June 24

When I was a freshman at my Catholic boys' high school in New Jersey, my gifted social studies teacher once played us an LP side of Leonard Bernstein's notorious, underrated, now rehabilitated masterpiece Mass, which was written upon commission from Jacqueline Kennedy for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Bernstein took some hard critical knocks for this extravagant, polymusical piece that drew upon the ferment of its time -- it was premiered in 1971 -- and upon all of the musical traditions that Bernstein loved. But I think time has vindicated this quasi-Catholic mass composed by one of America's greatest Jewish musicians. It has been increasingly performed and recorded (notably by conductors Kent Nagano and Marin Alsop) in recent years; we are only beginning to live with it. When my teacher played it for us, he was discouraged by our apparently noisy, inattentive reaction; but I contacted him years later to let him know that that class was a "life moment" for me -- his example is a key reason why I am a teacher today. The beauties of the Mass, including the majestic opening number "A Simple Song," have remained with me as an inspiration. Here is a gorgeous recent interpretation of "A Simple Song" in a Latvian performance led by conductor Maris Simais; Douglas Webster is the Celebrant.

 

The vocal and instrumental swell on the lyric "And the sun shall not smite me by day/Nor the moon by night" never fails to wipe me out.

Stephen Bowie is doing some excellent interviews at his blog Classic TV History; the latest is with the wonderful actress Shirley Knight.

http://classictvhistory.wordpress.com/2010/07/01/an-interview-with-shirley-knight/

Knight pays tribute to the head of casting at CBS, Ethel Winant, who first saw her in a production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger that co-starred Dean Stockwell: "Ethel really was the person who, more than anyone else, championed my career.  She would put me in everything." Winant is one of the unsung heroes of the arts. Robert S. Alley's and Irby B. Brown's excellent book Love Is All Around: The Making of The Mary Tyler Moore Show -- one of the best books ever written about a television program -- has a chapter describing Winant's casting of that show, including her discovery of Valerie Harper at a little theater. Casting (for which there really should be more awards, such as an Oscar) is utterly crucial to theatrical, televisual, and cinematic endeavors, but its nuances are little explored in print; Alley's and Brown's account of the casting process is the best I have read since Pauline Kael's famous essay on the making of Sidney Lumet's film The Group (included in Kael's book Kiss Kiss Bang Bang).

New music circles have been excited by the recent performance of Iannis Xenakis's Persephassa for six percussionists on Central Park Lake in New York:

Like many of [Xenakis's] works, “Persephassa” has a spatial element. He intended the percussionists to be placed far from one another in a hexagonal formation with the audience in the middle. The 30-minute piece has never been performed on a lake, the producers say. A veritable flotilla of rowboats made it to the west side of the lake on a hot, clear afternoon to hear “Persephassa"....Mostly there were four people to a boat. Two percussionists were stationed in gazebos on the shore; another performed from a bluff of rocks. Three others played on plywood platforms....atop two boats secured together. These boats had two rowers charged with keeping the platforms relatively steady.


persephassa on the lake from liubo on Vimeo.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/23/arts/music/23xenakis.html

Spatialization exists throughout Western musical history (the Berlioz Requiem with its placement of  brass bands, for example) but really takes off in the 20th century with Xenakis, Stockhausen, Schnittke, Henry Brant, and others. Of course it needs to be experienced live for full effect; but the video excerpt of the Persephassa performance above is thrilling.

http://knol.google.com/k/spatial-music#

I mentioned here on January 14 of this year how an early Seventies PBS television interview with photographer and bon vivant Cecil Beaton inspired me as a young man (just as hearing Bernstein's Mass around the same time did). The Imperial War Museum North in Manchester has mounted a new show of the World War II photographs Beaton shot for Great Britain's Ministry of Information:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=38653 

A Journey Round My Skull has unearthed another wonderful illustrator, Alexandr Mychajlow, although information about him is scant:

http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/2010/06/cinderella-meets-serpentina-in-kiev.html

Among notables born on this date are poets John Ciardi, Arseny Tarkovsky (Russia), and St. John of the Cross (Spain), short story writer Ambrose Bierce, crime novelist Lawrence Block, scientist/science fiction novelist Fred Hoyle, composers Hugo Distler, Terry Riley, and Harry Partch, film director Claude Chabrol, rock guitarist Jeff Beck, rock drummer Mick Fleetwood, clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, philosopher Julia Kristeva (France), political writer Ernesto Sabato (Argentina), economist Robert Reich, and actor Nancy Allen. I can't help loving the excellent story writer Ambrose Bierce for an extra-literary consideration, his disappearance in Mexico as a Pancho Villa sympathizer in 1914, which led to much speculation and theorizing that has continued to this day:

Perhaps the most convincing of the Mexico stories is that of soldier-of-fortune Edward "Tex" O'Reilly in his Born To Raise Hell. He claims to have been contacted by Bierce in El Passo and then in Chihauhua City -- but never met with him. O'Reilly says that several months later, he heard that an American had been killed in a nearby mining camp of Sierra Mojada. He investigated and heard how an old American, speaking broken Spanish, was executed by Federal Troops when they found out he was searching for Villa's troops. The locals told how he kept laughing, even after the first volley of his execution.
 
http://www.biercephile.com/death.cfm