I first look at a number and I start out complaining: “How am I going to do it with so few instruments?” “Why does he make these compositional choices? They seem arbitrary.” “Shouldn’t there be a much more different arrangement?”

Then, I’ll go and procrastinate - torrent a little, a book on tape, a book on Kindle.

Then I’ll come back to the chart and maybe look for a starting synth sound, stare at the screen for a few moments ...

Then it lines up ... a sort of ‘crystal point’: suddenly a few colors in my teeny tiny band match an odd choice of the composer - a synth patch work for a figure here - a woodwind choice is just right for the line there - throw away that vocal doubling - add a fill into the gaping hole there with a fill.

This moment usually happens about 1 am. I often stand up and go right to sleep. Colors and choices don’t disappear from memory like pitches and rhythms do (at least for me.)

Occasionally such a crystallizing moment (is that a more apt phrase?) occurs upon first hearing. Receiving an assignment from a performance as opposed to the printed page presents solutions much more quickly. if the emotional journey of the song is clear, and you’ve become familiar with what your present instrumentation can do ... sometimes all the right choices play out in your head as you are listening. The score page becomes an issue of how well you can execute what is already obvious.

The challenge, of course, is when such a moment of crystallization does NOT occur - and you have to move forward anyway. You want to think that only you can recognize which scores were inspired and which ones just got done. But sometimes, it’s all too obvious.

Claude Monet's Sunrise

When I listen to Debussy's "La Mer", I hear more than his capturing the physicality of the sea - I hear his thrill at the feel of ocean spray on his face, his delight at the lighting shimmering on the waves. It's his emotional reaction that causes him to write more than just shimmer and movement - his delight emerges as harmony and melody.

I recently caught the Kandinsky show at the Guggenheim (stick with me for a moment ...) I chose to see the show backwards - and I'm glad I did - I started at the top with the final works and worked my way doKandinsky - Composition VIII - 1923wn. As a result, instead of the exhibition being a biography, it became an analysis of what he was striving for by examining where he came from (as opposed to what he turned to next.) So I wasn't aware of his roots in Russian folk art till the end. I noticed his similarity to Chagall only incidentally through some similar use of color before reaching the end and seeing how they both really started in the same place. But mostly I got to enjoy Kandinsky's use of abstraction without looking for what was being abstracted. That only became an issue as I worked my way backwards.

As a result, the later works seemed to float - geometric elements seemed to float on top of color blotches - black line markings appeared to be improvised comments on the shapes of color below. One painting seemed to be pulled away from the viewer as it fell away into a black field behind it.

Kandinsky - Composition V - 1911But in each painting, there was a context for the abstractions - there seemed to be a dialog between colors, shapes and lines. The dialog was sometimes violent, sometimes serene. But never silent. Each painting was a universe with it's own rules.

It is so hard to look for that kind of process in words, when they're being sung. It is so easy to be swept up in the feeling when there's music present, and leave behind the thought that triggered the feeling. Lyrics appear to us in real time - we need to move with the mind's process, even if it's the million thoughts one has in a few seconds.

Perhaps it is best not to delineate the feelings, but just present the thought process and let the audience 'throb' itself, without doing it for them. Music is such a strong emotional language, it can over-color those thoughts very quickly. Perhaps music should be like Kandinsky's color blotches - coloring the sharp black lines above, while being cut themselves into pieces that fall away.

 

Do we need more support for the arts? Definitely for non-profit arts institutions. We need more assistance for regional theaters, and museums and orchestras in smaller cities. Maybe some tax breaks for commercial arts in certain economically troubled areas. (New York City's film office brought a lot of of production work to the city during the city's financial crisis in the late 70's.) Does this kind of support require a cabinet position? I don't think it does. Maybe an Undersecretary of Media and Arts in the Commerce Department.

More importantly we need better arts education in elementary schools. If children are taught to sing, play an instrument, perform in a play, dance and to draw a picture, they are more likely to appreciate the arts as adults. They are more likely to attend the theater, a concert, a museum. They are more likely to bring their own children to the arts to share in their passion.

Do we need a Secretary of the Arts to increase funding for arts education? Maybe an Undersecretary for Arts Education in the Education Department might be appropriate.

But what exactly would a Secretary of Arts deal with - would he oversee the commercial arts (Hollywood, Broadway, the recording industry?) Or the 'fine arts’ only (symphonies, museums, opera and dance companies)? What would be his priority when commercial and fine arts come into conflict?

Would he only deal with giving out support money (like the present National Endowment) or would he also be involved with copyright policy and policing piracy? Would his/her job be to protect the arts industries or to protect the individual artist? Or to protect the consumer of the arts?

Like the present Endowment, an Arts Department would be dictating what is ‘American’ art by what it chose to support. There is no denying the present Endowment sways in the political breeze of whatever administration is in power. Why would a cabinet position be any different?

And while everyone is in the glow of Obama's election and the idea of who he might appoint as a Secretary of the Arts, how about the hypothetical Secretary of Arts appointed by President Palin, eight years from now?

As someone working in the theater, I have seen how helpful government funding can be - the path from Off-Broadway to Broadway is a great example of how government support can produce more jobs, bring more economic benefits to the city and (sometimes) create great theater. But I have also seen government funding used as a form of censorship, frightening producers or museum directors from provocative projects when it’s time to apply for new grants. Moving the arts up to a cabinet position only put the dangers of government funding on a larger stage where politicians are more likely to use it as a medium for their own agendas.

* * * * * * *

In the age of the internet, the arts are in a complete uproar. All assumptions are off - all the paradigms are changing. The internet is also changing the nature of the consumer himself - tastes are changing - musical and visual vocabularies are changing. In such a turbulent time a Secretary of the Arts seems like a quick fix to help preserve some of the institutions that are suffering and disappearing.

But those institutions may have to disappear - or they may have to reinvent themselves as something that better responds to the changed world. Music and theater won’t disappear - but concert halls and Broadway might. Live performances will always occur - but in the future audiences may not even be in the same space.

In this shifting environment, government policy is the last place for the arts to find good ideas.

Instead of a Secretary of the Arts, how about an Arts Lobby, fighting for arts education, support for regional and non-profit institutions, and informing both the politicians and the public how the arts can benefit our society.

How about a Commercial Endowment, where a portion of the taxes normally paid by commercial arts institutions (media companies, movie studios, record companies), get siphoned off directly to the National Endowment to support non-profit institutions.

In the end, I think it’s all about the education - if we expose our children to the arts, they will become hungry for more. Their hunger will find the new forms when they appear.

But first we have to bring our children to the arts in a real, tactile manner. Once you have held an instrument and felt it vibrate from your own manipulation (even for just a few months) you forever hear music differently - you hear it as a musician.

But what of the 'Americana' aspect of his music? Ives' use of American hymns and simple folk songs evoke a sense of New England at the dawn of the 20th century - not an idyllic vision, but one where the bucolic greenery mixes with the chaos of a young democracy - outspoken, rough, rude and heartfelt - Whitman's 'barbaric yawp'.

Where Bartok seemed to have taken Hungarian folk music and ingested it whole to become part of his melodic voice, Ives never seems to completely absorb early American music into his voice. There's a ongoing process of synthesizing it all into a style - but the process is never complete - the hymns emerge from the darkness and fade back. The throb of Beethoven's 5th keeps emerging from the Concord Sonata only to be absorbed a few bars later.

It's almost as if Ives heard the simple hymn tune, and felt that all the swirls of atonality were implied by the populace that sang the hymn; he saw a complexity to the American character that joined together the roar of the mob, the untamed cosmos and the voice of quiet belief.

But other errors, those dealing with the actual economics, have not been corrected. In the light of some of the author's conclusions, a letter to the editor was written by Local 802 to simply inform the public of the actual economics of paying for music preparation (orchestraters and copyists) and for orchestral musicians.

For some reason, the Times chose not to publish this letter alongside Mr. Sondheim's letter. But I have been informed that it will be published this weekend (8/31/08) on the Letters page of the Arts & Leisure section. Here is that letter (presented with the permission of Local 802)

To the Editor:
NY Times Arts Section
 
Thanks to Susan Elliot (Off the Stage, What’s Behind the Music, Sunday, August 17, 2008) for describing how glorious a full live orchestra sounds on Broadway and sharing with readers the important creative work of Broadway’s talented orchestrators. The cost of creating the wonderful music of shows like South Pacific or Gypsy each night on Broadway, however, are not as Ms Elliot suggests, “staggering.” For a $8 -$10 million Broadway musical (hardly an unusual budget today) the cost of orchestrating and copying; i.e. putting the music on the stands is typically less than $175,000, or barely 2 %. This is a tiny fraction of what is typically spent on sets, costumes, lighting, etc, which quickly runs into the millions.  And the orchestra costs: As a part of a $120 ticket for a musical like South Pacific, the orchestra costs are about $15, a bargain by any standards and a compelling argument for the full “lush” orchestrations that Ms. Elliot and audiences so love.
 
Mary Landolfi
President, Local 802 AFM

I did receive 6 or 7 comments on the post, all from anonymous animators. Perhaps sometime in the future, I can post these comments. At present I thought it better to not do so.

In perhaps the most celebrated segment of the film, treating the power of art and the nature of authorship, Welles narrates a montage sequence of the medieval French landmark, Chartres Cathedral:

"Now this has been standing here for centuries. The premier work of man perhaps in the whole western world and it's without a signature. Chartres. A celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man. All that’s left, most artists seem to feel these days, is man. Naked, poor, forked radish. There aren’t any celebrations. Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must fall in war or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life... we're going to die. 'Be of good heart,' cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced - but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much."

There can, that is to say, be no theater unless bad things happen, unless there are terrible problems, insoluble knots; without them, there would be nothing for the characters to do. That “doing” gives us the very word by which we refer to what happens on stage: “drama” comes from the Greek drân, “to do” or “to act.” When we go to the theater, we want to see characters doing things. Bad things, preferably.

The inherent dramatic interest of badness helps explain the abiding fascination exerted by bad, or at the very least tormented, characters ....

- from Daniel Mendelsohn “The Truth Force at the Met”, a review of Phillip Glass’ “Satyagraha” in the New York Review of Books

PERSONISM: A MANIFESTO

Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man’s Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can’t be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on. I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, “Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.”

That’s for the writing poems part. As for their reception, suppose you’re in love and someone’s mistreating (mal aimŽ) you, you don’t say, “Hey, you can’t hurt me this way, I care!” you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do may after a few months. But that’s not why you fell in love in the first place, just to hang onto life, so you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.

I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They’re just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.

But how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Two many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies. As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s nothing metaphysical about it. Unless, of course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what you’re experiencing is “yearning.”

Abstraction in poetry, which Allen [Ginsberg] recently commented on in It Is, is intriguing. I think it appears mostly in the minute particulars where decision is necessary. Abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by the poet. For instance, the decision involved in the choice between “the nostalgia of the infinite” and “the nostalgia for the infinite” defines an attitude towards degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and MallarmŽ). Personisms, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poŽsie pure was to BŽranger. Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life—giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That’s part of Personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it. While I have certain regrets, I am still glad I got there before Alain Robbe-Grillet did. Poetry being quicker and surer than prose, it is only just that poetry finish literature off. For a time people thought that Artaud was going to accomplish this, but actually, for all their magnificence, his polemical writings are not more outside literature than Bear Mountain is outside New York State. His relation is no more astounding than Debuffet’s to painting.

What can we expect of Personism? (This is getting good, isn’t it?) Everything but we won’t get it. It is too new, too vital a movement to promise anything. But it, like Africa, is on the way. The recent propagandists for technique on the one hand, and for content on the other, had better watch out.

Frank O’Hara
September 3, 1959