I think it was when the eminent Brahms scholar Styra Avins confided to me that much of Theodor Adorno’s writing on music was “impenetrable gobbledygook,” that I felt a sigh of relief. Then it’s not just me! We all had to suffer through our share of it in college, and if you think it’s difficult in English, try the original German.

Adorno (1903-1969) was an influential sociologist/philosopher, trained as a classical pianist, who also studied composition with Alban Berg. His advocacy for the so-called “12 tone” composers and their music placed them firmly in the academic canon, some would say strangling other forms of musical expression for decades.

One of his frequent themes is what he called “the blare of the culture industry,” situated as he was, nearly at the beginning of the development of various electronic means of recording and dissemination of musical performances, to which we are all beholden today. I myself am guilty of what I think is a “crime” of listening to the Bach sacred cantatas on my iPod all over New York City. I can’t help it! I’ve been perverted I guess. Sorry Theo.

Adorno had no shortage of confidence in his own abilities and judgments. “I understand the language of music as the heroes in fairytales understand the language of birds.” But his way of expressing that understanding in dense prose makes me wonder whether it was all head and no heart.

“The curves so enjoined are to be traced by contemplation, rather than by ratiocination on the music from an ostensibly fixed standpoint external to it, in the pharisaic manner of the ‘New Objectivity,’ tirelessly toying with clichés such as that of the titanic late Romantic.” Does that say “Mahler” to you?

I’m not trying to take him “down.” He’s certainly an important thinker. But when you describe Italy as “the whole of life, lived as it were to the point of destruction, resists constant stabilizations and mirrors its own transience in illusion,” I venture to say you’re missing out on something.

Perhaps I should take his advice and look deeper: “The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.”

© 2012 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

The date: September 19, 2002. I was riding in a car, somewhere on the Triborough Bridge, 8 PM. The New York Philharmonic was about to broadcast the premiere of its joint commission with Lincoln Center’s Great Performers and one anonymous wealthy New York family. “On the Transmigration of Souls” by John Adams (b. 1947), for orchestra, chorus, children’s choir, and prerecorded tape, was prompted by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

I was stiffening internally, for I have mixed feelings generally about the Phil, and about radio broadcasts. I did not have mixed feelings about 9/11, however. It was the “direct/indirect” cause of my leaving Manhattan after 22 years to purchase an affordable co-op in Queens. I saw the planes hit the towers from my day job at the now-defunct Saint Vincents Hospital, and felt the frustration as all those immaculate gurneys sat in Seventh Avenue outside the emergency room, waiting for victims that never arrived. Twelve people I had known, albeit casually, died. I had PTSD for about a year afterward, obsessively scanning the air over Manhattan, fully expecting every plane either to explode midair or crash into a building. Nightmares, depression, the whole deal.

So, it was not with a great sense of optimism that I was greeting the broadcast. How could any occasion-specific music not trivialize this cataclysm? However, when the piece began, with rustling city sounds, whispered names and faint pleas, I was a goner. “Missing.” “Remember me. Please don’t ever forget me.” “It was a beautiful day.” “I love you.”

Adams described the piece as a “memory space” where each listener can be alone with his or her thoughts. He said that he wanted to create a similar sense to that one has upon entering one of the vast cathedrals like Chartres, a sense of the thousands of previous souls that had been there over time, and awe in the space itself. He wished to avoid any words like “requiem” or “memorial” because he said they suggested “conventions” that his piece didn’t share; and he hoped that the work would outlast its immediate cause. “Serenity” and “gravitas” were his hoped-for aims, in lieu of the much-overused “healing.”

“Transmigration” won the 2003 Pulitzer, and the recording of the premiere also won multiple Grammys.

Adams has become one of America’s most representative composers, while remaining experimental AND accessible, both at once. His operas “Nixon in China” (1987) and “Doctor Atomic” (2005) are modern classics. The controversial “Death of Klinghoffer” (1991) brought an unheard-of public discussion, pro and con, about opera into mainstream media. Clearly, he doesn’t shrink from difficult topics. The politics in “Nixon” bring Adams squarely into the Verdi “Risorgimento” tradition. He worked with the same team of Alice Goodman, librettist, and Peter Sellars, director, on his operas.

In 2000, his oratorio “El Niño” was premiered in Paris. It tells the Nativity story from the woman’s (mother’s) point of view, by using only texts by women authors, including contemporary Latin-Americans. It too, garnered its share of supporters and detractors.

He has also composed piano music (“China Gates” and “Phrygian Gates”) and large orchestral works, like “Harmonielehre,” “Shaker Loops,” and “Short Ride in a Fast Machine” to name but a few.

Adams continues on his way, with a Zen-like placidity, composing from inner necessity, and fortunate that he can make not only a living, but an impact from his work. I call him the “maximal minimalist.”

© 2012 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

Cecil Beaton called her “that furious lesbian.” Who? Mercedes de Acosta, that’s who.

All right children, I know you’re thinking who the hell was Cecil Beaton, for starters. Beaton (1904-1980), was best known as a fashion and portrait photographer, though his career also encompassed costume and set design, interior decorating, and creating confessional diaries of his privileged life. He won two Academy awards, for set design for “Gigi” and “My Fair Lady.”

Merdeceds de Acosta (1893-1968) was born into the “gilded” New York society of Fifth Avenue, when that street still meant something besides retail. She wrote many volumes of overwrought poetry in the 1920s, before turning to equally overwrought plays, none of which were very successful, despite having famous names attached to them.

Forced into a marriage with a man, she nevertheless continued racking up affairs with the most prominent women of the early twentieth century. A list of her lovers would have to include: Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Alla Nazimova (1879-1945, “Salome” in a silent movie), Eva Le Gallienne (1899-1991, acted in Molnar’s “Liliom” on Broadway in 1921, the play was the basis of the musical “Carousel”), Isadora Duncan, Tamara Karsavina (1885-1978, Russian ballerina in Diaghilev’s Ballets russes), Pola Negri (1897-1987, silent film siren), Katharine Cornell (1893-1974, stage actress, played Elizabeth Barrett Browning on Broadway in “The Barretts of Wimpole Street” [1931]), Ona Munson (played Belle Watling in “Gone With the Wind”), Adele Astaire (1896-1981, older sister of Fred), and Tallulah Bankhead. They were not all equally appreciative of being outed by Mercedes in her autobiography, which appeared in 1960.

So that’s a lot of estrogen-rich references to explore, but you know how historians are. We don’t want anyone to be forgotten . . .

© 2012 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

Carlos Acosta

The world of classical ballet is full of arbitrary, often punishing techniques that seek to create the artistic illusion that the sylphlike females and her male partners are, for that instant at least, not subject to the laws of gravity, earthbound like the rest of us poor sobs. Of course, it is just that: only an illusion. Dancers torture themselves to find the best ways to leap and twirl in what is, for most, a brief career as a performer. Only a handful ever reach “super” ballet stardom.

Continuing my mini-theme of “bad” boys who made “good,” I’m thinking today of Carlos Acosta (b. Havana, 1973), the Afro-Cuban premier danseur of London’s Royal Ballet since age 25. He has also danced with the English National Ballet, National Ballet of Cuba, Houston Ballet, and American Ballet Theater.

Born into Castro’s Cuba, his family was poor and large with eleven children, though close. Their neighborhood was rough and he often skipped school to engage in the more kid-friendly pursuits of break dancing, stealing mangos, or just playing soccer on a big empty field.

His truckdriver father, somehow, insisted that he attend ballet lessons as a child, already unusual in the macho Latin culture. By mysterious alchemy, his natural ability was developed, he took to the athleticism of it (though with reservations), and he was recognized. His bad-boy ways did not go away immediately however, and he skipped dance classes with some of the same energy as he had the scholastic classes.

The “click” happened at a large international competition in Lausanne, Switzerland, which he won at age 17. The same year saw gold medals in Paris, Italy, and Poland. He was launched. He gained the nickname “Air Acosta” for his breathtaking and fast leaps.

In 2010, he turned to “modern dance,” which offers greater latitude technically. Recall that I said a dancer’s prime career time is tragically short. Nevertheless, there is great precedent, Baryshnikov to name just one, and he is finding new creative fulfillment in this, his 38th year, and will be winding down with the Royal Ballet in 2012.

© 2012 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

Remember when “rap music” was an innovative tool of expressing frustration with urban poverty and crime? Well, some of that “protest” core remains, especially in France, where rap was adopted quickly, but not co-opted by producers and turned into a cesspool of dirty language and sexual stereotyping, as happened in the US.

Remember when Islam wasn’t demonized?

A really “bad boy” who made good is Abd al-Malik. He was born Régis Fayette-Mikano in 1975 in Paris to immigrant parents who then moved to his father’s native Congo for a few years, then returned to a ghetto outside Strasbourg. You have to see the segregation that rings many large French cities to believe it. The picturesque “old towns,” from which tourists rarely stray, are often surrounded by concrete block thickets of hideous apartment buildings (“banlieues”), giving rise to a dangerous underclass of potentially uneducated, unemployed, and restless youth.

Régis was one of those boys, raised by a single mother (his father had deserted the family), and five siblings. Nevertheless, she insisted that he attend a prestigious Catholic school in the “white” part of Strasbourg, working herself to exhaustion to provide for her children. He showed exceptional intellectual gifts that were recognized by his teachers. However, to keep pace with his peers, he often skipped class to engage in petty crimes such as mugging, car theft, drug dealing and the like.

Instead of succumbing to the drugs, or losing his life in gang violence, he discovered a thriving Islamic subculture in Strasbourg.

From his memoir:
“I lived Islam as a body of commandments that I only needed to put into practice scrupulously. My satisfaction was made all the greater when I noted everything my discipline was allowing me to escape. While we were keeping vigil, the youth at the foot of the buildings were smoking joints and knocking back one half-liter after another of 8.6—those well-known cans of Dutch beer that are 8.6 proof alcohol. These kids would drink and carry on, shouting unbelievable insanities and violently fighting among themselves when everything else had worn them out.
Most of the time the whole scene was enlivened by the squealing tires of stolen cars—a kind of background music. We, on the other hand, were certainly not large in number, but our meetings took place in an atmosphere that was serious and one of real solidarity. At that time, our ideal was to live the way Muslims had during the time of the Prophet as it was described to us in the books of piety. For us, the modern Western world, with its insipid and materialistic values, its contempt of dignity and human spirituality, constituted an aberration in history, a cancer even, that only Islam had the tools to cure.”

He converted to Islam at 16, but became at odds with the religion’s prohibition of music, as well as its sometimes violent anti-West rhetoric. He traveled to Morocco and met with a Sufi leader.

“Sufi” is a mystical dimension of Islam “beyond any one religion.” It seeks “spiritual essence” beyond words, and is something like the deepest aspect of Buddhist “Nirvana.” Malik’s personal relation with Sufi stresses the unity of all men, despite superficial differences. While developing his New African Poets group and releasing his first albums, Malik also attended university, gaining degrees in both Classics and Philosophy.

In 2004, he released a book of spiritual essays titled “May Allah Bless France,” showing his profound desire for a more compassionate world, rather than allowing himself to be turned into a tool for the more radical Islamists in the post 9/11 world.

His music defies easy categorization, including elements from blues, jazz, and slam poetry, always with a mystical and very romantic openness that seems to fly in the face of the usual “raw anger,” misogyny and homophobia we’re used to hearing in “typical” rap.

Explore his message if you dare! (Knowledge of French is helpful.)

© 2012 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs