Stringing the Pearls

The Five Borough Songbook, presented by the Five Boroughs Music Festival at the Galapagos Art Space, lured me out to Brooklyn on 6 October with the prospect of songs by nearly 20 composers, performed by four able singers. Getting to Galapagos — which used to be conveniently located in Williamsburg, across the street from my friend Eric’s apartment, but is now Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass (a.k.a. DUMBO) — got me lost in the dark in an unfamiliar neighborhood. I felt like a tourist, and I missed the first several songs.

But I arrived in time for two that I’d anticipated most gladly: those by Jorge Martín (“City of Orgies, Walks, and Joys!” to a text by Whitman) and Glen Roven (“F from DUMBO,” to a text by Michael Tyrell*). And I enjoyed the performances of the four singers: baritone David Adam Moore (no stranger to readers of this blog), soprano Martha Guth, tenor Alex Richardson, and the real discovery of the night, mezzo Blythe Gaissert.

Now, thanks to Roven’s ingenuity — and the fact that he’s the “G” in GPR Records — I’ll be able to listen to the Five Borough Songbook again and again, as often as I please, without getting lost in Brooklyn. Last week, I sat in on a recording session, and the experience proved fascinating indeed.

Glen Roven

GPR aims to step into the void left by the major labels, all of which have been hammered by economic and technological challenges, and some of which have neglected classical music for years. Working with Peter Fitzgerald (the “P”) and Richard Cohen (the “R”), Roven can avail himself of new technologies and unbeatable access: Fitzgerald, for example, is president and co-owner of Sound Associates, and he’s been sound designer for countless concerts and Broadway shows, including Rags. When the sound equipment is already in place, Roven says, and with studio facilities readily available in New York, it’s easy enough to record a piece; since brick-and-mortar stores are a thing of the past, it’s actually become easier to distribute albums.

Sitting in the control room with Roven, Cohen, and studio engineer Megan Henninger, I listened as David Adam Moore and pianist Thomas Bagwell put the finishing touches on Roven’s “F from Dumbo”; then Blythe Gaissert and composer Mohammed Fairouz came in to record his “Refugee Song” (to a text by Auden).

My experience in radio studios is pretty vast, but my experience in music-recording studios is quite limited — and all of it predates the digital revolution. Henninger can achieve with a few keystrokes what used to require razor blades and Scotch tape on the old reel-to-reel machines. (I still bear the scars.)

You’d wind up with a crazy-quilt of patches, and in some cases, you really did go crazy. That’s one reason that artists like Teresa Stratas tried so hard to get it right on the first take (as she did with The Unknown Kurt Weill), and the resulting record would be in that sense very much like a live performance: played straight through.

David Adam Moore

Now, however, the singers, pianist, and composers could go over individual bars again and again until they were satisfied, and the editing process was largely complete, almost instantly. The process struck me as less like a live performance and more like a rehearsal or coaching session, in which the musicians repeat fragments of the score and may never perform the song complete. (In this case, as with Stratas’ first Weill album, which grew out of a recital at the Whitney Museum, it surely helped that the Songbook musicians had performed the cycle complete before an audience only a few days earlier.)

In many ways, the process reminded me of filmmaking, and I remembered an interview with the actor John Malkovich, who said that his theatrical training proved useless or even harmful when it came time to make movies: before the camera, he had to think in a different way, just as Moore may do before the microphone. Now the image that presented itself was that of a mosaic, piecing together a larger picture — or perhaps (because music is in its way linear) the stringing together of scattered pearls.

Familiar as I am with Moore’s voice, the acoustic of a studio is different from what I’ve heard before, yet of course I recognized the clarity and the open, conversational tone I admire in his singing. Given that he’s such a physical vocalist, it shouldn’t be surprising that he listens with his whole body during playback, too.

Blythe Gaissert

I had a moment to chat with Gaissert before the session began. She’d given a thrilling performance in Brooklyn, not only in Fairouz’ song but in all her offerings; perhaps most surprising was the advanced stage of her pregnancy, at which few in the Galapagos audience might have guessed. Naturally, it turns out that she’s from Beaumont, Texas (birthplace of Joyce Castle), and she and David Adam Moore have known each other since they were in their teens.

“Refugee Song” requires that Gaissert traverse a wide range of strong emotions, and she delivers the music with guts and fire, always demanding more from herself. Another surprise: you know how we non-singers hate to listen to the recorded sound of our own voices? Well, singers feel the same way — but both Gaissert and Moore put up with the process gallantly. (Bagwell was unflappable all the while.)

Fairouz seemed on edge throughout the session, and afterward I asked whether he found the process stressful. Not at all, he said; in fact, recording isn’t difficult, but “Refugee Song” itself is so intense that he responds to the song this way. (I daresay he’s not alone in that response.)

Mohammed Fairouz

Through it all, Roven seemed playful, almost ebullient as he pushed the buttons and encouraged the musicians: producing a record is creativity expressed, and he really enjoying this work. If his ambitions drive him to record more and more music, I suspect that it’s due not only to his dedication to art but also to his desire to have fun.

And in due course, the Five Borough Songbook will reach an audience far beyond DUMBO. The cycle is necessarily a mixed bag, with work of varying quality (and surprisingly few lyrics worth setting**); I’m frankly not terribly enthusiastic about some of the songs, and I doubt I’ll play them often. But at least I’ll have the opportunity.

If I’d known how hard it was to find a good picture of Thomas Bagwell, I’d have brought my camera to the studio.

*NOTE: Roven’s was but one of several subway-themed songs, and the rare of these numbers that didn’t rely on comical complaints for (admittedly crowd-pleasing) effect.

**Indeed, the concert served as a useful reminder that, for all their lyrical gifts, composers aren’t always the best judges of what constitutes good poetry.

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Among the Conspirators

I’m running out of pictures of Nico Muhly.
This one is from his website.

My great trouble, whenever I attend a musical performance in the round, is that, no matter where I am, I always feel I ought to be sitting somewhere else.

This is not to begrudge my excellent press seat at Thursday night’s “conspiracy” between composer Nico Muhly and Gotham Chamber Opera, at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge. But especially in Muhly’s performances of his own compositions, some of which use pre-recorded material to accompany the live musicians — to artful, sometimes dreamy effect — I was so conscious of the placement of the loudspeakers, with respect to my chair, that I seldom believed I was listening from the best possible spot.

That said, this was a terrific opportunity to hear more of Muhly’s work and to see the bond between composer and company — which will “conspire” to present the world premiere of his opera, Dark Sisters, next month — strengthen. It’s healthy for both sides: composers need productions, and producers need to deal with composers who can talk back to them. (Most producers could use a lot of back-talk, actually.) Audiences need to hear works by somebody other than the same old cabal of dead guys, and if the living composer is personable and interesting — as Nico Muhly surely is — so much the better.

A scene from Dark Sisters. Photograph from Nico Muhly’s website.

Indeed, Muhly offered some informal observations from the piano during Thursday’s performance, and while I’ve seen him only a couple of times, I begin to think he’s going to chat with us any time he takes the stage. This isn’t considered kosher, at least by some critics, but in Muhly’s case the standard practices really don’t matter. The music could speak perfectly well for itself; the talk could be better organized and prepared, but so what? It’s part of his personal stamp. This is his evening, and if we don’t like it, why did we come here?

Whatever my doubts about the acoustics in Le Poisson Rouge, I was glad to sit facing Muhly as he played: with his entire soul and most of his body. This made an interesting contrast with Neal Goren, whose work I know so much better, but only from the back of his head. Now he played with great feeling (of course), while his demeanor remained stoical, almost impassive. So much of his expression in a performance is conveyed by other people’s faces, to say nothing of the poise and grace he elicits from young musicians.

The evening (lightly staged by R.B. Schlather) was loosely inspired by the theme of evening, and bookended by soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird’s pair of “Evening Songs”: the first, by Purcell, accompanied by Goren; the second, by Glass, accompanied by Muhly, and given an especially sensitive reading by Bird. This was the one glimpse we got of Muhly’s attitude toward other composers, and he didn’t hold back; the song, from Satyagraha, is one of Muhly’s very favorite pieces ever (or words to that effect).*

I was especially pleased with Eve Gigliotti’s account of Kurt Weill’s “Je ne t’aime pas,” usually a hard sell for me because it’s the song I played from Stratas Sings Weill, over and over, when I was in the despairing depths of a necessarily hopeless crush on Teresa herself. Those are impossible odds for any other artist to surmount, but Gigliotti really put the number over, bless her. With Muhly at the piano, she also performed “the world’s slowest mad scene” (as he put it), one of the high points of Dark Sisters.

Mezzo Vanessa Cariddi lent her luscious timbre to two songs by Sibelius, and Michele Angelini, who will appear with the Gotham company later in the season in a revival of Mozart’s Il Sogno di Scipione, gave us a preview, with the title character’s “Di che sei l’arbitra.” Violinist Yuki Lee Numata joined Muhly (on piano) for his Honest Music and cellist Clarice Jensen for a Ravel sonata. It was, as you can see, a lively mix of repertoire, as well it should be — given the personalities of the artists and the company involved.



*NOTE: Nico Muhly used to work as an assistant to Philip Glass.

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Conspiracy! Muhly & Gotham Chamber Opera

Tomorrow night will not be the first time Nico Muhly has played piano. Here’s proof.

Tomorrow night, Gotham Chamber Opera is celebrating. Consider it a little anticipatory yelp of pleasure, prior to its tenth-anniversary season and the world premiere, next month, of Nico Muhly’s opera Dark Sisters. The scene will be New York’s chic cabaret Le Poisson Rouge (on the site of the legendary Village Vanguard), and the program features both Muhly and Gotham’s founding artistic director, Neal Goren, on piano, in song selections ranging from Purcell to Sibelius, from Mozart to some guy named … Muhly.

That wide range of periods and styles is representative of Gotham’s ten seasons, of course. It will be fun to see Goren at work (or, perhaps more accurately, to see the side of his head instead of the back of it, since he’s most often seen conducting from the pit) and I’m hoping to get to know more of Muhly’s approach not only to his own music but to that of other composers.

But I confess that much of the evening’s excitement lies in the singers. Neal Goren has introduced me to dozens of terrific young artists, beginning with Gotham’s first production, Il Sogno di Scipione, and two pretty much unforgettable sopranos, Celena Shafer and Georgia Jarman.

Tomorrow night’s lineup features tenor Michele Angelini, soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird, and mezzo- sopranos Vanessa Cariddi and Eve Gigliotti, a knockout in the preview of Dark Sisters I attended (but did not review). Clarice Jensen on cello and Yuki Lee Numata on violin will join in — and I expect I’ll be there, too.

Gotham Chamber Opera and Nico Muhly Conspire
Le Poisson Rouge
Thursday, 13 October
Doors open at 7PM, Performance at 8PM.
158 Bleecker Street
$15 seats; two-item minimum at table seats.
For tickets and information, visit the website of Le Poisson Rouge…

…And for tickets and information regarding Dark Sisters, performances beginning 9 November, click here.

Interior photographs from Le Poisson Rouge website.

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U.S. Should Emulate Germany, Cain Says, Unveiling New Plan

MANCHESTER, NH -- Praising the Federal Republic of Germany for its economic and political stability in a time of global upheaval, presidential candidate Herman Cain is urging the United States to follow the example of its European ally. During last night’s debate with rivals for the Republican nomination, Cain unveiled his new plan.

“Do we want higher taxes? Nein! Do we want higher government spending? Nein! Do we want greater federal regulation and oversight? Nein!” Cain said. “Nein, nein, nein!”

Cain, former chairman and CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, has no political experience, a plus among many Republican voters this year. At least one recent poll shows him leading the Republican challengers. Advisers have tinkered with variations on his “Nein, Nein, Nein” plan in recent weeks, including a “Just Say Nein” campaign and “Proposition? Nein!” designed to appeal to California voters.

Following last night’s debate, Cain declined to speak with reporters. “Nein, nein, nein,” he said, when asked for comment.

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Denied Euthanasia, ‘Simpsons’ Will Cling to Life through Spring 2014

A realistic, down-to-earth show … that’s completely off-the-wall and swarming with magic robots.

HOLLYWOOD -- FOX Television executives have announced that The Simpsons, Matt Groening and James L. Brooks’ landmark animated series, has been renewed for two more barrel-scraping seasons. By spring 2014, the show will have produced a total of 559 episodes which aren’t as good as they used to be.

“We are pleased that The Simpsons will continue to suck, here on FOX,” network executive Lindsey Naegle told television reporters. “We are especially proud that our team of writers, actors, and animators, among the most creative people on the planet, will be prevented from doing anything else with two soul-crushing years of their lives.”

“I‘m thrilled,” series creator Groening agreed, “that for the foreseeable future I will be doing nothing at all but bashing my head against a wall while trying to think of anything, anything, we haven’t done a million times already.” Pausing, Groening then added, “Well, I guess I’ll always find time for rolling around in a vat of money, but apart from that, really, I have no life.”

Audiences will learn more of the back-story of Poochie, a skateboarding dog with attitude, who FOX says will get “biz-zay” in 2013.

Most of the series' cast members such as Nancy Cartwright, whose mental health hasn’t been affected in the slightest after portraying a ten-year-old boy, Bart Simpson, for a quarter-century, will return, at reduced salaries, following a lengthy series of negotiations and the discovery of compromising photographs.

“Honest, the little girl promised me she was 18,” actor Dan Castellaneta, who plays patriarch Homer Simpson, as well as a variety of other characters, told police.

Naegle said FOX has big plans for the upcoming seasons.

“Here's what’s on tap for Season 24,” Naegle said, delivering a Power Point presentation. “Magic powers! Wedding after wedding after wedding! And did someone say ‘long-lost triplets?’ So join America’s favorite TV family — and a tiny green space alien named Ozmodiar that only Homer can see — on Fox this fall.”

Unable to reach an agreement with FOX, actress Yeardley Smith will no longer voice the role of whiz-kid Lisa Simpson.

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Decoding Kirkwood’s ‘Good Times, Bad Times’

The love that dare not tell its story:
Something else lurks behind it.

The gift of a book may be intended to say any of a number of things, or none at all: about the giver, about the recipient. A book may indicate share interests and like minds, or it may suggest new ideas and unexplored territories. Or it may mean next-to nothing at all: that the giver felt the need to get you something and a book was the only item handy.

I don’t know why I received a copy of James Kirkwood’s Good Times, Bad Times as a gift in 1979, my first semester at Brown. My benefactor was an older student — I’ll call him Ben — to whom I turned for guidance on matters great and small during my first year in Providence. In giving me the book, was Ben trying to communicate a message? He said he thought I’d like it — I remember that — but he didn’t say why he thought so.

The novel is, after all, a fairly lurid spin on the conventions of the prep-school coming-of-age novel. Combine the homoerotic friendship of A Separate Peace with the creepy Mr. Antolini episode in Catcher in the Rye, then spread it out over an entire novel. Toss in an element of Grand Guignol, as the book’s antagonist, the prep-school headmaster, becomes more and more unhinged — picture Edward Herrmann playing Bette Davis as Baby Jane — and what you get is pretty much Good Times, Bad Times.

What’s striking is how much energy Kirkwood’s narrator expends in denying homosexuality. Despite whatever you may think, he says again and again, there was nothing sexual in his relationship with his best friend, a wealthy, dissolute older boy with a bum ticker and an enormous penis. No, seriously. Whatever you may have heard, there was nothing “funny” going on.

In 1968, the subject matter was still taboo — and Kirkwood’s story borrows certain elements from gay pulp fiction of the period, though that stuff was mostly set in reform school, not prep school. (Thanks to my friend Brooks Peters for periodically digging up this stuff and writing about it.) The only way to talk about some things, in those days, was to insist that you weren’t talking about them, or to discuss them primarily in terms of false accusations. (Consider the film adaptation of Toys in the Attic.) And a real-life boy in those days probably would have bent over backwards to deny that he and his best friend were lovers, just as Kirkwood’s narrator does. The Stonewall riots were still a year away.

Kirkwood went on to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning book to A Chorus Line and the Mary Martin–Carol Channing vehicle Legends (which played the Shubert in Boston just before Rags did), as well as successful novels of which I know only the titles: Some Kind of Hero and P.S. Your Cat Is Dead. As his plays demonstrate, he knew something about homosexuality and about camp, and it’s interesting that the narrator of Good Times, Bad Times shares with its author certain traits, including a father who’s a movie actor. But is this story autobiographical? I have no idea.

At 18, the tender age of Kirkwood’s protagonists, I read the book with a fevered mix of excitement and embarrassment. I kept it on a shelf, in plain view (it was a gift from a friend, after all), yet I read it furtively, as if it were pornography. What if somebody were to see it and get the wrong idea about me? Didn’t the picture on the cover look a little like a certain friend of mine? Supposing he saw it and made inferences about my feelings toward him?

The book was terrifying, it was thrilling, it was exhausting. After a few years, I got rid of it: I think, though I’m not sure, that I threw it away. Because it must not be linked to me in any way.

Years later, more comfortable perhaps in my own skin, or at least tortured by different matters, I remembered Good Times, Bad Times. The boy who gave me the book is a man now, but I’ve not seen him since he graduated college, and the only news I’ve had of him has been indirect. If he remembers me at all, does he remember his motive in giving me the book? Would my asking, if I could ask, yield any answer?

Kirkwood’s narrator rhapsodizes over the importance of “finding that one special friend,” and at the time I, too, was looking for a soul-mate. Platonic, of course. It seems unlikely that Ben saw himself as my soul-mate, or that the gift of the novel was in some way a proposal of a deeper friendship.

Had he spotted something in me that he hoped to address, through another man’s prose? Did he seek to reassure or to warn me? After all, Kirkwood’s narrator is the lone survivor of the fraught triangle he describes: it’s not exactly a happy ending. Gay desire is treated as shameful, possibly even more shameful than I believed it to be when I was 18; the headmaster’s recompense is death at the hands of the boy he craves.

Was Ben trying to tell me about one of our teachers who, I have since learned, was closeted and married, like the headmaster in the story? (That teacher always behaved himself impeccably with regard to me, I hasten to add.) What, if anything, was this book supposed to mean?

Good Times, Bad Times is out of print, and as I wander among the shelves of used-book stores, I don’t find a copy; at last I resorted to ordering from an Amazon dealer, whose modest shipping fees were more expensive than the book itself.

And so I read. I found no answers at all, really, and the book, no unjustly neglected classic, seems more quaint than thrilling to my grownup eyes. The relationship between the boys, which struck me as so titillating years ago, now seems either implausible or very sad.

Here, after all, are two bright, attractive boys who share a host of interests: opera, old movies, piano bars, campy remarks and bitchy gossip. Their closeness is physical, to the point of sharing (sexlessly, of course) a bed every night, but their emotional bond is greater. It’s a love story, and so far as the book has any strength at all, it is this: depicting great love between young people. And yet we are asked to believe that theirs is merely friendship.

How sad! Or so it would be, in that alternate universe where all fiction is real truth. If the boys’ story had continued, would they have gone beyond the single kiss they exchange, one New Year’s Eve in New York? Would they have admitted their love? Or would they have continued to deny it?

Ultimately, Good Times, Bad Times is a product of its own times — just as my first reading of the book was — and I’m glad I don’t live there any more.

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Florida Study Shows Texting While Alligator Wrestling More Dangerous Than Previously Thought

WTF: Where’s That Finger?

Tallahassee, FL -- Sending text messages via telephone while wrestling an alligator is even more dangerous than previously thought, researchers at Florida State University’s Institute for Behavioral Obviousness announced today, following a two-year nationwide study.

“While it may seem like no big deal to text, just taking your eyes off the alligator or letting your mind wander for even a second can mean the difference between two hands and one hand,” said lead FSU researcher Jackson Dundee. “Sure, you tell yourself, ‘Everybody else does it, and I need to tell my wife I’m running a little late.’ But it’s going to be pretty hard to text when you’ve got no more fingers, mister.”

Statistics from the Florida State Highway show that arrests for texting while alligator wrestling reached a record high last year, up 30 percent from 2009.

ROFLMAO: Risking Ostentatious Finger Loss
Main Attraction in Orlando

“People don’t realize how time-consuming gator wrestling is,” Florida native Cletus Spuckler said. He has been wrestling alligators since the age of five, he said, and he finds on-the-job texting a necessary risk. “Sometimes you can’t take a break, and you have to get in contact with somebody on an urgent basis. Or maybe you just want to order Chinese. What are you gonna do?”

FSU researchers surveyed a random sampling of 4,381 alligator wrestlers in 39 states, comparing results with emergency rooms nationwide. While safety experts have long warned against the presumed dangers of texting while wrestling, “Now when people ask us, we’ve got something to point to,” said Sarah Griffin of the Florida Safety Council. “That is, those of us who can still point.”

The study’s surprising conclusion has attracted attention already. “It seems there is no longer any situation in which Americans consider it inappropriate or inadvisable to send text messages,” said Dr. James Hook, a behavioral scientist at Balliol Junior College in Oxford, FL.

“Schoolchildren do it in the classroom. Employed people do it on the job,” Hook continued. “You’re doing it right now, while you’re trying to interview me. Put that thing down!”

Despite the warnings, many alligator wrestlers say they are likely to continue to send text messages while at work.

“I’m an adult in a free country, I know the risks, and I know what I’m doing,” Spuckler said. “I mean, it’s not like I’m texting while driving. You’d have to be crazy to do a fool thing like that.”

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