This Friday night, November 15, at 7:30 pm, my lovely wife Marilyn Nonken will take to the stage at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music and present Piano 360, a program of new and recent immersive musical works “surrounding the audience with a spatial audio ring of speakers,” according to the DiMenna Center’s page for this event. On the program are new compositions by Elizabeth Hoffman (which includes a few texts by yours truly), Ellen Fishman, and Natasha Barrett, as well as contemporary masterpieces by Alvin Lucier, Hugues Dufourt, and Jonathan Harvey.
Tickets for this event are available here; the DiMenna Center is at 450 West 37th Street here in New York. We’ll hope to see you there.
Today marks the 150th anniversary of Arnold Schönberg’s birth, and the Austrian Cultural Forum here in New York will celebrate next week on Friday, September 19, with the opening of Arnold Schönberg: 150 Years, an exhibition running through November 8 devoted to the life and work of the modernist composer, a collaboration with Vienna’s Arnold Schönberg Center. The celebration will get under way next Friday with a concert from Trio Callas, which will be performing the composer’s Verklärte Nacht and Charles Ives’s Piano Trio, following opening remarks from Dr. Ulrike Anton, the newish director of the Schönberg Center. This event is sold out, alas, but I’ll look forward to the exhibition itself.
As I raise my glass of Moric’s Haus Marke Red tonight, I’ll be listening to Hilary Hahn’s splendid rendition of Schönberg’s violin concerto, accompanied by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen. While the actual Deutsche Grammophon CD release is to be preferred, here’s the YouTube version — better than nothing — for all you cheapskates out there. And really, if you’re going to listen to this music, get yourself a real stereo system whydon’tcha.
In his study of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Carl Schorske turned not to Schoenberg, Berg, or Webern to introduce his themes, but to Maurice Ravel’s 1920 La valse. “I feel this work a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, linked in my mind with the impression of a fantastic whirl of destiny,” Ravel said, and Schorske wrote:
Ravel’s musical parable of a modern cultural crisis, whether or not he knew it, posed the problem in much the same way as it was felt and seen by the Austrian intelligensia of the fin-de-siècle. How had their world fallen into chaos? Was it because the individuals (in Ravel, the musical themes) contained in their own psyches some characteristics fundamentally incompatible with the social whole? Or was it the whole as such that distorted, paralyzed, and destroyed the individuals who composed it? … These questions are not new to humankind, but to Vienna’s fin-de-siècle intelligentsia they became central. Not only Vienna’s finest writers, but its painters and psychologists, even its art historians, were preoccupied with the nature of the individual in a disintegrating society.
As, I would add, am I. It is small comfort to realize that we’ve been here before, but we must take our comforts as they come.
To while away a few minutes today, you may wish to hear La valse itself. I’m quite fond of eccentrics; they are the spice of society, so long as they don’t shade into sociopaths, which they too often do. Below you’ll find Glenn Gould’s re-arrangement of Ravel’s solo piano arrangement of La valse in his 1974 series for the CBC, Music in Our Time. His introductory remarks are of interest as well.
