How To Be Rich

Yesterday's visit to the J. Paul Getty Museum was a great adventure, partly because of the experience of the architecture (the physical museum is a work of art), the location (atop a small mountain overlooking the city of Los Angeles as viewed from the west), and the exhibits (a nice selection from the permanent collection and a exhibit about Giotto and his influence on Florintine art during the first half of the 14th century). Admission is free, and parking is modest and efficient.

Like the Griffith Observatory, which sits atop a mountain to the east of the center of the city, it is a gift from a wealthy industrialist to the people of the city (and the world) that offers a chance to look at the world from a totally different perspective from the norm, whatever that may be.

I knew nothing about Getty before this adventure, so, after enjoying my day with his gifts, I bought a copy of his well-titled book, How to Be Rich. Sandwiched between chapters about how to work hard, make good investments, respect the people who work for you and respect the labor unions they belong to (it was first published as a series of articles in Playboy Magazine between 1961 and 1965), are chapters about the importance of education, music, and art in our lives.

Here's a taste:

The "anti culture" bias appears to thrive at most levels of American society. . . . Only a tiny percentage of the population reads great books or, listens to great music. It's doubtful if one in ten Americans is able to differentiate between a Doric and an Ionic column.

Do you know the difference between a Doric and Ionic column? Sure, you can look it up. But do you actually know, or care?

The book is really an interesting look at the times, which, in many cases, if we are to believe the state of art and culture an America during the early 1960s through the eyes of Mr, Getty, have indeed changed for the better. I like to think it has changed, in part, due to his posthumous efforts.

A parting thought from Getty's penultimate chapter called "The Art of Individuality":

The conformist is not born. He is made.

Looking Both Ways

I have been dismayed, of late, by a general avoidance of what I like to call "things right," so I have taken action. I now try to balance my position relative to people I walk with (not just Michael this week because we're visiting Rachel in Los Angeles) and talk with, and am learning the hidden wonders of developing a more panoramic approach to life.

Yesterday this practice of looking both ways really came in handy while we were at LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I came to really appreciate the individual experience it is possible to have with a work of art when you look at the whole thing at the same time, and on the right scale, i.e. artwork to human. I'll write about the Kubrick exhibit in detail at another time, but seeing an exhibit about film making and film directing (and everything else about what Stanley Kubrick did to make his films) made me realize just how much what you see on in a film (no matter how great a film it might be) is limited. The person who put it there is sharing not only his or her vision but his or her process of seeing it. The director is directing you as we'll as directing the actors. Perhaps this is why we go to the movies: to escape our thoughts and allow ourselves to be "directed."

This is not the case with art work. You can see a piece of art differently every time you look at it. It all has to do with the way you see it. You become, in essence, the director. But you are equipped with "camera equipment" that is vastly superior than any box fitted with lenses, no matter how sophisticated or expensive.

The better the piece of art, the deeper the experience can be.

Today we visit the Getty Museum!

Goldman Fantasie

I wrote an opera about Emma Goldman back in 2005, and, simply because I really should have been doing other things (which I will get to right away), I decided to organize some of the music that popped into my head and wouldn't leave into a stand-alone piece for clarinet, violin, cello and piano.

You can listen to it here and see the music in the Petrucci Library.

I did toy (for just a second) with calling it the "Goldman Variations" (before actually working on it) but I scrapped the idea because this piece is not a set of variations, and is also not worthy of such a reference, even a punny one (nothing is).

Auricolare!

I was poking around through the guitar method books on the IMSLP yesterday, and came across this print.

Notice that the fingers P, I, M, and A are all given their full names: Pollire (thumb), Indire (index), Media (middle), and Anulare (ring); but wait! The little finger also has a name, and that name seems to have something to do with ears. Could it be the finger you put in your ear?

Knowing Stuff About Music

Yesterday an acquaintance introduced me to a person who was visiting our fair city. She told him (wanting to give a good impression of our town) that I had an encyclopedic knowledge of music, to which I replied, "What I know is rivaled only by what I do not know."

I'm kind of proud of that statement, because it is true, and I am confident that it will continue to be true for the rest of my life.

I used to think I knew a lot about music, and I did know a lot of stuff about a relatively small amount of music when I was a teenager. I knew the flute repertoire inside and out (and would study the 1967 Frans Vester catalog of flute music to strengthen my knowledge).



I read Grout and Lang, knew most of Brahms' chamber music by opus number, and could identify most of Bach's instrumental music and some of his cantatas. I knew much of the standard symphonic repertoire from going to concerts and from listening to the radio, and I read the books about music that were in the house. When I re-read those books now, and re-visit music that I used to think I knew really well, I can see how shallow my understanding of music history (and of music and musicians) once was. I appeared to have learned enough in the process of reading and listening to give the impression of being far more knowledgeable than I was.

Now, thanks to our friends at the IMSLP, thanks to 13 years of working at a radio station, thanks to 20 years of reviewing recordings, thanks to escaping the confines of the pre-1967 flute repertoire, and thanks to the musical arm of the internet, I am pleased to say that I now know far less about music than I ever have known in my life.

It makes life exciting when every day can be an adventure.

Using an AED Machine

This, of course, has nothing to do with music. But a musician friend sent it to me, and I watched it, and now I know that if I were in a public place like a shopping mall, and someone were to collapse from a heart attack, I could feel confident about hopefully keeping that person alive until the paramedics arrived.

Here's the video.

You never know when something like this might happen, so it is good to be prepared.

Marlene Dietrich as You Have Never Seen Her Before

Margie King Barab writes all about her first encounter with Marlene Dietrich!

The Dot and the Line: Music by Eugene Poddany

This wonderful piece of classic animation, with music by Eugene Poddany, came bundled with "The Glass Bottom Boat," a Doris Day movie that Michael and I found funny mainly for its large helping of prop-related double entendre. Doris Day, who was 40 at the time, plays a young widow who catches the eye of a big shot rocket scientist where she works (NASA). He asks her to be his personal biographer. Hmm.

I won't mention anything about the CIA director who has an important part in the film, but I will mention that Paul Lynde appears in drag.

Charles Gounod on Composers and Society

The society of artists is dying on its feet. . . . Each member pivots around his neighbor. There is no progress toward an avowed purpose, toward a clearly perceived end. . . . This anarchy is a sad spectacle; time will put an end to it, but when will that time come? I think it will be when the masses develop a tendency of some kind to opinions of their own. . . . The public accepts an infinite number of productions, varied and even opposed to their points of view; and they enjoy the very contradictions. They split their affection and their sympathies, and necessarily divide the effectiveness of their stimulus to such a degree that they no longer even give an impetus to artists. . . . It seems to me that the principle of evil lies in this absence of a universal need. I believe, in a word, that the artist's growth stems from all the power and all the moral, intellectual, and religious energy of the epoch to which he belongs, and that society expresses itself through him in proportion to the vitality and activity it transmits to him.

This is part of a letter that Gounod wrote to a friend in 1847 when he was living in a Carmelite monastery. [Translated by Mina Curtiss and published on page 29 of her 1958 book, Bizet and His World. I find the contradictions very interesting, and I find it particularly interesting to think about what Gounod says in relation to life in the 21st century.]

Thoughts on Art and Entertainment

As I've said a million times, there has been an attempt, largely successful, to confuse what you might call art and what you might call entertainment. I think there's a very simple distinction, and it doesn't diminish entertainment in any way, because we all want it and we all enjoy it. Entertainment is that which you receive without effort. Art is something where you must make some kind of effort, and you get more than you had before.

Charles Wuorinen said this in a 2005 New York Times interview.

It would be nice to think that what we call art, in any sense of the word, requires a person to somehow, for better or for worse, give something of himself or herself to the material at hand. We all know that a person listening or looking at or reading or even touching art can become somehow changed by it--even in a very tiny way--if he or she makes a certain effort to "meet" it. Unfortunately, without that effort (and the media through which we now experience art doesn't always require effort), even something intended to be experienced as art can be, at best, experienced as entertainment, and if it isn't entertaining enough to be absorbed without effort, it is sometimes ignored completely, or immediately forgotten.

What am I? Chopped Liver?

I use this phrase from time to time, but I only recently learned what it means. According to Jewish culinary tradition, chopped liver was served as a side dish and not as a main dish, so the meaning of the phrase was obvious to everyone who ate. But these days chopped liver is a far cry from your normal side dish, particularly in America, and particularly in the non-urban mid-west. I would actually have to drive three hours north to the Chicago suburbs, or two hours west, to Indianapolis, to even order chopped liver as a side dish at a restaurant (but someone else would have to eat it).

It turns out that I have been using the phrase incorrectly anyway. Most of the time I feel like I should be saying, "I'm not even chopped liver," because more and more it feels like what I do doesn't even classify as a side dish in the dinner party of life. But that doesn't sound as good. I'm hoping that the feeling will pass, like the indigestion and heartburn that would eventually pass after eating real chopped liver.

It is possible to make mock chopped liver out of cooked lentils, sautéed onions, ground-up walnuts, a bit of soy sauce, a bit of miso, and a bit of broth. There's another recipe I found that uses sautéed, chopped mushrooms rather than lentils.

Eternally Young Elliott Carter

I never thought I would fall into the Carter obituary vortex, but here I am.

I find this video so interesting. Alisa Weilerstein, who is quite young, has the kind of guarded "grown up" affectation (and diction) that I often observe in successful string players in their 20s and 30s (perhaps she was nervous). Elliott Carter, who is quite old (103 in this video) actually seems young and free in comparison.

He is so physically IN the music when he talks about it. The way he speaks is never guarded. It is expressive and honest, both when he is talking with Alisa, and when he is coaching her.

Carter Eight Etudes and a Fantasy

I'll never forget the day that a woodwind quartet from the California School of the Arts came to my high school on a recruiting trip, and played Elliott Carter's Eight Etudes and a Fantasy for us. The piece, written in 1950, was a revelation to me back in 1975, and it still continues to be extremely and eternally inspiring, particularly because you can hear the obvious joy Carter had during the process of writing it.

I could describe how the piece works in more detail, but Jeremy Grimshaw has already written a fine analysis.

Our President Thanks the Young People who Ran his Campaign

This is great to watch for more reasons than I can articulate:

Building Listening Skills

I find so often that my community college students (many who are grown-up products of "no child left behind") have a great deal of trouble listening. There is not that much of a problem during class, when the visual help of a study guide (and a study guide guide, like a teacher) can help them keep on track while listening to a piece of music, but left to their own devices, many of them are at sea.

The problem affects every subject.

It is difficult for many people to keep "stuff" you hear in a class in the foreground, and it is easy to let constant internal chatter drown out what a teacher might be saying. It is also easy, in a world where music is mostly thought of as "background" to simply tune it out.

Thanks to the popularity of video games, children are quite visually sophisticated these days. When they play video games, they respond to visual stimulation immediately and physically by moving a mouse or pressing buttons on a touch screen. They make strategic decisions based on what they see, and have a great deal of fun doing it.

I wish there were some compelling and sophisticated games that all children, regardless of musical aptitude, could use to learn to practice listening to patterns attentively without the aid of visual stimulation. There seem to be so many children and young adults who can identify visual patterns with ease, and, it seems, there are relatively few young adults who can follow arguments, or write a compelling ones themselves. Very small children love language. They love rhythm, they love rhymes, and many love singing. Why should they lose this when they become old enough to go to school?

Following a piece of music is not that difficult when you know what to listen for. There are repetition schemes that help you keep your place, if you pay attention to where you are. Following an argument (in any discipline) takes similar skills. When you write an argument of your own, you need to know where you've been, where you are, and where you are going in order to express your point successfully.

I think that the skills developed by listening attentively (and with guidance) to music that is written using dance forms, song forms, and the basic classical instrumental forms might enhance these skills.