Klarinet Archive - Posting 000275.txt from 2009/01

From: "MICHAEL MARMER LINDA MARMER" <mlmarmer@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Inauguration Music
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2009 13:53:49 -0500

The Washington Post did not like this music.

Mike

John Williams's 'Simple' Misunderstanding

By Anne Midgette
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 21, 2009; C14

It was called "Air and Simple Gifts." It was billed as a new work, "composed
and arranged" by John Williams. It was a chamber piece that filled the gap
between the two oaths of office at yesterday's swearing-in ceremony. It was
functional, representational music, and it actually did serve a function: It
allowed everyone some downtime before the main event of the oath and the new
president's speech. For although it was only four minutes long, a lot of
people stopped paying attention and started talking to each other before the
music was over.

Music, at such a ceremony, has a role much like the bunting and flags that
adorned the west front of the Capitol yesterday: It provides a symbolic
background and adds color. "Air and Simple Gifts" tried to carry so much
symbolic weight that it almost collapsed under the burden. It wasn't just
that its four high-powered classical soloists spanned a Benetton range of
generational, ethnic and gender bases (Itzhak Perlman, 63, born in Israel;
Yo-Yo Ma, 53, of Chinese descent; Gabriela Montero, 38, originally from
Venezuela; and the 29-year-old African American clarinetist Anthony McGill).
It was also that Williams, in the music, was falling over himself to convey
messages about patriotism and solemnity and austerity and profundity.

Bringing the high arts represented by the soloists together with the
populist Williams was yet another clause in the message of inclusion that
the Obama team has generally been at pains to convey. Williams is not an
unfamiliar figure in the concert hall, but known for film scores and pops
concerts rather than so-called art music. Unfortunately, faced with this
assignment, he made the mistake so many popular artists do when confronted
with classical music: Rather than write what he is good at, he corseted
himself in a straitjacket of what he thought he was supposed to be doing.

So we could have had a stirring film-score-type theme proclaiming a new
beginning for Barack Obama. Instead, we got a chamber piece, at once sober
and frilly, in which -- and this is the ultimate cop-out -- Williams, after
opening with an original melody, reached for an existing theme, the familiar
Shaker tune "Simple Gifts," to convey the bulk of his message. Referencing
history is well and good, but since Aaron Copland already worked "Simple
Gifts" very effectively into the classical pantheon, its use here merely
evoked a well-worn idea of clean, honest, all-American values, without
contributing much new to the discussion beyond various instrumental
embellishments.

The spareness of instrumentation was certainly in keeping with Obama's
recurrent message about the country's difficulties, and his desire not to
make his inauguration too festive. The solo lines conveyed a message of
vulnerability -- the lone violin rising above the crowd is a familiar but
effective metaphor -- and the fact that the four voices ultimately
intertwined to work together while each retaining its own flavor was also a
useful simile. Williams did draw on one strength, that of writing a singing
theme for strings (both Ma and Perlman have, of course, been featured on
Williams soundtracks in the past, notably "Seven Years in Tibet" and
"Schindler's List"). Still, the music seemed awfully austere for an event
that calls for at least some measure of celebration. When you want to get a
job done, call in the Marines: The U.S. Marine Band played long and well
throughout the ceremony, and overall provided a better soundtrack to the
event than Williams's cameo.

Since Obama has harked back so deliberately to the model of Abraham Lincoln,
it's worth noting that Lincoln, an opera fan, chose to include the arts at
his second inauguration, according to the music historian Elise Kirk, by
mounting an entire inaugural opera: Flotow's "Martha," a work without much
political relevance. A message that can be drawn from this is: If you want
to include the arts, let the arts have their head and go where they will. If
you want symbols, stick to soundtracks. Or bunting.

------------------------------------------------------------------
The 2009 Woodwind.Org Donation Drive is going on right now - see
https://secure.donax-us.com/donation/ for more information.
------------------------------------------------------------------