Missouri Classical Music News

The Missouri Arts Council has canceled a program worth millions of dollars once promised to local arts groups.

In the fiscal year beginning July 1, the Kansas City Symphony, the Kansas City Ballet, the Lyric Opera, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and 21 other arts organizations across Missouri will no longer receive annual payments from the council that would have reached tens of millions of dollars over time.

The arts council gave no notice to any of the affected arts groups in October when it voted to end contracts with organizations participating in the Capital Incentive Program. The program allowed them to collect interest from the council’s endowment.

Now, because of budget cuts and erratic state funding of the arts council, there is too little money to pay them. . . .

In 1996 the state legislature began funding the Missouri Arts Council Trust Fund (also known as the Missouri Cultural Trust) as an endowment for the arts council. The money came from personal income taxes paid by non-resident athletes and entertainers up to $10 million a year. The goal was to raise $100 million in 10 years, which would have made the council self-sustaining. . . .

But the annual state disbursements into the trust never came close to $10 million a year. And the total amount in the trust fund never came close to $100 million. It once totaled as much as $28 million, but during a three year period beginning in 1999 the council transferred $20 million into a longterm investment fund that couldn’t be touched. Now the arts council has spent the remaining principal down to $4.2 million.

Four years ago the legislature, faced with huge deficits, cut its payments to the arts council trust fund and the council’s budget. For three years it paid nothing into the trust and in fiscal 2004 canceled the arts council’s budget entirely.

At the same time, lawmakers gave the council the authority to begin spending the principal of the trust. The council used the money for grants to arts groups around the state and to cover its own operating expenses.

One of my favorite anecdotes from the turbulent life of Gustav Mahler has always been the story of him walking up to the edge of Niagara Falls and shouting, "Finally, a real fortissimo!" Alas, as I discovered on a tour of my book's various loose ends, it doesn't quite pan out. Zoltan Roman's fine documentary study Gustav Mahler's American Years quotes from an interview that Howard Shanet conducted with Alma Mahler-Werfel in 1960. The great lady tells it thus: “Mahler was to conduct in Buffalo, New York, and we took advantage of the trip to visit Niagara Falls. We spent hours near and even under the roaring falls — they were even greater at that time than they are today, you know — and then with that roar still in his ears Mahler went to conduct Beethoven’s ‘Pastorale’. I was waiting for him as he stepped off the podium. ‘Endlich ein fortissimo!,’ he said, ‘At last a fortissimo!’” The fortissimo in question is Beethoven's, not Niagara's. The point, as Alma elaborates it in her memoirs, is that music can offer experiences more overpowering than Nature itself . . .

C, E-flat and G go into a bar.

The bartender says, "Sorry, but we don't serve minors." So E-flat leaves,
and C and G have an open fifth between them.

After a few drinks, the fifth is diminished and G is out flat. F comes in
and tries to augment the situation, but is not sharp enough.

D comes in and heads for the bathroom, saying, "Excuse me. I'll just be a
second."

Then A comes in, but the bartender is not convinced that this relative of
C is not a minor.

Then the bartender notices B-flat hiding at the end of the bar and says,
"Get out! You're a minor and the seventh minor I've found in this bar
tonight."

E-flat comes back the next night in a three-piece suite with nicely
shined shoes. The bartender says, "You're looking sharp tonight. Come on
in, this could be a major development."

Sure enough, E-flat soon takes off his suit and everything else, and is
au natural.

Eventually C sobers up and realizes in horror that he's under a rest.
C is brought to trial, found guilty of contributing to the diminution of
a minor, and is sentenced to 10 years of DS without Coda at an upscale
correctional facility.

On appeal, however, C is found innocent of any wrongdoing, even accidental.
The judge rules that all contrary motions are bassless.

The published report for this case is a list of four jury instructions nicely setting forth the subtle criteria for deciding whether a musical work - and specifically an "air" or "tune" - is sufficiently original to qualify for copyright protection. Carusi, who appears to have published an exact copy of plaintiff's music, must have asserted in his defense that the music of plaintiff's song, "The Old Arm Chair" by Henry Russell, was derived from preexisting public domain material. Perhaps Carusi hoped that because Russell was a popular English song writer and performer, the court might be inclined to infer that Reed's authorized publication of Russell's song was based on a prior publication of the work abroad that would have rendered the work (at that time) ineligible for protection under U.S. copyright law. The jury found otherwise and the court awarded plaintiff $200 (one-tenth of what Reed sought).

Henry Russell (1812 - 1901) claimed to have studied with Rossini and Bellini. Songs like "The Old Arm Chair" and his more famous and musically excellent "Woodman Spare that Tree," not only show musical kinship to the simpler works Rossini and Bellini wrote for domestic delectation, but also reflect the early nineteenth century appetite in Western Europe for exceedingly maudlin works dealing with subjects like orphans, the dying and recently deceased.

The "Old Arm Chair" recording excerpted here (streaming audio file, this website) is by pianist and songwriter William Bolcom and tenor Clifford Jackson.

So these broad shifts can, as in so many areas of culture, be crudely characterised as a movement away from 'top-down', single voice, broadcasted, edited, authoritarian models towards a more heterogenous, software-based, networked organisation of information, constructed in emergent fashion from a multiplicity of voices. A crude over-simplification but not without merit. Music discovery is now an incredibly rich, complex terrain in which intelligence moves to the edges rather than the centre. This movement could enable a richer, more beneficial model for music discovery, but only if the software and systems driving these discussions is carefully implemented - calibrated with specific knowledge of the subject area - in order to facilitate a richer experience around music.

• The Most Wanted Song (5 min)
  a musical work that will be unavoidably and uncontrollably liked by 72±12% of listeners
  
  
• The Most Unwanted Song (21 min 59 sec)
  fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population will enjoy this

The first is a mid-tempo rock love song of blistering blandness that "will be unavoidably and uncontrollably 'liked' by 72 ± 12% of listeners," as Soldier explains in the sleeve notes. Vocalist Ada Dyer squirms her way through Nina Mankin's "likeable" lyrics ("Lying in my silken sheets/I think of ways that we might meet") and is answered by a deep-voiced Ronnie Gent, sounding a little like Meat Loaf. After a couple of minutes, Vernon Reid of Living Color steps in firmly on electric guitar, as Gent muses, "Maybe she likes reading Wittgenstein/Fancy dinners drinking good red wine." This odd intrusion of the Austrian philosopher is presumably because 21% of the survey said they want intellectual stimulation when they listen to music.

The song gets even funnier as it climaxes, with guitar and saxophone (Andy Snitzer) both contributing solos that subtly parody the clichés of the genre.

As you might imagine, "The Most Unwanted Song" is a real crackup. Even though those surveyed hate opera and hip-hop, wild volume variations, the subjects of cowboys or holidays, accordions and bagpipes (not to mention the vocal stylings of children), this squeezebox-backed rap of screaming kids with an over-the-top soprano singing home-for-the-holidays-on-the-range lyrics is a hilarious mess. Survey says politics and religion are to be avoided as well, which explains why the soprano's soliloquies about saddling up the fellas and Wittgenstein are interrupted by a kids chorus yelling, "Yom Kippur! Yom Kippur! Self-reflection and atonement!"