7/4

You can change the defaults.

When you're looking at an individual forum, go to the bottom of the page and look at the forum options. You can tweak it there. .

this little tidbit from the NYTimes: Teo Macero, 82, Record Producer, Dies By BEN RATLIFF Published: February 22, 2008 Teo Macero, a record producer, composer and saxophonist most famous for his role in producing a series of albums by Miles Davis in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including editing that almost amounted to creating compositions after the recordings, died on Tuesday in Riverhead, N.Y. He was 82 and lived in Quogue, N.Y. - snip - Attilio Joseph Macero was born and raised in Glens Falls, N.Y. He served in the Navy, then moved to New York in 1948 to attend the Juilliard School of Music, where he studied with the composer Henry Brant. - snip -

Fringe Beat Henry Brant Early in his life as a Santa Barbaran, Brant’s music showed up locally, including a presentation of the memorable “Rainforest” that took place at (and around) the Lobero. He has since presented music elsewhere, globally, including his 2001, Pulitzer-winning Ice Field with the San Francisco Symphony. Another obstacle for Brant’s work is that stereo recordings don’t do justice to his multi-vantage-point music. Thus he’s had little interest in pursuing documentation of his music. Lately, though, Brant’s discography has grown dramatically, thanks to a recording series on Innova (the St. Paul-based label arm of the American Composers Forum). Two recent volumes in the “Henry Brant Collection” offer an informative mini-survey on the now-huge Brant catalogue of works, from the whimsical to the sublime. Volume 8 showcases shorter pieces, some dating from the ’30s, with a focus on Brant’s witty — and sometimes goofy — side, including Whoopee in D, “Revenge Before Breakfast,” and some jazz-based pieces. On Volume 9, we hear a few more decidedly abstract pieces — “Dormant Craters,” “Ceremony,” and “Homeless People.” In these, we’re admittedly getting a stripped-down version of the real, spatial thing, but still, the rigor of his creative voice is intact — and captured for posterity. Thursday, April 3, 2008 By Josef Woodard

Hey FFA, welcome back... .

Probably a temp thing. I was there lookin' 'round this afternoon.

April 27, 2008 Music Maverick With a Message of Solidarity By MATTHEW GUREWITSCH Frederic Rzewski at a 2006 performance. Mr. Rzewski, who has just turned 70, is featured this week at the Gilmore Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo, Mich., and at Zankel Hall in Manhattan. IN photographs the American composer Frederic Rzewski resembles an Old Testament prophet, all high-domed brow, deep-gazing eyes and white, wind-swept hair. Over the phone from Brussels, his home since the 1970s, he projects a different image: casual, common-sensical, to the point. Toss him a question sure to prompt the self-important to pontificate — something about the extramusical associations of old songs, say, or the consolations of tragedy — and Mr. Rzewski (pronounced ZHEV-ski) shoots it down. “I don’t think I have any more to say about that,” he replies. Or, “I think we’re getting into deep waters here.” Politics is another subject that fails to coax him onto a soapbox. Yes, his scores are shot through with melodies associated with the left and often have titles to match. Yes, the blacklisted folk singer Pete Seeger was a culture hero of his. But Mr. Rzewski is a musician, not a pamphleteer. None but the naïve could imagine contemporary classical music as the lever for social upheaval. It was a teaching job that brought him to Belgium, not the state of the American nation. “No philosophy,” he said recently. “I had a family to support.” More than music is on his mind these days. He turned 70 on April 13, “and for some reason, it made me go back to Ibycus,” he said. He quoted the poet’s haunted lines about falling in love in old age: “Like the old racehorse, I tremble at the prospect of the course which I am to run, and which I know so well.” Mr. Rzewski reads the ancient Greeks in the original. Tolstoy too. On Monday the Gilmore Keyboard Festival in Kalamazoo, Mich., is celebrating the milestone with a sampler of Mr. Rzewski’s music, to be repeated at Zankel Hall in Manhattan on Thursday. A formidable pianist with a touch and attack sometimes eerily reminiscent of Glenn Gould, Mr. Rzewski will play his new “War Songs,” arrangements of six traditional war or antiwar songs written over six centuries, from “L’Homme Armé” to taps. With Stephen Drury he will also perform a two-piano version of “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues,” from the series “North American Ballads.” The contemporary-music ensemble Opus 21 will join Mr. Rzewski in “Attica,” a response to the notorious 1971 prison riots in upstate New York. Mr. Drury joins the group for the premiere of “Natural Things,” pieced together from 49 mostly unrelated segments that run 20 to 25 seconds each. A prefatory note to the score alludes to the Haymarket massacre in Chicago in May 1886, which began as a labor rally in support of striking workers. And it lists household objects to be incorporated into the percussion section: tin cans, cardboard boxes, bottles and a bathtub or trash can. “It has to be a large metal container,” Mr. Rzewski said, “like a black hole in the middle of the music.” Once asked if commentators were right to call him a Marxist composer, he snorted, “Harpo or Groucho or what?” The anarchic streak in his music is as much comic as it is political. Somewhere in his seven-CD box “Rzewski Plays Rzewski: Piano Works, 1975-1999” on the Nonesuch label, between fantasias on protest songs and chapters of his mammoth pianistic “novel” in progress, “The Road,” there is a cameo turn for a seriously vocal rubber ducky. Yet what emerges above all is a picture of a pianist enamored of his instrument as handed down by the master builders of the 19th century. “Rzewski is in the line of the great pianist-composers like Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn,” said Daniel R. Gustin, the director of the Gilmore festival and the prime mover behind the current tribute. “He’s a bit of a maverick, which is fun, and it’s hard to pin him down as to style and approach. But his piano works connect to the great pianistic tradition.” Mr. Rzewski’s concentration on writing for piano is easily explained. “I tend to work with what is there,” he said. “Opera houses don’t come asking me to write operas. Symphony orchestras don’t come asking for symphonies. But there’s this piano player I see every day who keeps asking me for music. So that’s what I do.” A friend once suggested that he drop off some scores with the mesmerizing pianist Martha Argerich, another Brussels resident. “I thought, no, why bother the woman?” Mr. Rzewski said. “I have great respect for those who specialize in Schumann or whatever. The classical tradition needs to be kept up.” But if the Argerichs of the world pass Mr. Rzewski by, other adventurers of the keyboard seek him out — Ursula Oppens, for instance. The story goes that she requested a pendant to Beethoven’s monumental “Diabelli” Variations and that Mr. Rzewski obliged with an instant classic: the magisterial 36 Variations on “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!,” based on a Latin American revolutionary chant. Not quite so, Ms. Oppens said recently. “I asked him to write a piece. Anything. He said: ‘I want to learn more about you. What are you interested in?’ I said, ‘The next thing I’m going to learn is the ‘Diabelli’ Variations. Then this piece turned up, and I never did learn the ‘Diabelli.’ “It’s very challenging, but technically most of the time the writing is quite traditional. If you’ve had your normal background of practicing Chopin études, it’s right in that vein. I also think of Liszt because it’s so virtuosic. But above all one thinks of Beethoven because of the personality, the way Rzewski wants to defy the limits.” And then there is the vision. Much as the Beethoven of the Ninth Symphony harps on universal brotherhood, Mr. Rzewski hammers home the message of solidarity through dozens of musical permutations. More interested in structure than in timbre, Mr. Rzewski makes no great claims for his skills as an orchestrator. Writing for instruments other than the piano, he often leaves the choice of instruments and even of octave up to the performers. That came in handy for the oddball collective Opus 21 when it picked up a piece called “Spots.” But “Natural Things” was written for its specific configuration of violin, cello, clarinet, saxophone and piano, plus two percussionists. “The new piece brings together so many things that Rzewski is noted for,” said Richard Adams, the ensemble’s founder and artistic director. “The speaking of text of a political nature, moments that are very lyrical and almost Minimalist, others that are pointillist and 12-tone, along with a lot of everyday sounds and ad hoc sounds like tapping and strange effects like a musical saw.” No question, Mr. Rzewski likes to keep listeners guessing. When he plays other people’s music, he can raise hackles by improvising cadenzas in the middle of such untouchable masterworks as Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” and “Appassionata” Sonatas. “I do it because I think it’s authentic,” he said. “It’s what I think Beethoven would have done. A few years ago, after a concert at Bard College, a musicologist came up to me and told me very sternly that you could do that at parties but not at a concert. Usually people don’t hire you at all if they think you’re going to go in for such shenanigans. “And maybe they’re right. My Japanese friend Yuji Takahashi, the pianist and composer, says: ‘It’s redundant. All the irrational stuff is already there, in Beethoven’s writing.’ I do whatever I think is right at the moment. One thing is for sure: You shouldn’t prepare it. Improvisations have to pop into your head then and there, or there’s no reason for them.” Critiquing his own performances Mr. Rzewski can be severe. The Sonata (1991) as played for the Nonesuch collection, he said, is not good. “It’s very hard, and I hadn’t played it in a long time. So I fooled myself into thinking that it if it was slower, it would be more profound. But it just drags.” When others play his music, Mr. Rzewski is most appreciative. “Usually I find with some satisfaction that they play my stuff because they have something to say,” he said. “I’ve never heard a bad ‘De Profundis,’ ” he added, citing his elaboration on Oscar Wilde’s bleak yet comforting testament from prison. “It has this ridiculous theater stuff in it. A pianist has to go out on a limb. A conventional pianist won’t go near it.” Yet many of his pieces are as intricately constructed as a Swiss watch. Descriptions of the architecture make the head spin, yet the music is easy to listen to. Are all those wheels within wheels meant to register? “I’m not sure it matters that much,” Mr. Rzewski said. “You never know whether structural details have any counterpart in meaningful existence. They’re fantasies. Perhaps something happens when the structure is partly submerged. After all, that’s more like real life. You don’t see crystals and perfect forms. You see imperfect forms, unfinished forms. If you want music to be like life, it has to be imperfect. I think music should be as much like life as possible.” Full of grand designs, in other words, and full of surprises.

Henry Brant (1913-2008) Wiki web page Other Minds: Charles Amirkhanian Interviews Henry Brant An interview with Henry Brant by Alan Baker, American Public Media, June 2002 Henry Brant collection Daniel Wolf on Henry Brant I really liked what I heard.

Since I don't really want the CD, I'll just say my first response was Jan Hammer, then Eddie Jobson. .

When I am Old White People...

April 25, 2008 Jimmy Giuffre, Jazz Clarinetist and Composer, Is Dead By BEN RATLIFF Mr. Giuffre in 1959. Jimmy Giuffre, the adventurous clarinetist, composer and arranger whose 50-year journey through jazz led him from writing the Woody Herman anthem “Four Brothers” through minimalist, drummerless trios to striking experimental orchestral works, died on Thursday in Pittsfield, Mass. He was 86 and lived in West Stockbridge, Mass. The cause was pneumonia, brought about by complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife of 46 years, Juanita, who is his only survivor. Among the half-dozen instruments he played, from bass flute to soprano saxophone, it was the clarinet that gave him a signature sound; it was a dark, velvety tone, centering in the lower register, pure but rarely forceful. But among the iconoclastic heroes of the late ’50s in jazz, he was a serene oddity, changing his ideas as fast as he could record them. His first breakthrough album, “Tangents in Jazz” (1955), did away with chordal instruments like piano or guitar two years before Sonny Rollins famously did so; his trios from 1956 to 1961 were without a drummer, prefiguring the quieter, classical-timbred music of vangardist jazz circles in the 1980s. Little of this impressed more traditional audiences, however. What made Mr. Giuffre important to big-band aficionados was one composition, “Four Brothers,” a big hit for Woody Herman’s Second Herd in 1947. It established the characteristic Herman frontline sound of three tenor saxophones and a baritone saxophone, played fast, in harmony and without vibrato. Mr. Giuffre was born on April 26, 1921, in Dallas. He started on clarinet at the age of 9. He attended what was then North Texas State Teachers College, where he earned a degree in music in 1942; upon graduation he joined the Army for four years, playing with a quintet in mess halls at meal times, then moved to Los Angeles. After trying graduate work in music at U.C.L.A., he gave it up to study composition privately. In the late 1940s, he became a freelance arranger and, in some cases, saxophonist, for a number of big bands. In the early 1950s, West Coast cool jazz began, and Mr. Giuffre took part. Usually playing tenor saxophone, he was in small groups led by Shorty Rogers, Shelly Manne and Howard Rumsey. Meanwhile, he was growing stronger as a composer. Mr. Giuffre’s teacher from 1947 to 1952, Wesley LaViolette, stressed the virtues of contrapuntal writing, and counterpoint became the structural glue for Mr. Giuffre’s art, making some of his most outré experiments hold together. LaViolette also taught Mr. Giuffre that jazz could accommodate any amount of composition, not just for the frontline instruments, but for all of them, and in the mid-50s, he began to write specific parts for bass and drums, sometimes winnowing their roles to providing color and accent. The late-50s versions of the Jimmy Giuffre Three — with the guitarist Jim Hall and the bassist Ralph Pea, then Mr. Hall and the trombonist Bob Brookmeyer — gained him some commercial renown. (The Giuffre-Hall-Brookmeyer trio is immortalized in the opening sequence of the film “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” playing its best-known tune, “The Train and the River.”) If Mr. Giuffre was long on ideas, he was not a partisan in esthetic matters. Though he prized his even, smooth sound quality on clarinet, he did not disdain players who had a more fractured sound. He never saw an irreconcilable split between American and European influences He admitted that the instrumentation for his late-50s trios had a European inspiration, Claude Debussy’s “Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp”; at the same time, he used those trios to convey a sense of rustic, bluesy Americana. From the mid-50s on, Mr. Giuffre taught music, initially at the Lenox School of Jazz, the late-summer educational conference in Lenox, Mass., which existed from 1957 to 1960. (A remark made the rounds at the time: when told that Mr. Giuffre would be there to teach clarinet, among other things, the writer André Hodeir quipped, “Who will be teaching the upper register?”) It was at Lenox that Mr. Giuffre first encountered Ornette Coleman, a scholarship student at the school in 1959. Mr. Giuffre was knocked sideways by Mr. Coleman’s conviction and freedom and had a sort of ecstatic transformation. In short order, Mr. Giuffre changed his music again. The result was the moody, overlapping improvisations with no fixed key or tempo that characterize the playing of his trio with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow, heard on the ECM reissue “1961” and “Free Fall.” This trio lasted for less than two years, playing ever-more-uncompromising music; Mr. Swallow wrote that the group made its last stand at a Bleecker Street coffee house in New York, finally breaking up on a night when each musician earned 35 cents. But “1961,” a pairing of trio albums reissued by ECM in 1992, was met with a sense of awe among some younger musicians and critics, as if Mr. Giuffre had had a key to the long-distance future, beyond free jazz and John Coltrane and the pastoral jazz-fusion of Jan Garbarek; it received a five-star rating in Downbeat. A similar belated reception awaited “Free Fall,” which included some piercing, agitated solo improvisations. Though the album was a commercial failure upon its initial release in 1963, when Columbia brought it out again 25 years later, the “Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD” gave it the book’s highest rating, a crown. After “Free Fall,” Mr. Giuffre’s momentum was broken: he made no albums for 10 years. He taught at the New School in and New York University in New York City, and in 1978 he joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music, teaching there until the early 1990s. He also created another version of the Jimmy Giuffre Three, which turned to sounds from Africa and Asia; in the 1980s, inspired by the electronic instruments of the band Weather Report, he made a series of quartet recordings for the Italian label Soul Note. Also in the 1980s, he formed a productive association with the French saxophonist André Jaume, who recorded Mr. Giuffre several times on his own label, CELP; as a duo they made a live album, “Momentum” (Hatology). The 1961 edition of the Jimmy Giuffre trio, with Mr. Bley and Mr. Swallow, reunited sporadically for performances and recordings, including “The Life of a Trio” (Owl, 1990) and “Conversations with a Goose” (Soul Note, 1992). Jimmy Giuffre about 1983. He was also a music teacher.

there's a bit of a cushion there! .

April 25, 2008 Amy Winehouse appears at police station in London By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 1:01 p.m. ET LONDON (AP) -- Amy Winehouse ducked into a police station Friday for questioning, her representatives said. The retro-soul singer, whose career has been complicated by a chaotic personal life, was at the station to answer questions relating to an ''alleged incident'' in the north London neighborhood of Camden earlier this week, the Outside Organization said in a statement. Tabloid newspapers have reported the 24-year-old allegedly hit a man who got in her way while she was playing pool at a bar and then head-butted another who was trying to hail her a cab in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Winehouse has previously had problems with the law at home and abroad. She and her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, were arrested in the Norwegian city of Bergen in October and held overnight on charges of drug possession. She was arrested in London later that year on suspicion of attempting to interfere with a court case involving Fielder-Civil, but in February police said prosecutors were no longer pursuing the affair. Fielder-Civil faces charges of perverting the course of justice stemming from a case in which he is accused of assaulting a barman. Woah!

April 25, 2008 Bebe Barron, 82, Pioneer of Electronic Scores, Is Dead By DENNIS HEVESI Bebe Barron, who with her husband Louis composed the first electronic score for a feature film — the eerie gulps and burbles, echoes and weeeoooos that accentuated invisible monsters and robotic creatures in the 1956 science-fiction classic “Forbidden Planet” — died Sunday in Los Angeles. She was 82. Her son, Adam, said she died of natural causes. Louis Barron died in 1989. The score for “Forbidden Planet” — the tale of a starship crew that travels 17 light years from Earth to investigate why settlers on the planet Altair-4 have gone silent — “is truly a landmark in electro-acoustic music,” Barry Schrader, a professor of electro-acoustic music at the California Institute of the Arts, said Thursday. While the Barrons created electronically produced themes for the film’s characters and events, Professor Schrader said, their score crossed the traditional line between music and sound effects. “At some points it’s actually impossible to say whether or not what you’re hearing is music, sound effect or both,” he said. “In doing this, they foreshadowed by decades the now-common role of the sound designer in modern film and video.” While later electro-acoustic scoring became more melodic, the Barrons’ breakthrough fixed the technique’s otherworldly identity in public consciousness. Perhaps the most memorable character in “Forbidden Planet” is Robby the Robot, who brews bourbon and performs herculean feats; for him, the Barrons composed a mechanically bubbly theme. For the invisible monster Id, a percussive sinking sound with a descending pitch punctuates every hole his footsteps leave on the planet’s rugged terrain. Contemporary electro-acoustic effects are digitally synthesized. The Barrons used vacuum tubes and tape recorders. When it came to amplifying vibrations from a stylus on a record, vacuum tubes were a major advance from the days of the phonograph horn. Mr. Barron designed vacuum tube circuits, organizing them in patterns that controlled the flow of electricity to produce combinations of pitch, timbre, volume and other variables. The sounds were recorded on tape. Mrs. Barron would sort through hours and hours of tape. Together the Barrons would cut and splice; play segments at varying speeds to change the pitch; run segments in reverse to create new sounds; or induce delays to produce echoing feedback. Charlotte May Wind (her husband nicknamed her Bebe) was born in Minneapolis on June 16, 1925, the only child of Frank and Ruth Wind. She earned a music degree at the University of Minnesota in 1947, then moved to New York, where she worked as a researcher for Time-Life while studying music composition. Soon after, she met and married Mr. Barron, who was trained in electronics. Attracted by the avant-garde music scene in the early 1950s, the couple lived in Greenwich Village. Their fascination with electro-acoustic music began with a wedding gift: a tape recorder. Part of their apartment became a studio. There the composer John Cage recorded his “Project of Music for Magnetic Tape.” In 1952 the Barrons recorded the score for “Bells of Atlantis,” a short based on a poem by Anaïs Nin, who appears on screen. Then, in 1955, the Barrons crashed an art party in Manhattan for the wife of Dore Schary, the president of MGM. They told him about their unusual recordings. Ten days later they were driving to Hollywood, where Mr. Schary signed them for “Forbidden Planet.” The score drew critical praise, but a dispute with the American Federation of Musicians prevented the Barrons from receiving credit for it; their work was referred to as “electronic tonalities.” That slight was soothed in 1997, when Mrs. Barron was given the Seamus Award of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States. The Barrons divorced in 1970. In 1975 she married Leonard Neubauer. Besides her husband and her son, of Los Angeles, she is survived by a stepdaughter, Dylan Neubauer of Santa Cruz, Calif. The Barrons never scored another feature film. But “Forbidden Planet” is etched in the mind of Professor Schrader, who first saw it at the Majestic in Johnstown, Pa. “I was a 10-year-old kid who went to the movies every Saturday,” he said. “I sat through it three times and was still there for a fourth. Then I heard my father’s voice from the back of the theater, ‘Barry, where are you?’ ”

balls! .

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 Cutting Room Floor: Validation & Legacy Some musical works that we think of as masterpieces today were given a decidedly rocky reception on their first performance. (As we demonstrated in dramatic fashion at our January Inside the Classics concerts, Tchaikovsky's violin concerto was one such piece.) But Copland's Appalachian Spring was not only an instant hit on the concert stage, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1945. Which got me wondering what else had won the Pulitzer during the musically tumultuous 20th century. The music Pulitzer was awarded for the first time only two years before Copland won it, and William Schumann was the first recipient. (Schumann's music is not frequently performed these days, but he was extremely popular with orchestral audiences in the mid-20th century.) In 1944, it was Howard Hanson (another too frequently forgotten composer) taking the prize for his fourth symphony. (Hanson's best known symphony was his second, which the Minnesota Orchestra will coincidentally be performing next season.) Other familiar names capturing honors in the Pulitzer's first decade included Charles Ives, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Walter Piston. If the initial ten or fifteen winners have anything in common, it's that the majority of them fell outside the musical avant garde that was fast overtaking concert music at the time. Germany's Arnold Schoenberg, whom we'll be discussing at next week's Inside the Classics concerts, had thrown down the atonal gantlet with his system of 12-tone composition decades before, and by the 1950s, composers had well and truly splintered into multiple movements, some of which clung to traditional models of tonality even as others disdained anything that average audience members might actually enjoy listening to. The avant garde may have been fighting their way to the fore of the compositional profession as early as the 1940s (or even earlier, if you count such luminaries as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Berg as members,) but it took the Pulitzers a while to catch up. The first significant work of seriously atonal music that I see on the list is from 1960, when Elliott Carter won for his second string quartet. (In general, I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the atonal music that was written mid-century, but Carter's string quartets, like Bartok's, are truly masterworks, and did a lot to advance both composition and performance of chamber music.) Interestingly, the 1962 award went to Robert Ward, who rejected 12-tone and atonal music as "boring," for his operatic version of The Crucible, which is still regularly performed by companies the world over. And while the Pulitzer committee toyed with the avant garde a bit in the '60s (Leslie Barrett won in 1967, George Crumb in '68,) it stayed largely away from the most "out there" compositions of the era. But then, in 1970, the committee decided to jump headfirst into the new, and gave the award to Charles Wuorinen, for his synthesizer symphony, Time's Encomium. There are those in the music business who will tell you that this was the moment when concert music in America truly went off the rails and lost popular audiences forever. (I may not disagree - I generally despise Wuorinen's music, and most of what he stands for as a composer.) There are others who would insist that it was only when Wuorinen was legitimized in the eyes of the musical establishment that those of us in the hidebound, old-fashioned orchestra world finally began paying attention to the important changes underway in our profession. For most of the 1970s, the Pulitzer would go to an avant garde composer; not a surprise, given what was going on in America's larger culture during that decade of experimentation and rebellion. (One of the exceptions to the rule was Minnesota's own Dominick Argento, a staunch melodist who won in 1975 for From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, a song cycle premiered at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis.) But in the '80s, things throttled back a bit as composers began to emerge from decades of intense pressure to reject any idea that reeked of the past. By 1987, when John Harbison won the Pulitzer for The Flight Into Egypt, it seemed that tonality and atonality were on their way to a reconciliation. The last couple of decades have firmed up that idea, at least as far as the Pulitzers are concerned. A new generation of American composers, from Aaron Jay Kernis to John Corigliano, won the award for compositions that embraced traditional melody and harmony without sacrificing intellectual content. Some composers who had never gone away during the decades of experimentation (John Adams, for instance, who won in 2003 for a symphony inspired by the 9/11 attacks) experienced career resurgences. And in 2007, there was an even more positive sign: a jazz score, Ornette Coleman's Sound Grammar, won the Pulitzer for the very first time. (Jazz legend Wynton Marsalis had won the award in 1997, but it was for a classical composition.) A lot gets made these days about the collapse of traditional barriers between musical genres, and certainly, embracing jazz in 2007 doesn't exactly make the Pulitzer committee a risk-taking bunch. But just as orchestras (the biggest, costliest, and most unwieldy ensembles of the music world) are generally an important bellwether of which trends are truly here to stay in the classical world, the Pulitzers tell us a lot about which composers may (and I stress may) stand the test of time. The full list of winners is here if you want to peruse it yourself, and I'd love to hear about any winners that leapt out at you, or any you find incomprehensible...

Yummy. Anyways...IHM is getting a bit more interesting lately.

.

We have a bee-yotch and a bleak. Anyone else? .

This could be interesting, the review describes it as bleak. April 23, 2008 Music Review | ‘Il Prigioniero’ A 12-Tone Cry of Despair Assaults Hearts in Paris By ANTHONY TOMMASINI, NYT PARIS — Many directors of American opera companies would never even consider presenting Luigi Dallapiccola’s one-act “Prigioniero,” a bleak, 12-tone, boldly modernistic work from the mid-20th century about a despairing prisoner during the Spanish Inquisition. But unlike many of his timid counterparts, Gerard Mortier, the director of the Paris National Opera, has faith in audiences. How many operagoers have actually heard “Il Prigioniero” or know about it other than from its intimidating reputation? So Mr. Mortier has mounted a new Italian-language production, which opened on April 10, directed by Lluís Pasqual at the opulent, Old World Palais Garnier. I attended an enthusiastically received performance on Monday night, and in this stark staging, with a compelling cast and the conductor Lothar Zagrosek drawing a rhapsodic, shimmering performance from the fine orchestra, “Il Prigioniero” emerged as an intensely dramatic, musically arresting and grimly moving work. Dallapiccola had a personal connection to the subject matter. He was born to Italian parents in 1904 in a town now part of Croatia. His father was headmaster of an Italian-language school. But because of ethnic and regional conflicts the family was interned in Austria for a period during World War I. During World War II the composer, who was openly anti-Fascist, was forced for a time into hiding in Italy. “Il Prigioniero,” composed during the mid-1940s to Dallapiccola’s own libretto, is a protest work lasting less than an hour. The simple story concerns a Spaniard who has been imprisoned during the Inquisition. Visited by his tormented mother, he tells her that during the height of his suffering he was befriended at the prison by a jailer who called him brother, “fratello.” But after fleeting moments when the prisoner believes he will escape, he falls into the arms of the jailer, who is revealed to be the Grand Inquisitor himself. For the duped prisoner having hope has been the ultimate torture. After beginning his career composing in a richly chromatic, quasi-tonal language, Dallapiccola became the leading exponent of 12-tone technique and serialism in Italy by the 1950s. But a composer cannot grow up in Italy without succumbing to that opera-mad country’s feeling for lyricism. The 12-tone musical style of “Il Prigioniero” is certainly complex — tremulous with astringent harmonies and fraught with skittish thematic lines. Yet Dallapiccola used the 12-tone language in a sensually lyrical way. Vocal lines sing and plead. Chords are stacked with intervals that produce plaintively consoling sustained harmonies. And even during fitful outbursts the writing for the orchestra is never clogged with counterpoint or needlessly fussy. Everything is audible, textures are lucid. Truly the music should hardly be more challenging to audiences than Berg’s “Wozzeck,” which was just presented at the Paris National Opera in a well-attended and successful production. Mr. Pasqual’s staging of “Il Prigioniero,” with sets by Paco Azorín and costumes by Isidre Prunés, is dark, imposing and powerful. In the first scene we see the mother, the mezzo-soprano Rosalind Plowright, who brought anguished vocal colorings and fierce intensity to her portrayal, treading her way to the prison, hobbled with grief as she walked on a shifting section of the stage floor that keep her, metaphorically, stuck in place. Barely visible behind her is the prison, a gargantuan construction of slatted walls and staircases that slowly rotates. When we meet the prisoner, the stentorian bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin in an impassioned portrayal, he is tattered, bloodied and exhausted. A harrowing choral scene depicting the inmates takes place within the rotating prison, though the audience’s view is inhibited by the slatted walls. But enough is visible to make the moment gruesome. A bare-chested prisoner, suspended upside down from a rope tied to his ankles, is pushed back and forth by brutish guards with clubs as if he were a human piñata. The other prisoners look on in horror. The choral director, Alessandro Di Stefano, is visible. Yet his conducting of the prisoners becomes a visual metaphor for their servitude. In the final scene, when the jailer, the dynamic tenor Chris Merritt in a coolly menacing performance, morphs into the Grand Inquisitor, he removes his clerical robe and is revealed as a priest-doctor in a white lab coat, syringe in hand. The prisoner is strapped to a gurney and administered a lethal injection. In the final line of the opera, he sings, “La libertà?” More than worthless hope, death would seem to hold the only promise of freedom. One challenge in presenting “Il Prigioniero” is finding a work to pair it with, to make a full evening of theater. This production began intriguingly with Schoenberg’s “Ode to Napoleon,” a 15-minute piece composed in 1942. The work is a setting of Byron’s poem castigating the fall of a tyrant, in which the text is spoken by a reciter, accompanied by string quartet and piano. Schoenberg seized on the text to vent his antipathy to Nazism. In this performance the text was spoken, with occasional half-sung phrases, by the American baritone Dale Duesing, dressed in drag like a 1920s Berlin cabaret singer, with the band nearby. During the course of his recitation, which broke into bouts of hectoring, Mr. Duesing gradually changed costumes, slowly putting on the striped uniform of a concentration-camp prisoner. The performance was compelling, and the piece set the mood for the Dallapiccola opera. But I can think of another tragic, 20th-century, one-act Italian opera about a prisoner that might be performed in a double-bill with “Il Prigioniero.” How about Puccini’s “Suor Angelica,” which tells of a young Italian woman banished for life to a convent after having a child out of wedlock? She too is visited by a relative, her aunt. And death is similarly presented as the only sure path to freedom.

It was under $3 here in NJ only a few weeks ago, especially in my neighborhood. We have NY Harbor and refineries to keep prices down. I filled up my tank at $3.29 a gallon yesterday. It's still too much. .

The WSJ has a stellar reputation? .

Crap! Sorry to hear that... .

April 23rd, 2008 Another day, another record gas price Posted: 08:25 AM ET (CNN) — Continuing a recent trend, gas prices hit a new record Wednesday, with the national average for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline coming in at $3.533 — up more than two cents from the previous record of $3.511 set Tuesday, according to AAA. A month ago, the average price per gallon was $3.26. A year ago it was $2.85.

I can't blame ya. I barely travel outside of my neighborhood now unless I really have to.