a talent to annoy

Compilations of annoying things that people do never include this one, but it's happened to me more than once.

A group of people (not co-workers in an office, but e.g. a committee of volunteers, with other things in their lives) needs to hold a meeting. Careful planning is done to ensure it's an acceptable and feasible date: either it's discussed extensively at a previous meeting, or through one of those online apps that enable people to say what times they're available.

Then somebody complains that they can't make that date. Either they weren't part of the previous discussion, or their plans have changed, or something.

So the organizer makes a unilateral decision to change the date of the meeting, without checking with anybody else as to whether it suits them. And this after the elaborate procedure to try and establish a good date the first time!

Well, guess what: I have a conflicting engagement. Do I register my own objections? In this case, my conflict is unimportant: I can just cancel it, though I wouldn't have said I was available on this date if I'd been asked the first time. So I don't object: I can't feel arrogant enough to put the group through another date-setting hassle for a trivial reason.

In another case, I then went to great lengths to change my engagement on the new meeting date to the only other possibility, the old meeting date; and I only complained when the organizer then changed the date back again for equally arbitrary reasons. I said I cannot remain part of this committee if it's going to be run in this manner.

It's not just that a carefully-planned process can be overturned if it doesn't work for one person; it's not that the date couldn't be changed again if necessary; it's that the organizer made a unilateral decision, suddenly dropping the previous principle of being generally consultative.

news

1. As I've mentioned, I do not watch TV news, but I do watch the released videos of the monologues of Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Jon Stewart, et al, and those have clips. And this is where I've noticed what I wouldn't learn from print, which is that there seems no certainty as to how to pronounce the name of DT's lawyer Susan Necheles. Some say 'necklace', some say 'nichols'.

1a. Meanwhile, even the print media covering the trial is descending into inanity. I've seen articles discussing when the defendant has his arms crossed.

1b. I do give Stormy Daniels credit for the best snappy comebacks ever to cross-examination questions in a real-life trial.

2. Barron Trump, now 18, will be a delegate to the RNC. He is now an adult, he is now a practicing politician; that means the exemption shielding children from political commentary and attacks is now officially off as far as he's concerned.

3. In local news, the recount breaking the tie for second place in the November runoff for a Congressional seat has now been broken in favor of the candidate who opposed the recount from the start.

4. As I've mentioned privately, Pete McCloskey has died. Former Congressman (in my district, I'm proud to say) and the last liberal Republican, that is until 2007 when he finally gave up and joined the Democrats.

5. In media news, Peter Jackson has announced he's going to make more Lord of the Rings-inspired movies. One is of the hunt for Gollum, which has already been done as a fanfic movie, the other of the backstory of the Rohirrim. I thought Amazon was prohibited from using Third Age material, but apparently Jackson is not. This is producing in me moans of agony you're fortunate that you can't hear. Will I have to go see these, or has the necessity of knowing how they screw Tolkien's story up, so that I can better watch out for the distortions entering future scholarship, reached the point of diminishing returns?

5a. The article on this says that "The news that Jackson, Boyens and Walsh will be involved in the new film franchise is sure to calm any concerns from loyal fans." Loyal fans of what? Certainly not of Tolkien. Loyal fans of the Lord of the Rings movies, the ones who came up to me after the Hobbit movies came out and said "Now we understand what you were complaining about," are not going to be reassured either, because that trio were also responsible for the Hobbit disasters.

evaluating musical genres

The Post polled people on their opinions of various genres of music. The choices were Love it, Like it, Not sure, Dislike it, Hate it. It might have been easier if the choices were Love it or Leave it, but whatever.

It may be perilous for me to attempt my ratings, as several of these categories I have only the most tenuous acquaintance with. So my evaluations may reflect ignorance and rampant stereotyping, but here goes:

Classic rock. This was the most-loved genre among respondents, so the accompanying article had the most to say about it. It seemed to exemplify this genre as Aerosmith and the Eagles, two bands I have little use for. I like the Beatles, but the article defined classic rock as beginning with Sgt. Pepper, which is close to the end of my favorite Beatles segment, what I'd call "mid-period Beatles." So my full answer on this genre is "mixed, mostly nah," so I'll put Dislike it.

Pop. I'm not sure what typifies this category, though I'm sure it isn't the wailing guitars of classic rock. I like some pop songs, to be sure, though mostly ones now pretty old. I'd have to put Not sure.

R&B. Uh, I don't think so. I count myself fortunate that I even know what those initials stand for. Dislike it.

Blues. "I'm gonna sing a line three times / I'm gonna sing a line three times / I'm gonna sing a line three times / Then I'm gonna sing another line that doesn't rhyme with it." Really annoying music. Hate it.

Country. I've heard some that's OK, even enjoyable, but mostly it irritates me because it twangs. I'll have to say Dislike it.

Classical. This is about 70% of my listening. Unfortunately they don't separate out opera, which to my ears is an entirely separate genre. Love it.

Jazz. Various friends have tried to sell me on jazz, but 99% of it does absolutely nothing for me. With this one I'm sure of my opinion, because I've spent hours on end listening to it on the sound systems of dusty old used book stores, where it is the musical genre of choice, and I've remained completely unmoved. Dislike it.

Soul/funk. More annoying than blues. Hate it.

Hard rock/metal. No, no. If this comes on, I have to leave the room. Is there a category stronger than Hate it?

Reggae. I don't like it, but it can be fun to listen to in small doses. In-between ranking, hence Not sure.

Gospel/choir. Pretty much the same, except "fun" isn't the word: maybe "moving." Not sure.

Dance/electronic. That term could mean a lot of things, but I think what it's intended to mean is more stuff for which I have to leave the room. Hate it.

Folk. This can be narrowly defined (the song has to have been found by a credited collector in the dusky woods in the dark of night) or broadly defined (any singer and/or songwriter with an acoustic guitar). Broadly, it's another 20%-25% of my listening; either way, it's the other category for which I'd say I Love it.

Rap/hip-hop. I really only know this from having it blasted at me from the speakers of cars stopped next to mine at red lights, but based on that, may I say that I don't even think this is music, without being taken as criticizing it? It's a very interesting form of organized sound, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to be, it just isn't music. But I don't really want to listen to it. Dislike it.

Latin. "Music from Latin America" is a very broad category. I suspect that what's meant by the generic term "Latin" is the kind of music associated indelibly in my mind with Mexican restaurants. Because I hardly ever hear it anywhere else. Dislike it.

Alternative/indie. I'm not exactly sure what this is, but it might include some of what would be scooped up under a sufficiently broad definition of "folk." But I'm Not sure.

Contemporary Christian. Musically this is pleasant enough to listen to, but there's a limit to how much I can take of lyrics extolling Gee-zus, and that limit is very low. Dislike it.

Punk rock. This was coming in when I was in college, and all I could think was "Why?" Hate it.

New age. If you're cool, you hate this, but I'm not cool. Like it.

World music. More of the same. Like it.

Besides leaving out opera, they've left out the related but quite distinct category which occupies most of the other 5% or so of my voluntary listening: musical theater. Rodgers and Hammerstein? Sondheim? You've heard of them? Where would they go in the above list? (I'd put Gilbert and Sullivan here too, because if you class their works as operas, they'd have all of my five favorites.) And I'm sure you can think of other genres of music not included here.

Anyway, of the 20 genres listed here, I love 2, like 2, not sure about 4, dislike 7, and hate 5, so my negative genres outweigh my positive ones 3 to 1, which is about what I'd have thought.

200 x 9

Today is not only the birthday anniversaries of both Brahms and Tchaikovsky, but this very day is also the bicentennial of the first performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in 1824.

Like other famous Beethoven premieres, it was probably a pretty badly under-rehearsed performance in uncomfortable conditions, but it was a great occasion anyway.

The Ninth stands out among Beethoven's symphonies - it's long, monumental in scale, and it has that huge choral finale, something almost (not quite) unprecedented in symphonies, certainly in Beethoven's - but it's not always appreciated how distinctive the Ninth is.

The length. It had been the Eroica which was the path-breaker here, nearly twice as long as any symphony ever previously written, but none of its successors, however monumental (the Fifth!) attempted to outdo it in length. Until the Ninth, which was far longer still - and not outdone by anybody else in symphonic form for some 70 years to come.

The Ninth was the first symphony Beethoven had written in 12 years. He'd written all the other eight during the previous 12 years. Then, nothing. (Lots of other stuff - his profound last piano sonatas among them - but no symphonies.) So for a long time, Beethoven was the composer of eight symphonies. That was it. Then, big surprise, a Ninth, an epic unlike anything he'd done before.

This upcoming season, San Francisco Opera is putting on a performance of the Ninth in the opera house. Probably in lieu of another opera production, since it's a lot less expensive (no sets, no costumes, no acting). This isn't unprecedented: the Ninth was the only music not by himself that Wagner allowed at Bayreuth, considering it the seed of his own work. The Opera is permitting the Ninth as a choice for a subscription package, and since there's little else on their schedule I want to see, I'd have taken it, except that there's only one performance and I have a date conflict.

So, no live Ninth for me this year, though I've certainly heard it often enough in the past, most recently in a two-piano arrangement, but before that, last fall in one of MTT's final concerts with the SFS. I'll take that.

why a pause?

I've never seen this discussed or explained, but I see it all the time. (I don't watch tv news programs, but I see this on clips, typically embedded in online news articles.)

Whenever a news broadcaster is interviewing a person who is not in the same room, a pause of a couple seconds ensues every time the interviewer finishes a question or a comment needing reply, before the guest reacts and starts to respond. It's as if they're not receiving the interviewer feed at the same time the viewer is.

Why is that? I suspect that the showing of the feed with the guest in it is being delayed for censorship purposes, so that someone can have their finger on the bleep-out button in case the guest says something naughty that should not be broadcast. But I don't know if that's the reason.

yes, a theatrical review

When B. and I went to New York in 2000 and wanted to see a musical on Broadway, we wound up at a revival production of The Music Man. (The Producers hadn't opened yet.) Yesterday we went to see a local production of The Music Man. It was just about as good as the one on Broadway.

The costumes and set designs were outstanding and very evocative of the period at which the story is set. (So was the recorded music during intermission, which was Babes in Toyland.) Marian had a very strong voice and a firm rather than feisty personality. Harold Hill was no Robert Preston, but who else on earth is? He was very good anyway and sold that charm well.

But the real stars of the show were the ensemble. The large number of children, both teens and pre-, were outstanding, especially in the enthusiasm of their movements, dancing and otherwise. The adult ensemble shone most brightly in their singing. The "Pick-a-little/Goodnight Ladies" number jumped crisply and was the highlight of the show.

It was the chipper enthusiasm with which everything was done which really sold this show. Even those awkward moments when the lights were cut and a large cast had to clear the stage for the next scene didn't slow this baby down.

Only problem was that the orchestra was too loud. It's The Music Man, so they had 3 trumpets and 4 trombones, yeeks.

It's playing through next weekend (Friday-Sunday), so anyone near Palo Alto with a taste for this stuff should run and see it immediately. Tickets here.

not an anniversary

Anybody inclined to call this Star Wars Day because May the Fourth be with you - I've seen that joke twice already this morning and it's only 10 AM - should remember that the actual anniversary of the release of the first movie is May 25.

Its Wikipedia article says that "It was released in a small number of theaters ... and quickly became a surprise blockbuster hit." It was a small number of theaters to show it on the biggest screens available - that was how you got the impact of the opening scene with the Imperial ship coming overhead on and on and on. And that it was a hit was no surprise in the SF community, which had been talking about it for months and which hardly could have been more than a small percentage of the people who lined up at those few theaters to see it on opening day.

I had been rather skeptical - a neo-space opera didn't sound like my kind of movie - but I was convinced to go see it by a big writeup in the previous week's Time magazine (hardly the mark of a movie whose hit status was going to come as a surprise), which argued that it was less an adventure story than a fun story. All right, I'll go see a fun movie.

And I came out thinking, "Hmm, not bad." Had the world been of my taste, the movie would have amused inoffensively and been forgotten.

And there certainly would have been no sequels. I'm going to put aside the increasingly dismayed feelings I had upon watching each of its successors until I quit doing so after "Phantom Menace" and also the increasingly dismayed feelings I had on rewatching the first two movies, which are the only ones tolerable enough that I ever have rewatched them, and merely pass on my firm conviction, reinforced every time I do watch them, that Darth Vader is NOT Luke's father. I am absolutely convinced, and what I've read about the writing of the scripts confirms this, that that equation was never intended or even thought of until the final scene to "Empire" was added, because nothing else said about either Vader or Anakin in either movie makes sense unless they're different people. This goes far beyond what Obi-Wan says to Luke about how Vader killed Anakin. This is an example of a "surprise" story in which the eventual "true" explanation makes less sense than the "false" ones discarded along the way.

(It's not the only example of this. Similarly, Norman Bates isn't dressing up as his mother. The movie doesn't make any sense if he is.)

By the way, "Darth" isn't the title of a Sith Lord in the first movie. It's Vader's given name. Obi-Wan uses it that way.

If I'm going to have a Star Wars mythology, I prefer the original.

not a theatrical review

The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder

I'd seen The Matchmaker and Our Town, I thought I'd go see a local production of this. What little I'd read about it suggested this play was very weird, which is usually a plus in my book. I carefully avoided reading anything else about the play, or the text itself, so that my reactions would be fresh. A couple of very small-local reviews (forwarded in e-mail by the theater) were enthusiastic, so I was hopeful.

The ticket info said it would be 3 hours long and there'd be only one intermission. The intermission came one hour in. I decided I didn't want to sit through another two hours of this, and just left. If anybody from the theater had accosted me and asked why I was leaving, I'd have rolled my eyes and said, "If you have to ask ..." But you, lucky people, weren't there, so I'll try to explain it.

A bit was the acting. The actors tried very hard. The trouble was that you could see them trying. They didn't inhabit the characters, they spoke the lines with over-earnest emotion.

But it was mostly the script. It was weird, but it wasn't coherently weird. The author hits the audience over the head with what would have been clever allusions if they'd been a bit more subtly introduced. The characters keep saying the same things over and over again, as if they didn't think anybody else was paying any attention, and they might have been right. On top of which they also keep changing their minds, back and forth, in a vertiginous manner that seems overgenerated by any stimuli. My interest in the characters rapidly descended below zero.

It might have been funny - at times - without all these problems. After I got home I read the play's Wikipedia article. Had I known it was based on or inspired by Finnegans Wake, I would never have gone at all.

Kosman speaks

I passed on the news that Joshua Kosman, classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, is retiring after 30 years as the paper's chief (and mostly only) classical critic, and that he'd be giving a public conversation next week. That was Tuesday, and I went.

The venue was terrible. It was the stuffy, tiny back room of a bar in the Mission district, jammed with couches and folding chairs so that it was almost impossible to get past anybody. Sitting there was uncomfortable and cramped.

But the talk, essentially an interview with an audience question period, was very interesting. Some of the highlights:

• Kosman became a critic when he got to university (Yale, I think he said) and found a classical review in the student paper. I can do that, he thought, and volunteered. It was a way to have "a career in music without [having] any particular musical talent."
• When he arrived at the Chronicle in 1988, there were three full-time critics. Every Monday they'd have a meeting and the chief critic, Robert Commanday, would hand out assignments for the week. (I've read of other papers working the same way.) Now he's the only critic, and outlined his priorities for deciding what to cover: A-list performers (the SF Symphony, SF Opera, visiting big names), and otherwise what's interesting: new artists, unusual repertoire.
• He enjoys his work - the point of doing this, he said, is not so much being paid as to get the free tickets - but it's a job. When he was single he learned not to invite dates to accompany him to concerts he was reviewing. "Don't bring a date to your job."
• Try to write for a wide variety of audience, both specialists and the curious general reader. Don't write down to people, and don't write about artists you dislike: it doesn't do anybody any good. (I've noted that Kosman doesn't apply that stricture to works he dislikes.) He doesn't like to take notes: it leads to a boring play-by-play description of the concert. (I don't find it so.) Don't be brutal about bad performances (I agree): as an artist he'd criticized once told him, you can be both honest and a mensch. Try to keep a large vocabulary: "go to the well for words." The artistic possibilities are infinite.
• The nicest performer he's ever met? Yo-Yo Ma. His best work? The recent commentary on the background to Salonen's resignation from SFS. (I agree.) His worst mistake? Praising David Helfgott's Rachmaninoff recording under the spell of the movie Shine. Best concert he ever heard? Victoria de los Ángeles emerging from retirement at 72 as a substitute performer for a recital with SFS. He'd figured her voice would be gone, but the event was "transfixing, mesmerizing." Best anecdote? The time the SFS marketing exec invited him to lunch and slid over a piece of paper with the name of the next music director on the other side. According to the marketing guy, Kosman "jumped out of his seat" when he saw it was Salonen, because Salonen had told Kosman personally that he wasn't interested in the job, and he was the only plausible candidate whom Kosman would find exciting. Also, the time Michael Tilson Thomas - whom Kosman calls a superb raconteur - told Kosman about visiting the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, who in turn told MTT about visiting the French composer Olivier Messiaen. So there's MTT imitating Takemitsu imitating Messiaen, and Kosman said he couldn't possibly imitate that himself.
• Asked about musical controversies in general, Kosman's immediate response was "Yuja Wang can wear whatever she wants." She's one of the great artistic geniuses of our day, he says.
• The future of SFS? He wonders if it and the Opera aren't "punching above their weight." It's rare for an urban area this small to have such world-class institutions (what about Cleveland? I wondered), and guesses it may be inevitable that they'll go down a bit in prestige.
• The future of reviewing? Moving online has changed things a lot: you're going for clicks, and Kosman found that an interview he did with Igor Levit about the rare Busoni Piano Concerto, in which Levit described it as the most challenging piece he's ever performed, got more hits than anything else he'd written when the paper used that comment as the headline without identifying the work: people clicked on the article to find out what it was.
• But what will happen at the Chronicle after he's gone? He has no way of knowing. But at this point, a woman in the audience, apparently Kosman's editor, piped up to say that they'll cover the scene as best as they're able, whatever that means, and that they're looking for freelancers. (Will I try to sign up? Probably not. I have two venues that I'm happy with, and that's enough.)

end of the St. Lawrence

An announcement appeared in my e-mail and on the St. Lawrence String Quartet website:

After a one year hiatus following the death of founding violinist Geoff Nuttall, the members of the St. Lawrence String Quartet (SLSQ) today announced that 2023-24 will be the ensemble’s final season. They are continuing, however, to make their lives at Stanford University, where the SLSQ has been in residence since 1998 —performing, teaching, directing Stanford’s chamber music program, and producing their annual Chamber Music Seminar, in addition to pursuing other musical projects.

Well, there's more to the press release than that, but I guess that means they will no longer be giving concerts under the St. Lawrence name, with the three of them plus various guest musicians. I've been going to the public concerts of the Chamber Music Seminar, at which the St. Lawrence musicians host but usually do not perform. I've heard solo recitals by the cellist, but I haven't heard the others without a St. Lawrence label. So I don't know what they're going to do in place of what they have been.

I'll miss the group, but really the group was lost when Nuttall died, and everything since then has been a quiet afterlife. Anything that follows will be more of the same.