Missouri Classical Music News and Notes

Though critics often dismissed Mr. Menotti’s music as maudlin and unadventurous, many of them still celebrated his impressive lyric gifts, his deft touch with orchestral sound and his talent for making opera comprehensible and enjoyable for people who had previously shunned it. Of critics he once said, “They often spoil my breakfast but never my lunch.”

His contemporaries, too, were sometimes unkind. Igor Stravinsky was dismissive of Mr. Menotti’s musical language. The composer Luigi Nono withdrew from a project rather than allow his music to appear on the same program as Mr. Menotti’s.

Yet Mr. Menotti’s Christmas classic, “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” has been performed more than 2,500 times, often by amateur companies and on high school stages, since it was created for television in 1951.

Mr. Menotti’s works, including “The Medium,” “The Consul,” “The Telephone” and “The Saint of Bleecker Street” all showed that opera could sustain itself in a Broadway theater, something that Kurt Weill and George Gershwin managed to do only sporadically.

Mr. Menotti’s involvement with the musical theater was complete. He composed 25 operas, almost all in English. He wrote his own librettos and usually staged his own works.

Among his works is the first opera composed for radio, the most popular Christmas opera, possibly the first opera in which a telephone plays a principal role (Poulenc's came more than a decade later), an opera about aliens, and a masterpiece about life under totalitarian rule (which was also the first time that suicide by gas oven made it to the stage) . . .

Some of his works were Broadway successes. And he created one of the finest music festivals [includes embedded music video].

People who listen to contemporary classical music don't expect to like everything, or even to understand it. They often merely endure it, and remind themselves that Wagner and Beethoven were considered far out in their day too. Just how much a listener will unquestioningly endure was acknowledged last week by the British Broadcasting Corporation. On its highbrow Third Program, it recently broadcast a musical "composition"' consisting of twelve minutes of random noise —and received no complaints.

Called Mobile for Tape and Percussion, the thing was identified to the audience as the work of one Piotr Zak, a young avant-garde Pole considered "one of the most controversial figures in contemporary music." Zak's "work" was a dreadful cacophony punctuated by rattles, bangs and random blows on a xylophone. Next morning the music critics passed learned if mystified judgment. Wrote the London Times: "It was certainly difficult to grasp more than the music's broad outlines, partly because of the high proportion of unpitched sounds and partly because of their extreme diversity." Agreed the Daily Telegraph: "Wholly unrewarding."

The confusion onstage was loudly reminiscent of a 1961 broadcast during which the BBC startled England with a perform ance of Mobile for Tape and Percussion, identified as the work of young, avant-garde Polish Composer Piotr Zak . . . Composer Zak's cacophonous creation lasted twelve minutes and left the London Times complaining desperately . . . Zak's Mobile proved to be the handi work of two pranksters who banged away haphazardly at "all the instruments we could find" in an effort to discover just how much the public would endure.

The Kansas City Symphony came under pressure this week to withdraw a lawsuit against the state of Missouri.

Six statewide arts groups signed a letter asking the Symphony to reconsider its position because they feared Gov. Matt Blunt would cut all arts funding from his Jan. 24 budget proposal.

Kyna Iman, lobbyist for one of the groups, Missouri Citizens for the Arts, asked the Symphony to drop its lawsuit after a Wednesday conversation with a deputy chief of staff in the governor’s office.

Iman said the argument coming from the governor’s office is simple: Why appropriate funds that may be tied up in litigation for years?

Selling digital music without copy-protection makes sense . . .

All DRM does is restrict consumer choice and provide a barrier to entry, says [Apple Computer CEO Steve] Jobs; without it there would be far more stores and players, and far more innovation. So, he suggests, why not do away with DRM and sell music unprotected? “This is clearly the best alternative for consumers,” he declares, “and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.” . . .

The music giants are trying DRM-free downloads. Lots of smaller labels already sell music that way. Having seen which way the wind is blowing, Mr Jobs now wants to be seen not as DRM’s defender, but as a consumer champion who helped in its downfall. Wouldn’t it lead to a surge in piracy? No, because most music is still sold unprotected on CDs, people wishing to steal music already can do so. Indeed, scrapping DRM would probably increase online-music sales by reducing confusion and incompatibility. With the leading online store, Apple would benefit most. Mr Jobs’s argument, in short, is transparently self-serving. It also happens to be right.

Much as people thump a watermelon to test its ripeness, Stanford composer Jonathan Berger wants them to use sound in novel ways to figure out the world.

So he put sound to the way professional golfers swing their clubs. The result: It's now possible for pros and duffers alike to improve their game by listening to their own strokes. In another experiment, runners, rowers and other athletes can "hear" how their bodies are performing -- from heart rates to stress levels -- while practicing.

And Berger's sounds for digital images of microscopic cells can help doctors distinguish cancerous ones by the "music" they make.

arts advocates are excited that, despite the Kansas City Symphony's lawsuit against the state, Gov. Matt Blunt took the high road and recommended strong funding for the arts in his fiscal year 2008 budget. Many feared he wouldn't.

Best of all, Blunt more than doubled last year's transfer of funds from the athletes and entertainers tax into the Missouri Cultural Trust. The total recommended transfer of $7.8 million lets arts groups stop holding their collective breath over the future of Missouri Arts Council-funded programs. Just as important, the transfer embodies the spirit of the tax, created for the most part to help fund the arts.

The proposed budget is great news, say arts advocates. The lawsuit had everyone "shivering in their tutus" with worry that the arts would get cut, says Sandra CH Smith, Springfield Regional Arts Council's new executive director.