Iphigenia in Brooklyn

From: Iphigenia in Brooklyn, a cantata, S.53162
Composer: P.D.Q. Bach (Peter Schickele)
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Aria: "As Hyperion across the flaming sky his chariot did ride, Iphigenia herself in Brooklyn found."

Recitative: "And lo, she found herself within a market, and all around her fish were dying; and yet their stench did live on."

Ground: "Dying, and yet in death alive."

Recitative: "And in a vision Iphigenia saw her brother Orestes, who was being chased by the Amenities; and he crie out in anguish: 'Oh ye gods, who knows what it is to be running? Only he who is running knows'."

Aria: "Running knows."

As featured on "The Wurst of P.D.Q. Bach," (LP 1977)

Putting It Simply

Did you know. . . ,"Most of what any conductor accomplishes takes place in rehearsal?" This statement by music critic Tim Mangan seems so simplistic that it hardly seems necessary to say, but for any musician who has conducted, it shouts volumes!

Source: Tim Mangan, The Arts Blog:"Bernstein Rehearses 'The Rite'" (September 18, 2007) http://artsblog.freedomblogging.com/category/uncategorized/

Copland v. McCarthy

Did you know there is a complete transcript of Aaron Copland's inquisition by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1953? Here is a link to the Senate website. Select S. Prt. 107-84, Vol. 2, pp. 1267-1289 [PDF pages 362-384].

Source: Alex Ross, (Blog) The Rest is Noise, August 31, 2007

France 1940-1944

Did you know that during the Occupation of Paris (1940-1944) during WWII, financial support for the four orchestras of Paris—Pasdeloup, Colonne (renamed Pierné during the war because Colonne was a Jew), Lamoureux, and Société des concerts du Conservatoire—actually increased during the four years of the Occupation as much as 459 percent? The latter, under conductor Charles Münch, gave concerts in the provinces in 1942 despite the difficulties of traveling during the war.

Source: French Music Since Berlioz, Richard Langham Smith and Caroline Potter (Burlington:2006), p.283

Nicolas Breakspear and Leonin of Paris

Did you know there was an English Pope? Nicolas Breakspear served as Pope Adrian IV from 1154 to 1159. In 1152, shortly before his papacy began, Breakspear was sent as papal legate to Scandanavia. As he returned to Rome in 1154, he met Leonin (ca.1135- ca.1201), poet, priest, musician and the founder of the Notre Dame School. He also composed the collection of organa called the Magnus Liber Organi. According to musicologist Craig Wright, when the two men met in Paris, Breakspear "promised the young cleric [Leonin] his assistance." Such help never came, but Leonin found favor with the next pope, Alexander III (1159-1181). Alexander III lived in France from 1162 to 1165 and it was he that supposedly "laid the first stone of he new catherdral." (Source: Craig Wright, "Leonius, Poet and Musician," Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. XXXIX, No. 1, Spring 1986, pp.23-25)

Musicians Incognito

Did you know that former FED Chairman Alan Greenspan (b. 1926) in1943 enrolled in the Juilliard School to study the clarinet and that he dropped out the next year to join Henry Jerome and His Orchestra, a travelling swing band? That former British Prime Minister Edward Heath (1916-2005) was an organ major at Oxford University? That U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice (b. 1954) first studied to be a concert pianist?

Condoleeza Rice the Musician

Did you know that Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is a musician? During a radio interview January 2, 2005 on Mad About Music with Gilbert Kaplan, Rice expressed her views about music and her tastes in musical style. Condi Rice was a piano prodigy at three and a concerto competition winner at age 15. Kaplan explained that her name is “a variation of con dolcezza which means, of course, ‘with sweetness,’ a direction of how to play the music.” She started piano lessons at three with her grandmother and by ten, she went to the Birmingham Southern Conservatory of Music – “the first black student to go to that newly-integrated conservatory in Birmingham,” said Rice. Her family moved to Denver and she won a young artists' competition playing the Mozart D Minor Piano Concerto. At 15, she entered the University of Denver as a music major. Rice explained, “I planned a career as a concert pianist but I realized in my sophomore year that I was pretty good, but not great.” Her two favorite operas are both Mussorgsky: Khovanschina and Boris Godunov. She said, “I’m quite a fan of Prokofiev and of some Shostakovich.” Rice admitted, “I've always been much more attracted to Brahms, to Schumann, to a certain extent to Schubert. I don't particularly like programmatic music and Liszt . . . has never been particularly interesting to me.” Though obviously accomplished, she says about ability: “I'm one of those people now if you put it in front of me, I can read it. But if you ask me to play it by ear or with improvisation, I have much harder time. . .” With her busy life as Secretary of State, Rice says she has little time to practice. “I now play almost exclusively chamber music and I have to be selective,” said she. Her favorite symphony is the Beethoven Seventh. (Source: Transcript at http://www.wnyc.org/shows/mam/episodes/2005/01/02 )

Biographical notes: Rice was born November 14, 1954 in Birmingham, Alabama. She earned her bachelor’s degree in political science, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Denver in 1974; her master’s from the University of Notre Dame in 1975; and her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver in 1981.

Vaughn Williams on Bellini

"Personally," says John Klein, "I have never been able to understand the violent prejudice against [Vincenzo] Bellini in English musical circles; it was glaringly revealed in [Ralph] Vaughn Williams's strange outburst on the historic occasion of the successful revival of Norma at Covent Garden in 1952. 'We have only two opera houses here,' he exclaimed, 'but in the centenary year of [Charles Villiers] Stanford's birth, when they might have given us an opportunity of hearing such splendid works as Shamus O'Brien or Much Ado, they chose to shake the dead bones of Norma.'" (Source: John Klein's review of Bellini by Leslie Orrey (London:1969) in Music and Letters, Vol. 50, No. 4, October 1969, p. 491)