Marta and I will be on Cape Cod for the next week visiting family and relaxing after the EMF marathon.

I’ll be back on August 8th!

Are we really so Puritanical as a society that a picture of a baby nursing is offensive? If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out the latest scandal to emerge from that filthy rag Babytalk. Even though I don’t agree with many of the high and mighty stances that are taken against pornography in this country, I can understand how some folks with delicate upbringings can find nudity offensive, but come on, breast feeding?

So today is the penultimate day of the Eastern Music Festival and I just returned from my 6th, and last dress rehearsal of the Eastern Philharmonic Orchestra. It has been my habit to attend the dress rehearsals in favor of the concert for several reasons, among them the fact that I always have a great seat and I don’t have to spend the money to see a concert, something that as a musician, I am loathe to do! I guess I miss the energy of a live performance and a full house, but the chance to be alone with the music and without cell phones, crying babies, and candy wrappers is better than a 5 or 10% improvement in performance quality.

Before discussing today’s performance, last week was concert 5 of 6 featuring mezzo-soprano Frederica Von Stade performing Mahler’s Five Songs to Poems of Friedrich Rückert. Rounding out the program were Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, Respighi’s Pines of Rome and a Respighi orchestration of Bach’s Passacaglia in C Minor. For me, the deeply emotional and moving Rückert Lieder stole the show. The poems were written after the death of two of Rückert’s children, and Mahler’s simple yet deft setting of the text is masterful. Von Stade’s reserved interpretation was spot on emotionally and Schwarz and the orchestra responded with a graceful and nuanced performance. (Now I really sound like a critic!!)

The second half of the program was far too much Respighi for me to handle in one day. First of all, let me say that I simply do not like the Pines of Rome. I find it bombastic, banal, and pointless and the recorded bird calls go way beyond the pale. However, I do know that a majority of the listening public is not as elitist about classical music as I am, so I can accept the reasons for its continued place in the repertoire. The Bach was, in my opinion, an unmitigated disaster. The orchestra played it capably, and the work is a brilliant piece of music, but it is a piece of genius written for the organ, not for a huge Romantic orchestra.

Today was the dress rehearsal for the final concert tomorrow night. The program is fairly straightforward: Mozart’s Overture to The Marriage of Figaro and Piano Concerto No. 26 in D Major (”Coronation”) on the first half and Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 on the second half. Garrick Ohlsson is the soloist this week, and while he performed the work fairly well, I felt that he was a bit more casual about this rehearsal than I would have hoped. Either that, or this is a warm-up for his performance of the same work next week at the Mostly Mozart festival in New York.

Though I wore out my recording of the Mahler as a teenage trumpet player, this was my first chance to hear the piece live. I know I seem to speak only in superlatives about the festival and the EPO so bear with me while I say that this was truly the culminating musical moment for me this summer. First of all, to be perfectly clear, the piece is tremendously (and in spots, pointlessly) difficult and has had the orchestra stressed out for the past several days. I know that many would argue that there is more difficult music out there, and I would agree, but my counter is that there are few pieces that sustain such a high degree of difficulty over such a long stretch. The cello part is 50 pages and the sheer volume of music makes it a nightmare for an orchestra that doesn’t already have the work in its standard repertoire. (The EPO has three rehearsals and a concert per week, that’s not a lot of time…) That being said, much (certainly not all) of the difficult music is lost in the gorgeous orchestration and powerful orchestral tutti sections to the point where I hardly noticed any miscues, even though I know (and could see) that they were there. Kudos to the orchestra for all of their hard work and I know that the concert will be a great success tomorrow evening.

On a side note, I was saddened to learn that John Mack, the longtime oboist from the Cleveland Orchestra passed away from cancer this week. His performances, especially of Debussy, inspired me as an undergraduate and the music world lost one of its great performers.

So anyone who has been following along (all 3 of you, I’m sure) knows that I gave up a full time teaching gig because Marta got a better, tenure-track, offer at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. In the interim, I’ve been canvassing the St. Louis area universities with phone calls to try to find some way to make a bit of extra cash and to fill in the year on my C.V.

Well, I’m happy to report that I’ve accepted offers for adjunct work at two schools. One of the two jobs is at SIUE, so I’ll be working (again) with my wife, teaching two sections (8am and 9am, surprise!) of freshman theory and ear-training five days a week. The second job offer I received was from Maryville University in St. Louis to teach keyboard harmony/aural skills, world music, and some sort of ensemble.

The Maryville gig is only 3 days a week, and the world music is a 3-hour night class that only meets once a week and runs for a meager 8 weeks beginning in October. The ensemble is a bit scary, not because I’m unqualified (I was a high school band director, once upon a time…) but because it is currently amorphous with no definite ensemble and no telling what type of musicians might just show up that first day of class. If worst comes to worst, I’ll break the class up into small ensembles and just punt, but I’m hoping for something with a bit more structure!

My apologies for taking so long to update the blog. Since my last post about the Eastern Music Festival, the EPO has had two more concerts, the first featuring the Brahms Third Symphony and the Rachmaninov Second Piano Concerto.

After years of ignoring Brahms, sometime in the past 3 or 4 years I’ve become increasingly enthusiastic about his music. I’m not sure why I have had the sudden change but I suspect it has two sources: First, I’m not sure that I ever really made Brahms a priority, given the amount of energy I spent listening 20th Century music and second, perhaps I was simply not ready to embrace the depth and sophistication of Brahms’ music. The orchestra gave a splendid performance of the symphony, and the quiet ending that seemed so anti-climactic when I first heard it as a teenager is now the perfect ending to a wonderfully crafted piece.

The Rachmaninov was also well done, and Andre Watts was, as usual, brilliant but I find “Rocky” to be a bit tedious these days. This ambivalence is precisely in contrast to my feelings about Brahms. When I was younger, I found Rachmaninov thrilling and exciting, but I’ve since grown away from it. I suppose if I were living in Germany in the middle to late 19th Century, I suppose I’d be squarely in the Brahms/Schumann camp lined up in opposition to the Wagner/Liszt supporters.

The program for the second EPO concert was the Meistersinger Prelude by Wagner, the Shostakovich Cello Concerto, and the always iconic Beethoven Symphony in C Minor. The brilliant cellist was Xavier Phillips (pronounced Zahv’ee a), a scion of Rostropovich and a remarkable musician. The orchestra gave a tremendous performance of the Beethoven (guest conducted by Stefan Sanderling of the Florida Orchestra) that still has me humming excerpts. After four concerts the group is starting to play to its full potential and there is nothing quite so remarkable as a good ensemble/performer playing one of the pillars of Western classical music.

(On a side note, I’ve never lost my passion for either Beethoven or Shostakovich. I’m still just as excited by both of them as I was as an undergraduate.)

Other than the two EPO concerts, there have been four student concerts, several faculty chamber concerts (including L’Histoire and a very cool violin/cello duo by Schulhoff), and several guest artist concerts. These guests have included the Canadian Brass, the Air Force String Quartet, Roberto Diaz, the Orion String Quartet, and Anthony Dean Griffey. Only ten days of the festival left to recharge my passion for music before I begin preparing for a whole new group of theory students.

I promise this will be my last World Cup post, at least for the next 3 and a half years…

Though I seem to be in the minority, I thought the final was quite exciting, full of excellent effort, a few great shots, dramatic fouls, and of course, the infamous Zidane head butt. I’m not sure whether to condemn Zizou for the blatant attack that most certainly deserved the red card, or to applaud him for finally standing up for himself after being grabbed, pulled, and otherwise harrassed for the entire game. He’s been the greatest player of his generation, and I don’t really know what to say beyond mentioning that I doubt it affected the outcome of the game in the least.

Even though my grandmother was born in Italy, I was sentimentally hoping for a French win for several reasons: I wanted to see Zidane win in his swan song, Thierry Henry has a been a vocal force campaigning for the elimination of racism in the sport, Ribery is just fun to watch and finally I just plain don’t like the style of the Italian game. Check out this passage from Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World:

Starting in the 1960’s, the Italians began practicing a highly defensive strategy called catenaccio, the lockdown. This formation adds an extra layer of defese, a sweeper, bringing up the rear of an already robust back line that marks man to man. Offense doesn’t usually receive many resources in this arrangement. Goals are scored in bursts of counterattack, with the ball quickly sent up the field in flashes. This way, goals come with great rarity, usually only once or twice a game. With so few opportunities to score, and so little margin for error, players must do whatever they can to gain the upper hand. Thus, the greatest cliche of Italian soccer - the impassioned two handed mamma mia pleading with the referee.

Even as the old catenaccio style has been heavily modified in recent years to provide more offense, the tropes of the system still remain. Complaints and gamesmanship are still meant to provide a decisive advantage in games. Players flop in hopes of deceiving the referee into awarding a penalty. They argue the justice of every decision, calculating that they can plant enough doubt to earn a make-up call later in the game. After every goal, defenders hold up their arms in protest, as if this gesture might pry up a linesman’s offside flag.

Because of the referee’s centrality to the outcome of games, teams do whatever they can to influence him.

It is precisely this diving that most American sports fans turn to when they inevitably begin their anti-soccer diatribes. It is a fair complaint, but in my opinion not really at the heart of America’s active disdain for the game. Again, turning to Foer’s book, he (correctly, in my opinion) points out that in most of the world, the majority of soccer fans are drawn from the working class. In America, we are one of the few countries where the game has been co-opted by the middle and upper class and turned into what many view as an elitist sport. The best analogy I can come up with is to compare soccer with John Kerry on one side and NASCAR and George W. Bush on the other. When soccer enthusiasts claim that the game represents sophistication (which it clearly doesn’t, except for the Europhile) and everyone who doesn’t like it is ignorant, they don’t do the sport any favors and just continue to feed the frothing hatred that comes from certain quarters of the American sports media.

I wish soccer fans would quit trying to convert the masses and acting like they know something that the rest of the country is too stupid to figure out. If this were to happen, then perhaps the sport could gain some popularity all on its own!

As I mentioned in a post last month, I have more than a passing interest in the folk music of Bulgaria, and particularly that of the region around my wife’s native city of Burgas. While we were there, we happened to run across an interesting book titled Musical Folklore of Strandja Region: Peculiarities of Rhythm, Metrics, Structure, and Modes by Professor Stefan Tchapkanov. The only problem with the book, for me at least, is that other than the foreword and the abundant musical examples, the entire text is in Bulgarian. So until my reading comprehension improves, the book is basically an outstanding anthology to accompany research by American ethnomusicologists such as Timothy Rice and Donna Buchanan.

So what does this have to do with a career opportunity? Well, I took the book off the shelf yesterday and started reading through the foreword. After just a few moments I suddenly became aware that I had absolutely no idea what I was reading! It is not that the literal translation is incorrect (and far be it for me to criticize anyone who speaks more than one language with any fluency!) but rather that the translation, in many subtle (or not so subtle) ways just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense without very careful scrutiny. This immediately brought to mind a career opportunity that I’ve had in mind for many years now: Re-Translator!

So here’s the job listing:

Wanted: Young, entrepreneurial native English (or French, or German, etc.) speaker with a good vocabulary, good writing skills, and a sense of adventure to join our staff of translators. No experience necessary, proof of language skills required. Come enjoy living abroad as you contribute to our burgeoning economy by re-translating a variety of documents.

Do you have what it takes to be a re-translator? Here is a passage from the forward of Musical Folklore of Strandja Region first in Bulgarian, and then translated into English. Please re-translate, you have 10 minutes, starting… NOW!:

В Този контекст трябва в днешното фолклорно наследство на странджа да откриваме самобитно музикално светоусещане, в което се транслира по един или друг начин общата полклорна култура на странджанци с тяхната регионална идентичноцт като потомци на едно автохтонно население. Нецлучайно Михаил Арнаудов не се поколебал да вложи своето особено усещане за тази автохтонност на странджанското духовно наследство в една дума “мистика”.

This is translated as:

In this context we should look for the distinctive musical conception of the world imminent to the folklore heritage of Strandja into which in one way or the other the common folklore culture of the people of Strandja with their regional identity as decedents of autochthonic population is retranslated. It is not by accident that Mihail Arnaudov did not hesitate to express his own perception of of this autochthonism of the Strandja spiritual heritage with one word - mysticism.

You can leave your answers in the comments section…

STANDARD (Politically Correct) DISCLAIMER: The job listing itself is entirely fictional (The passage from the book, however, is not.) This was inspired simply by the sheer volume of poor translations common in restaurants, museums, and local guide books and the years of work it will take to provide more modern and tourist friendly documentation. I’m quite certain that Bulgaria has many excellent and hard-working translators who, if given an opportunity, could do all this work themselves.

So as you can probably tell, I’m trying to redesign the blog a bit. It’s not going quite as well as I had hoped, so if you come here in a day or two and it is different again, don’t be too terribly surprised.

Inspired by Rob’s Glob, I answered a few of these short online quizzes that are supposed to cleverly categorize you based on the answers that you provide. After looking at them, perhaps they help explain my politics as well…

And then there is this one:

You Are 10% Redneck

I’ll slap you so hard, your clothes will be outta style. You ain’t no redneck - you’re all Yankee!

There you have it, I am a Yankee after all…

Happy Fourth of July!

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Two hundred and thirty years ago today, the Declaration of Independence was signed, with those word written boldly at the top of the second paragraph. However, with my progressive political views, I can’t help but notice that these truths have become co-opted to represent a vision of liberty that doesn’t exactly reflect my own.

If you are a progressive like myself, I urge you to visit The Rockridge Institute and particularly the writings of George Lakoff. Lakoff is a professor of linguistics at the University of California and one of the most influential progressive writers that I have ever read. His expertise is language and in his books and essays he points out the methods by which the conservatives have framed the debate to their advantage. He does not make wild accusations, does not act in an extremist fashion, and does not go on rants that are embarrassing to the Democratic Party. (Michael Moore, for example) What he does do is point out how the conservatives have been successful in the way they’ve used the language to their advantage and what progressives can do to counter this trend. What follows is an excerpt from the Rockridge Institute website that gives his example of conservative framing:

On the day that George W. Bush took office, the words tax relief started appearing in White House communiqués to the press and in official speeches and reports by conservatives. Let us look in detail at the framing evoked by this term.

The word relief evokes a frame in which there is a blameless Afflicted Person who we identify with and who has some Affliction, some pain or harm that is imposed by some external Cause-of-pain. Relief is the taking away of the pain or harm, and it is brought about by some Reliever-of-pain.

The Relief frame is an instance of a more general Rescue scenario, in which there a Hero (The Reliever-of-pain), a Victim (the Afflicted), a Crime (the Affliction), A Villain (the Cause-of-affliction), and a Rescue (the Pain Relief). The Hero is inherently good, the Villain is evil, and the Victim after the Rescue owes gratitude to the Hero.

The term tax relief evokes all of this and more. Taxes, in this phrase, are the Affliction (the Crime), proponents of taxes are the Causes-of Affliction (the Villains), the taxpayer is the Afflicted Victim, and the proponents of “tax relief” are the Heroes who deserve the taxpayers’ gratitude.

Every time the phrase tax relief is used and heard or read by millions of people, the more this view of taxation as an affliction and conservatives as heroes gets reinforced.

~Excerpt from “Simple Framing” by George Lakoff

His new book, Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea presents his views about how the conservatives are slowly but surely changing the way most Americans view this most basic of American values. If you think like me, I urge you to follow up on the links I’ve provided in this post.

Tomorrow, it’s back to business as usual and I’ll talk about music, or travel, or sports and move back away from politics for a while.