So I've Heard

Survivors: Every account I’ve read of Clay Felker’s passing has one date wrong. New York Magazine began as a Sunday supplement to the Herald Tribune in September, 1963, not 1964. I had an article in the first issue; it was called “This Way to the Abattoir” and it was about how hopeful young performers could get slaughtered by critics, press agents and the realities of the talent market on their way to a career. I could write it again.
James Bellows was the great mind at the Trib in those days, presiding over its glorious final years as the haven of the country’s most imaginative journalism, and its downfall in a land no longer willing to accept that quality . He saw to it that the paper’s masthead of stellar writers – Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Walter Kerr on theater, Judith Crist on film and I – were set free to work on this new magazine project;, with Peter Palazzo as designer, Sheldon Zalaznick as editor.  The more familiar names – Milton Glaser’s designs and Clay’s editorial vision – came aboard within a year, but the reports so far have been particularly deficient in not recognizing Bellows, whom I have been privileged to know and work for on both coasts, as the creative force behind New York.
      Something about having worked for Clay Felker creates a binding force; partly it’s the sense of having shared a vision – or several visions, since we all know that the attempt to clone New York as New West was his one great career mistake. Partly it’s just a memory of great partying and great journalism under pressure: Steinem and Sheehy bringing in sandwiches during the Harlem riot reporting. When I get to New York I always summon a gathering of survivors: Debbie Harkins, copy-editrix extraordinaire; Ellen Stern, “Best Bets”;Jack Nessel, managing ed; Tom Bentkowski, art director, bought my house in Grand View-on-Hudson; Shelly Zalaznick; Florence Fletcher, who did the concert llistings; Fred Allen, assistant ed…where are we now? We always talked about Clay; we always will.
Ficchi: The figs are out already, almost a month earlier than usual. Maybe it’s because of it’s being a leap year, maybe it’s because of a new watering system I installed last winter, but there they are: big, luscious, Black Mission beauties, ready to succumb to the depredations of the scrub jays…or mine. To an adoptive Californian, or just a visitor, the fig is the most remarkable of fruits, the one most different from the packaged product back east. Its anatomical resemblance was made much of in the lurid imagination of Ken Russell, in the fig-eating scene of Women in Love but it was, after all, handed to him in the D.H. Lawrence novel. Beyond all that, the fig – fresh-picked, just off the tree, plucked in warm California sunshine – tastes like nothing else on earth. Owning a fig tree bestows a deep sense of pride. I knew owners in New York, where fig trees do not easily surive, who buried their trees up to six feet every winter, just for the ego trip of handing off fresh-picked figs for a few days every summer. They’re all Italians, by the way; that figures. (oops!)
Yecch: Tony Palmer is in town, and I have a date to talk to him on Monday. I liked his nine-hour film on Wagner, especially when he got it down to five. Hail, Bop! is a dazzling John Adams documentary, and he’s here to promote his American pop documentary called All You Need Is Love, 17 hours’worth. But I’ve also been sent a DVD of his Puccini, which he directed from a script by Charles Wood, and I’m not sure I can face him. The film isn’t merely an utter falsehood on a misinterpreted episode in the composer’s life, it is so utterly false as to distort both the episode in the life and the music that came out of it. It revolves around the non-affair between Puccini and a slavey in their household, whom Mrs. Puccini drives to suicide over accusations of hanky-panky with the Mister. (Apparently she was the only gal in all Italy who didn’t.) All of this then boils down to the suicide of Liù in Turandot  which, folks, is why Puccini couldn’t complete the opera, which  he then set aside in guilt-ridden grief two years before his death.. 
    Setting aside the historical flimflam, with Mrs. Puccini standing in for Turandot, the town gossips for Ping, Pang & Pong, and the actor Robert Stephens in a Puccini impersonation that I wouldn’t entrust to compose Yes We Have No Bananas, this is a movie that insults every aspect of the musical existence that I hold dear.  Oh yes, there’s a pretty good high-powered rendition of “In questa reggia” by Linda Esther Gray, and the role of the Councilman Ping is sung, according to the back cover, by “Alan Okie.” Alan Opie should sue.

The Scuttling of KCSN (?) 
Rumors now abound from high in that the University  has decided to sell KCSN the excellent little  station for which the University holds the broadcast license – perhaps by as early as July 1st.. As we last reported, Dean Robert Bucker (he of the deceptive letter in our last post) had initially arranged for Minnesota Public Radio to provide their Classical Lite ‘stream’ to replace KCSN award-winning “eclectic” ARTS & ROOTS format.
Perhaps as an aid to lessening the impact of their scuttling the station, Dean Bucker has not only cancelled the most recent Pledge Drive and fired Les Perry, KCSN’s leading programmer and fund-raiser, but has now taken KCSN’s stream off the Internet.
The question is why. 
The current crisis at KCSN – if it has not already been resolved to the station’s extreme detriment – has its origin in a misunderstanding of the station’s functioning – especially in regards to transmitter power. As reported in Performances magazine – KCSN has the weakest signal of any Southern California radio station: 370 watts.  The range of all other stations is between 5,000 and 100,000 watts.  Thus KCSN has produced $42/per watt, far more than most public stations. Despite the fact that the station has received “Best of LA” from Los Angeles Magazine, is currently the station of choice for the Arts Community (where it enjoys an entirely favorable prestige, and that the station’s last 16 pledge drives have shown consistent increases from 5-15%, the University in the person of Dean Bucker (to whom KCSN reports)  has declared the station to be “underperforming”.
Further, these successes have been achieved with a staff of 5 full-time employees and 2 paid part-time announcers.  More importantly is the lamentable fact that in the last 8 years CSUN has contributed nothing for Marketing for KCSN.   Not one penny.  While other “classical” stations have not only vastly greater power, and have spent large sums on bus-cards, print advertising and other marketing strategies, KCSN has relied exclusively on word-of-mouth.
CSUN was approached with excellent opportunities for marketing and fund-raising by a uniquely credible entities. In addition a major LA broadcaster has tried to approach Bucker with a plan to fund and manage KCSN, bringing marketing, advertising and operating funds to remove all costs from CSUN’s responsibility,  to no avail
 So, a unique jewel of a broadcast entity faces extinction because of CSUN’s failure to perform its fundamental task of business analysis: Strengths and Weakness. Here is a brief sketch:
Strengths
Programming
Prestige
Membership
Weaknesses
Power
Marketing
Underwriting
Management/Oversight. 
SOME HISTORY 
As currently constituted KCSN is the product of the fertile brain, abundant spirit, and love of the Arts of retired Dean (of the College of Arts Media and Communication) William Toutant, PhD., an acclaimed composer, music professor, author of books on Music Theory and Host of The KCSN Opera House. The station is the result of Bill’s extraordinary vision, dedication to standards of excellence and hard work.  It was Dr. Toutant who hired Martin Perlich as Program Director. Recently Bill has said:”The best thing I ever did as Dean was to hire Martin and let him have his head.” 
In the ensuing 8 years Dr. Toutant’s faith has been rewarded: As Program Director Martin Perlich has brought uniquely thoughtful, high quality programming to KCSN. In the hands of Morning Host Ian Freebairn-Smith and Midday Host Laura Brodian the station has been able to present the best and broadest classical selection in Los Angeles.  As on-air Afternoon Host, Perlich has brought innovative programs such as his daily The Audition Booth (fresh out-of-the-box new releases) and Cost-Conscious Classix (Budget CDs), as well as Martin Perlich Interviews, his archive of historic chats with Leonard Bernstein, Frank Zappa, George Szell, Gore Vidal, Isaac Stern Itzhak, Perlman and hundreds more), As author of The Art of the Interview (Silman-James 2007) Perlich also  hosts ARF!! (Arts & Roots Forum,) daily live interviews with “major contributors to Arts & Roots  in Southern California”: Stacy Keach, Paul O’Dette, Terry Riley, Cecilia Bartoli,  YoYo Ma, legendary jazzman Buddy Colette, satirist Sandra Tsing-Loh, Henry Winkler and Sarah Chang,  as well as a wide variety of major cutting edge playwrights, filmmakers, authors, world music performers, choreographers, actors and directors. 
Unfortunately Toutant suffered a major coronary in 2006, and retired as dean. He was replaced by an interim dean who, despite having little if any understanding of broadcast, decided to attack the station’s Strengths – and change the station’s format. Fortunately, at the end of his term the Interim Dean returned to his academic chores.
The new incoming permanent dean is a man of high musical and administrative achievement.  Robert Bucker is a man of probity, intelligence, discernment and high standards. Perhaps because of his newness, and the urgent need to attend to the many problems left to him by the inexperienced and unready Interim dean, the new dean initially focused little if any attention on  KCSN.  He declared in his first meeting with KCSN staff “You’re not on my ‘radar screen’”.  More distressing was his decision once his attention had turned to KCSN that station “fund-raising was paltry.” When informed of the station’s 370 watts transmitting power – which is truly “paltry”, he admitted ignorance of that fact.  So his judgment of KCSN’s performance – and subsequent decision to change format – was made in absence of sufficient research of the key facts: low power and total absence of marketing budget to make an informed decision. Why else abandon a long and well-established niche in the LA radio market of over 100 “sticks” with the mere hope of rebuilding audience, membership, prestige and fund-raising.
This precipitous decision threatens the Los Angeles cultural, and broader listening audience with the removal of one its greatest (if weakest) gems, a station broadcasting programs of broad ranging classical music: new music by living composers and major 20th century masters, ancient music, plus chamber, choral, instrumental and vocal music heard on no other station in the LA market. 
In addition to classical – 6:00AM – 6:00 PM weekdays – evenings and weekends are filled with “Roots” music of the highest and most diverse nature: bluegrass, blues, rockabilly, jazz, singer/songwriter, “classic country”, plus substantive shows devoted to the music of Bob Dylan and the Beatles. When one adds to this mix the unique informational programs on the visual arts, psychology, women’s issues and wellness, it is clear that the effects of KCSN’s disappearance will be deeply felt.
This is especially true when one considers that CSUN is currently building a new Performing Arts Center costing $125 million at current estimate, and called the “Valley Arts Center”, focusing primarily on the needs of residents of the San Fernando Valley and the large populations of adjacent communities.  Since we know that Dean Bucker’s first choice of replacement formats for KCSN was a “stream” of light classical music based in the Midwest, this would present at least an apparent contradiction to the avowed “localism” proclaimed by CSUN President Jolene Koester, whose “baby” the Performing Arts Center has been – except for the now-overlooked contribution of the of the above-mentioned Dr. William Toutant, whose idea it was in the first place.
Ah, bureaucracy! Ah, Humanity.
                                *        *         *       *        *       *
ANOTHER DEPARTURE: I began writing out here just a little short of 30 years ago, covering musical events here and up north for an ill-fated, ill-considered attempt to clone the magazine that had sent me out here. What made life even partially bearable was the treatment I was accorded by the press department at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Public-relations offices and print critics are not supposed to trust one another beyond each other’s earshot, and the notion of genuine human cordiality is a commodity that is not expected to exist in the shadow of those filing cabinets and Xerox machines 
    Norma Flynn made it that way, a public-relations genius and a warm-hearted momma who turned the job into a genuinely human interaction. Adam Crane hasn’t been a warm-hearted momma, but he’s been a pal, and that’s even rarer in p-r annals. His reasons for moving on are so human that you can’t be angry: he’s going home to Saint Louis, where his Dad isn’t well, his grandparents are really old, and  he has a great job with the Symphony Orchestra under David Robertson which is becoming truly important and adventurous.  If I didn’t  know what Saint Louis feels like in the summer, I’d be truly jealous

MATTERS ORGANIC Paul Jacobs was in town on Friday; great lunch at Engine 28. He is bound and determined to convert me into the ranks of organ-music devotees, but then the conversation turns to items such as the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony and I back down. In 1942 I had a best friend at summer camp, also named Alan; after that one summer we lost track of each other. When my book came out – you know which one – I had the urge to find him, via Google, and send him a copy, which I did. He’s a distinguished anesthesiologist, now retired, with an avocation of recording some of New York’s great church organists. He sent me a pile of his disks, which turned out not so bad as I feared, and I started going to organ concerts and writing about them. Came a letter from this Paul Jacobs, who is  the young (31) whizbang head of Juilliard’s organ department and full of chops to erase the old church-organist images – Albert Schweitzer on one hand, Virgil Fox on the other –  sort of welcoming me to the fellowship.
   Paul was in town to check out the organ – excuse me, the William J. Gillespie Concert  Organ — at  the new Segerstrom — sorry, the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall — in Costa Mesa. I asked to tag along, with the promise to withhold judgment  on the instrument itself, which isn’t quite finished and which will be formally inaugurated by Paul at a concert  with the Pacific Symphony– the Saint-Saëns, wouldn’t you know! – in September. (An open house and preview concert – free, but you need tickets – is scheduled for June 29.) And so we got to spend a whole afternoon in that oversized boudoir in its cold, cold color scheme, with its sweeping curves that are its architect’s ideas of the outlines of a cello, its silvery, pasted-on fake vertical organ pipes beside which Disney Hall’s “French Fries” look downright real.
    But I mustn’t, as I said, comment. I’d never before been inside the workings of a real pipe organ and this, I must say, is damn impressive. A small door next to the console leads to a fantastic mingling of technology and mechanics. Metal pipes 32-feet tall tower over on one side; huge bellows are worked from the innards of a small cabinet of green computer boards, the same as in your cell phone.  Several loft areas are reachable from ladders; you get the impression of a huge expanse folded in upon itself. 
    Paul wants to take my picture at the keyboard, to seal the triumph of his conquest.  I rattle a few bars of the “Moonlight” Sonata, but the keys feel unnaturally resistant; can this be music-making? The organ is the product of C.B. Fisk, of Gloucester, Mass. There are several other Fisk organs in Southern California, including one in Pacific Palisades; Orange County’s is, of course, the largest. One of the two guys from the plant, who are out here working on the installation, wears an Ipswich tee-shirt, from the town next to Gloucester with the famous Clam House. Man, I could taste those steamers, and those fries all afternoon.
 HARRY: A friend in London has sent me discs that he has recorded from the Beeb broadcast  of Harrison Birtwistle’s latest opera The Minotaur which had its world premiere at the Royal Opera in April and was broadcast and televised at that time. Think of that: an opera by a leading composer known for the intellectual strength and “difficulty” of his music, still made available  to the public at large.   
   Birtwistle, much honored in his native land,  is too little known here.  Betty Freeman commissioned an excellent Piano Concerto which Uchida played at the Philharmonic.  and Manny Ax played a big piece at a Monday Evening Concert  last season. Milton Babbitt was an early influence, and Pierrot Lunaire caused him to think a lot about theatrical pieces in small shapes growing outward into  deceptive complexity. His Punch and Judy is a case in point; it is anything but a kiddie show. The Minotaur is one of several legend operas; it brings Theseus and Ariadne to the Minotaur’s labyrinth in Crete,  where the beast is eventually slain, but not before many Innocents are made to lie in their own blood, while the cohorts of the Beast devour their entrails. The music is fully up to this: dark, densely contrapuntal, not eimmediately congenial but powerful. It is at all times gripping, relevant to the violence and to the dark, poignant visions of Ariadne as well. The libretto is by David Harsent, wise and brilliantly metaphoric. Reading it, reflecting on what our local company considered a well-balanced season (the one just ended with Tosca and La Rondine), the only somewhat more rewarding one to come, or even the occasional letter to home from Mark Swed when traveling, I wonder if the very word “opera” shouldn’t perhaps be partitioned into several definitions.

MAGDA DOES JOAN: “La Rondine” is with us again,  Puccini’s elegant snore, with Marta Domingo’s tinkerings in place to confuse what is already inadequate in the dramatic resolution and with Michael Scott’s Coney Island Merry-Go-Round of an Act-Two stage set to cheapen and vulgarize even further what is already wrong-headed and simply clumsy in Signora Domingo’s “conception and direction.” Speculations, however cynical,  as to why impresario Plácido tosses this directorial bone to his wife from time to time don’t work this time, since Plácido is also in town, conducting the last few performances of “Tosca.”  
  Marta’s most blatant tinkering is to allow her heroine — mere moments after her Ruggero, having discovered the seedy details of her past, throws a hissy fit  of the sort that any exuberant loverboy  might throw from time to time and recover from an hour later – to hook onto a passing tsunami and disappear,  Joan Crawford style, into the billowing wave. The dramatic timing is completely wrong; a suicide scene in any other Puccini opera – “Madama Butterfly” for one – takes up a fair proportion of the act; this one goes wham-o, with music Marta has dug up from somewhere. Granted, the opera’s ending as  composed (and laboriously revised) by Puccini is hardly thrilling: the heroine  Magda bathed in melancholy resignation; at least the timing is right. Marta Domingo’s evasive justification for the suicide, as printed in the program, is so much baloney. And that placid expanse of ocean in Michael Scott’s set design looks as capable of churning up a tsunami as my backyard fishpond.
  Is the current baggage at the Chandler Pavilion worth all this ink, or that $235 top ticket? No, not really. Patricia Racette is an okay hard-boiled heroine for contemporary opera, and a responsive Butterfly in Robert Wilson’s hands; here she’s a stick with a few pretty top notes. Marcus Haddock, the Ruggero here in 2000 and again now, looks a convincing goofy kid from the provinces and has a voice best described as utilitarian. [He’s also the Rodolfo in a new Telarc CD of “La Bohème,” conducted by Robert Spano, if anyone cares.] On the podium, but scarcely into the score, is a certain Keri-Lynn Wilson. She is the current spouse of Peter Gelb, who heads the Metropolitan Opera, a fact not mentioned in the program after a vita of her conducting history that includes practically every opera ever composed. There’s a lot to be said for family ties.
FANTASTIC! Gustavo Dudamel’s performance, with the Philharmonic, of Berlioz’ “Fantastic” Symphony can now be had on a download via iTunes, five “songs” (as they insist on calling every item) at 99 cents per. This isn’t merely a brash kid making everything louder and faster than the next guy’s performance; it is a deep and penetrating study of Berlioz’s amazing rewrite of the whole language of the orchestra: the way, for example, he will take a solo instrument from the ensemble to highlight just the end of a phrase to give it a special radiance.
   Don’t just listen to the spectacular sound-effects in the “March to the Scaffold”or the “Witches’ Sabbath,” where Dudamel carves fabulous sound-sculptures out of the massive percussion leading up to the strokes on the enormous bell. Listen also to the marvelous delicacy in the scoring for harps in the Ballroom Scene, which I’ve never heard so beautifully designed. This was Berlioz at 26, and now it’s Dudamel at the same age; there’s something to be said for that. Let’s see:Beethoven at 26, Mozart, Bach…there’s lots of good music there! The recording captures a fair amount of the sound of that performance in this great hall; at $4.95 it’s sinful not to have it.
BARGAINS  As with any enterprise on the brink of obsolescence, the record biz seems to be cleaning off its shelves on the cheap, and we the customers stand to benefit. A nice box from Teldec – do not confuse with Telarc, which I often do – came to the doorstep yesterday: all seven Prokofiev symphonies on four disks, conducted by Slava, a “Puccini Experience” (blah) on two disks, and, best of all, the complete Teldec Ligeti series, five disks. The price per disk: seven bucks, half the original asking.    
   The Ligeti series, you remember, was originally begun on Sony; Esa-Pekka was involved, and the series was underwritten by a financier Vincent Meyer. If you read the appendix in Paul Griffiths’ valuable Ligeti biography you’ll see the disk numbers assigned to the complete Sony series. It was only partially fulfilled, however; Ligeti  had wanted the Los Angeles Philharmonic involved; Sony had only come up with British bands of lesser quality. Meyer ended up in prison on a child-rape case. 
  Then Telarc undertook to complete the series, with the Berlin Philharmonic, the rising young British conductor Jonathan Nott, Reinbert de Leeuw and his Schoenberg Ensemble – all the right people. Between these five disks and the twelve on Sony, Ligeti’s heritage is well preserved. The Teldec set includes such gorgeous pieces as “Clocks and Clouds” (my favorite) and a performance of the Requiem  under Jonathan Nott almost as fine, as eerily bone-shaking, as the one Esa-Pekka led here not so long ago. Nothing can match that.
BOB: New York Magazine began in April, 1968, the phoenix risen from the ashes of the Herald-Tribune. By September of that year we  had acquired enough self-confidence (and subscribers) to start acquiring a style of our own, and, occasionally, even acting cute. At the start of the music season I composed some poetry – or, rather, some rhyming couplets in arrogant doggerel –  to hail the occasion. Maybe I’ll run them here some week when I’ve run out of real material, maybe I won’t. Bob Grossman was one of our best illustrators, and he did this one for my page of verse, with Lennie perched on the typewriter and  with teeth I no longer own. I wrote Bob recently asking how much he would charge if I used this cartoon for my blog, and he instead made me this new color version, free. Nice guy. bob@robertgrossman.com

THE LATEST FROM OJAI: I’m writing this a few hours after one of the best Ojai Festival concerts ever, the best kind of program for that special place. It began with high-class noise: Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music,” his early (1972) essay in pure rhythm, in an “original cast” performance: Steve and Russ Hartenberger. Music director David Robertson had interceded at the start, asking the crowd to regard the entire  program as a single event, not applauding between pieces, but this clap-along piece was irresistible. Then came the amazing Eric Huebner, the new superstar of this year’s Festival’s, in two of Ligeti’s Piano Etudes, fabulously difficult peces with  their world of sound commentary wound into their complex piano magic, leading as if logically into the music that might have begun it all, the 1931 “Ionisation” of Edgard Varese for percussion ensemble, which drew the rest of the morning’s percussion contingent into the program: the veteran Nexus (the outgrowth of Steve’s original Players) plus the new So Percussion. And that was only the first half. 
    Make no mistake; this was the year of the big Steve Reich immersion at Ojai, and the catchphrase “America’s Greatest” resounded far and wide. I wasn’t so sure about all that; I find the “great” Steve less to my taste than the “fun” Steve, so I left before “Tehillim,” the final event. Three out of eight programs were all or largely Steve; midway, moreover,  in a Q&A session an audience in a warm church found itself trapped for nearly half-an-hour of recorded “great” Steve. The music of Steve’s that I wanted to go out on came on the second half of that Sunday-morning concert: “Drumming,” 75 minutes of a young (35)  man’s exhilarating arrogance that set music onto a magical pathway.  I’ll donate 75 minutes of my lifetime to that piece anytime. At Ojai furthermore, it got the all-star treatment: Nexus and So Percussion.
    Some other Ojai choices were somewhat more puzzling; Whatever music director David Robertson had in mind with a revival of the Charlie Chaplin “Modern Times,” it didn’t work. A movie screen in that outdoor setting, where half the crowd sits on the lawn behind the seats (a mini-Tanglewood) and thus must stand to see the film is one poor choice; the screen hanging over the front row of seats, without enough extra places to reseat those people from down front, is another. If the Festival wants to show something rare and wonderful, let it be at 11 p.m. in the Arts Center; this wasted a precious Ojai Festival evening. But so did the rest of the music that evening, the trashy Antheil “Jazz” Symphony and the unspeakable (if well-named) “Grand Masturbador.”   
  Saturday night’s program, usually a big audience draw, proved even more puzzling this time around. Robertson’s choices consisted of two large-scale monodramas for woman’s voice: one by Philippe Manoury, a sometime Boulez protégé, for soprano – delivering in French, a fevered, erotic text for which no printed or supertitled information was provided — and electronics (nothing but, empty stage plus light show); the other an equally fevered accounting (but at least in English) as Cassandra relives her altogether messy life in Troy leading up to the moment of her murder, supported by orchestral music of one Michael Jarrell, grinding, grating but at least something to look at on stage. No program info in Mr. Jarrell; Wikipedia has him as a Swiss composer, born in 1958, and “a fascinating creature.” Barbara Sukowa, the great German actress who once delivered a stunning “Pierrot Lunaire” at LACMA, spoke the Cassandra; Juliana Snapper  delivered the Manoury, mostly at a howl.  
   Wonderful solos: Saturday morning there was Dawn Upshaw, singing the birds down from their heavens, and gift-wrapping everything from Stephen Foster to Bill Bolcom to Kurt Weill to a divine Schubert encore that seemed to encapsulate everything about the place. Indoors at the Arts Center, young Huebner honored the centenarian Elliott Carter with his mysterious, piano-filling “Night Fantasies” and, with the veteran Erika Duke, the old timer’s journeyman Cello Sonata.  Well, he had to start somewhere.

WHERE SOMETIMES IS HEARD A DISCOURAGING WORD: The trials of KCSN, the plucky, valuable station attached but somewhat dangling at Cal State Northridge, continue. This letter was recently sent to all listeners complaining that the station had abandoned its fund-raising activities:

Dear KCSN Listener:

Thank you for expressing your interest in the current and future
direction of KCSN, an important part of the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communications and a valuable instrument of service to the broader community.

As you perhaps are aware, during the past 18 months the University has been reviewing and evaluating the programmatic mission and supporting technical structure of the radio station.

While the station has some passionate listeners like you, the audience is currently so small that the station no longer qualifies for Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding. Historically, little money has been raised during the pledge drives to support the operating budget of the station.  This disconnection between the  station and the larger listening audience both on- and off-campus has lead us to  reflect on the future of KCSN. The University subsidizes the station significantly, and the current state budget environment has required us to prudently avoid entering into a pledge drive that implies programmatic promises that are not sustainable into the future.

Again, we are grateful for your support of the current format of KCSN and look forward to corresponding with you further following the completion of our review and evaluation process.

Sincerely,

Robert Bucker

Further news, considering that the station gains considerable prestige from its interviews with local composers and other arts personalities, who are willing to  drive to its Northridge studio, is this from someone else at CSUN with similar P-R skills:

“I’m writing on behalf of Martin Perlich to provide you with important updated parking information for guests that come to the KCSN Radio. Unfortunately, KCSN is no longer able to provide parking passes. Guests will either need to park on the street or purchase a parking pass as they enter the parking structure.”

(Proceeds from which, one presumes, will go to the school’s new performing-arts center.):

OKAY, BACK TO THE REAL WORLD:

Poking around in my Archives I found this old piece, which I rather like: a memoir of a Beethoven orgy by John Eliot Gardiner (now “Sir”) and his youthful orchestra to the “old” Segerstrom Hall back in 1999. O happy time: you could do a week of commuting to Orange County without the cost of gas entering your mind; only Beethoven.

    An all-in-one festival of the Beethoven Nine is one of music’s can’t-lose propositions. The size is right: five concerts of leisurely length, with room here and there for an overture or two. The music, needless to say, is also right: “the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.” wrote E. M. Forster. 
Beethoven is “of all composers,” a wise critic once wrote, “the one who most insistently tells us that we cannot do without him.” The sublime efficiency of the hype machine – now well into its second century – further guarantees sellout crowds. They mustered last week at Orange County 3000-seat barn of a Performing Arts Center for the sublime Nine in the first-ever California visit by John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, brought in for an exclusive American stint by the Orange County Philharmonic Society. The parlay of Beethoven the genius and Beethoven the public-relations icon – however variable the performances themselves — made for an irresistible force.
         Gardiner himself, now 56, is an important part of that parlay; so is his mostly-youthful orchestra founded in 1990,  with its recorded legacy (including the Nine) well-received and voluminous. Part of that generation of Brits whose work purports to reconstruct the music of past masters as the masters themselves had heard it – strings of gut rather than steel, woodwinds actually made of wood, valveless horns and trumpets that invoke the twin gods of music and plumbing – Gardiner has been more successful than some colleagues in folding the sounds of his historically-informed orchestra into a more modern need for the bone-rattling and the whizbang. It cannot be mere coincidence that the hottest tickets around town last week afforded admission to battlefields: the expanse of the “Star Wars” landscape or the no-less-fantastic realm as an intruding C-sharp in the “Eroica” marks the invention of modern music for all time. 
            It was the struggle-‘n’-strife in this music that brought out the best in Gardiner’s week of performances: the brutal upheaval in the “Eroica’s” first movement that hurtles into vastly “wrong” keys; the blaze in the brass that bursts upon the spook-ridden scherzo in the Fifth; the manic rhythmic obsessions throughout the Seventh. The relatively small size of the orchestra (60 or so) and the silken clarity of old or quasi-old fiddles, beautifully broke apart the music’s complexity; rare indeed, the listener who found nothing new in Gardiner’s splendidly thought-out readings. 
            There were other moments not so fine. Whatever Beethoven’s own (and often challenged) tempo indications, it is neither possible nor worth the effort to breed certain expectations out of an audience: the chilling outcry of grief in the “Eroica’s” Funeral March, the celestial soft harmonies in the slow movement of the Ninth. These moments, and others of quieter, more mystery-laden lyricism in the Fourth and Sixth, brought out lesser insights on Gardiner’s part – and a surprisingly high quotient of instrumental bloops in the winds and brass as well. 
             At the end, the Ninth drew a standing, stomping, cheering 15-minute ovation. The miracle of Beethoven – one of them, at any rate – is the variety of sheer narrative momentum in each of the symphonies, each different, each leading to terminal exhilaration. Hearing the Nine as a unit – in a single sitting, you might say –  produces another kind of momentum, from the Haydnesque trickery of the first two symphonies to the Ninth’s ultimate triumph – marvelously voiced, by the way, by Gardiner’s own small Monteverdi Choir.  Great music never loses its power to surprise, to reveal something you never noticed before. The week of supremely familiar Beethoven became an exercise in constant surprise. – Alan Rich

BEST OF ALL…I seriously doubt if any place on earth could provide a more intellectually stimulating and , ultimately satisfying musical  week  than the one we’ve just had here in Los Angeles and its environs. It began out on the edge, with Jacaranda in Santa Monica; it ended with Esa-Pekka’s new Piano Concerto downtown. Midway came Thomas Adès, whose young genius exalts and disturbs us as any true genius should.
Add a couple of days to that week, to allow for Adès’s  earlier program, chamber music to proclaim his private passion for the music of Couperin  (François “le Grand”, not  Louis or the eight other Couperins listed in Grove , although the program never made that clear). A delight in Couperin’s music is not difficult to fathom; it is the passion for the perfect, the exquisite, the unfettered fanciful , the perfect musicalizing of the spirit of an era. Play Couperin at a keyboard, even as poorly as I once did, and you  are transformed. The inventor of that marvelous  Apotheosis of Lully that Adès played with a couple of Philharmonic musicians, a kind of wet dream around the composer Lully returning to life in grand style, is the kind of madman-genius who reaches across centuries and shakes hands with the composer of Powder Her Face.
    A week later Adès had a “Green Umbrella” to himself, with some music we’d heard here before and some we hadn’t. Arcadiana and Living Toys are early works: the one serene and packed with small imaginative darts, the other rather mad, the work perhaps of someone who might later become seduced by Couperin.  The splendid  Calder Quartet was on hand for Arcadiana, in a beautifully nuanced performance. The new work was In Seven Days  a visual on six screens created by Tom’s partner Tal Rosner to a new piano concerto with Nicolas Hodges the soloist, the whole package brought over from its premiere at London’s South Bank. The title refers, of course, to the Creation, and I suppose you could say that the entire work was some sort of intelligent design. I found it mostly disappointing: some attractive joining of music and watery flow for the start and the end, the rest mostly glorified screen-savers set to less than memorable music. Genius is entitled to its stumbles, but reports from Britain had prepared me for a major  multimedia  experience  and this did not happen.
 
   ON THE EDGE Then to Jacaranda: its fifth season finale in Santa Monica’s attractive First Presbterian, where it will return after opening next season at The Broad Stage a mere nine blocks inland; the midpoint in its wonderfully imaginative celebration of the Messiaen centennial by recreating the whole musical  world around that seminal composer.  Things still in my head from this music-laden event : Debussy’s Sacred and Profane Dances in their original setting for harp (Maria Casale) and five strings, an explosion of rich, lush harmony; the glorious racket of birdsong transformed in Messiaen’s Colors of the Celestial City  with Gloria Cheng, our local treasure, at the piano, and – music remarkable and most unfamiliar, Daniel-Lesur’s Song of Songs for chorus a cappella, the harvest  of darkest, ripest fruit set to music, sung by a small chorus under Grant Gershon to end the season not with a bang but a whisper. 
 
   MASTERPIECE Salonen’s Piano Concerto should be well-known by now, downloads  of the New York broadcast have been circulating. It’s not just balderdash, however, to imagine another dimension to the work from hearing it at Disney – where, by the way, it is also being recorded this weekend, by DG, along with the rest of this remarkable if curious program. Salonen has spent 16 years working in Disney Hall; it’s impossible not to recognize the sound of that place, deeply embedded in his musical imagery wherever his writing desk may be located.
  The Concerto is a great work. It flings free from bygone imagery even while its opening gambit – the solo breaking loose from the orchestra, struggling upward, is a clear image of the start of the Second Brahms. Piano and orchestra struggle that way on many occasions, usually along more original patterns. Maybe it takes a non-pianist to write for the instrument as forcefully as Salonen does in the second-movement cadenza; it’s a strange, wonderful moment. The endings are all surprises; in retrospect, they are all just right. Aside from the moments when Mr. Brahms pokes in his head – meaning no harm – this is firm, forthright, original music. Even though I own the music – in my computer, on a disc – I’m going twice this weekend.
    Its program-mates are a mixed gathering. So much do I love Stravinsky’s Les Noces, with its wonderful rough edges and its raw, red earthiness, that I can welcome Steve Stucky’s orchestral transliteration of its instrumental substance if it makes the music more often accessible; four pianos can be a tall order. The transcription is well done, and the sounds are still edgy and percussive and the music curdled gorgeously under Salonen’s  leadership. Colin Matthews’ orchestration of four Debussy’s Piano Préludes are, on the other hand, shameful. I won’t write about them because I don’t want to make myself remember them.
 
   HARRY In September, 1953, I returned from my European year and resumed studies at U.C. Berkeley. The phone rang; it was KPFA. There had been a palace revolt  (one of many); could I hurry on down and become music director?  I filled in the time nicely: a Beethoven symphony here, a Brahms there. Came November  19, and I found myself confronted with a previous commitment  the station had made, beyond comprehension. Some wild-eyed eccentric named Harry Partch, with a collection of musical instruments just in from some other planet, was giving a concert  at International House which KPFA had promised to broadcast live. We ended up running cable down Bancroft Way, a mile at least. Somehow, the damn thing got on the air; don’t ask me how. That was the first-ever complete live performance of Harry’s Plectra and Percussion Dances. The second-ever took place at REDCAT this weekend.
     In the intervening 55 years the world and I have matured to the point where we now understand and deserve Harry Partch. The original instruments have gone into hiding in a refuge in exotic New Jersey, but the heroic John Schneider of KPFK has undertaken to have them copied, or cloned if you will, and they made for a gorgeous interplanetary display on the REDCAT stage. I only missed the huge expanse of the original  glass cloud-chamber bowls; the new ones looked – well – dainty. But a handsome aggregation of CalArts people were on hand to wrest the Partch sound ideal from these splendid toys. Someone needs to make  a DVD,
      Harry’s music? It is not, let’s face it, much. No rhythm beyond a basic pulse, nothing that could pass for melody, just that weird (and sometimes wonderful) pulsation and those oddball harmonies that lead nowhere most charmingly. That is apparently enough to satisfy the Harry-manes, who are numerous and who stem from all the ages,  to sell out the hall – twice this weekend . The sheer  daring  of the man abides, and the devotion of Schneider in bringing this all about—well, it borders on the saintly. . Hail to them all  – and to the ensemble of mostly CalArts folk past and present,, who keep  the memory of Harry alive ,and, perhaps, his music as well.
 
  BLOG It has gotten so that I can’t walk down my street, or into my local Trader Joe’s, or the Disney Hall lobby, without being besieged with questions about my blog and/or website-to-be, I’ll tell you what I know, what isn’t much. Marvelous friends have taken  care of the setting-up, so all I have to do is to pour my weekly wisdom into some mysterious electronic hole – which is what I always do – and it comes out in a neat format, The people who run the Ojai Festival are throwing a Bloggers’ Party next Thursday, and I’m supposed to be some kind of guest-of-honor. You’ll be at the Festival anyway, won’t you, so look in.
 
     Anyhow, starting next weekend, you find me by logging on to soiveheard.com  and going through a painless registration process where you choose your own password, etc. If there’s a problem, just let me know at alanrich1@mac.com and I’ll get Mark or Vanessa or Adam to fix it. Meanwhile, as  I get familiar with the thing, I expect to have all kinds of fun with the blog. I have a huge trove of archive material, including all my Herald-Tribune scrapbooks, and I’ve just learned how to operate my scanner.
 
 Stay tuned.
 
ADDENDUM: Sunday’s concert drew a super-large crowd, as expected,  Steve Stucky, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Yefim Bronfman waxed garrulous, charming and informative  on the matter of the Piano Concerto at the pre-concert “UpBeat Live,” which had the ushering staff working hard and in vain, trying to shoo away  the overflow crowd. The Disney Hall management might consider some training in tactful behavior, on the part of its young employees toward ticket-holders who might have paid up to $150  to get  in; words like “please” were in short supply. 
 
    Stucky’s reworking of Stravinsky’s Les Noces was  marvelous to hear again; fortunately it will be included on the DG disc along with the Piano Concerto and the Matthews orchestration of the Debussy Préludes (which is a waste of time and space). The Concerto works its magic. There is a warm and lovely place:  in the slow movement, two horns interweave to carry a simple, elegant melody over a glistening fabric of string tone, and then the movement whispers to its close. Play this for people who tell you that composers today have lost the power to write beautiful music.
 
     Play it for the letter-writers in Atlanta, the people who wrote to today’s L.A. Times because Mark Swed had stepped on their fair city and its passion for musical Cream-of-Wheat, nurtured by Robert Spano, who leads that city’s Symphony (of frequent Grammy-winning fame). Let me stick a finger into this bowl of porridge if I may. A couple of months ago I got a call from London’s Gramophone,  a publication I have revered from the day I acquired my first album of 78s (Grieg’s Piano Concerto,  if you care).  Wow! They wanted me to do a Cover Story, and on a topic I knew something about: new music, who were the great composers. I was presented with the list of composers who had already been photographed to go with my story. Steve Reich,  Osvaldo Golijov,  John Adams, Tom Adès  AND Jennifer Higdon, Belle of Atlanta. There’s Atlanta for you: bad composers,     great  P-R. The magazine is out, by the way, the June issue. Every man has his price. I’m in   the July,issue,  too.