Sofia Gubaidulina

I just came across the news that Sofia Gubaidulina died on Thursday, at the age of 93.

Here's the most extensive and explanatory piece about her music I've written, in a review of a San Francisco Symphony concert back in 2009:

Sofia Gubaidulina, 77 years old and the most senior of distinguished living women composers, her round face reflecting her Tatar ancestry, leaned forward in her chair and stared in an intense birdlike way at the interviewer posing wordy, vapid questions in a language the listener knows little of, then waited as the self-effacing translator (Laurel Fay, actually one of the most formidable American scholars of modern Russian music) rendered them into Russian, then replied in the same language for Fay to make English of it.

They were talking about Gubaidulina's The Light of the End, a recent orchestral composition that the SFS then performed under Kurt Masur. This is, the composer explained, a work about the conflict between the pure tones of just intonation, represented by the French horns, and the modern compromised system of equal temperament, represented by, I guess, the rest of the orchestra. The moments when the horns went on their way against other instruments produced an intense sub-intervalic dissonance very different from the boring old chromatic dissonances of your average modern composer. It had an almost spiritually cleansing effect, especially as it was used as punctuation, not a steady diet, and the whole thing was resolved into pure consonance at the conclusion, the "light of the end" of her title.

But that's Gubaidulina for you. Much of her music has a hushed, expectant quality. This piece was louder and more forceful than others of her works I know, but it played on that expectancy. And her mastery of the orchestra and capability for creating a distinctive voice were strongly evident. I "get" Gubaidulina in a sense that I don't get Carter, Dutilleux, or Kirchner (three living male composers older than she, all of whom I've suffered through in concert).

Gubaidulina expressed satisfaction that the light of her hard-won conclusion would be followed by Bruckner's Fourth Symphony, which she described as what comes afterwards when you get there.

words to live by

B. is reading a book by Mariann Edgar Budde. She's the Episcopal bishop who offended DT by asking him to be merciful. In the book, she quotes these lines:

"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

world according to cat

It's beginning to look rather spring-like out there. Tiny birds are settling down on the top of the fence around our front patio. I can't hear if they're saying anything, because the sliding glass door is closed, but Tybalt is looking at them and is making enough chirping noises for the bunch of them. He wants them, but he's not going to get them.

John Wain

Today is the centenary of the birth of John Wain, a British writer - mostly novelist and poet, though also dramatist, critic, and professor - who was well-known to followers of contemporary English literature in his heyday in the 1950s, but is almost forgotten today.

Except for one thing. As a student at Oxford in the 1940s, he'd had C.S. Lewis as his tutor, and after his graduation Lewis invited him to attend the Inklings, so now he's on the unofficial roster of that famous society.

But he wasn't too happy about being known for that, when he was still around to express an opinion (he died in 1994), because the Inklings are most famous for fostering Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and Wain disliked that book. He found it meaningless and detached from reality. Wain's own fiction is conservative modern realism, so you can see the difference and perhaps understand why he couldn't grasp fantasy as reflective of reality.

But perhaps he shouldn't have been too upset, at least with me as an example, for after learning about Wain through reading about the Inklings, curiosity drove me to try his writings. I liked enough of them to carry on. Eventually I read all 14 of his published novels and 3 short story collections, as well as much of his nonfiction. Most of his novels aren't really very good, though they were clearly readable and not murky or dull, but a few I enjoyed, one of them - Lizzie's Floating Shop, his only juvenile - enough to re-read it. Some of his short stories are extremely biting. And I liked a lot of his nonfiction, particularly his two books of memoirs (Sprightly Running and Dear Shadows) and his biography of Dr. Johnson.

Last year I finally completed a long-mooted project of writing a paper about Wain - his biography, his literary views and their formation, and a survey of his novels - and gave it at Mythcon and a Signum University conference. It's not formal in nature so I have no plans to publish it academically, but maybe I can get it out somewhere else.

In the meantime, a centenary is a moment to think about its celebrant. Wain was born in Stoke-on-Trent, son of a dentist, on March 14, 1925, and by his own account wasn't much formed literarily or in personality until he got to Oxford at 18 and became a disciple of Lewis, the Oxford drama teacher Nevill Coghill, and, less formally, the independent scholar E.H.W. Meyerstein. Then Wain met fellow students and budding writers Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, both much better remembered today than himself, and his literary affiliations were set.

weird almost-coincidence

The New Yorker this week (Mar. 17 issue) had an article on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

Leaving aside the politics, it discussed something about Abbott I hadn't known, though apparently everybody else did. He's permanently in a wheelchair.

It told the story of how he got there. One day, some 40 years ago, he was out jogging, and a large oak tree collapsed and fell on him.

That's weird, I thought, because at approximately the same date - and I'm just about Abbott's age, too - almost the same thing almost happened to me.

I was walking on the Stanford campus where I was working at the time (work was over and I was heading to the parking lot), and going past Encina Hall, when a full branch from a large spreading oak tree suddenly detached itself and slammed to the ground, right in front of me.

A couple steps away and I would have been hit, with unknown consequences.

But I'm confident that, whatever damage it would have done to my head, it would not have transformed me into a right-wing Texas politician.

The most amusing part of the article is an interview with Abbott's principal political advisor, who explains why he lives in New Hampshire and has been commuting to Texas fortnightly for getting on 30 years. “I never thought of moving,” he said. “Texas is hot as hell, and they have snakes.”

wickeder

B. and I just endured some three hours of watching the Wicked movie. The charge for streaming it online having been more than we wanted to pay (and far more, it turns out, than it was worth), B. put a hold on a library DVD and it came in.

Mind, I haven't seen the stage musical, and I never finished reading the Maguire novel. But seeing the movie fresh, I found:

The plot was forced (as in, "we're gonna cram in Wizard of Oz references whether they fit or not"). The dialogue was broken and discontinuous. The special effects were garish. The songs were dull and, even worse, sometimes gratuitously irritating. The problem is that they stood in the place of better songs. For instance, the movie begins with a song about how the Wicked Witch is dead. I could hardly avoid wishing I was hearing the infinitely more catchy song on the same topic from 1939 instead. And the song about visiting the wonders of the Emerald City was a pale, anemic little thing that made me think longingly of the similarly-themed but much more vivid and colorful "New York, New York" by Bernstein/Comden & Green from On the Town.

Thumb down on this one.

concert review: Vienna Philharmonic

Another year, another three-concert set by the visiting Vienna Philharmonic, the most renowned orchestra in the world, at Zellerbach Hall, and I perforce am sent to review one of the concerts. Each of the four times I've done this, it's been a different conductor. Vienna doesn't have a music director; the orchestra is a self-governing entity and invites whoever they like.

This time it was Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director in Montreal (of which he's native) and Philadelphia. I hadn't heard his work before. I didn't say so explicitly, but I couldn't avoid comparing his Dvořák New World Symphony with the splendid rendition under Dalia Stasevska that I heard from SFS a year ago. This one was effective enough, but felt rather superficial in interpretation next to Stasevska's profundity. Nézet-Séguin was, at least in this work, one of those conductors whose idea of interpretation is to take fast passages really fast and slow passages really slow. In other words, rather like Christian Thielemann, who did a haphazard job on Mendelssohn and Brahms the last time I reviewed Vienna, except that Nézet-Séguin is more like Thielemann done right. He showed more control and better taste, and so he was passable if not excellent.

The Vienna sound is still great, though. There was a small but detectable increase in the number of women in this once, not long ago, all-male orchestra, since the last time I saw them. Vienna has an elaborate system of training prospective players in the Vienna sound, and it takes recruiting players for the early stages of this process to get them in the orchestra later.

wicked

Our fantasy book discussion group met on Sunday to discuss Gregory Maguire's Wicked, in commemoration of the recent release of its musical's movie. How much the book, or the musical, is based on the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie as opposed to Baum's book was a major topic of discussion. Our answer was: mostly. Not too much of the distinctively Baum in it.

I got a confirmation of that when I checked the DVR today to see what was on Great Performances lately and found they had shown the Movies for Grownups Awards, sponsored by AARP. Alan Cumming hosted, boasting that he'd just turned 60, the spring chicken, but he and his show were far preferable to the average Oscar host and show. It moved along briskly, didn't waste time with a lot of follies, and Cumming's little songs were funnier than the average Oscar host's little songs ("Hey, Mr. Chalamet man, sing like Bob for me").

Anyway, the screenwriting award went to the writers for the Wicked movie, and Jeff Goldblum, who played the Wizard in that movie, introduced the winners by saying that their movie was based on a stage musical which was based on a book which was based on a movie which was based on another book. And there's your officially blessed answer: Maguire's book was based on the 1939 movie.

a day in San Francisco

There's a music series I'm on the mailing list for, held at a small church in the City, but for which the timings are usually awkward so I can rarely go. But this Saturday morning they were holding a children's program, and I had to go up to the City anyway for a concert at Herbst that evening, and the program for the children's concert was Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals, which I like, so I thought, why not?

Because I often have difficulty forcing my body to be ready to go out in the mornings, that's why not, but this time it co-operated and I was there. It was only about half an hour, but the arrangement for one piano, violin, viola, and bass worked fine - Meena Bhasin on viola playing "The Swan," as far as I could tell in the same register as the original cello part, was particularly good, and it was fun watching the tiny children cavorting to the music.

The evening concert was the Calidore String Quartet, which previously I've found very impressive, but either I was too tired out or they were, because otherwise why would a program with Beethoven and Schubert in it sound dull and crabby, and the best piece in it was Jesse Montgomery's Strum? I've heard that before and thought it an outstanding piece; it was even better this time. The scherzo of Korngold's Third Quartet was also a moment that had life in it.

That left over eight hours with nothing to do besides meals, so what would I do with it? I decided to spend my time in North Beach, which is another neighborhood I rarely get to. Herbst is in the Civic Center which is here, and the kids' concert was in Noe Valley which is over there, and North Beach is way off in the other direction, but with knowledge of the city's bus and streetcar system, I got between the places OK.

There was a restaurant in North Beach that had been on my "try this" list for some time, and I walked over to examine from below two of the legendarily steepest street segments in the City which were nearby, but I spent most of my afternoon in the famous City Lights Bookstore, which was also conveniently nearby. I'd never bought anything at City Lights on my few previous visits, having not found anything that interested me, but it turns out that's because I hadn't noticed that there's a little staircase leading down to the basement, and that's where all the books are that are more my speed.

Good thing I brought a canvas bag, also for a couple bottles of interestingly flavored cider that I found at a little street fair back in Noe Valley.

world according to cats

After his visit two weeks ago to the vet for a teeth-cleaning, Tybalt began - even more than usual - to love-bomb me. I was afraid he was calculating that sufficient ministrations would convince me never to take him to the vet again.

Unfortunately that didn't work. Yesterday he went back for a follow-up check, and this time it was Maia's turn in the dental chair. The cries of dismay as we stuffed them in their carriers and hauled them off by car were intense, but they survived and are back at home, as over-loving as ever.

For instance, I cannot work at my computer without Tybalt alternating between 1) standing up right in front of the screen so that I can't see anything; 2) flopping down by the side and preventing me from using the trackball by clawing at my fingers whenever I try.

Tybalt had been sent home from his major appointment with various meds which we were supposed to squirt onto his teeth twice a day. B. held him and squeezed his mouth open while I wielded the syringes. We gave up on this after a day and a half, having traumatized the cat and placed more medicine on his jaw, B.'s hands, etc. than in Tybalt's mouth let alone on his teeth.

Anyway, yesterday the vet, trying to examine Tybalt's teeth, was having even more trouble squeezing his mouth open than B. had had. I refrained from pointing out that this was why we gave up on the meds.