Journalists spend way too much time chasing the ephemera of Youtube, which is a hungry, hungry medium. But I had just finished doing a little project on the music of Leos Janacek when I discovered the Bed Intruder Song, which uses Auto-Tune technology to turn speech into song. Janacek, like opera composers before and after him, was looking for a melodic and musical style that would reflect the spoken rhythms and inflections of Czech. Auto-Tune can make the process almost ridiculously literal. I tried to make connections between the two forms in a column for The Washington Post. But I won’t be chasing online video memes again any time soon. I hope.
Monthly Archives: August 2010
On Wagner’s Ring
It always amazes me that there are people who love Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen without reservation, who find it essentially a perfect work of art. I love it… and hate it. I am blown away, every time I make the effort to sit through its 16 hours of music, by much of it. But there’s always a nagging question in the back of mind my: Do I care? Do I really care about these people? And are they really people at all, or philosophical archetypes animated by the illusion of humanity? I’ve never made up my mind. For a long time I thought that was perhaps a flaw in my understanding, a failure to adequately engage myself in the drama. But increasingly I think it’s a failure of the work. Not that there isn’t magnificence in it. But it is flawed, deeply flawed. I tried to work out my reservations in a piece for Opera News, which has already attracted considerable scorn on some of the opera blogs, especially among orthodox Wagnerians. Here’s part of its basic argument:
How much longer can Wagner’s Ring retain its exceptional status? Its enduring popularity runs so counter to the vast majority of cultural and artistic trends that it’s tempting to think of it the way many people thought of the boom stock markets of the Bush and Clinton years: somehow, for reasons beyond explication, it can only go up, stay up and never fall. But there is an Achilles heel to the Ring, a weakness that could suddenly deflate the singular and inspiring power it has retained despite all its absurdities, its extraordinary longueurs and its punishing demands on those who stage it, sing it and watch it.
Keep your eye on Siegfried. If the status of Siegfried begins to change for the worse, the whole Ring could come crashing down with him. He is the cycle’s most problematic figure, its most volatile element. For decades (especially since World War II), he’s been both its hero and its antihero, attractive and odious at the same time, and somehow perpetually in motion between these extremes. As long as we can suspend judgment about the character of Siegfried, the Ring can go on. But if, in the future, audiences reject him, Götterdämmerung for the Ring could come at the end of Die Walküre.
How will books haunt us, if there are no books?
I didn’t post a link to this when it ran, in the special summer reading section of The Washington Post. It irked some orthodox fans of the brave new e-reader world. But it’s not really about e-readers. It’s about how books make us feel like failures.
Filed under Architecture, Culture
Open the Doors, Part 2
In May, I wrote about the travesty of the Supreme Court doors–closed for ever, it seems, because security experts have decided it’s safer to bring people through a ground-level, side entrance. The damage to the narrative experience of Cass Gilbert’s building is horrible. The damage to the United States, symbolically, incalculable. But in this Sunday’s Washington Post I write about a small bit of good news: A resolution, introduced in the House of Representatives, calling the Court to open the doors. Perhaps this the beginning of a new chapter in the debate about security, not just a conversation about architecture and security, but a chance to consider how institutions, bureaucracies, find courage:
Individuals may find courage within themselves, but when it comes to institutions, courage can be injected only from without. A congressional resolution about a security decision at another branch of government is, at the very least, an outside challenge to do better, to live up to professed ideals. But perhaps it can gin up courage, the way soldiers on a battlefield find a collective courage that is stronger than any singular fortitude. It is a reminder that, as said the president under whose watch the Supreme Court doors were first opened, the most frightening of our enemies is fear.
Let’s hope so.
Filed under Architecture, Culture
