Seeking Ferret

sara requested Klezmer recommendations, probably more than a year ago. I know I've scattered klezmer through various playlists I've posted in the past, but I've never made a full post dedicated to it, and klezmer is very important to me, so I'm going to try to create an introduction to Klezmer.

Klezmer is a yiddish word that wikipedia informs me is actually a contraction of klei zemer, which means "instrument to play music". That makes sense, but had actually never occurred to me. Musicians who play klezmer are called klezmorim. But the point here is that klezmer isn't, like rock and roll or jazz are, names for genres. Klezmer just means music, which is to say it means folk music. It's the generic name for the folk music traditions of the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Ashkenazim.

I've made this point before: In pre-war Europe folk traditions varied drastically on a regional basis, because of the limited interconnection between nations and communities. The Jews of Eastern Europe were a multinational clan that had a strong tradition of communication across borders even when their gentile neighbors didn't. They were also an often impoverished group of communities that had severe restrictions placed on its ability to travel by both their economic status and ethnic status. Many Jews travelled from shtetl to shtetl across the region, trading goods, sharing news, and talking Torah. But many Jews never left the town they were born in.

All of which leads to several conclusions: Traditional klezmer shares some unified objects because of the shared language and faith of its performers and the ability of traveling Jews to trade tunes and techniques. The language of klezmer is Yiddish, and there are rhythms and melodies that are fairly common across the belt of Ashkenazi Europe. However, there were also strong regional variations in klezmer. If you look at a modern, Klezmer Revival album you'll find polkas and other dances of Northern Europe alongside things called Araber tantses (Arabian dances) that reveal a Southern influence. It strikes me as highly unlikely that actual Ashkenazi klezmer in the shtetls was this pan-European. That mixing came later, most likely in America. The other conclusion, of course, is that klezmer shares a lot with its goyish neighbors. Klezmer isn't so much a style of music as it is the name for the music that Jewish musicians traded back and forth with their non-Jewish neighbors.

The great wave of Jewish immigration to America took place between, say, 1890 and 1940. Coincidentally, this is also the time of the rise of recorded music. In New York, Jews established record labels for the recording of klezmer and other Yiddish language music. These are the first klezmer musicians you can actually hear, people like the legendary clarinetist Naftule Brandwein. If you want to hear klezmer traditions as they actually existed in Europe, these recordings are the troves you need to dig into to get as close as possible. And they are troves. These days your only way to listen to most of this music is to have access to one of the handful of collectors of early 20th century Yiddish music records. One of them has a regular radio show on WFMU. Another occasionally releases curated digital transfers from his collection as CDs. A third has a podcast. These are literally the only ways I know to listen to this music.

And then Yiddish culture in America faded out. That's really the wrong phrase. Was made to fade out. Assimilatory pressure on American Jewish immigrants was complicated. Some of it was internal, the desire to do what it took to succeed in the new country. Some of it was external pressure from both the more assimilated Jews who provided the support structure for the new immigrants and from the non-Jews who ran the schools immigrant children went to and the businesses the immigrants worked at. There were conscious efforts to make Yiddish a dead language, to make sure that new Jewish children in America didn't speak it or know the culture. A new Jewish culture was invented. And the klezmorim found that the best jobs they could find in America weren't at bar mitzvahs and weddings, they were at jazz clubs. Benny Goodman and Art Shaw and Irving Berlin became the archetypal Jewish musical successes. Klezmer faded as a cultural presence. (Except as a sort of ironic joke. As the Yiddish theaters died, "Fiddler on the Roof" emerged as a sensation that eulogized the European experience for an English speaking audience that didn't know Anatekva from Cracow, but knew Chicago from New York. The fiddler on the roof, the titular figure, the symbol of the Jewish people surviving no matter how precarious the situation? He was a symbol of the past for a Jewish culture moving toward middle class security in America.)

Then came the Klezmer Revival. Young Jewish musicians grew up, learned jazz and rock from the people around them, didn't learn Klezmer. Oh, sure, there'd be a hora now and again, there were still the oldniks who never adjusted to the new country and wanted some acknowledgment of the tradition, but it wasn't the music of their childhood. So they grew up, trained as jazz musicians, and found that they were in a moment in time, in the '70s, where identity politics was blooming and everyone wanted to discover who they were and where they were from. So some of these Jewish jazz musicians travelled back to Europe or found old klezmorim still playing on the Lower East Side and apprenticed themselves to the old ways. And they formed new bands: The Klezmer Conservatory Band, the Klezmatics, the various ensembles of Andy Statman. They reintroduced assimilated American Jews to the sound of the shtetl, but there's always something fundamentally inauthentic about Klezmer Revival music. It sounds too much like America, too much like jazz, to really be the sound of the shtetl. As a more or less assimilated American Jew, I've learned to mostly embrace this inauthenticity as an authentic part of my cultural heritage. The klezmer bands I grew up with, the klezmer concerts I went to, the klezmer melodies I danced to- they were all Klezmer Revival, not classic klezmer. When I catch glimpses of traditional klezmer, it sounds off, because it's not the music I grew up with.

That inauthenticity has been the driving force for interesting klezmer music since the rise of the Klezmer Revival scene. Rather than trying to reproduce a lost art, Jewish musicians, by and large, have sought to create Jewish music that speaks to who we are today, both forward looking and past looking. So if you ask me who's doing interesting work in klezmer today, mostly I point to people who aren't really considered klezmorim at all. The Ornette Coleman-infused klez-jazz of John Zorn's band Masada is a favorite of mine. The klez-punk of Golem is another great example. The Warsaw Village Band is one of the most recent klezmer-tinged groups I've gotten excited about, and their music ranges from traditional Eastern European folk to something like folk-rock. Basya Schechter's band Pharaoh's Daughter blends klezmer with Middle Eastern music, and gives it a Jewish feminist spin. They may use some of the same scales as the original klezmorim of the shtetls, they may use some of the same instrumentation, occasionally they'll even use the same exact melodies, but they don't sound anything like the music of a century ago, and they have no interest in doing that.

The best klezmer of today is the music of a people adrift between the rigidity of Chasidism and Charedism and the elasticity of Western life. Geographically adrift, culturally adrift, intellectually adrift. It's a music of uncertainty and doubt, but Judaism has long understood doubt and uncertainty as central themes, and not in themselves reason for concern, or even reasons to abandon the pursuit of happiness. As I said, klezmer is the music of the folk. It's the music we dance to at weddings and bar mitzvahs, sing at tisches. It's a vital part of the way we mark time as Jews.

And yet it is also not: Most Bar Mitzvahs and Weddings these days barely feature klezmer at all, even Klezmer Revival. The music of the folk, the music of Bar Mitzvahs, is mostly 21st century American pop. More Bar Mitzvahs feature the songs of Justin Bieber than Frank London. When I attended my cousin's bar mitzvah last month, they set aside the time for one Jewish folk medley, with Hava Nagila and Heveinu Shalom Aleichem and three or four other songs for us to Horah to, and then the pop came on and the kids danced to Gangnam Style. So let us not misrepresent modern Klezmer as representing the voice of my generation. It is merely one of many voices that moves my generation of Jews, a voice that is more self-consciously old-fashioned than most. If we're to mention Jewish musicians representing other strains of contemporary Jewish music we might mention Dan Bern playing classic American folk-rock in the Bob Dylan tradition, but with words that welcome Jewish identity where Dylan tried to hide his. Or we might mention Atom and his Package singing punk rock about the eating Chinese food on Christmas. And we mention Adam Levine and other musicians like him who are Jewish and don't hide that, but who don't make their Judaism a visible part of their music. All of this, in one sense, is Klezmer. But in reality Klezmer is a ghost who still haunts us late at night, a memory from a different Jewish people on the other side of the Holocaust.


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Today is the thirty third day of the Omer. Happy Lag B'Omer!

Just a note to say that a lot of the album I can take or leave, but "Joy to You Baby" is quite possibly Josh Ritter's best song since "Kathleen".

Ritter has long been a favorite musician- one of few whose concert appearances I've sought multiple times. His music sounds like the great folk rockers of the '60s and '70s, but his themes feel present, in the moment, without anything that reeks of nostalgia. (I've written before that his music lives between two poles- Dylan and Springsteen- and how enjoyable I find his music depends on how he negotiates the balance)

In "Kathleen", he sings about finding meaning in a one-night stand, and he sings with such brightness and earnestness and yet colors it with a pragmatism born of heartbreak. "All the other girls here are stars/ You are the Northern Lights," he opens with, the voice of a passionate lover driven to poetry. It is an astonishingly simple, stark, and beautiful metaphor. But then he softens it with reality, later: "I know you are waiting, and I know that it is not for me." Kathleen is a song about the difference between love and lust, about the difference between temporary human connections and the permanent connection that most of us are eternally questing for. But it's mostly just a song about taking happiness where you can find it and leaving the worrying for later. It's a song I can listen to in any mood. Its questions about our place in the world are so basic and pure.

I don't know that I would say that "Joy To You Baby" is as good a song. It is lyrically and musically less complicated, even more stripped down to our human essence. It's the capper of an album, "The Beast in Its Tracks", which has been touted everywhere as Ritter's divorce album. Most of the album tells stories of heartbreak. Ritter doubts his relationships, doubts for his future. He casts blame on his ex-wife in some songs, casts blame on himself in others, mourns in still others.

And then he tops it off with "Joy To You Baby", which at its first level is just blissed out, as if he has worn out his anger and his frustration and his doubts and finally emerged to a place of peace. "Joy to the city/ Joy to the streets /And joy to you baby, wherever you sleep" And that little zinger at the end, that "wherever you sleep", at first I thought was just minor, almost resigned irony, but the more I listen to it the more I hear its jagged edges showing. The frustration buried beneath the acceptance. If "Kathleen" is a song that finds meaning in a meaningless one-night stand, "Joy to You Baby" might be a song that rejects the meaning in joy, that can't quite find a way to forgive her for leaving but is damned good at faking it.

But then I listen to it again, "Joy to the many/ And joy to the few /And joy to you baby /Joy to me too." and I don't hear it as an affirmation either positive or negative. Instead I hear it as a prayer.

Joy to You Baby by Josh Ritter

I had to hold in all the music I wanted to share with people over the last month and a half, because it would have spoiled my Yuletide story. So here, have a music post.

My single favorite discovery from the past two months was Maurice Ravel's "Kaddish", from "Two Hebraic Songs". Neither of these songs is in Hebrew, mind. "Kaddish" is in Aramaic, the other song is a setting of a Yiddish folksong. But "Kaddish" is an incredible setting of a powerful prayer. It's my second favorite setting of those words now, after Leonard Bernstein's untoppable version. Ravel's is so fluid, so sensual, and grounded in the disappointments of the real world. The shipper in me imagines it as his tribute to the Jewess Emma Bardac, Debussy's second wife. The litgeek in me sets it beside Ravel's "5 Greek Songs" and envisions it as Ravel's struggle with Hegelian dialectic. (The shipper in me sees "5 Greek Songs" as a pretty blatant confession about sexuality) And the practicing Jew in me just sits back in astonishment and listens to passages in the song that just feel so, so right, from a composer who admits in a letter I read that he didn't even know enough of the language to know whether his singer was singing the Aramaic competently.

Other songs, more well known, that I listened to constantly include Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun," whose glissandi drew goosebumps and inspired me to exact the same response from the reader of my fic; Ravel's "Bolero", with Ravel beating time in his famously exacting way (He apparently screamed at Toscanini for adding an accelerando to the conclusion); Both of their string quartets, which each play with the formality and rigidity of the string quartet form with playfulness and bursts of imagination; Debussy's "Petite Suite", especially "En Bateau", whose perfectly formed four handed piano structure enchanted me for about six consecutive repetitions.

Ravel and Debussy are composers I've enjoyed in the past, certainly that I knew enough about that contemplating writing RPF for them for Yuletide wasn't rejected out of hand, but they're not composers I was deeply familiar with. I've always kept French classical music at arms length because my childhood was all about Italian and German classical music and French classical music sounded different enough to sound unfamiliar and a bit intimidating.

But... as music that is unmistakably Modernist without entirely rejecting tonality, there is a major attraction here to this music now. It's a powerful companion to Berg and Schoenberg and Strauss, roughly Ravel's contemporaries: Obviously both sides of the Maginot Line were influencing each other, yet these musical traditions evolved in different directions. I think it's a useful observation to link those evolutions to the differences between French and German visual arts in the same period: Unquestionably one of the links between Schoenberg and Debussy and Ravel is the influence of painting on their music. I think this also links them to their Russian forbears like Mussorgsky, whose "Pictures at an Exhibition" was obviously championed by Ravel. But looking forward instead of backward, this explains the continued French emphasis on harmony as the Germans were lured toward more elusive, more meta-analytic approaches to art.

The other thing that stands out to me in Debussy and Ravel is orchestral color. Ravel was the genius orchestrator, but Debussy was no slouch at it either. It's not easy to do this right, and the story of 19th century classical music is a drift toward bigger and bigger orchestras that drowned out the voices of individual instruments in less expert hands. The 20th century saw, in people from Britten to Bernstein the return of smaller ensembles and focused attention on individuating timbre. I think we need to point to Debussy as one of the most important inspirations for this trend. And I should say that this trend is one of the reasons I don't warm to much of 19th century classical music and greatly prefer the music of the 18th and 20th centuries.

So yeah, Ravel and Debussy are awesome and I was bursting to tell you guys that last month, but I guess now will have to do.

The Jewish Month of Elul is coming up in a couple of days. As the month before Tishre and the Jewish High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, it's a month of spiritual rededication, a time for evaluating the past year and preparing for the confrontation with God that's looming. It's a time where I ask myself what I will be atoning for, what I've done wrong, what solutions I can offer. Going into Rosh Hashanah unprepared, walking essentially into a service geared toward inducing self-confrontation, acceptance of guilt, and the intention to repent, is a really emotionally exposing and difficult thing to do. If you give the time and energy to work up to it, it's a much productive and meaningful process.


As part of that process of preparation, I've put together this playlist of Rosh Hashanah-inspired music.

We begin with four versions of the same words.

First, Shuly Nathan's complete "Unetaneh Tokef". Let me explain Unetaneh Tokef to my readers, because it's got a great apocryphal story and it's an essential, central part of the Rosh Hashanah service, yet I don't think it's that well known outside of Jews.

The story goes that the evil Christian ruler of the the city of Mainz had ordered Rav Amnon to convert to Christianity, and Rav Amnon, to stall, had agreed to think about it for three days. After three days, he'd refused to show up at the ruler's request to provide an answer and the ruler had dragged him to his palace and removed his limbs one by one, as he again ordered him to convert.

The dying Rav Amnon was then carried to Rosh Hashanah services where he composed Unetaneh Tokef on the spot and then died. But wait, Ferret! Nobody there was allowed to write down his composition because it was a Holiday, so how do we still have it? Well, obviously the next day his friend Rav Kalonymos had a dream in which Rav Amnon dictated the prayer to him.

It's a pretty great story, right? Gruesome, inspirational, you name it.

Anyway, the prayer itself is one of the central moments of the Rosh Hashanah service because it distills a whole long pile of themes of the day into a single, gorgeous prayer. It positions the Jewish people as the creation and responsibility of God, places us beneath his awe inspiring might, and identifies us as a nation dependent on his kindness and mercy. And then in the most famous passage, it lays out the stakes: "On Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed: Who will live and who will die." It goes on, laying out in grisly and gruesome detail how those who die will die, how those who suffer will suffer, how those who struggle will struggle. And then, miraculously, just when it appears that we are helpless before God's awesome power, we are given a recipe for salvation: "Through Repentance, Prayer, and Acts of Charity we can cause God to cancel his harsh decree." It's a really intense, amazing moment.

Next up, the Kronos Quartet and cantor Mikhail Alexandrovich do "K'vakarat", the second paragraph of the Unetaneh Tokef, in an arrangement by Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov. It's the same verse we heard from Nathan accompanied by bold brass notes, but here it's accompanied by doubting, hesitating string riffs. In the verse, God is compared to a Shepherd tending his herd, making calm, calculated, rational decisions about what will be in store for mankind. And Golijov makes his singer sound uncertain about where that will shake out for us, whether rationality demands anything good for us at all.

Next, a favorite: Leonard Cohen's "Who By Fire", which translates parts of the third paragraph of the Unetaneh Tokef, the part with all the gruesome ways of dying, and then adds in new ways of dying, adds in new forms of suffering, and asks a strange and moving question:"And who may I say is calling?" I love it because it shows how much the words of this ancient prayer still mean, still convey our doubt about the uncertainty of the future.

And last an odd goodie: Shany Kedar translates "Who by Fire" into Hebrew, borrowing from the original words of the Unetaneh Tokef but translating Cohen's new additions into Hebrew as well. This cover is such a glorious mixture of new and old.


Ok, that's enough of Unetaneh Tokef. Let's move on to three versions of perhaps the most famous High Holdays song: "Avinu Malkenu". This is a dead simple lyric: "Our Father, our King, Show grace to us and answer us, though we lack good works. Perform charity and kindness for us, and save us."

I present the lyric in three versions: A chazzanos (traditional Ashkenazi prayer chant) version sung by Chazzan Sawel Kwarten, a jazz quartet version without lyrics (Uri Caine, Mark Feldman, Greg Cohen, and Joey Baron comprising the quartet), and a jam rock band version(Phish, of all things).



And let's close out the affair with an Israeli love ballad that takes its title from a Psalm that is especially recited during the High Holidays- Idan Raichel's "Mi'maamakim", which I know isn't really about Rosh Hashanah, yet still manages to get me in the spirit of the day.



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The Omer is the period of 49 days between the second day of Passover and the beginning of Shavuos. It was a period of prayer for the farmers of Israel waiting to see if they'd get adequate rain for their wheat harvest, when they would bring sheaves of wheat to offer at the Temple on Shavuos. It's also a commemoration of the period between the Exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, a period of waiting and uncertainty about the future of the Jewish people.

It also developed other traditions over time. A plague took tens of thousands of Jewish students during the time of Rabbi Akiva, and in response the custom developed to take on certain mourning customs during the first 33 days of the Omer. Many people don't cut their hair, don't have weddings, and don't listen to instrumental music.

This is a minhag- a custom- and it doesn't carry the full force of Jewish law. Different people have different ways of observing it. Some avoid only live music, while some also avoid recorded music with instruments. My personal policy is that I don't listen to live music, ***UNLESS I REALLY REALLY WANT TO***. If my friends are going out for a night on the town and there's going to be a band in the bar, I won't go. If a performer I love is doing a rare New York show, I'll probably make an exception.

And I listen to all kinds of recorded music without making distinction. But in a nod to people with a different minhag, I do tend to listen to a little more a cappella music than usual. So I thought I'd share some with you.

Most Jewish music sucks. Most Jewish a cappella music, therefore, sucks, too. But here's some stuff that I think doesn't. In a variety of styles. (Warning: If you observe kol isha in recorded music, there are women's voices here.)

Chag Sameach!


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"Shir Hamaalot" - Composed by Salamone de Rossi, performed by King Singers. Polyphonic choral music a la Monteverdi, by a Mantuan Jew who decided to write a new synagogue liturgy. Lyric is Psalm 124.

"Uzziel" Composed by John Zorn, performed by Mycale. World music-infused four part harmony. Lyric: "My strength and my song are from God, and he will be my salvation," Exodus 15:2.

"Kmo B'tmunah" Original by Rita, performed by Tufts Shir Appeal. A nice example of contemporary collegiate a cappella, well-produced and well-sung. Song is an Israeli pop tune, presented to an American audience that mostly doesn't know it.

"Keh Moshe" Trad., performed by Oni Wytars Ensemble. Mediterranean Jewish music of the middle ages, with a perfectly executed call and response.

"Nachamu" Performed by Ani V'Ata. A more traditional collegiate a cappella piece. This is a song that pretty much every Jewish college a cappella group has in their bag of tricks, and I honestly don't know who originated it. All I know is that when Ani V'Ata sang it, they asked the audience not to sing along because everyone knew it. The verse is from Isaiah 40, offering comfort to Israel and promises that the exile will end.

"Adon Olam" Performed by Ani V'ata. This is a fun one- A classic part of the prayer liturgy, sung to a Billy Joel tune.

"Tutim" By Ethnix, Performed by Chicago Rhythm and Jews. Another Israeli pop song turned into American college a cappella. This song uses military metaphors to discuss a broken relationship.

I used to have a nice a cappella version of Carlebach's Cracow nign, but I don't know where it went. I was going to throw in one of my chazzanos recordings, too, but I couldn't find an a cappella one in my collection that didn't use God's name. I'll take recommendations!

And I don't have an mp3, but of course let's finish with the Maccabeats "Candlelight!

I downloaded Mycale's album off Amazon last night, which apparently gave me a 20GB Amazon Cloud Drive. Remains to be seen how useful such a thing is. There appears to be no API and no linux client to access it yet??

As far as I can tell, right now its main significance to me is that it belatedly implements a feature Amazon should have supported from the start- the ability to, for no extra cost, redownload music I've already bought from Amazon. Other e-vendors like Baen have done this for ages, but neither Amazon or iTunes supported it, leading to lovely situations like the various times I've had to bug customer service when a downloaded interrupted midstream and wouldn't allow me to restart because I'd already downloaded it. Now all I'd need to do is go back to my cloud drive and redownload it. The fact that Amazon beat iTunes to it adds to my appreciation of Amazon, but it's not really a gamechanger. My music collection is saved in about three places already, but it'd be nice to have a Cloud place for it, though I'm not sure the 60 bucks a year is worth it for my 60GB music collection.

As to whether I will upload some or all of my collection to Amazon, well, I'm not sure yet. I have an MP3Tunes locker that I never use, because the interface is screwy and uploading huge amounts of music is a pain in the ass. If Amazon makes the process easy, I may do it. If it makes the process hassly and especially if there are anti-piracy components, I will avoid it. Especially if there's no way to make it talk with Amarok.





No fucking clue how to review the three Monodramas that New York City Opera staged last week. No fucking clue.

The night was about as high concept as you get. Three one act operas by 20th century composers, each written for solo soprano. The classic "Erwartung" of Arnold Schoenberg, his earliest atonal opera, was the most well-known part of the repertory in the show. The other two pieces: John Zorn's "La Machine de L'Etre" and Morton Feldman's "Neither", were even more obscure.

Zorn's been a favorite musician and composer for years, and as he's a major figure of the East Village music scene I went to a lot of his concerts back when I was in school. Schoenberg's even more central to my musical taste- he wrote my favorite opera, Moses und Aron, along with many other longtime favorite pieces, especially Verklarte Nacht. I have anticipated this night for months now, even as I struggled to persuade someone to attend it with me. I managed to convince Noah to come along, finally.

The show opened with the Zorn, which is dubiously an opera at all, though it's clearly a monodrama even if it's not an opera. Its 'libretto' consists of wordless syllables. And even though I usually love Zorn, I definitely will admit I struggled with this piece, especially its first half. I was saying to Noah at intermission that my understanding of the significance of the Schoenberg revolution is that convention was thrown out the window to be replaced by constant semiotic renegotiation. Before, an elaborate language of musical convention governed our response to a piece of music- major and minor keys, tempos, orchestrations, musical forms. After Schoenberg, every composition could define its own musical vocabulary, either basing it in whole or part on someone's previous work (Terry Riley's "In C" striking me as a great example of this) or starting as much from scratch as possible. So when I listened to the Zorn, the beginning involved working through that negotiation with the composer, figuring out what kind of musical language he was using and how much sense I could make out of it. It took me a few minutes, and the piece was only ten minutes long, so there was only about five or six minutes where I felt like I was in the same world as the music. I think if I saw it again I would enjoy it more.

But what I did get of it, the second half of the piece, I thought was really interesting and moving. Michael Counts, the director, began with dozens of people on stage wearing brown abayas and hijabs- traditional Muslim female clothing. A man and a woman in mens' eveningwear moved through this crowd undressing random members of the crowd to reveal a variety of costumes- a man in a brilliant red suit, a woman in white undergarments, a woman in a black evening dress. The woman in the black dress turned out to be the singer who would perform the monodrama, while the rest of the people responded to the music and to her singing.

Beginning with everyone in Muslim clothing had me on the lookout for problematic depiction , but what I saw was surprisingly warm. A number of those so dressed were established as individual characters. They danced, played jokes, gallivanted across the stage. The hijab certainly stood for the anonymity and uniformity enforced on Muslim society, but in one scene six women had their outer layer removed to reveal that beneath, they were all black-haired white women with identical haircuts wearing identical wedding dresses, cleverly suggesting that Western society equally has ways of enforcing uniformity, not to mention femininity.

But what I really enjoyed was the conjunction of machine and etre, mechanism and being, that drove the whole staging thematically. Many of the gestures produced onstage were reversible processes that were shown going through a highly mechanistic cycle, as in my favorite moment, the man in the red suit being elevated above the stage and then lowered on wires. And the music, quirky but clearly aching, methodical and prescribed but full of human moments, told the same story. It was a story about people living in a world that tries to force them to stay on the tracks, to color within the lines, whatever those lines might be. And it says that being, existing, is about trying to escape the lines, ascend out of the machine.

Or at least, I think that's what it was about. At intermission the question everyone was asking each other was "What did you think the Zorn was about?" The Schoenberg was comprehensible, though the staging wasn't quite. The Schoenberg was also a little bit dull in places. Nobody was talking about Erwartung at intermission, they were buzzing with questions and theories and jokes about "La Machine de L'Etre". Even the people who didn't like it, who didn't get it, who found it dull or incomprehensible, they were talking about it.

And yet Feldman's "Neither" surpassed it, after the intermission. At least in my opinion. Noah disagreed, I think. He told a guy in the subway after the show that he preferred the Zorn, but that was kind of a snap judgment and perhaps with time both of us will change our mind.

Built on a spooky, meditative text by Samuel Beckett, designed to consist entirely of textual ambiguities, and stretched out to an intoxicating length by Feldman's high, monomaniacal score, it gave the director a lot of room to work. And in some sense I think Counts struggled with that freedom. This was not an entirely successful work because it was at places tentative and it gave too much room to Beckett's ambiguities. But it did some really cool things.

Rather than a 'set' as we've come to know it, Counts's lighting designer constructed an architecture of light, using a host of interesting reflective surfaces to throw light, both white and colored, about the set in intricate and beautiful ways. Centrally, dozens of mirrored boxes, suspended by strings from the ceiling and dropping down and moving up along with the music, provided the major focus for the eye during the performance. I told Noah that if my primary theory was proven wrong, my fallback was that this was an opera about Tetris.

But my primary theory was that this was an opera about Quantum Mechanics and Uncertainty. With a set built out of light, the libretto made allusions to the quantum nature of light - "from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither" seeming to me to be a great expression of wave/particle duality, whereas "unheard footfalls only sound" signaled Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and the way it involves the observer in the experiment. Various dances throughout the piece suggested quantum entanglement to me- one dancer begins moving and others, at other points across the stage, begin moving in identical ways.

And I found myself moved deeply by the micro made macro, as the expression about the Schrodinger experiment goes- by the way Quantum theory casts serious doubts not just about the experience of our senses but about our overall place in the world. The sense we have that Uncertainty can infect our lives, how the great and terrible power of scientific discovery has not given us anything resembling comforting truth, though it has exposed us to the imposing majesty of the cosmos. And I like to think that in his libretto Schoenberg is musing on this trade, and whether it's worth it. And I like to think that Feldman, by stretching out the libretto, gives us both time to reflect on it and a physical appreciation for the way our senses can be distorted.

But it could be an opera about Tetris.

Back to "Erwartung", which I skipped so I could directly contrast "Neither" to "La Machine de l'Etre". Here I can only make recourse to my theory of the Revolutionary Orthodoxy, the principle by which I consider canonized works of avant-garde art. Art which was designed to challenge the audience and challenge some artistic status quo, but which, being successful, undermines its mission. I usually have referred to this idea in talking about visual art, because MoMa is my main example of a building to showcase the canonized avant-garde.

The important thing to think about when experiencing a Revolutionary Orthodox work is that you can't forget that it was created to be different and controversial. Even if you don't find it controversial, even if your artistic vocabulary has entirely assimilated the new concepts, you have to keep poking yourself and reminding yourself that the work was intended to be provocative or you won't understand what the artist is doing.

And, well, that was "Erwartung". It is a stirring piece of music, powerfully psychological, but it's nearly a hundred years old now and it didn't feel as fresh as the Zorn. And it didn't feel like the director had much to add to it. And in the middle I felt like it got lost a little bit. But not at all inappropriate on the bill with two pieces clearly inspired by it.

All in all, the thing I'll say is that I want to echo all the critics saying how amazing it is that we have an institution in NYC that dares to put on a show like this. In Lincoln Center.

An interesting thought on The Autograph Man that hadn't occurred to me originally. If someone playing the Jewish/Goyish game were to ask me about New York and London, I'd obviously say New York-Jewish and London-Goyish. No question, right? And it's not even London, it's a suburb of London, where the story is set, so you know, kal vachomer...

Yet Smith, who's spent her entire book playing the Jewish/Goyish game and surely can't have missed this, uses Kabbalistic motifs when her characters are in London and Zen motifs for New York. And before Alex heads into deep Brooklyn, the Jewish neighborhood where Kitty lives, they first visit her fanclub president in Chinatown. Smith seems to be going to a certain amount of trouble to make New York goyish and London jewish. And I think that's really worth delving deeper into.



Here's another thing I wrote for Purimgifts and didn't end up using. I'm a little frustrated with that, actually. I wrote a reasonably lengthy poem and then realized it wasn't really how I wanted to end Purimgifts, so I had to reject it. Though it inspired "Jamie and Every Shapiro in Washington Heights", which I think is a dramatically more interesting work.

With sincere apologies to The Nails, here's my song parody... As with the story I did post, its sole inspiration was me hearing "I've had Shabbos dinners on Friday night with every Shapiro in Washington Heights" and thinking "Damn, that's a lot of Shapiros." I know it's reductionist and probably therefore misogynistic- that's a significant part of why I didn't use it. But for what it is, I think it's kind of fun.

( 88 Lines About Every Shapiro in Washington Heights )

My new laptop came yesterday! Anyone want to try to see the Philadelphia Opera Company's Romeo and Juliet this Sunday afternoon?

Still, her voice is gorgeous and her simple, mincing verse gives me chills. I haven't been to any of their shows this season, and I want to rectify that. It's even telling me that it's receiving and transmitting data, but I can't connect to my network. Damnit, the wireless should be working.

Then I'm going to shuffle them up sentence by sentence because I'm crazy. The joyful multilingual songs of the first album were a large part of the appeal. I'm not really a fan of it as a story, but I think it's been a stunningly deep well of musical inspiration over the centuries. I'm really pleased with it, it really seems to be everything I want, but installing Linux has been kind of hassly.

Also yesterday the new Yael Naim album arrived from France via Amazon. Listened to it this morning on the car ride. I'm going to write a series of miniposts because I have many things to say. But I'm disappointed she doesn't sing in French or Hebrew. I like much of it, and several songs really stand out.

Finally got around to grabbing El Madmo's debut album from a couple years back. El Madmo being Norah Jones's "punk rock" band. Apparently Norah Jones regularly does this thing where she dresses up in a costume and plays music you'd never expect her 'brand name' AC albums to have. I saw her last January as "Avril Lavigne", wearing a black wig and playing classic country covers with her all-girl trio Puss 'n Boots. And let me tell you, Norah Jones singing Johnny Cash while strumming along on a guitar is a wondrous and surprising thing.

El Madmo's songwriting is haphazard and lazy, rather than the tight, carefully considered construction you expect in a Norah Jones song. They seek to make up for it in buoyant enthusiasm and a lot of the time, it works. This is music determined to pretend it's not gimmicky. It is so much fracking fun. They seem at times to be intentionally trying to break every rule a good musician follows, just for the hell of it. Jones howls, screams, and shouts her way through songs. They go for the obvious rhyme always, like a mantra, especially in the opening number "Carlo." Songs are overproduced, underproduced, misproduced. The last track, if you listen through a minute or so of silence, gives you a 'hidden track' of ridiculous outtakes. It's these three phenomenally talented musicians whose usual show act is polished to mirror-finish, taking off the polish and just having fun. The last song is called "Rock Yer Balls Off".

Um... in any case, I cannot recommend it highly enough, and I'm sorry I didn't listen to it earlier.

Last night was packed, with a NaNo write-in followed by a late night D&D makeup session that pitted half the party against the other half in the quest to find magically-laced Drakes and harvest their magical energies for fun and profit. NaNo wordcount is up to 27,000. I was saying at the writein that 26,000 is an important milestone because it's where Ferret and Florence and the The Da Vinci Code Code crashed and burned two years ago. I feel like if I can pass 26,000, there's nothing between me and 50,000.

My novel... it is fucking weird, even for me. And I haven't even gotten to the part where I use LaTeX tabular mode to do a scene in two columns.


Tonight, going to see Strauss's "Intermezzo" at New York City Opera with Talia. Looking forward to it!

Yankees took a division series from the Twins! Again! Go Yankees! You're next, Rangers! (I have to admit, it's looking like a Yankees-Phillies rematch is fairly likely. You're going down, jerks from Philly!)

A Polish funk album arrived in the mail! Explanation: So back in the days of Napster, I went hunting for music by the Midwest a cappella group The Blenders and turned up music by the Polish funk group The Blenders. And discovered I didn't like the a cappella group, but apparently whimsical Polish funk turned my wheel.

Recently, I was trying to put together a playlist from my music library with songs in as many languages as possible and realized that my Polish funk had disappeared during one of my many transfers of music from computer to computer. So I went on Amazon and found one of their albums (The one whose opening track translates to "Cybernetic Wanderer") and had it shipped over here. See? Piracy leads to more sales. I don't understand most of their music (I'm told that "Pociag of Love" means "Train of Love"), but I pretty much don't care when the music is this fun.

Anyway, expect the aforementioned polyglot playlist to pop up eventually.


Yuletide nominations are open!!!! I'm so excited for Yuletide. So, so excited. My first pass at nominations was

1. Le Nozze di Figaro
2. Les Contes d'Hoffman
3. Norma
4. La Fille du Regiment
5. Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore
6. Um... I don't remember, but it's just filler until I decide if I want to nominate Moses und Aron or Wozzeck.

So yeah, a pile of operas and Six Characters in Search of an Author, a Modernist play that was my first childhood exposure to great metafiction. I'm sort of hoping it can be the If on a winter's night a traveler of this year's Yuletide, a springboard for beautiful metafanfic. This is a predictable assortment of fandoms for me.

People who are reading this, I don't care if you've ever written fanfic in your life before, you should consider trying Yuletide. It's a fabulous experience, full of enthusiastic people who love the same obscure books and movies and operas and TV shows and songs and... as you. Getting a story written personally for you in a fandom you've loved forever is just a bonus. Then sprawling your way through the archive of daring and unexpected stories produced is a delightful way to spend your end of year days off.