Category: MUSIC

        The victorious First Crusade established the capacity for believers to pilgrimage to the holiest sites in Christendom to walk in the footsteps of Jesus and identify with His life on earth.  Biblical references were brought to stunning reality for the pilgrim in Jerusalem.  The immense injection of vitality that this would provide to the church was obvious to Pope Innocent II, but the world of the twelfth century was a very dangerous place for a believer on pilgrimage.  The road to Jerusalem was treacherous, filled with bandits, murderers, and many countries with little incentive to protect the pilgrim on his travels.  A special group of evangelists were created out of the First Crusade whose calling was to be as defenders of the faith and those that sought the pilgrimage.  Housed in the Temple of the Mount in Jerusalem, the monastic group of knights  known as the Knights Templar proved to be Innocent’s vehicle for defense of the rights of pilgrims. He made sure they received unique abilities to transcend national borders and take a leading militaristic role in defending the base elements of the faith and the faithful.

At the turn of the twentieth century, classical music was in need of just such a knights templar to defend itself against the inroads of radical transitions and intellectual demolishing of the elements of technique and romantic passion that had been responsible in achievement of its height as a primary cultural force.  The group of passionate technicians that would save the concept of classic in classical music – the knights templar of musical performance that saved the human element of classical music – turned out to be a group of Russian Jews. Linked to the unique struggle for basic human rights in a Russia first under attack by authoritarian anti-Semitic czars, and later by atheistic Communist totalitarians, a stunning group of Jewish musical knights  sprung forth from the vast Russian countryside from the years surrounding the birth of the 20th century.  They managed through their brilliance to secure classicism in music and grudging respect for their people under enormous pressure for the destruction of each by forces that saw both classicism and Judaism as characteristics of a failed cultural model.  The names Heifetz, Horowitz, and Rubinstein ring through the ages, but an equally talented and perhaps more monastically pure performer, Nathan Milstein, was as vital to the defense of classicism as any of his more famous fellow knights. Unlike the the aforementioned trio, however, Milstein was not a self promoter, and tended to let his music performance  speak for itself.

And how it spoke.  Milstein was a performer who saw the music as the spoken verse of the poet.  The clarity of the language was critical to him.  He devoted his performing to find ways to articulate the most difficult of passages with the precision he saw demanded by the composer.  His technique was not the bounding passionate noise of explosive pyrotechnics of Horowitz.  He wished to strive instead for the perfection of celestial music with superhuman clarity.  Like the great Russian performers of the century’s turn, Milstein was identified by his prodigy status and brought to the great teacher of the Russian Conservatory, Leopold Auer.  Milstein was not a revolutionary; he was truly a defender of the catechism, and took to Auer’s severely demanding style of instruction requiring surgical precision and humanistic passion in performance as indelibly intertwined forces, not conflicting truths.  Milstein learned from Auer that difficult passages required not only physical gifts, but mathematical and geometric ones, and Milstein would ceaselessly work and re-work fingering techniques and strategies until he had achieved the most logical and efficient means of articulating the passage with precision.  It was a philosophy that made Milstein a master of the classicists such as Beethoven and Bach, while bringing a humanity to the carnival aspects of Paganini.  He proved you could marry both with clarity, and made it possible for Milstein to present reproducible interpretations that didn’t depend on his mood that day, or the romantic idealism so true of his good friend and fellow “child of the revolution”,  Horowitz.

Nathan Milstein did what all of the Jewish Knights Templar did during the cataclysmic years of the twentieth century.  He immigrated to America permanently in the 1930’s where he spent the rest of his performing life basking in the freedom and protection that America’s unique take on individualism allowed for.  America became the Temple of the Mount to the defenders of human expression and personal freedom, and there, any undertones of anti-Semitism proved feeble against the power of talent and free expression.  One wonders in an America that has forgotten its mission, what country will be the welcoming temple that brings the pilgrims of human excellence and free expression to her shores, and preserves for at least one more century the calling of civilizational greatness.

      This weekend is the occasion of the 280th anniversary of the birth of Franz Joseph Haydn, one of the giants of western musical expression and and somewhat under- appreciatedinnovator in bring ‘classical’ music into the form we know it today.  I find myself pulled lately into communion with Haydn’s music, retreating again and again into its ordered, civilized and uplifting beauty in this difficult modern time of ‘Sturm undDrang’.   Haydn encapsulated the image of the almost perfect genius.  He was clever and funny, he was self effacing, he was loyal, he was liked by almost everybody, and most of all he was good and only got better, in a singularly directed curve to greatness stopped only by his death.

     Haydn did not start out the universally loved and respected Papa Haydn.  He was born of relatively common circumstances on March 31st, 1732 in the little Austrian town of Rohrau in the shadow of the principality of the Esterhazy family that ruled nearby Hungary.  He showed early musical talent but for the most part was forced to gain a musical education piecemeal and informally, freelancing his way to the very infrequent profitable performer’s job and  means of assuaging his ever-present hunger.  One forgets that obtaining a consistent access to food was a driving force in most people’s lives at that time who were not born of wealthy circumstances.  The unknown historical imprint of Haydn might have ended there, had his particular skill at composition rather than performance not become evident to others.  It was his innate ability to produce original musical themes that brought him eventually to the attention of CountEsterhazy, who became Haydn’s benefactor through most of his adult life.  Haydn became the court appointed kapellmeister, and with it, the exposure of the regional world to Haydn’s organizational talents and prodigious work ethic.  With a consistent income (and therefore food) to provide fuel for his talents, Haydn over the next decades threw himself into all musical forms, and re-fashioned many of them into the structures we know of today.  He produced sonatas and concertos for performers that had mature structure, recurring themes, and cohesiveness that brought out the music into a mature, listenable form that highlighted the performer’s gifts.  He expanded the sonata form into new musical devices known as symphony and string quartet that utilized the various instrumental voices that stringed instruments were beginning to provide as the recent technological advances to make the instruments had made possible.  He provided the structural  bridge from the monumental but removed stylings of Bach and Handel to the elevated classicism of Mozart and finally to the romantic everyman idealism of Beethoven. And Haydn did it with supreme grace and respect such that all that took the bridge recognized him as the indispensable piece in their own development. 

     The music he created though was more than a bridge.   It was an original expression of personal genius that has held up well over the centuries as others equally renownedhave fallen away.  It is captured in both supreme compositional skill as well as beautiful melody. One hears the sublime pride Haydn felt in his homeland’s history and beauty in the magnificent melody of the third movement of the Emperor String Quartet, that eventually became the German national anthem.  The stirring of the performance artist as not just an echo of symphonic expression but the elevated musical voice of talent to be enjoyed and recognized for its own sake is the dominant imprint of the unforgettable Cello Concerto in C Major.  The series of ever expanding complexities culminating in the magnificent London Symphonies gave Beethoven the freedom to make the Symphony the supreme musical venue for the composer’s expression. 

     The catalogue of available Haydn music is immense, and frankly, almost all of it a delight of renewed appreciation of his gifts to any who will take the time to listen to the various forms.  A surprise is  in store for the investigator who re-looks at Haydn’s productive later years.  Freed from the demands of the  compositional requirements of the court, Haydn achieved a world status with his time in London and became independently wealthy.  He no longer had to create for the intimacies of the court, but could afford to take  the extended time and energy that more profound musical expressions required to devise.  Haydn, whose reputation for civilized, intimate composition dominates, proved every bit the Olympian composer that later reputations for Beethoven and Brahms were later secured.  Haydn’s epic masterpiece, The Creation, evokes the same exaltation and profundity that is credited to Beethoven’s Ninth or Verdi’s Requiem.  The expanded and ethereal buildup that leads to Haydn’s musical inspiration of God’s divine impulse to bathe His creation of heaven and earth in Light as single pizzicato note, makes the glory of the exposed divine creation in the beautiful noise to follow a moment of great theater on par with any in music, and has caused audiences to gasp and cry at the revealed Truth  for centuries. See for yourself as to whether your own emotions match the audiences of the centuries since at around 8’20” onward of the Creation moment in the third video below if you don’t have the patience to appreciate the entire performance.  The deeply religious Haydn has left for all time a monument to his devotion and thanks to the God of Creation that had given him the ability to express what others could only feel.  For our time, Haydn’s magnificent gifts to all of us continue to bring joy and appreciation for the beauty of His creation and our need to do what we can to preserve it.  And God said, Let there be Light – and through His creation that brought us Franz Joseph Haydn – There was Light.

     After a significant hiatus, the American troubadour Ryan Adams has returned to writing and performance.  His musical persona as a troubadour was first celebrated by Ramparts on 07/10/10, in the midst of his self induced absence from the music world.   Only 37, the writer and  performer Adams has been associated with reflecting and reforming almost all the significant trends in American popular music in the last 16 years.  At the forefront in his early twenties of the sound referred to as alternative country with his band Whiskeytown, Adams developed a reputation of simultaneously and effortlessly capturing the intimate story telling of rural North Carolina with the energy and brashness of a Greenwich Village counter culture poet.  He also developed a reputation for volatile and immature stage behavior that often fractured the good feelings he had engendered with his prodigious performing and song writing talent.  Eventually Adams grew too big for his bandmates and struck out on his own, producing one album after another of inflections of American music – folk, country, rock, and glam – and echoing giants of American popular musical culture like Dylan, Gram Parsons, and Neil Young – reflecting, not parroting, them.  Albums such as Heartbreaker, Gold, Easy Tiger, and Cold Roses created some of the best coalitions of musical brash and poetic heartache to be heard in decades.   It showed in the performers willing to serve as background vocalists for the albums, such as Emmy Lou Harris, Gillian Welch, Norah Jones, and Elton John.  For ten years the issue wasn’t whether music would be created, but rather whether Adams would ever stop creating music, putting out as many as three albums in a year and often speaking of many other unrecorded collections waiting to go public.  The pressure of being first the Next Thing, and then,  The One, weighed heavily on a relatively simple individual from rural Carolina, and in 2009, the years of self abuse through drugs, burn out, and progressive hearing loss and disability from Meniere’s Disease, Adams decided to stop the circus act and get off the stage.

     Two years later, rested, off drugs, happily married, apparently healthy, and relaxed, Ryan Adams is back, and the troubadour impulse is stronger than ever.  In a the new Album Ashes and Fire Adams returns to the intimacy of country inflected rock and stirring folk anthems that made Heartbreaker so popular with the critics and public alike.  The same leit motifs are there,  rain, ocean, and moonlight the verbal landscapes, heartache, desire, and redemption the poetic psychologies.  This is, however, an adult Adams, that responds to the desparate moments with his clear tenor, directs understanding through the organ echoes, and ultimately appears very comfortable with who he has become as a songwriter.

     Ryan Adams will likely always be incorrigable, but he is becoming evermore thankful of his gift.  Ryan Adams has above all always been one of those unique performers who sound even better live than in the closely packaged creations of a recording studio, and each time I’ve heard him, created an unforgettable emotional tie. These are, after all, the songs of  a troubadour, who can relate the very thread of human emotion and experience, elevate the little things in life, and always make us ever more self aware. The troubadour, who has been rewarded throughout history with the rapt attention of the listening audience, who, while briefly connected, always leaves feeling a little more alive.   Our generation’s troubadour is back, and hopefully will stay for a while, and a long time to come.

     Everybody has their favorite voice variant that defines how they want to hear certain songs in the American Songbook.  For me,  its the melted caramel warmth of Ella Fitzgerald when she sings Rogers and Hart’s Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered , or Frank Sinatra’s masculine yet vulnerable rendition of Gershwin’s It Had To Be You.  The modern versions lean toward voice over interpretation,  production over emotion too often.  There are however some very talented singers out there who get it and are fashioning another layer of American jazz excellence onto the beautiful songs of the 20th century that merit a close listen.  One such singer is the beautiful Jane Monheit, who is managing at a very young age to marry the sophisticated and nuanced emotional overtones of the best songs with her pristine pitch, while not ignoring the emotional questions of thoughtful lyrics.  Monheit, with a nearly perfect singing voice, is making a mark on listeners like me that want to feel and live a song as much as hear it.

     Jane Monheit is in 2011 only 33 years old,  but has been in the jazz singers lime light almost since her high school graduation.   She is an accomplished graduate of the Manhattan School of Music and already has multiple critically acclaimed albums.  Her singing voice trends toward light operatic, but rhythmic grasp is night club.  She is especially strong in the dancing rhythms of South American composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, but has sufficient swing inflection to handle Gershwin and Berlin.  Monheit’s voice is has a mountain spring like quality, with sun dappled inflections that sparkle and tingle. Her youthful sound  brings a yearning and optimism to even the sadder lyrics that sometimes seems insufficiently time-weary, but she is a professional performer that is willing to challenge herself and the listener, and that makes her more interesting to me than the musings of a Diana Krall.

     We are living in a time where the mature introspection of the great songs that reflected our society’s coming of age in the middle third of the last century, is being lost to sophomoric and superficial machinations about sensations rather than feelings.  I look to Jane Monheit and other young artists like her, to continue our education and acknowledgement of the life long  journey of discovery as to who we really are…

    
The 17th and 18th centuries in Europe were home to some of the most profound individual achievements  in the history of western civilization.   The 17th century proffered the return of the scientist and objectivity with great discoveries and theorems delineated by some of the greatest minds in history, including Descartes, Newton, Galileo, and Hooke changing man’s perception and acknowledgement of the natural world.  The 18th century was the age of enlightenment, dominated by political revolution and elevation of the musician composer to giants of the age, with Handel, Haydn, and Mozart reconnecting man to his internal psyche and soul, and his personal relationship to his God.  The individual that bridged the two eras and lived in both the world of objectivity and spiritualism was perhaps among the greatest of them, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 -1750).  Bach lived a life of total devotion to his artistic science and to his God and ended up creating a nearly perfect form of veneration that knows no equal.  He saw himself as a vessel of the creative force of the Holy Spirit and devoted his musical life expression to the sacred.  Many composers have produced greatness, but Bach stands alone in the marriage of musical design,  intimate melody, diversity, and sacred profundity.  Now over 260 years from his death, Bach stands as a colossus of western civilization.

     Bach spent his entire life in relative obscurity for his creations but was recognized as an organ virtuoso from the start.  The Bach family mutated a significant musical gene with Bach born of a musical family and he himself producing three composer sons of significant repute.  Bach was born and reared in Eisenach, Germany, and spent much of his adult life close to home.  His initial significant impact was as a court musician in Weimar, eventually taking positions as chief Kapellmeister in Kothen, and then Leipzig.  At each step Bach churned out both secular and sacred music for local consumption,  bringing virtuoso individual skills to prominence while elevating liturgy to profoundly emotional spiritual levels.  Brief contacts with fame were fleeting; the most famous story regarding Frederick the Great’s desire to see if the legendary German could hold a candle to his French language and culture dominated court. He brought him to the royal court in Potsdam and challenge him to create a from scratch fugue from a musical theme he had composed. Bach immediately dazzled the court with an extended three part fugue that left them speechless, then retired to his room to compose a six part fugue he presented the next day.  At a time when music wavered between song and uncomplicated construction, Bach brought a mathematical science to his singular melodies that will never know an equal.  The style known as contrapuntal, elevated music to an intellectual complexity not previously known, with an emotional depth previously seen only in the great artworks of the Renaissance.  Yet Bach in his lifetime was a relatively obscure jewel and died with his greatest works essentially unknown to the wider audience beyond his Sunday services.

     With the elevation of the great composers of the 19th century to celebrity status, Bach’s works were rediscovered and their timeless greatness were noted to have held up very well.  The perfect structure, the intensely emotional expression, and the absolutely unique creations have become a critical part of humanity’s sense of existential purpose and the most profound examples of the human capacity for greatness.  Bach was too humble regarding his place in God’s creation to see himself as anything other than a vessel for God’s relationship with His creation.  Humility like that, that creates genius output like Bach, should be a humility that we all could only hope to emulate.

     The silly little argument that underlies the cultural extension of music is that only a person born and immersed in the specific culture that forms the basis of a piece can truly emote the composer’s desired expression. In simple terms as Salieri was supposed to have said, ” a German writing Italian Opera? Preposterous!”  Obviously the argument that Lang Lang can not perform Liszt or Christopher Parkening can not perform Rodrigo as the music is best expressed is absurd.  Yet, intermittently a performer so owns the music canon of their birthplace that the audience wants no other interpretation to interfere with the marriage of culture, music, and performer.  Anne-Sophie Mutter, the beautiful and oh so talented  German violin virtuoso has been a premier interpretor of the German composer hall of famers, the three B’s – Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms – since her international debut at age 13, and if you add appropriately her Mozart performances, she has become the face of the face of German musical cultural expression.  And what a face it is.

     Anne-Sophie Mutter was born in the small German village of Rheinfelden, just up the Rhein river from Basel, Switzerland in 1963.  Her musical talent was apparent at a very early age and her magnetic stage presence soon after.  At age 13, she was “discovered” by Herbert Von Karajan and placed on the stage with the Berlin Philharmonic, performed at Salzberg at age 17 and has “owned” the german music literature ever since.  A technical virtuoso, she is also one of the most strikingly beautiful performers gracing the stage, and the marriage of the two has created an indelible image that this is how Brahms, Beethoven, Bach (and Mozart) should be performed, by a beautiful woman expressing to perfection the romantic motifs and musical lines of the German greats.

     Her music strengths are as arresting as her beauty – a perfect clarity of melodic line and pastoral  reflections that bring great humanity to the gruff german composers.   The sonatas of Brahms and Beethoven particularly come alive under her technique.  The gentle flow of the Rhein, the picturesque timeless villages, the ordered countryside and introspective emotions come to life with her bow and magnificient Stradivarius.  Though music remains a universal expression of man’s understanding of his life and soul, Anne-Sophie Mutter makes it just a little more clear, the great beauty and phenomenal contribution to western civilization, of the German soul.

    The musical world is used to tragic loss associated with the inherent instability associated with creative artistic life.  The early deaths of John Lennon, Buddy Holly, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, George Harrison, and Jim Croce among many others came suddenly and offered little time to absorb the effects of such loss on the musical universe.  There is, however, another kind of tragic loss that is upon us, and this time we will have a significant amount of time to experience the dying of the light.  Glen Campbell, a musical force for nearly 50 years, has announced that he has progressive Alzheimer’s disease.   A we have come to experience with other public figures such as former President Reagan and actor Charlton Heston,  Glen Campbell will slowly be taken from us, and we from him, until neither is recognizable, and the greatness of this most musical of talents will be just a ghostly shadow long before he leaves this “mortal coil”.

     Glen Campbell’s greatness may be somewhat under appreciated by the general musical public, but certainly not by music lovers or playing professionals.  Glen has such talent that no single venue has ever seemed to fully represent his abilities, and the breadth of his creative expressions truly awesome.  Glen Campbell was the ultimate session musician when performers often relied on such musicians to maximize their sound. His guitar prowess was legendary from the moment this Arkansan came to Los Angeles to make his mark. He brought virtuoso performance to instrumental albums, and was a critical part of the special sound that was Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound and the the Beach Boys at the height of their popularity.  Then a sideline talent was identified, Glen’s ability to sing, and suddenly the studio artist became a mega star in the late 1960’s with such songs as Gentle on My Mind, Wichita Lineman, and By The Time I Get To Phoenix.  Suddenly, Glen was an extremely hot entertainment act, and nothing seemed beyond his reach.  He brought country music to prominence as a leading TV star on the Glen Campbell Goodtime Show, and a movie star with his role opposite John Wayne in True Grit.  He showed himself to be the best musical interpreter of America’s best songwriter of the time, Jimmy Webb, and a recording star fully versatile in country music, pop, and gospel.  Everybody wanted to sing duets with Glen, and everybody lived in awe of his guitar virtuosity.  Through 1980, there was no entertainment venue that Glen Campbell was not a dominant contributor.

     Like all supernovas, the brilliant light that had shone on Glen Campbell’s career for 20 years, was dimmed by personal demons.  In the case of Campbell, the demon was the old standby alcohol, which warped the family life and relationships of this religious man, skewered his choice of songs and musical opportunities, and brought his run of number #1 hits to an end.  Through all the dark years and personal struggles, his spectacular musical talent remained recognizable whenever he was asked to pick up his guitar and play.  Cleaned up and sober, Glen Campbell over the last 15 years experienced a reunion with his audience and a renaissance with his performing career.

     Now he faces the most difficult of times when the skills and talent he has taken for granted will slowly crumble like the monuments to greatness of past civilizations.  He will likely leave us with a few more gems, but the body of work he has already created is vast and available for all to see on the Internet.  The sadness we will feel as he drifts away from us towards the setting sun, will be balanced by the remarkable bright light of every musical moment he has given us to savor.  Whether it is the young baby faced version, or the later chastened more introspective one, Glen Campbell is a unique reflection of how deep talent goes, and how wonderful it glows, in those who truly have The Gift.