musical notes

1. I reviewed a concert from last weekend, the Redwood Symphony. The music director in forwarding this to his mailing list called it very nice, but opined that "much more enthusiasm in the tone is warranted."

Yes, it could have been much more enthusiastic. It wasn't. There's a reason. It was a good concert, but I wasn't enthused. The Stravinsky was very well played, and I did say the players "were at their finest," but when I called Kirke Mechem's 1960s symphony "a worthy slice of chromatic tonal modernism," the implication that it's interchangeable with a lot of other slices was deliberate. I've heard a lot of works like that from that period that neither attracted nor repelled me. If I wrote with enthusiasm, what words would I have left for something which genuinely enthused me?

What interested me more was Mechem's statement that he no longer wrote symphonies, or much other concert music, after 1970, because he couldn't get his conservative modernism played. He elaborates on this in his memoir, Believe Your Ears, which I read through before the concert. To an extent it's an indictment of the serialist hegemony, the one whose proponents continue to insist it never existed. Mechem considers himself a victim of it. To the argument that lots of tonal composers continued to write all that time, including himself, Mechem says: look at the textbooks and the listeners' guides to modern music of the time. Those composers were ridiculed, belittled, dismissed, or totally ignored. And I certainly noticed that at the time, in the 1960s and 1970s. That's why I call them the Hidden City.

2. Enough of that. Obituaries have been appearing for Vic Damone, a lesser figure among the great wave of Italian-American male crooners so prominent in American popular music in the mid 20C. I confess I only know his name for the occasion that he, along with Dean Martin, a better-known crooner of the same ethnicity, shared a TV session with Allan Sherman - who was neither Italian nor a crooner - to sing some of Sherman's briefer and punchier song parodies, some of which made it on to his own albums and some of which didn't. The first one is a rather cranky generational clash, but the rest are just silly. The three of them had a fun-filled and unedited time of it. Watch Damone at 4:45 stumble over a spoonerism on his way to one of the most telegraphed puns in musical history.