June 9: All RIP Edition

RIP: Andrei Voznesensky. The Russian poet (1933-2010) came to prominence along with "daring poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Bella Akhmadulina and Robert Rozhdestvensky who burst onto the stage in the cultural thaw that followed Stalin’s death in 1953."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/books/02voznesensky.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Voznesensky

The New York Times obituary reminds us of the difficulty of translating poetry; it mentions Voznesensky's famous poem "I Am Goya," and notes that

The poem creates its impressions of war and horror through a series of images and interrelated variations on the name of the painter, which echo throughout in a series of striking sound metaphors in Russian: Goya, glaz (eyes), gore (grief), golos (voice), gorod (cities), golod (hunger), gorlo (gullet).

RIP: Louise Bourgeois. The French-born sculptor (1911-2010) constructed "in wood, steel, stone and cast rubber, often organic in form and sexually explicit, emotionally aggressive yet witty, covered many stylistic bases. But from first to last they shared a set of repeated themes centered on the human body and its need for nurture and protection in a frightening world." I sort of think she makes the body frightening, too:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/arts/design/01bourgeois.html 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7141633.ece 

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/05/louise-bourgeois-is-dead-at-98.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Bourgeois

At 98, Bourgeois was one of the oldest surviving figures in the world of the arts, but not quite the oldest. I used to participate in a Celebrity Deathwatch, which might sound pretty ghoulish but through it I have learned rather a lot about elder statespeople in the arts. My annual ballot always consisted of people whose work I admired who were close to the century mark, or beyond it. I never came remotely close to winning (nor did I care to, really), because I discovered that if you make it to 95, you might very well get to 105; living that long puts you among the toughest of the tough. Here are 16 living artists and intellectuals who were born before Louise Bourgeois, by year. They all deserve a toast!

1902 -- Hugues Cuenod (Swiss tenor)
1906 -- Eva Zeisel (Hungarian designer)
1907 -- Jacques Barzun (French-American historian), Run Run Shaw (Hong Kong film producer), Oscar Niemeyer (Brazilian architect)
1908 -- Elliott Carter (American composer), Manoel de Oliveira (Portuguese film director)
1910 -- Lupita Tovar (Mexican actress), Dorothea Tanning (American artist), Luise Rainer (German actress), Norman Corwin (American radio dramatist), Tyrus Wong (Chinese artist), Magda Olivero (Italian soprano)
1911 -- Ernesto Sabato (Argentine writer), Ronald Neame (British film director), Otakar Vavra (Czech film director)

RIP: Himan Brown. Radio drama producer Brown (1910-2010), also senior to Louise Bourgeois by some 17 months, created a number of popular shows:

...probably his most memorable was “Inner Sanctum Mysteries,” whose ominous opening of a creaking door and menacing farewell of “pleasant dreams” became signatures not just of the show but also of the heyday of radio itself, when listeners sitting on the family sofa or curled under quilts attached their own fanciful images to the sounds coming out of a box that had no screen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/arts/07brown.html

http://thrillingdaysofyesteryear.blogspot.com/2010/06/rip-himan-brown.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Himan_Brown

RIP: David Markson. For a relatively obscure literary novelist who never had much in the way of sales and who never won a major award, Markson (1927-2010) has received an extraordinary outpouring of online tributes:

Markson read widely and deeply. One of his novels begins with an epigraph from Borges: “First and foremost, I think of myself as a reader.” Or, as Samuel Johnson said—and Markson also quoted—“A man will turn over half a library to make one book.” Markson worked his way through the stacks more than once, picking a path that traced literature, art, music, biography, and baseball, linear foot by linear foot....“Petrarch sometimes wrote letters to long-dead authors,” Markson writes. “He was also a dedicated hunter of classic manuscripts. Once, after discovering some previously unknown works of Cicero, he wrote Cicero the news.” Reading that again, I thought that maybe art is, in the end, like so many letters to Cicero, notes addressed to the dead, to one’s ancestors and betters, or simply to those one had in mind while working. I felt sure and I felt glad that authors will now be writing Markson with their news.

http://nplusonemag.com/david-markson

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2010/06/the-man-could-not-shave-himself-in-lieu-of-a-belt-he-knotted-a-rope-or-a-discarded-necktie-around-his-waist-mornings-he-n.html

http://www.sarahweinman.com/confessions/2010/06/david-markson-rip.html

http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2010/06/david-markson-1927-2010.html

http://thesecondpass.com/?p=5822 

http://www.edrants.com/rip-david-markson/

http://thefastertimes.com/indiebooks/2010/06/07/a-few-compiled-and-digested-thoughts-on-david-marksons-passing-2/

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/06/david-markson.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/arts/08markson.html 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Markson

RIP: John Hedgecoe. The British photographer (1937-2010) was "a big man of astonishing energy and in the vanguard of style," well-known for taking the photograph of Queen Elizabeth II featured on British stamps, for his friendship with sculptor Henry Moore and picture-taking of his work, and for writing many books and articles on photographic technique.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7148330.ece

http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/1653040/the-taught-world-photograph

RIP: Benjamin Lees and Jack Beeson. These two American composers (1924-2010 and 1921-2010, respectively) were contemporaries who worked the tonal arena in an atonal era, and who made strong reputations for themselves doing so. (No editorial comment implied; I love atonal and tonal music both.) Lees concentrated on instrumental compositions, Beeson on operas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/arts/music/04lees.html

http://www.sequenza21.com/2010/06/benjamin-lees-86/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lees

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/arts/music/09beeson.html

http://www.sequenza21.com/2010/06/jack-beeson-88/

http://www.sequenza21.com/2010/06/remembering-jack-beeson/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Beeson

RIP: Omar Hernandez-Hidalgo. This one is tragic. Mexico's leading contemporary violist, adept in the music of many syles and eras, and only 38 years old, was found murdered in Tijuana about a week ago. Different stories have him kidnapped, or the probable victim of a "crime of passion." I have not seen any reporting on this in America beyond the San Diego Union Tribune  and the Sequenza 21 blog.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/jun/07/musician-found-dead-in-tijuana/

http://www.sequenza21.com/2010/06/omar-hernandez-hidalgo-1971-2010/

Here is Hernandez Hidalgo playing the 3rd movement of the Viola Sonata by leading Mexican composer Jose Pablo Moncayo, who also died sadly young in 1958, at the age of 45.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Pablo_Moncayo

Among notables born on this date are composers Otto Nicolai, Carl Nielsen, Alberic Magnard, Ingolf Dahl, Cole Porter, and Charles Wuorinen, soprano Ileana Cotrubas, pop guitarist Les Paul, pop singers Jackie Wilson and Johnny Ace, novelist Charles Webb, science fiction novelists Joe Haldeman and Keith Laumer, poet John Gillespie Magee Jr., screenwriters George Axelrod and Aaron Sorkin, and actors Johnny Depp, Leslie Banks, Michael J. Fox, Robert Cummings, and Natalie Portman. A lot of musicians today! Charles Wuorinen was a composition student of Jack Beeson, who in his youth was a student of Bela Bartok; music history proceeds forward quite a bit by these pedagogic relationships. It is interesting that both Bartok and Wuorinen are far more "radical" than the conservative-sounding Beeson, which speaks well for the latter as a teacher; he wrote the music that was congenial to him but seems to have been open to other expressions in his pupils (among whom were also the great theater composer John Kander, Grammy winner Joan Tower, and avant-garde flutist Harvey Sollberger). Composers do not necessarily seek imitators among their students. I have always cherished what Maurice Ravel said about his favorite (and unlikely) student Ralph Vaughan Williams -- that he was "the only one of my pupils who does not write my music."