Quote of the Day (Terry Teachout, on the Loss of Browsing in Online Book and Music Buying)

“Everybody knows that browsing is central to the experience of museum-going. It enables the serendipitous, horizon-widening discoveries that are part and parcel of an art lover’s education. Absent such discoveries, you’ll never know more than what you already knew going in. To put it another way, you may deepen your knowledge of art, but you won’t broaden it. And therein lies the problem of online book and record buying: By eliminating casual browsing, it deprives us of the opportunity to grow.” ― American critic, biographer, playwright, stage director, and librettist Terry Teachout (1956-2022), “Closing Our Browsers,” The Wall Street Journal, October 24, 2014

The accompanying image of Terry Touchout was taken at the 2013 Texas Book Festival in Austin, on Oct. 27, 2013, by Larry D. Moore.

Flashback, January 1943: Ellington Debuts ‘Black, Brown and Beige’ at Carnegie Hall

Duke Ellington achieved a new level of prominence in January 1943—a month when his new management began marketing him as a multidimensional musical force—by debuting, with his big-band jazz orchestra, at Carnegie Hall. 

The concert, also marking the premiere of his 45-minute Black, Brown and Beige, was commercially successful, but also inaugurated a strain of commentary on the bandleader-composer-pianist that has endured to this day: the question of whether his genius was better suited to short or extended musical works.

The black-tie affair was marketed both as a charity ($5,000 raised for relief of Russia, America’s ally at the time in WWII) and as a celebration of Ellington’s 20 years as a bandleader. In the seven days before the big event, a barrage of ads, articles and radio spots orchestrated by his management, the William Morris Agency, promoted “National Duke Ellington Week.” To accommodate the overflow of such illustrious attendees as Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Sinatra, Glenn Miller, and Leopold Stokowski, roughly 200 people had to be seated onstage.

The attention brought by the concert was much wanted and much needed. Ellington had been privately peeved when Benny Goodman became the first jazz big-band leader to appear at Carnegie in 1938, and even more so when he believed his manager at the time, Irving Mills, had turned down a chance to book the band a year before Goodman’s landmark concert.

But Ellington was not primarily motivated by ego in wanting the appearance at one of New York’s principal cultural institutions: he felt that it would maintain the band’s public profile at a time when it desperately needed it.

A traditional vehicle for doing so—the release of an LP—had been foreclosed since August 1942, when the American Federation of Musicians, in a royalty-payment dispute with radio stations, forbade its members from making commercial recordings. 

There was little problem provoking interest on the West Coast, where the band had been particularly active for the past two years (mostly involved in making music for movies), but it was another matter on the Eastern Seaboard. A suggestion by his agent at William Morris that he go to Carnegie was the spark Ellington needed—and the bandleader thought he had the requisite material, a project he had spoken of as far back as 1930: “My African Suite. It will be in five parts, starting in Africa and ending with the history of the American Negro.”

The next six weeks became a struggle, at times frantic, to shape the material into a coherent whole. How much he cobbled together from a previously announced opera, Boola—which, in its subject matter, sounds like an altered form of African Suite—is difficult to say, as no performance, recording, or physical artifact remains of that aside from an unfinished scenario.

But the subject of that long-aborning project now formed an inextricable part of what he eventually subtitled "A Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in. America."

In his autobiography, Music Is My Mistress, Ellington noted that the Carnegie concert was the only time he never experienced stage fright: “I just didn’t have time. I couldn’t afford the luxury of being scared.” Even up to the day of performance, he was making changes in the program.

At the beginning of the 1940s, Ellington and his band had reached a creative and commercial zenith. But from this point on to the end of his life, he devoted considerably more energy to extended forms: thirty-odd concert suites and three “Sacred Concerts.”

Most Ellington observers have been kinder than biographer James Lincoln Collier, who thought these longer compositions represented “one of the great artistic errors in jazz history.” But the majority have been critical, and certainly so in the immediate aftermath of the 1943 concert, when Ellington’s attempt to add new orchestral colors failed to satisfy neither jazz nor classical purists.

Even the admiring cultural critic Terry Teachout, in his 2013 biography Duke, felt compelled to write that Ellington might have “fumbled the ball just short of the goal line.” But if the organic unity prized by critics proved elusive, the vivacity and power of the music endure.

Take, for instance, “Come Sunday,” one of the most forceful expressions of the composer’s spirituality. In its original instrumental version, it spotlighted alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges. But I came to know it, three decades ago, through a transcendent 1958 recording featuring soul-piercing vocals by Mahalia Jackson, with Ellington himself gently accompanying her on piano.

I’m not so sure, in any case, about the overall validity of critical pronouncements on artists attempting a larger canvass. Critics may prefer the small scale because artists can concentrate their efforts there more easily to achieve perfection. But would critics really want to trade a perfect Mark Twain short story for an admittedly imperfect but still magnificent Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

The Met’s James Levine Problem: From an Individual’s ‘Open Secret’ to Institutional Crisis

“[T]his is no ordinary scandal: It is an existential crisis, one that threatens the survival of a financially beleaguered organization that had already spent years struggling with the problem of Mr. Levine’s declining health….If the number of accusers continues to grow, it will appear increasingly likely that others, at the Met and elsewhere, knew more about Mr. Levine’s alleged behavior than has previously been acknowledged. Should this prove to be the case, then the poison will have spread beyond a single individual to the institution as a whole.”— Terry Teachout, “The Levine Cataclysm,’ The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 6, 2017

As far back as freshman year in college in the late 1970s, a classmate nicknamed “Opera Man” passed along to me a bit of gossip about James Levine, then only a few years into his lengthy tenure as principal conductor -music director of the Metropolitan Opera.

“He likes boys,” my classmate said, leaving little doubt, with his lifted eyebrow, exactly what he meant.

This conversation took place in New York. But as far away as Kansas City, around the same time, the same tidbit made its way to Terry Teachout, the playwright, blogger and longtime Wall Street Journal cultural critic related in a recent column.

Just these two people—one, geographically distant from the events (Levine), the other, not a part of the maestro’s musical milieu (me)—are enough to demonstrate that this particular rumor about Levine was, in the phrase so commonly used now as to become a cliché, an “open secret.”

Over the years, I’d catch sight of Levine—profiled on American Masters as “America’s Maestro,” showered with Opera News, George Peabody, and Grammy Awards, honored by the Kennedy Center, for God’s sake—and wonder how so many people who must have heard the same thing I did managed to close their ears and shut their eyes. 

And I wondered, after the bonfire of sexual abuse allegations engulfing and terribly damaging the Roman Catholic Church in 2002: “When will it be Levine’s turn?”

Well, at long last, it may be now. Reports in The New York Post and The New York Times that Levine has been accused of sexual misconduct with four youths dating back decades show that the “Me, Too” phenomenon unleashed in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal has taken on a whole different dimension. 

Some wags have employed the term “maestrobation” to describe one of the particular activities supposedly engaged in by Levine. The surprise of the new word might be funny, except that what is being described is sexual assault that leaves long-lasting psychological damage. And the financial cost to ameliorate such damage, as the Roman Catholic Church has discovered, ends up being borne not just by perpetrators but by the organizations that abetted the abuse.

As Teachout points out in the characteristically trenchant column I cited above, the Met itself stands in mortal danger if the investigation by the outside law firm Proskauer Rose turns up evidence that the institution either covered up or turned a blind eye to Levine’s alleged crimes.

I’m not just talking about other musical festivals and organizations that the globetrotting maestro visited, such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), the Munich Philharmonic and the Ravinia Festival in Illinois. 

(When he was 12, according to Ben Miller in an article for VAN Magazine, his father--a BSO cellist--and mother told him about the "serious rumors" whirling around Levine already, and warned him "never to be alone in a room" with the conductor and even to "walk the other way if I saw him coming." As for Ravinia, it was, in effect, ground zero for the charges: abuse of a 16-year-old that allegedly took place in 1986— an accusation reported last year. For once, someone—in this case, the Lake Forest Police Department in Illinois—actually pressed hard to investigate Levine. That department has now announced that it will not pursue charges because the teen involved was of the age of consent at the time.)

No, smaller institutions may also be gulping and sweating now. Each summer, classical music, theater, and dance companies around the country train in their craft thousands of talented youngsters. The incentives to these companies are obvious: creating a talent pipeline for tomorrow’s artists, gaining a source of cheap, short-term labor, and attracting funding from foundations that will pay for this educational outreach. The advantage to teens is even stronger:  a much-needed experience that can help them better themselves and develop a support network.

But such summer internships could also prove a nightmare for parents who leave their talented children, craving affirmation, in places where they can get it, all right—at the hands of cunning sexual users who can appear as mentors even as they camouflage their true intentions. 

These young people are in their way every bit as vulnerable as the children of at-risk families who seemed to be the special targets of many pedophile priests. Yes, their talents make them special, but also isolate them from peers. 

In commitment to craft and willingness to abide significant aches and pains, a ballet dancer, for instance, can be just as athletic as a football player, but unlikely to receive the adulation accorded to gridiron stars. She is all too open to someone who can give that attention.

All of this can happen in environments where alcohol can soften defenses and where family and friends are hundreds, even thousands, of miles away.

The opportunities for exploitation are considerable, and Levine is not the only charismatic adult in the cultural world who may have done so. Last week, The New York Times also reported that Israel Horovitz, the playwright and longtime artistic director of the Gloucester Stage Company, has been accused by nine women of sexual assault and misconduct. 

If the allegations are true, Levine and Horovitz went beyond the deference often granted artists to something more akin to droit du seigneur, the customary right of a feudal lord to have his way with a vassal's bride on her wedding night—in modern terms, taking advantage of their positions to sexually surprise confused teens.

They share something else in common, too, if their accusers are to be believed: an icy coldness when the fun and games are over. When Chris Brown, who said he surrendered to Levine's advances as a 17-year-old at Michigan’s Meadow Brook School of Music in 1968, told the up-and-coming maestro that he would not repeat the experience, Levine ignored this former favorite for the rest of the summer. Similarly, when an aspiring actress protested after Horovitz put his tongue in her mouth during rehearsals, the director would put in an understudy and replace her with another cast member.

The Met has already been skating on thin financial ice for a while, forcing general manager Peter Gelb into a nasty labor dispute with its orchestra and chorus two years ago. (See James B. Stewart’s article in The New Yorker about this troubled time.) 

An adverse report from Proskauer Rose about the organization's dealings with Levine may not only trigger costly lawsuits but an exodus of faithful members and donors. A smaller institution may have even fewer means of survival--particularly if it has to answer questions, as The Met surely will now, about why they didn't do the necessary due diligence and investigate a star administrator or performer before offering him a generous contract. 

The 74-year-old Levine, who has already suffered from health problems for the last several years, may now, as a result of the scandal, have conducted his last performance at The Met and the other institutions where he worked, as virtually all have either suspended or completely cut ties with him. 

But even as his presence fades, the questions posed by his case and other errant artistic leaders across the country will persist. Administrators of the arts and their trustees will have to honestly and painfully review their past actions to see what went wrong--and implement new procedures to ensure past mistakes aren't repeated.

"All professions are conspiracies against the laity," George Bernard Shaw wrote in The Doctor's Dilemma. Acolytes of the arts have, unknown to much of the public, been experiencing their own loss of faith because of the profession's "priesthood." For that reason, the American arts community, already facing adverse forces in the Trump administration, may now have to weather a storm whose ominous clouds they had ignored for far too long.

(The accompanying Flickr photo of James Levine at the Metropolitan Opera House was taken Dec. 21, 2013, by Ralph Daily.)

Quote of the Day (Roger Ebert, on Blogging)

"My blog became my voice, my outlet, my 'social media' in a way I couldn't have dreamed of.  Most people choose to write a blog. I needed to."—Roger Ebert, Life Itself (2011)

For two decades, TV viewers became familiar with the voice of Roger Ebert as the co-host and frequent sparring partner of Gene Siskel. In recent years, cancer deprived him in the cruelest way of the physical nature of that voice, leaving him unable to speak, eat, or drink.

But in perhaps the finest period of his life, he refused to be silenced by his dire medical conditions. Astonishingly, he continued to write reviews at a pace that challenge a man half his age, not to mention a memoir, tweets and blog posts. What writers call their "voice"--their unique style and sensibility--strengthened in him, even as his body's deteriorated.

Ebert’s passing a few days ago made me think back on when I first happened across him and Siskel while watching a PBS station in the Midwest around 30 years ago. There was nothing quite like it what was then called Sneak Previews, at least in my experience.

I was familiar enough with film reviewers on the evening news and local newspapers, but I had never seen critics try to educate audiences on the elements that made a film compelling. And it was a show that made no concession to the men and women strong on appearance but short on intelligence who were increasingly taking over the airwaves. However Siskel and Ebert had landed this gig, it was, most assuredly, not through good looks.

Don’t underestimate what they managed to do together. There have been imitators and (following Siskel’s death) replacements, but nobody has managed to equal what they had: the sharp physical contrast between the short, heavyset, bespectacled Ebert and his tall, thin rival at the Chicago Tribune, not to mention contentious conversations that could quickly become more entertaining than what they were reviewing. (Ebert’s frequent response—“Well, Gene, I don’t think we were watching the same movie!”—should be enshrined in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.) It was a hard-won chemistry, as Ebert recalled after his partner's death, by trial and error, after they had learned to throw away their carefully prepared scripts and simply wing it.

In 1990, the satiric Spy Magazine ran a cover story with enlarged blow-ups of the two most famous thumbs in America, along with the waggish headline, “Whose Is Bigger?” The article proceeded to analyze whether Siskel or Ebert wielded more influence on the success of films. The verdict: The thin man, at least partly because he liked fewer films than his on-air partner. In a way, that says something positive about Ebert’s exuberant affection for the medium.

He came by that affection and knowledge partly the way most film buffs (myself included) do—by sheer osmosis, watching film after film that engages (and some that don't)—and partly by some (limited) experience in the industry. It was his dubious job to collaborate with Russ Meyer on the campy exploitation film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). It sure wasn’t Citizen Kane, but at least it gave him an idea of the mechanics of filmmaking and the stresses that even sleaziest practitioners of cinema must endure. And perhaps that gave him a healthy respect for industry professionals, even when he delivered some of his most memorable criticism.

Not that I always agreed with his views. I wondered, for instance, how he could object to the scene in the Neil Simon-penned The Slugger’s Wife in which the baseball player watches stock-still as his towering line drive heads for the fences. He wanted to know: Didn’t the filmmakers know that once a ball is hit, you’re supposed to run right away? Siskel spoke for me and many other viewers when he asked if Roger had watched Reggie Jackson in recent years. I also shook my head in deep anger when Ebert joined with the rest of the critical establishment in hailing the absurdly overhyped Pulp Fiction.

Writing at even the pace my blog requires often leaves me feeling I barely have time for a life. When you write as much under constant deadline for as long as Ebert did—46 years this week, when he got his job as a 24-year-old with the Chicago Sun-Times—the inspiration inevitably flags some days, particularly when you’re averaging more than 200 reviews a year, as Ebert was. Combine that with his continuing TV commitments and I think you can understand why, at points in the ‘90s, I speculated whether he might be overextended. Too many of his reviews, I thought, were reading like plot summaries rather than explanations of what made a particular movie work or not—the reason why I began watching him in the first place. He could inveigh, as he did in this You Tube clip discussion with Siskel, on political correctness as “the fascism of the Nineties,” but he himself could have broken with his pack of fellow critics more.

But in the end, his rage to write sustained his rage to live. Given all his health problems, he could have simply elected to withdraw from most people and from his work. But he wrote at a white-hot intensity, in an attempt to get down on paper everything he ever felt—about his relationship with Siskel, his continuing recovery from alcoholism, his liberalism, his Catholicism, his favorite pieces of literature. He revealed dimensions few would have suspected from the man on the aisle seat.

Where will Ebert eventually rank among film critics? As a sheer writer, he will not generate acolytes the way that Pauline Kael of The New Yorker did, but that’s probably a good thing: Kael’s idiosyncratic voice too often degenerated into cruelty. (For examples, see Robert Redford’s reminiscence of her brutal treatment of him early in his career, in the new issue of Esquire, or Renata Adler’s discussion of how Kael incorrectly berated George Roy Hill for recording outdoor scenes for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in a studio.) He might not have had the luxury to dig deeply and at length, as she had on the weekly schedule of The New Yorker, but she would have been hard-pressed to better the Pulitzer Prize he won for his far more frequent pieces. At the same time, he won't be known for seeing the medium in a new way, as James Agee was.

Still, I hope that his publisher is now considering something like A Roger Ebert Reader. It should take in so much across so many years and across so many media—not just the print pieces by this old-fashioned film journalist, but also the segments with Siskel, his tweets, his memoir, and his blog posts. It might go some way to counter the slight note of condescension in Wall Street Journal critic Terry Teachout’s summary of him as “the very best kind of middlebrow, an earnest enthusiast who took his work seriously.” It would demonstrate how Ebert’s career—and his long, brave death in public—justified the Virgil phrase that a high-school English and Latin teacher scrawled in my yearbook: Labor omnia vincit.

(The photo shows Evert at the time of the release of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls--a dubious film credit that, to his credit, he refused to disown.)

This Day in Pop Music History (Sousa, ‘America’s March King,’ Dies)

March 6, 1932—He is associated indelibly with the Fourth of July, when his “Stars and Stripes Forever” blares joyfully from virtually every pop-music orchestra hall and village bandshell. But John Philip Sousa passed away in late winter at age 77 in Reading, Penn.

Leading the United States Marine Corps Band for a dozen years, Sousa molded a musical unit that matched its larger military organization in precision and pride. He then led a band of his own named after him, composing more than 130 marches alone, not to mention a variety of other genres. So heavily associated was he with the march that he became known as “America’s March King.”

North and South, East and West, Sousa’s oeuvre (which also included "The Washington Post March" and "Semper Fidelis," the official march of the Marine Corps) formed a central part of musical Americana. In the era between the Civil War and the Great Depression, the United States badly needed a force that could overcome divisions bred by class and race. Sousa provided the musical harmony that made citizens forget what had so recently drawn them apart.

Contemporary nativists ought to consider this the next time Sousa’s music makes their hearts move faster (as it inevitably does): this maestro so associated with Americana was the son of immigrants (his father was born in Spain of Portuguese parents, while his mother was Bavarian).

In a 2008 column for the Wall Street Journal, “Sousa as Storyteller,” critic/biographer Terry Teachout discussed the brisk, no-nonsense writing style of Sousa. That’s right: not just composing style, but writing style: 138 newspaper and magazine articles, dozens of song lyrics, three full-length novels and an autobiography, Marching Along: Recollections of Men, Women and Music (1928).

Quite an active creative life, if you ask me.

Incidentally, a film of Sousa's life was released in 1952, starring Clifton Webb, best known as the waspish, prissy critic Waldo Lydecker of Laura. I can't imagine that the actor had much in common with his subject.