Why the iPod Matters

ACD expresses puzzlement about the importance of the iPod and challenges Steve Metcalf on a point he made in an article on New Music Box.

I'm not puzzled.

What the iPod and iTunes have the potential to do is reach new audiences. Alex Ross pointed out some time ago that 14% of the iTunes downloads are classical works. Some of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Minamalist Jukebox series has been made available at iTunes. That means people who weren't in the hall and don't have the CDs of the works performed can get to hear first-class performances of important music on demand. The iPod market is immense, as Steve Metcalf points out in his article, and iPods are cool. Reaching more iPod owners = reaching a new audience. (Ignore ACD's blathering about the coarsening of the culture. We'd have the music he hates, whether that's rock or rap, even if we were still on 78s.)

I'm not sure Alex is right to agree with ACD's point 3, mostly because I so dislike claims that classical musical is "fundamentally elite." There was a mass audience for new music in the 18th and 19th centuries, because there was much less of a distinction between popular music and what we now call classical music. Composers could make a living writing music because there was a market for commissions and performances of new music. (Okay, I do realize that was not the point Alex was responding to.) I absolutely think that for classical music to thrive, we need audiences for new music, and a few superstar composers - household names, whose music interests the public - would be a fine thing indeed.

Update 1, April 14: ACD points approvingly to a Playbill article reporting that some Philadelphia Orchestra concerts will be broadcast on radio. However, the NPR program is not available nationwide; for example, no stations in NYC or the Bay Area carry it. In California, you can hear these programs on the radio only if you live in Bakersfield or Fresno. If the contract included podcasting rights, I could download MP3s of the concerts to my computer. Or to an iPod, if I had one.

Update 2, April 14: ACD has updated his original post and will not respond until I demonstrate better reading comprehension. In that, we're even.

Update 3, April 16: ACD updates again and, in taking issue with Galen Brown, states that "What classical music is today seen as is the music of a superior intellectual and cultural class, and as such deemed elitist and therefore anathema." Can we have some evidence of that, beyond ACD's assertions? ACD regards himself as part of a superior intellectual and cultural class, that is quite clear, but I don't know anyone else who takes that stance. Moreover, I've never seen anything supporting the idea that people who don't go to classical music concerts or who are ignorant of classical music don't do so because they think it's elitist or the music of a superior intellectual or culture class. The people I know who don't go to classical music concerts are intellectual, well-read members of the middle and upper-middle classes, who are aware of, say, the intellectual currents in the literary arts, in politics, in historical thinking, in the scientific world. I can have conversations with almost all of my friends about Dawkins vs. Gould or the history of creationism, but it's a lot harder to find people to talk with about, say, Minimalism from Terry Reilly to John Adams, let alone Thomas Ades.

We'll take, for example, the friend I took to the Symphony last night, to a concert of Webern, Stravinsky, and Ives. She and her partner go to a few classical events a year, mostly in the Cal Performances series in Berkeley, even though they live walking distance from S. F. Civic Center, where the Symphony, Opera, and S. F. Performances have plenty of events. They attend plenty of intellectual and cultural events - go regularly to the museums here, subscribe to two different theater companies, attend City Arts & Lectures (lectures and conversations covering a wide range of political, literary, and cultural matters). There's the time issue, in not attending classical music concerts. There's the question of "what's good?" But believe me, the reasons they're not going to a lot more classical performances have nothing to do with whether classical music is elite or not. I think they'd just laugh at that, as I would.

Update 4, April 16 About ticket prices: I wrote an article for SFCV called The (High) Price of Music. Someone not too familiar with the classical world might not be willing to pay $30 to $129 to sit in Disney Hall listening to the L.A. Phil, but might pay $5 for a concert podcast to hear on that iPod - and then might be willing to spring for a concert ticket.

Alice Coote

Steve Smith writes about Alice Coote's Met debut, as Cherubino in Nozze. I've seen her only once, in the notorious Stuttgart/San Francisco Alcina, which put a marvelous cast of singers into perhaps the most bizarre and incomprehensible production I've ever seen. It was definitely better if you closed your eyes - but I'll never forget Coote's backward glance at Catherine Nagelstad, as Helena Schneidermann rescued her at the very end of the opera.

Wish I could be in New York, even though I have tickets to see Nozze here - twice - June.

It's TAFTO Time Again!

Once again, Drew McManus is hosting Take a Friend to the Orchestra Month at Adaptistration. Contributors so far include Jerry Bowles of Sequenza21.com, Marc Geelhoed from Time Out Chicago & the blog Deceptively Simple, Timothy Judd, violinist, Richmond Symphony Orchestra, Kevin Giglinto, Vice President for Sales and Marketing, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Connie Linsler Valentine, Executive Director, Nashville Chamber Orchestra, Pete Matthews, classical music enthusiast & for profit marketing professional, Joe Patti, theatre manager and author of the arts management blog Butts In the Seats, Brian Sacawa, saxophonist and blogger (Sounds Like Now), and Alex Shapiro,composer & author of the Notes from the Kelp.

Take a look, and - take a friend to the orchestra this April.

Appearing at Mills

This Saturday night, April 15, 2006, 8 p.m., the Welsh pianist Iwan Llewelyn-Jones is giving a recital at Mills College. The program consists of Beethoven: Sonata Op.27 No.2 (Moonlight), Ravel: Gaspard de la nuit, Franck: Prelude Choral et Fugue, Chopin: Berceuse Op.57, Scherzo No.2 Op.31, and Fauré: Nocturne No.4 in E flat Op.36.

Admission is $20 general, $10 seniors; the recital is in the Mills College Concert Hall. Mills has an extensive concert series during the school year.

(I have not heard Mr. Jones's playing, but I suspect this recital hasn't gotten much publicity, so I am passing along the information.)

The Gathering Storm

Last Friday, I caught the American Symphony Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall, in a concert of British music from the 1930s. The ASO plays absolutely fantastic repertory - almost all off-the-beaten-path rarities. Next year's concert series isn't on line at their Web site yet, but includes concerts entitled The Art of the Psalm, with works by Bruckner, Zemlinsky, Liszt, Schreker, and Reger; Symphonic Mexico (Revueltas, Ponce, Chavez); Uncommon Comrades (Vainberg, Shostakovich); and the American premiere (amazingly) of Schreker's opera Der ferne Klang.

Friday's concert consisted of Oration (Concerto Elegiaco), a cello concerto by Frank Bridge, Arthur Bliss's piano concerto, and Ralph Vaughn Williams's Fourth Symphony. The Bliss, with soloist Piers Lane, is virtuosic tripe; a lot of ideas that last 30 to 90 seconds but are never developed or taken anywhere interesting. The Bridge, on the other hand, is an extremely interesting, very modernist piece, lyrical and moderately dissonant, emotionally intense. Matt Haimovitz, who played eloquently and with gorgeous tone, was the cellist, and I'd like very much to hear it again, both for the piece and the performer.

The RVW surprised the hell out of me; it's extremely pessimistic, despairing, gloomy, and definitely not what you'd expect from Mr. English Folk Song himself. There is one moment when I thought it would go all hey-nonny-nonny, in the trio of the scherzo. Careful observers would have seen me glance at the ceiling of Avery Fisher and then put my head in my hands - but then that almost-sweet melody turned out to be bitterly ironic. Elsewhere in the pice, I heard an allusion to "Ich hab' ein glühend Messer," from Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen.

I didn't realize RVW had it in him to write a piece this powerful, even though I know and love the Sea Symphony. The fourth is strongly put together and very moving; it ought to get played more, but how often do the English symphonists get played in this country? Right.

I think Leon Botstein, the conductor, is a little on the cautious side. The last two movements of the RVW would have made even more impact if they had been played a bit faster and more incisively.

I hadn't been in Avery Fisher Hall in, uh, well, not since the 1970s. The proportions are odd, with that giant sprawling orchestra section and the teeny shallow balconies. The last remodel left the hall looking ugly, except for the stage area. I remember approving reviews of the design - but the seats are such a bizarre color, sort of mustardy olive, or maybe green tinged too deeply with yellow. Muddy dun? Ick, in any event (and the seats are uncomfortable). The circulation space is dated, as well; the mobile that looks like it's made of giant brass toothpicks is hideous and the display cases (which had a great Elliot Carter exhibit) definitely look old-fashioned. I was also amazed to see a folding table set out at which Matt Haimovitz CDs were being sold; that touch was so amateurish, so high-school...isn't there a gift shop someplace??

Aesthetics aside, I'm not exactly sure why there is so much complaining about the sound. I was in about the 10th or 15th row and found it reasonably warm, with no problems hearing the winds and no sense that the brass ever overpowered the strings. At this point Avery Fisher is no worse, and I thought better than, Davies in SF, where there is an awful lot of undifferentiated blaring, the cellos and basses have very little presence, and if you're in one of the balconies you feel like the orchstra is a BART stop away, sonically speaking.

Update, April 12: The title of this posting is the title the ASO gave the concert I saw. Anne Midgette reviewed the concert in the Times earlier this week.

Speaks for Itself

ACD denies that he defended Bernard Holland, which neatly gets him out of addressing the specific points made by me and Marcus.

Read Marcus's two postings here and here. Read ACD's original reply to me, and judge for yourself.

Learning to Love the Requiem

Mozart's, that is.

No, it's true, I never liked the piece. I sang it some years back and it failed to grow on me, and learning a work for performance normally sets the piece deep in my heart. It was all too obvious where Mozart left off and Sussmayr took over, the orchestration seemed clumsy, and I just could not stomach the sweeter sections of the piece. I heard it a few years ago, performed by the California Bach Society, and when a friend who then sang with them asked me what I thought, "because I know you'll be honest," I shook my head and said "Fine performance, but I just can't stand the piece."

Well.

A friend suggested some time ago that I check out Hogwood's recording, and offered to lend me his copy. I turned white and demurred; he became just a bit more insistent. Well, okay, why not, I thought, and took the CD, even though I was dubious.

Well.

Hogwood's performance makes the piece work for me, to the point that it recently lived in my car stereo for a couple of weeks. To the point that one day I hit repeat five times after the "Dies irae."

If I'm remembering the liner notes correctly - they're in California and I'm in New Jersey just now - the edition is one that attempts to strip out as much Sussmayr as possible. That certainly helps. But it's what Hogwood and his performers do with the piece that makes the recording so great.

To start with, there's the transparent clarity of both the orchestra and the chorus. I love the sound of English choruses with boys singing the soprano and alto parts - and those choruses are almost always superbly trained. On this recording, the Westminster Cathedral Boys Chorus and Academy of Ancient Music Chorus are nearly perfect. Every word is clear, every attack snaps, every cutoff is clean, every sibilant the same length.

Most important, though, are the choices Hogwood makes. His tempos are ideal; he respects Mozart's proportions and doesn't try to inflate the piece into a giant Romantic drama. He conducts crisply at all tempos, and the music never bogs down or loses the pulse. And so, the Requiem speaks for itself, classically.

I think there's only one serious problem with the recording: Emma Kirkby. One of the boys might as well have stepped out of the chorus for the soprano solos, for all the impact she makes with that mousy little voice. She's utterly out of scale with Carolyn Watkinson, the alto soloist, who sounds like an adult, and you can hear the other soloists holding back to make sure Kirkby is audible when the quartet is singing.

Oh, well - it's easy enough to ignore her. The real stars of the show are Hogwood, and his marvelous orchestra and chorus, and I'm glad to finally like, if not quite love, K. 626.

Updated because I managed to date this posting in the future.

Tepid, Torpid

To the 92nd Street Y last night, my first visit there, with Steve Smith, for what looked like a promising concert of Ravel, Rorem, and Brahms, with the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, plus baritone Nathaniel Webster and violist Cynthia Phelps.

And "promise" was mostly what the program had going for it. The Ravel, a one-movement violin sonata written during his student years and not published until after his death, is salon music. It's pretty, and it was prettily played, and it would make very nice background music for a tea party of old friends. For any other use, it's about 15 minutes too long and much too repetitive.

Ned Rorem's song cycle Aftermath is a pacifist work, setting texts by a number of different poets, from Shakespeare to John Hollander. The composer was in the house and, seemingly ageless at 83, came bounding out for bows at the end. He looks like he'll be composing for another 20 years.

I'd like to hear the cycle again, with a more imaginative singer. Nathaniel Webster has an attractive basic tone, good control, dynamic variety. But the basic tone hardly varied, and while his diction is quite good, I still got no sense he was doing much with the words. He had the music on a stand in front of him, and perhaps that interfered with his spontaneity and ability to connect with the audience.

Still, in most of the songs, Rorem doesn't give the singer much help. Too many seem based on circular motifs, with phrases that circle stepwise or in arpeggios around a single tone. He sets the words with peculiar accents in some phrases, and the settings could do more to illuminate the poems and their structures. Putting that another way, I felt like the settings muddied the poems rather than clarifying or strengthening or adding to them. These lines, coming at the end of John Hollander's "The Park," should chill the listener, but Rorem's setting did nothing for me:

I shall never have grown into old
Winter with you now: has time robbed me
Of waiting with you here, or spared me?

A few of the songs are more effective than the others: I liked the first song, John Scott of Amwell's "The Drum," set with a spare piano accompaniment mimicking a drumbeat, and the last, Muriel Rukeyser's "Then," which was given a lovely melody indeed. Randall Jarrell's "Losses," the longest text, also got a fine setting. But other poems, such as "When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced" (Shakespeare sonnet LXIV), sounded incoherent.

The program concluded with a performance of Brahms's Piano Quartet in g minor, Op. 25. Brahms shouldn't be boring and shouldn't put the listener to sleep; last night's performance barely held my attention until the quartet finally woke up in the last movement. Somehow, the first three movements sounded as if they were all being played at one speed, without much being done to distinguish them from one another. The quartet took no risks, and what came out was spineless and dull.

The Former Chief Critic of the Times

Marcus Maroney writes about a wholly inadequate Bernard Holland review of this week's Orpheus Chamber Orchestra concert. I've been toting up my own list of Holland horrors for a few years now. I don't understand why he still has a job. Everyone reviewing for the Times is more competent than he is. And I consider it an utter mystery that there's more frothing in the blogosphere about Anthony Tommasini's reviews than about Holland's, which can be so astonishingly unprofessional and damaging.

By me, Holland's sins are:

• Unnecessary cruelty, also known as misplaced nastiness.
  
  I'll never forget his review of the Westminster Choir's 1996 Christmas Concert. Note the condescending tone, the sneering suggestion that serious listeners need not attend, the slap at the chorus for attempting Schoenberg's difficult "Friede auf Erden."
  
  I don't review the Oakland Symphony with the expectation that it will perform with the precision of the San Francisco Symphony. That's not a hard lesson for most reviewers to learn - and any amateur chorus taking a shot at "Friede auf Erden" deserves praise. I would certainly never sneer at any audience attending a classical music concert, though I've commented at least once on how different an audience's reaction was from mine.
• Disdain for the work under review.
  
  In 1998, the Met opened with Samson et Dalila, a work Holland simply can't abide. My solution? Don't review works you hate! If you must, say it once at most, then review the performance. Believe it or not, even the former chief critic of the Times hasn't got enough power to chase Samson out of the repertory at this late date.
  
  Better yet, relax and have a good time. I've only seen Samson once, thought it a hoot, but maybe I have more tolerance for well-constructed camp with great tunes than Bernard Holland does.
• Relying too heavily on the program notes.
  
  In 2002, the San Francisco Symphony put on a semi-staged version of Rimsky-Korsakov's Mlada. I attended a performance and enjoyed it very much, excepting the acid-toned soprano singing the villain of the piece. Holland came out to review it; when I saw his review a few days later, I was surprised at how closely his remarks on the work and its history tracked with the program notes. I would have at least read the New Grove articles on Rimsky and the opera! (Re-reading the review, I'm surprised he didn't comment on the "Egyptian" music, so Hollywood-campy as to make Samson sound positively noble by comparison. And he's wrong about an opera company taking the thing on. The music is wonderful, and it would certainly be nice to give the lead dancer room to spread out, but nothing happens. The opera is completely unstageworthy.)
• Barely making the effort
  
  Okay, I admit that I read and admire Think Denk, pianist Jeremy Denk's blog. Don't hold it against me when I say that I was very sorry the Times sent Holland to review the Joshua Bell/Jeremy Denk recital a few weeks back. I get that they're young and peppy and accurate, but he says absolutely nothing else about the performance. Couldn't he have tried??

Updated, April 6. ACD replies, without actually discussing any specific points I make or any of Holland's reviews (and guess what? calling Holland the only Times critic worthy of the name is a defense of Holland). Marcus comments further on Holland. Steve Hicken takes note of the ongoing discussion; do read the very entertaining comments.

The Subway

A few months ago, a friend and I had dinner at Farallon, a spectacularly-designed San Francisco seafood restaurant. We were seated in the Pool Room, which is barrel-vaulted and covered with charming and suitably marine mosaics. I took a look around and said "This room reminds me of a subway station." I meant that in a good way, and my friend knew exactly what I meant. He's been in plenty of subway stations himself.

Since I arrived on the East Coast last week, I've taken several subway lines up, down, and across Manhattan, and all the way to Brooklyn. My, what a difference a few decades makes. I remember the hot, grimy, noisy, filthy, scary NYC subway system of the 1970s all too well. Today...well, I wouldn't exactly want to live down there, but the stations and cars are clean, and much quieter than they used to be. There's no stink or garbage, and much of the acrid, characteristic subway system odor has disappeared. The grime is gone, and every available surface is now covered with shiny white tile or mosaic. Some of the mosaics are newly-commissioned artwork; other mosaics are restoration of tiling from the early days of the subway system. It's so much nicer than it used to be!

I wish I had photos to blog, but not yet, not yet. Next visit, though!

Opera in the Plaza

David Gockley is making good on one of the promises from his first press conference as General Manager of San Francisco Opera: The first Madama Butterfly of the summer season will be simulcast to a giant LED screen in Civic Center Plaza.

This will be on Saturday, May 27, 2006, at 8 p.m. I'll be out of town, at Wiscon 30, so let me know what it's like.

True Love Knows No Fear

And neither did Erika Sunnegårdh in her first appearance as Leonore (Fidelio) this past Saturday, under what can only be termed extraordinarily high-pressure circumstances:

• It was her Met and U.S. debut


• The performance was a broadcast


• She was substituting for Karita Mattila, perhaps the greatest soprano now singing

Yes, I was there, up in Family Circle standing room, lured in by the circumstances. I'm exaggerating a bit, but only a bit. Ms. Sunnegårdh did show some nerves, but who can blame her? She was intermittently out of tune in the first act; a couple of first-act high notes didn't come into focus and sounded harsh; she inexplicably dropped one of the tougher passages in "Abscheulicher!" A friend listening on the radio thought she had gotten lost, and that seems probable. Personally, I'd be nervous too, and I'd miss a lot more than one difficult passage.

Beyond those issues - all of which I expect will be fixed in her scheduled performance later this week, given that the second act had no vocal problems - I have nothing but praise for her. She looked adorably boyish; she executed all of the stage business accurately and believably, fitting in well with a cast that had been working together; she blended into the ensembles and sounded good in them.

She has a big voice, indeed. Her high notes are very big, and easily produced. I had no sense she was at the limit of her potential volume. There's mass and weight without thickness, and more weight and size at the top than the bottom. She's due to sing some Turandots next year, and it's easy to hear why; the voice is built more like that of Nilsson or Turner than like Flagstad or my last Leonore, Christine Brewer. She'll have no problems as the Chinese princess.

I was happy as can be about the performance as a whole. True, I winced at Ben Heppner's entrance, when he slid up to his attack on "Gott!" at the beginning of Act II. (Is Florestan the Turandot of tenor roles, or what??) He warmed up and settled down and most of the act was very good indeed. He's a good actor and he and Sunnegårdh put on a fine show of marital love. I liked Gregory Turay and Jennifer Welch-Babidge; I loved the bit of stage business near the end that at least makes a run at resolving the Fidelio/Marzelline situation. I thought Kristinn Sigmundsson excellent and James Morris in much better vocal shape than the last couple of times I heard him, though his voice will never have the beauty of 20 or so years ago. Alan Held has become quite a singer and actor, but why did he bark and shout so much when he obviously would have been just as effective if he'd just sung?

Paul Nadler led a grand performance, well-proportioned and full of tension; the chorus sounded fabulous. I loved every minute, found it all gripping, and cried during Act II. I'm still troubled by the bizarre proportions of the piece (Act I is too long, Act II too short) and the implausibility of the Leonore/Pizarro confrontation. Did she have him in a hammerlock in this production, or what?? I couldn't quite tell from the rafters, as I left my binoculars in California.

Still, these are minor quibbles. The occasion itself was operatic, and the opera itself splendidly performed. What more could I ask?

Spelling corrections made some hours later, and read what Steve Smith and Anthony Tommasini have to say. (I agree with Tommasini that there was some tentativeness in her performance.) Also, read Daniel J. Wakin's original article about her and his post-performance follow-up.

I Gambled and Lost

LHL has cancelled her upcoming SF Symphony appearances owing to a severe gall bladder condition, according to today's press release. The Mahler Rückert-Lieder are being replaced by the 1947 version of Petrushka.

Not since Ponselle?

The wonderful Karita Mattila isn't singing tomorrow's Met matinee - and thus broadcast - of Fidelio; instead, her cover, Erika Sunnegardh is singing. She is 40 and making her Met debut (!); she's also under contract to cover Mattila's Elsa, and she's taking part of a run of Turandot a season or so down the road. I'm rather astonished to find this in the Times article about tomorrow; the quotation is from Joe Volpe's not-yet-published memoir:

"Not since Rosa Ponselle's debut in 1918, opposite Caruso in 'La Forza del Destino,' has the Met given an unknown singer such an opportunity," Mr. Volpe wrote.

I guess that's about her upcoming starring role and the covers, but I wonder how that plays in the context of Astrid Varnay's 1941 debut, covering Sieglinde for an indisposed Lotte Lehmann, followed by singing Bruennhilde the following week covering for Helen Traubel.

In the East

I'm unexpectedly home on family business, completely with laptop so that I can get some work done while I'm here. So I will be blogging, I expect, and will also be attending some performances in NYC, I hope.

Peter Craven Rants

An entertaining rant by Peter Craven, in The Age, about the recent, awful film Tristan and Isolde, complete with a fine discussion of Wagner's opera.

The Fredosphere in San Francisco

Fred Himebaugh's choral piece The Evidence will be performed in the San Francisco Bay Area by San Francisco Choral Artists in concerts on March 25 (St. Mark's Episcopal, Palo Alto), April 1 (St. Gregory of Nyssa, San Francisco), and April 2 (St. Paul's Episcopal, Oakland). SFCA is a superb group! Congratulations to Fred - and I'm hoping to be at one of those concerts.

Link Roundup

I have a couple of interesting links in my mail box, but no postings to hang on them, so:

• Bridge Records sends me mail about once a month with new releases. Music for cello and piano by Chopin and Liszt, anyone? Tone poems by 19th and early 20th century American composers? Check out their Web site and get on their mailing list.


• Duo 46 is a violin & guitar duet (Beth Schneider and Matt Gould, respectively). They've commissioned many interesting works and are charismatic performers of an unusual repertory. Listen to the many samples of their work.

How It Went

The inaugural concerts of the Haydn Singers this weekend went well. Palo Alto was a little more ragged than we would have liked, and the turnout was fairly small, at least in part owing to the ghastly weather. Apparently thunderstorms tend to suppress the audience, and who can blame them? I might have stayed home myself. But my friend David Bratman, who reviews for San Francisco Classical Voice, came, and wrote us up on his LiveJournal.

The Berkeley concert went splendidly, and we had an excellent turnout, especially considering that we were performing opposite Hesperion XXI and the San Francisco Bach Choir.

We will very likely be performing this same program in the fall, in venues to be announced later, with other programs to follow. Catch us then!

Haydn Singers This Weekend

I'm thrilled to report that the Haydn Singers, conducted by Paul Flight, are debuting this weekend, in Palo Alto and Berkeley, CA. Our first program includes:

• The obligatory Mozart: Misericordias Domini, K. 222, and Missa Brevis, K. 192, both very dramatic indeed


• The eponymous Haydn: some delightful part songs and a Salve Regina by Franz Josef, plus Christus Factus Est by FJ's brother Johann Michael


• The unknown Gasparini: a remarkable setting of Adoramus Te

Tickets are inexpensive ($15 general admission, $12 seniors, $10 students, all at the door), the music is delightful, the venues excellent:

• Friday, March 10, 8 p.m. First Presbyterian Church in Palo Alto
  1140 Cowper Street Palo Alto, CA


• Saturday, March 11, 8 p.m.
  Church of St. Mary Magdalen in Berkeley
  2005 Berryman Street (between Milvia and Henry), Berkeley

(Moved to the top of the heap on Friday, March 10; first published several days ago.)

Dojo space sought

A posting from my non-musical life.

I'm just starting to look around for space for my jujitsu dojo, which I plan to open....well, let's say June or July, maybe as late as September.

You might know a space that would work for me! Here's what I'm looking for; some of the requirements are more flexible than others, and might change if I can't find what I want where I want it, but for now, these lists are it.


Required:

Shared space of some kind (I cannot rent a storefront on my own)
In Berkeley, CA or Oakland, CA (Not Laurel District)
On BART or a major bus line
750 s.f. open space minimum (no columns dividing the space); the
bigger, the better up to 1200 s.f.
At least 17 feet wide
8-10 foot ceilings (The higher end of the range is better)
Space has mats already or has storage space for mats
Storage space for other stuff (I am willing to buy Ikea-type storage
closets, etc.)
Available 2 or 3 evenings a week in 3-hour blocks (class will be 2
hours but I need setup & takedown time)
Changing rooms
Bathroom


Would be nice:

Available for a couple of weekend classes a month
Within walking distance of a BART stop, with walking distance defined as 10 blocks/15 minutes
Wooden or raised or sprung floor
Mirrors
Ability to hang bags
Room for me to have a desk
Wheelchair accessible


This space can be in a dance or movement studio of some kind; it can
be shared with another martial art; it can be in warehouse space; it
can be in a Y or recreation center or church or synagogue or other
house of worship (as long as I don't have to convert :-).

If you point me to a space I ultimately take, you get six months of
free jujitsu classes, which you may transfer to another person if you
don't want classes. (I'm planning to teach anyone 14 and up; no
children's classes, some flexibility on 14 depending on the individual
child.)

The Numbers

Greg Sandow posted some fascinating numbers on his ArtsJournal blog last week, covering the number of concerts and number of attendees annually at some 1200 American orchestras between 1990 and 2004. His posting focusses on the attendence patterns, but to me that's not the most interesting aspect of the numbers.

What caught my eye is the enormous increase in the number of concerts in that time period: from 25,210 to 37,263. Folks, that's a 50% increase in the number of concerts! There's an amazing story buried in that! Who is giving those additional concerts? Where are they? Does this mean that somewhere, new orchestras are attracting new audiences? That existing orchestras are overextended? That too many organizations are chasing the same butts to get them in the seats? In what segment are those additional concerts? (Greg raises that question.) What on earth do those numbers mean?

Venues

I really ought to have pushed this past weekend's Soli Deo Gloria concerts a little harder. It's not my favorite repertory, but yesterday's concert, especially, went quite well.

And the chorus sounded great. I arrived at the venue, Zion Lutheran in Piedmont on the late side; the rest of the chorus was already running through some openings - wow. A beautiful sound, well-blended and balanced, and way more sound than you'd expect from 35 singers. (I must say that Soli Deo Gloria has many excellent voices in it it!)

Our other two venues were First Lutheran Church in Palo Alto and St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco.

If you've never been to St. Gregory's, you really do need to go. The building itself is beautiful, delightful, and unusual: the sanctuary is two very high-ceilinged connected rooms that are round, rather than square; it seems either can be configured with an altar; the iconography of the dancing saints is nothing like you'll see anywhere else. It's a fabulous venue for listening to music or for singing; the sanctuary is lively without being overwhelmingly resonant, and it's easy to hear yourself and the whole chorus. Sight-lines are also very good. The seats are comfortable as well.

First Lutheran is small, traditionally-configured and very fine to sing in as well, though I think you wouldn't want a really big chorus in there, or a group with an orchestra - that would overwhelm the space.

What I'm thinking about most is Zion Lutheran and how different it sounded to me a week ago and yesterday. My initial impression at our rehearsal last Monday was "dead space, unresonant, too muffled because of the carpeting and padded pews." I couldn't hear myself so well, and the chorus sounded to me like a bunch of disconnected voices. But we sounded great yesterday. I have to assume that was mostly a result of how I was feeling a week ago, with the balance being the extra week of rehearsal and two performances we had under our collective belts.

Poetry on Assignment

I wrote poetry intermittently at various times when I was younger - a lot younger - but only a few poems since I got out of school.

It turns out that what I might need is to be assigned a subject. I've written three poems recently, all response to assignments, more or less, from outside sources. One came from a Salon article. The other two....

My friend Elise makes fantastic and very individual jewelry - she has an incredible eye for combining different stones and beads, and has developed a wire-bending technique different from anything I've ever seen before. She is also a person of, well, whimsy: she names all of her pieces, from fairly simple earrings to extremely complex and beautiful necklaces. She also likes to issue literary challenges and give earrings and other jewelry in exchange for writing.

I saw her at the Potlatch science fiction convention over the weekend, and rose to the challenge. For a hair ornament, she asked for a work about pirates. I wrote a poem and took home an ornament (the poem is a little too personal to post). A bunch of these were available; a couple of other friends also have hair ornaments. A 7-year-old of my acquaintance got a hair ornament in exchange for a drawing.

For a pair of earrings called "The Truth Berry," Elise put on a contest: write a haiku about the earrings. No digital camera (yet), so I can't show you the earrings. They combine a purple, faceted glass bead with a heart-shaped green bead, so they look like a leaf and a berry.

I won the contest with this:

Taste it now. Is it
sweet or bitter? Will you live
or die? Tell the truth.

I told Elise, and was only half-joking, that maybe she should send me poetry assignments all the time.

New in the Times

A couple of features in the Sunday Times Arts & Leisure section are by apparent newcomers, unless I've missed their bylines:

Evan Eisenberg's Arms and the Mass, or: Why Does This Liturgy Sound So Familiar? is about masses based on the song L'Homme armé; the story has too many jokes and too little solid info - he's trying too hard and misses the point. There are audio clips labeled as if they're from the Dufay and Josquin L'Homme armé masses, but actually they're both the tune itself, not excerpts from polyphonic masses. Aaargh.

Meline Toumani, in Get Them in the Seats, and Their Hearts Will Follow, discusses an initiative at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln for getting youth in the door. What's different about this? Teenagers themselves are in charge.