seeline

Some other scholars' comments in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/arts/music/doubts-greet-claims-about-stravinskys-sexuality.html?hp&_r=0 Doubts are, as they say, cast on Craft's assertions... personally, I'm still waiting for documentation. (not hearsay.)

Thanks for the heads-up on Joe's new CD - looking forward to it.

This series of recordings features a lot of music by African immigrants - one volume (no. 3) is devoted to that.

The recent documentary on the Ballet Russes is available for streaming on Netflix, in case anyone's interested... As far as influences on a partner's work, I was thinking about people like Samuel Barber and Giancarlo Menotti, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, John Cage and Merce Cunningham, etc. Also, I think it would have been pretty much impossible to have been part of the Parisian arts scene during the early 20th c. and not have been around/been friends with LGBT folks. (Like Cocteau, who seems to have known everyone who was anyone.)

Though I think it may be just as likely that they proclaim they have an artistic or intellectual reason for doing something, and in fact that is just as likely that at root it is based in personal relations or animus towards someone else. They may not even want to admit this to themselves. I've seen this dozens of times at academic conferences where what appears to be a theoretical disagreement is really driven by personal dislike. ejp - yes.

I just don't know that it's that important, overall.

Diaghilev was from a wealthy background and from all that I know about him, didn't hesitate to make people feel that they needed to "know their place" (as the English used to say). Stravinsky wasn't the only person involved in the creation of The Rite... - much of it (ideas, plot, visual stuff) came from Nicholas Roerich, although apparently Stravinsky denied that later in his life, claiming that The Rite... was his alone. Roerich and others (including Stravinsky) came from a background of various Russian art and political movements that had a huge influence on visual, literary, musical (etc ) production by lots of people - not just Stravinsky. (Reliance on folklore, belief in the Asiatic - "Scythian" - origins of ancient Russian culture, attempts to recreate Slavic paganism, pan-Slavic political/cultural movements and more). OK, perhaps Stravinsky was hypocritical in his pronouncements about the Ballets Russes circle, but the kind of hothouse atmosphere that flourished there might well have been deemed unpleasant by many gay people (though I don't know; it's just conjecture). I think Diaghilev's personality - and Stravinksy's - probably had as much, or more, to do with what Stravinsky said about him than Craft might credit, since he seems so intent on talking about homosexuality (and who Stravinsky was sleeping with) in that article. I noticed that Craft also talks about Stravinsky's friendship with Ravel and other composers (many of them gay) in that same article. Perhaps these friendships - and exchanges of ideas that were likely a part of the milieu - are more important than Stravinsky's alleged liason with Delage? I honestly don't know, but I'm willing to bet that that's the case. (if Stravinsky had had a long-term relationship with Delage, things might be a bit different - especially per shared interests and ideas.) I noticed this - which Craft says is an aside (along with the other material re. Delage) in the article - Upshaw recorded them on the disc I mentioned in a previous post:

I'm not at all sure how a relatively brief relationship with another man affects the tenor of Stravinsky's work over a lifetime. Wagner's antisemitism is - imo - very different, in that it truly did affect his work and much more. I'm baffled as to why someone's sexual orientation and/or sexual history are made out to be so important - my point above is that there have to be lots of other things that are important to any given individual, yet they're far less gossip-worthy. But this is going around in circles.

No sense trying to debate this... for me, sexual orientation is not the most important thing here, and Craft is controversial. At this point, what he claims to be revealing makes me yawn.

Funny how nobody is talking about what other things in life (besides sexual orientation and relationships) might have been important to Stravinsky, Delage - or anyone else, for that matter. Personally, i think Delage's interest in South and East Asian music is intriguing; ditto for Stravinsky's interest in Russian folk songs and Orthodox liturgy. If I knew that gardening or being a master of cuisine was important to either, I also think that would be more interesting than a litany of who slept with whom. Add to that the fact that Robert Craft's claims can't be substantiated by anyone - since all of the people in question are dead, it's all rumor. And, as Bigshot said, it's all about as interesting as H'wood gossip or the endless speculation re. Queen Latifah's sexuality. I don't care one way or the other if an entertainer or musician chooses to keep their private life private. What they do is work, and they deserve to have some off-the-clock time of their own, though our celebrity-obsessed culture hates that. (cf. Perez Hilton and all the rest of the rumor mongers.) **** fwiw, Dawn Upshaw recorded Delage's "Quatre poemes hindous" on her 1991 album The Girl with Orange Lips - definitely worth checking out.

Nope - I'm just plain tired of people speculating ad nauseam about the sexual orientation(s) of others. Don't see how Stravinsky's relationship with Delage has anything to do with his music, frankly.

About this whole topic: So? Craft... that's a whole 'nother story; I personally don't trust him on much of anything.

This is my favorite (scroll down to get to the pics) - http://web.archive.org/web/20050212095358/http://homepage.mac.com/danielturek/PhotoAlbum50.html * Created by Daniel Turek, who no longer maintains the photo album.

You never know!

I don't get the whole "distribution medium" aspect. In this digital age it just seems akin to having a hand crank on the front of your car. the people buying them are mostly under 30 and cassettes are a novelty item, kind of - and very "retro." I can see the appeal to the "lo-fi" and punk bands that use cassettes. It's against the trend, very much an "underground" kind of thing. The people who are putting out cassettes (see article) said that they know the trend could change to something else tomorrow.

I can see the appeal to the "lo-fi" folks who are using cassettes as a distribution medium (as stated in the article). I don't miss cassette tapes, either, but I do kind of miss the shopping trips I used to make to various "ethnic" grocery stores that also sold hard-to-find music on cassettes. Grabbing a bunch of those and taking them home to listen (and, often, re-dub, since the physical quality of the ones I bought was usually horrendous) was a lot of fun. You never quite knew what you'd be getting. Cassettes were my intro. to older Bollywood soundtracks and a lot of Arabic music. Even today, there are rare cassette-only issues of some Arab singers that are worth hunting down.

I lived down there for a bit over two decades. The beach: no contest! I would never go back to D.C., even though I like D.C. itself. One reason (apart from what everyone else has mentioned); the terrible air quality. It got exponentially worse during the last 5 years that I lived there (late 90s-early 00s) and even though I don't have asthma, there were smoggy days during the summer when I found it difficult to breathe outdoors. (Only in the last 2-3 years I lived there, though.) A few years ago I had a hotel room in an area with comparable air quality during an August heatwave, and it brought back everything about D.C.-area smog with a vengeance. Between that and trying to drive in Beltway-type traffic, forget it!

She was also a mainstay of the D.C. Tower Records jazz room for a number of years, and did concert producing (mostly avant-garde-ish projects) during the 80s at D.C. Space (now defunct). The article: I had no idea that people were moving in to "gentrify" Adams-Morgan and am alarmed, though I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I really hope WPFW makes it out of there OK... D.C. lost its other jazz station in the 90s.

I completely agree that the editing and fact-checking at the Ties - and just about every other publication I can think of - is severely lacking. Still...

Thanks, Chris. fwiw, Kia Gregory covers Harlem-related news stories as a rule. Not sure that she's supposed to be a jazz expert in order to write about Harlem now. Nice article on what it took for her to be able to finish school and land a job at the Times: http://news.temple.edu/news/2012-05-04/after-12-year-juggling-act-journalism-grad-moves-times Here's a list of her NYT articles and blog posts: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/kia_gregory/index.html

About Canadian mail: I've always had a problem (in the US) in terms of super-slow delivery of *anything* from Canada - parcels and letters alike. And some friends who live in Canada will deliberately drive across the border to the US to mail things that are important, like wedding invitations, because they have their own horror stories about important things getting lost en route from Canada to the US. (This has been a problem since the mid-1980s, if not before, according to them.) So... I think there are problems with both countries' postal services, not just ours. fwiw, when I was really small, there were still two mail deliveries a day (US) and stamps were 5 cents or so.

Byron's fondness for concept albums might be part of the problem, I'm thinking. Really do enjoy his playing on Ralph Peterson's 1st Fo'tet album as well as on his own Tuskeegee Experiments.

Listen, I think Byron's claims in that interview are way out of line... Oddly, though I'm not a big klezmer fan, I was fascinated by the 1st klezmer revival records I heard (some of them seemed closely tied to Yiddish theater, which has always interested me), so i guess I paid attention for cultural reasons if nothing else. Whether someone's music grabs me or not is another story altogether!

Well, being bored by someone's music isn't the same thing as acknowledging their place in the overall timeline, right? I 1st saw/heard Byron on a 60 Minutes segment on the KCB that ran way, way back... he was still in Boston at the time. Their lead vocalist called him "Dondele." (I'm not Jewish, but as a kid, I heard the "-dele" suffix more than a few times, from neighbors' parents and older relatives.) As for Byron's Mickey Katz album, I like the pieces that feature Sklamberg, and i think everyone intended those to be jokey, since the originals certainly were. I don't think they're anything but clever parody, though - probably better as part of some kind of musical revue, cabaret or other stage show than anything else. Byron's liners, though... and his opening and closing pieces for that album - are another thing entirely! What really surprises me is that the Forward published this interview! I bet they've had lots of not-so-happy feedback from a lot of readers since it went up.