Covering your budget

March 3, 2024
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When I was a young and poor college student and wanted to buy a classical music LP, I was faced with a choice. Most of the biggest names in the field recorded for one of the major labels: Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, Columbia, RCA or Angel (aka EMI). And those disks were pricey. 

In some cases, I would just have to suck it up and spend more than I really should have. But there was an alternative. There were budget labels, offering their records at cheapie prices. 

Most were sub-labels of the pricier brands, as Seraphim sold older versions of Angel releases, or Victrola from RCA and Odyssey for Columbia. And Vanguard Everyman. And there were some bottom of the barrel labels, with really poor recordings of Eastern European, and Russian musicians, such as Melodiya and Urania. Those sounded awful. 

And their album covers were usually cheaply designed, or copies of how the premium brands showed themselves, with photos of the conductors or musicians, or with pretty landscapes. After all, classical music was serious. It was art. 

But then came the Baroque revival, and instead of Beethoven symphonies, we were offered Vivaldi, Telemann and Monteverdi madrigals. The Sixties were in full swing, the budget labels dove into bright, colorful, more lively album covers, often with whimsical illustrations. 

These were Nonesuch recordings and the Vox budget label, Turnabout. My collection was full of them

There were two labels in particular that went for the comic and the hip. Westminster and Crossroads. The created memorable cover art, but took very different paths. 

Westminster Records began life in 1949 as a high-end audiophile label, but by the time I came to know them, they were a low-end budget brand, and their covers were as simple and unadorned as the “plain brown wrapper” that used to hide racy novels. Those red covers, with a horizontal black line were easy to spot in the record store bins, and for those of us on a limited budget, an instant look-see. The performances were generally very good, if by musicians more noted more in Hungary or Poland than in Carnegie Hall. They were dependable. I owned bunches. 

But, the label was bought out by ABC-Paramount and by 1970, they began marketing their back-issue catalog with sometimes ridiculous and campy cover art. To attract the kids, I guess. 

They included a Beethoven concerto with a busty brunette, whose busts were those of the composer, strategically placed. Or Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite with a faux Georgia O’Keeffe cow skull, or — my favorite — a Barbarella knock-off of cheap sci-fi for Gustav Holst’s Planets. 

(Click on any of these images for a clearer look)

These covers are now collector items for a memorable gallery of time-stamp art. I have gathered images of well over a hundred of these gems, and thought I should share a few of them.

Westminster sold the 1968 Hans Swarowsky Nuremberg Ring Cycle with Carnaby Street Valkyries, Rhine Maidens and Norns. 

And there was the two-disk recording of Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet, coming out hot on the heels of the Franco Zeffirelli film starring Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting. Could this cover be a coincidence? See the image at the top of this column. The album folds open to give us the whole picture (Love those socks). 

Then, there is organist Virgil Fox’s “Greatest Hits,” with the baseball player; traditional Italian songs with, of course, just the kind of mafiosi who regularly croon such tunes; and to round out the ethnic stereotypes, there is Albert Ketelby’s In a Chinese Temple Garden. Subtlety is no object. 

Then, there’s the sex and death contingent. Although what a cast-off bra has to do with Mozart is hard to tell. Tosca, though, surely liked to show off her décolleté, although I am unaware she ever had a tattoo. The obvious follow-up is a requiem. 

For some reason, the recording of Baroque flute and harpsichord sonatas shows us a bassoon and cello. And if you are going to have opera without words, you need a horned helmet and bandaged mouth. And there’s the merry widow drinking wine on a coffin. 

Haydn’s clock symphony, some Beethoven trios (apparently for teddy bears), and Bach cello sonatas. 

An American in Paris, selling risque pictures, a lipstick Bolero, and a gang of Russians selling us Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky. 

Judas Maccabaeus was known as the Jewish Hammer, so, OK. The William Tell Overture has its connotations, and the Skaters’ Waltz is obvious. 

Pictures at an Exhibition needs a camera; Porgy and Bess share a disk — and eyeglasses — with an American in Paris; and, if the composer is Matthew Locke, you clearly had no choice. 

There are many more, just as hokey, corny, and campy. As I said, I have about 130 of them in my files. 

But, it is the other label I really like better. Crossroads was a subsidiary of Epic Records. Epic dealt mostly in popular music and jazz, but in the late 1960s, they licensed reams of Supraphon recordings, mostly recorded with Czech musicians, and sold them under the Crossroads label, with often quite witty cartoon album art. The level of performance was top-notch, with some of the world’s best soloists and orchestras. 

I have gathered about 70 Crossroads album cover images, and offer a few here.

The Prague Madrigal Singers recording of Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes was the perfect performance, light, with a happy amateur feeling of a group of friends singing together. Other recordings I have owned were too operatic and artsy for Brahms’ gemütlich bourgeois lovesongs. And the cover art perfectly reflected the tone of the performance, and of the music Brahms wrote:

Unfortunately for me, this performance has never shown up on CD and I long ago got rid of all my LPs. 

Many of the other Crossroads releases have subsequently been rereleased on other labels, including the original Supraphon recordings. But the album covers of the CDs never quite match the joie of these LP covers. It is also obvious that these came out about the same time as the animated Yellow Submarine movie. The style is unmistakeable. 

There’s a bit of Hokusai’s Great Wave in this Debussy. More Yellow Submarine for unknown classical-era composers and Someone has to vacuum up all the dropped notes.

There is, of course, a lot of Dvorak and Smetana in these Crossroads releases. 

But it’s not all Czech. Here’s some Franck and a great Schubert “Trout” quintet. And even some of the musicians are not Czech. There are Germans, too.

The covers are a delight, even for heavier music: Dvorak’s most Germanic symphony, Bartok raucous Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion and the deep slog of going through Brahms’ string quartets. 

Villa-Lobos, Milhaud and others; Schubert’s giant op. 99 Trio; and 18th century Bohemian composer Jan Voríšek, apparently having his tooth pulled. 

Listening to the Loud Classics on earphones; two Brahms violin sonatas (you cannot find a better performance than the great Josef Suk and pianist Jan Panenka; I owned this LP for years — a delight); and Haydn’s “Chase” symphony.

The tradition of budget recordings continued into the CD era, with some super-cheapie labels, such as Pilz and Laserlight, and there was a deluge of rare repertoire items that came out on Naxos, before that label went upscale. And the classical music recording industry has just about collapsed with fewer new recordings, but a raft of back-catalog items being issued in budget boxes by Sony, Warner, and Brilliant, often for as little as a buck a disk. 

And now that I am retired, I find myself back in the same situation I was when I was newly graduated from college and making $50 a week at a retail store (well, not quite that bad off), and I find myself again stocking up on piles and piles of budget issues.

Click on any image to enlarge

Me, my shelf, and I

February 24, 2024
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If you’re reading this, and read blogs, it suggests you are a reader, and probably love books as much as I do. In fact, you may be a bookaholic, or have gone over the edge to become a bibliopath. Books are a central foundation of who I am, who I used to be and who I am still becaming. How can it be otherwise for anyone with a pennyweight of curiosity about people and about the world? 

I’ve written about books in my life in many blog entries, and one of the most often-read is the piece I posted on Oct. 10, 2020, called “Shelf life,” in which I chose a single rung of a bookshelf in the house and discussed all the volumes resting on it. We are, at least in part, what we read: The books become internalized. And so, as I wrote then, I wanted: “to search for myself among my books.” I decided to take a single shelf from a single bookcase, “to see if they were in any way a mirror in which I could discover my own physiognomy.”

I didn’t want to pick a neatly organized shelf, but one where books were randomly scattered, left uncatalogued after casually unpacking after a move, or after re-reading, or just was too lazy to put back where it made sense. The bookcase next to the bed seemed the proper choice. 

And so, I thought I might do so a second time. I looked at the shelf above the one I wrote about and it also seemed to be a mirror: That was me, there, in those pages, however jumbled it seemed to be. 

What surprised me the most was how many of these books have been with me for most of my life — books I read when young that still take up space in my brain and on my shelf. And also how many were only recently bought and opened. 

I should start with the three matched volumes at the right of the shelf: James Joyce’s Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. This handsome set replaced the many earlier versions I have owned in various editions. (I still have at least four other Ulysses on various shelves in the house, including a very special cheapie pirated paperback printed by Collectors Publications, a publisher most known for printing porn — which I suppose Ulysses was thought of when this version was published — ads at the back of the book offer The Incestual Triangle, Four Way Swappers, and All Male Nudes, among other things.)

I first read Portrait of the Artist when I was in eighth grade, in the dark green paperback Viking Compass Book edition. I’m not sure how much I could have comprehended reading it at the age of 13, but I knew I loved the way the words looked and sounded: “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo …” There was the mud of the rugby field, the great hellfire of the sermon, and the “forged in the smithy of my soul.” 

I reread the book every four or five years, and every time, it hits the spot. In the habit readers always have, I soon jumped on all the other Joyce I could find. I bought a copy of Viking’s A Portable James Joyce, and have given up or lost several versions over the years, but still have one, a hardcover one, now in a library binding — in fact, it sits on a lower shelf of this selfsame bookcase I’m writing about. I tackled the play, the poetry, Stephen Hero, the essays — even Finnegan, although, at the age of 76, I am still defeated by the whirl of the whorl of the world of Finnegan. I will leave it to the next life. 

Ulysses was a harder nut to crack after Dubliners, when I was a scrub-faced kid; Ulysses problems were verbal; Dubliners was harder to understand because of the complexity of the human emotions written about. You have to have some life pushing behind you to grasp the complexities of human experience and emotions written about in those short stories. As a teenager, I knew pimples better than I knew people. I re-read Dubliners last year and was blown away, especially by the final “The Dead.” It broke my heart.

Ulysses I did get into years later, and it is now my favorite novel of all, although, to be fair, I don’t always read it cover to cover, but rather, read again and again the bits that I most love. It astounds me: It is filled with some of the most beautiful prose I have ever encountered. No, I take that back: The most beautiful prose. 

Next to Joyce on the shelf is James Michener: Tales of the South Pacific, and Return to Paradise. I remember, in my 30s and still something of a snob, looking down my nose at Michener as a best-selling author of doorstop bricks. But one day, in a book store, I picked up a copy of Tales and thought I would read a page, maybe two, to catch the flavor of Michener’s prose. It was 30 pages later I was standing there ready to flip the next page. This was a special kind of talent: to make you need to find out “what happens next.” 

The prose was simply not the point. It was invisible; you read through the words as if looking through glass. This was story-telling, and Michener really has a value I had failed to understand. I’m not saying he didn’t eventually turn into an industrial manufactory, but in his first book, he made magic. It was also nothing like the South Pacific musical I had expected. Rather it gave me a real sense of what the war in the Pacific must have been like for those who experienced it. 

A few years ago, after re-reading it, I found a copy of its sequel, Return to Paradise. I got through a few of the stories, maybe a third of the way in, but lost interest. The magic had gone. It was OK — it wasn’t just junk — but it didn’t grab me the way the first book did. It was more like a book of short stories that a short story writer might write. Something, perhaps, that a publisher might request after a best-seller. The two sit together on the shelf nonetheless. 

I’m going out of sequence on the shelf to mention the other Michener book sitting there. In 1958, Michener published The Hokusai Sketch-Books: Selections from the Manga. Hokusai, of course, was the famous Japanese 18th-19th century artist. In 1814, he published a multi-volume sketchbook, called manga, in which he drew everything he saw in the world around him: people, plants, animals, ghosts, architecture. It was an encyclopedic venture. Michener selected enough of these drawings to fill out a thick book. I have owned it since college. It is one of my holy-of-holies. 

From high-school days, I was fascinated with all things Asian; I read books on Zen Buddhism, listened to Noh Plays, took my girlfriend to restaurants with hibachis. There were Kurosawa movies and sumi ink paintings, which I attempted with my own shizuri and brush. 

The non-Western way of looking at the world opened my world view and I have been looking beyond the horizon ever since. 

Next on the shelf some The Great Gatsby and nothing proves how little youth knows, than what I made of the book — or didn’t make of it — when I was required to read it in eighth grade. I never then figured out who this Gatsby guy was; I thought the book was about Nick Carraway; and what the heck was all that about green light? 

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the book then, but that I had no clue about its depths. I bought an excellent edition three years ago and reread it for maybe the third or fourth time and loved every second of it. It is a deep, rich book, with prose that is delectable. 

I believe for most young readers with a ripe curiosity, we tend to want to read beyond our abilities. We believe, as teenagers, we are grown-ups and want to partake of the adult world. And so we — and I — took to reading much that we had no business attempting. I read Saul Bellow, Henry Miller, John Updike, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Pynchon, James Purdy — a whole host of writers that I thought proved I was now in the company of the heavyweights. 

And among those books was Jean Paul Sartre’s The Words, his autobiography. I knew he was an existentialist and that all the most intellectual people (this was the mid-1960s) were hot on existentialism. Not that I knew what that meant (I’m not sure anyone really does — it encompasses so many different things, but back then, it pretty much meant berets and espresso). But I read it, enjoyed it, thought I understood it, and flashed a few words around to let anyone know. I got a subscription to Les Temps Moderne, although I couldn’t read French (and also a subscription to The Evergreen Review — I was one hip 16-year-old). I re-read Les Mots last year and it’s a fine enough autobiography, but not exactly world-shaking. 

Getting back on track along the bookshelf: In the 1970s, I was living with a redhead and we wanted to travel. We hiked a good portion of the Appalachian Trail, and drove, amongst other destinations, to Maine and New England. I was fascinated by geology and I had a book by Neil Jorgensen called A Guide to New England’s Landscape. I had by then, an interest in all things under the heading of “Nature.” I had a raft of Peterson Guides, could name dozens of plants and birds by their scientific names (“Know-atia Dudiflorum,” my wife teased me), collected rock samples, and could name dozens of constellations in the night sky. 

The Jorgensen book accompanied us as we drove past monadnocks and till, varved clays and drumlins. I admit I haven’t read the book since then, but I still have it, as a memento of meaningful times.

I was by then active a photographer, and so I had another guidebook: Illustrated Guide to Yosemite, by Ansel Adams and his wife, Virginia Best Adams. I so wanted to visit Yosemite, but never had at those years the time or money for such a long trip. The book is loaded with Adams images, and so, it functioned more as a picture book than a useful guide. It was only many years later that my wife and I drove up the east slope of the Sierra Nevada along the Tioga Road and got to see the stunning Valley. The book is another that I’ve owned for 50 years and is a piece of me. 

If I could choose to write like anyone, it would be James Joyce, but if I couldn’t have that, I would want to write like P.G. Wodehouse. He is magic with words, although of a more comic variety. I have bunches of Wodehouse lying around, but three years ago, I bought a new edition of A Pelican at Blandings, mostly because these new hardback versions, by Overlook Press, were so seductively handsome. If I had the money, I would buy all the volumes in this set, but this one will have to do. 

All the Blandings books are a hoot. He may be most famous for his Jeeves stories, but I like Lord Emsworth and his pig and his sister Connie, just as much as Jeeves and Wooster. This is the kind of book I read when I just want to have fun. 

The Complete Southern Cookbook, by Tammy Algood is not one I bought. It was a gift from my daughter. I seldom use cookbooks. And when I do want one to check on some Southern specialty, I head for the old standby, Henrietta Dull’s Southern Cooking, originally published in 1928. 

I was born in New Jersey, but left there when I was 17. I’ve lived in four corners of the country, with 25 years in Arizona, and a year in Seattle, but the longest soujourn has been in the South, in North Carolina and Virginia, where my years add up to 33. I feel like an adopted Southerner. 

And while I still miss the foods I grew up with, such as a good pastrami on rye, real pizza, or a kaiser roll, I have to admit that I’ve come to love those things a Yankee will never understand, like greens, pulled pork, or fried okra. I count on Mrs. Dull for those (although, to be honest, no one uses a recipe for such things). 

The funniest book I have ever read is Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. It is one of the few I find myself actually laughing out loud at. So, thought I, perhaps his other book, A Sentimental Journey, must we worth looking into. It is much more straightforward, less surreal, and while it has its moments, doesn’t quite catch fire for me. The edition I have is however quite handsome to look at. 

The next two books are by Jean Renoir. Renoir is probably my favorite filmmaker. His films are so genuinely humane and wise. Nick Carraway, from Gatsby, relays that his father gave him advice to live by: “Remember that not everyone has had the advantages you have had.” That’s all well and fine, but the words that most illuminate my life are from Renoir’s Rules of the Game, when Octave, played by Renoir himself, says “The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons.” It isn’t usually malice or conspiracy that mucks things up, but rather, “Everybody has their reasons.” You learn to be less judgmental from that. 

He wrote about his work in My Life and My Films, from 1974. It is filled with anecdotes and pictures, and the quiet acceptance that is the core of his being. But even better is the biography he wrote about his father, Renoir. I was never a big fan of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. I find his paintings a little blowsy. He is the least of the major Impressionists. But, as his son writes about him, he comes off as one of the kindest, sweetest, most understanding and generous of men. I came to love old Pierre-Auguste not through his art, but through his biography. 

I said we readers have a tendency to find authors we like and then plow through the whole corpus willy-nilly. About five years ago, I came across Clive James, the late Australian-English writer and critic. I tore through everything, including his poetry. And when I found his book Cultural Amnesia, I couldn’t stop myself. Subtitled Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, it makes the case that too much important history has been forgotten, ignored, or misrepresented, and that if we need an understanding of the past to navigate the future, then the men and women he writes about in this book, deserve to be remembered. 

He writes about more than a hundred of them, in alphabetic order from Anna Akhmatova to Stephan Zweig. Some are hardly obscure, like Charlie Chaplin or Leo Tolstoy, but he brings to mind aspects that may have more cultural impact than you might remember, or other facets to their work. 

I love the grim joy of Dimitri Shostakovich; his music speaks volumes about misery and dictatorship. His Seventh Symphony, the “Leningrad Symphony” was partly written and later first performed in that city during the 900-day siege by the German Wehrmacht during World War II. It is a sprawling work, lasting well over an hour, and its first movement has a grinding passacaglia representing the jackboots of oppression. 

My wife gave me a copy of Leningrad: Siege and Symphony, subtitled “The Story of the Great City Terrorized by Stalin, Starved by Hitler, Immortalized by Shostakovich,” by Brian Moynahan. Its well-researched 500 pages cover everything one needs to know about the siege, the horrors, and its legacy. But, I confess, I have not read it. It sits there on the shelf, waiting. But I really feel I am told everything I need to by the music itself. 

I went through a D.H. Lawrence period, where I read everything I could get my hands on. But not the novels or short stories. For some reason, they never much appealed to me. But his essays and travel writing, and his poetry, I adored. It’s the best travel writing I know, partly because it isn’t the usual version of the kind, but his personal, very idiosyncratic way of looking at the world. 

Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine is an anthology of seven of his essays, including the title piece, which starts as thoughts on having to shoot a porcupine on his New Mexico ranch, and goes through the issue of all life dependent on devouring other life, and ends, in a disturbing turn that, for him, justifies “superior” existence having its way with “inferior.” Lawrence is capable of a good deal of piffle. 

But it is the particularity of his observation that I love, the detail. Even crazy talk can be well written. 

Next, the best writing, the most original use of word and sentence, since, at least Joyce, was penned by Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita is an absolute brilliance, despite is subject. And so I read Speak, Memory, his 1951 autobiography, which recounts his life in Russia, before leaving in 1940. 

It begins, “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” So, you know you are not just getting a sequence of entertaining anecdotes. The book is a dialog, essentially, between existence and memory, the memory of a pre-Revolution Russia, as recalled by a child, and then a young man. 

Finally, I have an omnibus edition of four Maigret novels by Georges Simenon. I have moments when I devour Simenon like chocolate-chip cookies, one after the other. But it can get expensive buying volume on volume, one at a time. This edition, once in the collection of the Ypsilanti District Library in Michigan, was bought used on Amazon, cost less than $5 and gave me four novels. I have read three. I am holding the fourth unread so far, in order to experience the delicious anticipation of reading it. 

And so, with that shelf catalogued, I look at the books and think, do I see myself in their spines, lined up? I certainly see a bit, like seeing a face through partially opened Venetian blinds. It’s me, all right, but only a bit. I look at the book case from top to bottom and see more of the rest of me. I walk down the hall and into other rooms with other bookcases and the picture fills up. The oldest books among them all speak of the boy that remains in the core, the newest of the weary old man I am now that covers it all in wrinkles. It is that “brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” 

It’s not all the same

February 21, 2024
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No, classical music doesn’t all sound the same. In fact, sometimes it’s hard to find any relationship at all between the far corners of the field. What do Gregorian Chant and Karlheinz Stockhausen have in common? 

When someone complains that “it all sounds the same,” you can be pretty sure that the reason is simply lack of exposure. A sample group too small to generalize from. So, I thought, as a followup to my previous blog entry about classical music, I should try to stretch the boundaries of the subject, to stretch out the definition tightly from end to end to see how far it spreads. 

If you listen to the items on this catalog, you will find music so different as to be hard to assign a common category. 

In the previous blog entry, I attempted to move from one suggestion to the next in the most contrasting way, from, say, Renaissance polyphony to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring — a clear jerk from one mode of hearing to the other. 

This time, I hope to provide some framework to see how what we call classical music, or art music, developed over time. You may object that about half of the music comes from the 20th- and 21st-centuries, but that is only being fair: You should remember that the Rite of Spring — which is the traditional mark for the beginning of Modernism in music — is actually closer in time to the death of Haydn than it is to us today. Twentieth Century music is no longer new — it is classical. 

(I’ve chosen a single piece from each of the large clumps of music history, varying both style and genre, including keyboard, chamber, vocal, choral and symphonic. From each period, I have supplemented the examples with two contrasting pieces for further listening.) Beginning with: 

Vivaldi: Gloria in D Major, RV 589

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) wrote at least three settings for the Gloria, but this one is the version everyone remembers, with its chugging motoric drive and its brassy fanfares. It is built from 12 short movements split between choral numbers, solos and a duet for soprano and contralto. 

Its catchy opening “one-TWO-three-four, one-TWO-three-four” with its octave leaps, returns later to unify the work. The Baroque era ran from roughly 1600 to 1750, although styles evolve slowly and overlap. It’s not like everyone stops writing one way and begins writing the new way. This piece, from 1715 lasts about 30 minutes and exemplifies the energetic forward motion of the Baroque. 

Alternates:

J.S. Bach (1685-1750), The Goldberg Variations (1714), a set of 30 variations on a repeating bass line, for keyboard; and George Friedrich Handel (1685-1759), Musick for the Royal Fireworks (1749), a suite for a large band of wind instruments, for outdoor performance during a famous fireworks display meant to celebrate the end of the War of Austrian Succession. The crowd loved the music, but the fireworks caused a building to burn down, blinded a soldier and injured several others. Later performances often added strings to the wind band, with no further reported injuries. 

Haydn: Quartet in D major, op. 64, no. 5 “The Lark”

It is often said that Joseph Haydn and Mozart wrote music in the classical style (roughly 1750-1828), but in fact, they created the classical style. If Haydn didn’t singlehandedly invent the symphony, he made it what we think of today; and he did the same for the string quartet — music for two violins, viola and cello. 

This is music generally less cluttered or fussy than the earlier Baroque, and seeks a kind of modest tastefulness, along with, in Haydn’s case, a witty sense of humor, as in the imitation bird calls at the start of this quartet, which was written in 1790 and has the usual four movements: an opening allegro, a dance movement, a slow movement and a jaunty finale. 

Alternates:

W.A. Mozart (1756-1791) Serenade No. 10 for 13 Winds in B-Flat, known as the Gran Partita (1781), which, in Peter Shaffer’s play, Amadeus, he has Antonio Salieri react by saying, “It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.” Or Franz Schubert’s (1797-1828) Symphony No. 5 in B-Flat (1816), which is a really tuneful symphony built on Haydn’s model. 

Liszt: Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-Flat 

Franz Liszt (1811-1886) is the perfect Romantic composer, the greatest piano virtuoso of his time, and a matinee idol that all the ladies were in love with — something of which he took great advantage. His music, as in this 1855 concerto, is filled with all the wild emotion that the classical era avoided: over the top, loud, brash, and with a solo part for the triangle — it scandalized its first audiences. The jangle of the triangle was considered bad taste — but bad taste is the goal of much Romanticism. Audiences loved being scandalized. 

Alternates:

Robert Schumann (1810-1856) wrote a cycle of songs, telling a sad love story, called the Dichterliebe, or “A Poet’s Love,” in 1840, and includes a song claiming over and over, “I’m not angry,” to some of the angriest music ever. Clever. Or Bedrich Smetana’s (1824-1884) Moldau, an orchestral portrait of the Czech river (now usually called the Vlatva or Voltava), which is a perfect example of the Romantic Nationalism that swept over Europe. Great tunes. 

Debussy: Images for Piano, Book II

In the late 19th century and the 20th century before the First World War, music went through several changes. One of them is a rejection of Romantic excess, and the French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) came up with his own style — usually called Impressionism — of ambiguous tonality, exotic scales, and an approach to the piano that was soft and non-percussive. 

He wrote a great deal of piano music, including the famous Clair de Lune, but I’m offering the three pieces in his Images, second series (1907): Cloches à travers les feuilles (“Bells through the leaves”); Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut (“And the moon descends on the temple that was”); and Poissons d’or (“Golden fish”).

Alternates:

Some composers went in the opposite direction, with larger orchestras, more chromatic harmonies of profound longing, in what is often called Late Romanticism, or Post-Romanticism. Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) often added voices to his orchestral music, or wrote orchestral song cycles, such as his Songs of a Wayfarer (1885). Richard Strauss (1864-1949) used huge orchestras and explodes out of the gate with Don Juan (1889), a musical version of a Don Juan more idealistic than lecherous. It is an avalanche of sound, with a huge six-horn signature that, in live performance, you feel through you fundament as much as hear with your ear. 

Janáček: Sinfonietta 

Now we are ripe in the 20th Century, and Leos Janáček’s Sinfonietta (1926), a five-movement piece for huge orchestra, including 25 brass instruments. The first movement has 10 trumpets alone, playing a hair-raising fanfare. 

All five movements are built from catchy tune-bits, extended and repeated. And although the music is clearly modernist, I’ve never come across anyone who didn’t instantly love the Sinfonietta. 

Alternates:

French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was imprisoned by Nazis during World War II, and in prison camp, wrote his Quartet for the End of Time, for piano, clarinet, violin and cello (the instruments available in the camp). It is a hugely idiosyncratic piece, written to Messiaen’s own music theories, but can be overwhelmingly emotional in a good performance. And for the double-dip experience of atonal music, try Alban Berg’s (1885-1935) Three Pieces for Orchestra (1914), for something like what people used to call “modern music.” 

Penderecki: Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima

Classical music, or art music, is still being written, and responds to life in the current world. We live in a post-Hiroshima age, and Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki (1933-2020) summarized the feeling in his 1961 string-orchestra piece, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, although you may have some difficulty recognizing it as string music made by violins, violas, cellos and double basses. It shrieks of the horror. 

It masses its 52 string players in tone clusters and dissonances, various vibratos and odd bowings, for 8 and a half minutes, that is not meant to be beautiful, but to evoke intense emotions. It is, nevertheless, beautiful. (Remembering Tom Robbins notion: “The ugly may be beautiful; the pretty, never.”)

Alternates:

Minimalist composer Philip Glass (b. 1937) also reacts to the modern world in his film score for the Godfrey Reggio film, Koyaanisqatsi (1982). The modern world is a crazy world, as the film and music underline, but with quite a variety of minimalist techniques. The horrors of war fill Henryk Gorecki’s (1933-2010) Third Symphony (The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) (1976), in which a soprano sings Catholic laments and words by victims of the Nazis, all to music so slow and so inexorable as to be almost a force of nature. Its 1991 recording by the London Sinfonietta sold more than a million copies. Gorecki, surprised at the popularity of such a sorrowful piece of music said, “perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music…. something they were missing. Something, somewhere had been lost to them.”

Epilogue

Of course, this diversity is among the European tradition of art or concert music. Most cultures have their own classical musics, such as the sitar or sarod music of India, the Chinese opera music, and Japanese flute music. Each is a tradition handed down from master to student and carried forth, with development and variation. That is what makes it classical. 

If I were to think of a purely American classical music, it would be jazz. It, likewise, has a wide range of styles and sounds, from Louis Armstrong through Duke Ellington and down through Ornette Coleman. 

But it is what we call classical music in the West that I am best familiar with and love. And writing this has given me the chance to listen once more to each of the pieces I’ve written about, and more joy me. 

Acquiring an acquired taste

February 7, 2024
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Occasionally I get asked (OK, once) where should I start listening to classical music. Classical music is something that a few people as they age past Top 40 songs, come to believe they should begin to know, the way they should read Proust or watch foreign films. 

Philip Larkin mentions the drive in his poem Church Going: “Much never can be obsolete,/ Since someone will forever be surprising/ a hunger in himself to be more serious.” 

I have been listening to what is called classical music for 60 years, and my first thought is that classical music does not exist. Not really. 

What is called classical is a combination of old church music; popular music that has been around so long, it no longer sounds like the pop music we know; and music meant to entertain, first, a class of aristocrats who could afford to pay for it, and then an aspirational middle class that took up the buying of tickets. 

It wasn’t until late in the 19th century that anyone really considered such music “classical.” And only in the 20th century that most symphony orchestras were organized to play what in the past had just been music, but was now given this new label. 

Until then, most concerts consisted of new music mixed with a few old favorites (much like modern pop music — they wanted to hear the hits). And so, old standards became classics. 

Not all of the old standards were heavy and serious. Mozart wrote tons of divertimenti to be played as the count and countess ate lunch. It was only meant to sound nice, with catchy tunes. Yes, some classical music is meant to evoke deeper thoughts and emotions, some even meant to change lives. 

But there is pop music that is serious, too. Consider the Beatles’ A Day in the Life, or Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. They aren’t always short. 

And so, when you ask about classical music, you aren’t asking about a single thing. If you were to open up that can of worms and try to learn what classical music has to offer, you will have to recognize that no one thing can suffice. Nor any one style; nor any one century. 

If there is anything that marks music as classical, it is its length. Most tunes last three or four minutes, while a symphony can run anywhere from a half-hour to 90 minutes. The popular music is meant to put a tune in your head and you like it (or not) and may sing it to yourself as you wash the dishes. Such music is usually meant to be absorbed passively. 

What is called classical tends to be more like a story, even a novel, with multiple characters and changing moods, so where you start is not where you end up. It is music you pay active attention to. It goes somewhere and you have to pay attention to notice the plot. 

The story told in music, though, is not one that can be translated into words. It is one you listen to as it unfolds in musical terms: the melody changes, sometimes broken into pieces, the harmony turns grim or lilting, sometimes the melody might be played half-speed, or faster, or even upside down. These are all part of the musical story-telling. 

So, what do I say to my friend asking advice on how to start listening to classical music? 

The complaint I hear often is that classical music all sounds the same. It doesn’t. And so, I want to offer examples both of the stories and of the diversity. And I want to start off with a symphony with the clearest, most direct “story” to tell.

If there is any single place to begin, it is with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or, more formally, Symphony in C-minor, op. 67, first performed in December, 1808, in a freezing cold concert hall in Vienna, along with a host of other new works by the composer, making for a concert lasting more than four hours. For all that music, the orchestra — a pickup ensemble paid for by Beethoven himself — had only a single rehearsal to work out the kinks. In one of the pieces played that evening, the orchestra got lost and had to stop and begin the whole piece all over again. 

But that Fifth Symphony eventually became iconic — the single stand-in for all of symphonic music. 

It begins, as almost everyone knows with the heavy tread of the dah-dah-dah-DUMM. Those four notes are played over and over through all four movements of the symphony, sometimes straight, sometimes altered, sometimes as a drumbeat underneath another tune. I once counted in the symphony score more than 700 repetitions of dah-dah-dah-dumm. That works out to once every three seconds of music from start to finish. It’s almost OCD. It’s no wonder the notes are often compared with hammer blows. 

The symphony is in the minor key, a key of angst, anger, uncertainty, which Beethoven underlines by having the music stop outright several times after we hear the four-note motif. As Peter Schickele said, in his comic sportscast of the symphony, “I can’t tell if it’s fast or slow, because it keeps stopping.” 

But it picks up steam to an intense, driving rhythmic motor, all in that relentless C-minor. It blasts you over the head with it. The first movement (of four) lasts, in most performances, only about five minutes, but you may very well be worn out by all that hammering and minor-keying. 

The second movement is a relief from the drive of the first, but the dah-dah-dah-dumm is often there, heard beating away in the bass line. The third movement starts with an ambiguous arpeggiated melody in the basses, but then brings back dah-dah-dah-dumm as a main theme, with the drive of a forced march. The movement doesn’t really end, but rather morphs into a chaotic repeated note pattern that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, until … until… it does — and it explodes into a big, brassy blast of C-major — the major key the entire symphony has been trudging toward for all its length. The feeling is absolutely triumphant. The spirit soars. 

And yet, if you listen carefully, you will recognize that those happy, brilliant tunes are actually a metamorphosis of the dah-dah-dah-dumm, buried in a longer, rising optimistic melody. And at the very end, Beethoven drives home that C-major with 25 bars of pounding C-major chords in the full orchestra. You know you have reached the finish line with the last long-held chord. Having won it, he’s not going to let go. 

The story the symphony tells is from anger and angst into triumph and joy. It is this long development of an idea that marks what is called classical music as different from popular music. 

And even in classical music that doesn’t have the symphony-long coherent story to tell, each movement has its own plot and narrative. The most common narrative in classical music is presenting a theme or two, or three, in order, then mixing it all up, taking them apart, replaying them in foreign keys and disruptive orchestration, and then, finally, bringing them back in something like their original form so that you have a satisfying feeling of having returned home after a journey. Roughly half of all classical music is built on this pattern — with infinite variations. 

It is the surprise variations from the standard pattern that often delights music listeners. But to get the variants, you have to have become familiar with the expectations. It is hardly different from knowing the general plan of a TV sitcom, and being delighted when the show gives you a turn on your expectations. In a modern sitcom, you almost always have a main plot, a secondary plot, and a third, smaller background action, and they alternate in your attention, but are all wrapped up by the end. Same with a symphony or sonata. 

Next, about classical music all sounding the same (I have my own ignorance, too: For me, all pop music sounds the same). I have come up with a list of five classical pieces to spread the parameters. Each of these pieces can be found on YouTube to be listened to for free. 

Orchestral music is what most people think of as classical music. But there is so much more. 

Let’s start with some choral music. Before the late 17th century, most art music was vocal, and most often for the church. What instrumental music there was was usually improvised, rather like jazz. 

So, first, listen to Spem in Alium by English composer Thomas Tallis (1505-1585). It is a 40-part motet setting the Latin text “I have never put my hope in any other but in thee, God of Israel.” (Spem in alium — “Hope in other”). It was written about 1570 for a combined eight choirs of five voices each. 

It starts with a single soprano voice, adding others until, about three minutes into the piece, the entire five choirs all burst forth in a glorious racket. It is quite sublime. 

Then, let’s go the other direction. In 1913, Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (“The Rite of Spring”) was premiered as the score to Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography for the Ballets Russes in Paris. That premiere famously caused a riot. Stravinsky fled the theater in fear for his life. Or so he claimed — one never knows just what to believe in a self-mythologizing artist. 

The music is rhythm torn apart, pounded home as part of what Leonard Bernstein called “Uncle Igor’s Asymmetry Machine.” It tells the ballet story of primitive Russian society and its ritual sacrifice of a young woman who dances herself to death. With its riotous dissonance, pounding percussion, and extreme orchestration, it remains perpetually modern. 

But we should not forget chamber music — music for a small group of players, often just two, such as violin and piano. César Franck’s Violin Sonata in A-major is about the most tuneful sonata ever written. He wrote it in 1888 as a wedding present for the famous violinist Eugene Ysaye. 

Its four movements borrow tunes from each other, and so although the movements are quite distinct emotionally, they are all tied together by the memorable melodies. 

And I cannot forget song. Most of the great composers also wrote songs, though they are nowadays called lieder, which is just the German word for “song,” but gives a higher-toned, more prestigious ring to the name. But they are songs nonetheless. 

The greatest of these classical song-writers is undoubtedly Franz Schubert (1797-1828). Poor all his life, and hardly recognized as a great composer by any but his closest friends, he was a gushing fountain of melody. His song Erlkönig tells the story of a father and son riding through the night on a horse, stalked by the evil elf-king who wants to take the boy. The child screams in fear, the father tries to protect him, and the goblin tries to seduce the kid away. It is a frightening song, but full of tremendous melody. 

This should give you some sense of the incredible range of the art music of Western culture. And a start in classical music. 

Next: A look at the changing eras of classical music

Revisiting “Gunsmoke”

January 23, 2024
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When I was a wee lad, in the 1950s and television was about the same age, I watched the images on the screen flash by with no critical eye. It was all the same: old movies, kiddie shows, talk shows, variety shows, sitcoms — it all wiggled on the toob and that was enough. 

If there were any difference in production quality, or acting ability, it made no difference. I just watched the story, or listened to the music. The very idea that there were people behind the camera never occurred. I didn’t really even think about there being a camera. Things just appeared. I suspect this is true for most kids. It may be true for quite a few grown-ups, too. 

There were certainly programs I liked more than others, but I could not have given any reason why one and not the other. Mostly, in the daytime, I watched cowboy movies and cartoons, and in the evening, I watched whatever the rest of the family was watching. 

In all that, there were a good number of Westerns. There were those for the kids, such as The Lone Ranger or The Cisco Kid, and later, those in the after-dinner hours aimed at the grown-ups — Gunsmoke or Death Valley Days. There were also the daytime screenings of old Western movies with such stars as Buck Jones, Hoot Gibson, Bob Steele or Johnny Mack Brown. 

I mention all this because I have recently begun watching a series of reruns of old TV Westerns on various high-number cable channels, seeing them in Hi-Def for the first time. I have now seen scores of original Gunsmoke episodes and my take on them is entirely different from when I was in grammar school. I can now watch them critically.

It’s been 70 years since I was that little kid, and since then I’ve seen thousands of movies and TV shows, served a stint as a film critic, written about movies, and introduced films in theaters. I have a different eye, and understand things I couldn’t know then. 

And so, a number of random thoughts have come to me, in no particular order:

1. 

Old TVs were fuzzy; new TVs are sharp. In the old days of cathode-ray tubes, TV pictures were made up of roughly 480 lines, running from top to bottom of the screen, refreshing themselves every 60th of a second. Broadcast TV was governed by what is called NTSC standards (altered slightly over time). Such images were of surprisingly low definition (by modern standards). 

The sharpness of those early TV pictures was not of major importance because most people then really thought of television as radio with pictures, and story lines were carried almost entirely by dialog. The visual aspect of them was of minor concern (nor, given the resolution of the TVs at the time, should it have been.)

Of course, now, we watch those old Gunsmoke episodes on HD screens. And two things become apparent. 

First, is that shows such as Gunsmoke were made better than they needed to be. They were made mainly by people trained in the old Hollywood studio system, where such things as lighting, blocking, focus, camera angles, and the such were all worked out and professionally understood. They were skilled craftsmen. 

However, second, some things were designed for analog screens, and so, often, painted backdrops used, especially for “outdoor” scenes shot in the studio, have become embarrassingly obvious, when, originally, they would have passed unnoticed on the fuzzy screen. 

Outdoor scenes were often shot in studios. Dodge City, during some seasons, was built indoors and the end of the main street in town was a backdrop. Again, on the old TVs you would not notice, but today, it’s embarrassing how crude that cheat was. 

You can see it in the opening shootout during the credits. In early seasons, Dillon faces the bad guy outdoors. In later seasons, he’s in the studio. 

2. 

Because Gunsmoke is now seen on a widescreen HD screen, but were originally shot for the squarer 4-by-5 aspect ratio, the image has to be rejiggered for the new screen. There are three ways of doing this, and as they show up on current screens, they are either shown with black bars on either side of the picture, to retain the original aspect ratio, or they are cropped and spread out across the wider 16:9 space. And if so, there are two ways this happens. 

If the transfer is done quickly and cheaply, the cropping is done by just chopping off a bit of the top and bottom of the picture, leaving the middle unchanged. The problem is this often leaves the picture awkwardly framed, with, in close ups, the bottoms of characters’ faces left out. 

However, in some of the newly broadcast Gunsmokes, someone has taken care to reframe the shots — moving the frame up or down — so as to include the chins and mouths of the characters. To do this, the technician has to pay attention shot by shot as he reframes the image. 

And so, it seems as if the Gunsmoke syndications have been accomplished either by separate companies, or at different times for different series packages. You can see, for instance, on the INSP cable network, examples of all three strategies. (My preference, by far, is for the uncropped original squarer picture.)

3. 

Gunsmoke changed over its 20-year TV run. There are three main versions: Black and white half-hour episodes (1955-1961); black and white hour-long episodes (1961-1966); and hour-long color episodes (1966-1975). The shorter run times coincided with the period when Dennis Weaver played Matt Dillon’s gimpy-legged sidekick Chester Goode. Chester continued for a season into the hour-longs, but was replaced by Ken Curtis as Festus Haggen, the illiterate countrified comic relief. 

Technically, the black and white seasons were generally better made than the color ones. When the series began, TV crews had been those previously at work in cinema, and brought over what they learned about lighting, framing, editing, blocking, use of close-ups. The black and white film stock allowed them to use lighting creatively, using shadows to effect, and lighting faces, especially in night scenes, with expressive shadows. Looking at the older episodes, I often admire the artistry of the lighting. 

But when color came in, the film stock was rather less sensitive than the black and white, and so the sets had to be flooded with light generally for details to be rendered. This led to really crass generic lighting. Often — and you can really spot it in night scenes — a character will throw two or three shadows behind him from lights blasting in different directions. Practicality drowns artistry. 

Gunsmoke wasn’t alone in this: This bland lighting affected all TV shows when color became normal. It took decades — and better film stock — before color lighting caught up. (One of the hallmarks of our current “golden age” of TV is the cinematic style of lighting that is now fashionable. Color has finally caught up with black and white.) 

4. 

One of the pleasures of watching these reruns is now noticing (I didn’t when I was a little boy) the repertory company of actors who showed up over and over again, playing different characters each time. 

I’m not just talking about the regular actors playing recurring roles, such as Glenn Strange as Sam the barkeep or Howard Culver, who was hotel clerk Howard Uzzell in 44 episodes, but those coming back over and over in different roles. Victor French was seen 18 times, Roy Barcroft (longtime B-Western baddie) 16 times; Denver Pyle 14 times, Royal Dano 13 times, John Dehner, John Anderson and Harry Carey Jr. a dozen times each.

Other regulars with familiar faces include Strother Martin, Warren Oates, Claude Akins, Gene Evans, Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Elam. Some were established movie actors: George Kennedy, Dub Taylor, Pat Hingle, Forrest Tucker, Slim Pickens, Elisha Cook Jr., James Whitmore. Bette Davis, too. 

William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan

And a few surprises. Who knew that Leonard Nimoy was in Gunsmoke (four times), or  Mayberry’s George Lindsay (six times — usually playing heavies and you realize that the goofy Goober Pyle was an act — Lindsay was an actor, not an idiot), Mayberry’s barber Howard McNear showed up 6 times. Jon Voight, Carroll O’Connor, Ed Asner, Harrison Ford, Kurt Russell, Suzanne Pleshette, Jean Arthur, DeForest Kelley, Werner Klemperer (Colonel Klink), Angie Dickenson, Dennis Hopper, Leslie Nielsen, Dyan Cannon, Adam West, and even William Shatner — all show up. 

It becomes an actor-spotting game. John Dehner, in particular, was so very different each time he showed up, once a grizzled old miner, another a town drunk, a third as an East-coast dandy, another as a hired gunslinger — almost never looking or sounding the same. “There he is, Dehner again!” 

And it makes you realize that these were all working actors, needing to string together gigs to make a living, and the reliable actors would get many call-backs. It is now a pleasure to see how good so many of these old character actors were. 

5. 

I have now watched not only Gunsmoke, but other old TV Westerns, and the quality difference between the best Gunsmoke episodes and the general run of shows is distinct. While I have come to recognize the quality that went into the production of Gunsmoke, most of the other shows, such as Bonanza, simply do not hold up. They are so much more formulaic, cheaply produced, and flat. Stock characters and recycled plots. 

Gunsmoke was designed to be an “adult Western” when it was first broadcast, in 1952, as a radio show, with stocky actor William Conrad as Matt Dillon. In contrast to the kiddie Westerns of the time, it aimed to bring realism to the genre. 

William Conrad as Marshal Dillon

It ran on radio from ’52 to 1961, and on TV from 1955 to 1975, and then continued for five made-for-TV movies following Dillon in his later years. There were comic books and novelizations. Dillon became a household name.

Originally, Matt Dillon was a hard-edged, lonely man in a hard Western landscape. As imagined by writer and co-creator of the series John Meston, the series would overturn the cliches of sentimental Westerns and expose how brutal the Old West was in reality. Many episodes were based on man’s cruelty to both men and women. Meston wrote, “Dillon was almost as scarred as the homicidal psychopaths to drifted into Dodge from all directions.” 

On TV, the series mellowed quite a bit, and James Arness was more solid hero than the radio Dillon. But there was still an edge to the show, compared with other TV Westerns. After all, according to True West magazine, Matt Dillon killed 407 people over the course of the TV series and movie sequels. He was also shot at least 56 times, knocked unconscious 29 times, stabbed three times and poisoned once. 

And the TV show could be surprisingly frank about the prairie woman’s life and the painful treatment of women as chattels. 

In Season 3 of the TV series, an episode titled “The Cabin,” two brutal men (Claude Akins and Harry Dean Stanton) kill a woman’s father and then serially beat and rape her over the course of 35 days, when Dillon accidentally comes upon the cabin to escape a snowstorm. The thugs plan to kill the marshal, but he winds up getting them first. When Dillon suggests that the woman can now go back to living her life, the shame she feels will not let her. No one has to know what has happened here, he tells her, but, she says, she will know. And so she tells Dillon she will go to Hayes City, “buy some pretty clothes” and become a prostitute. “It won’t be too hard, not after all this,” she says. 

“Don’t let all this make you bitter,” Dillon says. “There are a lot of good men in this world.”

“So they say” she says. 

This is pretty strong stuff for network TV in 1958. There were other episodes about racism, and especially in the early years, not always happy endings. 

Dodge City, 1872

6. 

According to Gunsmoke producer John Mantley, the series was set arbitrarily in 1873 and in Dodge City, Kansas, on the banks of the Arkansas River, although the river plays scant role in the series. In 1873, the railroad had just arrived, although in only a few episodes of the TV series is the train even mentioned. 

The Dodge City of the series is really just a standard Hollywood Western town, with the usual single dusty street with wooden false-front buildings along either side. 

In reality (not that it matters much for a TV show, although Gunsmoke did try to be more realistic than the standard Western), Dodge was built, like most Southern and Western towns, with its buildings all on one side of the street (called Front Street in Dodge) and the railroad tracks on the other. Beyond that, the river. 

Dodge City, Kansas 1888

And in general, the geography of Gunsmoke’s Kansas would come as a surprise to anyone visiting the actual city. The state is famously flat, while the scenery around Matt Dillon often has snow-capped mountains, and at other times, mesas and buttes of the desert Southwest. 

Hollywood’s sense of geography is often peculiar. So, I don’t think it is fair to hold it against the TV series that its sense of the landscape has more to do with California (where the series was generally shot) than with the Midwest prairies. 

I remember one movie where James Stewart travels from Lordsburg, N.M., to Tucson, Ariz., and somehow manages to pass through the red rocks or Sedona on the way. Sedona is certainly more picturesque than Wilcox, Ariz., but rather misplaced.

Or John Ford’s The Searchers, where the Jorgensen and Edwards families are farming in Monument Valley, Ariz., which has no water, little rain, sandy soil and no towns within a hundred miles. It is ludicrous place to attempt to farm. Of course, it is said, in the movie, to be set in Texas, but Texas doesn’t look like the Colorado Plateau at all. 

We forgive such gaffes because the scenery is so gorgeous, and because we’ve been trained by decades of cowboy movies to have a picture of “The West” as it is seen in Shane rather than how most of it actually was: flat, grassy, and boring. And often, it is not even the West, as we think of it. Jesse James and his gang robbed banks in Missouri. The Dalton Gang was finished off in Minnesota. The “hanging judge” Parker presided in Arkansas. Some of the quintessential Western myths are really Midwestern or Southern. 

So, many of the tropes of Hollywood Westerns still show up in Gunsmoke, despite its attempt at being “more realistic” than the standard-issue cowboy show. 

“Gunsmoke” studio set

Two things, however, that are hardly ever mentioned that seems germane to the question of realism on film. The first is the pristine nature of the streets. Historians have shown that, with all the horses, not only in Westerns, but even in 19th-century Manhattan, the streets were paved with horseshit. Cities even hired sanitation workers to collect the dung in wheeled bins, so as not to be buried in the stuff. 

OK, I get that perhaps on TV shows broadcast into our homes, we might not want to see that much horse manure. In reality, the dirt dumped in the studio set of Dodge City had to be cleaned out, like kitty litter, each day, or under the hot lights, the whole set would stink of horse urine. 

But the second issue relates to the very title of the show: Gunsmoke. Strangely, smoke never appears from the many guns being fired in the course of 20 years of episodes. But the series is set in an era at least a decade before the invention of a practical smokeless powder (and 30 years before its widespread usage). And so Matt Dillon’s gun should be spouting a haze of nasty smoke each time he fires at a miscreant. 

Me firing a black powder rifle

We know, from records of the time, that Civil War battlefields, and before that, Napoleonic battlefields, were obscured by clouds of impenetrable smoke, blocking the views of soldiers aiming at each other. And I know from my own experience firing black powder weapons, that each show spews a cloud of smoke from the barrel. So, why no gun smoke on Gunsmoke?

Click on any image to enlarge

RIP PDQ

January 18, 2024
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Professor Peter Schickele has died, and there is one less star twinkling in the sky. 

Schickele, who was the creator of PDQ Bach, was 88 and had been ill. 

I have a long history with PDQ Bach, and I will miss his music and wit terribly. He came from a notable line of musical satirists and clowns, including Spike Jones, Anna Russell, Victor Borge and, of course, the Hoffnung Festival in Great Britain. But, at least initially, his target was Baroque music in particular. 

At the beginning of what was called the “Baroque revival” in the 1960s, Schickele devised PDQ as a way to parody some of the excesses, cliches, tropes, and habits of the newly popular historical style. His first concert was in April of 1965 at Town Hall in New York. I did not attend that one, but in December of that year, he brought the program to Philharmonic Hall, and I was there for the Concerto for Horn and Hardart, the cantata Iphigenia in Brooklyn, and the Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons. Schickele was there as narrator and explicator; he arrived late at the hall, and swung onto the stage, Tarzan-style from the balcony. 

It was one of the funniest things I ever saw or heard. 

“In general, the dance music of PDQ Bach suggests that one of his legs was shorter than the other.”

The cantata — “Scholars are unaware Iphigenia ever was in Brooklyn” — has Orestes “being chased … by the Amenities” and he sings the sorrowful aria “Who knows what it is to be running? Only he who is running knows,” followed by “Run-running knows, run-running knows, ru-u-u-u-u-ning running knows.”

It was all a bit goofy, but made fun of things familiar from Baroque music. (Anyone familiar with actual Baroque opera will realize this “running knows” isn’t that much sillier than the real thing.)

The Hardart was a vast instrument made up of bells, whistles and gongs, each tuned to a different pitch, and with little windows on its front from which you could get pie. The second movement was a theme and variations, but “the variations have nothing whatever to do with the theme.” 

I was a teenager then, and attended the concert with my high-school girlfriend, who became a professional bassoonist, and, in fact, later played with Schickele in PDQ concerts, and even occasionally appeared with him on radio interviews promoting concerts. 

We came the next year to the second season of PDQ Bach, then at Carnegie Hall, to hear The Seasonings, The Echo Sonata for Two Unfriendly Groups of Instruments, and Eine Kleine Nichtmusik. 

In fact, through marriages, break-ups, divorces and remarriages, I attended a PDQ Bach concert every year for more than 20 years. Schickele took his act on the road, and wherever I was living, whether Greensboro, N.C., Seattle, Wash., Norfolk, Va., or Phoenix, Ariz., Schickele found his way and I found a ticket. 

In Norfolk, I caught up with him backstage after the concert and we talked about my bassoonist ex-girlfriend. Unfortunately, she wasn’t part of the Norfolk performance. I would have loved to catch up. 

PDQ Bach always functioned on two levels. Even those who knew little about classical music could enjoy the slapstick and the bad puns; but anyone with familiarity with music history could catch the often sophisticated in-jokes. 

Schickele in Phoenix

I, of course, bought all the albums, and later, CDs. The last time I got to hear a PDQ Bach concert was in Phoenix in March, 2001, when Schickele and the Phoenix Symphony performed Oedipus Tex with Michèle Eaton as Billie Jo Casta, and Schickele as Tex. The program also included Swing Sweet, Low Chariot.

As his career-shtick progressed, Schickele widened his target to include the Classical era, giving the treatment to Mozart and Rossini with such things as The Civilian Barber, and The Abduction of Figaro, and into the Romantic era, with a parody opera, Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice. 

Schickele and his sidekick Robert Dennis famously gave a sportscast of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. “I can’t tell if it’s fast or slow because it keeps stopping.” In one live performance of this, in the early 1970s, when the Vietnam War was still an issue, the “game” began with what started as the National Anthem. Half the audience stood up, hand over heart; the other half, self-righteously in protest, sat motionless. Except that the arpeggiated beginning of the anthem ended immediately with a descending arpeggio ending after a couple of bars. The whole thing took less than five seconds. Everyone in the audience, standing or sitting, was caught red faced. 

He took on contemporary music, also, with Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach turned into Einstein on the Fritz. and Koyaanisqatsi became Coy Hotsie-Totsie.

The titles of his schlamperei are enough to draw whoops, especially for anyone familiar with the originals. Among them: Concerto for Piano vs. Orchestra; Fanfare for the Common Cold; Goldbrick Variations; Hindenburg Concerto; Liebeslieder Polkas; No-no Nonette; Notebook for Betty-Sue Bach; Royal Firewater Musick; Safe Sextet; Schleptet in E-flat; The Short-Tempered Clavier; Traumarei for Unaccompanied Piano; The Triumphs of Thusnelda. Wikipedia lists more than a hundred titles. 

In fact, he had leftover titles, ready to attach to newly “discovered” works: Rosenkavalier and Guildenstern; The Passion According to Hoyle; the Half-Nelson Mass; and Famous Last Words of Christ.

The Hoffnung Music Festival in London lasted for only seven concerts. PDQ Bach lasted from 1965 through 2015 (with a break in the 1990s) and encompassed 20 albums, 2 video recordings (many more on YouTube), and the definitive biography of PDQ Bach, titled The Definitive Biography of PDQ Bach. 

I should mention that Schickele was also a serious composer, with many works published under his own name, and wrote the film score for the 1972 movie, Silent Running. 

So, it wasn’t all tomfoolery. But even his parodistic work is well crafted and full of memorable tunes. PDQ will likely last a very long time. 

I will miss hearing new works and weird concerts. 

Critics are not all thumbs

January 16, 2024
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At the bottom of every product entry on the Amazon webpage you will find customer reviews. Some are quite thoughtful, others merely complain that the package they got was dented. Too often, close reading shows that the review shown is for some other product altogether and simply slung in with the rest by someone — or some algorithm — that wasn’t paying close attention. 

Check out Google’s list of restaurants near you and you will find any number of reviews by those who have eaten there, and often with an iPhone photo of their dinner plate. These range from “The worst scungilli I’ve ever tasted” to “The cleanest restroom I’ve had to use.” Again, perhaps with a photo. 

My favorites are those where someone posts a four-star CD review with the words, “I haven’t heard this yet.” 

More than ever, we are led to believe that “everyone’s a critic.” Opinions are like noses (I’m being polite): Everyone’s got one. But I spent 30 years of my life as a professional art critic, and it has always bothered me that the wider public seems to think that real criticism, by people who are actually paid to think about such things, is little more than “I liked it,” or “I didn’t like it.” 

On such a level, yes, everyone’s opinion is valid. If you liked it, then to say so is an obvious truth. But that is not what a professional critic is paid to do. 

Granted, there are some people out there with the title on the masthead who do little more than report their likes and dislikes. But the kind of criticism I’m talking about — and that I did my best to engage in — has very little to do with simple likes and dislikes. 

I was paid, rather, for my range of knowledge about the subject, about the history of it, the variety of it, the consensus about it, and my ability to say something meaningful and coherent — and interesting — about it. 

I was paid to explain what I was seeing, put it in context, say why it is important — or not — and, especially with new art, to attempt to unknot difficulties that may make understanding elusive. The art world is full of “elusive.” 

 I began as a freelance art critic with the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va. in the mid-1980s, and became staff critic with The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, Ariz., in 1987, where I worked for 25 years until I retired in 2012. By then, newspapers were in decline and few still had any critics on staff as layoffs became as regular as seasons. When I left, I was not replaced. All across the nation, critics are not being replaced; lights are blinking out all over the heavens. The loss is considerable. 

I have continued to post about art on this blog. There was a long piece about Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat. Another on the long echoes from the pose of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus. I wrote about photographers Nan Goldin and Garry Winogrand. Some of these have been the most frequently visited blog entries on my site. 

Over those three decades in journalism, I covered an awful lot of art, both locally and nationally. Much of the art, I loved. Some not so much, and there were even shows of art I had little sympathy for. All of it, I tried to say something real about and meaningful. So, I feel I have established my bona fides to write about criticism.

My tastes didn’t stop me from recognizing quality or importance, even if it was art I didn’t much care for. And there was, correspondingly, art I knew wasn’t especially important that I really, really enjoyed. My likes and dislikes didn’t count much, and weren’t supposed to. 

Let me give you some examples either way. 

One of the very few times I had a contretemps with my editor was about a show at the Phoenix Art Museum of art by the so-called Mexican Muralists. I mentioned to my editor that I was thinking of giving the show a pass and she nearly bit my head off, making it absolutely clear that I wasn’t being paid not to write about an important show, or to care whether I liked the work. I knew this, of course, but I had to confess my lack of simpatico with the work. Of course, I wrote about it. Without expressing my own qualms. 

In general, I have little love for art that is primarily propaganda, and that is just what the work of Diego Rivera or David Siqueiros is. There is good ol’ Karl Marx pointing the way to the future for the downtrodden campesinos. There are the peasants displaying solidarity by all wearing the exact same clothes and carrying the exact same weapons. For me, this is a big snooze. 

And on top of that, the colors used favor rather dull browns and ochers. It just isn’t very inviting or attractive art. Nevertheless, the movement, from the 1920s through the 1940s, defines an era of Mexican culture, and was immensely important. And, moreover, some of the muralist art was clearly better than other, and it was my job to show that and explain why and how. 

It should be pointed out that it isn’t Mexican art I have a problem with. I love the crazy work of Frida Kahlo; I wrote an appreciative review of Rufino Tamayo for ARTnews  magazine. I enjoy the skeletons and calaveras of Jose Posada and the volcanic landscapes of Dr. Atl. And all that colonial-era art, and all the bright, colorful, energetic folk art. 

It’s just the dreary, politically sentimentalized work of the muralists I dislike. 

Let me give you some other examples. There is no question but that the pointillist works of Georges Seurat are masterpieces, and important in the history of art. But I find Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grandes Jattes a huge bore. Stiff and unyielding, all the life sucked out of what should be a bustling joy. It seems to me a painting made to justify a theory, and not something that had any more lively reason to burst out of his imagination. 

And there is his older contemporary Camille Pissarro. I don’t dislike Pissarro’s painting, but it just seems a trifle dull. He is the painterly version of a composer who can write perfect fugues, knows voice-leading, and can orchestrate magnificently, and yet cannot write a tune I can whistle. 

I’m specifically writing about art I have actually seen in person, and not just stuff I find in books or magazines. Reproduction cannot give anyone a clear idea of the art, its size, gloss, color. You can only get the iconography and some loose sense of everything else. 

The necessity of seeing the art in person was brought home by Paul Cezanne. I never cared much for the work of Cezanne. But then, I spent some time with the actual work, and it exploded in my eye with form and color that just eludes reproduction. Now, Cezanne is one of my most loved artists and I kick myself for all those years when I paid him scarce attention. Those apples and pears — I want to lick the paint off the canvas. 

Another confession: I never cared for Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. I’ve been to the Louvre now, several times, and in person, the Mona Lisa is no more exciting. It is a small, rather ordinary portrait. Yes, the sfumato technique is quite pretty, but the painting itself does not deserve the fame it seems to suffer. 

On the other hand, I do love the same artist’s Ginevra de’ Benci, at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. It has all the glow and spirit that poor Mona Lisa just doesn’t have. 

But even Ginevra doesn’t draw the pleasure from me that I get from Raphael’s portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, one of the most perfect paintings I have ever seen. 

Rembrandt saw the portrait, copied it in pen and ink, and later used it as inspiration for one of his self-portraits, now at the National Gallery in Washington. I love that one, too. 

So, it is not that I hate great paintings and love minor ones. It is just a matter of taste. My taste drifts toward some and is left unmoved by other. But, as a critic, I certainly know the difference. 

I have no issue with anyone liking or disliking any piece of art. Not everything has to appeal to everyone. If you think Damien Hirst’s pickled shark is disgusting, I have no issue with you. If you think the hands on Michelangelo’s David too large, and his privates too small, that’s fair. Even if you find yourself moved emotionally by the light inside the cottage of a work by Thomas Kinkade, I say, enjoy. But that doesn’t qualify you as a critic. 

The art I love — and “love” is not too strong a word — includes some famous and important paintings. I grew up with Picasso’s Guernica when it was hanging at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In my teen years, I visited MoMA often and thought I’d have Guernica to see for my lifetime. But it returned to Spain in 1981. Seeing it stretched across 25 feet of wallspace helped steer me into a life with art. 

I loved seeing Jackson Pollock’s One Number 31, also at MoMA, back when abstract art was still seen with suspicion by the public. It hit me like a brick, and I loved its visual busy-ness and textural depth. It was a painting I could lose myself in.

In Boston, I finally saw Paul Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, another panoramic picture. Unlike the Mona Lisa, it makes a stronger affect in person than reproduced. 

At the National Gallery in Washington, there are a number of paintings I visit, as if on a pilgrimage. Perhaps the main one is Mary Queen of Heaven by the 15th-century Master of the St. Lucy Legend, an unknown artist (so many were anonymous back then) with a magical ability to create detailed fabric and rich color. It is not one of the superstars of the collection, but it is dear to me. It is 7 feet tall, and busy with detail. I love art that highlights texture and color, and am less drawn to iconography or storytelling for itself (such as features in propaganda). The virgin Mary means nothing to me religiously, but this painting I worship. 

All the work of Claude Monet pleases me, but it is the large waterlilies that move me. When I finally got to see the group of them at the Orangerie in Paris, I had to sit down. Two oval rooms with walls banded with waterlilies. It was a holy place. 

These are all works that both give me great pleasure, and are also historically important works, anthologized in any art history text. 

 Yet, some of the art that I love most and that gives me great pleasure is art not especially important, or at least not widely known. There are so-called “local artists” who never get the national reputation; there are artists I know personally and whose work speaks to me in part because I see their personalities so clearly in what they produce. 

I love the art of Arizona’s Mayme Kratz. I’ve written about her work several times. Mostly, she finds discarded bits of the natural world — seeds, husks, birdnests, grains, twigs, shells — and embeds them in patterns in colored acrylic, finished with a fine sheen. They are intensely beautiful. Kratz makes a living from her work and has buyers and collectors, but I don’t know why she isn’t featured in galleries in New York or Berlin. Her work deserves to be. 

Tucson painter Jim Waid has a growing reputation and has representation outside of Arizona. But his large canvases, electric with color and texture, were featured (during my time) primarily at one gallery in Scottsdale. As I wrote about him for the newspaper, “Is there any reason that David Hockney is ubiquitous and that Jim Waid is not? Waid is clearly as good a painter, and his canvases as original and distinctive, yet Hockney jet sets, and Waid paints in his studio in Tucson.” One of the highlights of my year was the annual Waid show at Riva Yares Gallery. 

My brother, Craig Nilsen, is a painter and printmaker from Virginia. I have seen his work all his life and I cannot help but see him in the paintings so particularly and often heartbreakingly. He is now retired, as I am, and I am lucky to own quite a few of his pieces. I love them all. 

And finally, my brother-in-law Mel Steele, who has a pretty good reputation in North Carolina, although not always for his best work. He made his living for years selling prints of North Carolina rural scenes. But his real work has always been his abstractions, layers of shapes and colors, creating virtual depth and space on the canvas. I am not alone in enjoying his art, but I feel my life would be much less rich without it. 

And so, I feel as if my immersion in art has two channels: One is the official one, where I write for a public and attempt to be somewhat objective; and a second which is what I feel most emotionally connected with. 

There are many other examples of work I feel deep in my bones, but I can’t catalog them all. What I can say, is that a life immersed in paintings, as in music, dance, film, theater, architecture and literature, is a life more deeply connected with being human. I am grateful for having been able to make a living writing about it all.

Click on any image to enlarge

Birds, beasts, and bugs

December 16, 2023
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French composer Camille Saint-Saens was smarting from a concert tour in Germany that didn’t go over well, and so, in 1886, he withdrew to small Austrian village and wrote a short piece about music critics, which he called Personnages à longue oreilles, or “Characters with long ears,” in which the critics bray in imitation of asses — “hee-haw.” It is barely 45 seconds long, but it seems to have given him a bigger idea. 

And so, he wrote thirteen accompanying short, mostly comic,  compositions, each describing another animal, and had them played privately as La Carnaval des Animaux, or “The Carnival of Animals.” He wrote his publisher in Paris that he knew he should be working seriously on his Third Symphony, but that instead, he was having “such fun.” 

Yet, fun wasn’t what he wanted to be remembered for. He was to be a serious and honored composer of five symphonies, many concertos and 12 operas. And so, he refused to allow the Carnival of Animals to be published until after his death. 

The irony is that, along with his Danse Macabre and the Bacchanale from his opera Samson et Dalila, what he is best remembered for, and most loved, is this 25-minute-long musical menagerie. In fact, his best-known piece is undoubtedly The Swan, for cello and piano, the second-to-last section of the Carnival. 

Many of the pieces parody famous music by other composers and popular songs, but I want to pick out, in particular, the second section, Poules et Coqs (“Hens and Roosters”), which gets its main theme from a 1726 piece for harpsichord by Jean-Philippe Rameau, called La Poule (“the Hen”), from his Suite in G from his Nouvelles Suites de Pièces de Clavecin. 

You can see the similarity, even in these few bars. 

But that set me off on a search for other music about or imitating animals. It’s not just “Old MacDonald” and his “oink, oink, here and an oink, oink there,” but in fact, a long history of musical animals. Some famous, some obscure. 

Of course, such animal imitations go back to prehistory, if we believe the musicologists, who tell us that they often feature in folk songs, from all around the world. “Old MacDonald” is only one of them in English. But there are Chinese songs, Turkish songs, Swahili songs, all with animal noises as part of their lyrics. 

But I was most interested in Western art music, after the invention of musical notation and printing, where the music could be tracked down and maybe even listened to (on YouTube when available). 

The earliest I found was from the middle of the 13th century, a ditty called Sumer is icumin in, with its lyrics “lhude sing cucu,” which have been set to various tunes, most of those I have heard include a melodic line that imitates the falling third of the cuckoo birdcall. 

No doubt because the cuckoo’s call is so distinct and so clearly a falling third, it is about the most frequently used birdsong in classical music, as we will see (followed by the trilling of the nightingale). 

Indeed, the next entry is Par Maintes Foy, by 14th century composer Jean Vaillant, which not only has the singers call out the cuckoo and the nightingale, but also the goldfinch, starling and quail. “Lire, lire, lirelon,” Toowee, toowee, toowee.” 

But it isn’t all birds. In 1505, Josquin de Prez, perhaps the most famous of all early composers, published his El Grillo, which has its singers imitate the sound of a cricket. 

Clement Jannequin (11485-1558) wrote Le Chant des Oiseaux (“Song of the Birds”) with a blackbird singing “Ti-ti, pi-ti;” the nightingale trilling on “Frian, frian;” and the cuckoo again doing his “Cu cu, cu cu.” 

Pierre Passereau (1503-1553) wrote Il est Belle et Bon, in which a wife praises her husband for being so compliant and even feeding the chickens, which she then imitates “co co co co da.” 

In his Book of Ayres with a Triplicitie of Musicke, from 1606, John Bartlett published a madrigal called Of All the Birds That I Do Know, in which words get repeated in a way that clearly evokes the chatter of birds. “Of all the birds that I do know, Philip my sparrow hath no peer … Philip will cry still, ‘yet, yet, yet, yet, yet, yet.’” 

As we leave the vocal Renaissance and enter the more instrumental Baroque age, we begin having fiddles and hautboys imitating various birds and beasts. 

Sonata Representativa (1669) by Heinrich Biber dedicates a movement each to imitations of nightingales, cuckoos, frogs, hens and roosters, quails and cats. Written for violin and continuo, it alternates short interludes with sections depicting animal sounds. After a Preludio, a Nightingale on the violin sings four eighth notes repeated and a long trill over a pedal; a Cuckoo hits repeated fast eighth notes making the usual cuckoo sound; then come Frogs with an appoggiatura of dissonant seconds, sounded together, and resolved upward, over and over to make croak; Hens cluck with upward portamento; quail have a repeated dotted rhythm “dah, da-dah;” a Cat comes mewing portamenti in nursery-rhyme-like tune; then all is rounded off with a march.

Georg Phillip Telemann wrote his Alster Overture, with a fourth movement imitating “Concertizing Frogs and Crows.” There is also a swan in another movement. 

Of course, the most famous and familiar sounds come from Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. In the opening movement of the four concertos, we hear the squawking of birds. In the second movement, he has dogs barking, and in Summer, the slow movement has the strings buzzing around as a swarm of flies. 

But it wasn’t only the Seasons: In his Flute Concerto, op. 10, no. 3, “Il Gardellino,” he has the flute imitate a goldfinch. 

The keyboard is well represented, too. In addition to Rameau’s La Poule, there is Louis-Claude Daquin’s The Cuckoo and Francois Couperin’s Le Moucheron (“The Gnats”), to say nothing of Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata No. 30 in E-flat, known as the “Cat Fugue,” with a tune that imitates a cat walking distractedly up a harpsichord keyboard (an early version, I guess, of Zez Confrey’s Kitten on the Keys).

 Then, there’s Georg Friedrich Händel’s Organ Concerto No. 13, known as “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale,” from 1739, with birdsong in the second movement. 

There’s no counting the birds, beasts and bugs in the music of Franz Joseph Haydn. He loved a good joke, and among his 104 symphonies and 68 string quartets (to say nothing of his 41 piano trios, 52 piano sonatas, and 126 baryton trios — not counting the additional 36 baryton works for that obsolete instrument with other pairings) you can find Symphony No. 82, “The Bear;” Symphony No. 83, “The Hen;” String Quartet op. 33, no. 3, “The Bird;” Quartet op. 50, no. 6, “The Frog;” Quartet op. 64, no. 5, “The Lark.” 

And in his magnum opus, The Creation, in Part 2, describing Days 5 and 6 of the biblical creation, he has the orchestra imitate multiple birds and animals, including an eagle, a whale, a stag, lowing cattle, and even a worm.

As we move into the Romantic 19th century, the animals are truly fruitful and multiply, beginning with the slow movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, which ends with a cadenza that quote quail, nightingale and cuckoo. 

So, let’s make a quick list — as quick as it can be with such a long zoo parade. There is Schubert’s song, The Trout; Robert Schumann’s Papillon and the Prophet Bird; the braying donkey in Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Chopin’s Etude, op. 25, no. 9, known as “The Butterfly Etude.” Not forgetting that it was said that Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” was inspired by the composer watching his dog, named Marquis, chasing its tail.

Cats screech over and over in the Cat Duet, attributed to Gioacchino Rossini (jury’s out on the authorship). 

To continue: There are birdsongs in the woodwinds in Bedrich Smetana’s Bohemian Woods and Fields; The Flight of the Bumble Bee, from the opera Tsar Saltan by Rimsky-Korsakov; The Lark by Mikhail Glinka; the Ballad of the Unhatched Chicks from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition; the “Dying Swan” and the “Dance of the Cygnets” from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake; and The Swans of Tuonela by Jean Sibelius. 

In Scandanavia also, we have, but Edvard Grieg: The Butterly; Little Bird; The Pig; The Horsefly and the Fly; and Cow Call. And from his contemporary Norwegian composer The Hare and the Fox by Harald Saeverud. 

Serge Rachmaninoff’s Etude Tableau, op. 39, no. 2 for piano is called “The Sea and the Gulls.” Enrique Granados wrote The Maiden and the Nightingale. And Richard Strauss caused some grumpiness and consternation in his staid German audience when, in the middle of his tone poem Don Quixote, he has the orchestra imitate a herd of sheep. But Strauss was no stranger to vulgarity: It is one of his strong points. 

Which brings us up to date with Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals, which gives us, in order: a lion; hens and roosters; wild asses; tortoises, the elephant, kangaroos, fish in an aquarium, personnages a longue oreilles; a cuckoo in the woods; birds in the air (aviary); pianists practicing scales; fossils; the swan; and a finale that brings back many of the menagerie. 

But it’s not over yet. As we move into the 20th century (and the winding-up of the 19th), there are some very beautiful evocations of nature and the animals in it. Such as: Delius’s On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. Or the fourth movement of his North Country Sketches, called “The March of Spring: Woodlands, Meadows and Silent Moors.” 

Ralph Vaughn Williams gave us one of the most beautiful violin show-off pieces in his The Lark Ascending. He also put some swarm sounds in the overture to his ballet The Wasps. Edward Elgar wrote for voices a very peculiar piece called Owls: An Epitaph. Pianist Leopold Godowsky gave us, in his Java Suite, a movement called “Chattering Monkeys.” 

Claude Debussy wrote Poissons d’Or (“Goldfish”) in his Images, Book 2, no. 3; and his counter-Impressionist Maurice Ravel wrote Oiseaux Triste (“Sad Birds”) in his Miroirs. Paraguayan guitar virtuoso Agustin Barrios wrote Las Abejas (“The Bees”). 

Ottorino Respighi took music from early composers and reworked and orchestrated it in his Gli Ucelli (“the Birds”), with movements called “The Dove,” “The Hen,” “The Nightingale,” and “The Cuckoo.” But he goes one better in his Pines of Rome, by including an actual sound recording of a real nightingale. (Tape recorded animal sounds return later in the century.)

Whole chapters might be given over to Gustav Mahler, who began his very first symphony with cuckoo calls, and inserted all sorts of animals, birds, and natural sounds into his music, including cow bells in his Sixth Symphony and a donkey braying in his Third, so say nothing of the sleigh bells in the Fourth, fish in his song Saint Anthony of Padua Preaches to the Fishes. They show up again in his Second Symphony. Nature is never far from the surface in Mahler’s music. 

But more than in Mahler, bird song is everywhere in the music of Olivier Messiaen. The man was obsessed with bird sounds. He used them often as the source of his thematic material (I hesitate to call them tunes), not simply transcribed, but often lowered in pitch, slowed down radically, or even played upside down or backwards. 

His 1958 Catalogue d’Oiseaux (“Catalog of Birds”) is a collection of 13 pieces for piano, each of which is based on the call of a different bird, running from the Alpine chough, the Eurasian golden oriole, the blue rock thrush and the tawny owl, through the woodlark, Cetti’s warbler, the common buzzard and the Eurasian curlew. The whole catalog takes just short of three hours to perform. 

Then, there is the Petites Esquisses d’Oiseaux (“Small Sketches of Birds”) from 1985, six short piano pieces, about 2 minutes each, that picture blackbird, skylark, thrush and robin. The L’Abîme d’Oiseaux (“Abyss of Birds”) is one movement from the Quartet for the End of Time. Le Merele Noire (“Blackbird”) is from Le Reveil des Oiseaux (“Dawn Chorus”), La Fauvette des Jardins (“Garden Warbler”) — on and on through his works, the birds are the foundation of his music. A devout Catholic, Messiaen saw birds and their song as emblematic of the beauty of God’s creation. 

Although, to be honest, it is usually hard to hear the music as bird calls, since they are so transformed by the composer. You kind of have to take his word for it. 

It’s hard to keep up with Bela Bartok, also. He wrote many short piano pieces, some of which bear the names of animals. But there’s The Diary of a Fly (Mikrokosmos vol. 6, no. 42), and the famous Bear Dance from his Ten Easy Pieces. 

But he is best known for the several “Night Music” pieces, from his Out of Doors suite for piano; the slow movement of his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta; and the middle of his Piano Concerto No. 3. Wikipedia lists some 20 compositions where Bartok employs his Night Music, which imitates the sounds of a Hungarian summer evening, with insects chirping, birds singing and frogs croaking. The effect can be miraculous. 

(Duke Ellington wrote his own versions of night music in his Queen’s Suite, with movements called “Sunset and the Mockingbird,” “Lightning Bugs and Frogs,” and “Apes and Peacocks.” I mention it here because, really, Ellington is classical music.)

Igor Stravinsky has elephants dancing in his Circus Polka, and nightingales warbling in his Chant du Rossignol. It has been reported that his Rite of Spring contains quotations from Russian folk songs about animals. I’m taking the musicologists’ word for that. 

Sergei Prokofiev has his own menagerie in Peter and the Wolf, and Malcolm Arnold attempted to add animals to Saint-Saens’ zoo with his own Carnival of the Animals, written for the comic Hoffnung Festival in 1960. His additions are: The Giraffe; Sheep; Cows; Mice; Jumbo; and Chiroptera (Bats) — the last of which is a joke, since the musicians “play” so high in frequency that “only bats can hear it.” The audience hears silence until a final tinkling on a bell. 

Several 20th century animal-musics were created as humor or jokes, including The Monk and His Cat from Hermit Songs, op. 29, no. 8, by Samuel Barber; The Cat and the Mouse by Aaron Copland; the Promenade (Walking the Dog), written by George Gershwin for the Fred Astaire film, Shall We Dance, and The Procession of the Cats on Solstice Night by Bohuslav Martinu. 

Then, there’s Ferde Grofe’s On the Trail from the Grand Canyon Suite, with its clopping hooves and braying donkey. 

The Critics

Francis Poulenc took on the grasshopper, bear, lion and roosters for his Les Animaux Modèles, a ballet from 1942 based on the fables of La Fontaine. 

I mentioned earlier Respighi’s recorded nightingales in The Pines of Rome. Alan Hovaness famously used recordings of the humpback and bowhead whales in his And God Created Great Whales. (George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae does not include actual whale songs, but uses electric flute, electric cello and amplified piano to imitate both whale songs and seagulls.)

And in 1972, Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara wrote his Cantus Arcticus, subtitled Concerto for Birds and Orchestra, which uses recorded sounds of birds from northern Finland against a symphony orchestra. 

This list does not exhaust the trove of animal-inspired concert music, but it is what I could dig up without spending two years on a doctoral dissertation. It is a tradition that continues, both in a simple vein, as with Sally Beamish’s Songs from Hafez, which reference the nightingale, the peacock and the hoopoe, and the more avant-garde work, such as Chris Hughes’ piece for cello and bird recording, Slow Motion Blackbird, which repeats the blackbird call for six minutes, slowing down each bar of music 5 percent (without changing pitch) until it is a slow, almost unfollowable adagio. 

Most of this music is easily available, either on commercial recordings or through a YouTube video. Chirp chirp. 

Ouroboros: Infinity

Music to cry for

December 8, 2023
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Classical music critic David Hurwitz recently posted a YouTube video on works that “reduce me to a quivering puddle of emotional resonance.” He cited 10 compositions that seem to work, no matter how they are performed (although, they can be ruined by a miserable performance). 

“The crying can be sadness; it can be happiness. Usually for me it’s a confrontation with something which is so beautiful … it just seems to get to the heart of the universe and makes me weep. What can I tell you? It happens.”

He then invited his viewers to submit their own lists of works that bring on the waters. A subsequent video addressed those lists. 

Such lists usually come in round numbers: “Top Ten,” or “The Hundred Best,” etc. But when I made my own list, I realized I could go on for quite some time. 

I begin my list with the sarabande in J.S. Bach’s Suite No. 5 for unaccompanied cello. It is a ridiculously simple composition, barely more than a hundred individual notes, almost all unrelieved slow eighth-notes, but notes that plumb the deepest depths of innigkeit — that profound sense of inner subjective experience, of aloneness from the world, contemplation of things beyond words. 

The tears come, not from sadness, but from a sense of being left to your own thoughts in the darkness, the knowledge that, no matter how much you love or engage, there is always an awareness of separation. An aloneness we share with everyone else on the planet. 

I’ve heard the sarabande, and the suite, countless times, both live and on recordings. The one that always does me in is the version played by Pablo Casals in 1939. Casals was the person most responsible for the resurrection of the score, after he found a forgotten copy in a used book store in 1889, when he was 13 years old. He waited until he was 60 before recording them. There is some fuzz and hiss to the old 78rpm recordings, but the depth of Casal’s playing speaks through it all. 

The sarabande has struck many as special, even among the whole of Bach’s works. Cellist Paul Tortelier called it an “extension of silence.” Yo-Yo Ma played it on Sept. 11, 2002, at the site of the World Trade Center, while the names of the dead were spoken, on the first anniversary of the attack. 

Second on my list is the final chorus of Bach’s Passion According to St. Matthew, Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder, which expresses grief over the death of Jesus on the cross. That chorus transcends religious doctrine so that I, as a non-believer, can internalize the sense of loss, of death, and grieve along with them. “We sit down in tears,” they sing, with a section that also asks for “peace, sweet peace.” 

I first head the chorus as film-score music for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Neorealist retelling of The Gospel According to St. Matthew, a dour black-and-white version, almost word for word from the Bible (and how peculiar that the most successful Christian film should come from a homosexual Communist atheist, but with reverence for the humanity of the story; no Cecil B. DeMille hokum and claptrap for this one). 

Grieving is one cause for the waterworks in listeners. How can you not feel the intense sadness of Dido as she faces her own death in Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, in the section known as Dido’s Lament, “When I am Laid to Rest.” It is a ground bass (repeated bass line), over which she sings “Remember me … remember me.” It is heartbreaking. 

Alban Berg used his entire Violin Concerto to express mourning over the death of Manon Gropius, daughter of Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler, who died of polio in 1935 at the age of 18. Berg dedicated his concerto “To the memory of an angel.” 

It begins quietly on the violin’s open strings, builds to an angry climax, and reaches a point of cosmic acceptance with a quote of J.S. Bach’s chorale, “Es ist Genug” (“It is enough.”) 

After all the turbulence of the anger, the simple hymn, albeit harmonized in a very 20th-century way, seems like the peace of the angels, a calm in the universe. I, for one, cannot listen to the concerto without tears streaming down my cheeks. 

Although it is written in his idiosyncratic 12-tone style, the Berg Violin Concerto is never simply noise: Even those who hate modern serial music love this concerto. It is music, not theory. 

These several pieces work because, while they are expressing their grief over a specific death, they also subsume the rest of us. And there is music which expresses not individual grief, but Weltschmerz — “the sorrows of the world” — that sense that all lives have an end, that life is suffering, that “no one gets out alive.” 

The work that seems to hit everyone in the gut with this is Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Originally the slow movement of a string quartet, Barber orchestrated it to create the version known best. 

The music is simple, barely more complex than a Gregorian chant, but builds slowly to an overwhelming climax, then silence, then a short peroration of calmness and repose. Never a dry eye. 

The only problem with the Adagio for Strings is that it has become so popular, played at the funerals of Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Princess Grace of Monaco, Albert Einstein, and Barber himself. It has become de rigeur for public tragedies such as Sept. 11, The Charlie Hebdo attack, the 2016 Brussels bombing and the Orlando nightclub shooting, and the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, and in 2020 for the victims of the Coronavirus. To say nothing of how many movies it provides a trigger for emotions, as in Platoon, The Elephant Man and Lorenzo’s Oil. So that, for some, it can no longer be heard innocently, but only with irony, as in its appearance in Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and South Park. 

But so far, the Adagio has proved bulletproof. It always works. Emotions pour out. The music is powerful.

And talk about Weltschmerz: Another concerto brings out the emotions almost instantly, and that is Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Unlike most classical music concertos, it opens with the solo cello playing widely spaced E-minor chords, ringing sad and hollow, followed by a short cadenza before the orchestra ever plays a note. 

Elgar wrote it in 1919 in distress over the death and destruction of the First World War. It is a musical evocation of the famous lament of British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey in 1914: “The lamps are going out all over Europe and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” It is hard, with our distance from the events, and after the Second World War and the horrors of the Cold War, to fathom what a psychological wrench that first cataclysm was for the world, and how much it was clear that everything anyone knew had changed utterly and forever. So much was lost. Elgar’s concerto puts that sentiment into music. 

That sense of loss is personal as well as civic, and you sense it in the greatest of Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs, “Im Abendrot.” It is a song for soprano and orchestra that conveys such a sense of longing and loss that even without the words, the orchestra alone can bring out the tears. 

In it an old couple stands on a hill looking at a sunset, a lark flies off into the twilight and the words by German poet Joseph von Eichendorff, say, “Wie sind wir wandermüde — Is dies etwa der Tod?” “How weary we are of wandering — Is this perhaps death?” 

There is something of the same feeling (and similar orchestral lushness) in Gustav Mahler’s Der Abschied, the final song of the cycle, Das Lied von der Erde, “The Song of the Earth.” The half-hour song tells of the beauty and permanence of nature and in the brevity of the human life. Even for a Mahler nut like me, who loves pretty much everything the man put on paper, Der Abschied is the single most beautiful and heartbreaking thing that composer ever wrote. 

“O Schönheit! O ewigen Liebens – Lebens – trunk’ne Welt!” “O beauty! O eternal loving-and-life-drunk world!” And the voice finally shrinks down to near-silence repeating the word “Ewig,” “forever…” over and over until it and the orchestra dissolve in emptiness. 

Mahler himself asked whether the music should even be played. “Won’t people go home and shoot themselves?” he asked. The thing is that the highest art may tell the most dismal tale, yet the beauty of the telling is life-enriching and leaves us weeping but full of joy. 

Mahler gave us also a song of such inwardness and reflection in the Rückert Lieder, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” a setting of a poem by Friedrich Ruckert. “I am become lost to the world, with which I used to waste so much time. It has for known nothing of me for so long, it may well believe me dead.” The slow tread of the song, with its repeated incomplete upward motive, leaves you floating between earth and sky. 

That Mahler song may not be the deepest expression of giving up on life. That honor has to fall to the final song in Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise, “Winter Journey.” The cycle of 24 songs by German poet Wilhelm Müller collectively tell the story of a romantic young man spurned in love, who travels in suffering through a winter landscape, telling of loneliness, heartsickness, futility, fate, and finally, in Die Leiermann, “The hurdy-gurdy man,” finds an image of utter hopelessness. 

“Barefoot on the ice, he sways to and fro, and his little collection plate remains empty. No one wants to listen to him; no one looks at him. … He plays and his hurdy-gurdy never stops.” The piano accompaniment repeats the same figure over and over, with no sense of forward motion, and the singer sings his words over and over with little variation. This is psychological depression at its peak expression. “Strange old man, shall I go with you?” The implication is that the Leiermann is simply Death itself. 

 But I may be giving the wrong impression. While music of woe may bring on the deepest emotion, so, too, can music of joy and beauty. There is a reason people cry at weddings. When any emotion, from grief to ecstasy, fills the interior space, it can swell and overflow, and the overflow valves in the human being are the eyes. The emotional pressure in the body swells until it cannot be held in check. Tears of joy, tears in the face of beauty. 

I remember the words that playwright Peter Shaffer put in the mouth of Antonio Salieri in his play, Amadeus. Salieri overheard the adagio of Mozart’s Gran Partita for winds. 

“Extraordinary!,” he says. “On the page it looked nothing! The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse. Bassoons, basset horns — like a rusty squeezebox. And then, suddenly, high above it, an oboe. A single note, hanging there, unwavering. Until a clarinet took it over, sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I had never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.”

It is an astonishing thing about beauty, real beauty, that it can sit beside the horrors of the world, the miseries, the deaths, the wars, the hatreds and injustices, and make you pause, fill you with emotions and remind you that no matter how bad things are, you still cling to life. The beauty can not excuse the suffering, but in some inexplainable way can somehow balance it. Beauty can stop time and fill you up to overflowing. 

Shostakovich wrote his 13th symphony, setting the Yevtushenko poem, Babi Yar, about the 1941 massacre of more than 30,000 Jews by Nazis at Babi Yar, near Kiev. It is a powerful poem denouncing anti-Semitism and the horrors of war and hatred (and a warning about Soviet anti-Semitism). The following movements of this choral symphony take on bitter humor as antidote to bureaucracy and tyranny; the hunger of food shortage; the use of fear by totalitarians; and finally, the difference between amoral careerism and the need for artists to express truth. 

This finale is introduced by a flute duet of such sweet delight, such soothing calmness, that although it cannot gainsay the horrors, it somehow balances them. The music itself, while beautiful, is nothing special in itself, but coming as it does at the end of this explosion of the miseries of the world (and especially Stalin’s Soviet Union), is such an unexpected release, it seems a miracle, and with the pressure taken off, at least momentarily, it can only be felt and expressed by its audience in the immediate explosion of waterworks. 

Now, all I have to hear is the flute bit, and I instantly recall all that went before, and I weep uncontrollably. 

That sense of beauty as counterbalance is the overwhelming sense you can get from the slow movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which gives us 15 to 20 minutes (depending on performance) of stillness in the universe, a slow pulse that seems more cosmic than corporeal. It comes after a terrifying first movement and a relentless scherzo. The world then, after flowing through turbulent rapids, empties out into the calm ocean of the adagio. The release is overwhelming. 

It is also the slow motion of the finale of Mahler’s Third Symphony, which, after earlier movements titled “What the flowers in the meadow tell me,” “What the animals in the forest tell me,” What Man tells me,” and “What the angels tell me,” ends his symphony with a half-hour movement, “What Love tells me.” 

It is marked “Langsam — Ruhevoll — Empfunden,” (Slowly — Peacefully — Deeply felt,” and moves at a slow tread, first in the strings and building, a half-hour later, with trombones and brass and a final chord that can last to eternity. Conductor Bruno Walter, who knew Mahler and conducted the premieres of both his Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde, said of this movement, “Words are stilled — for what language can utter heavenly love more powerfully and forcefully than music itself? The Adagio, with its broad, solemn melodic line, is, as a whole — and despite passages of burning pain — eloquent of comfort and grace.”

The Swiss critic William Ritter said it was, ”Perhaps the greatest Adagio written since Beethoven.” Another anonymous critic wrote about the Adagio: “It rises to heights which situate this movement among the most sublime in all symphonic literature.” At its premier in 1902, Mahler was called back to the podium 12 times, and the local newspaper reported that “the thunderous ovation lasted no less than 15 minutes.”

That sense of time standing still reaches a much quieter apotheosis in the slow movement of Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G. With subtle cross-rhythms and a melody that seldom rises above a mezzo-piano, it is entirely hypnotic. The beauty of it brings me to tears almost even just thinking of it. 

And there is the sublime beauty of Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, a choral work that lasts a mere four minutes in just 46 bars of sighing chromaticism and sotto voce music, and, as one critic put it, is “capable of leaving the listener just as moved as might an entire five-day long cycle of Wagner’s Ring.” 

Some of these may work their magic only on my ears, some seem to work for everyone. And there are times when the listener may be too tired, to caught up in other things, or a bad meal or just in a sour mood, when such music can pass by almost unnoticed. And there are times in a concert when I am so tuned in, that almost any music, played well, may bring on the waterworks. 

But for me, this music almost never fails. The music triggers some empathetic response, and the emotions shiver to life. I am human; these are human feelings; these emotions are what make us human. 

Music can do that better, and more immediately, than any other art. 

That picture’s a butte

November 14, 2023
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Some years ago, there was an unusual installation at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. It was a 34-minute video by Mungo Thompson titled The American Desert (for Chuck Jones) and consisted of altered clips from old Warner Brothers Roadrunner cartoons, with the protagonists filtered out, leaving a series of edited backdrops of the American Southwest, with mesas, buttes, canyons and cliffs. 

Screen grabs of Mungo Thompson’s “The American Desert (for Chuck Jones)

The video loop (it played continuously) showed me the landscape I knew so well, but translated into cartoon visuals, with all the shapes, colors and weirdness I loved from the Colorado Plateau — Monument Valley, Canyonlands National Park, Capitol Reef NP and Arches NP, the Navajo and Hopi reservations — simplified and turned into theatrical backdrops. 

That region has served its term many times over more than a century, as backdrop for drama, from early silent Westerns (The Vanishing American, 1925), through classic John Ford films (beginning with Stagecoach, 1939), and most recently in the Coen Brothers’ Ballad of Buster Scruggs. The Southwest is photogenic, if nothing else. 

But the Warner Bros.-Chuck Jones animation presented a stripped-down, diagrammatic version of the landscape that gave us the essentials only — the rocks, cactus, roads and precipices. 

Warner Brothers, already famous for its Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons, tried something new in 1949, with the first of its series of Roadrunner cartoons, Fast and Furry-ous, with characters created by writer  Michael Maltese and drawn by Chuck Jones. 

Michael Maltese (l.), Chuck Jones (r.) and their star (c.) 

The seven-minute short was a series of attempts by a hungry coyote (originally named “Don Coyote” after Don Quixote) to capture and dine on a roadrunner (given spurious scientific names in the cartoons, such as “Disappearialis Quickius,” although in the natural world, Geococcyx Californianus). The Coyote comes up with an endless series of Rube Goldberg contraptions to catch the bird, who perpetually escapes usually leaving the coyote blown up by dynamite or falling to a sodden crash at the bottom of a canyon. 

For 49 animated cartoons, the formula never really changed, each film just a catalog of gags with the same outcome. And after Warner Brothers closed down their animation studio in 1963, Jones took his Roadrunner into various newer permutations, both in theaters and on TV, never varying the formula, but later adding a sheepdog, or Bugs Bunny into the works — even a baby roadrunner and coyote. 

The formula never changed, but the desert did. Several background designers worked on the films. The earlier ones, by Robert Gribbroek, were more realistic, but as time went on the landscape, designed by Maurice Noble, became both more abstract and more surreal. 

Roadrunner landscape, early (l.) and late (r.)

But, to be honest, how can you really make such a landscape more abstract or more surreal than the actual thing. The Southwest, and particularly the Colorado Plateau of northern Arizona and southern and central Utah, is a wonderland of geoforms, with buttes rising up and canyons dropping down. And in the popular mind, they have become a generic version of the American West, the place setting for countless cavalry-and-Indians movies, and endless TV series. 

The idea of a cartoonish Southwest landscape goes back before the Roadrunner. Beginning in 1913 and continuing until his death in 1944, cartoonist George Herriman filled Hearst newspapers with Krazy Kat comic strips, set in a bizarro world Coconino County, the original of which sits in northern Arizona. 

Although now famous, the Krazy Kat cartoon strips were not terribly popular when they first ran. They were too weird for popular tastes. Only because the big boss, Hearst himself, loved them, they continued until Herriman’s death. But since then, Krazy has become a cult favorite. 

Of course, just like the Roadrunner cartoons, they never changed. Gender-fluid Krazy is in love with Ignatz the mouse, who hurls bricks at the cat and is punished or admonished by Offissa Pup, the doggy policeman of Coconino County. A thousand changes are rung on the formula. 

And behind them, the surreal landscape that was a stylized version of the Four Corners region, a landscape Herriman himself came to love through many visits to the Kayenta area just south of Monument Valley.

But, it should be noted that Herriman wasn’t the first cartoonist to fall in love with the Western landscape. It is often stated that the first cartoon strip ever created was The Yellow Kid, by Richard Outcault, which ran in the Pulitzer and later Hearst papers at the end of the 19th century. But the prize for being first has an equal claimant in Jimmy Swinnerton (1875-1974), who began producing the Little Bears strip for the San Francisco Examiner a few years earlier than The Yellow Kid. 

Panel from Swinnerton comic strip, with Hopi kachinas

Like Herriman, the California-born Swinnerton loved the American West. When diagnosed with tuberculosis, he moved to Arizona. In 1922, he began a cartoon strip for Good Housekeeping magazine, titled Canyon Kiddies, about Navajo children and life in the Four Corners region. Each was a series of pictures with rhyming verse underneath. 

In one, he almost predicts the Roadrunner cartoons, as a coyote eyes a rabbit (instead of a roadrunner) but asks, “It’s simply terrible to have a meal/ That can run much faster than yourself.” 

Swinnerton was also a serious painter, and from the 1920s on, made many landscapes of the West. They were more realistic than his comic-strip landscapes, but were still a kind of stripped-down style that borrowed from the popular Art Deco esthetic of the times. 

That style has proved durable over the decades. There are artists who prefer a more detailed, more photographic style, but many others seem to have realized that a smoothed-out, simplified version of the landscape was perhaps more expressive. They emphasized tones and colors above detail. 

Maynard Dixon

Among the first serious artists who adopted the style was Maynard Dixon (1875-1946). Born in California, he later lived, and died, in Arizona. 

Dixon began as an illustrator and painter of a kind of generic California Impressionism, but his career hit its stride with the landscape of the West, and a more Modernist approach. 

What was a distinct style with Dixon later became a common vision for painters of the West. Simplified mesas and buttes, huge clouds above a low horizon, and dusty pastel colors. 

Maynard Dixon 

With Georgia O’Keeffe, geology turns almost to biology, as her many paintings of New Mexico seem almost like bulging muscles and twisting torsos. 

Of all the artists working in this style, no one did more to make the style personal. You can spot an O’Keeffe from the other side of the room. Who knew that the most stubbornly cussed Modernist painter of the Southwest could share so much with Roadrunner cartoons? 

What all these artists have in common is the reduction of sharp detail and an emphasis on color and general form. The desert Southwest surely demands such.

As the turn-of-the-20th-century art critic John C. Van Dyke wrote in his book, The Desert (1902): “Painters for years have been trying to put it upon canvas — this landscape of color, light, and air, with form almost obliterated, merely suggested, given only as a hint of the mysterious. Men like Corot and Monet have told us, again and again, that in painting, clearly delineated forms of mountains, valleys, trees, and rivers, kill the fine color-sentiment of the picture.”

Van Dyke continues: “The great struggle of the modern landscapist is to get on with the least possible form and to suggest everything by tones of color, shades of light, drifts of air. Why? Because these are the most sensuous qualities in nature and in art. The landscape that is the simplest in form and the finest in color is by all odds the most beautiful.”

Dixon (l.) and O’Keeffe (r.)

 In my years as an art critic in Arizona, I knew many artists who found the color more important than the texture. The Art Deco style of Dixon or (more idiosyncratically) O’Keeffe proved to be infinitely malleable for their work. 

Many more recent artists have adopted and adapted this style for their landscapes of the Southwest. 

Dennis Ziemienski (l.), Martin Sabransky (c.), and David Jonason (r.)

There is a thriving market for Western paintings. (I had to deal with quite a bit of it during my stretch as art critic in Arizona, where a kitschy version, called “Cowboy Art,” was popular in toney art galleries. These artworks, filled with bronco busters and noble Indians, were often painted with considerable technical skill, but very little originality — they were really more merchandise than art). 

But among the kitsch are quite a number of landscape artists, including Brett Allen Johnson … 

G. Russell Case … 

Gary Ernest Smith, who usually paints more Midwestern scenes, but occasionally gives a go at the Southwest … 

And Doug West, whose work is often done in silkscreen, or mimics the silkscreen style, which is the simplified color-and-shape taken to extremes. 

If you think we have wandered too far from the Roadrunner cartoons, they consider at least this one painting by Carol Bold:

Roadrunner cartoon (l.) and Carol Bold (r.)

But there are two artists I want to mention in particular, both of whom I knew back when I kept track of all the art being made in Arizona. 

The first is Ed Mell, who began his career painting fancy cars as a commercial illustrator. Not finding personal satisfaction as a New York advertising artist, he took a job teaching on the Hopi Indian Reservation and rediscovered the landscape of the Colorado Plateau. 

His early works tended to be influenced by Maynard Dixon, but as his career progressed, his painting tended to combine the Art Deco with a kind of Cubism, to what one might call “Cubist Deco.” More like the stylized landscape of the cartoons.

That Cubist Deco has made it to other artists, as well, including the above-mentioned David Jonason …

The other artist I want to bring up is Bill Schenck, who has also given us work in the Deco style …

But has also branched out into what can only be called a “paint-by-numbers” esthetic. It gives a hard edge to the otherwise more Impressionistic styles of his contemporaries. 

The style has also been mixed with the techniques of Bob Ross, to make a kind of “furniture store” art. One example shows up as a background to MSNBC security analyst Frank Figliuzzi. It is a painting by gallery-owner and artist Diana Madaras. 

And I couldn’t end this study without mentioning the Roadrunner esthetic of Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. 

He even has a few appearances of a roadrunner, just to let you know, wink-wink.

I collected more than 200 images for this essay, and I had to leave out so many that I wanted to include. But there is only so much space, and so much attention willing to be subjected to this rabbit hole. 

But I did want to end with one final road runner, set in the landscape we’ve been discussing. 

Click on any image to enlarge