So here’s a press release that jumped out at me recently about a work to be performed on June 7 by “8 synchronized Yamaha Disklavier player pianos plus an automated ensemble of 2 xylophones, 4 bass drums, tamtam, siren, 7 bells and 3 airplane propellers.”
Think you know what it is? If you’re thinking this is a composition perhaps written last week or earlier this year, you’re in the wrong century entirely. It’s Ballet Mécanique, George Antheil’s most famous work, a film-with-music written in 1924. For this weekend’s performance at the 3LD Art & Technology Center on Greenwich Street in Manhattan, an automated orchestra created by the Brooklyn-based League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) will perform the score, to a screening of the restored Fernand Léger film. Somewhere along the way—perhaps when a strip of leather from one of the airplane propellers reportedly flew into the audience at the 1926 performance in Paris—Antheil became known as the “bad boy of music,” which is how he is invariably described and is the title of his famous 1945 autobiography. read more
In the opera universe, there’s wacky and weird—and then there’s Stefan Zucker. This living “world’s highest tenor” is so strange as to defy description—the closest I can come is that his speaking voice sounds like a Mike Myers impersonation in an Austin Powers movie, and his attachment to Italian opera divas of the past is almost pornographic. Many New York opera-lovers remember him from his WKCR radio show, which was discontinued in 1994. For the uninitiated, he can be viewed in a YouTube clip.
Zucker’s voice opens Jan Schmidt-Garre’s 1998 film, Opera Fanatic, just released in the U.S. on an Arthaus DVD, with a telephone message: “Oh hi, this is Stefan. I feel like shit with a touch of fever and a sore throat, but I will get on the plane… I have some little pimples on my face, and I would feel much more at my ease, much less self-conscious with makeup.” If this doesn’t give you the heeby-jeebies, I’m either not telling it right, or you’ve never heard Zucker’s voice before. read more
I’ve watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train at least six or seven times, including when it recently aired on Reel 13. With its tight screenplay adapted from the book by Patricia Highsmith (author of the Tom Ripley books), fabulously evil villain played by Robert Walker, pivotal train scenes and tense back-and-forth between Farley Granger’s Forest Hills tennis match and Walker’s evidence-planting trip to the scene of a murder, the film has always been one of my Hitchcock favorites.
Of course, music plays a huge part in Strangers on a Train, as it does in all Hitchcock movies. Many individual Hitchcock films have been studied for their music—particularly the films scored by Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the most famous film-music cue, the shower scene in Psycho—but Jack Sullivan’s detailed guide to music in Hitchcock films, which comes out in paperback on May 20, appears to be the most comprehensive. The book, Hitchcock’s Music, covers all the Hitchcock films, from the early silents to the British films like The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes and the best-known films like Rebecca, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. The book, which won a 2007 ASCAP Deems Taylor Best Book of the Year award in the concert music category, is so detailed that you may feel the need to go watch numerous scenes again, just to listen to the music cues you somehow missed.
Recently I spoke to Jack Sullivan about Alfred Hitchcock’s film music, how the director’s carefully plotted approach to making movies extended to its music, and the post-Hitchcock era of film scoring.
Jennifer Melick: How far back does your interest in Hitchcock’s movies go?
Jack Sullivan: Back to my childhood. I was just old enough to probably sneak out and see Vertigo. Then right after that I saw North by Northwest and Psycho. As a kid, I remember being riveted by the music. read more
What’s the opposite of a golden age? Whatever it’s called, it’s the age we’re living in when it comes to soundtracks—particularly from Hollywood movies. Trying to find a score that makes for decent home listening shorn of its accompanying images is a daunting task these days. Roughly speaking, your choices are either collections of pop songs (more or less inspired, cf. Juno) or formulaic scores that (1) tend to repeat a couple of themes ad nauseam and (2) are utterly predictable in their arrangements and melodic approaches. An ongoing film series at the Museum of Modern Art, “Jazz Score,” not only puts this dire situation in perspective, but shows us the birth of a specifically American approach to scoring. read more
The opera stage is filled with tragic characters who have lost touch with reality—one of the best-known examples being Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, seen in Mary Zimmermann’s new Met production earlier this season with the high-flying soprano Natalie Dessay.
But, as Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez tells it in his new book The Soloist, out from Putnam on April 17, real-life tragedies with mental illness at their center are playing out on our streets every day, and some of them involve musicians. Lopez literally stumbled on a story one day three years ago: a middle-aged, schizophrenic homeless man playing a violin in Pershing Square, who clearly had had some serious musical training in a former life.
The story of this man, Nathaniel Ayers—who once attended Juilliard—was originally the subject of a series of newspaper columns. Readers began donating musical instruments, and Lopez became more and more involved in trying to get Ayers off the streets and into treatment. The book is now being made into a movie for release later this year, directed by Joe Wright (Atonement) and starring Jamie Foxx as Ayers and Robert Downey Jr. as Lopez. read more
I’m particularly looking forward to the broadcast of The Magic Flute this week: Mozart’s masterpiece was the first opera I saw, though it wasn’t live but a TV broadcast of the delightful filmed adaptation Ingmar Bergman made in 1975. It is widely acknowledged as one of the most successful filmed operas (and, for that matter, plays) ever, and may well be the perfect gateway film to the perfect gateway opera.
What’s gateway art? Basically, it’s an easy first step into opera, ballet, art film or avant-garde theater, the kind of thing you should start with if you’re either young or older but willing to explore unknown territory. (And don’t think that gateway works are simplistic or artistically inferior. Not only did seeing Bergman’s movie in my early teens start me on a lifetime of loving the arts, but it’s an enduringly charming, poetic, incredibly multilayered masterpiece.) read more
A little more than a month after the riveting new animated short film Peter and the Wolf won an Academy Award® in the best animated short category, it airs on PBS during a month that Hugh Welchman, one the film’s producers, has called a “victory parade.”
Actually, the dates on Great Performances were booked before the film received the award. But as part of the heady follow-up from receiving the Oscar®, Welchman and his Oscar® statue have been in great demand, and are making the rounds—as well as occasionally setting off security alarms at the airport.
What’s it like to be the subject of this sudden notoriety? I spoke to Welchman on Monday from his London studio, Breakthru Films, where he described his whirlwind tour during the last month. He also talked about how he and Philharmonia Orchestra conductor Mark Stephenson came up with the idea for a modern interpretation of this Prokofiev piece that has served as an introduction to the orchestra for so many children; how he thinks videocassettes changed children’s listening habits; how director Suzie Templeton got arrested by the F.S.B. (the renamed K.G.B.) in Russia while researching the film; and upcoming plans for a Chopin film.
Jennifer Melick: So what has it been like for you since winning the Oscar® for Peter and the Wolf on February 24?
Hugh Welchman: It’s been completely crazy—lots of things to do. I had 3,000 e-mails to start with [laughs]. I had to go through all of those. Then obviously a lot of people connected with the project suddenly got in touch with me, and I had to do things like go over to Poland and go meet the minister of culture, because we made the film in Poland, and so had to do a kind of victory tour. Then off to Russia. Yeah, it’s been pretty crazy. read more
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