulsions political and social.
His wife by his side, Thomas has been a stalwart warrior against racial agitation. He was key in forming today’s indissoluble bond between the Court and the oil industry. His grasp of the world and its complexities is reflected in his two books “Travels with Harlan Crow” and “Uncle Tom’s Camper. If anyone in this country knows his place, it’s Clarence Thomas and that place is The Clarence Thomas Center for the Arts.
From Roscoe C:
I am the president, CEO and principal distributor of Roscoe Pharmaceuticals.
My company’s burgeoning clientele, drawn from the city at large but doing a brisk business with Center employees as well, has enriched our
community. It deserves a name and more than a little fame. Economists are studying our marketing techniques. The convenient evening
hours and al fresco transactions have coined a phrase,”Relax with Roscoe.”.
Melania’s evanescence is harder to pin down. We do not look to her for Beethoven’s “Hammerklaver” Sonata or Strindbergian soliloquies. Her business is beauty and who In high places can match her experience in pageants, contests and other displays of the feminine form? What better anchor for a new Melania Trump Center than an Academy of Beauty—a cultural destination and training center for the blossoming flowers of young womanhood around the world.
After personal interviews by White House officials and strict adherence to immigration laws, girls (they only flirt with womanhood) will study the mysteries of grooming, the skills of entertainment, the hygiene of the beautiful. For lessons in sophistication and experience there would be field trips to other culture centers such as the Kit Kat Klub. Successful businessmen would volunteer their time to teach girls how to make money. All this with the shining example of Melania herself and her beautiful life before them.
God, what a great country this is.
BERNARD HOLLAND
_________________________________________________
BREAKING NEWS
The International Institute of Quantum Physics has received the following complaint from its Swiss division:
We have been inundated by job applications from unemployed
American scientIsts. Job openings are few in this limited community and the Americans’ offer to work for ridiculously low wages constitutes an unfair advantage. We also fear disease and crime. Recent intellectual purges in the US have distorted the job market here and elsewhere. Do anti-dumpng laws apply?
Mexico’s foreign minister has issued the following:
Given the frequency of ecological disasters in the body of water to the east of our country we are happy to disavow the designation “Gulf of Mexico” and embrace its permanent name “Gulf of America.”
From the federal capitol of our nation Dayton, Ohio, the following alert has been issued:
The state of Texas has been designated a No-Fly Zone. Its border Is closed. The state’s intransigence over electrical cars, solar power, renewable energy and vaccination – also acts of violence against women, school children, latinos, blacks, transgenders, homosexuals and medical caregivers has earned it the label “Highly dangerous” for travelers. Travel visas are available at local Texas consulates. The US cannot guarantee its citizens safety. Negotiations for a statewide barbed wire fence are underway.
In a related matter a board of enquiry will examine the criminal dumping of unsold oil and gas into the Gulf of America. Hearings will be held at Chevron headquarters and chaired by Harlan Crowe and Elon Musk.
The Department of Education has announced a new motto for America’s schools:
“A little learning is a lovely thing”
“There is so much our children do not need to know. Let’s free up their minds to pitch in and help our leaders.” said/ Linda MacMahon, Education Secretary. New department policy reasons that once the present semi-educaled generation passes the baton to a purely uneducated workforce America will have a formidable army of laborers, farm workers, hod carrIers, fast-food employees and servIce station attendants providing the muscle to make America great again,
News of insurance:
Homeowners insurers along the Eastern Seaboard will no longer honor claims for salt water damage or wind damage under 120 miles an hour.
News of discoveries:
Since the discovery of rare earth deposits beneath downtown Chicago
consortiums headed by South Africa, Israel and Russia have formed one of the largest private sector undertakings in history. Created out of buyouts, eminent domain and other intense persuasions a mining site called Merchandise Mart Two will be the first of several. President Trump has sent his son Freddo to supervise. “I’m going to learn the mining business,” he told an interviewer.
BERNARD HOLLAND
_________________________________________
DAS RHEINGOLD REVISITED
Oval Office door: Knock knock. May I come in?
Trump: Why?
Visitor: I want to see your gold.
T: It’s mine, you can’t have any
V: I just want to see it light up.
T: Come at night My hair gets up to 60 watts
V: I want to see something now.
T: I could take off my socks and show you my toenails.
I wiggle them and no more need for a flashlight at night.
V: Where did you get all this gold?.
T: I invented gold. Before me there was only pewter.
V: Where do you keep it?
T: Here in the Oval Office. I call it Fort Knox North.
V: Aren’t you afraid someone will steal it
T: Fafner has a cot outside the door.
T: I saw a suspicious little weasel skulking around the West Wing. Calls himself Alberich.
T: That’s Stephen Miller. He’s a little nuts. He works here. We call him Al.
V: I have to go
T: Fafner has to frisk you. With all that gold thread in the wall paper we found some
visiting foreign ministers with chisels.
V: Where did you find Fafner..
T: He got cut by the Steelers..
V: What’s the downside of all this gold?
T: Gold is heavy. With all that stuff on the mantelpiece I had to bring in the Corps of Engineers to shore up the floor.
V: Why is gold so special?
T: Should the Treasury go on the gold standard or the pig iron standard? Does
American Express give out an Aluminum Card? Gold sends a message: I’m rich and you aren’t.
V: You have the Declaration of Independence on the wall. Is that an original?
T: No. It’s a copy.. Every time I look at it I remember that if it can be a fake, so can I.
BERNARD HOLLAND
THE TRUMP CENTER: THE NATION’S DESTINATION FOR WHOLESOME ARTS
Coming Musical Events:
The Guantanamo String Quartet plays the first installment in its season of Haydn. Featured is the composer’s E-flat minor Quartet “The Waterboarder.”
The Vestals, Trump Center’s resident all girls choir, offers “On Your Knees.”a light-hearted oratorio dedicated to makIng our men feel “Great Again.” Stormy Daniels is guest soloist.
EPA Chamber Opera’s first production of the year will be a new all-negro, one act musical drama called “I Can Breathe.”
Senator Lindsay Graham’s dance troupe The Dashing Young Men will explore a current dance craze called the Waltz.
Reiterating that all Americans, no matter how repugnant their roots, retain the right to a third-grade education, the Trump Center Literary Society’s “Reading What’s right” crusade will end its first year of library decontaminations by announcing a Trump Center restocking drive.
The tasteful comic strip will be a major force. For the advanced reader there will be Trump’s “The Constitution Annotated” in a new red letter edition, followed by ”The Advantages of Mob Rule,” ‘The Pitfalls Of dissent” and “The Tyranny of Laws in Civiiized Societies.” Those desiring autographed copies should order from the Trump Family, Inc. Major credit cards accepted.
The Trump Ethical and Religious Society will offer a series of public debates.Two subjects being explored are “Rap or Rape? Looking for Murderous Intent in Kendrick Lamar.” and “Vengeance, God? Who Says You Own It ?”
At a new Casual Sunday series Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas will show slides of his latest trip aboard the USS Harlan Crowe. No date is yet set for Matt Gaetz’s memorial service for the late Jeffrey Epstein. Justice Brett Kavanaugh adds to the Court’s presence when he presents the Bud Light trophy for temperance to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
In other events:
Russia’s KGB will offer a workshop in defenestration
The West Virginia Anthracite Society will demonstrate its new coal-burning light bulb.
Literary events will include Senator Tommy Tuberville reading excerpts from his recent historical study “George Washington Takes on the Communists.“
A new weekly feature at Trump Center will be the “After Hours Horror Film Society” with one-man presentations by Stephen Miller.”
Government officials of the Republic of Panama will join Jared Kushner in a roundtable discussion of beaches in Central America, its lighthearted tItle: “If you’ve got the money honey, I’ve got the sand.”
HHS head Robert.F. Kennedy Jr will explain new developments in the crossbreeding of leeches and will take questions about his latest book “The Blessings of Bleeding”
The governments of Mexico and Canada have graciously agreed to handle
post-concert clean-up for all these events.
(Trump Center’s rigorous standards have resulted in a number of vacancies in this season’s calendar. No longer scheduled are the National Symphony, Washington Opera and Ballet and musical theater such as “Hamilton.” The Trump Center provides excellent venues for garden shows, weekend antique sales, product demonstrations and revival meetings. Contact our marketing department for more information.)
BERNARD HOLLAND
THE MET: TEFLON
I wonder if we aren’t confusing the Metropolitan Opera with the Washington Monument and “grand opera” with “opera house.” What might also help is to figure out what the word “belongs” really means. There is a lot of conflict at the moment as to what does and does not belong inside the Met. Peter Gelb the Met’s intendant seems weary of publicly pussyfooting around charges that a “grand opera” repertory has survived a few hundred years of exposure, taken over the premises and relegated the new and the fresh to the sidewalk. His productions of new operas, and there are some, seem almost defensive measures — there, that’s done. Let’s get back to “Tosca.”
Composers and their listener-allies are not having it. The government subsidizers, after a postwar of largess, have become stingier but the Met has always survived on rich friends. These continue to back the Puccini-Verdi Industrial Complex against what they see as smellier revolutionaries. Ambitious newcomers in turn are rightly resentful. Opera is a living organism, say the latter. The Met smells of embalming fluid.
I have never resented a penny of government money given to the arts but in my 27 years on the beat I was amazed at how the system was played. How does one persuade a Washington politician who thinks Bach is a kind of beer to give money to put on my opera? It’s all in the subject matter — a tragic movie star, a giant of contemporary history, news of the day, a cataclysmic event that even culture-free senators will know about. Quality of the music? Dramatic values? Of lesser importance. These operas have premieres but rarely revivals. They are like fireflies.
Both sides are right and wrong. Those who argue that the “standard repertory” is dense with genius and that new pieces fail to match them should ask any musicologist about a 19th century that produced enormous amounts of musical trash to go along with an occasional “Tristan und Isolde.” Operas by Saariaho and Ades do get noticed and some Met audience members like them.
I used to rail at culturally unwashed audiences happy to hum along to the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto while at the same time “Moses und Aron” sat mute in some music librarian’s file cabinet. Maybe my anger was misplaced. Worshipping at the altar of Rach Two is no blasphemy. (I love it.) A Haydn string quartet may have more to say but it will have to make do with a smaller listenership. Peace.
And who says the Metropolitan Opera and its fellow traditionalists are obligated to give their imprimatur to operas that speak radically different languages with questionable persuasiveness? Well, the pure of heart do and I feel for them. I too hope that Messiaen’s “St. Francis” and operas of equal heft find their way forward but God knows how. Certainly not by throwing one new mediocrity after another up against the Met stage and watching it bounce back. The Metropolitan Opera is not a workshop. Capitulate. Let the Met be what its patrons want it to be, guilt free. Walk around it. The pure of heart feel it only fair that the new be nurtured by the old. Fairness, however, is not high on the list of humanity’s ambitions.
By BERNARD HOLLAND
HORATIO ALGERITHMS
There is one slogan this steroid-driven year of politics will not let Americans forget: that no matter at what level their lives begin there is no limit how many levels can be clImbed. Candidates hammer us with their modest middle class orIgins or childhoods of tortured poverty. Americans are used to success stories and tend to accept this social and economic elevator casually. They shouldn’t.
Other people don’t live like us. France is not run by those who have struggled up from penury but by graduates of several elite schools, one in particular. The Germans are masters of stratification. If lawyers and doctors are licensed everywhere, In Germany so too is every trade, craft or describable job. If you want the legitimizing title “Diplom IngenIeur.” in front of your name you go to school, pass exams. If you are a married man your wife becomes “Frau Diplom Ingenieur” thus cementing your life into place.
There are benefits. The public is assured of master wielders of mops and broom while the street sweeper’s troubled dreams of higher things are smoothed by free health care and other public goods, also a safe and reasonable career and retirement. Social elevators are fewer. I knew a Viennese doctor —a cancer surgeon, late 30’s, nice income, nice car, plenty of leisure time to see the world. His assignment – number two man at a small suburban clinic. His boss, not much older than he, had his life also in place. Where was my friend to go? Advancement might come in 20 years. Assassination could be contemplated. My friend might never know where his ambition could take him. Yet he had an assurance of his place in life few Americans know.
In America no one knows his place. It is both an enriching a terrifying advantage. Maybe that is why so many of us are nervous, self-doubting, neurotic, overly aggressive. Having no established future and no government to catch us when we fall. we are imprisoned by our freedom. Years ago with a few extra dollars in my pocket I wanted a rug for my living room. It took three minutes for dealers around the corner on Second Avenue, brothers from the Middle East, to descend from $8,000 to a thousand. They were liquidating. Their promising business of a year ago had gone south. “Yes,” said one to me. “America is the land of opportunity but we have an equal opportunity to fail.”
So what do we fear more – the discrete jaws of security or the terrors of sudden collapse in a society where we are both free and condemned to seek out our own future. I came home from years in Europe landing in a mid-American city. I found a shabby apartment on a chic residential street. (My view of them was pleasanter than theirs of mine.) My first job was making coffee for graduate students at a local university. My modest sight-singing skills were enough to become a paid semi-professional plant in a high-end Episcopal church choir. (I hope American singers realize how much is owed Episcopalians.)
No one tried to license my future. No one asked me who I was, leaving the last for me to figure out myself. People were happy when I had something to offer, kind to me when I had fewer talents to contribute. I was poor but never hungry. Gradually came private teaching, writing about music, etc. Private piano teachers in Germany are guaranteed paid vacations — a dream of paradise for former private teachers such as myself. Still any attachment to German bureaucracy gives me a serious itch. Is security worth the rIsk?
BERNARD HOLLAND
TWINKLE, TWINKLE
What keeps the stars from falling on our heads? Is some kind of heavenly geometry in play?. Does it steer the planets along their predictable paths, keep them more or less collision free. And what takes those ever bigger bites out of the moon each month?
Modern science tells us with some authority (and with a bow to gravity) what holds the planets up but no explanation is quite so seductive as an idea that has held Western imagination since the time of the Greeks. It is called the Music of the Spheres _ an ancient astronomy that tells us that the skies can not only be seen but heard. It bids us put down our slide rules and calculators and then let it sing to us. How dry celestial maps appear in comparison.
The Music of the Spheres suggests that as we sit at our pianos and pick out progressions from, say, g-minor to D Major we are emulating in microcosm the measurements of the heavens. Pythagoras is our ground zero for this thinking, for not only did he promote the Music of the Spheres, he measured sound vibrations here on earth and in ways that gave us the musical scales on which several thousand years of Western music are based. The ancients and not so ancients took all this seriously. If music education today adds a little culture to our lives it was once believed to be essential and taught alongside mathematics and geometry. What better way to represent the universe at work?
What does this musIc sound like? We scarcely know. Plato says we hear it from birth but push it to the back of our minds.We know it’s there but its musicology escapes us. Maybe animals hear it better. Maybe we might pay more attention. Shakespeare said, “The earth hath music for those who listen.”
BERNARD HOLLAND
MISTAKEN IDENTITY
Every once a while I see in my mind a map of Africa. Down one side races the mighty Atlantic, down the other the Indian Ocean. They meet at the unfortunately-named Cape of Good Hope. Two mighty energies engaged in a hopeless struggle for dominance. Arithmetic fails them.Their powers do not double. They intertwine in chaos.
Now let me change the subject. I am thinking of music I remember and why. I have a handful of experiences stored away. One is a Sunday afternoon at Carnegie Hall. Dvorak’s G-Major Symphony was the music — led by James Levine, played by his hand-built creation the Met Opera Orchestra, its players meticulously chosen over the years by a musician of admirable taste and sophistication.
I often return to the beauty of that afternoon though in the last few years the vision has faded. Levine is dead. His orchestra belongs to others. His departure from the opera company he did so much to build was a horrid episode of anger and accusation. The sordid tales of a conductor’s private life may well be true though the degree of their sordidness is debatable. If you wish to deny that palace intrigue was involved there is a nice bridge over to Brooklyn I can let you have cheap.
My recollection of that Dvorak Sunday is encumbered by what happened later on. Do Levine’s alleged sins matter in the face of such beauty? In a certain world they matter very much. Society will not survive without standards imposed, lines drawn, the good rewarded, the bad not. Still I am angry. I dare any listener to find any moment of Dvorak’s symphony that dances to the reputed misdoings of James Levine. Music has no knowledge of sin or virtue. Music exists in its own cosmology.
Back to Africa. Let’s rename our two oceans Beauty and Virtue. Racing southward they seem at first glance brother and sister. So many genes are shared _ what emotions sound like, the feel of great swells of energy, the calm of great spaces. Meeting at our own private Cape of Good Hope we expect a happy merger but instead find hapless collisions. Does a beautiful object inspire moral behavior, or the other way around? Can we really say that the wonder and amazement evoked by a Haydn string quartet is any more genuine when played by four divinity students than by four Auschwitz guards after a busy day at the office?
Does Beethoven’s Ode to Joy make your patriotic heart accelerate and your nerve endings tingle? Tear off Beethoven’s music from Schiller’s Ode and it will attach nicely to any tv commercial. The Star Spangled Banner began as a bar room song, an 18th century take on “Drink, Chug-a-Lug,” We somehow expect music to be a force for good. The things attached to it perhaps but music has no interest in being good, evil or indifferent, only in being itself. That blessed Sunday afternoon bears no guilt. It has not
laid hands on gullible young men. But it has gone and I shall never get it back.
July,202
BERNARD HOLLAND
AUTOBIOLOGY
Like squirrels preparing for winter old people accumulate their past. In old age there is less nourishment on the ground, so the wise have stored up enough to feed the present. Early life is edited. The quotidian becomes The Good Old Days. Christmases were merrier.
Nostalgia is the old gold we use to pave over the rougher streets of later life. I wish I had more of it. My nostalgia tank is empty. I remember the Washington Senators, the Andrews Sisters and the words to “Cement Mixer, Putty, Putty.” but have no idea of who I was when they existed. My earliest years are a blank, my teens a blur. I started having fun at 18 and it’s been a chuckle a day ever since.
Happy childhoods require talents I never possessed. No one mistreated me. I just wasn’t very good at it. And why call up early stabs at love, my inability to hit a curve, diarrhea on the night train to Paris? My humiliations have been stored out of sight. They peek out infrequently. Remembrance is not some deep well, something we descend into in order to retrieve what we can. We re-create our past at every moment. It is two-dimensional. The only thing we know is what we know right now. Everything else we can change with a few keystrokes. And we do.
There are those who find happy childhoods a curse. The good stuff is over and many years of anticlimax beckon. Better a little misery at first, they say, then gradual emergence into the light. I miss a few people but mostly things.
There are counselors to clarify our past and put our troubled old minds at ease. But wouldn’t it be wiser to hire professionals to reinvent it? Trained agents could parse your dreams and fill in any gaps. You would be charged on a sliding scale depending on how much more happiness you need or how much you can afford. My long dead Richmond friend Sydney Allsopp while puzzling over a Brahms Intermezzo once said to me, “I’m not the man I used to be and I never was.“ We could fix that.
BERNARD HOLLAND
THE ACCIDENTAL SCHOLAR
I live as much of the year as I can on a small island just across the Canadian border. There are the seascapes and great stands of spruce but there is also a tiny world that seems to have ignored the last 80 years. It survives as a kind of naturally occurring Colonial WillIamsburg, a place whose little roads and shingle houses arrive from my Virginia childhood intact.
About a mile along my wreck of a dirt road and down a path-like driveway is a family of three, like my wife and I, summer refugees from a faster world. Their house, lIke ours, sits on a promontory overlooking the Bay of Fundy. Of winter refugees there are few. The thousand or so fisherman families that have lived here for several centuries bear the cold and wind with equanimity. We do not.
The father designs the machines that have made on demand book publishing possible. The mother, the daughter of a Chinese general and long in America, is a cook of extraordinary Chinese feasts. But it is the daughter I am writing about. She is slender, comfortably over six feet tall, Vassar graduate. Her otherwise American face gives way to a subtle overlay of her mother’s features. When I first encountered her she was fresh from school and bent towards visual arts. A year later she told me she moved stocks and bonds for a San Francisco brokerage.
Her father fretted about her indecisions in life although I couldn’t imagine her failing at anything. He once brought me into the conversation. I think afterward he wished he hadn’t. I began by saying I had been unemployed for 23 years and that my job at The New York Times, begun at age 48, was my first since editing the Haiti page of the Journal of Commerce. My boss there enjoyed his four-martini lunches, leaving me to write headlines (in pre-computer days an art) and fend off questions I didn’t understand.
A country cousin I barely knew sent me a thousand dollars saying I should go to Europe. Harboring a real and unrealized passion for music and understanding that shipping news was not the answer to my future. I quit my job and its $65 a week, gave up my cold water flat on Cornelia Street and went. The next eight years is a story for another day.
I arrived— little money, no contacts, prep school French. My father, an old Southern lawyer, took pity on my musical yearnings and said he would send me l,200 dollars a year. That was It. An old romance had moved to Vicenza but I was now in her rear view mirror. I climbed on trains to see what was to be seen. I ended in Vienna — lots of music. cheap tuition, affordable booze and cigarettes. I was to learn to my delight that bars by law closed at 4am as a whole new set was about to open.
Thus began my non-career and accidental education. Let me separate myself from the surgeon who has spent third of a life learning how to do a job, or from the pianist who can play the “Hammerklavier” Sonata in public only by virtue of years-long, daily attempts to make one’s body do things it does not want to do Early commitment to what one’s life will be represents a certain kind of courage. I simply worried that my young woman would choose too easily, would glide through life with an acceptable happiness and then find her second thoughts moot.
Indecision has its rewards. So much of what I know passed my way unbidden and unexpected. I spoke no German but being too poor to move in American ex-pat circles I heard no English. I eventually got the grammar right not because I understood its intricacies but because it either sounded right or it didn’t. No career fitting my education beckoned. If it had I would probably have led a placid life as book editor with a family and a little house in Westchester.
The sixteen Hungarian freedom fighters housed with me near the Prater park taught me my first German, along with a vocabulary of Hungarian obscenities more imaginative than those of any other language. I can still do a passable German as spoken in a Budapest drawl. I have since repressed my German due perhaps to a lack of fondness for the place and its people.
My contemporaries may now have fat bank accounts but who among them know the word for helicopter (Hübschrauber)) or con man (Hochstapler), the right way to peel an orange (not the old round-and-round way), the hangover cure that works (more beer)? How many can say “F..k your mother” in as many languages as I, including Romanian?
What you see before you today is a bottomless well, a molten sea of worthless information. Its riches are not bankable but I revel in them. What Wall Street estates lawyers can tell a joke in Viennese dialect that is a pun on Hungarian bad words?
I know that I have edited out of my story great swaths of involuntary solitude and false starts.
Maybe my life of adventure was not the highlight reel that plays back to me in old age. I simply hope my young friend will not rush too quickly toward success. There is much to be stumbled into. I hope she will wander while still in her prime, although her father would kill me for saying it. The last I heard she was in China digging away for ancient things.
BERNARD HOLLAND
ANTIFA, EAT YOUR HEART OUT
At lunch with an American conductor not long ago the subject of concerts, critics and The New York Times came up. I told him that the paper, in my day at least, had no belief in one kind of music nor did it have a roster of performers and singers whose fortunes we were eager to advance. He looked at me in disbelief. This is a musician of long experience and considerable sophistication.
I was horrified. Wacko conspiracy stories about The New York Times in an age when it covered a lot more of the music world than it does now were common among the lower echelons of the classical music community. Indeed musical talent and brain power don’t necessarily come together in this tiny world. But this was an intelligent man who has seen it all. I took a lot of time trying to set him straight but in the end I’m not sure he believed me. Anyway, this is what I told him:
For a number of years I was in charge of assigning Times critics to write about musical events. Information on the coming week’s events had been gathered and listed day by day and at a weekly meeting decisions were made. At low tide in any New York music season this was pretty straightforward. From mid-October to the week before Christmas and then from late January to he end of April we trembled at the tidal wave of music about to roll over us.
At our cleverest we engaged in a kind of three-dimensional chess, fitting in what should be covered with what our little ship could withstand without sinking. After many acts of triage, some looked either brutal or non-sensical. I often didn’t feel clever at all.
The cry of outrage was of course, why not hire seasonal freelancers— like the temps Macy’s customers battle every Christmas. The Newspaper Guild had long since put its foot down on that one. If you use people’s work you pay them benefits, health, retirement. The Guild relented on one or two stringers as they are called, but made unpleasant noises about more.
Sinister plots hatched on West 43rd Street and intended to undermine the careers of performers and composers were taken as gospel the only alternative explanation being the caveman-like stupidity of New York Time music critics. My impression of The New York Times, both in my little bailiwick and in The Times as a whole, was of smart, decent people fighting valiantly against avalanches of information. I marveled at how that paper could come out every day.
Years before I did the music assignments there was a Sunday offering Bach’s B minor Mass at 2, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis at 4 and (I think) the Brahms Requiem at 8. One of our critics had the flu and another, a stringer, had wandered off God knows where. I covered all three concerts in one day.
BERNARD HOLLAND