The Berkshire Review Artsblog

[Ed’s note. J. R. R. Tolkien detested movies, and he didn’t know what pop culture was, beyond perhaps Ivor Novello and the music hall. He would have been perfectly aghast to learn that he and his Lord of the Rings trilogy would become the most extreme sort of Hollywood epic and that he himself was destined to become a not only a pop culture icon, but a New Age guru as well. Even when I first learned about Lord of the Rings back in the 1960’s, it was as an esoteric highbrow indulgence. Today Huntley Dent is able to rank him securely among the pop heroes, contrasting him with Eliot. Thinking of Cats, one could say that Tom Eliot beat him to it, but somehow he did not retain the same authorial aura over the show with nine lives.] 

A sense of an ending. I didn’t go to the Drury Lane production of The Lord of the Rings solely to be the oldest person on the premises besides Gandalf the Grey. I went to revisit a certain wistfulness that Tolkien felt and imparted to his readers. The blockbuster movie trilogy missed it, and sadly, so does this hypertrophic, noisy musical, which expressed about as much elegiac regret as P. Diddy. I read the books on an extended spiritual retreat twenty years ago. (In between chapters I vacuumed floors, washed pots, and meditated for hours.) Anyone with a smidgeon of English lit recognizes the fingers of Dickens and Shakespeare on Tolkien’s pages, the hobbits being furry children of Sam Weller and the Pickwick Club, while Gandalf abjures his magic with Prospero cueing him from the wings.

The trilogy is infused with regret over the passing of pastoral England — the arch villain Sauron might as well be the owner of Blake’s dark satanic mills. The author came legitimately to his sense of a lost Anglo-Eden. With forebears who emigrated from Saxony in the 18th century, and who “quickly and intensely became English,” according to a biographical sketch, Tolkien himself was a Victorian until the age of nine and lived into the era of Nixon, Vietnam, and the moon landing. Not that Victoria’s was a pastoral age, but Tolkien saw the world from a dreaming Oxford tower where he procured a professorship in Anglo-Saxon, and like D.H. Lawrence, who once declared that he could see tragedy in the side of a cow, the Ring master saw it in rampant modernization and two world wars, with immeasurably greater reason. 

For years those of us who grew up in the shadow of the H-bomb viewed TV newsreels of every WW II battle in the Pacific and Europe. It was like having a back-row seat to universal catastrophe. We were also the ones who took up Tolkien en masse, sharing his wistful doom scenario, which was comforting in its gentleness. Shorn of only a finger after he hurls the ring into the cauldron of evil, Frodo sails off to a mythic green land in the postlude, leaving Middle Earth to the new race of humans who have no need for magic. Tolkien was never acknowledged by his peers as a serious writer and was finally awarded an O.B.E. just a year before he died (in certain circles it’s not done to write the most widely read book of the twentieth century). 

The West End show hasn’t had a kind fate. The reviews appreciated its stupendous stage machinations, depicting Orcs, Mount Doom, Ents, and other memorable artefacts from the novels. A great many short actors inhabited the shire. The young audience loved everything, but the production somehow lost its lease and will disappear this week, perhaps to be reincarnated on a smaller scale in the fall. As it stands, most of what goes on is past tense already. The singing recalls the shrieking, vibrato-less style of Evita, tinged with Celtic and (oddly) Moroccan flavors. The kinetic stage takes the battle scenes from Les Mis and injects them with performance enhancing drugs. As you’d imagine, in the midst of volley and thunder the performances were diminished instead. Even the hobbits were leather-lunged. Yet for sheer visual ingenuity, this LOTR deserves an award – we even got Cirque du Soleil acrobats hanging from jungle vines and a Gollum who writhed in a twisty semi-epileptic manner that only a modern dancer could have mastered (he entered climbing down the stage curtain from the flies). The music was minimal, however. My seat mate said it was like a Christmas panto, only with giant spiders.

But I’m not here to mock. Tolkien thought he was nearing the end of the world, but he was only a marker on the road. The world went on its zigzag way. To his generation, I would be an ignoramus because my Latin is sketchy and my Greek nil. To me, this generation seems like ignoramuses because more people recognize Joe Camel than Joseph Stalin, much less Conrad. That’s not the point. The two world wars did mark a seismic shift that I might typify this way: Newton said that he stood on the shoulder of giants (a phrase borrowed from Bernard of Chartres), but we seem to stand on the rubble of giants. The Lord of the Rings is to pop culture what The Wasteland is to educated culture.

Remember the U. N.? UNESCO, anyone? While lower Manhattan appears to have become the playground of incompetents, real estate manipulators, and egomaniacial poseurs, they have sponsored an amiable world tour of painted bears, one more variant of a popular shtick in public art, but one which seems, if you examine Joanna Gabler’s photographs, to have provided a fair share of fun, comfort, and instruction for the citizens of Warsaw. Lucas Miller’s latest post in his coverage of the Edinburgh International Film Festival is his review of Errol Morris’Standard Operating Procedure, which deserves our full attention.

So far, this Fourth of July message hasn’t offered much to get one out into the streets singing “You’re a grand old flag,” but there is hope yet. Ronan Noone’s The Atheistshows that the spirit of those grand old Americans Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain lives! Earlier today, July 5, it warmed my heart to see two or three Americans stomp out of the theater, one of them contentiously asking for his money back at the ticket office—a telling sign that the WTF is doing good work this summer. Of course Bierce and Twain, especially the dark side of Twain, are as American as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. I am only concerned that the play may give some people the wrong idea about atheists and journalists—some people, I mean, those who aren’t really paying attention, and of course most people don’t. We must cherish our atheists. In this country as in the Middle East, both good atheists are as urgently needed as good journalists. In fact, some of the most moral people I’ve known are atheists or agnostics. They have to go it alone, you know.

It is hard to see The Atheist without thinking of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (available in the Criterion Collection) a long-neglected masterpiece whose time has come. And who can watch the manipulations of the cynical journalist Chuck Tatum without thinking of the Bush administration’s falsification of evidence in pushing the country into war in Iraq, the absurd rainbow of security alerts to engender fear and keep it alive, and a host of other deceptions?

As frustrated as we are with the state to which the Bush administration has brought us, none of us have forgotten the greatness of what is in danger of becoming more of a tradition than a reality, dare I say, a myth? Why don’t we celebrate the national holiday with a reading of the Constitution before we light up the grill and break out the Bud Light?

Les Troyens is so widely accepted as Berlioz’s greatest work, that the progress of the Berlioz Renaissance is punctuated by performances of it in the opera house and in concert, beginning, arguably, with Sir Thomas Beecham’s moderately abridged 1947 BBC broadcast. Now Boston music-lovers may consider the Berlioz Renaissance to be something of a noble fiction, since his music has had its own secure place in the Boston Symphony repertoire for many years, maturing with Charles Munch’s arrival in 1949. During his tenure he and the BSO performed and recorded several of Berlioz’s most important works, and the recordings are still considered among the best. Later, both Jean Martinon and Seiji Ozawa continued the tradition most capably, and Berlioz has been one of James Levine’s great enthusiasms since early in his career. Expertise in Berlioz seems to be a prerequisite for the job. Yet, this is the first complete performance of Les Troyens by the foremost Berlioz orchestra in America, which in the past has only played brief excerpts, above all the “Royal Hunt and Storm” from Act IV. Hence these concert performances of Parts I and II on following weeks, culminating in a complete performance on Sunday May 4, are in fact landmarks. To read the rest of the review, click here.

…and now I have several items of bad news to report. Absorbed in the intricacies of first-year Latin and stunned by the Karajan Renaissance, I missed a few weeks of music world news. It seems to happen in the spring, whether it is in Atlanta or Minneapolis. Cutting costs right and left, managers in the traditional print media have been busy firing critics once again. Last May the Atlanta Journal-Constitution cut back on arts reviews and eliminated its specifically assigned arts reviewers, the Minneapolis Star Tribune eliminated the position of full-time classical music critic, and New York Magazine fired its illustrious music critic Peter G. Davis. This year it’s the Seattle Times, the LA Weekly, and the New York Times, which ran an article last June about the casualties of the previous spring after the news had done the rounds of various professional journals and blogs, some of which printed letters of protest. This year the toll is even more serious, but so far there hasn’t been much response outside of Musical America and the Music Critics Association of North America Web site. (Click here for their compilation of reports and letters., and here for my own comments, reposted on the Artsblog.) And this year, I doubt we can look forward to an article in the New York Times.

In mid-April the Seattle Times, as part of a downsizing of 200 staffers, bought out Melinda Bargreen, who has been on the staff for 31 years. Her position is considered expendable by the management and will not be filled. (Click here for her farewell article.) Around the same time, LA Weekly, a subsidiary of the troubled Village Voice Media, eliminated the position Alan Rich, 83, who has written a highly regarded column, “A Lot of Night Music,” for the past 16 years, terminating its regular classical music coverage. (Click here for his parting shots.) Just before that the Voice itself had laid off its film critic, Nathan Lee, as well as its dance critic of forty years, Deborah Jowitt. As Susan Elliot has reported in Musical America (May 13, 2008), The New York Times has been seeking to eliminate 100 employees from its newsroom of around 1330 through attrition and buy-outs, and in the course of this senior music critic Bernard Holland, Jennifer Dunning, dance critic, Diane Nottle, deputy editor for classical music and dance, Gwen Smith, assignments coordinator for dance and art, and Lawrence Van Gelder, senior editor, are going, leaving the paper with one full-time dance critic, two full-time music critics, as well as James R. Oestreich, editor of classical music and dance, and a couple of free-lancers. This is dire news indeed, since the New York Times has had such a preeminent reputation for its arts coverage, although it has perhaps been out-performed by the Wall Street Journal and other financial newspapers in recent years.

Alan Rich, for example, has already taken up a position at Bloomberg. (He will also maintain his own site, So I’ve Heard.) One could say that along with an undeniable shrinkage in arts journalism (Columbia closed its national program in 1995.), there has been a shifting of the remaining resources away from the dailies to more specialized publications. While the Financial Times has maintained especially distinguished coverage of the arts for some years, other publications, like Bloomberg, Fortune, and Forbes have found glamour in it as a complement to restaurant reviews, articles on expensive travel, and art and antiques. New York Magazine after firing Peter G. Davis is left with no classical music content worth mentioning. Online media—blogs and magazines like the Berkshire Review for the Arts—now provide a wealth or reviews, commentaries, and resources, unrestricted by the necessarily secondary position of the arts in daily newspapers. The appointment of a music director like Alan Gilbert or the Met’s Tristan agonies must yield to former governor Spitzer’s exciting lifestyle or the latest progress in the Middle East, although Riccardo Muti, in his recent appointment as music director of the Chicago Symphony did not fare too badly. As the Internet further undercuts the viability of the print media, arts coverage of all kinds and qualities flourishes. Most revealing of all is the way in which Alex Ross, music critic of the New Yorker—a position as solid as any in journalism—supports both his magazine reviews and his recent, very well received book, The Rest is Noise, with a blog of the same title.

It must also be said that the Web sites of the arts institutions themselves provide more and more information for the public, whether through season schedules, educational programs or other programs (although hardly objective reviews), and local resources like Cultural Pittsfield and greylocknews provide valuable services, to name only local examples.

You might think that an online journalist might derive some satisfaction from the success of his medium. That is not the case, however. I’m worried. As I stated in the article I wrote about the subject last year, classical concerts, opera, theater, dance performances and the rest all have a traditional and perennially valid place in the context of the daily local news. Whether it is New York, Atlanta, or Pittsfield, Massachusetts, cultural events remain a vital part of the daily life of the city, and an informed critical voice belongs on the pages of daily newspapers as long as they continue to survive, which may not be long.

When a “regular” disappears for a while, one always wonders… At Berkshire Fine Arts we don’t bother with markers for vacations or the like. It serves no purpose anyway. When I read “Paul Krugman is on vacation.” in the New York Times, I still worry.

In fact, I took an informal sabbatical to finish a lingering translation project. I wish I could say that I was writing a book or protesting against one of the seemingly endless procession of abuses in the world, but I was simply working.

In the face of world events and dwindling resources for keeping informed about them, the world of classical music may strike many as somewhat rarified, if not trivial. Even the Dixie Chicks succeeded in making a political statement, which is somewhat rare in classical music, on the whole. The doctrinal triviality of post-modernism has pushed aside works of the earnestness and power of, say, Luigi Nono’s protest-piece against the Vietnam War, Como una Ola de Fuerza y Luz. However, in statements like these I run the risk of simplistic self-righteousness, and, with a reference to my two recent Fidelio reviews (Levine/BSO; Davis/LSO) on the anything but simple question of politics and music, I’ll turn to something closer to home.

There have been protests among music critics and musicians over the past few weeks. Unfortunately I found it necessary to cancel my planned visit to annual meeting of the Music Critics’ Association of North America and missed the opportunity to engage directly in anxious discussions of the latest bad news in our small world, but I did receive an e-mail from the meeting about a disturbing rash of “redundancies” in our field, that is the firing of an individual as well as the elimination of positions. The news was covered in the New York Times, but earlier, and with greater urgency on Henry Fogel’s blog, “on the record,” under “Trouble in Atlanta,” “A bad trend that seems to be gathering momentum with the speed of light…” and “Wonderful News from Atlanta,” as well as New Yorker critic Alex Ross’ blog, the Rest is Noise. (Search for Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Peter G. Davis on the blog. One of the healthy signs in the sea-change we are undergoing is the fact that Mr. Ross writes both for the New Yorker and as a blogger.) I recommend you read these entries to capture these events in detail and to take in the range of opinions, both from concertgoers and from professionals of various sorts.

Atlanta, Minneapolis, and, obviously, New York all rank highly among American cities for the richness of their musical life. All have distinguished symphony orchestras. (The Minnesota Orchestra in particular, under its music director, Osmo Vänskä, is pursuing a remarkably active recording schedule on the Swedish BIS label, and many of its discs have been highly praised in the press.) New York Magazine has fired Peter G. Davis, one of the most highly respected critics in the field, who has been on the staff for 26 years. A spokesperson for the magazine, Serena Torrey, refused to say whether he would be replaced, but stating that “We will continue to cover classical music in a robust way.” It has, however, been noted that New York Magazine has cut back considerably on classical music coverage in recent years, as Mr. Davis himself has pointed out.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has eliminated the position of full-time classical music critic, Michael Anthony, although, as Mr. Anthony says, “The audiences are large and fervent, and moreover they’re readers. I don’t think the management knows a lot about local culture, and that’s one of the reasons they cut the job.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also eliminated the position of full-time music critic, Pierre Ruhe as part of a staff reorganization, then, faced with vigorous protests, rehired him as one of two “reporter-critics.” Hank Klibanoff, Managing Editor for Enterprise at the paper explained the manoeuvre as a seemingly Byzantine, but democratic reorganization procedure, which was largely misunderstood or misinterpreted in the media. His lengthy replies to criticism from outraged concertgoers, musicians, and critics are quoted by both Mr. Fogel and Mr. Ross.

As traditional printed news media fade away, we feel the loss of a vital resource, as people’s knowledge and memory of vital events and trends dwindle. Whatever their corporate managers say, trained professional reporters and commentators held to professional standards, present on site and able to ask questions of participants and witnesses are irreplaceable. However, it isn’t hard to understand what is at stake, when one has to make a choice between a local classical music critic and, say, a correspondent in Beijing or Paris, not that there are that many of them left. Without digressing too far into the complex question of the inevitability of a transition into electronic media and the necessity of maintaining professional standards and of creating and economic base to pay a living wage to the trained professionals who can maintain those standards. While there is a certain appeal to the idea of the public taking information and opinion into their own hands, and the news media have suffered greatly in recent years from internal scandals and government censorship and propaganda, it is clear enough that the threat to professional news media is one of the more serious threats to the personal liberties and rights we have come to take for granted in post-enlightenment history. Few of us have the time or expertise to sift through the hundreds of plausible crackpots and egomaniacs who abound on the Internet today. A term like the “fourth estate” and the concepts which cluster around it imply an integral place in the structure of society. Its disappearance would require the replacement of the entire socio-political model.

Classical music reviews belong in newspapers, because classical concerts, whether we are talking about Manhattan or Pittsfield, are events in the community, just as much as a basketball game or a murder. If, say, Garrick Ohlsson makes a periodic visit to a particular community with an All-Beethoven program or a new piece he has commissioned, it is an event significant within the context of that community, and, as such it is significant not only for the community itself, but for the Garrick Ohlsson and all his colleagues as well, even musicians who “never read reviews.” Still it is community news which belongs in the local newspapers, whether it is the New York Times, the Post, New York Magazine, or the Berkshire Eagle. Criticism, apart from providing a public record of an artistic event, also has an educative role, as we join in with program annotators and music educators within performing institutions in attempting to form the next generation of music lovers. Audience education is as vital after the performance as before, since we are preparing the audience for its next experience of a work in the future. A return to established texts is as much a part of classical music as that fully-conscious listening, a balance of intellect and feeling, which doesn’t sprout immediately into a person’s head at his or her first concert.

Since this site is dedicated to the arts, and our online format allows us to write in some depth, our mission is quite different. However, since the arts are an especially important part of our community life and our economy here in the Berkshires, a review in an informally specialized, but free-ranging publication like this one has a commensurately broader significance for the community. While this site is not in any way a blog, we belong to the host of online publications whose editorial standards and priorities are pretty much like those of similar print publications. Hence, I write this from outside the world of daily newspapers, but from a point of view very close to it. Blogs and online magazines like this one cannot replace the arts coverage of the dailies, and we have no ambition to do so. The loss of an informed critic on the Minneapolis Star-Tribune or an internationally respected voice like Peter G. Davis is as much of a loss to us as it is to their readership and to the world of music.

[For the May 18, 2008 posting on this subject, click here.]

For many years Norman Lebrecht has managed to maintain an entirely undeserved amount of attention as the Thersites of the music world, the coarse, obtuse outsider, who doesn’t get the point of the war. Polemics can make almost anything interesting, even Mr. Lebrecht’s warped view of classical music. After letting him sour my existence a few times, I found I was beginning to get bored, and I stopped reading his tirades. In some ways the world of classical music may show a certain fragility that was not apparent a generation ago, but things are not as bad as some people believe. The growth of new institutions, festivals, music schools, etc., and the emergence of immensely gifted young artists like Benjamin Moser, Viviane Hagner, Yevgeny Sudkin, and Jeremy Denk, to name only a few, favors optimism. We should ask ourselves rather why we relish the doom and gloom of writers like Lebrecht and Teachout, as if it were more fun to be sick than healthy, or to cultivate enemies instead of friends. Yes, invective can make a laundry list exciting, but there must be some focused, intelligent judgement and integrity to support it.

When a respected friend sent me a recent article of Lebrecht’s from the Independent I felt I had to read it, and when I saw that his target was Herbert von Karajan, whose centenary is being celebrated this year with re-releases of selected DVDs and CDs, I read on with enthusiasm, thinking that this might finally be a topic on which Lebrecht and I might agree. And if Norman Lebrecht is the Thersites of the classical music world, Karajan must surely be its Agamemnon—far from the most valiant warrior and hardly an Odysseus in intelligence, he knew how to hang on to his edge right up until his final bath. Not that Karajan died a violent death, just a heart attack while working at full tilt at his Alpine retreat.

My first memory of Karajan goes back to his set of Beethoven symphonies for Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft, released in 1962 or 1963. As a very young person, I think it was my first complete set of that basic item. At that time many of DGG’s recordings were only available in the United States as special imports. In New York one had to go to shops like Discophile or to the German importers that used to line East 86th Street to find them. But this set was considered so important by the more informed and plentiful record buyers of that time, that here was something that could be sold profitably in any record store. This surely must have been one of the issues which transformed DGG from an occasional licenser of material to American companies (primarily American Decca) into an international label which exported its own pressings. This Beethoven set was the watershed for Karajan’s world-wide ascendancy, but also the beginning of his decline into the figure which Lebrecht depicts in his caricatural fashion.

Karajan transformed himself from the imaginative and energetic conductor of the fifties into the magisterial authority of the sixties through the eighties. Whether everyone believed it or not, he pretended to set a standard by making himself ubiquitous through his tours with the Berlin Philharmonic and his recordings. His “packaging” became slicker along with his interpretations. The lovely balanced, but clear sound of those 1962 Beethoven symphonies—surely a technological benchmark at the time, along with Mercury’s “Living Presence” recordings and RCA’s “Living Stereo,” which are still highly esteemed today—developed into a more homogenized sound, the “Karajan sound,” which was the most obvious characteristic of his work. There was a luxuriant softness of ensemble, but still precise, with a predominant lush string sound, through which winds added discrete, but rich touches of color. The tempi flowed, but not rigidly. Melodic line, texture, and color, some thought, where in perfect balance. Early on, not so much detail was sacrificed to this polished surface, but soon enough it dissolved into what seemed to be mere poshness. By the early seventies, I and many others had grown tired of it, and Karajan himself seemed to have grown bored with the core classics, the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and the like, delivering slick, mindless run-throughs on his tours, and I stopped going to them. However, he also branched out into new territory, and there is no denying that he found material that excited his interest.

It may be that Karajan created a caricature of himself in focusing on the qualities which “branded” him, but he did have genuine musical gifts which make some of his work valuable today, as vulgar as his ambitions were. The principle of these is his understanding of compositional structure, which is amply apparent in his early Beethoven recordings and probably his late ones as well, but which, in their time, was truly impressive when he approached Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, Shostakovich, and the Second Viennese School. Of his recordings these are the most interesting, even today, and his set of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern was in its time a most welcome alternative to what had been previously available. Since then Boulez, Dohnanyi, Eötvös and others have gone further with this repertory, but Karajan’s only modestly Procrustean musicality in this repertoire is still to be valued, just as there is a great deal to be learned from his recordings of the Ring Cycle, as smoothed-out as it is. On the other hand, am I that much attracted to it? Do I make much effort to revisit them? No, not at all. Today I’m more interested in the likes of Thierry Fischer, Pappano or Elder, and if I look back it will be to Furtwängler, Walter, Klemperer, or, in Karajan’s generation, Jochum or Fricsay. And there’s a whole middle generation in its maturity which needs none of Karajan’s hype to communicate with us: that of Colin Davis, Charles Mackerras, and Claudio Abbado. If you listen to one of Karajan’s old recordings after hearing them, you are immediately aware of his pretensions and affectations. It’s true that his work of the 1950’s was better. If you want to hear Karajan at his best, dig up his 1950 Meistersinger from Bayreuth, his Vienna Carmen from 1954 or his famous St. Matthew Passion of 1950. And there are some splendid recordings from his later years, like his great Shostakovich Symphony No. 10. At one time Karajan helped some of us to understand Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, but do we need him today? No, not really.

In his conclusion Lebrecht said, “For music lovers, there is not much to celebrate. Once the centenary is over, we will drop the curtain once and for all on a discreditable life that yielded no fresh thought and upheld no worthwhile human value. Karajan is dead. Music is much better off without him.” Instinctually, I felt like cheering for the old sourpuss, that is, Lebrecht. I’ve tried to point out some of Karajan’s virtues, which are by no means unique. His work should, I think, shrink down to size as an exploitative, commercialized secondary plot in the history of performance, while Furtwängler and Boulez will always remain essential—both composers. As Lebrecht observes, Karajan’s suppression of other conductors, especially in connection with the BPO, was well-known. On the other hands, we can hardly complain about the recorded legacy of the major conductors during Karajan’s peak years of influence, Giulini, Jochum, Böhm, and Fricsay, for example, and access to the podium of any major orchestra is fraught with political problems. Music directors and principle conductors have not been noted for their collegiality.

Perhaps because of Karajan’s detestable political sympathies during the Third Reich we may be inclined to connect his authoritarianism with Hitler’s. On the contrary we should look to the western, democratic world for that. Toscanini, who made himself at home there early, astounded audiences with his forceful, driving performances and his colleagues with the extraordinary fees he could command. Toscanini’s influence on the musical world from the 1920’s onwards was incomparable. Karajan derived his particular sound from Furtwängler’s, which was deeply ingrained in the Berlin Philharmonic in any case. While Karajan may have wanted to bury Furtwängler under ground, he wanted to make Toscanini’s stardom and earning power his own. He succeeded, although, if you compare the recorded legacy, that his talents were but a shadow of Toscanini’s, as they were of Furtwängler’s. Yes, Lebrecht is right to blame him for his influence on performance style and the politics of music. He points out that Karajan made the Salzburg Festival a resort for the rich and powerful, and I have no doubt that Karajan heightened this unfortunate and inartistic trend. On the other hand, I doubt that Salzburg was ever a terribly democratic institution, unlike its imitator, the Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood.

We Americans should be grateful that we have weaned ourselves from Toscanini, as popular as his old recordings remain, and with reason. It’s not easy to sell recordings of any kind today, even Nicola Benedetti or Hilary Hahn. We can’t blame Deutsche Grammophon for trying to capitalize on recycled product. But I’d never use such a vile expression for Klemperer, Rudolph Serkin, Schnabel, Furtwängler, Myra Hess, Walter, or any of the other grand old hands.

Yes, dammit, Norman, you’re right about Karajan, and you’re right about those meaningless musical awards presented to musicians who are so well known they don’t need them. My premise is that classical music is healthier than you say, and if it is, it can surely bear some scrutiny, especially in its weakest area, commercial classical recordings. Deutsche Grammophon have done a fairly decent job of selecting and packaging the work of the major artists of their halcyon days. Their “Original Masters” retrospective boxes of Furtwängler, Fricsay, Kempff, Jochum, Schneiderhan, the Amadeus Quartet, even the young Karajan are exemplary, and even the Karajan centenary crop includes a solid 10-disc survey, Herbert von Karajan, Master Recordings, along with various fluff products, “deluxe limited editions,” combining disiecta membra of various sorts on CD and DVD, indiscriminate hodge-podges of Italian opera overtures, movements from ballets, concertos and symphonies, all thrown together. If this is the only way classical music can be made accessible—sorry, marketed—to new listeners, these are truly sad times.

Many art dealers and some curators find any number of artworks randomly passing under their noses in endless variety on an almost daily basis. One can go from a putative Michelangelo to a catalogue of the work of some obscure short-lived Soviet abstractionist to, for example, a certain Ohio artist, who dresses like Abraham Lincoln and produces landscapes with magic markers in fast food restaurants, to a collection of Elvis music box liquor decanters without a pause to catch one’s breath. Such experience should, one would think, give one an infinite curiosity about human image-making, and a burning desire to uncover the secrets of any artifact that might come one’s way. Such is not the case, however. Even the most receptive among us are apt to let something go by, perhaps that modern Piranesi impression one has inherited or an attractive, but decidedly minor oil of boats in Provincetown harbor one has bought for a song in a flea market. These can liven up any back corridor or populate the attic unexamined. Then, there is Ebay…

The more conscientious among us may feel a twinge of guilt every now and then, but there is always something more pressing: the solid little mannerist thing that can turn a profit or make a reputation, or the good, but faded Matisse a collector is yearning to donate or sell. The recent review of the Café des Artistes taught me a good deal about Howard Chandler Christy, the author of the delightful murals which decorate the restaurant, but not enough, at least at first. I’ve seen them and enjoyed them periodically over the years without feeling the urge to know more about Christy. In the review, I confess, I wrote about them unthinkingly from the point of view of a grad student in the days when connoisseurship was still a major part of the curriculum, and Jakob Rosenberg’s ghost still held his nose high, even if Bernard Berenson had grown a trifle seedy. Not all of our faculties evolve apace. While Ian Woodner’s coterie might avidly pick over Watteau attributions or the Dürer-Hofmann controversy, there are collectors, dealers, and a few scholars who take American illustrators with the utmost seriousness. While Christy’s taste may seem questionable to a specialist on Perino del Vaga, it is taken for granted in Christy’s own specialized field, where his better work fetches serious prices. Today, only Norman Rockwell has emerged from that specialized corner of appreciation. Gibson, Leyendecker, and Christy have yet to be recognized as “serious” artists. (Does Rockwell owe his new respectability to gender studies or to pop culture, or to something else all together?) We are now invited to view his homely everyday scenes, like the famous barbershop or “Freedom from Want” (Thanksgiving) dinner in the same light as the Sistine Chapel or The Execution of Maximlian, while Christy’s palette still inspires a wry smile and his joyful gospel of the feminine may even be considered offensive in certain quarters. (It is interesting to compare our contemporary pruderies with those of 1935, when Christy’s nudes in the Café would have been unprintable in a mainstream magazine.)

I read more about Christy and pondered. I made revisions to my review, all with a mind to better fairness towards this once-famous illustrator, portraitist, and history-painter, who is, once one gets to know him, quite an appealing figure. I changed the phrase bad art to “bad art,” a more radical revisionist gesture than it might seem. Without the qualification of quotation marks the concept would seem to indicate a category of art which is intrinsically bad and therefore excluded from the confines of good art, which is intrinsically good. Over the past quarter-century, since the days when Ian Woodner summoned the art historians to his table at the Café des Artistes, the perimeter around “good art” has long lost its bastion-like solidity, and, growing increasingly porous, has virtually disappeared. In this way relativism approaches aesthetic agnosticism or even nihilism. One can cling to the old standards, of course, even crusade for them, like the worthies of The New Criterion and the New York Academy of Art; but at the very least, one comes away from such stuff with a hollow feeling, as if these champions of disegno have left a part of their job undone, and something important at that. Some twenty-five years ago there was a major Gustav Klimt exhibition in the Pinacoteca Capitolina in Rome. In it some mischievous curator (or subversive, if you have to be so pretentious) placed, facing Guido Reni’s Anima Beata, a ferocious self-portrait, in which he is engaged in anguished self-abuse. Both works have seen service as bad art (without quotation marks), the Klimt among National Socialists and the people Klimt intended to shock and the Guido among a more general demographic. At the time of the exhibition, as today, Klimt would attract more attention than Guido among any group except perhaps the most obsessive Bolognese specialists, and his work certainly fetches more on the market. Hence, as rewarding as the experience of a drawing by Pisanello, Pontormo, or Cézanne may be for me, I am prepared to admit that a construction of plastic toys like Maya, the masterpiece of Norman Rockwell’s son Jarvis (in which he subverted his father’s co-option of quality through painterly skill by assembling ready-made plastic toys), or a found photograph framed by a toilet seat may be more compelling than an unsuccessful and faded drawing by Claude Lorrain…but a Pontormo? Never!

Hence, certain aspects of Christy’s art seem outmoded today, or ridiculous, like his allegory of the Salvation Army, or disturbing or repulsive, like the World War I recruitment posters, although he brings a certain innocence and exuberance even to them. There could be nothing more bound to its time than the sensibility behind the “Christy Girls.” I have no doubt that many Christy collectors are fueled by nostalgia and that nostalgia is thoroughly suspect as an aesthetic principle. Still, Christy’s vitality is infectious and his naive glorification of pleasure is refreshing. Perhaps it should be a lesson to us all, especially in the Café des Artistes, where he not only left his most sincere and personal work, but shared his last meal with his beloved daughter.

Nothing could be a more poignant reminder to ask ourselves, when we contemplate a work of art, whether we really like it and why. Because for it to be good, somebody has to have liked it at some time or another.

Am I too cynical? On some days, perhaps. Any tendency in that direction vanished a few weeks ago, when I spent an afternoon in the Metropolitan Museum’s splendid exhibition, Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions. There, as I made my way through this rich survey of Poussin’s landscapes, I felt no inclination to bark or growl at our contemporary glut of miscellaneous imagery, as I immersed myself in Poussin’s grand harmonies of design and mythological allusion. There is such a maturity of understanding even in Poussin’s earliest works that almost anything else I’ve mentioned here seem like a case of arrested development. He was 31 or 32 when he painted this Landscape with a Nymph and Sleeping Satyr (Musée Fabre):

This is good art.

A full review of the Poussin exhibition will appear soon. Meanwhile I can alert you to the upcoming exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Over the Top: The Illustrated Posters of World War I, November 8, 2008 through January 25, 2009, featuring not only the work of Christy, but that of J.C. Leyendecker, James Montgomery Flagg, Jessie Willcox Smith, and Henry Raleigh.

And my apologies to The Museum of Bad Art. Their work is important and I value it, but that is yet another category of BAD ART!

If you go to church this Christmas, you will very likely hear, either as a passing remark, or even as the topic of the sermon, some lament about how secularized, commercialized, bland, and ultimately faceless the season has become. News announcers hover over the pulse of the retail sector like a doctor in an old movie, and note the undue attention presidential candidates are now claiming from an harrassed public (who would presumably rather get on with their shopping) with survey-generated principles, sniping at rivals, and tasteless (I mean really awful!) messages pandering to Christmas sentiment, as each strives to show he or she is the Best Christian. Two American shibboleths are now colliding—the general practice of watering traditional customs down to the point that no sect can take offence and the apparently vital need of Americans to have a devout Christian as the chief executive of their government. Whether for you this day means the Nativity of Jesus Christ, a jolly Saturnalia, a solar festival, or an excuse to clear out for Barbados, it naturally conveys a sense of closure and new beginnings, and it is customary to include a moment of reflection in the celebrations…no, the spirit of Christmas is a dangerous topic, I think, and I shall leave it to the professionals, saying simply that I find it an especially beautiful festival which atavistically puts us in mind of beliefs and rituals extending far back into the distant past, far beyond Tiberius or Augustus.

I had hoped to celebrate the season with reviews of two excellent recent recordings of Handel’s Messiah, but circumstances made this impossible. Messiah properly belongs to Holy Week in any case. (A scriptural oratorio of the sort could escape the seasonal ban on theatrical entertainments which prevailed at the time.) What’s more, many people may have had their Messiah already at one of the excellent performances in Boston or New York, or Hanover, New Hampshire, where The Handel Society of Dartmouth College just celebrated its bicentennial with a performance of Messiah under Helmut Rilling. In any case the 2006 recording by the Dunedin Consort under John Butt and the London Symphony Orchestra’s 2007 release under Sir Colin Davis, each very different from the other, are both at the top of their categories, and are absolute musts for any musical person. (Look for a full review soon, certainly in time for Holy Week!) In fact, Sir Colin and the LSO have been busy with Christmas recordings: this year they have also released Berlioz’ L’Enfance du Christ, another recording I recommend highly. (Availlable together with Messiah and Haitnk’s excellent Beethoven Symphonies as a special Christmas offer.) If you enjoy the now almost unheard-of luxury of being able to go out to a record store and buying them, by all means do so. Otherwise the SACD/CD hybrid discs are available for purchase in the Berkshire Bookshop. For that matter, all can be downloaded from the LSO Live (more precisely iTunes Plus) or Linn Records sites. Whilst the LSO downloads are slightly compressed, Linn Records, one of the top audiophile labels, offers both CD quality downloads as well as uncompressed duplicates of the studio master, pretty much the very best digital reproduction possible.

But before we all sink into the warm atavism of Christmas for whatever few days or weeks our work will permit us, we should think of another atavism which haunts American society rather more than most others: capital punishment. The one demographic the presidential candidates feel free to offend—the leading ones, at any rate—are prisoners on death row, who of course can’t vote. A recent editorial in the New York Times observed that two significant advances towards the abolition of this obsolete, barbarous punishment aroused only feeble attention in the United States.

First the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution for a global moratorium of the death penalty 104 to 54. This nonbinding resolution is basically symbolic, but it is the first to pass the General Assembly and is therefore historic and a potent symbol marking a step towards a future without the death penalty. The shame is that the United States, as one can only expect, voted against the resolution, joining itself with Myanmar, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, Iran, China, Pakistan, Sudan and Iraq.

Second, Governor Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey signed into law a bill abolishing the death penalty in that state, the first such bill to be passed since the Supreme Court allowed its resumption in 1976. Of course this is good news, and important, even though the state of New Jersey has not carried out an execution since 1963. With the Supreme Court considering the legality of lethal injection, it is a sign that the death penalty may be on its way out in the United States, a country where it certainly has no place, whatever its supporters may say.

Of course the death penalty has many supporters. An NPR interviewer asked the sponsor of the bill, New Jersey State Sen. Ray Lesniak, whether he had considered the consequences of his action, considering that opposing the death penalty was certainly “no vote-getter.” He answered that it was a matter of conscience for him, and that he believed he had to go through with it and deal with the consequences later. Lesniak said, implying that his support for the death penalty in 1982 was a political expedient, “I had a spiritual conversion to a belief that centers on the release of anger, resentment and the need for revenge. Relieved of those emotions, I was able to conclude that governments should not be deciding who should live and who should die, and that justice is served by replacing the death penalty with life without parole.” This statement is interesting, because it reflects an inner change in the Senator’s moral consciousness and suggests that the unacceptability of capital punishment is a truth best known by the heart, although there are many rational arguments against it as well, for example those cited on the site of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty. For a properly antiseptic discussion visit NPR’s interview with two academic experts from both sides of the issue. If you put this together with what has recently been said about what constitutes torture, you will get an idea, I suppose, of contemporary ethics, or at least one unedifying aspect of it.

This, I believe, takes us closer to the core of the issue than the hair-splitting which supports the opposing view, that the death penalty “saves lives.” (Statistical and other evidence is so ambiguous that it can be used to support both sides.) This is the view of George W. Bush, who, as governor of Texas, presided over 152 executions in six years, or approximately two per month. During the 2000 campaign he said, “I do [believe that the death penalty is a deterrent to crime], that’s the only reason to be for it. I don’t think you should support the death penalty to seek revenge. I don’t think that’s right. I think the reason to support the death penalty is because it saves other people’s lives.” Bush’s dictum has become the rallying point of supporters of the death penalty in public debate. At least the good president rejects the other popular argument for the death penalty, that justice is not complete without it, that the relatives of a victim have a right to the comfort of knowing that the ultimate price has been paid for what they have suffered indirectly. Apparently this eye-for-an-eye mentality is the belief Senator Lesniak has left behind.

One could go further and enter a debate about Biblical support for the death penalty, as some members of the religious right have done, although most Christian religions oppose it. Theoretically both the Jewish and Roman Catholic religions accept the death penalty as a deterrent, but its application is so stringent that it is all but ruled out. Maimonides said, “It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.” Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae and the current Roman Catholic catechism say that the death penalty is justified only if it “is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.” In practice the Roman Catholic Church and many Jews have been among the most active opponents of the death penalty. In fact a significant role in the U. N. resolution was played by the Community of San Egidio (St. Giles), a Catholic organization initiated by a young high school student in 1968.

Especially ludicrous is the idea that Americans need the death penalty to be protected from terrorism. The destruction of the World Trade Center was a suicide mission, wasn’t it? Didn’t Zacarias Moussaoui show his eagerness to be executed—”to die in a battle [...rather] than in a jail on a toilet,” as he said to the court. Do Americans need to execute people just to feel safe?

As I mentioned, there has been unconscionably little celebration in this country, although the smile on Governer Corzine’s face as he signed the bill was a celebration in itself. The Times editorial observed that by contrast in Italy, which has opposed the death penalty with admirable conviction and energy, according to recent custom “the Colosseum, where Christians were once fed to lions,* [was bathed] in golden light.” It is pity that the United States has chosen to join countries like Iran, China, and Myanmar and turned its back on the Judeo-Christian teaching which has historically occupied a place close to its ethical core. The United States has made much of taking the moral high ground in the past, but actions like the war in Iraq, extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo, New Orleans, illicit wiretapping and many other policies of the current government have forfeited any claim to moral leadership in the world. Fortunately the world can find moral examples not only in Italy, but in the humanitarian and peace-making work of countries like Ireland and Norway.

Christmas traditionally invites a spirit of rejoicing, as in the verse from Zechariah the cantankerous librettist Charles Jennens mustered for Handel to set to music:

“Rejoice greatly O Daughter of Sion, shout, O Daughter of Jerusalem, behold, thy King cometh unto thee: He is the Righteous Saviour; and he shall speak peace unto the Heathen.” (Zech. 9.9-10)

And for once, as Governor Corzine clearly saw, there actually is something to rejoice about. If Americans have no time to think about this, perhaps they can think about their collective moral standing this Christmas, lest Guantanamo, like the Colosseum, be venerated as a holy place one day.

—

*This is basically untrue, a late belief, promoted by Pope Pius V (1566-72) a few years after the Council of Trent. Most of the human deaths were gladiators, and even they were often spared, being properties as valuable as Peyton Manning or Michael Schumacher. Presumably the New York Times fact checkers let this one go, because it happened too long ago really to matter. If for most Americans ancient history begins with the Clinton administration, when does it begin for the NYT editors?

Alan Miller, December 4, 2007

Did it really happen? Is he really gone? The anxiety, the fear campaign, the year of a hundred opinion polls; they’re all over. John Winston Howard, Liberal, former member for Bennelong, George W. Bush’s “man of steel,” the most willing of the coalition, Australia’s second longest serving and most conservative Prime Minister, suffered a resounding electoral defeat at the hands of the Australian people on November 24, 2007.

When I dared imagined political change, I never thought it would go down like this. It is difficult to convey to people outside this country just how rusted on Howard seemed during his eleven and a half years as PM (no, Australia doesn’t have term limits). It truly was a Howard Era. Aside from his odious and divisive policies, the shadow of his Government seemed somehow to lie behind every whining leafblower, every reckless SUV, every McMansion, every feeble Australian film. Obviously this is all irrational; there is a new Labor government and the life’s annoyances remain. The Great Unravelling (Paul Krugman’s phrase will be the most enduring, I think) has made us uncharitable and bitter. It has filled subtle minds with unsubtle thoughts. It has blunted human interaction and cast us all as stereotypes — Chardonnay Socialists, Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys, Security Moms, NASCAR Dads, Howard Haters and South Park Conservatives. In Australia that era is over and by God is it good. We have our brains back now.

How do you imagine all this ending? How will the good times return?

Until the election I had assumed that, over time, the reality based community of Chardonnay Sippers would make small gains. We would write sensible articles and gradually people would see reason. One day perhaps our leader would tell one lie too many and a gradual erosion of support would transpire. The Opposition would gradually claw back seats in Parliament, Howard would retire, and moderation, imperceptibly, would prevail.
It wasn’t like that on Australia’s fateful election night. In one night John Howard lost everything, becoming only the second sitting Prime Minister to lose his own seat in Parliament. His once powerful Liberal party has no choice now but to acknowledge Labor’s mandate and, I hope, to transform itself into a moderate party of the centre-right.

The reasons for Labor’s triumph under Kevin Rudd, Australia’s 26th Prime Minister, (that felt so good I think I’ll write it again…Kevin Rudd, Australia’s 26th Prime Minister), have been well documented in the weekend papers, and I won’t go into them now. What the papers cannot convey is the remarkable lack of resentment or even gloom among Howard supporters. Most of them seem relieved. It is as though a spell has lifted. This reaction, combined with a general lack of gloating on the winning side, encourages me to believe that a real cultural shift has occurred, literally overnight. Perhaps this is the beginning of real consensus, not the insipid and sentimental centrism of a David Broder, but of and honest and mature sense of commonwealth. All the bullshit about Kyoto wrecking the economy, all the scare campaigns about union headkickers running amok in the workplace; these were the staples of Howard’s campaign and suddenly no one believes them anymore. It was only smoke from a dying fire. We’re all about the future now.

Australian elections don’t get much play in the States, and what attention this one received mostly concerned Labor’s plans to withdraw Australia’s remaining combat forces from Iraq. I do hope at least some of the Democratic candidates were watching. It is imperative that the people of the United States do this for themselves. It is possible for one election to realign everything (Florida 2000 certainly did) but you have to kick ass first. Part of the genius of the Kevin 07 campaign was the way he managed to embody a clear alternative government while engaging in the eggshell walking necessary in a prosperous country emerging from conservative government. Like it or not, striking this balance is the task of centre-left parties these days and we rarely acknowledge that it can be done well. The Republicans are not half as clever as Howard. They are quite capable of total collapse.
Over the weekend I happened to spend a few hours in the delightfully unpretentious Old Parliament House in Canberra. Its sunny corridors must surely be filled with ghosts. There are few places in the world where the public can freely wander the halls of what was so recently the seat of government. Part of the building houses the National Portrait Gallery, and one large canvas depicts a grinning John and Janette Howard, Sydney Harbour spread behind them. The label had already been updated to reflect the new order of things, and it fills me with hope to imagine one of the staff turning up at dawn, Monday morning, in order to be the first to shove history into the past.

by Michael Miller, September 24, 2007

In recent months local arts organizations have had their share of controversy. One has attracted interest in the outside world, and the other, fortunately, not. A third should be attracting more.

Mass MoCA, after the collapse of its project with the important Swiss installation artist Christoph Büchel, made itself unpopular by exhibiting the unfinished work, “Training Ground for Democracy,” under tarpaulins against the will of the artist, who promptly sued the museum. A Springfield court has ruled that Mass MoCA does indeed have the right to show the work, as long as the public is informed about its unfinished state. Boston Globe art critic Ken Johnson called Mass MoCA’s action “sad, dumb, and shameful.” Roberta Smith, his counterpart on the New York Times, said, “When a museum behaves badly, it’s never pretty. But few examples top the depressing spectacle at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.” Since the debacle has been covered amply by these and other writers, I’ll add little. Money has been wasted, and an opportunity missed. Americans will have a long time to wait before they see a work by Christoph Büchel on home ground, if ever. Mass MoCA’s reputation has been damaged, but so has the Getty’s and the Met’s, and life goes on. Mass MoCA will survive to mount other installations. Artists with any clout at all will now exercise extreme caution in entering in to such projects with museums, especially with Mass MoCA, which would be well advised to take extreme care in all future installations to observe the artist’s intentions to the letter. They should raise enough money to do things right and spend it wisely. (Surely they could have found a cheaper house in North Adams, of all places.) As usual the only people to come out ahead are the lawyers. It is not the first time nor the last that a museum has botched the installation of a work of art, wasted money, or behaved badly.

No sooner did the Tanglewood season come to an end, than the Berkshire Eagle launched another one of its attacks on the venerable institution. According to the Eagle editorial, the Boston Symphony is letting down its audience and dooming itself to obsolescence by failing to create a shoulder season devoted to popular bands, nothing disruptive or subversive, “respectable,” “artistic” groups, like Bright Eyes or Dave Mathews, suitable for Tanglewood, unthreatening to the lawns and unchallenging for the local police. The idea is to compensate for the BSO’s 6% deficit by hosting events which will provide an opportunity not only to charge high admissions, but to charge for parking and to over-charge for the execrable beer and hot dogs customarily sold at those events. Of course these policies would never be applied during the regular season. The assumption is that the Tanglewood brand and all that empty grass should be exploited, not to mention all those willing suckers. Who are these people with so much money to burn for the benefit of the Berkshires? Are they kids spending their rich parents’ money? Or are they middle-aged “baby-boomers,” eager to recapture their youth by milling around in a big crowd, while a band, surrounded by electronics and neon Budweiser and Coca Cola signs, lip-synchs music they are too old and worn-out to produce from their own lungs?

Can you believe it? These local boosters are openly promoting the exploitation of summer visitors—however easily they may be able to afford it—but they are also trying to get Tanglewood to do their work for them. If these people believe that the Berkshires needs a vast pop event, they should undertake the responsibility and expense of developing it themselves. Why couldn’t they take the grounds recently used for Bob Dylan’s second coming and use it for an annual pop festival? But to begin with, shouldn’t a resort area, especially a relatively posh one like the Berkshires, at least preserve a veneer of hospitality?

As far a Tanglewood is concerned, it’s a question of context. I’m not against pop music in general, rather a concept of it which comes more from the world of marketing than music, the idea that music which has been identified as appealing to a certain demographic is appropriate for Tanglewood. There is SPAC, on the one hand, where an array of pop events coexist—I am told—with the Philadelphia Orchestra. On the other, there is a Bard Summerscape, a varied program planned around the Bard Music Festival. These include family events in the afternoon and a cabaret in the evening—hip events designed to appeal to a sophisticated younger audience, Iva Bittová, Trio Loco, Martin Creed, and so forth. (Now that’s more like it, I say! Perhaps the tent-dwellers will be back for the opera next season.). Note, however, that audience numbers and financials are on an a much smaller scale than what the Eagle has been proposing for Tanglewood—quite unrealistically, as BSO general manager, Mark Volpe, pointed out to Andrew Pincus, music reviewer for the Eagle, in an August 24 interview.

At Bard I could see the symbiosis of the different Summerscape offerings, when I was in Sosnoff Hall one evening to see the Zemlinsky double-bill. A cool young couple, apparently up from New York sat behind us for the first one-act opera, A Florentine Tragedy. They seemed interested enough to exchange a few words about it during the performance, but they didn’t come back after the intermission, presumably going back to the Spiegeltent. Of course it’s a Good Thing if people can shop around at festivals in this way. But the younger people around Tanglewood aren’t the same kind of people as the New York City students who can buy sharply discounted tickets and come up to Bard on the Metro North. Neither the Bard nor the SPAC solution would do for Tanglewood, where the culture is rooted in Dr. Koussevitzky’s high-minded plan developed in the early twentieth century. Opponents will say that this is the twenty-first century. Who cares about outmoded missions? That is the very point. Institutions like Tanglewood and the BSO exist to pass on the best values of one generation to its successors. The Bard Festival began in 1990 and reflects the values of its own time, just as Tanglewood reflects the values of the 1930’s, and we need them both.

Still, the arrogance of pop promoters is astonishing. Shaken by the virtual disappearance of the record market and tepid to non-existent interest in over-hyped and overpriced tours by superannuated pop stars (Even Britney is letting us down!), they see the classical world as sicker than it is, and, desperate for a solution to their own problems, they self-servingly offer themselves as “saviors,” hypocrisy worthy of a government which attempts to terrorize its citizens and then remind those citizens of how they, the administration, are protecting them the people, from terror. Young audiences are fed up with the inanity and commercialism of the pop industry, and digital technology has given them the means to seek out performers who speak to them more personally.

And not one of theses self-appointed gurus mentioned Morrissey!

They also seem to be unaware that the name Tanglewood is inseparably linked with pop music through the Tanglewood Conference of 1967, which was repeated at Williams College this past June in commemoration of its 40th anniversary. One of the determinations of this famous conference of music educators was that ”currently popular teen-age music” should be included in music curricula. Another, the very first in fact, was that “Music serves best when its integrity as an art is maintained.”

As for “shame” and “disgusting,” the exclusion of the musicologist Nalini Ghuman from her place of work and her fiancé continues, as I have discussed elsewhere, according to an article by Nina Bernstein in the New York Times, strangely and unfortunately buried in the NY/Region section. (I understand that the article stimulated quite a few letters to the editor. None have been published.) Many members of the musical community are outraged and disgusted by the summary revocation of her visa at the border, as she attempted to reenter the United States on August 8, 2006 after a research trip. Still, a year later, in August 2007, she was prevented from presenting her paper at the Bard Elgar Festival, even after months of Kafkaesque applications up and down the U.S. government hierarchy. The rich intellectual life that has flourished in certain sectors of American society since the 1930’s is largely due to this country’s open reception of scholars from abroad, whether as visitors, émigrés or refugees. As Americans become increasingly ignorant of the outside world at a time when this knowledge is vitally necessary, it is all the more crucial for our academic institutions and media to welcome international minds and voices. Otherwise, the consequences will prove harmful to the way of life we have come to take for granted.

Many of the issues at play in Christoph Büchel’s abortive installation came to the surface in Washington last week (that of September 16, 2007). Congress, having failed to put the slightest check on the administration’s pursuit of the war in Iraq, devoted their valuable time to debating and voting on not one, but two proposals to condemn MoveOn.org for their New York Times ad, in which there appears a black and white photograph of General Petraeus standing behind an array of microphones and a veritable billboard of decorations, staring somewhere above a horizon (surely invisible in Congress building), and speaking—testifying—into the microphones, and below this the caption “GENERAL PETRAEUS OR GENERAL BETRAY US?,” and below this the phrase, “Cooking the Books for the White House.” Four paragraphs follow, warning readers about why they should be wary of the general’s testimony. These were based on published, thoroughly discussed facts. As childish as the ad was, the most disgusting thing in it was the Pentagon’s bizarre set of criteria of what constitutes violence, surreal non-definitions worthy of Hasek or Orwell.

The next day President Bush said at a press conference, “I thought the ad was disgusting. I felt like the ad was an attack not only on Gen. Petraeus but on the U.S. military, and I was disappointed that not more leaders in the Democrat party spoke out strongly against that ad. And that leads me to come to this conclusion: that most Democrats are afraid of irritating a left-wing group like MoveOn.org, or more afraid of irritating them, than they are of irritating the United States military.” Reports on this in various newspapers inspired public responses which listed many other disgusting things in the public eye, from Guantanamo and the erosion of the Justice Department by Bush apparatchik Alberto Gonzalez to the Patriot Act.

What is truly disturbing, apart from the Defender of Civilization’s assumption that it is better to fear the military than “a left-wing political group like MoveOn.org” and his abuse of the English language, is the Senate’s use of the word “liberal,” a concept which has manifold meanings and connections throughout the history of the educational and political institutions which give us what freedom and dignity we have today. (I refer you to the relevant chapter of C. S. Lewis’ Studies in Words.) It is also interesting that Bush sees MoveOn.org as something to be feared, perhaps as Bolsheviks were once feared.

I was about to attribute the phrase “It’s a free country.” to Groucho Marx. Somehow it seems that if he didn’t invent the phrase, he made it his own through frequent exercise and well-honed use. But it turns out that this isn’t true. Groucho has no pre-eminent right to the phrase. In any case, through much of the ongoing hearings about the war in Iraq, our elected officials behave as if the phrase were a joke—a dead man’s joke, but not Groucho’s, nor even W. C. Fields’.

If these senate hearings were a machine it would have been running backwards and forwards at the same time. In fact, Americans like to think of their democracy as a smoothly-running machine. I believe I received my first lessons in civics around the same time I learned about the workings of a grandfather clock, and they are linked in my synapses. I visualize checks and balances in the form of weights, counter-weights, flywheels, and the stately pendulum swinging so dependably back and forth. Yes, something is broken somewhere in the works. The founding fathers believed in logic. The logic behind this farce is that if there is sufficient anticipation built up, people will believe anything. In contemporary American “civilization,” belief is as dangerously overrated as generals, but if one’s ambition is to gum up the works, it has its uses.