7/4

April 10, 2008 Our Towns In Princeton, an Offline Haven for Music Shoppers Thrives By PETER APPLEBOME, NYT Regulars from near and far can browse the 150,000 or so titles at Princeton Record Exchange, open since 1980. PRINCETON, N.J. For better or worse, it’s all here. The used CD of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” already marked down to $1.99 and the five-LP set of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” for $5. That beloved dub (a more heavily produced version of reggae, if that helps) CD by Sly and Robbie and the ancient Big Mama Thornton album with the quietly eloquent title, “Jail.” There’s plenty of contemporary rap, metal, Goth and hip-hop; DVDs, laser discs, computer games and Blu-rays. But the main appeal of the Princeton Record Exchange is vinyl for all conceivable tastes and then some. The original 3-D album cover of the Stones’ “Their Satanic Majesties Request.” “Cha Cha with Tito Puente at Grossinger’s.” “Brigitte Bardot Sings.” “Hi-Fi Zither.” “The Supremes Sing Rodgers and Hart.” You can find the Crests, the Clovers, the Aquatones and all the rest somewhere in the 150,000 or so titles scattered around the atmospheric time capsule that Barry Weisfeld started in 1980. Which makes one wonder, given the supposed broadband pace of change and cultural extinction, what to make of the grungy bustle of Mr. Weisfeld’s place. Of course, we’re more likely to honor things when they’re long past their prime — witness Bob Dylan’s honorary Pulitzer Prize this week, and Martin Scorsese’s homage to the Stones, “Shine a Light.” Still, the lesson of Mr. Weisfeld’s store seems to be that if you’re going to be a dinosaur, be a serious dinosaur. “A lot of people who come here are obsessed,” said Mr. Weisfeld, a resolutely low-tech guy wearing an incongruous orange Yahoo! cap. “I’ll give you an example. One year, we got a very bizarre collection, world music, international music, whatever you call it, very unusual stuff. We let our customers know, and we sold 500 of the 1,000 in three days. They’re not people looking for Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ or something by Billy Joel.” The Princeton Record Exchange isn’t the last of the hard-core independents, but it’s definitely part of a dwindling breed. Mr. Weisfeld, 54, got his start, after graduating from the University of Hartford in 1975, on the road, selling LPs at 27 campuses, from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire south to American University in Washington. He slept in his Chevy van and showered at the school gyms before they had morphed into high-security, high-end health emporiums. He knew he could do that for only so long. He almost opened a shop in Hicksville, on Long Island, then picked Princeton, figuring it was halfway between New York and Philadelphia, had a downtown that people walked around and plenty of students, his prime clientele. Princeton students today are more likely to download music than riffle through stacks of it at a store, and the main drag of Nassau Street these days is filled mostly with pricey boutiques and cafes and upscale chains like Panera Bread and Ralph Lauren, not funky alternative music or bookstores. But over the years, the Princeton Record Exchange gained a following of local customers and obsessives from near and far — Gene, who plays for a symphony orchestra in Ohio and drives over every few months; Ralph, who owns about 20,000 classical vocal records and takes the train from New Haven once a month. The customers the other night were a varied lot: Chris Roff, a very serious 12-year-old who likes everything but country; Molly Levine and Jessica Hundley, 20-somethings who were friends from high school and looking for modern rock; Chris Gibson, a 43-year-old pharmaceutical salesman from Pittsburgh whose shopping cart was populated by Bill Evans, Warren Zevon and Steely Dan. Amazingly, the current, appealingly ratty, location, situated just off Nassau on South Tulane Street and decorated in early-dorm room with dorky posters, wood-plank ceiling, gray linoleum and an emaciated gray carpet, is considered a huge improvement from earlier days. That’s also said to be true for the behavior of Mr. Weisfeld’s 20 employees, who pride themselves, like the characters in Nick Hornby’s novel “High Fidelity,” on having way too much knowledge of useless musical trivia. “They don’t roll their eyes anymore,” said Matthew Hersh, 31, a Princeton native and longtime shopper. “They used to be holier than thou. They might still be, but they don’t show it as much.” In fact, “High Fidelity,” which was made into a movie starring John Cusack, is sort of PREX’s evil twin and bête noire, the obvious reference point for a place full of obscure music, peopled by a virtually all-male staff of music wonks who can debate the fine points of the Lehigh Valley punk scene. But Jon Lambert, the general manager, says the comparison goes only so far. “That store was always empty,” he noted. “How did it stay in business? You can’t really keep a place like this going if people spend all their time sitting around making lists of their 10 favorite ’60s records about doughnuts and dogs.” Mr. Lambert said he wondered for years when the bottom would fall out and the store would finally be washed away by the wonders of the digital age. But last year, Mr. Weisfeld signed a new 10-year lease. Mr. Lambert figures that in the end, people may like downloads, but they also like to browse, appreciate something tangible, like the weird cult-like atmospherics of a store full of like-minded obsessives. Lots of things change, but not everything does. “It’s a cold, sterile world on the Internet, and people get an experience here you can’t get online,” he said. “If there are five stores left standing, I think we can be one of them.”

April 10, 2008 Music Review A Guitarist-Led Quintet, Packing a Forceful Arsenal By NATE CHINEN, NYT The guitarist Adam Rogers specializes in a turbocharged, sleekly designed, ultimately armored brand of postbop. His compositions, with their harmonic and rhythmic feints, can suggest complex spring-loaded devices. His playing, skillful to the point of superfluity, can impart a similarly mechanical feel. There are bolts of daring and imagination in his enterprise, but not a shred of vulnerability and only traces of warmth. None of this closes off the possibility of good music, as Mr. Rogers periodically proved on Tuesday night, in his debut as a leader at the Village Vanguard. The week’s first set was well paced and sharply executed, with more than enough sparks flying among the five musicians onstage. On its merits it was an impressive performance. Mr. Rogers played two songs apiece from his first album, “Art of the Invisible,” and his second, “Allegory.” As on both of those records, which were issued by the Dutch label Criss Cross, he featured the articulate pianist Edward Simon and the attentive bassist Scott Colley. Rounding out the group were two more strong and distinctive voices, the tenor saxophonist Mark Turner and the drummer Jeff (Tain) Watts, who did an admirable job of asserting themselves inside the parameters of the music. The set opener, a tricked-out version of Jerome Kern’s “Long Ago and Far Away,” established two separate modes of inquiry for Mr. Rogers and Mr. Turner. The guitar solo, which came first, was neatly episodic. Beginning with cool-headed long tones it moved on to a choice offering of runs, then a syncopated holding pattern, and finally an open-faucet profusion. The tenor solo felt less concrete and more exploratory, especially as Mr. Turner unfurled his strange arpeggios to an improvised sequence of chords. Mr. Rogers presented one new piece, a classically inflected prelude called “Sight,” and followed it with a dazzling solo cadenza. This in turn drifted into a modal polyrhythmic waltz, in the vein of the John Coltrane Quartet. Because that song, “Phyrigia,” provoked some searching actions from Mr. Rogers, and because no one alive plays this sort of groove more compellingly than Mr. Watts, it registered as uncharted and fiercely soulful. But what came next was more characteristic: “Confluence,” a slippery exercise with the rhythm section pulling toward one pulse and the melody insisting on another. After this brainy opening the full band downshifted into a fast, bright swing, and the sense of release was palpable. So was the intensity of Mr. Rogers during his solo, which involved a rat-a-tat cadence and a spirit of propulsive burn, along with a burnished self-assurance.

It's not like it was in NYC. For some of us, it's out of the way.

What he said. Hey...I said that!

I've heard of him. Some others...

So, how's the subway doin'? The NYC subway doesn't have conductors that take your fare. All they do is run the train. Besides, a lot of people in NYC don't bother with the subway. They walk, take cabs or buses.

Someone did that and I was there the next time he took the train and ran into the same conductor. The cops hauled him off at the next stop. Federal law - don't fuck with the help, you can't win.

April 9, 2008 Frank Zappa's Widow Sues German Fan Club By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 1:45 p.m. ET DUESSELDORF, Germany (AP) -- Frank Zappa's widow is trying to stop a German fan club from using the Grammy-winning rocker's name for its annual ''Zappanale'' festival. Gail Zappa says the German-based Arf Society's use of Zappa's name and an accompanying logo infringe on trademarks held by the Zappa Family Trust. The logo features a prominent mustache similar to that sported by the legendary musician. The Arf Society says the trust has been aware of its use of the name since the festival was launched in 1998. A state court in Duesseldorf began hearing the case Wednesday.

Bang on a Can. I think he arranged one of the transcriptions. I think it's nice that one of the post-modern NYC minimalists won, but now I expect Phil Kline to win it next year.

I don't know about the LIRR, but on NJ Transit, they used to have signs to remind people how to act on the train and it's up to the people operating the train - the conductor and trainmen have to enforce it. Federal laws folks - it's their job!

Experimental Musicians in a Post-Tonic Universe Downtown innovators like White Out fight for survival in a brave, disquieting new world by Brad Cohan April 8th, 2008 12:00 AM Tom Surgal, drummer for the improvising avant-gardists White Out—a duo completed by his significant other, multi-instrumentalist Lin Culbertson—insists that although myriad clubs they've played are now history (including the Cooler, CBGB, and, most recently, Tonic), it's not their fault. "I wouldn't label Lin and me the kiss of death of the New York club scene," Surgal asserts. "There are a slew of venues that cease to exist which I can assure you we never played in." The two met in 1986, introduced by actor (and original Sonic Youth drummer) Richard Edson outside CBGB during a Big Black show. Fittingly, White Out now stand as Big Black's antithesis, a free-jazz deconstruction devoid of niche, with a seismic ambience and atonal serenity that's made the group a vital, if overlooked, part of the downtown scene. Surgal insists that he's guilty of "never playing a beat in my entire life," but WO's records—Red Shift (1995), Drunken Little Mass (2001), and China Is Near (2005)—damper his claim. His throngs of beats (or lack thereof) freely shift from tribal textures to cymbal-tapped propulsions, intersecting with the angelic streaks that Culbertson provides via analog synthesizer, flute, autoharp, and interstellar voice manipulations. Like Thurston Moore, Surgal traversed the downtown infrastructure for years: He booked gigs for Pussy Galore in the '80s and set up shows during the Gulf War under the label "Support Jazz, Not War." He also watched the fledgling art-music scene evolve from a minuscule enclave shunned by clubs to a fledgling powerhouse embraced by the avant homestead that was the old Knitting Factory on Houston. Not that Surgal was a fan: "I never liked it there, or any incarnation. Years ago, when they were coming into their own, they were practicing a kind of 'cultural apartheid.' I started a series doing off-hours at rock clubs, putting on local jazz guys because they were being aced out—people like Charles Gayle and Rashied Ali." Surgal found CB's no better. "I used to play with Rudolph Grey and the Blue Humans, and Thurston would often sit in. The sound guy was so clueless he wouldn't recognize him—and he's goddamn recognizable at like seven feet tall. They'd turn the PA off halfway through our set. That was New York at that point, so we've come a long way, baby." He's alluding to the ascension of downtown experimentalism, fomented by meatpacking-district hub the Cooler and its progeny, Tonic. "That's an undocumented aspect to New York nightlife, because the Cooler had an eclectic program," Surgal says. "You can go see Gayle, us, Tortoise, electronica—it all worked together. Nothing seemed incongruous. Nothing has taken its place. Tonic was its cultural heir." Ah, Tonic. Closed a year ago this month, and lamented thousands of times since. Forced out by those fucking luxury condos sprouting like the plague from Bowery to Norfolk Street and beyond, displacing any semblance of artistic confluence in its path. White Out, like many experimentalists, called it home, called its owners and employees family. "It was a real community," Surgal says. "We were like the house band and felt like we were one with the club." His better half echoes the sentiment: "Tonic was a hangout," Culbertson recalls. "You could meet friends there for an evening and hang at the bar. The sad thing is, we've lost contact with a lot of people as a result of it closing." Helen Rush, of avant-folksters Metal Mountains, worked the door for seven of Tonic's nine years, and testifies to that familial environment. "There is no venue left with the intimacy it had and the range of artists that played there—new, upcoming outsiders to old-school avant," she says. "Collaborations were born out of folks meeting there." Co-worker and ubiquitous drummer Anton Fier lends a pessimistic outlook, speculating as to who's picking up its clientele. "I thought Knitting Factory would have taken over," he says. "Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog just played there, but it took a year for that natural transition to happen. Manhattan is a more difficult place to play than ever." "I still get e-mails from local and touring musicians who aren't sure where to play," former Tonic co-owner Melissa Caruso Scott writes via e-mail. "The Stone [in the East Village], Barbès [Park Slope], and Jalopy [brooklyn's Columbia Street] are great, but I'm not sure where 'Tonic musicians' play." She echoes the powerful hankering for a clique, a home base. "Most people I speak to miss having a space where creative musicians came almost any night and saw someone they knew in the audience, and discovered something new and exciting onstage. Although there are new venues, I don't think any of them have fulfilled this need." Williamsburg's Zebulon, Park Slope's Tea Lounge, and a few other experimental W-burg spots—Glasslands and Death by Audio—have also helped fill the void. The migration, though, has slanted primarily toward the Stone, John Zorn's anomalous performance space. "It's a great facility, but it's not a 'club,' " Surgal says. "They don't encourage people to hang out, and it caters to a rarefied stratum of music. It's curated, so the chances of playing there with any frequency are marginal. Even Zorn can't play there—and he owns the place—depending on who's curating that month. It exists out of the kindness of his heart, and it's hemorrhaging money." Indeed, last Saturday night, the Stone charged an econo five dollars to see White Out transcendently run the gamut from sonic overload to pristine calm. Augmented by Samara Lubelski's delicate violin touch-and-pluck as well as Surgal's dry banter ("We encourage bodily functions," he announced, motioning toward the makeshift bathroom looming near his drum kit), the set was an exercise in rapport, personal and musical, Culberton's sinuous nuances brushing up against the clanks, dings, shakes, and scrapes emanating from her partner's cache of percussive contraptions. Not content with the occasional Stone gig, Surgal's back to booking shows, too. His monthly events at Rehab (formerly Club Midway) on the LES, subtitled "Red Desert Nights," have an explicit Tonic connection—a former employee there works the door. "I wouldn't be curating these shows if Tonic was still in existence, but I don't wax nostalgic—I'm not into that," he admits, having waxed only slightly nostalgic. "At the end of the day, you pave on and find a new situation. It's why I'm doing this—out of necessity." With Culbertson chipping in—she designs the posters—White Out has found a new space to improv. Last month's noise-dominated night (derailed, alas, after Midwestern rascals Hair Police totaled their van) supports Surgal's vision of an aesthetic mélange. "I don't want to slap myself on the back, but I've put on variety," he says. "I've had P.G. Six, Sunburned [Hand of the Man], Zorn, and Han Bennink. It's social, and I'm friends with these people. But as time ensues, I'll start booking my enemies." Next for White Out is May's No Fun Fest, the annual noise free-for-all, held this time at the Knitting Factory. The duo is also set to return to Moore's powerhouse Ecstatic Peace! label: "Thurston's gone corporate, and he can afford our big asking price," Surgal jokes. Their forthcoming effort will be a double album—joined by frequent co-conspirators Jim O'Rourke and Moore himself—recorded live at (where else?) Tonic. "That's our final homage," Surgal says, "and a fitting punctuation mark to that whole era." http://www.villagevoice.com/generic/show_p...mlkPTQwNDEyMA==

Weingarten's inane (and IIRC journalistically unethical) piece of dung won the Pultizer? Guess that's all you need to know about any such award. If the jurors are a bunch of monkeys... I saw this comment over at Sequenza21: Got to give Weingarten credit for pulling a PT Barnum and getting a world class musician to trot himself out as a side show geek for one of the all time half-witted experiments. Certainly caused a minor stir for a week or two…

I hope you're feeling better Chewy! .

That's part of the asshole element of this story.

Maybe you'd have to experience suburbs to NYC commuting to understand what it's like.

I couldn't find the previous discussion, I tried and gave up.

April 9, 2008 Man Who Yelled at Phone User Acquitted By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 7:35 a.m. ET NEW YORK (AP) -- A retired police officer who screamed obscenities at a train passenger who was talking on a cell phone and who hit the hand of another passenger who intervened was acquitted Tuesday of misdemeanor charges stemming from the confrontation. John Clifford, who is also a lawyer, was found not guilty after a two-day nonjury trial at which he acted as his own attorney. He had been charged with misdemeanor counts of attempted assault, disorderly conduct, harassment and attempted petit larceny and had faced up to a year in jail if convicted. Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Larry Stephen issued his verdict immediately after closing arguments: ''I see no crimes having been committed beyond a reasonable doubt. The case is dismissed and sealed.'' The 6-foot-4 Clifford acknowledged during trial that he was aggressive and overbearing when he approached Long Island Rail Road commuters he considered rude for talking too loudly on cell phones and for other behavior. During trial, Clifford, 60, admitted cursing at Nicholas Bender, ''a 19-year-old nitwit waking up one girlfriend after another,'' and slapping the hand of Lydia Klein after she slapped his when he reached for a business card she was handing Bender on the train from Long Beach to Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station on March 28, 2007. Clifford, who retired as a police sergeant after 10 years on the job, said Tuesday he had been arrested eight times after being accused of throwing coffee, spewing expletives and getting in the faces of people whom he considered loud and rude on the commuter line. This was the only case that wasn't dismissed. ''It took a lawyer and an old ex-police sergeant to stand up to it (public rudeness),'' Clifford, of Long Beach, said as he left court. He said that unless lawmakers and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority do something, the lack of public civility will persist. Asked what he regretted about his behavior, Clifford replied, ''Nothing.'' He added, ''I don't want anybody to think they can't have a private conversation (around me), but keep it private.'' The LIRR issued a statement saying it was ''disappointed'' but accepted the judgment of the court. ''Some of our customers feel as if they have been abused by Mr. Clifford's behavior,'' the statement said. ''We will not tolerate aggressive behavior by Mr. Clifford if he seeks to impose his own standards of conduct on others. We will not hesitate in the future to call on police if necessary to protect the safety of our customer and employees.'' Meanwhile, Clifford, a lawyer since 1984, has filed five lawsuits against passengers and against the MTA, which runs the region's mass transit system, for issues arising from his reactions to rudeness. Clifford, formerly a security staffer for HBO, was fired after being arrested several times in connection with his LIRR confrontations. He said he plans now to ''hang out my shingle again'' and practice law.

April 9, 2008 A Noisy Train, a Fed-Up Rider and a Day in Court By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS, NYT All John Clifford wanted was a peaceful ride to work on the 7:39 to Pennsylvania Station. He would get to the Long Island Rail Road station at Long Beach early every weekday morning, board the train, stake out a five-seat section to rest his bad back, and prepare to read his newspaper and eat his breakfast. But all around him, there would be chaos. One woman putting on full makeup while listening to her iPod and talking to friends. Another inviting guests to a barbecue and talking about personal problems. Men chatting on cellphones. They were treating the ride as a social situation, he testified in court on Tuesday, forming cliques and getting to know each other by name. He asked the passengers to keep it down, but the chatter continued. In March 2007, Mr. Clifford had had enough. He shouted an obscenity at a passenger talking on his cellphone and slapped the hand of another, and was arrested. On Tuesday, he found himself in Manhattan Criminal Court, telling his tale. “I stand up for my right to be let alone,” Mr. Clifford, a retired New York City police sergeant, declared from the witness stand at his nonjury trial on charges including harassment and assault. To his accusers, Mr. Clifford, 60, was a bully who hogged five seats and had told one passenger, Donna DeCurtis, who had talked loudly, that he knew her name and where she lived, and that “I can make your life hell.” He had been arrested before, the prosecutor said, though, until now, the charges had always been dropped. After one of those arrests, Ms. DeCurtis testified on Tuesday, “everybody just stood up and applauded.” But Mr. Clifford testified that, deep down, many of his fellow passengers were grateful, but were too scared to speak up. “When I sit on the train it’s quiet,” he said. “I get up, people come over and shake my hand. They say: ‘Thank you. I wanted to rip her throat out.’ ” Outside court, he compared himself to Rosa Parks, fighting for his right to sit where he wanted in peace. “Look what happened to her,” he said, pointing out that Parks was punished for her stand against discrimination. In court, however, he sometimes sounded like the Miss Manners of the railroad, blaming the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the railroad’s parent agency, for not enforcing its own etiquette rules, which restrict noise to 70 decibels under some circumstances. He had bought a noise meter and found that the train alone measured 70 decibels. “When you’re talking across the car it goes to 80 decibels,” he testified. Although he seemed like a perfect client for a civil rights lawyer, he chose to represent himself. He has a law degree. Dressed in a blue Oxford shirt, wearing glasses, and with close-cropped gray hair, he looked lawyerly as he was sworn in to testify. Mr. Clifford said that he routinely took up a section of five facing seats because he was 6-foot-4 and suffered from backaches. It was, he said, the only place where he could cross his legs to ease the pain. He offered to show his scar from a back operation to Judge Larry Stephen, who declined. “Do I admit to being domineering?” he testified. “Yeah.” He described his usual routine on the 7:39 or the 8:03 from Long Beach to his job as a private investigator in Manhattan: “I eat. I mind my own business. I read my paper. I get to work.” Interfering with that routine, he said, was “this clique that think it’s their absolute right to talk as long and as loud as they like.” Only one clique? the prosecutor asked. “There are different cliques throughout the train,” he replied. “Throughout every train.” He said that in October 2006, Ms. DeCurtis deliberately provoked him by talking to one of her friends across the aisle. “They’re talking from one side of the train to the other,” he testified. “That aggravates me. I can’t concentrate. I can’t catch up on current events, and it gives me a headache, so I tell them off.” Judge Stephen gently interjected, “You can move to another car, can’t you?” “The problem is, Your Honor, there are no seats,” Mr. Clifford replied. He admitted that he had threatened to make Ms. DeCurtis’s life hell, but said he knew personal details about her only because she had talked about them so loudly to her friends. “But you have to realize some of your conduct is inappropriate?” the judge asked. “Your Honor, it only becomes inappropriate when people themselves won’t behave,” he said. Mr. Clifford faced charges of misdemeanor assault, attempted petit larceny, harassment and disorderly conduct. He admitted that he had cursed at a passenger, Nicholas Bender, who was talking on his cellphone, then slapped the hand of another passenger, Lydia Klein, as she tried to give her business card to Mr. Bender — but only after she slapped his hand first. The prosecutor said Mr. Clifford was trying to steal the information on the card, hence the larceny charge. “He is not a white knight, he’s Darth Vader,” said Mary Weisgerber, the prosecutor, in her closing argument. But after it was all done, Judge Stephen acquitted Mr. Clifford of all charges. The judge said he had discounted most of the testimony against Mr. Clifford because all but one of the witnesses had “an ax to grind.” “While the court does not condone the defendant’s manner of getting people to remain quiet or silent on the Long Island Rail Road,” Judge Stephen said, “I see no crimes having been committed beyond a reasonable doubt.” Railroad officials said they were disappointed. “Some of our customers feel as if they have been abused by Mr. Clifford’s behavior,” said Joe Calderone, a spokesman for the railroad. “We will not tolerate aggressive behavior by Mr. Clifford if he seeks to impose his own standards of conduct on others. We will not hesitate in the future to call on police if necessary to protect the safety of our customers and employees.” As Mr. Clifford left the courtroom and stepped outside to light a celebratory cigar, he pronounced the judge “excellent” and even complimented the prosecutor for finding one neutral witness. On Tuesday evening, he took the A train to the Grant Avenue-Pitkin Avenue station in Brooklyn, where he picked up his car for the drive home to Long Beach — not because he was afraid to take the commuter railroad, but because the subway was more convenient, he said. He celebrated at Shines bar. “Believe me,” Mr. Clifford said, “I am no hero. Rosa Parks is a hero. I’m just a knucklehead.”

April 8, 2008 A Disease That Allowed Torrents of Creativity By SANDRA BLAKESLEE Image of a migraine by Anne Adams, who was drawn to structure and repetition. She had a rare disease that changes connections between parts of the brain. Published: April 8, 2008 If Rod Serling were alive and writing episodes for “The Twilight Zone,” odds are he would have leaped on the true story of Anne Adams, a Canadian scientist turned artist who died of a rare brain disease last year. Trained in mathematics, chemistry and biology, Dr. Adams left her career as a teacher and bench scientist in 1986 to take care of a son who had been seriously injured in a car accident and was not expected to live. But the young man made a miraculous recovery. After seven weeks, he threw away his crutches and went back to school. According her husband, Robert, Dr. Adams then decided to abandon science and take up art. She had dabbled with drawing when young, he said in a recent telephone interview, but now she had an intense all-or-nothing drive to paint. “Anne spent every day from 9 to 5 in her art studio,” said Robert Adams, a retired mathematician. Early on, she painted architectural portraits of houses in the West Vancouver, British Columbia, neighborhood where they lived. In 1994, Dr. Adams became fascinated with the music of the composer Maurice Ravel, her husband recalled. At age 53, she painted “Unravelling Bolero” a work that translated the famous musical score into visual form. Unbeknown to her, Ravel also suffered from a brain disease whose symptoms were identical to those observed in Dr. Adams, said Dr. Bruce Miller, a neurologist and the director of the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco. Ravel composed “Bolero” in 1928, when he was 53 and began showing signs of his illness with spelling errors in musical scores and letters. “Bolero” alternates between two main melodic themes, repeating the pair eight times over 340 bars with increasing volume and layers of instruments. At the same time, the score holds methodically to two simple, alternating staccato bass lines. “ ‘Bolero’ is an exercise in compulsivity, structure and perseveration,” Dr. Miller said. It builds without a key change until the 326th bar. Then it accelerates into a collapsing finale. Dr. Adams, who was also drawn to themes of repetition, painted one upright rectangular figure for each bar of “Bolero.” The figures are arranged in an orderly manner like the music, countered by a zigzag winding scheme, Dr. Miller said. The transformation of sound to visual form is clear and structured. Height corresponds to volume, shape to note quality and color to pitch. The colors remain unified until the surprise key change in bar 326 that is marked with a run of orange and pink figures that herald the conclusion. Ravel and Dr. Adams were in the early stages of a rare disease called FTD, or frontotemporal dementia, when they were working, Ravel on “Bolero” and Dr. Adams on her painting of “Bolero,” Dr. Miller said. The disease apparently altered circuits in their brains, changing the connections between the front and back parts and resulting in a torrent of creativity. “We used to think dementias hit the brain diffusely,” Dr. Miller said. “Nothing was anatomically specific. That is wrong. We now realize that when specific, dominant circuits are injured or disintegrate, they may release or disinhibit activity in other areas. In other words, if one part of the brain is compromised, another part can remodel and become stronger.” Thus some patients with FTD develop artistic abilities when frontal brain areas decline and posterior regions take over, Dr. Miller said. An article by Dr. Miller and colleagues describing how FTD can release new artistic talents was published online in December 2007 by the journal Brain. FTD refers to a group of diseases often misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease, in that patients become increasingly demented, Dr. Miller said. But the course and behavioral manifestations of FTD are different. In the most common variant, patients undergo gradual personality changes. They grow apathetic, become slovenly and typically gain 20 pounds. They behave like 3-year-olds in public, asking embarrassing questions in a loud voice. All along, they deny anything is wrong. Two other variants of FTD involve loss of language. In one, patients have trouble finding words, Dr. Miller said. When someone says to the patients, “Pass the broccoli,” they might reply, “What is broccoli?” In another, PPA or primary progressive aphasia, the spoken-language network disintegrates. Patients lose the ability to speak. All three variants share the same underlying pathology. The disease, which has no cure, can progress quickly or, as in the case of Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, who announced his retirement last fall because of an FTD diagnosis, over many years. Dr. Adams and Ravel had the PPA variant, Dr. Miller said. From 1997 until her death 10 years later, Dr. Adams underwent periodic brain scans that gave her physicians remarkable insights to the changes in her brain. “In 2000, she suddenly had a little trouble finding words,” her husband said. “Although she was gifted in mathematics, she could no longer add single digit numbers. She was aware of what was happening to her. She would stamp her foot in frustration.” By then, the circuits in Dr. Adams’s brain had reorganized. Her left frontal language areas showed atrophy. Meanwhile, areas in the back of her brain on the right side, devoted to visual and spatial processing, appeared to have thickened. When artists suffer damage to the right posterior brain, they lose the ability to be creative, Dr. Miller said. Dr. Adams’s story is the opposite. Her case and others suggest that artists in general exhibit more right posterior brain dominance. In a healthy brain, these areas help integrate multisensory perception. Colors, sounds, touch and space are intertwined in novel ways. But these posterior regions are usually inhibited by the dominant frontal cortex, he said. When they are released, creativity emerges. Dr. Miller has witnessed FTD patients become gifted in landscape design, piano playing, painting and other creative arts as their disease progressed. Dr. Adams continued to paint until 2004, when she could no longer hold a brush. Her art, including “An ABC Book of Invertebrates,” a rendering of the mathematical ratio pi, an image of a migraine aura and other works, is at two Web sites: members.shaw.ca/adms and memory.ucsf.edu/Art/gallery.htm.

April 9, 2008 Changes, and a Constant, for New York Jazz Festival By BEN RATLIFF Last year when George Wein sold Festival Productions Inc., jazz fans worried about what might happen to the programming of his JVC Jazz Festival New York, the city’s biggest and longest-running such event. But this year’s edition, which takes place from June 15 to 28 and whose details were announced Tuesday, turns out to be undiminished and newly energized by welcome changes of locations and some imaginative bookings. Mr. Wein has been running a jazz festival in New York since 1972, and before that, in 1954, he started the Newport Jazz Festival. His New York festival has rarely been vanguardist. It has often relied on formula or genre crossovers that have diluted its aesthetic integrity. Yet now it appears to be edging closer to a truer reflection of serious jazz, with one of the more promising lineups in recent years. Mr. Wein’s sale of Festival Productions was more like a merger. He and most of his employees went to the new company, the Festival Network LLC. JVC-New York and about 15 other music festivals around the world are now under the aegis of the new company, and Mr. Wein is no longer the chief executive. (His new title is chairman of the company’s Live Events Division.) At the time of the sale he said he intended to keep acting in a managerial role, but there was a natural assumption that Mr. Wein, now 82, might step back from the day-to-day business. Instead, starting last fall, he got more involved, especially once his main festival booker, Danny Melnick, left to start his own company, Absolutely Live Entertainment. “I just jumped in and did it,” Mr. Wein said. “In the past I always made the final decisions, but this was as I hadn’t done it in 25 years or more.” Together with Jason Olaine, a 40-year-old producer hired in November by Festival Network, he booked this year’s event. Mr. Olaine — whose résumé includes six years of booking Yoshi’s, the Bay Area jazz club, and working as a record producer at the jazz label Verve — explained that he was given a mandate by the company, for this festival and others, to find combinations of A-list artists that fit well together for exclusive festival events. “It isn’t really about making the concerts skew younger,” he said. “It’s just an attempt to reach new audiences.” Mr. Olaine added that it was initially daunting to work with Mr. Wein. “He’s very direct, and he has so much knowledge of tickets and audiences and scaling,” he said. “He’d say that clubs are different from festivals, that the West Coast is different from the East Coast. But then he said, ‘O.K., kid, whaddya got?’ ” Mr. Wein said simply, “We speak the same language.” As in the past the JVC festival will use Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium for a string of larger shows. They include the bossa nova pioneer João Gilberto on June 22, Herbie Hancock’s new band on June 23, the pop-jazz trumpeter Chris Botti on June 24, Al Green and Dianne Reeves on June 27 and the Mos Def Big Band with Gil Scott-Heron on June 28. Four concerts will be held in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall: the pianists Brad Mehldau (June 22) and Dick Hyman (June 23), the singer Tierney Sutton (June 24) and the French accordion virtuoso Richard Galliano, with his Tangaria Quartet (June 28). But another set of concerts has been scheduled at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, whose auditorium has never been used by the festival. On June 17 it will be the site of a tribute to Alice Coltrane, including her son Ravi Coltrane, Geri Allen, Charlie Haden and Jack DeJohnette. Two pianists of radically different stripes play solo performances in a June 20 double-bill: George Cables and Cecil Taylor. On June 24 the Bad Plus, a trio, will for one night add the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel as a fourth member. Another double-bill, on June 25, presents two new young bandleaders, Anat Cohen and Esperanza Spalding, and Charles Lloyd’s new quartet, with the pianist Jason Moran, plays on June 28. And finally, instead of hanging the festival’s banner in different self-programmed jazz clubs through the city, Mr. Wein and Mr. Olaine have fully programmed the music in one club, Le Poisson Rouge, a new space occupying the site of the old Village Gate, which closed in 1993. (The club, which holds 200 seated and 750 standing, will start its own regular programming in the fall, Mr. Olaine said.) The shows include Charlie Haden’s Quartet West on June 18, Bill Frisell’s trio on June 19, the Swedish group E.S.T. with the New York band Aetherial Bace on June 21 and the jazz-funk band Soulive collaborating with the saxophonist Joshua Redman on June 26 and 27. In recognition of the old club’s groundbreaking Monday night Salsa Meets Jazz series, the Latin-jazz conguero and the bandleader Poncho Sanchez will perform there on Monday, June 23. Other concerts will be held at the Rubin Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Prospect Park Bandshell. Tickets go on sale Wednesday at 10 a.m. through the concerts’ respective box offices or the festival’s Web site, festivalnetwork.com.

day late... April 7, 1971 OBITUARY Igor Stravinsky, the Composer, Dead at 88 By DONAL HENAHAN Igor Stravinsky, the composer whose "Le Sacre du Printemps" exploded in the face of the music world in 1913 and blew it into the 20th century, died of heart failure yesterday. The Russian-born musician, 88 years old, had been in frail health for years but had been released from Lenox Hill Hospital in good condition only a week before his death, which came at 5:20 A.M. in his newly purchased apartment at 920 Fifth Avenue. Stravinsky's power as a detonating force and his position as this century's most significant composer were summed up by Pierre Boulez, who becomes musical director of the New York Philharmonic next season: "The death of Stravinsky means the final disappearance of a musical generation which gave music its basic shock at the beginning of this century and which brought about the real departure from Romanticism. "Something radically new, even foreign to Western tradition, had to be found for music to survive, and to enter our contemporary era. The glory of Stravinsky was to have belonged to this extremely gifted generation and to be one of the most creative of them all." George Balanchine, head of the New York City Ballet and a fellow Russian and longtime friend, said: "I feel he is still with us. He has left us the treasures of his genius, which will live with us forever. We must have done 20 ballets together, and I hope to do more." Planning began immediately for memorial programs. The New York Philharmonic, although unable to change its rehearsal schedules to include Stravinsky music this week, announced that the concerts would be dedicated to his memory. The New York City Opera dedicated last night's performance of "Don Rodrigo" to the composer. With Stravinsky at his bedside were his wife, Vera; his musical assistant and close friend, Robert Craft; Lillian Libman, his personal manager, and his nurse, Rita Christiansen. Mr. Craft, according to Miss Libman, was too shaken by the death to speak to callers, but wished it known that he had "lost the dearest friend he ever had." Mr. Craft, who had been Arnold Schoenberg's secretary before that composer's death, went to work for Stravinsky in 1947. The composer had returned in August, "much refreshed," after a vacation of two and a half months at Evian, France, Miss Libman said, but had entered Lenox Hill Hospital here with pulmonary edema on March 18. His stay there was extended somewhat, she said, because his new 10-room apartment overlooking Central Park was being decorated. He did not go home until March 30. The last words Miss Libman could remember Stravinsky's saying, she said, were, "How lovely. This belongs to me, it is my home," as his nurse gave him a tour of the apartment in his wheelchair. The cosmopolitan musician, she said, had moved around the world so much--Russia, Paris, Hollywood, New York--that his yearning for a home had been strong. Was Composing Recently Stravinsky knew his friends to the last, according to Miss Libman. "Two and a half months ago he was playing the piano and composing--orchestrating two preludes from Bach's 'Well-Tempered Clavier,'" she said. His death came as a surprise, since he apparently had rallied on Monday night from breathing complications that developed over the weekend. Dr. Theodore Lax, the composer's physician throughout his recent illness, was not present at the time of death. He arrived soon thereafter and ruled the cause as heart failure. Since 1967, Stravinsky had suffered several arterial strokes, Miss Libman said, and had been in and out of hospitals since then. Besides his widow, Stravinsky is survived by a daughter, Mrs. Milena Marion of Los Angeles, and two sons, Soulima, a pianist and teacher who lives in Urbana, Ill., and Theodore, of Geneva. The composer's body was taken to Frank E. Campbell's at Madison Avenue and 81st Street. A Russian Orthodox service will be held there Friday at 3 P.M., with the Rev. Alex Schmenin officiating. Burial in Venice In accordance with Stravinsky's wish, burial will be in Venice, in the Russian corner of the cemetery of San Michele. The composer had long been fond of the Italian city, where several of his works including "The Rake's Progress" were first performed, and where Diaghliev is buried. It was Diaghliev the Russian ballet impresario, who produced the first performance of "Le Sacre du Printemps" on May 29, 1913, thereby giving Stravinsky his chance to turn music upside down. Stravinsky's more recent activities had been as a writer and dealer in his own memorabilia. The complete, corrected manuscript score of "Le Sacre," about 7,600 additional pages of manuscript and 17,000 documents were put on the market at an asking price of $3.5-million last December. No purchase has been reported. In recent years, in spite of his feeble health, Mr. Stravinsky continued to be a fountain of wit and acidulously put wisdom. In an article in The New York Review of Books last February, he commented wryly on Leonard Bernstein's athletic podium style: "I have never seen him jump in 'Les Noces' and regretted missing his performance last fall." Igor Stravinsky: An 'Inventor of Music' Whose Works Created a Revolution During World I, Igor Stravinsky was asked by a guard at the French border to declare his profession. "An inventor of music," he said. It was a typical Stravinsky remark: flat, self-assured, flagrantly antiromantic. The composer who revolutionized the music of his time was a dapper little man who prided himself on keeping "banker's hours" at his work table. Let others wait for artistic inspiration; what inspired Igor Stravinsky, he said, was the "exact requirements" of the next work. Between the early pieces, written under the eye of his only teacher, Nikolai Rimsky- Korsakov, and the compositions of Stravinsky's old age, there were more than 100 works: symphonies, concertos, chamber pieces, songs, piano sonatas, operas and, above all, ballets. The influence of these works was profound. As early as 1913, Claude Debussy was praising Stravinsky for having "enlarged the boundaries of the permissible" in music. Forty years later, the tribute of Lincoln Kirstein, director of the New York City Ballet, was remarkably similar: "Sounds he has found or invented, however strange or forbidding at the outset, have become domesticated in our ears." Aaron Copland estimated that Stravinsky's work had influenced three generations of American composers; a decade later Copland revised the estimate to four generations, and added European composers as well. In 1965 the American Musicological Society voted Stravinsky the composer born after 1870 who was most likely to be honored in the future. He was not unanimously honored during his lifetime. Three colorful works of his young manhood--"L'Oiseau de Feu" ("The Firebird"), "Petrushka" and "Le Sacre du Printemps" ("The Rite of Spring")--were generally admitted to be masterpieces. But about his conversion to the austerities of neoclassicism in the nineteen-twenties, and his even more startling conversion to a cryptic serial style in the nineteen-fifties, there was critical disagreement. To some, his later works were thin and bloodless; to others, they showed a mastery only hinted at in the vivid early pieces. Figure of Fascination To all, Stravinsky the man was a figure of fascination. The contradictions were dazzling. The composer marched through a long career with the self-assurance of a Wagner--and was so nervous when performing in public that he thrice forgot his own piano concerto. He once refused to compose a liturgical ballet for his earliest patron, Serge Diaghliev, "both because I disapproved of the idea of presenting the mass as a ballet spectacle and because Diaghliev wanted me to compose it and 'Les Noces' for the same price." His Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1939-40 were dignified papers, delivered in French, on the high seriousness of the artist's calling. Three years later he wrote a polka for an elephant in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. He had many friends--Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Pablo Picasso, Vaslav Nijinsky, Andre Gide, Jean Cocteau--and many homes: Russia until 1914; Switzerland (1914- 1920), France (1920-1939), the United States (1939 until his death). In every home he was restless at night unless a light burned outside his bedroom. That was how he slept, he explained, as a boy in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad). Igor Feodorovich Stravinsky was born in a suburb of St. Petersburg--Oranienbaum, a village where his parents were spending the summer--on June 17, 1882: St. Igor's Day. He was the third of four sons born to Anna Kholodovsky and Feodor Ignatievitch Stravinsky. His father was the leading bass singer at the Imperial Opera in St. Petersburg. The composer once described his childhood as "a period waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell." For his family he felt only "duties." At school he made few friends and proved only a mediocre student. Music was a bright spot. At the age of 2 he surprised his parents by humming from memory a folk tune he had heard some women singing. He dated his career as a composer from the afternoon a few years later when he tried to duplicate on one of the two grand pianos in the family's drawing room the blare of a marine band playing outside. "I tried to pick out the intervals I had heard. . .but found other intervals in the process I liked better, which already made me a composer," Stravinsky said. At 9, Igor started piano lessons and proved a good student, but no prodigy. Nevertheless, his interest in music grew. An uncle--"the only one in the family who believed I had any talent"--encouraged him. As a teen-ager he haunted his father's rehearsals at the Maryinsky Theater. To his parents, the boy's interest in music was "mere amateurism, to be encouraged up to a point, without taking into consideration the degree to which my aptitudes might be developed." They agreed to let him study harmony with a private teacher--on the condition that he also study law at the University of St. Petersburg. In four years as the university, Stravinsky recalled, "I probably did not hear more than 50 lectures." For by this time he had taken the first step toward becoming a composer. A Refusal at First One of his classmates was a son of the great Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov. In 1902 Stravinsky visited the elder man, gave him some of his early piano pieces for criticism and asked to become his pupil. The composer looked at the scores and replied noncommittally that the young man would need more technical preparation before he could accept him as a student. Crestfallen at first, Stravinsky decided to take this as encouragement. After a year's outside study, he applied again to the master and was accepted. It was under the supervision of Rimsky-Korsakov that Stravinsky's first orchestral works- -a symphony, a suite ("Le Faune et la Bergere"), the Scherzo Fantastique--were composed and performed. In 1908, a few days after he had mailed his teacher the score of a new orchestral piece, "Fireworks," the package was returned to the young composer with the note: "Not delivered on account of death of addressee." Stravinsky's formal education was over. Later that year Stravinsky met Serge Diaghliev, then assembling a company of Russian dancers for a season in Paris. Impressed with the composer's first work, Diaghliev had a job for him: to orchestrate two piano pieces by Chopin for the ballet "Les Sylphides." The commission was gratefully accepted--Stravinsky now had a wife and two children-- and impressively fulfilled. A year later there was a more important Diaghliev commission: a ballet on a Russian folk tale, "The Firebird," for the Russian Ballet's second season at the Paris Opera House. Somewhat apprehensively--"I was still unaware of my own capabilities"--Stravinsky set to work. The flashing, vigorous "Firebird" was a great success: so great a success that Stravinsky, in his later years, thought of it as an albatross around his neck. Arranged as an orchestral suite, it was played all over the world; the composer was asked to conduct it everywhere; it was the work the man-in-the-street most associated with the name Stravinsky. (On a train the composer met a man who called him "Mister Fireberg.") The irony was that because Russia had no international copyright protection, "The Firebird" brought him few royalties. The next Stravinsky-Diaghliev production was "Petrushka" (1911), a brash, colorful ballet about puppets come to life. To signify the insolence of one of the puppets, Stravinsky put some of the music in two keys at once. The combination of an F sharp major arpeggio (all black notes on the piano) and a C major arpeggio (all white notes) was to be known ever afterward as "the Petrushka" chord: it was the first important use of bitonality in modern music. The ballet, with Nijinsky in the title role, was another popular success. More important, said the composer, "it gave me absolute conviction of my ear." While completing "The Firebird," Stravinsky had a daydream about a pagan ritual in which a young girl danced herself to death. This was the genesis of "The Rite of Spring," a revolutionary work whose premiere on May 29, 1913, caused one of the noisiest scandals in the history of music. An open dress rehearsal had gone quietly, but protests against the music--barbarous, erotic, unlike anything Paris had ever heard--began almost as soon as the curtain went up on opening night. Soon the Theatre des Champs-Elysees was in an uproar. Stravinsky hurried backstage to find Diaghliev flicking the house lights in an attempt to restore order and Nijinsky, the choreographer, bawling counts at the dancers from the wings. Stravinsky was furious; Diaghliev, who knew the value of publicity, said afterward that the crowd's reaction had been "exactly what I wanted." Less than a year later, Pierre Monteux conducted a concert version of the score in Paris and Stravinsky received a hero's ovation. World War I separated the composer permanently from his homeland (he did not see Russia again until a tour in 1962) and temporarily from Diaghliev. It also marked the start of a new style for Stravinsky--a leaner, more astringent, less colorful musical idiom that critics were to label "neoclassical." Economy Was Necessity An early work in the new manner was "Histoire du Soldat" ("The Soldier's Tale"), written in 1918. This was a jazzy theater piece with only seven instrumentalists. The economy of orchestration was less a matter of esthetic choice than of practical necessity-- Stravinsky and his collaborators, down on their luck in Switzerland, wanted a work that would tour cheaply--but the composer found austerity to his liking. In the years that followed Stravinsky's postwar move to Paris, the "Apollonian principles" (as he liked to call them) of order and restraint replaced the Dionysian ecstasy of the big early works. "One is tired of being saturated with timbres," he decided. "One wants no more of this overfeeding." "Les Noces" (1923), a throbbing Russian wedding cantata, seemed a throwback to the Dionysian style. Actually, most of it had been composed before the war and could be seen, in retrospect, as part of the transition from opulence to severity. Representative of another aspect of the new style was "Pulcinella" (1920), a ballet at Diaghliev's suggestion. This work employed themes attributed to the 18th-century composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, with contemporary glosses by Stravinsky. The composer called it "my discovery of the past." Stravinsky now looked to the past for his models; the trick, he said, would be "to make use of academic forms. . .without becoming academic." A piano concerto composed for his first American tour, in 1925, evoked Bach and the baroque. "Oedipus Rex" (1926) suggested a Handel oratorio. "Le Baiser de la Fee" (1928) was an explicit tribute to Tchaikovsky. "Apollon Musagete" (1928) was a ballet scored for strings alone. "Capriccio" for piano and orchestra (1929) reminded some of an up-to-date Carl Maria Von Weber. "Persephone" (1933) wore the pastels of the impressionists. The forms had been used by others. The contents were unquestionably new and unquestionably Stravinsky's--complicated, tic-like rhythms; harmonies no less audacious for being uttered in a moderate tone of voice. During this period the composer was often accused of antiquarianism, but no one ever called him old-fashioned. Purely Instrumental In his middle years, Stravinsky turned more and more to purely instrumental music, including the "Dumbarton Oaks" Concerto for chamber orchestra (1938), the Symphony in C (1940), the Symphony in Three Movements (1946). His dogged productivity did not lessen with increasing age. Having moved to the United States in 1939, Stravinsky arranged "The Star-Spangled Banner" for a performance in Boston--and brought in the police, who almost arrested him for tampering with the national anthem. Then he moved to Los Angeles, where he composed the rest of his works. "Danses Concertantes" (1942), a chamber piece, was commissioned by the Werner Janssen Symphony Orchestra of that city. "Orpheus" (1948) was a ballet choreographed by an old friend, George Balanchine. As a young man Stravinsky had written two operas: "The Emperor's Nightingale" (1908- 1914) and "Mavra" (1922). After World War II he began a third. "The Rake's Progress," with libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, was a deliberate re-creation of Mozartean 18th-century style. First performed in 1951, it received the composer's usual mixed reviews. "You never see the change when you are driving along," Stravinsky told an interviewer in 1948. "A little curve in the road and suddenly you are proceeding east. . . ." Donning the monk's cloth of neoclassicism had been such a change for the composer; an even more unexpected one was to come. For years Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg were thought to divide the world of contemporary music between them. Stravinsky was head of the tonal camp: those whose works, dissonant or not, inhabited a universe of harmonic gravity; the world of "key." Schoenberg and his disciples belonged to the 12-tone camp: a world where all notes of the scale were in free fall, none having more harmonic weight or status than another. It was a style of composition, Stravinsky had said, "essentially different" from his own. Soon after "The Rake's Progress," however, Stravinsky himself became a 12-tone composer: more precisely, a "serial" composer, who based each work on a series of notes stated as a "tone row" in the opening measures. Robert Craft, a young musician whom Stravinsky had hired as an assistant in 1947, unquestionably had much to do with the composer's conversion to serialism. It is also apparent that Stravinsky, to whom obstacles were inspirations, was attracted by what he called the "dogmatism" of the row. Whatever the reason, the tone row was the spine of his last works, among them "Agon," a ballet (1957); "Movements for Piano and Orchestra" (1960); and "Abraham and Isaac," a "sacred ballad" (1964). The change kept him a controversial composer to the last. This did not bother Stravinsky. "I don't mind my music going on trial," he wrote in 1957. "If I'm to keep my position as a promising young composer I must accept that." What Stravinsky could not accept was "the professional ignoramus, the journalist- reviewer pest." His battle with music critics became legendary. At first he was above battling. In 1929 he stated grandly that his music "was not to be discussed or criticized." "One does not criticize somebody or something that is in a functional state. The nose is not manufactured. The nose is. Thus also my art," he said. Thirty years later he was naming the "pests." Winthrop Sargeant, music critic for The New Yorker magazine, was, to Stravinsky, "W. S. Deaf." Paul Henry Lang's unfavorable review of Stravinsky's ballet "The Flood" (1962), composed for television, brought a telegram from the composer to The New York Herald Tribune accusing the critic of "gratuitous malice." But Stravinsky's scorn was not reserved for writers only. He disliked showy performers and conductors ("Stokowski's Bach? Bach's Stokowski would be more like it"). The dislike turned to loathing when the performer was caught mis-"interpreting" (a word the meticulous composer considered a personal affront) one of his pieces. To show musicians exactly how his compositions were to be performed, especially as to their tempos, Stravinsky made piano-roll transcriptions of his works for the Pleyel Company in the early nineteen-twenties. For the same purpose, he signed an exclusive contract with Columbia Records in 1928. Well before his death, Stravinsky and his assistant, Mr. Craft, had recorded nearly all his works for Columbia. During the twenties Stravinsky also began to conduct and perform his works in public. Never a virtuoso pianist and scarcely trained at all in conducting, he suffered acute stage fright before his first appearances and seldom performed without a score. Stravinsky was a small, wiry man (5 feet 3 inches, 120 pounds) whose morning regimen, until he was 67, started with a set of "Hungarian calisthenics" (including walking on his hands). A renowned hypochondriac, according to his friends, the composer would visit his Los Angeles doctor almost every day--and then hike two miles home. Sketch Caused Furor Stravinsky's remarkable face--long-lobed ears, hooded eyes, large nose, small mustache, full lips--tempted portraits from many artists. A straightforward Picasso sketch of the composer once caused a furor at the Italian border. A guard refused to let it out of the country on the suspicion that it was not a portrait at all but a mysterious, and probably subversive, "plan." "It is a plan of my face," Stravinsky protested. But the sketch had to leave the country in a diplomatic pouch from the British Embassy. To Stravinsky, composing music was a process of solving musical problems: problems that he insisted on defining before he started to work. Before writing "Apollon Musagete," for example, he wrote to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who had commissioned the ballet, for the exact dimensions of the hall in which it would be performed, the number of seats in the hall, even the direction in which the orchestra would be facing. "The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self," he would say. "And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution." He worked like a craftsman in a room that looked like a laboratory, organized down to the very labels on the gum erasers and the pens for different-colored inks. He worked almost every day, behind closed doors ("I have never been able to compose unless sure that no one would hear me"). Unlike many composers, he worked directly at the piano. Some took this to indicate that Stravinsky's "ear" was not as acute as one might have expected. He defended the practice: "Fingers are not to be despised. . .[they] often give birth to subconscious ideas that might otherwise never come to life. . . . I think it is a thousand times better to compose in direct contact with the physical medium of sound than to work in the abstract medium produced by one's imagination." "Our Igor," Diaghliev used to sigh. "Always money, money, money." It was a frequent criticism of the composer that he not only worked like a businessman but also charged like one. Stravinsky coolly agreed that he had never "regarded poverty as attractive" and that his ambition was "to earn every penny that my art would enable me to extract" from a society that had let Mozart and Bartok die in poverty. Most of his works were written on commission--"the trick," he once wrote, "is to compose what one wants to compose and get it commissioned afterwards"--and the fees were handsome. But they did not affect his artistic independence. Many of Stravinsky's works, especially during his last years, were based on religious themes--"Symphony of Psalms" (1930), "Canticum Sacrum" (1956), "Threni" (1958) and others. To write good church music, the composer maintained, one had to believe, literally, in what the church stood for: "the Person of the Lord, the Person of the Devil and the Miracles of the Church." He was himself such a believer. Born into the Russian Orthodox Church, he left it in 1910. Later he discovered "the necessity of religious belief" and was a regular communicant from 1926 to 1939. Thereafter his churchgoing lapsed a bit. (The music, he complained, all sounded "like Rachmaninoff" and once in confession the priest had asked him for his autograph.) Fascinated by Words But to the end he considered himself stanchly Russian Orthodox, tempted at times by Roman Catholicism--he wrote a Roman Catholic mass in 1948--but remaining with the faith of his fathers "for linguistic reasons." Words fascinated Stravinsky. Beside Russian he could hold forth, and make puns, in French, German and English. "When I work with words in music, my musical saliva is set in motion by the sounds and rhythms of the syllables," he said. Stravinsky wrote his own librettos for two works--"Renard" (1915) and "Les Noces"--and wrote several books as well. "Chronicle of My Life" (1936) and "Poetics of Music" (1948), the latter his Harvard lectures, expounded Stravinsky's ideas about music with dry, episcopal confidence: "Music is by its very nature essentially powerless to express anything at all. . . . The sensation produced by music is that evoked by contemplation of the interplay of architectural forms. . . . The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free." No less controversial but far more lively were the books written with the help of Mr. Craft: "Conversations with Igor Stravinsky" (1958); "Memories and Commentaries" (1959); "Expositions and Developments" (1962); "Dialogues and a Diary" (1963); "Themes and Episodes" (1966) and "Retrospections and Conclusions" (1969). These "disguised monologues" combined contradictory recollections of the past, domestic trivia, name-dropping anecdotage, gratuitous insults, handsome compliments, bad puns and stunning insights into life, art and self. They were a portrait of the composer that few artists would have dared paint, and Stravinsky was proud of them. Stravinsky married twice. His first wife, Catherine Nossenko ("my dearest friend and playmate"), was his first cousin. Married in 1906, they had four children: Theodore, Ludmilla, Sviatoslav Soulima and Maria Milena. Ludmilla died in 1938 and Mrs. Stravinsky in 1939, both of tuberculosis. In 1940 Stravinsky married Vera de Bossett, a painter. They had no children.

Look out!!! They are airborn!

I'm surprised myself.

April 7, 2008 David Lang Wins Music Pulitzer By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 6:43 p.m. ET NEW YORK (AP) -- David Lang had always loved Bach's ''St. Matthew's Passion.'' But as a Jewish composer, listening to one of classical music's greatest works always gave him pause. ''It's a strange thing as a Jewish artist to listen to this music, because we are the enemy in this, we are the bad guy, and yet the music is fantastic,'' he said of the orchestral and choral piece, written for Easter and considered to have some anti-Semitic text. So when coming up with the concept for what on Monday became his Pulitzer Prize-winning work -- ''The Little Match Girl Passion'' -- he decided to use the revered ''St. Matthew's Passion'' as his base, but remove the Christian element of the piece. ''When I got this commission, I thought maybe there's a way to heal this wound, to fix this, so I imagined what it would be like to take some of the story of the 'St. Matthew's Passion' and take Jesus out of it and put in the story of this other person who also suffers and who also dies,'' he told The Associated Press on Monday after winning his prize. So he used the story of the tragic child who was the focal point of Hans Christian Andersen's ''Little Match Girl'' and wrote text that was interspersed with the Book of Matthew in the Bible, Andersen's words and others. The 35-minute piece, which debuted at Carnegie Hall in October 2007, was performed by the vocal group Theatre of Voices. ''It's a very emotional piece. ... it's a very heartbreaking story,'' he said. ''It's an odd feeling as a composer to be happy to have had so many people in the audience miserable.'' Lang, who is co-founder and co-artistic director of the music collective Bang on a Can, admits he was feeling pretty miserable himself on Monday morning. He was having a bad day and was in the studio. His mood didn't brighten until he got a call from National Public Radio telling him had won the Pulitzer. ''I feel a little better, (but) I'm sure I'll be miserable tomorrow,'' he joked.

Yeah, well...how about that.