Today, only diehard specialists seem to have heard the name. Fewer still have ever played a note of his (enormous) output of mostly solo piano music. Part of that may be due to its fiendish difficulty, though technical standards do improve, and every young lion seems to cut his teeth on them with little strain.

His music is of striking originality, both in storytelling through music, and piano texture. He wrote fewer of the trivial but brilliant variation sets on popular tunes than most other nineteenth century virtuosi. His conception of the piano was as a stand-alone symphony. In fact, there is a “Symphony” in four movements for piano, also a “Concerto” without orchestra. And so forth. This keeps ten fingers awfully busy!

My former mentor at Manhattan School of Music, the great pianist Raymond Lewenthal, used to stride through the halls in a black cape (lined with red satin) and top hat. We thought he was Alkan. He could infuse the music with the grandeur and ease it needs. The sense of playfulness he brought to the fiercely difficult “Le Festin d’Esope” (Aesop’s Feast) was awe inspiring, particularly the impish “flea” variation.

He had been preparing a biography of Alkan, but was “scooped” by British pianist Ronald Smith, to Lewenthal’s eternal bitter chagrin.

There are numerous short works that “are” within the reach of even young student pianists, lest you think it’s all mammoth works.

I mean how can you NOT like a guy who writes a plaintive little ditty called “The Song of the Madwoman by the Seashore”? No, it’s not Snooki on a bender. It’s pre-impressionism and expressionism all in one, in the user-unfriendly key of A Flat Minor (seven flats).

There’s a programmatic Piano Sonata “Quasi-Faust” depicting the ages of man: 20, 30, 40, 50, with titanic desire, struggle, bargaining, and waning strength, including a giant fugue.

Chamber music fanatics, there’s a Piano Trio. Your pianist will kill you if you say “hey let’s read through this.”

Due to his strange temperament, Alkan didn’t thrive as a parading virtuoso and he became a hermit. He did emerge in the late 1870s to give a series of historical recitals encompassing the entire repertoire as it was known at the time, similar to what Anton Rubinstein did. But he then went back into his little world, dying in 1888.

© 2012 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

Dear readers, 2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the first appearance of the word “jass” in print, in a newspaper. It took a few years for the spelling to standardize to what we call “jazz.”

I’ve been listening to a lot of trumpeter Louis Armstrong lately. His home for many years is only a couple of miles from mine (now a museum). His fourth wife, Lucille, picked it out, in Corona, Queens. In the late 1940s, blacks were not welcome in every neighborhood, but Corona was one of the “okay” ones. There’s a garden party there today and tomorrow, if you’re in New York.

What do we mean when we say “jazz”? It evolved from many streams of American black (and non-black) life and culture: work song, hymns, spirituals, blues, “Dixieland” (New Orleans), syncopated music often lumped together as “ragtime,” popular song, and dance.

It is NOT “random improvisation,” although in the 1950s a “strain” of that more abstract music making crept into jazz, rendering people rather judgmental about the old-fashioned approach of an Armstrong or a Jelly-Roll Morton, who claimed to have invented jazz!

I prefer to call it “variation” over a known tune. That’s where the element of disciplined freedom comes in. The musicians know the structure, chords, and key areas ahead of time, but can then embroider around and over it, as far as their virtuosity or desire permits.

We need to remember how hard life on the road was for the earliest players. The US was far from desegregated, and black musicians were not allowed to stay in most hotels or eat in most restaurants. A (white) manager would have to run in and bring food back to the bus. Some places would not even allow the band itself to be mixed-race.

Armstrong, at one point the second most popular entertainer in America after Bing Crosby, got into hot water be calling Eisenhower an “asshole” for his poor response to school desegregation in Arkansas (sending in federal troops to “preserve law and order.” America really needs more than two eyes, we have so many black eyes when it comes to race.

A lot of jazz critics more knowledgeable than I am consider Armstrong’s heyday to have been his early recordings from the 20s. They seem to be uncomfortable with his evolution into a more general entertainer, including singing and acting. “Hello, Dolly” paid all his bills for many years. And who can forget “Wonderful World”?

I apologize for my wandering tone today, illness being what it is, but please investigate “Pops” Armstrong, or Earl “Fatha” Hines, or any jass musician of your choice!

© 2012 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

The US (and Britain) bombed Dresden near the end of WWII, reducing an entire jewel of a city to dusty rubble. One can see a movie version of that in “Slaughterhouse 5.” By the way, this was what they called a “morale” bombing, Dresden having no military strategic value. In the midst of the ruins of the library, an enterprising Italian musicologist claimed to have found a tiny scrap of music manuscript from an unknown work by the Venetian born composer Tomaso Albinoni (1671-1951).

Great story right? But the piece, which Giazzotto published in 1958, was by him, not Albinoni. He called it “Adagio in G Minor for strings and continuo, assembled from fragments by Albinoni.” It was supposed to be the central movement of a typical three movement sonata.

The bass line is strongly reminiscent of that “other” Baroque hit, Bach’s “Air” (on the G String) from an orchestral suite. The melody repeats a common melodic cliché of lament, used notably in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op 110 (Arioso). If you examine Abinoni’s other completed surviving concerti, of which there are many, you will nor find one movement anywhere, despite some lovely touches, that behaves as the “new” Adagio does.

Hey, I grew up with Karajan’s luscious “way-too-many strings” version on LP with the Berlin Philharmonic. The piece also made the pop classical list on “hit” compilations of 18th century music many times.

It has also been used in at least nineteen (!) movies, including my favorite, Peter Weir’s “Gallipoli” (1981), and also, the unlikely “Flashdance,” as well as television and pop music.

By the way, Giazzotto died in 1998, I would imagine a rather well-off musicologist, since he had copyrighted the piece back in ’58.

By the way, Albinoni, also a composer of opera, said: “The recitative loads the gun, the aria fires it.” Take that NRA!

© 2012 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

The scene: A seedy cabin-type motel on the highway leading north from Salinas, Kansas. Year: 1967. Late July or early August. Time: 9 PM. Temperature: 102 degrees Fahrenheit. We’re on the annual farm inspection tour, my father, stepmother, and me. Any motel that costs more than $9.99 is unacceptable to my father. So, no swimming pools, ever. “They just jack up the price for that.”

The room door is open, giving right onto the highway. A tired electric fan is on the sill, blowing hot air into the room. A wobbly black and white television is the only sign of life. All at once, manna falls from heaven.

A broadcast of the movie version of Edward Albee’s 1962 play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Liz and Dick slashing and burning their way through the bitter invective. How could a nine year old boy so identify? And how could this controversial drama, with its salty language ever have wound up on TV, in Kansas?

Albee didn’t win the Pulitzer for the play, because the prize board was shocked at the language. Even the MPAA had issues with its use of “screw” and “hump the hostess.”

Albee later won three Pulitzers for other plays. “VW” won five Tonys, and the film version five Oscars, though it was nominated for thirteen! Mike Nichols first feature film as a director, amazing.

George and Martha, after a night of boozy small-college networking, come home for even more drinking, and their usual “jousting,” this time with a fresh young married couple they have invited over at 2 AM.

Is their baby imaginary? It’s a common theme in Albee, perhaps reflecting his parents’ giving him up for adoption to a rich, but loveless, Westchester couple. The young couple had a shotgun wedding due to that wife’s hysterical pregnancy. Clearly, reproduction is a problem in this claustrophobic world.

Speculation abounds about the meaning of the title, the sort of intellectual pun that might occur at a college. Albee claims to have seen his future title scrawled in soap on a “message mirror” in a Greenwich Village bar he frequented. But he also enjoyed mystifying, and like many artist did not like to “explain” his work.

The lead characters, George and Martha, are usually said to obliquely refer to our first president and his wife. You know, “I cannot tell a lie” (even though he probably never said that). Albee’s work inspired a 1974 children’s book (!) by James Marshall in which George and Martha are cartoon hippopotamuses that teach each other gentle moral lessons.

Albee’s George and Martha humiliate and destroy everything, everyone, and each other. Yet, they seem to need this interplay, and I even find the end gently optimistic. They have burned through all their illusions and have a chance to start over. Well, on good days I think that.

I memorized every line seemingly instantly, and later in life, never was more than an arm’s length away from my copy of the play. I’d perform all the parts, or just Martha, or just George, for anyone who’d listen. Yes, it was insufferable.

If you’re on Netflix, or even if you’re not, check out this landmark film, one of the most successful transfers from stage to movie.

© 2012 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

One of them is by Samuel Barber (1910-1981), a setting for soprano and orchestra of words by James Agee (1909-1955), called “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” Those words are from the Prologue to his Pulitzer Prize winning novel “A Death in the Family,” published posthumously in 1957.

Agee was born in Knoxville, and educated at a series of fairly elite boarding schools, including my alma mater Phillips Exeter Academy, then continuing at Harvard. He wrote for Time and Life magazines, and even did screenplays.

Agee’s father died in a car crash when James was six, an event that provided the material that is dramatized in “A Death in the Family.” The child remembers comforting moments with his strong father figure, mingling with his hard drinking and presumed womanizing, qualities that would also adhere to James Agee. He searches for identity, and in the end realizes that no one can ever “give” that to him. He must find it, reveal it, develop it for himself.

Even in his earliest writings, Agee’s gift for language was refined. In one of many letters written over the years to his spiritual mentor Father Flye, he described a Harvard girl he had a crush on as having “unobstreporous intelligence, tinged with a charming limeadish sarcasm.” Right, a real charmer that boy.

Perhaps his best known work today, though it was virtually ignored at the time, is the collaboration with photographer Walker Evans called “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (1941) about the lives of poor sharecroppers in Alabama.

All his writing from the earliest poems on seems imbued with a sense of the “nearness” of death, of which his own premature demise was the fulfillment. “A life is only found in losing it.”

His statement on “why” he wrote: “Now as awareness of how much life is lost, and how little is left, becomes even more piercing, I feel also, and ever more urgently, the desire to restore and to make a little less impermanent, such of my lost life as I can.”

Won’t you have a listen to my “push button”? There are any number of fine recordings. Diction is paramount, because the words are so beautiful, though the vocal writing is high, making it a challenge to project clearly. Eleanor Steber, Leontyne Price, Sylvia McNair, even Dawn Upshaw, all rise to the challenge

© 2012 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

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

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 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