Good news from Broad and Spruce

My preview of the Philadelphia Orchestra's 2008-09 season ran today in the Bulletin, just in time for the year's first subscription concert. I can report, based on this afternoon's matinee, that the players are sounding great, even with Maestro Dutoit out of town to kick off the Chicago Symphony's season. Associate Conductor Rossen Milanov filled in capably and showed warmth, care and considerable athleticism in leading a program of Tchaikovsky, Haydn, and Lutoslawski. My review of today's concert will appear in Monday's Bulletin, and the Orchestra will reprise the program on Tuesday night at 8 pm. Maestro Dutoit will make his first appearance in leading the opening gala next weekend.

Quoted for truth

I discovered the following in doing some Tchaikovsky research before this afternoon's concert. I had to nab it before sharp-eyed Wikipedians fix it.

From the entry on The Five, a group of Russian nationalist composers in the mid-19th century:

In May, 1867 the critic Vladimir Stasov wrote an article, Mr. Balakirev's Slavic Concert, on a concert given for visiting Slav delegations to the "All-Russian Ethnographical Exhibition" in Moscow. The four Russian composers whose works were played at the concert were Glinka, Dargomïzhsky, Balakirev, and Rimsky-Korsakov. [1] The article ended with the following statement:

We fly high, no lie; you know this... BALLIN!! God grant that our Slav guests may never forget today's concert; God grant that they may forever preserve the memory of how much poetry, feeling, talent, and intelligence are possessed by the small but already mighty handful of Russian musicians

Looks like there was a Furious Five long before Grandmaster Flash.

Aggrieved in the Cleve

The news of Cleveland Plain Dealer music critic Donald Rosenberg's reassignment from the orchestra beat had raised many questions, considerable fervor in the blogosphere (the Baltimore Sun's Tim Smith has amassed a good list), and a sizable lump in my throat.

Rosenberg occupied a fairly lofty position in Cleveland as critic of the city's most notable musical institution, one praised all over the world. Did his frequently negative criticisms of Orchestra director Franz Welser-Möst lead to this decision? Did the Orchestra put pressure on the newspaper to make this move? I've read Rosenberg's reviews occasionally over the last few years, and he has always appeared to me to be deeply knowledgeable. His commentary on the unfortunate situation with the Columbus Orchestra was equally thoughtful and incisive.

Whatever pressure might have been brought to bear, I certainly hope that Mr. Rosenberg will seek recourse and that he will continue to put his gifts as a writer and critic to use, either in Cleveland or elsewhere. Best of luck to Zachary Lewis, the Plain Dealer's new orchestra critic; for him, for Mr. Rosenberg, for me (I'm reviewing the Philadelphia Orchestra at its matinee this afternoon), and for all of us who try to put this ineffable stuff into words, it's all we can do to listen close, play it straight, and tell the truth.

Snarc: A Stephen Starr restaurant

This week's edition of Paperboy has landed on Phawker. Not much more to add, though I can say it was compiled in between rounds of copious revision for a freelance assignment that has held my attention for most of the last two weeks. Some odd echoes in the PW cover story of some friends and classmates in college who set up Christian "intentional communities" by block-booking rooms in dorms. Not my style then, and even less so now, but it seems to put author Steven Wells - British by birth, atheist by his own admission - positively off his lunch. Barely concealed disdain for your subject isn't exactly a tenet of journalism, Gonzo or not, but from what I know of Wells, he's PW's go-to rabble-rouser. I wonder if he gets a bonus per angry letter.

Kudos also to CP for a funny, breezy Choice Awards issue, with the one caveat I mention at the end of my column: the C-word mention. Liz Lemon hates that word, and so do I.

Stringing you along

A banner day on Phawker, with the latest edition of Paperboy as well as my review of the latest album by Old Crow Medicine Show.

I first saw OCMS at a small venue at Bucknell University in 2004, and subsequently caught them numerous times on Prairie Home Companion. The percussive upright bass-sound to which I refer in my review is no exaggeration; you'd swear they had a drumkit backing them up. Playing full-tilt, their sound verges on the punk-rockabilly of The Living End and Tiger Army, but their slower tunes don't sacrifice any intensity. The new CD drops next Tuesday, and I highly recommend it. Also, tonight's show at the Electric Factory in Philly is the first on the band's fall tour. I can't make it (Quizzo beckons), but catch them if they come to your area. It's a hootenanny and a half.

There's not much that didn't make it into Paperboy, but I will say it was a bad week for typos in both publications. PW was bursting with good content this week - kudos on that - but many errors were missed. From the Way Too Common Mistake department, "Ghandi" (see fourth section) is not an acceptable alternative for the Mahatma's last name.

Where be your gibes now?

The sad news of David Foster Wallace's death came as a particular shock to me, as I'm currently about 600 pages into Infinite Jest and have been planning a kind of retrospective-review for several weeks now. I can't add much to the reams of generous, thoughtful tributes that have surfaced in recent days, but I will say this: I came upon his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College only a few months ago, and I've come to value it very highly as a plea for kindness, understanding and awareness not just of self, but of the larger world. When I first read it, I was spending a good deal of time sitting at a desk in an office, walking the aisles of grocery stores, and driving alone in my car, and it was tempting to retreat into my own private obsessions and thoughts. How refreshing it was to read a message that was essentially moral without being high-and-mighty and to be reminded of the largeness of the sea in which we all swim.

My heart goes out to his wife and family, his former students, and to all those at Pomona College and elsewhere who are now deprived of a chance to share in his wisdom.

Causes for celebration

After a drought of several weeks, my girlfriend and I were victorious once again at a Philadelphia Quizzo event. I owe it to remembering the two Best Picture-winning movies that Paul Haggis has written (though I only liked one of them -- try to guess which) and to Lindsay's recollection of a popular new restaurant in Center City.

Also, even though I'm a recent transplant to Philly, the Phillies' victory last night also qualifies as reason to make merry.

Finally, I'm getting involved in choral singing once again and have joined this group. Rehearsals start this Saturday for an all-Eric Whitacre concert at the end of October, and the rest of the season is dominated by J.S. Bach. I can't wait.

Konichiwa Bitches

Today, a less-joke-laden-than-usual issue of Paperboy on Phawker. What can I say? Serious, well-written journalism tends to defuse snark. In particular, the Weekly cover story is weighty and award-worthy, and the fall arts calendar in City Paper brought some great stuff to my attention (Orchestra 2001 doing Elliott Carter for his centenary). Kudos to both establishments.

I did get to indulge my fact-error-crazed side a bit, though. Sean of the Dead? Heh. Interestingly, I found that very DVD under the coffee table at the place I'm house-sitting for the next week. Weird.

A rhyme that's right on time

Tricky at the Troc, reviewed for Phawker. Not an artist I knew a whole lot about before this week, though I remembered him being in the lineup for Lollapalooza in 1997 back when I was first discovering alternative rock. The opening vamp the band played (after taking the stage to "In the Air Tonight," a strange choice that the crowd loved) was even featured on radio spots for the touring festival in '97. I didn't know the name of it then, and I couldn't figure it out last night and this morning as I wrote my review.

A great show, though, with a lot more presence and volume than I anticipated. In addition to Lil Wayne and Young Jeezy, to whom I referred in my review, Tricky's stage presence and sound also reminded me of a different kind of MC: Lajon Witherspoon, lead singer for the heavy metal band Sevendust, whom I saw on Warped Tour in either '99 or 2000. Not my cup of tea then or now, but Witherspoon definitely owned the stage, much the way Tricky did last night. Highly recommended if he comes to your area, and if you missed him in New York two nights ago, the NYT's Jon Pareles can fill you in on what you missed.

Someday my prints will come

Today on Phawker, an unusually meta edition of Paperboy. Allow me to explain.

The cover story for Philadelphia Weekly is by George Miller, a journalism professor at Temple University and a former staff reporter and photographer for the city's two daily papers. As I read his stories from the trenches and the way in which he has struggled with educating young minds in the ways of an industry in decline, I couldn't help but reflect on my own training, both in the basement of Roberts Hall working on a college weekly and in the hallowed Newhouse complex. Much of the "takeaway" value of his article mirrors the advice I received from instructors in my masters' program, which I've been drawing upon since I graduated and especially since I moved to Philly. I semi-call Miller out for his notebook-dump of quotes from local media authorities, but all in all, it's a very thoughtful and, ultimately, hopeful piece.

The other bit of meta-commentary comes from articles by two staff members of Phawker appearing in this week's edition of the City Paper. Props to Jeff Deeney for his intrepid reporting in Chester and to Citizen Mom, aka Amy Quinn, for bringing some attitude and standing up for the vitality of the Jersey suburbs. Still, I'm writing for a website about a print publication featuring people who write for the same website which started as an alternative to print publications... I think the heat may be getting to me.

Still looking for thoughts on a title for my Phawker position. Given my interest in both pop and classical music and my fondness for New Yorker-style journalism, how does "Middlebrow Correspondent" sound?

From my ink-stained hands

The latest edition of Paperboy hit Phawker this afternoon. I'd like to add my own huge props to the Live Arts and Philly Fringe Festival, on top of the recommendations and rundowns already printed in City Paper and Philly Weekly.

Two little nitpicky things I noticed in CP, but that didn't merit mention: The Pennsylvania state treasurer who killed himself on live TV was named Budd Dwyer, not "Bud", as indicated on CP's Quality-of-Life-o-meter. Also, Dogfish Head Brewery is in Milton, Delaware, not Lewes. I don't catch every mistake, but where American microbreweries and topics from my communications law class are concerned, I consider myself something of an expert.

Canon fodder

New today on Phawker, my retrospective review of Don DeLillo's Underworld. It's under the heading "Re-Consider This," and I look at what a book that catalogs post-Cold War anxiety has to offer today's readers and society. I focus on a somewhat narrow slice of the book; I wish I'd had the space to dig into Klara Sax's swords-to-plowshares art project, converting a weapons surplus into a work of art. Alas, that's the stuff dissertations are made of, I suppose. It's my first venture into serious, or semi-serious, lit-crit since college. I'm wondering what my staff title, on the left side of Phawker's homepage, ought to be, since I've covered rock concerts, new-music happenings, and literature, and figure to do more of all three in the future. Any thoughts?

Catch a rising star

Today on Phawker, a Q&A with Nico Muhly, composer of sweetly nuanced contemporary music and author of funny, thoughtful blog posts with eccentric spelling. I've been a fan since transcribing an interview with him for NewMusicBox in February 2007. I asked him about his current tour with Doveman and Sam Amidon, which comes to Philly's First Unitarian Church this evening. Muhly's method for getting his music out there - get a group of friends together and play it yourselves - recalls his employer and semi-mentor Philip Glass' approach during the 1980's, though it remains to be seen whether it will land Muhly and friends on Saturday Night Live, as it did Glass and his ensemble.

I recall seeing a video of that performance (March 22, 1986 with host George Wendt, if several websites are to be believed) but can't track it down, so this one, from Sadler's Wells Theatre in 1982, will have to suffice.

Alternative, strongly.

Today on Phawker: my first effort as Paperboy, providing a digest of Philly's two alt-weeklies, Philadelphia Weekly and City Paper. Note: despite the headline, I do not think, and have never thought, that you are a bitch. I'm reviving the column for the first time since April; if the headline has caused you offense, please contact my editor.

Stay tuned. Preview of the 802 Tour featuring Nico Muhly, Doveman, and Sam Amidon to be posted soon, including a Q&A with current new-music "it" boy Muhly.

The bleeding heart show

Another review up on Phawker, of the New Pornographers and Andrew Bird at the Electric Factory on Saturday, August 9. (Bird was the opening act, but listing them in performance order makes it sound like the New Pornographers are Bird's backing band, a la Paul Revere and the Raiders, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, etc.)

Extra stuff that didn't make it in:

-Though Kathryn Calder has the unenviable task of replacing the luminous Neko Case on harmony vocals, she performed admirably.

-Calder also played tambourine on a few songs and, at one point, went to fetch the instrument from the drum riser a full two songs before she would actually need it. Preparedness might not seem very rock-and-roll, but something about the clean (but not antiseptic), tight and somewhat-remote nature of the New Pornographers songs seems to demand that kind of advance planning.

-The tuxedoed mannequin that joined the Pornographers on stage during their encore seems to be a replica of someone famous, but I couldn't place whom. Can anyone help me? Also, a mannequin of John Wayne joined them during "From Blown Speakers" to somewhat less riotous applause than the first statue received.

-Though I was only intermittently thrilled by Andrew Bird's performance - too many technical snags, and too many sample-dumping pileups - I'd love to see him try his hand at leading a chamber orchestra, or maybe even composing something more akin to "concert music" for one. Maybe the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, which has an outstanding, though recent, tradition of taking on "artistic partners"? Or maybe the always forward-thinking Brooklyn Academy of Music, which took a risk in commissioning a piece from indie-rock savant Sufjan Stevens, a musical polymath like Bird - a risk that paid off in a big way.

Viva la freelance

I'm doggedly tracking down freelance work in Philly and have landed a gig contributing to the website Phawker. Though the name might suggest something similar to the website Gawker only located in Philadelphia, it's something slightly different: Philly-centric cultural coverage, a digest of national cultural coverage, more of an attitude of just-putting-it-out-there than just-making-fun-of-what's-out-there.

In any case, my first assignment for the site was a review of the Download Festival, an eclectic affair that played previously in LA and San Francisco with slightly different lineups. I hadn't done a formal review of a rock concert in a while (the rust shows in the lede, I think, despite some help from my editor), and I made my initial pitch to them about covering the new and classical music. Though I know I'll get around to reviewing the offerings of Relâche, Network for New Music, the Curtis Institute, and maybe even the Philly Orchestra, it looks like I'll have free rein to write about whatever I'd like. Next up: a retrospective/book review of DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. Stay tuned.

In hand and in ears

Currently reading: Don DeLillo's Underworld. I saw it on the library shelf, half-remembered Colin's hearty recommendation from a year ago, and am now nearly halfway through and utterly engrossed.

I'm now a thoroughly devoted Pandora user. The transitions between my current lineup of channels can be a little jarring at times, but this will give you an idea of both my longtime favorites and current tastes:

-Punch Brothers
-Edgard Varèse
-The Dismemberment Plan
-Spoon
-Olivier Messiaen
-Nickel Creek
-Steve Reich
-Radiohead

A note about the first artist on that list: They were robbed in the ESPN Battle of the Bands, in which recording artists presented their adaptations of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." Thanks to Marc Geelhoed for informing me about the competition. I've been without a cable hookup for the better part of a week and haven't been receiving my regular dose of sports programming.

Alarmism will sound

Ordinarily, I'd be elated to discover a prominent media mention of my former graduate program in arts journalism, but this most recent one, in an article by Financial Times' Martin Bernheimer, is hardly cause for celebration. With daily newspapers scaling back or eliminating their coverage of the arts, notable music critics are being dropped left and right, and Bernheimer wonders whether programs like one from which I graduated last June might be fighting a losing battle.

...several academic institutions are offering programmes dedicated to improving the quality of arts journalism. The University of Southern California is spending $1m to train incipient critics. Syracuse University has created a master’s degree programme for the same purpose. One wonders where the graduates will find work.

Upon learning of USC's establishment of a degree-granting program, supplementing its already very highly-regarded mid-career Fellowship program, I must confess I wondered the very same thing.

I count myself lucky that I was able to find work writing about music, in some form, immediately after graduating; I know that many of my classmates were not so fortunate. I don't know what awaits the program's most recent graduates or the journalists that began their studies in the 2008-09 edition of the Goldring Arts Journalism program this past week. To both of those groups, I can only offer this: be curious, do your research, and be dogged in the pursuit of stories, regardless of the subject or the audience. There are always ways to make yourself heard and to make your work read.

Resonance and remembrance

As a fan and performer of contemporary choral music, I often speculate about the potential of poems for musical setting. Today, I was struck by this poem, which was recently recorded by the BBC in remembrance of journalists and reporters killed while serving as war correspondents. The poem, aptly titled "Memorial" and written by James Fenton, accompanies a statue commissioned by the BBC in honor of those brave reporters. I have the deepest respect for those who enter war zones to write and to report - not only as a journalist myself, but as a member of the human race.

Fenton's poem is almost deceptively traditional; I had to read it twice before realizing it was in a simple "ABAB" scheme. The following enjambed sentence speaks volumes as it runs its course across a stanza break:

...Some seemed honour-bound
to take the lonely, peerless track
conceiving danger as a testing ground
to which they must go back

till the tongue fell silent and they crossed
beyond the realm of time and fear.

I discovered the poem via the New Yorker's recently-launched and frequently-updated Book Bench blog, which also excerpted much of that achingly wrought line. I think it must be the idea of the tongue falling silent that so begs to set to music, almost as a musical act of defiance against death.

At a baccalaureate service for a college graduation last month, I heard a setting of the poem "Do Not Stand By My Grave and Weep," believed to have been originally written by Mary E. Frye. The piece came from a version of the Requiem by composer Eleanor Daley, and the choir dedicated its performance to two members of the graduating class who passed away during their first year at the college. Though I'm told the poem is a popular funeral oration, the choral performance was the first time I'd encountered it. Fenton's poem, with its regular scheme and elegant build to a spare but powerful ending, reminded me of Frye's. I was stunned by both, but nearly brought to tears by the latter. Properly set, I believe the Fenton poem might have a similar effect, and not merely on myself.

Inviting chaos

This article by The New Republic's David Hajdu holds two very personal attachments for me. First, the author advised me in my master's program in arts journalism; his guidance in writing and his recommendations in reading have scarcely left my mind in the year since I completed my degree.

Secondly, the invitations that Hajdu addresses by the bands Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails for fans to remix their songs have a clear analog among my own musical tastes and experiences. The 2003 album of remixed versions of songs by the Washington, DC-based band The Dismemberment Plan is a precursor to the current wave of fan-driven invention. The band is among my all-time favorites, and the album, titled "The People's History of the Dismemberment Plan," is a creative endeavor similar to Nine Inch Nails "The Limitless Potential": a collection of re-imagined songs drawn from raw tracks of individual instruments and voices. Some were done by longtime fans, others by casual listeners, and one notable contribution came from an artist who had never heard any of the Plan's music until after submitting his contribution.

The Plan's project was somewhat wider in scope than Trent Reznor's. Tracks from three of the band's four albums could be downloaded and remixed, more than just the two most recent releases that Reznor made available. The experiment, though conducted less than five years ago, also took place in a different era with respect to music technology. The band attempted to sell actual CDs of the remixes, rather than offer them for download.

Without having the CD in front of me, I don't know whether the Plan claimed ownership over the remixes in the way that Radiohead does in its current project. I suspect not; after a short-lived flirtation with Interscope Records, the Plan never strayed from its roots on the DC-based independent label DeSoto Records. "The People's History" is wild, weird and uneven - modifiers that might describe the band's early output, albums titled "!" and "The Dismemberment Plan is Terrified." Only one track from those albums appear on "The People's History," though, and the remixes of songs from later albums "Emergency & I" and "Change" presents more staid material in a newly unhinged fashion. The band's music, in its original and altered forms, remains vital today, with a irresistible tension between exuberance and melancholy in its lyrics and a blend of the rubbery and the robotic in its playing.