Wampum

Kevin DeLuca, the IT Manager for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra wrote to ask

3. What is your experience with music in general? With classical music (including recordings, live performances, ringtones, Bugs Bunny, etc.)?

WQED is conducting its winter fundraising drive, and while "public classical radio" is something I out-grew decades ago, having started on the LA Phil @ Hollywood Bowl (via radio, and as a surreal pleasure, QED is playing Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1, which was a Bowl staple in the early 60's. All very Hunky and Emotive). Later it was short-wave, followed the classical FM stations of Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco. My father had a large collection of LPs. He was an audiophile, and back then I could listen to Bolero with a straight face. Back then I could also read Time and US News and World Report as straight acts.

But there was something better. There was something other than the "Top 100 Classical Thingies" (the QED gift in exchange for about that many dollars in subscription/contribution), played by an indifferent collection of orchestral groups with an indifferent collection of conductors under an indifferent set of auditory and recording condititions and royalty fee schedules, to an indifferent and "Top 100 Thingie" collecting audience. Remarketed for brighter, whiter Mozartian babies. There was, and is, Mary Berg's show from 5am to 9am, Sundays on KPFA (Berkeley) and KFCF (Fresno). That was, and is, the program for the tired of classical program.

Easily the worst musical investment of my life was a compilation of Americanists -- early 20th century composers (US nationals) reacting to the fact that the best work for a sympony about the New World was From the New World, by a Czech on a busman's holiday. The only endurable moment was Rudolf Friml's "Natoma", and that only because it grew up and became the Hamm's beer jingo. I went down that rathole because Arthur Nevin attempted to work the Scarface story into an opera. Poia had a very short run, once here in Pitt 99 years ago and a few years later in Berlin. Seriously, the best collection of Nisitapii (Siksika speaking) culture outside of Glenbow is in Munich, of all places.

The better recording is the Furtwangler/Berlin Philharmonic concert from November 1941, which is now known to have been by Oswald Kabasta, not Furtwangler. Kabasta worked the score from the pit of dispair, in a world of victorious Nazis, which is about how any serious Indian would have worked the material prior to the advent of Indian Gaming and the money that started coming into Indian Country.

What is your experience with music in general? I don't play. I am utterly without skill in any instrument. I'm vastly fonder of early music than of most works that form the "classical" ouvre. I think there are some works that really are serious, I own two recordings of Britten's War Requiem. I'm partial to requiems as a form. A commisioned work for oboe sounds like fun. Its an instrument I'm partial to, being a modern shawm. The Higdon series too looks like fun. I might be able to spring for tickets to one or two.

On a lighter note, I hope to be able to afford a ticket to the Pittsburgh Opera's production of Tosca. Dictatorship. Secret police. Torture. A table knife. Good clean fun set to music. Utterly irrelevant. Escapist. Light Opera in a time of Madness and War.