The process of digitizing all archived material of the International Years is not yet over. All 1.3 million items are expected to be online by 2012, but there are already hundreds of thousands of items to sort through—each a historical gem. The archive is replete with nuggets (both educational and entertaining) that will surely satisfy the curiosity of classical music fans for many, many hours.

For an example of both entertainment and educational value, look no further than the programs from the Stadium Concerts. From 1922 to 1964, the Lewisohn Stadium became the de facto summer home of the New York Philharmonic. Concerts occurred between five and seven nights a week and started promptly at 8:30pm. These shows would cater to a more casual crowd, using low ticket prices and “greatest hits” set lists to draw large audiences to the stadium. The programs in the Digital Archive illustrate quite vividly the scenes found at the stadium. Check out this great advertisement for Lucky Strike cigarettes, from a Stadium Concert program in 1952:

Still, sandwiched between ads shouting “Buy Easy To Play Pianoforte Music At Macy’s!” and “Support Your Country With War Bonds!” are program notes and conductors’ comments that shed light on the evolution of symphonic perception. It is interesting to find a description of a Mahler symphony and compare that to another written one decade later, then two, and so on.

Hundreds of scores hand-marked by Bernstein are also worthy of special notice. They provide unprecedented insight into the working genius of the Philharmonic’s revered director. I am continually stunned by the depth of his preparation and technique. For example, he would mark two-bar phrases with a mark resembling a pyramid, whereas a three-bar phrase was denoted with a curve akin to a slur. Notes written in red pencil were for the staff copyist to disperse into the parts, while blue pencil marks were Bernstein’s reminders for himself. Pictured below is one such blue-pencil three-bar-phrase mark, found in Copland’s Symphony for Organ and Orchestra.

It is thrilling to see the literal marks of genius. These historical artifacts help us remember that even a man of Bernstein’s talent is not above, from time to time, a penciled-in reminder (often punctuated with exclamation points) of a dynamic change or a viola entrance. It also bears mentioning that along with this score is a delightful plethora of other tangential information. This score was used in concerts at the end of 1966 and the beginning of 1967. In December of 1966, Copland’s Symphony for Organ and Orchestra was flanked by Bernstein’s own Chichester Psalms and Mendelssohn’s Fifth Symphony. Just a week later, in January of 1967, it was preceded by Handel’s Organ Concerto in F Major and followed by the same Mendelssohn symphony.

As a student, I am also acutely aware of the innumerable ways in which the Digital Archives can be utilized for study. I am working on an examination of the Russian Five (Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, Borodin, and Cui) and was curious to see if American perception of Russian music was altered during the Cold War. So, I examined concert programs containing Russian music from the forties and compared the descriptions to those of the sixties and seventies. This is just one of many ways the Archives could be used for study. They also contain images (including some 5,000 slides drawn by Ernest Schelling for Bernstein’s Young Peoples’ Concerts) as well as some original manuscripts by composers such as Beethoven, Wagner, and Rimsky-Korsakov. There are plans to include video and sound clips, but these are not yet individually available for search. Instead, some documents included in the Archives are accompanied by sound or video excerpts.

Some of the more devoted historians might also be interested in the thousands of business documents saved and scanned by the New York Philharmonic historians. One thing which caught my eye while browsing were the minutes from the January 12, 1962 meeting of the Music Policy Committee. The notes included, among many other topics, the practice of selecting soloists to play with the New York Philharmonic. Here is an excerpt from that document:

“The number of great artists who can draw big house audiences being small, it has been the practice to buy each one of the artists, where practicable, for four concerts – a pair in one week and a Saturday and Sunday pair in a later week. Considerable savings have been effected by doing this and more people in different Series have been pleased. The only people who seem to object are critics [...] It is to be noted that during these last few years, practically everything Bruno Walter has conducted has been chosen because of recording requirements. In this way, the Society has accumulated a great group of recordings which are gradually being issued and which, when Dr. Walter ceases conducting, should be a source of profit to the Society for many years [...] There is a growing audience for contemporary works especially among the young attendants at the concerts. The fact that the single sales have been growing faster than the subscribers during the last few years is probably an indication of this desire for modern music. In this case, Mr. Mitropoulos has done a first class job. The society has received, especially from older subscribers, many objections to the inclusion of contemporary music and to the format of the programs [...] The Philharmonic-Symphony is compelled, because of the number of concerts in each season and because of the tremendous repertoire which it must play, to have two conductors who represent the major part of the season and to have a certain number of weeks allotted to guest conductors. Such guest conductors may be composer-conductors who do their own works, such as Strawinsky, Hindemith, Villa-Lobos, etc., or may be conductors of the great orchestras in Europe or America, such as Szell, Paray, Monteaux, Munch, Reiner, Krips or von Karajan, Markevitch, Cluytens, Martinon, Kletzki, Celibidache, Beecham, Barbirolli, etc.”

Those excerpts, penned by Bruno Zirato (an associate manager of the NY Phil), spread an astounding number of valuable facts over a mere two or three pages. It is unlikely that there are any easier ways to come by this much information; the archives allow us to succinctly uncover some of the most basic business rules of the New York Philharmonic.

I am sure that there is more in the Archives than I could ever learn. But having such a volume of information at my fingertips, with robust tools with which to trawl through that information, is really an incredible opportunity. Students and classical music fans alike should be ecstatic at the collection released to the public by the New York Philharmonic.

Earlier this month, a concert in San Francisco was disrupted when an elderly couple began shouting and sarcastically clapping during a “modern” work for viola in order to bring the performance to an end. The performer, JHNO (who claims to have been invited specifically to fulfill a “subversive” role, adding an experimental element to the evening), did in fact end his piece prematurely, smashing his viola and storming offstage. Elderly violist Bernard Zaslav, formerly of the Fine Arts Quartet, claimed retrospectively that a faulty hearing aid simply made the performance unbearably painful, however his shouts of “I’m a real violist and this isn’t music!” and “Bravo!” certainly don’t help his case.

While the event in San Francisco didn’t escalate into a full riot, the incident, together with the anniversary of Igor Stravinsky’s birth yesterday, allows us a chance to reflect on musical riots of the past. The first such upset that I learned of occurred during a performance of Steve Reich’s Four Organs in 1973 under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. The piece is twenty-five minutes of a single chord, first punctuated and then drawn out. The 1973 concert received shouts and catcalls from the Carnegie Hall audience, and one woman famously beat the stage with her head (or her shoe, depending on which version you hear). Interestingly, the piece had been fairly well received at its premier three years prior, and though subsequent performances received a mix of applause and boos, nothing prepared Reich for the hostility he received at Carnegie Hall.

Looking back, perhaps no musical riot has escalated quite as much as what followed a performance of Daniel Auber’s La Muette de Portici. The work itself is notable for being the first French grand opera, as well as for introducing influential concepts such as mime to the world of opera. Similar to Reich’s work, the biggest fuss was not at the premiere performance (which occurred in early 1828), but rather in 1830 when the politically-charged opera was performed in Brussels. That performance sparked the riots that lead to Belgium’s revolution for independence.

Still, the most famous music riot is undoubtedly the one which followed the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in early 20^th-century Paris. The combination of Stravinsky’s score—barbaric, primitive, complex, and decidedly genius—and Nijinsky’s sensual choreography sent the crowd into an uproar. The piece had hardly started when the audience was already shouting and whistling; this further devolved into arguments and fistfights in the aisles of the Theatre de Champs-Elysees. Saint-Saens himself is said to have stormed out of the theatre, infuriated at the misuse of the bassoon in the opening measures of the work. The Paris police arrived at intermission, but even they were unable to maintain order in the midst of rabid concert-goers. Stravinsky ran backstage to help Nijisnky lead the dancers, who were unable to hear the orchestra. Diaghilev, the famous arts patron who arranged for the commission of the work, flashed the lights of the theatre to try to bring order, but to no avail. Stravinsky was forced to flee the theatre.

Coincidentally, following the viola debacle in San Francisco, Mr. Zaslov was asked if he would also have shouted down The Rite of Spring to which he responded “But that was real music!” Many have speculated that audiences have become desensitized to composers and artists trying to shock them into awe or disgust. They feel that riots will soon become fossils—mere remnants of the past. Perhaps too, the rift between “traditionalists” and “modernists” in the classical music world has grown so wide that we are never forced to confront the uncertain. That the Beethoven crowd and the Berg crowd are never forced to share a stage. This effect, this sanitizing of the music worlds, is ultimately neither positive or negative, but simply a fact however sour or grim. As we look forward, the question of aesthetics seems to fade as the delineation between music and noise becomes confused into oblivion.

See also:

ViolaGate! by Brian M. Rosen via Music vs. Theatre

List of Classical Music Riots on Wikipedia

It's really hard to find truly good scores and recordings of the Goldbergs that are just free; free to download, listen to, perform, share, arrange, or mash up. And almost none of them are gratis.

The Open Goldberg Project is solving this problem, at least in the case of the Goldberg Variations, while exploring the intersection between open source software, public domain, crowd sourced funding, and emergent web technologies for music. The primary goal of the project is to create a new edition of the score of the Goldbergs, as well as a new studio recording, played on the piano by Kimiko Ishizaka. Both the score and the recording will use the Creative Commons Zero tool to place them into the public domain, assuring that they'll both be free (gratis and libre) forevermore.


Here is entered the last remains
of Issac A. Spofford
son of Deacon Eleazar & Mrs. Mary Spofford,
a brand plucked from the ashes
of Rev. Laban Ainsworth’s house.
[…]

The music resonates with the mournful texts, acting as a gateway to another time and plane. But beyond setting colonial lamentations to music, The Old Burying Ground uses spoken poetry to create a programmatic exploration of graveyard verses’ underlying sentiments. The work begins with a poem accompanied by orchestra. It describes the The Old Burying Ground’s atmosphere and invites listeners to “take the chain from the gate” and “walk in.” Read by their authors, the poems reflect on the nature of life and death specific to the messages on old headstones. The poetry’s elaboration on these inscriptions creates cohesion within the cycle and allows the listener a wider window through which to peer at lives gone by. On “O Say Grim Death,” Poet Thomas Lynch writes:

No doubt the Reverend Ainsworth read from Job
Over the charred corpse of the deacon’s boy
To wit: “Blessed be the name of the Lord”
Or some such comfortless dose of holy writ
[…]

The soloists express The Old Burying Ground’s somber character with the same care and insight the orchestra maintains throughout the work. Folk singer Tim Eriksen brings a rustic sensitivity to his performance, and tenor Nicholas Phan demonstrates a keen responsiveness to both text and ensemble. Likewise, soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird brings depth to the text through masterful richness and control. Soloists and ensemble alike embrace the tranquil, mournful
context in a performance which details
this macabre exploration with poignant clarity.

On his encounters with gravestones, Chambers writes that they “are an opportunity to […] grow in understanding of one of the central truths of our lives: we die.” Likely founded in graveside contemplation, this perspective permeates the texts taken from the headstones of an Old Country cemetery, and it details not only the inherent brevity of the human condition but also the tragedy of short lives cut shorter.

The Old Burying Ground aspires to bring life to the dead and give a voice to words not uttered for centuries. The University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra and Kenneth Kiesler embrace this opportunity and create a recording rich with history and color through its mournful sentiments.

Find the record on Amazon here