Posted on December 30, 2011 at 2:50 am by Robert Levine
in General |

In what may be the last NLRB decision in a long time, a few days ago the Board ruled that musicians in several per-service orchestras were employees and not independent contractors, and thus could force their employer to recognize their union as bargaining agent:

The National Labor Relations Board has found that musicians playing for symphony orchestras in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Texas are employees, not independent contractors, and therefore are eligible to vote on whether they want union representation.

In a 2-to-1 decision in Lancaster Symphony Orchestra, issued Dec. 27, the Board reversed the Regional Director’s decision to dismiss an election petition and sent the case back to the region for further action.

In unpublished decisions issued the following day, citing Lancaster, the Board also found that musicians at the Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra and Plano Symphony Orchestra are employees.

In Lancaster, the Board examined numerous factors and found they weighed heavily in favor of employee status. For instance, although musicians have some control over their work by choosing whether or not to bid on programs, “once they are selected to work in relation to a particular program, the musicians’ control over their work time ends.” The Board noted that orchestra management sets work hours, payment schedules, dress codes and standards for behavior, among other things. The Board also found that the musicians do not enjoy entrepreneurial opportunity or suffer risk because their fees are set and cannot be negotiated.

Chairman Mark Gaston Pearce and Member Craig Becker voted to approve the decisions. In his dissent in Lancaster, applying the same multi-factor analysis as the majority, Member Brian Hayes found the factors to weigh strongly in favor of finding the musicians to be independent contractors. Pertinently, as to the right of control factor, Member Hayes argued that, under Board precedent, the relevant question is “whether the musicians retain discretion to accept or decline to work with the employer and to play elsewhere,” and concluded that, in this case, they do. In addition, he found that the musicians’ freedom to take as many or as few jobs as desired and to work for various employers demonstrated their entrepreneurial opportunity for gain.

Why “the last decision” for a long time? Because one of the three members (two seats are vacant) is leaving the Board because his appointment was a recess appointment, made after Republicans in the Senate threatened to filibuster his nomination. And, as the Supreme Court has decided that the Board needs three members for a quorum, and as Republicans have threatened to filibuster any more appointments by President Obama, and as the House is refusing to allow the Senate to recess in order to deny Obama any opportunity to make recess appointments, it appears the NLRB will be unable to make any decisions during 2012, and perhaps beyond.

So we should be glad they made this one. It’s worth reading in full. Also worth reading in full is the dissent by Brian Hayes, the one Republican member of the Board. Some of the logic of his dissent (included in the document linked to above) would apply as well to full-time orchestra musicians as it does to per-service workers:

Looking beyond the musicians’ control over where, when, and for whom they will work, I disagree with my colleagues’ conclusion that the musicians’ control over their work ends once they decide to perform with the Symphony. To be sure, at that point, the Symphony controls the conduct of the rehearsals and performances, as well as oversees certain artistic aspects of a performance. But, practically speaking, work by creative profession independent contractors is often performed to the specifications and on the timetable of the hiring party, but that structure does not convert an independent contractor to an employee. See Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, 490 U.S. 730, 750–751 (1989) (Court found a sculptor to be an independent contractor even though the nonprofit association that hired him defined the scene to be sculpted and specified the details of the sculpture’s appearance, including its scale and the materials to be used); and Radio City Music Hall Corp. v. U.S., 135 F.2d 715, 717– 718 (2d Cir. 1943) (court found performers to be independent contractors even where the producer controlled the timing and conduct of rehearsals and directed the performers to “weld” together the performance). This is particularly true where, as here, the employer’s artistic control and direction is primarily related to the end product, i.e., the sound and look of the symphony as a whole, not the manner in which the individual musicians providing their services prepare for and perform the work…Thus, based on the above discussion of the right of control factor, I would find that the record evidence weighs in favor of finding the musicians to be independent contractors.

Mr. Hayes has clearly never worked for a conductor.

We tend to assume that the right to organize and bargain collectively is a settled matter in our business. But maybe it’s not. Hayes’ dissent (and, if you’re wondering, Hayes was appointed by a Democratic president, albeit as part of a package of three nominations) could very well have become Board doctrine if the last election had turned out differently.

Rights are only rights because people in the past, near and distant, demanded them and fought for them. That’s just as true of the right to organize as it is of the right to criticize the government, the right to own property, or the right to worship the deity of your choosing. As Frederick Douglass so memorably wrote:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

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Posted on December 28, 2011 at 2:20 am by Robert Levine
in General |

…or one of them at least – is what conductors actually do. I thought it was all about the hair; Justin Davidson thinks it’s more than that:

“Knowing the score”—the expression implies mastery, but it doesn’t suggest the sustained and solitary study that’s required to achieve it. There are a few miles of roadway that I have driven often enough to navigate them faultlessly in my mind: I know every pothole, every deer crossing. A conductor needs similarly detailed recall of an enormous musical terrain. In the weeks I spend fussing over just my six minutes of Mozart, Gilbert conducts Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande; symphonies by Mahler, Brahms, Dvorák, and Beethoven; and assorted pieces by Webern, Bruch, Berg, Bach, Corigliano, Dutilleux, Haydn, Sibelius, Wagner, Janácek, and Mozart—dozens of hours, millions of notes, pieces he has performed for years and pieces he’s never seen before. During one session, Gilbert demonstrates for a percussionist how to get the right sound on the triangle, corrects a bowing in the violin part, sings the bassoon line, and points out a subtle harmonic shift—all without glancing at the score. “I haven’t looked at this piece in five years,” he says, “but it’s still in there somewhere.” If the entire symphonic tradition were incinerated, a team of conductors could write it all out again.

I don’t think it’s that. Memorizing a score (which very few conductors do, at least in the sense of being able to write it all out from memory) has little to do with getting an orchestra through a score, much less making music out of it.

As for that second measure, (Alan) Gilbert politely deems my elaborate two-handed solution too fancy. “Just beat clearly and they’ll take care of it,” he advises.

That’s a useful though not universal commandment: Do Less. The Maestro Paradox leaves insecure conductors constantly justifying their presence: They gesticulate, point, urge, and cajole, like a castaway signaling a distant ship…

One day, there’s a heightened buzz in the rehearsal room: Bernard Haitink, the great Dutch conductor, is paying a visit. In the middle of Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture, Haitink politely taps an overzealous student on the shoulder and borrows his baton. Then he starts the piece again, doing almost nothing but flicking the stick’s tip millimetrically. The effect is of hushed delight, until his left hand describes a single upward sweep, releasing a ferocious forte. Haitink smiles and returns the baton. “The musicians are very busy with playing,” he says. “You should not distract them!”

That’s more like it. Obviously part of conducting is the visual bit. That doesn’t mean that everything needs to be signaled.

In Italian, the word maestro also means teacher. As we power toward the final cadence and I exchange glance after glance with the young musicians, it occurs to me that they are bombarding me with unspoken questions and it’s my job to convey answers. That’s what a conductor does: mold an interpretation by filtering the thousands of decisions packed into every minute of symphonic music. The clarinetist inclined to add a little gleam to a brief solo by slowing down slightly, the tuba player preparing for a fortissimo blast after twenty minutes of nothing—each will look to the podium for a split-second shot of guidance, and the conductor who meets those fleeting inquiries with clarity and assurance will get a more nuanced performance. My efforts haven’t made me a good conductor, or even a mediocre one, but they have given me the glimmerings of competence—an intoxicating taste of what it might feel like to realize the fantasy of my boom-box days.

That’s getting warm, I think. But I keep coming back to what the great French conductor Pierre Monteux once told a student. “Conducting is like riding a horse,” he said (or words to that effect): “most of the time, the horse is fine without your help. You’ve got to know when the other times are.”

Of course, all of that focuses on the sexy part of the job – the bits where the tossed hair gets noticed. Most of the real work of a conductor is what, in the real world, is known as “coaching.” We call it rehearsing, but it’s much the same. Very few conductors do it well. Sadly, even fewer both rehearse and conduct well. And, of those few, fewer still have much to say musically.

If we have structural deficits in our field, that one might be the biggest.

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Posted on December 22, 2011 at 1:00 pm by Ramon Ricker
in Being a Professional, gigs |

At the end of this blog is a letter to the editor that was published in the December 13 Louisville 
Courier-Journal. In it the writer laments the absence of an orchestra at this year’s Nutcracker performance. The tone of her letter is typical of what I had read in the past when ballets have opted to use recorded music instead of live. The experience just isn’t the same.

Coincidentally, during the same time period I was playing the national touring company production of the Broadway show, Billy Elliot. The basic instrumentation (not accounting for doubles) was conductor/keys 1, keys 2, guitar, bass, drums, horn, trumpet, reed 1 and reed 2.  In this particular production only the conductor/keys 1, keys 2, guitar and bass were in the pit. The four “horns” were in a separate, very large, room behind the pit. Our space was delineated by curtains on pipes. We had our “clubhouse.”

Our Clubhouse

The drum set was also in this large room but he had a special little glass “house” which was about 20 feet from us. We all had our personal video monitors, which broadcast the conductor, and a mixing board that we configured in any way we wanted.

It seems that this set-up was chosen to better control the sound.  The instruments that were in the pit we all electronic, and their sound went directly into the house sound system. Therefore no sound actually emanated from the pit. As they explained to us, if the acoustic instruments were in the pit, they would be mic’d, but some acoustic sound would naturally be present. The overall sound experience for the audience wouldn’t be as good, since the sound engineer would not be able to totally control the mix. The orchestra or parts of it in a remote location is an option that has been used for several years now by Broadway shows.

Sorry for the long-winded set-up just to get to the point of this blog.  .  .  and it’s not even going to be about electronics taking over the music world.

My point is that the four “horns” didn’t feel part of a performance. Don’t get me wrong. I was happy to have the gig, and the four of us in our little clubhouse did form a bond over the two weeks. We had a good time and played well, but even though the pay was very good, it was somehow unsatisfying. We were literally “phoning our parts in.” We came to the theatre in street clothes. Sat down, did our thing and went home. It was like a recording session, but with no second takes. During the bows the conductor would motion to the four players in the pit. We wondered if the audience asked themselves, “where are the drums?” What concerned me was that the audience didn’t see half of the pit band, and had no inkling that we were even there.

I began to think that by playing our parts in a remote location, our importance to the overall show experience was devalued. The sounds that came from our instruments were anonymous. For all the audience knew, we could have been a recording.

My Musical World for Two Weeks

Then I read the letter to the editor that is at the end of this post.

In a way, what we were doing is a step in a progression to using total pre-recorded music. A musical experience is always better in a live situation. I don’t think any of us has given our favorite CD a round of applause upon its completion. The feelings the writer to the Louisville newspaper expressed, were similar to what we felt. Live is definitely better.

The following letter is from a reader and was published in the Louisville
Courier-Journal on December 13, 2011.

 A Tradition Muted



What a very sad Christmas story tonight. Like so many years prior, my family
was very excited to attend the preview performance of “The Nutcracker”
Friday evening. The energy and richness of years past was replaced by a more
hollow experience.

Gone is the pre-curtain excitement and anticipation that mounts as the
musicians tune their instruments. Gone are the shadows of light and movement
as the musicians lead the way for the dancers. Gone are the lingering notes
that transition one scene to the other with the tenderness of a conductor’s
lead.

I had no idea how much the emptiness of the orchestra pit would impact the
experience, especially from the balcony. I was so distracted by the vacant
lifelessness of the pit, like a toothless mouth, the transitions of music to
OFF, the frequent speaker feedback which plagued the second half of the show
(my heart breaks for these technicians trying to replicate an orchestra). I
felt so sad for these dancers who have invested their bodies, souls and
lifetime of work into the thrill of performing live, and they now dance to
canned music with feedback (hopefully resolved after the preview).

Should we prepare for an eventual recording of the dancers on stage, too, as
the quality of the ballet experience becomes additional carnage? We could
run a “Nutcracker” recording from years past and save the trouble of
performing it live. Is anyone going to take the lead and figure out how to
undo this orchestra train wreck?

This was my first experience of the great loss for our city and of all of
the artists, technicians and patrons enduring the consequences. Bah, humbug!

KRISTIN CRINOT

Louisville

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Posted on December 20, 2011 at 2:54 pm by James Undercofler
in main |

As I contemplate the new year, 2012, these are my professional resolutions. I will: 1. Get involved politically, making donations as I can to the political candidates I support. Too often I've promised to do this, but haven't. This year, as it appears to me more important than ever to the arts and culture sector, I will. 2. Strongly advise my friends and clients who run, or who participate in running arts and culture organizations that the amount and nature of contributed revenue is changed forever (or at least for the next 7-10 years); and that they need to reimagine and reconstruct their business models. Yes, this have been known and advised for a while now, but there's not much evidence to support any systemic change taking place, hence the emphasis. 3. Find substantive ways to support arts education in the public schools. I've carped about this one long enough (my whole professional career?), and it's way past time I did something real about it (other than carping). The link between the vitality of arts education in the public schools and the vibrancy of professional arts activity is a given. Without one, the other noticeably suffers. 4. Work to provide more academic substance to the burgeoning field of arts entrepreneurship (the field where I'm most active). The term arts entrepreneurship is being used to mean so many different things that I feel responsible to assist in giving it a clear definition. 5. An old saw: -- spend more time in other arts areas. In an earlier professional life, when in Minnesota, whenever I was confronted or challenged by a particularly difficult-to-solve problem, I visited the Walker Art Center, and somehow, magically, new solutions, new ideas emerged. I need to find a way to do this in Philadelphia and Ithaca. 6. Further support Alt-Classical performers and ensembles. I'm on the board of Alarm Will Sound, a remarkable group of adventuresome and likeable young musicians, but this is not enough. 7. Stay close to mission. The arts are about conveying thoughts, feelings, and emotions, about communicating complex intellectual constructions. That the arts contribute to economic and community development is great, but I must not forget that the elevation of the human spirit and the transformation of society are our central goals. No comments

Posted on December 16, 2011 at 1:18 pm by Robert Levine
in General |

There was a story the other day on our local public radio story that got me thinking about one of the key differences between choirs and orchestras: their relationship to the beat:

We revisit our conversation with classical choral composer Eric Whitacre, who has just been nominated for a Grammy for his latest CD “Light & Gold.” But he’s also known for his “virtual choirs.”

Here’s how it works: Singers around the world take video of themselves, upload them onto YouTube, and assembled into one performance. The most recent choir involved 2052 people performing Eric Whitacre’s “Sleep”.

As best I can figure from the video below, he conducts on the video, people record themselves singing to his conducting and upload the result, and he blends it all together in software.

I can’t imagine this working with an orchestra. But why not? I suspect the reasons are the same as the reasons choir conductors and orchestras tend to have trouble together; choirs and orchestras react very differently to conductors.

The most common complaint I’ve heard from choral conductors is that the orchestra isn’t with their beat, while orchestra musicians tend to feel that choral conductors are always slowing down to match their beat to what they’re hearing. I suspect all of these are symptoms of the fundamental problem, which is that choral singers follow the conductor while orchestra musicians follow each other following the conductor (this is also the reason why one of the highest compliments an orchestra musician can pay a conductor is that he/she “stays out of the way”: once a pulse is established, a conductor should simply let the musicians follow the pulse and not risk confusing the orchestra by also doing anything that looks like a pulse).

Choruses seem much more dependent on conductors than do orchestras, while at the same time less reliant on a standardized conducting “language.” Perhaps this is a function of the structural relationship between a chorus and its director being more like student and teacher than is the usual relationship between a professional orchestra and those standing in front of it, notwithstanding the “Maestro” honorific (which would probably choke most musicians if they didn’t subconsciously avoid the translation of the term).

Of course there was a YouTube orchestra. But it didn’t occur to anyone involved to use YouTube as anything other than a blingy version of the taped audition. It would have been a mess if they’d tried the Whitacre method, as well as much less profitable for all involved. Besides, doesn’t the joy of conducting fundamentally lie in wielding all that power in real time and seeing all those deferential young faces looking up in adoration?

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Posted on December 14, 2011 at 2:11 am by Robert Levine
in General |

This study is about visual artists, but I think it should apply to us as well:

According to some scientists, even human beings are just trying to make it in the animal kingdom, and everything we do can be traced back to basic survival. Man hunt, man fight, man eat, man… paint? In 2000,Geoffrey Miller suggested that man’s creative pursuits were not survival mechanisms but courtship mechanisms, aimed to maximize mating possibilities. In other words, our minds operate like peacocks’ tails. The recent study, Status and Mating Success Amongst Visual Artists, examines artists and their mating habits, asking whether or not being a more successful artist will make you more successful in bed.

Helen Clegg, Daniel Nettle and Dorothy Miell conducted a survey for the journal ‘Frontiers in Psychology’, using a sample of 236 artists, 85 men and 151 women, from 18 to 78 years old. They gauged these artists’ success through a variety of factors including self-reported artistic success, time spent on art, the number of days artists have displayed their work over the past 5 years, minimum cost of art, maximum cost of art, percentage of income from art, importance of art in life, importance of public recognition, and importance of recognition from other artists…

To make a long story short(er), males displayed a correlation between making sweet art and making sweet love. Females, meanwhile, showed no correlation. Maybe humans are more like peacocks than we thought…

This reminded me of a scene in one of my favorite movies, the Scottish coming-of-age comedy Gregory’s Girl:

Not that any orchestra I’ve played in has been like that, of course.

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Posted on December 8, 2011 at 2:37 pm by Tony Woodcock
in Uncategorized |

Years ago there was an interview with the great British film director Alfred Hitchcock about a movie that he always wanted to make but never quite did. The movie is set at La Scala Milan, the great opera house of Italy.

Callas as Medea

Maria Callas (whom Hitchcock always wanted to cast) is on stage singing one of those death scene arias which she is delivering with every ounce of her passionate being.  She looks out into the audience and for a brief moment spies, through the glare of the lights, a commotion in one of the VIP boxes. A hand is raised. It contains a dagger. It falls with awful speed and force towards its victim. Callas sees this just as she is approaching a high C and the high C becomes a scream of such dramatic force that the audience immediately gives her a standing ovation. She, of course, is left looking towards that box and the murder she thinks she witnessed. Great idea. And what a start to a movie. Hitchcock was probably joking in the interview but in a way he was also revealing how he might take a creative germ and develop it into movies such as Psycho, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, and Suspicion. He was letting the reader in on some of his creative process, but the flow and narrative detail of the drama were inexorably locked in his imagination, and only he would tell the tale. In a way that helps to define one of the characteristics of the “film noir,” that astonishing genre that fascinated audiences from the 1940’s to the late 1960’s with its dark sets, darker stories, chiaroscuro lighting effects, nefarious crimes, femme fatales,  trenchcoats, rakishly tilted fedoras, and atmospheric haze of cigarette smoke.

Robert Mitchum

Never has a raincoat looked more elegant and chic than when worn by Jean Gabin, Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum.  Never has a cigarette appeared more compelling and sexy than when Alain Delon would light up a Gitanes and blow blue smoke over some irresistible blonde. And I only imagine that the smoke was blue because “film noir” had to be in black and white, that greatest of cinematic media which allowed directors and actors to emphasize the corruption of their world and the evil in their hearts. Colour would have blown it completely. The “noir” genre came into existence probably in the 16^th century with the prototypical plays of Shakespeare. Just think of Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Julius Caesar. They all have the quintessential qualities of classic “film noir” and have been filmed or staged as such. Consider Orson Welles’s Julius Caesar Broadway production from 1937, or Laurence Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet with the “To be or not to be” soliloquy balanced between spoken dialogue and voiceover, just like a Philip Marlowe narrative.   That Hamlet has a film score by William Walton that is straight out of Laura from 1944. Now try putting some classic “film noir” actors in Shakespearean roles. Who wouldn’t have paid top dollar to see Bette Davis as the First Witch in Macbeth, or Joan Crawford as Lady Macbeth, or  even better, Barbara Stanwyck with her ineffable quality of vulnerability (think Double Indemnity)? Or how about Edward G. Robinson as Lear (Orson Welles played the part on television in a scaled down production by Peter Brooks) or Robert Mitchum as Iago or even Edmund in Lear with Rita Hayworth as Cordelia? But I am getting carried away.

Les Diaboliques

Anyway . . . the genre has been around a long time and probably achieved its pinnacle of success in movies like Les Diaboliques, whose final bathroom scene I still find frightening; or The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Five Fingers and Sunset Boulevard. And it still inspires. What are Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction or even Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (surely the final piece of introspection from Philip Marlowe?) but later examples of the genre. Of all the outstanding “noir” examples, the one I keep coming back to because of its sheer power and storytelling originality is Carol Reed’s The Third Man. Filmed on location in war-torn Vienna in 1948, the movie is based on a novella by Graham Greene that he wrote in contemplation of the film treatment. It is a rare example of a film or theatre adaptation being so much better than the book. (The other of course being My Fair Lady, which adapted Shaw’s boringly self-reverential play Pygmalion.) The film for me is the “ugly twin” of another movie classic, Casablanca from 1942, which famously starred Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. Casablanca is a movie of heroes, of optimism in the face of tragedy, of the positive future that war could produce. It even has a happy ending. By contrast, The Third Manis a story about the dreadful after-effects of war.  It is about doubt, menace, gloom, conscience, fear, hatred, and evil. And most of all it is about a hunted soul, Harry Lime himself. His lover, Miss Schmidt, played by Alida Valli, is a Bergman lookalike. The hat, the coat, some of those intensely sad looks. But there is no redemption for her. The last scene of the movie is an invitation to a happy ending. A long shot in a Viennese cemetery. It is day, a rarity in this movie. The sky is clear. There is no rain. Miss Schmidt is in her Bergman hat and coat walking briskly between a colonnade of trees that are not just devoid of leaves, but resemble the skeletons of a First World War battle scene. She walks towards a man waiting for her, who is patiently smoking a cigarette. A man who has the power to change her life and who is in love with her. And she walks straight past him . . . it is so exactly brilliant and right in its courage.

Scene from The Third Man

Earlier, she has a scene with this man, Holly Martin, an American who makes a living writing Westerns, played with all the right naive credulity by Joseph Cotton. The scene exactly models the famous rendezvous of Bergman and Bogart in the Arab market place. In Casablanca, we understand perfectly that the lovers are soul mates, yet the scene ends with Bogart crushed by Bergman, his face averted from the camera, in the weakest shot any actor can be made to play. Cotton and Valli play out the analogous incident in a rail station waiting room but without any sign of closeness, and with the dissonance of her train leaving without her. It ends with that same weak shot of Cotton’s face turned from the camera, defeated. The same is true of humor. In Casablanca it’s the pickpocket and the fat blond waiter playing out a set piece comedy routine. In The Third Man the humor is embodied in a poor emaciated man with a fixated stare walking slowly and inexorably towards the British forces trying to sell a mass of balloons. What could be more incongruous? The major protagonist of The Third Manis Vienna. It is ravaged by war. There are bomb sites, rationing, a pervasive gray ambiance, the black market, the look of hunger in people’s faces. The city is divided into four zones occupied and controlled by the Americans, the British, the Russians and the French, and you feel that political vise tightening around its people.  The streets are wet with some relentless seeping moisture, the damp cobblestones giving off a phosphorescent gleam under the street lights. Pavement and buildings are crumbling. The avenues and passageways appear as dark mazes or caves.

"Papa!"

The play of shadows turns a small three-year-old boy with an oversized newsboy’s cap, very short pants, skinny legs, and a long coat, into a giant of scary proportions. He runs, shouting “Papa, Papa,” his voice echoing down the streets. I can hear it now. I have seldom come across such mastery of light as Reed demonstrates here. But then, having created magical effects above ground, he takes us into the depths of the city . . . its sewers which he illuminates as if they were a vast subterranean cathedral. This is the setting for the denouement which I will mention in a moment. The film’s second major protagonist is Harry Lime, played by a young Orson Welles. You have to wait 67 minutes for him to make his appearance but when he does it is one of those unforgettable moments in cinema history. A slightly drunk Holly Martin (who has been trying, despite ominous warnings, to unravel the mystery of his friend Harry’s suspicious death) thinks he is being followed in the dark streets. At the same time, a cat has escaped from Miss Schmidt, to whom Holly has declared his love. Suddenly, the camera discovers the cat which is seen purring in obvious delight, wrapping itself around the feet of a man hidden in the shadows of a doorway. Holly shouts so loudly that he wakes a neighbor in a top floor who opens her window to complain. It is the shaft of light from the windows that plays on the face of Orson Welles, revealing him like the most brilliant spotlight in the theatre.

Orson Welles

The very much alive Harry Lime stands,  smiles, is unafraid. And at this moment we become aware of how important the music has been throughout the movie. Indeed it is like a third protagonist, for it is so characterful. Carol Reed, who initially didn’t know what to do with the music, went out to dinner one night in Vienna and heard for the first time a zither played by Anton Karas. He was so taken with this sound that he recorded Karas for hours and then inserted the music into the film, including the famous Harry Lime theme. The music is essentially commercial, the sort of ersatz folk idiom you hear in cafes and street corners when on vacation in various European capitals. But when used in the context of this drama and story it paints the states of minds, of emotions, of tragedy. The use of music at the moment of Harry Lime’s lighted entrance is nothing short of genius. I mentioned the denouement. This happens in the Viennese sewers. The police and British forces have discovered that this is how Harry travels the city without detection and they are giving chase. Suddenly all those closed entrances are clangorously opened. Men and dogs and shouting fill the space of the submerged cathedral.

Vienna Sewers

And Harry runs. His body, his soul, they’re both running to be free of the calamity he has set in motion with his life and crimes. There is one shot that touches me with its simplicity and profundity. Harry has found a set of spiral stairs leading finally to the opening of a Viennese street. Escape is literally close at hand, but he doesn’t have the strength to open the grate. Instead you are left with the image of just his fingers stretching through the grillwork in the night air, the sound of wind blowing, as though his quivering fingers are small flowers that will never bloom in the sun. The moment lasts maybe fifteen seconds but it was made by a master.

Ran Blake

All of this has come to mind recently because of Ran Blake, one of our great faculty members, musician extraordinaire, founder of “Third Stream” with Gunther Schuller, and one of the great lovers of “film noir.” His “film noir” nights at NEC, recently featuring the work of Chabrol and Hitchcock, have reminded me personally of the wealth of images and originality of this genre.  It sent me back to look at The Third Man and I was overcome by just how great this movie is. So . . . I am not just commending it to you. I think I am saying it is essential watching for anyone who is fascinated by the human mind and creativity, and compelling storytelling. (Incidentally, if you’d like to hear music from The Third Man, you might consider attending our Viennese-themed Feast of Music, Feb. 25. More information here.) P.S. Oh yes . . . the title of this blog. It is taken from the conversation between Holly Martin and Harry Lime as they ride the Ferris wheel in the heart of Vienna (the huge amusement park ride at the Prater is still a Viennese icon).  The words come at the climactic moment of one of the most nihilistic and cynical observations on humanity ever uttered. The words are Harry Lime’s… pronounced in the most off-hand, almost humorous way as he crunches on pills for his indigestion. The speech, undoubtedly the best in the movie and one of the best in any movie, lasts about three minutes and was written not by Graham Greene but by Welles himself who felt that the drama needed such a lift. And if you compare this with the Greene original, he is totally right. Take a look . . . No comments

Posted on December 6, 2011 at 6:00 am by David Cutler
in Uncategorized |

Ok, ok, I admit it. I’m a complete Star Wars geek.  But even if you don’t know Chewbacca from Midi-Chlorian, this epic video by The Piano Guys is not to be missed.  You won’t be disappointed. Here’s what they have to say about it:             Long ago in a galaxy far, far away… We bring you CELLO WARS! A [...] No comments

Posted on December 6, 2011 at 6:00 am by David Cutler
in General |

Ok, ok, I admit it. I’m a complete Star Wars geek.  But even if you don’t know Chewbacca from Midi-Chlorian, this epic video by The Piano Guys is not to be missed.  You won’t be disappointed. Here’s what they have to say about it: Long ago in a galaxy far, far away… We bring you CELLO WARS! A [...] No comments

Posted on December 5, 2011 at 12:18 pm by James Undercofler
in main |

As I interact more with arts entrepreneurship professionals, especially those in music (my home field), I am appalled at how often and consistently these professionals are asked to defend their discipline. What could be more important today than equipping our students with skills that will enable them to create a new musical landscape, one that is infused with youthful energy and vitality? Perhaps the most intractable and, in my opinion, ridiculous argument against the inclusion of entrepreneurship education in the college curriculum comes from faculty who reject its appropriateness. One hears that the academy is not the place for such activity, that students are there to learn artistry and nothing else, that if well equipped with artistic skills, they, the students will succeed in the "real world." I think this line of thinking harkens back to the European conservatory of the late 19th century, which served as the model for so many of our current higher education degree programs. It is astounding how higher education undergraduate degree programs continue to emulate this model. How many indicators of the collapse of the 20th century music establishment will it take before higher education wakes up and calls an emergency? So, in this emerging field of arts entrepreneurship, I see a growing group of truly energetic and skilled young professionals who are ready to ignite the field. But in so many cases they are asked to justify their efforts, to fight for budget allocations, to work in conditions that are sub-par. And these are the ones who have actually been employed to work. Needless to say, of the almost 500 higher education music programs in this country, only a fraction address students' futures in any meaningful way. It's time we arm ourselves with powerful advocacy messages. It's time to tell the truth. If higher education doesn't get with it soon, we will be looking at a total mess within 10 years in the professional fields. 1 comment