The Drama Desk decision to not honor orchestrators

For years the Drama Desk recognized orchestration while the Tonys did not. It meant so much to me as a young musician to have my orchestration for Sunday in the Park recognized. The Drama Desk was also the first to have awards for sound design. After being in the forefront of recognizing creative contributions and being brave enough to ignore the border between Broadway and off-Broadway, why the sudden retreat?

It baffles me that the Drama Desk would stop recognizing a creative contribution that stays with the identity of a show for many years after the original physical designs are no longer used. We still use Sid Ramin's orchestrations for West Side Story a half century after the original production. We may experiment with new orchestrations for a production, but we will always return to Jonathon Tunick's orchestration of Sweeney Todd. Not to diminish the work of Bernstein or Sondheim in any way, the orchestrations for those masterpieces will always be part of their identity. 

Such is the nature of the collaborative art form - when it's done right the pieces meld into a greater whole. Then award programs try to dice and slice that whole into individual contributions. How sad that they think this particular element of making a musical is suddenly of less importance.

I know what I was able to contribute to the shows I worked on this season, Queen of the Mist and Leap of Faith. The highest praise for me is the approbation of my fellow collaborators on a show. But to have that work recognized in an public venue is also an honor and a pleasure. I will have to look elsewhere for that honor now. I am mostly saddened for the young orchestrators in the business whose off-Broadway work will now go without any public honor. They should remember that this action by a few individuals in no way diminishes the wonderful work they do which is heard nightly in theaters of New York.

An Honest Description of Myself with a Glass of Whiskey at An Airport, Let Us Say, in Minneapolis, by Czeslaw Milosz

My ears catch less and less of conversations, and my eyes have weakened, though they are still insatiable.

I see their legs in miniskirts, slacks, wavy fabrics.

Peep at each one separately, at their buttocks and thighs, lulled by the imaginings of porn.

Old lecher, it’s time for you to the grave, not to the games and amusements of youth.

But I do what I have always done: compose scenes of this earth under orders from the erotic imagination.

It’s not that I desire these creatures precisely; I desire everything, and they are like a sign of ecstatic union.

It’s not my fault that we are made so, half from disinterested contemplation, half from appetite.

If I should accede one day to Heaven, it must be there as it is here, except that I will be rid of my dull senses and my heavy bones.

Changed into pure seeing, I will absorb, as before, the proportions of human bodies, the color of irises, a Paris street in June at dawn, all of it incomprehensible, incomprehensible the multitude of visible things.

(translated from the Polish by Robert Hass and Czeslaw Milosz)

My favorite Mahler recordings

I'm posting this in celebration of Mahler's birthday (July 7th, 1860). These preferences change all the time; and there's a lot of Boulez here because the series he recorded over the last decade or so made things so CLEAR. They are great 'study' recordings. With age I seem to prefer the clarity.

Bernstein's recordings are an old preference from discovering Mahler in my teens. And a few years ago I picked up his full cycle with the Vienna Phil that was recorded between his two cycles for Columbia/Sony and DG - I think it's a great cycle, in addition to getting to watch him perform.

And Barbirolli is another old fave - slow tempos that somehow stay exciting.

1st - Bernstein, NYPhil
2nd - Bernstein, NYPhil
3rd - Horenstein, LSO
4th - Bernstein, NYPhil
5th - Boulez, Vienna
6th - Barbirolli, New Philharmonia
  (but I also like the Mitropoulos, NYPhil)
7th - Boulez, Cleveland
8th - Boulez, Berlin
Das Lied - Kletzki, Philharmonia
    (Fischer-Dieskau, Dickie)
9th - Barbirolli, Berlin
10th - Rattle, Bournemouth

Honorable mentions:

Tennstedt's complete set
Bernstein's complete DVD cycle with Vienna
  (recorded between his two CD cycles)
The NY Phil set of historic Mahler recordings

other good recordings of the 6th:
Boulez, Horenstein, Szell

Bill Monroe - old time bluegrass and rap

I've been listening to some Bill Monroe recordings lately. In case you don't know, Bill Monroe was one of the founders of 'bluegrass' style. In fact, the style is named after his band, "Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys". In particular, I'm enjoying

"Bean Blossom" (a live recording of a music festival he started)

, and

"I Saw the Light" (a collection of gospel quartet songs.)

I'm not sure I can explain what appeals to me about roots and folk music. I work in commercial theatre music. I grew up on classical music and 60's rock. But there's something about Taj Mahal, Janis Ian, Patty Griffin and now Bill Monroe that speaks to me. I'm aware of the musical simplicity - but that doesn't get in my way. There's a sense of truthfulness (or 'truthiness' as Stephen Colbert says) that makes it land in some way. In my daily life, I certainly don't share the blues experience - but the blues take me somewhere different than Sondheim, Mahler and Bach.

Someone recently knocked me for wanting to listen more to WFUV (a folk and folk-rock station) than WFMU (a wonderfully eclectic college station that plays anything.) This person knocked WFUV for playing 'that folky shit'. But as I thought about it, I realized that i was more interested in music based on song structures than music based on grooves and oddity. There's plenty of great stuff on WFMU, and plenty that I don't like on WFUV. But I prefer to hear the struggles of song writers to that of musicians trying to shock or surprise me with novelty. (Old Fuddy Dud Alert - here it comes ...) And a lot of music today is built on groove and words - melody and harmony taking a back seat. That doesn't work for me in any kind of music.

But WHY has that occurred? I know rap and hip-hop were cultural developments as well as musical ones ... but why the strong move towards groove over everything else? And why the persistence of that tendency for a few decades now? We don't seem to be dancing as much as we used to (that could be my age speaking) - so the predominance of groove doesn't seem to be a dance thing. Yes, words that are done in a rap style have a different approach to communication than sung lyrics. But despite the content being so direct, the 'tonal' context seems so limited after a while - it's always the same voice, the same inflection.

This is way off what I wanted to talk about - the appeal of roots music. But maybe for others, the spoken word has that simple directness that I'm finding in roots music.

Or maybe what I hear in hip-hop as a lack of musical gesture is what my father heard when we were playing Jimi Hendrix records in the 60's - for him maybe Hendrix was a lack of organized musical structure and indulgent soloing.

But what is disturbing to me is not the music I don't like ... but the music that seems void of content - music where there's not enough content to hang my displeasure on.