Sunday, March 17, 2024

news

Well, I've got some news.

First, that The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien is being published this fall. My first excursion into Tolkien arcana was tracking down some of the obscure anthologies and magazines where Tolkien published occasional fugitive poems in the 1920s and 30s - some of them tangents to his then otherwise completely unknown Silmarillion mythology. And now nobody will have to do that. I've put the details up on the Tolkien Society blog.

Second, that not one but three short stories by the late, great, and utterly weird Howard Waldrop are being made into movies. They're all short films, but I don't know when they're being released. But there are trailers online! They are:

The Ugly Chickens, starring Felicia Day

Mary Margaret Road-Grader. That looks like Keanu Reeves, but he's not in the IMDB credits.

Night of the Cooters, starring Vincent D'Onofrio. That one has already been released, but I hadn't known about it.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Friday's SFS concert came in the wake of institutional trauma unleashed the previous day. Thursday morning the Symphony unveiled its schedule for next season, 2024-25 (I haven't looked at it yet; there's no point until I know which concerts will be on my series). That afternoon was a matinee performance of the same program I would hear on Friday. In between, however, Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen released a statement that he will not be seeking to renew his contract which expires at the end of next season. "I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does," the statement said waspishly.

He didn't say what those goals were, but the CEO of the orchestra said in an interview that it was due to financial cutbacks, especially hurting EPS's pet projects, that were undreamed of when he was hired.

But SF Chronicle critic Joshua Kosman thinks there's more to it than that. I got into terrible difficulties when I tried to summarize what he wrote, so let me just quote him:
What went wrong?

The simplest answer to that question is banally obvious: COVID-19.

Salonen announced plans for his first season as music director in February 2020. It was supposed to begin that September with an inventive festival spotlighting the eight artists and thinkers he’d tapped as Collaborative Partners, and to include an array of dynamic, inventive programming.

A month later, it all crumbled in the face of the pandemic. Some might argue — OK, I would argue — that the Salonen era in San Francisco never fully recovered from that initial blow.

Nearly everything Salonen undertook for the first two years of his tenure had to function as a survival strategy, and later a recovery strategy, in the face of the pandemic.

He took the Collaborative Partners online with “Throughline,” an ingenious but slender digital program with a score by pianist and composer Nico Muhly. He reconfigured SoundBox, the orchestra’s experimental music series, to function as a digital offering.

And in spring of 2021, when audiences were finally able to trickle back into Davies Symphony Hall for in-person performances, he created ingenious programs that worked around the logistical constraints of masks and social distancing.

All of this was handled with imagination and dexterity. But it wasn’t what anybody wanted — not the orchestra, not its audiences, not (I assume) Salonen. Even after regular concerts resumed in earnest that fall, there was still that faint shadow across the proceedings, a sense that we had all gotten off on the wrong foot together.
One should remember that EPS doesn't need the music director job. He didn't want another music director post after retiring from the LA Philharmonic; he wanted to compose and to guest-conduct occasionally. He acceded to SFS's offer because the opportunity to do the work he wanted was irresistible. If it no longer is giving those opportunities, why should he continue beyond what he's already contracted for? He'll be turning 67 about when next season ends; maybe it's time to go.

That gives management about a year to find a replacement, assuming they don't go the "seasons of discovery and decision" route of making a season or two out of auditioning people in guest conducting slots. SFS tried that once before, in the early 1950s: it did not produce a successful result. Nor did it work well for the San Jose Symphony in the 1990s. On the other hand, the California Symphony is happy with the music director it got that way, after firing its previous director because of - ta-da - financial disagreements.

So how was Friday's concert? EPS conducted, and there's no question what the audience thought about the situation: he received rapturous applause and cheers from the full house when he entered, though that was nothing compared with what he got when he finished. He took his bows standing in the midst of the orchestra, as if to emphasize the musical partnership which is unaffected by what management does, and the orchestra members presented him with a huge bouquet of flowers, which they'd also done on Thursday.

EPS specializes in new music, but if you're going to have a conductor from Finland, you can't prevent him from indulging in Finland's most renowned composer, Jean Sibelius, and doing a fabulous job of an all-Sibelius program. He took the famous tone poem Finlandia with great solemnity, grand and slow with biting brass and timpani. In the Violin Concerto, soloist Lisa Batiashvili, who specializes in this piece, gave a sweet and caressing tone throughout double-stops and harmonics and whatever else threatened to be difficult. Meanwhile, EPS kept the orchestra fully involved in dialogue with the soloist, not an easy accomplishment in this concerto. I didn't catch Batiashvili's announcement of the shivering piece she played as an encore, though I think she said it was (like herself) from the nation of Georgia, but I'm not reviewing this concert so I don't have to worry about it.

The concert finished with Sibelius's First Symphony. EPS pulled out all the grand and solemn stops he'd used in Finlandia for the finale, but otherwise the piece was bright, crisp, and bold. I was particularly impressed by the emphasis on the strophic outline of the opening of the gorgeous and touching slow movement, yet without a sense of repetitiveness. A magnificent performance that kept me rapt throughout. It deserved all the applause it got.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

in bloom

Lucy H. reported that two weeks ago she drove down I-5 from the Pacheco Pass to Bakersfield and was astonished to see the usually dry and dusty country blooming with nut trees in blossom. I decided I had to see some of that, so today I headed over there, a 90-minute drive from here. I spent little time on I-5 and didn't go anywhere near as far as Bakersfield but mostly drove back farm roads in the area immediately adjacent to the road coming from Pacheco.

The top of the blossoming has faded by now, but I did see some orchards still in bloom, and the main street of one small farm town in Merced County* was lined with trees which, like ones I remember from my childhood when the area I live in was still mostly orchards, were so full of white blossoms they looked from a distance like popcorn trees. Popped popcorn trees.

This trip also gave me the chance to have lunch at my favorite Basque restaurant in the area, possibly my last chance to eat tough chewy food for now, as the dentist is scheduled to have at me tomorrow and things may be tender in there for a while.

*Or possibly Fresno County. The road signs said it was Fresno, but the map said it was Merced.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Oscar the grouch

So Oppenheimer was the big winner, taking home Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, and a couple of technical awards. I saw that one when it came out, but mostly because I'm a sucker for historical films on topics that interest me. I wasn't terribly impressed by the movie, and have no desire to see it again, and that's largely because it tried too hard to be Big and Impressive, probably the very qualities that endeared it to the Academy voters.

As I wrote at the time, it's a Christopher Nolan Auditorily Obnoxious Special. Except when making a speech or giving testimony, Cillian Murphy mumbles to show how diffident Oppenheimer is. Only about half of what he says is audible. Meanwhile Nolan blasts you with the subwoofers any excuse he can, from the sound of nuclear bombs exploding to the sounds of an applauding audience stomping its feet on stadium bleachers. They're equally loud.

I've seen two other of the Best Picture nominees: Maestro (7 nominations, no wins), which I was lured to for the same reason I saw Oppenheimer, and which was impressively made but is so focused on its subject's personal life that it's of no possible interest to anyone who isn't fascinated by Leonard Bernstein as a person; and The Holdovers (5 nominations, 1 win for Supporting Actress), an intensely feel-good movie about the redemption of a curmudgeon, so much so that even the sour ending feels feel-good. I'm not inclined to see either of those again soon either.

I saw Nyad, which didn't get a Best Picture nomination but did get two acting nominations, which I thought well-deserved. I had no interest in the subject matter and tend to feel that a feat like that depicted here is pointless. Yet I enjoyed this movie more than any of the above.

Strangely, I have seen a couple other winners in the category of "not really candidates for Best Picture," because they showed up for free online. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (Best Live Action Short) is a highly stylized film in a style I enjoy, captivating though the plot doesn't make much sense. The Last Repair Shop (Best Documentary Short), however, is a strangely unsatisfactory film though adequately watchable. The topic is a musical instrument repair shop which services the instruments given by the LA school district to its students. Interviews with repair personnel telling their inspiring life stories are intercut with students testifying to how much they appreciate their instruments, but there is hardly any music played. At one point a student plays a few bars of Beethoven on the piano, but the camera is focused on her head, pulling down to the keyboard only just as she stops. I'm not sure what to make of the repairers, either, especially the one who claims to have once been a major success as a bluegrass fiddler. Count me skeptical of his importance once I found that his group has no entry in Wikipedia. And he doesn't say anything about how, in that case, he wound up with a lowly job in musical repair, still less why he's working on wind instruments and not violins.

Friday, March 8, 2024

way up high

So here's a musical conundrum that I learned of courtesy of File 770, not normally a source for musical stories, but it's a science fiction fanzine and this story relates to a fantasy movie, so the story's presence there is no more dragged in from the dirt than is the content of the story itself.

The question is, is the melody of "Over the Rainbow" - the song famously sung by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, composed by Harold Arlen with words by E.Y. Harburg - plagiarized?

This article goes into the matter in detail.

The putative source is a Concert Etude, Op. 38, for piano, by the Norwegian composer and pianist Signe Lund (1868-1950), who was living in the U.S. when she published the work in 1910, and apparently played it widely. Could Arlen have heard it? Maybe. He was five years old when the piece was published, and he studied piano as a boy. His testimony (quoted in the song's Wikipedia article) is that the melody just suddenly occurred to him one day while he was thinking of other things.

But even if Arlen's subconscious dredged Lund's piece up, is his just copied or is his song a substantially original composition? I'd say the latter.

Here is Lund's Concert Etude, played by the pianist who noticed the resemblance. The section with the resembling melody begins at 1:24. You can follow along with the score of that section which is reproduced in the Hollywood Reporter article.

And the first thing I notice is that Lund's melody completely lacks the most distinctive characteristic of Arlen's: the octave leap at the beginning. It does have the subsequent smaller leaps, in which its resemblance to "Over the Rainbow" principally lies, but their effectiveness comes from the way they follow the initial leap. See Rob Kapilow on why "Over the Rainbow" is such a haunting and memorable song. It doesn't make such an effect in Lund. Also there's the bridge section of "Over the Rainbow" and its echo at the end, also mentioned by Kapilow and absent from Lund's version.

If I'd been presented with the two with no indication of priority, I'd have been far more likely to guess that Lund's more elaborate melody was a variation and elaboration on Arlen's rather than that Arlen had boiled Lund's down to get his own. And I'd think that based on my experience of listening to how classical composers work when writing variants of melodies. Though Arlen wasn't a classical composer, so who knows.

Furthermore - see the Wikipedia article again - it's already been noticed that "Over the Rainbow" also resembles a melody from an intermezzo from an opera by Pietro Mascagni - and the opera, Guglielmo Ratcliff, predates Lund's publication by 15 years. So who's copying from whom?

So it's possible, but by no means certain, that parts of the melody to "Over the Rainbow" came from Lund. And in today's fiercely puritan environment, that may be enough to find guilt in copying. But it's clear enough to me that the genius in the melody - what keeps the song alive today - was put there by Harold Arlen and by him alone.

Thursday, March 7, 2024

snappy answers to obvious questions

"You got your hair cut!"

1. No, I got all of them cut.

2. Oh, so that's what that guy was doing!

A more challenging thing to answer is the barber's question, How long do you want it?

I've taken to saying that I want the hair by the earlobe to be as long as will take it up to the earlobe but no further; I don't want it over the ear. And the same length all the way around.

I have no idea how else to say it. I can't estimate inches off, which they sometimes want to know, and in any case hair on different parts of the head grows at different rates, so it can't be consistent.

Often I have to give my answer two or three times. Yesterday I had an inexperienced barber and had to say it about 15 times. Even then he didn't do it right. No, the hair is still going over the ear. See? It needs to be shorter than that.

Eventually I got a satisfactory haircut, but this is why I find barbering such an unpleasant experience.

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

concert review: Castalian Quartet

I'd been very impressed with the Castalian Quartet on my first visit to the Banff String Quartet Competition eight years ago, and this was my first chance to hear them since, nonwithstanding that only two of the four members are still the same people.

It still sounded much the same, navigating a serious-minded way through Haydn's Op. 20/5 with bright, intense colors, and playing Brahms's Piano Quintet, one of my all-time favorite chamber works, with pianist Stephen Hough. The treble intensity of the quartet made the first two movements sound a bit thin, as if fewer instruments were playing than usual, but they made up for it by emitting the scherzo as a ferocious roar.

Also on the program, a quartet by Hough himself, which he'd been commissioned to write for a recording otherwise of French quartet music. So he decided to write a piece reminiscent of Les Six, though none of them were among the composers on the record. Yeah, it sounded a little like Les Six at times, but it didn't sound much like Stravinsky in the parts that were supposed to sound like Stravinsky, and much of it didn't sound like anything at all. You want to be very careful before you position yourself between Haydn and Brahms.

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

obituary: Richard Plotz

A notable figure in the history of Tolkien appreciation passed from us last Saturday. Richard Plotz was the founder of the Tolkien Society of America. Though not the first Tolkien fan club, it was the one that took off and served as foundation stone of the Tolkien fan boom of the 1960s.

Dick was a bright 16-year-old high school student from Brooklyn, auditing classes at Columbia University, when he saw some graffiti in Tolkien's Elvish at a subway station. Various similar comments went by for some time, until finally Dick impulsively scrawled the date and time for a meeting of a Tolkien club on campus.

On the date, half a dozen people showed up - none of whom was the original subway scribbler, but one of whom, Deborah Webster Rogers, later became co-author of the Twayne's English Authors series volume on Tolkien. They talked Tolkien for an hour.

This was February, 1965, before the Ace paperbacks, let alone the Ballantine paperbacks, were published later that year. All these people had read The Lord of the Rings in hardcover.

Clearly there was a surging interest in this. The group continued and formalized. Dick placed a classified ad in The New Republic and attracted more people. W.H. Auden, known to be a Tolkien fan since his laudatory reviews of The Lord of the Rings in the New York Times, attended a meeting, and an attending reporter wrote about it in The New Yorker.

Rather to Dick's surprise, the group continued to grow. Mail poured in. An at-first sketchy magazine called The Tolkien Journal was published. Dick's friend Bob Foster started compiling an annotated glossary of names in Tolkien's world, later published as A Guide to Middle-earth. Seventeen magazine sent Dick to Oxford to interview Tolkien. Tolkien, exhibiting more patience with the fan group than he inwardly felt, wrote Dick several letters, informative on himself and his creation. The most valuable of these was a declension of Quenya nouns, the only first-hand material on Elvish grammar then available; it was passed around in a semi-hushed fashion among devotees until it was finally published over 20 years later, and it may now be found on p. 522-23 of the new edition of Tolkien's Letters.

Come 1967, Dick graduated high school and went off to Harvard. College pressures as a pre-med student forced Dick to give up the Society, which was taken over by Ed Meskys, a science-fiction fan from circles there which had been discussing The Lord of the Rings since its publication. When Ed's health problems in turn forced him to give it up in 1972, the Mythopoeic Society (founded in 1967, another fruit of the college and teenage Tolkien boom) took it over.

Dick eventually got his medical degree, became a physician specializing in cancer research, married a woman he'd met in the TSA, and devoted his leisure time to family genealogy. He left active Tolkien fandom behind him, but his contributions haven't been forgotten.

Obituary for Richard Plotz

Recent video interview with Richard Plotz and Robert Foster

Thanks to Carl Hostetter and Gary Hunnewell for information.

Monday, March 4, 2024

counting Hugo ballots

So here's another proposal to fix the Hugos. This one wouldn't hive the entire administration off to a permanent committee (which I think would be a mistake) but would create a continuing committee to watch over the software for counting ballots.

For it seems that "convention committees all seem to have at least one person on them, in a position of authority, who wants to be the one to invent the software suite to rule them all that will solve all future fannish endeavours henceforth," so they all reinvent the wheel, and this was done particularly badly at Chengdu, where McCarty wrote his own software which 1) had plenty of code errors in it 2) can't be corrected because the code is proprietary and he won't release it.

My, how different things are from when I co-administered the Hugos thirty years ago.

First off, in those days almost all ballots were on paper. (We got a few by e-mail. We printed them out, so they'd fit with all the others.)

Second, we only used software to count the final ballots. Nominating ballots and voter ID check were done by hand. The idea of creating software to count the nominating ballots seemed to me ill-advised. There were too many different nominations, too much irregularity in how they were identified. Maybe if there'd been 5 or 10 times as many ballots we'd have been forced into it, but a few hundred nominating ballots, most of them largely empty? Not a problem.

As for that final-ballot software, all three years we used the same program, which had been devised by the administrator from seven years before our first run. Why? Well, it was a reliable program, and its author was a friend of ours. I think others used it too, and I always presumed it (revised by the author as rule changes required) was the standard ballot-counting program, at least for a while.

I'm not computer programmer guy, so I have no idea what computer language it was written in, but I do know the code was simple and accessible. It could be filled out so that the names of the actual finalists would appear on the data entry screens, and then the end users just typed in the sequences of numbers from the ballot. Finish your batch, save the file, run the program for the complete results on that file if you're curious, then when the ballots have all come in, combine all the files and run the program for the final result. Then do recounts on categories where the results are tight. Us two administrators and a couple volunteer assistants did all the data entry work.

This program was only designed for manual data entry, so it couldn't count the electronic ballots used today without inserting an unnecessary and stupid manual step. And I suspect that the EPH rules of the far future would have been beyond it without a massive rewrite.

But it did everything we needed it to do back then. It even calculated adherence to the 5% rule which caused so much vexation in those days. The 1st ... nth place result cascades that we submitted to Locus and other news sources? Those were a direct cut-and-paste from the output of our wonderful little program.

Sunday, March 3, 2024

musical theater review: The Lamplighters

Having successfully transplanted The Mikado from Japan to Renaissance Italy, the G&S company The Lamplighters has now experimented with Ruddigore or, in the spelling they prefer, Ruddygore.

Ruddigore is a satire of early 19th-century melodrama, and it must have occurred to somebody that its plot - of witches, ghosts, madness, a family curse, and a plot twist leaving a woman unsure which of three men she's engaged to - resembled a Mexican telenovela.

And while the result isn't much like Jane the Virgin or the stage play Destiny of Desire, the only telenovela-inspired works I know, it is set in Mexico, late 19th century. The character names and spoken dialogue were tinkered with a bit, but the English core of the story, unlike the Japanese one of The Mikado, is apparently irreducible, so the setting is a real town which was settled in the 1820s by Cornish miners. So the characters are mostly either Mexicans of English descent or actual English who immigrated to be with their ex-compatriots.

Thus Richard, though clearly a Mexican (and played by an actor who looks and sounds Mexican), whose pet name for himself is Rico instead of the original's Dick, has still joined the British Navy, sings the same boastful British mock-patriotic song, and as in the original waves a Union Jack to protect his fiancée.

On the other hand, Sweet Rose Maybud (also an obviously ethnically Mexican performer) has had her name changed to Rosa Capullo de Mayo, though she's still "Rose" in the songs because "Rosa" wouldn't scan. Mad Margaret's code word Basingstoke is replaced by Cocoyoc (it's a town in central Mexico), and the place that Ruthven gets it confused with is Calistoga.

The cleverest plot addition, however, had nothing to do with the Mexican setting. In the scene where the ghosts torture Sir Ruthven for not committing his daily crime, which usually consists of Roderic pointing his finger at Ruthven who writhes in agony without obvious cause, this time the torture consisted of the ghosts - the male chorus - singing "Poor Wandering One" and "Little Buttercup" in falsetto. Writhe away, Ruthven.

The big change, of course, is in the costumes and sets, all of which are meticulous 19th century Mexican style. Very impressive. Many of the ghosts are made up in the fashion of Day of the Dead figures. The dances are whatever Mexican folk dances the choreographer could find that fit Sullivan's music.

The setting was explained to the audience by a combination of supertitles and animated pictures on the scrim backdrop during the overture. (During the opera itself, the supertitles were in both English and Spanish.) The ghosts made their entrance by just walking in from the wings without even covering smoke, but at the same time their portraits vanished from the frames in the scrim, and reappeared when they left.

As a performance, this was OK. It didn't have any of the Lamplighters star performers, so it lacked their ability to achieve the transcendently wonderful. It's good to introduce Hispanic performers trained in this kind of material, but even the non-Hispanic ones were ... OK. The acting was OK (Noah Evans as Ruthven was a lot funnier as a clumsy bad baronet getting caught up in his cape in act 2 than he'd been as a clumsy yeoman farmer in act 1), the singing was frequently more than OK, but overall it was merely all right, and the Mexican setting didn't really click into place in all tabs.