Crazytown

WE NEED A LITTLE CHRISTMAS

Right. This. Very. Minute.
By Alisha Giampola (Writer/Performer)

It doesn't feel like Christmas yet in New York. There's only been a brief flurry of snow, nothing to stick, nothing to take a picture of. Even I, grumpiest of cold-weather persons, have not yet unpacked my heaviest winter coat. The overall feeling of sadness and dread that settled over the city after the election has not yet dissipated. Difficult times, corrupt leadership, war and strife, these things frequently nudge our greatest artists to produce their greatest art. Beauty is always best forged in the hottest fire. This week, I took myself to see a dear old friend in a play that I absolutely love, but have never had the opportunity to see. Jonathan Larson, of Rent fame, wrote only one other musical in his too-short life. The Keen Company's Tick, Tick...BOOM! is playing right now at The Acorn Theatre in Midtown, and if you have a chance before your flight home this holiday (it closes for good on December 18th), I highly recommend that you see it. Besides the fact that the three actors in it (including my amazingly talented friend George Salazar), are all phenomenal- this show resonates right now in a way that feels incredibly contemporary, despite being set in 1990. Disillusioned by friends having to sell out and work for soulless corporations, struggling with the pull between creating art and seeking stability, uninspired by Bush-era politics, wondering what the decade of one's thirties will bring, and set deep in the heart of the AIDS crisis, I had forgotten how relevant so much of the script is. The AIDS crisis aside, it's basically the life of me and like 90% of my friends.

This holiday season, it feels like we just voted in the Grinch, Mr. Potter, Ebenezer Scrooge...(just basically every bad guy from every Christmas movie ever but with none of the redeeming qualities rolled into one) into office. It felt good to take in art- challenging, beautiful, heartbreaking art. It was a reminder that there is always ugliness, and the job of artists is to shine flashlights into the corners and make the cockroaches scuttle. And there are a lot of dark corners right now. When bullies vie for other bullies to be put in charge, when refugees are being turned away and innocent people are ducking bombs, when an entire country has been conned, it's easy to feel like kindness and generosity are sorely lacking in this world this holiday season. But what George Bailey and Tiny Tim and Mrs. Claus and the Cratchits and Susan Walker and Buddy the Elf and all the Whos down in Whoville want you to remember is that kindness and love and art are the best and really only way to protest anything.

2016 has been a hard year for our world and this new year feels both promising and slightly ominous. So much rests on the small, everyday actions of all of us. The kind of person who assumes the mantle of the most powerful person the world stage, yet feels the need to write a tweet every time someone satirizes him, is the kind of person who requires attention, positive or negative, at any cost. That's the kind of person who will continue to surround themselves with yes-men and sycophants, regardless of their danger to others or to democracy in general. Journalists have their work cut out for them, as do all persons currently in or planning to run for office in this country and in other world democracies. What can artists do in 2017? What should our New Years Resolution be? We can refuse to bend our moral compass towards the closest, brassiest magnet. We can choose our ability to express ourselves to others as a platform for love instead of hate, for inclusivity instead of hostility. We can call the emperor out for wearing no clothes, in numbers too multitudinous to be retweeted. We can keep creating. Keep questioning. As the last song of Tick, Tick...BOOM! reminds us: "Fear or love baby? Don't say the answer: actions speak louder than words." 

I've been thinking a lot about the finale of the operetta Candide by Leonard Bernstein. In college, I sang the role of Paquette in a staging of that final song we performed in a small cabaret of several opera pieces. It is a beautiful song with beautiful lyrics and when I try to talk about what I hope artists do with the time we all have in 2017, when I think about the words I would most like to be my New Years Resolution, if such things can be resolved, these are the words that keep playing through my mind:

Let dreamers dream what worlds they please
Those Edens can't be found
The sweetest flow'rs, the fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground.
We're neither pure nor wise nor good,
We'll do the best we know
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow
And make our garden grow.

ALISHA GIAMPOLA is an NYC based actor/teacher/writer who would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas. Kiss my ass. Kiss his ass. Happy Hanukkah.
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THE MUSIC THAT MADE OUR WORLD PODCAST

Classical music that's fun for everybody.
By Tom Rizzuto

I think that it would come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog that podcasts are my current favorite form of entertainment. They're fun, accessible, and there are so many out there that anyone can find something they're interested in. 

And starting this Fall, they'll be one more. 

That's right, everybody. I'm throwing my hat into the podcasting ring and developing my own! 

The Music That Made Our World podcast (which you can, and should like on Facebook immediately) is a new kind of podcast about Classical Music. 

What makes it so new, you ask? 

We won't beat you down with dry, boring music theory or subject you to hours of composer biographies. No, we get right to the good stuff.

Did Beethoven help us beat the Nazis? Why were the first musicians to performed Vivaldi's Four Seasons all orphans…and why were they kept in a cage? Why are Chopin's body and his heart buried in two different countries? Who the heck is Figaro anyway? 

All of these questions and more will be answered in The Music That Made Our World, an upcoming podcast about classical music for everybody, regardless of what kind of music you like to listen to. 

How can I be so sure, you'll like it? 

The truth is you've been listening to classical music your entire life, whether you realize it or not. You've heard it at weddings, graduation ceremonies, and even funerals. You've heard it blaring from people's cell phones on the subway. You've heard it in movies, TV shows, and commercials. Haven't you ever wondered why or even what you were listening to? The real answers might surprise you?

We focus on the stories that the history books won't tell you. The funny, sad, and even shocking stories behind classical music's greatest hits. We want to teach you more about the pieces you already know and love…or at least, sort of like. 

Along the way, you'll hear about how classical music influenced every aspect of the world we live in. The pieces that won wars, inspired nations, and literally changed the course of history. This is the soundtrack to our lives. This is The Music That Made Our World.

 

Tom Rizzuto is a freelance musician and writer working in New York. He has also taught guitar and music history at several local universities. For real, everybody, like the Facebook page. 
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NATASHA AND PIERRE AND DAVE AND CLAUDIO

Are today's radical musicals reenacting the revolution of 1598?
By Eric Grunin

I saw Dave Malloy's Natasha and Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 back in 2013, and somewhere in Act 2 I had a tiny epiphany about where he's coming from, and perhaps where we're all headed. Since The Great Comet is coming back to town, and since the cast album is a good representation of the whole show (and can be heard in its entirely online), I'm going to talk this one out.

Let's start with some background.

Dave Malloy

I saw The Great Comet during the Meatpacking District run, the one in a pop-up tent. Phillipa Soo was terrific as Natasha, which none of you will find surprising. Malloy himself was Pierre, and presented as a cross between Elvis Costello and Vladimir Vysotsky (which I mean as high praise). And Tolstoy spins a great yarn when he puts aside his obsession with theories of history and gets on with his story.

Pierre (Dave Malloy) fights a drunken duel.

I found the show more consistently engaging than Malloy's 2010 Three Pianos, a hallucinatory fantasia on Schubert's song cycle Die Winterreise, whose energy level dropped considerably about two-thirds of the way through. I had a similarly uneven experience at last year's Preludes, a play with music (definitely not a 'musical') which digs deep into the dream-life of Rachmaninoff as he struggles against depression and despair. But all this work is on a very high conceptual level. Malloy is deeply engaged with the emotional processes of the so-called Romantic Era, a musical epoch for which Schubert and Rachmaninoff virtually delimit the beginning and end.

As it turns out, Malloy is very, very dissatisfied with the state of musical theater. He even wrote a kind of manifesto about it five years ago. I disagree with a lot of his analysis, but he's asking the right questions, and that's more important. Here's a short and less dyspeptic interview from 2014:

 

Now it's time to turn away from Mr. Malloy for a minute and go over a little recent history.

Lyrics and Music and Style and Idea

The way that music and story interact in what we call the American Musical has remained essentially unchanged since 1943. There's nothing wrong with that: using songs to advance the story and delineate character and subtext is a strategy that is far from exhaustion.

The harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary of the music has also remained much the same, which is much more problematic: English usage is in the middle of a revolution unlike anything seen since Shakespeare's time, and new linguistic tropes require new music to match. The way we talk, even in 'formal' settings, now incorporates informality, slang, new grammatical constructions, viral catchphrases, and the telegraphic speech of sitcom banter.

In the late 1950s, when this transition began to pick up speed, popular music was changing to accommodate it: you had to have a new kind of music if what you wanted to say was I wanna hold your hand, let alone Good golly Miss Molly, sure likes to ball.

 

No YouTube clips with lyrics - coincidence?

THE LAST STRADIVARIUS GUITAR: THE SABIONARI

The rarest guitar in the world.
By Tom Rizzuto

Antonio Stradivari made the best violins ever built. Everybody knows that. The name Stradivarius has enjoyed this kind of brand recognition for close to three hundred years, and with good reason. There's something special about the sound of a Stradivarius that people have been trying to put their finger on for centuries. However, even after hundreds of years of uninterrupted cultural relevance, you can still surprise even the most diehard music aficionado with this fact about Stradivari:

He also made guitars.

You know he's got some surprises up his sleeves. Look how big they are!

BEN FRANKLIN: OUR MOST MUSICAL FOUNDING FATHER

Like you needed more reasons to love this guy.
By Tom Rizzuto

The Founding Fathers loved music. This shouldn't be that surprising. Everybody loves music. They attended concerts, sang drinking songs, and a bunch of them even played instruments. However, one of these guys took his musical activities further than the rest.

All about the Benjamins indeed.

You can be forgiven if you never learned the extent of Ben Franklin's musical resume. After all, Franklin did a lot of stuff. After your history teachers got through the printing, writing, ambassadorship, inventing, the whole kite situation and The Revolutionary War, they probably didn't have much time for anything else. If you're lucky, you might have heard something about a "Glass Harmonica" but that was probably the extent of it.

TILL THERE WAS YOU FROM THE MUSIC MAN

My recent vocal demo recording. 
By Kat Flynn (Actor)

 

I'm so pleased to share with you my recent vocal demo. I'm so proud of it and I hope you'll enjoy it! Oh, and share the shipoopi out of it! ;)

xoxo

KAT FLYNN is an American Expat living & working in Great Britain. www.katflynn.com
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OFFBEATS: ERIK SATIE

Stories about the strangest people and events from the history of classical music.
By Tom Rizzuto 

People love hearing about wackos. We call them eccentric. We say that the things they achieved couldn't have been fathomed by a normal mind. We believe that every genius must battle with a fair amount of their own personality quirks in order to find their way in society.

Maybe these things we tell ourselves are true, but the fact of the matter remains that we as a society love to learn about people who have made a name for themselves despite being, well, a little off.

The history of music, perhaps more than that of any other profession, is filled with these stories. Hence, my new semi-regular series: Offbeats.

These are the stories of the most eccentric individuals from a field that is known for being a breeding ground for eccentricity, and the crazy incidents that seem to get swept under the rug when it's time to write the textbooks. These are things you didn't learn in your music appreciation class. This is the stuff that polite society doesn't want getting out. The stuff that the blue-haired one-percenters in the orchestra boxes at the Met would prefer we didn't talk about. These, are the Offbeats.

Erik Satie was a contemporary and influence on many of the best-known names of French Impressionist music in early Twentieth Century. Debussy, Ravel, and many other household names of classical music idolized him and promoted him whenever they could. He is seen as a pioneer of not only Impressionism, but of Minimalism, The Avant-Garde, and Modernism as a whole. So why haven't you heard more about him?

I mean just look at those glasses.

 

JOHN CAGE: GENIUS OR CON MAN

WHY NOT BOTH?
By Tom Rizzuto 

Last semester, towards the end of my American Music class, I started a session by playing a YouTube video of John Cage's famous 4'33" and silently watched my class wrestle with what they were watching. If you're not aware of 4'33'' it's a piece of music in which a pianist sits down at a piano, sets a stopwatch, and just sits there, doing nothing for just over four and a half minutes.
 
Less than a minute in, my class exploded. "When is he going to start?" "Is the video frozen?" "No look, he just moved." "Professor, what's going on?"

I waited quietly, answering none of their questions until the piece was over. After which, I walked in front of the room and explained that what they had just witnessed was a performance of one of the most famous works by one of classical music's most famous and influential composers. Just then, Kimberly, a student who was attending school on a volleyball scholarship, had no interest in music, and generally used my class as an excuse to catch up on text messages made her first relevant point of the semester, "Professor, if that's all it takes to be a famous classical composer, I'm going to become one."

5 REASONS WHY BEETHOVEN SHOULD BE YOUR HERO

And none of them have anything to do with him being deaf. 
By Tom Rizzuto

The world needs heroes, everybody. We need people to look up to and say, “Look at all those great things he did…maybe I can do great things too.”

Sadly though, sometimes it seems like the world is running short on people who deserve our admiration. Especially for those of us in the arts, our heroes mostly seem to fall into one of two categories: “People who were born with a gigantic head start in either their family’s finances or connections,” and “People who are so crazy gifted that it seems like they never had to work at anything, it just came to them naturally.”

Luckily for us history is full of the kinds of rags to riches stories that we need to keep us going, and for me personally, the guy on the top of that list is none other than Ludwig van Beethoven.

Man, you better ask somebody.

Before we even get started, at no point in this list am I even going to mention the fact that he went deaf and still managed to write some of the most enduring music ever composed. Why? Because you know that already. It’s been done.

This list of Beethoven facts is about Beethoven the man, not Beethoven the medical case study. It’s about the other things he overcame and the struggles he went through to become as ubiquitous as he is. In a world where it’s easy to feel like you have the odds stacked against you, Beethoven stands as undeniable proof that you can make it if you work hard enough. Here’s some reasons why:

1. His childhood and family life were terrible.

As we know, nobody has the power to hold you back like your family. Beethoven’s family was so bad that if he hadn’t gone into music and pursued say a career in serial killing, I doubt many psychologists would have been surprised. His mother was usually depressed or sick (medical science at the time often didn’t distinguish between the two) and his father was an abusive alcoholic who was fixated on making his son the next Mozart. He set out to attain these goals by beating the hell out of him until he played better. By the time Beethoven was a teenager, he was essentially supporting his family financially and, as the oldest son, probably emotionally as well.

2.  He was an extremely gifted child, but he was no Mozart.

Beethoven obviously had a gift for music. He’s Beethoven after all. However, it’s worth mentioning that while other composers, most notably Mozart, seemed to have come out of the womb ready to put on a show, Beethoven had to work at his craft constantly. He practiced so much, and was under so much pressure, that it’s hard to tell how much of Beethoven’s success was due to inspiration and how much was due to perspiration.

3. He was ugly.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m sick of seeing beautiful people everywhere. Even female MMA fighters…women who get punched in the face for a living are all hot nowadays. Beethoven, by all accounts was ugly as sin. He was short, had scars all over his face from a childhood battle with smallpox, he never quite learned how to groom himself due to a childhood marked by considerable neglect, and his complexion was dark and uneven.

This is image that most of Beethoven's friends agreed best captured how he really looked.

4. He bounced back from so many disappointments it’s ridiculous.

When he was a teenager, he got the opportunity to study with Mozart. Then his mom died and he had to go home to get his family in order. By the time he was ready to go back to Vienna, Mozart was dead too. His next teacher, Haydn, barely had any time for him. He looked up to Napoleon, but the Napoleonic Wars caused all of his benefactors to flee Vienna and virtually destroyed his career for years. He was constantly underpaid, he could never maintain a relationship, and in his darkest moments, people ridiculed him in the streets. Oh yeah, and he lost his hearing. 

5. Besides music he was bad at just about everything.

He was so bad with numbers, and was so confused by simple math, some people think he was dyslexic. He never learned how to shave properly, which contributed to his slovenly appearance. He couldn’t dance, and apparently had trouble sharpening pencils. He was constantly unlucky in finding love despite the fact that he was one of the most famous and eligible bachelors in Vienna. He had no fashion sense or manners for that matter, and had such a bad temper that he once broke a chair over a benefactor's head. And, if scholars are to be believed, he seemed to be constantly falling in love with Italian women, which take it from your old pal Tom Rizzuto, may not be a character flaw but certainly won’t make your life any easier.

Deaf to the haters.

Tom Rizzuto is a freelance musician and writer working in New York. He has also taught guitar and music history at several local universities. He's sorry if he hurt the feelings of any Italian Beethoven fans, but he calls them how he sees them and Italian women are nuts. 
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ON OPERA, PART 2

Puccini for the First Time
By Sam Perwin

Last week's episode of Scandal ended with a really choice musical gem: Aretha Franklin's iconic rendition of "Nessun dorma" from Puccini's Turnadot. Yes, you read that right. For anyone who doesn't remember, at the Grammy's in 1998, Luciano Pavarotti was scheduled to sing the famous aria, but canceled due to illness. Who, of all people, should step in, but the Queen of Soul herself Aretha Franklin. Her performance was strange, brilliant, disruptive (before that was a thing...), totally inappropriate, and masterful. Only Aretha would have the balls to replace Pavarotti, sing one of his most iconic arias, and sing it her way: Yes, I can and will riff on Puccini BECAUSE I'M ARETHA FUCKING FRANKLIN THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

If you haven't seen it, watch it and be changed. If you have, watch it anyway and remember the joy:

 

The moment I heard her sing the first few notes in the background of Scandal, I shot up on the couch and asked my fiance if he recognized what it was (and silently offered up thanks to the All-Mighty Shonda for bringing this musical moment back into my life). When he said no, I promptly grabbed my computer and showed him the above clip, then, sensing that he didn't grasp the magnitude of it, I found a recording of Pavarotti singing it for comparison. Unhappy with the quality of that particular recording, I found Domingo singing it - whose voice he seemed to like better. As we listened, I asked him if he'd ever heard the aria before. "No, he replied. It's beautiful." And suddenly I remembered what it was like to hear Puccini for the first time. The grandeur, the expressiveness, the emotion. He's never been my favorite composer, but I understand the appeal. 

We spent the next hour or so listening to some greatest hits, and I watched him take these arias in for the first time. We were on a tenor kick, so I played him some de riguer recordings of my favorite tenor, Carlo Bergonzi: the Rigoletto quartet, "Vesti la giubba," "Che gelida manina." We hit some Bel Canto with "Una furtiva lagrima" (Pavarotti for that one, of course). I even ventured into some deeper cuts: "O tu che in seno agli angeli," from La forza del destino, for example (Domingo), and even veered off the tenor path with "Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix..." (I thought he'd like Saint-Saëns - he did).

Carlo Bergonzi. Get into it.

It was beautiful and thrilling to watch him listen and ask to hear more. Some pieces brought tears to his eyes. We talked about the different voices and what he liked about them and didn't like about them. We talked about different composers and hearing the differences. I looked for a book I thought he might like called Getting Opera, by Matt Dobkin - it helped me so many years ago when I was first starting my opera journey. Of course, we've been to various operas together, but I realized that he's never experienced any of the classics: Boheme, Traviata, Carmen, Rigoletto. We opera snobs call those "war horses," but when they're done well, we remember how they got to be such stalwarts.

On a more personal note, I was struck by how much my fiance and I still have to learn from each other and with each other, and more importantly how wonderful that is. Our wedding is fast approaching, and by the time it happens we will have been together almost 6 years. Not much will change about our day to day lives after this wedding. We will come home to the same apartment; we will live the same lives. And yet, at the risk of sounding cliche, our wedding feels like it will be a complete reset of our relationship - like it's been building to this point, and from here on out it's a clean slate. From that point in a mere 7 weeks, we'll build something new together, based on what we've already built so far. All I can say for sure so far is that will include far more opera.

SAM PERWIN Actor. Singer. Writer. Tall. www.samperwin.com
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