Conductor Arturo Toscanini celebration for the 150th anniversary of his birth March 25, 1867 tonight at Rizzoli Bookstore. New York- a city he loved except for its noise! The construction group Salini Impregilo and its American wing Lane wondered why on earth Rizzoli was asking them for sponsorship. It didn’t take so long to be convinced. “without great values and great example we [humans] would be nothing than beasts: I decided to invest my time and the time of the company on this book” said their spokesman.
Cameristi della Scala founded in 1982 and formed by musicians from the orchestra of Teatro alla Scala in Milan (Italy) delighted and moved us. With surprise guest (who also performed at last night’s concert in Washington’s Union Square) soprano Mihaela Marcu. Looking at her European schedule she is busy!
The livestream footage (watchable again) is far better than mine (saves me editing;) - a conversation with Toscanini scholar Harvey Sachs concludes the evening. (And no: the portrayal of the maestro in Florence Foster Jenkins is total fiction. But don’t let that deter you from a fascinating sad and in many aspects much so true still nowadays film.
It isn't essential necessarily to see conductors conduct (unless you're the musician or singer!). And if one knows nothing about conducting can that be a fascination? Some appear to do almost nothing and others more of something. What it must be to fly!
Elsewhere in New York. The Dana Shutz controversy at the Whitney Biennale finally got a detailed response from the show’s curators. The nay-sayers of the painting setting a very dangerous precedence. Everyone has the right to their voice and that voice for good or ill can now travel the airwaves of the world even if they physically cannot. Thinking of Toscanini who could never be accused of denying anyone a voice and who in December 1936 travelled to Palestine to train refugee Jewish musicians (they later became the Israel Philharmonic). Equally, he also tried to give conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler his own job in New York in order for him to escape the Nazis. (Like Herbert von Karajan, the jury is still out and forever will be on whether Furtwängler collaborated or not with the Nazi regime.) Does that mean we should ban and destroy all the recordings of those two maestros? New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick promulgated the banning of Gone With the Wind for its use of the Confederate flag. Should also we ban every film that shows the Third Reich? It is the same argument, though none would really stand up in an international court of law. Should we ban "Leni" Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films? And of course the case of composer Richard Wagner who clearly was anti-Semitic but few want to delve further into history than that. And a composer often conducted by Toscanini.
There’s an Iranian photographer Niloufar Banisadr, brought to my attention many years ago showing at AIPAD. Her photos of window curtains were packed with such a quiet debate. Should she be banned for furthering that artistic expression a little more loudly in her work by some authorities? History like politics so often tries to simply white or indeed black or yellow ....wash awkward topics. Time and time again. Toscanini indeed supported (as did President Theodore Roosevelt) Mussolini, the maestro for a much shorter time than the President in truth, aghast and abhorring what was happening so quickly in Italy. Historian Simon Schama is one of your men for attempting to see and discover what really lies under those rocks that will forever weigh down many of us. Shouldn't we use our own senses far more often to sense danger? Deer can do it at over 80ft. Many humans, alas, often can barely smell at 10 paces.
[apologies for the wrong 'letter' mistake last night. Computers have a knack of trying to help when it isn't really welcomed. Blame the well meaning HAL] I did triple check that! Of course! i think i changed the lower case company name to upper-case and hAlt stepped in-my revenge!
Making jokes at the expense of the movie 2001’s HAL is one thing. (I don’t flatter myself that someone would be interested enough to compile an Anthony Burgess –esque Clockwork Orange glossary of Brilliant Adventures ‘source-code’- what did Burgess call it? - my copy is in another box. Somewhere. There is a Hidden Figures morality that if the humans don't properly programme the computer then…inevitably…how wrong did humans get the Hubble Telescope..
Like Toscanini and every other famous conductor…word gets handed down and mauled that is so inaccurate.
Some Hubble Telescope problem links:
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/14/us/probable-mistake-in-hubble-is-found.html
http://people.tamu.edu/~v-buenger/658/Hubble.pdf
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27509559
The REAL problem: Contrary to popular belief, the mixup [of measurement] was not an SI vs English units problem. The problem was that the numbers were passed from Lockheed to NASA without units. Without the actual units jotted down after the numbers, the Lockheed people knew the units were lb-f. The NASA people assumed the units were Newtons. It's an important distinction because the same error can happen even if you work entirely in SI units. If I write down a number in kilonewtons but fail to write down the units, and you assume it is just newtons, we end up with the same problem. I've seen this happen countless times in the lab and while tutoring, with kids plugging grams into an equation when they're supposed to be using kg. (Which BTW is one stupid thing about SI units - really confuses the kids that the base unit for everything else has no prefix, but the base unit for mass is a kilo-gram.) Fortunately, forcing them to write down the units after every number usually takes care of this problem. In science and engineering, any time you see a number without units, your immediate reaction should be to ask the person who provided the numbers what the units are. (Actually you should be ripping him a new one for failing to write down the units, dimensionless numbers excepted.) Never assume the units, always ask.
Some media simplified the problem into- one guy measure in inches and the other metric. Well...that is always possible, said the 'deer'. ;)
Not unlike most conventional wisdom of musical tempi etc etc that is far far from wise. Long live Sir Roger Norrington. You may not agree but you can't possibly say that u are bored!
Where is all this leading? I forgot...no..I didn't even at 2.30am. Wait a moment while I eat another bratwurst;) Maybe I should go to computer sleep...;) HAL- piss off! geezes...haven't you got a Kylie Minogue song to listen to?...
Know what spawned this sudden 'outrage' of 'geek' ? I saw for the the first time (alas) tonight a whole gallery of Sebastião Salgado's now world famous 1991 Kuwait photos of burning oil wells. These images from, not just a photographer, but a human who made changes to the world -not one who just stood back and 'snapped'. I'd seen them in repro and then over the years a few at a time. But for me it was an unexpected new experience. And seeing them in the flesh, a phrase when applied to these extraordinary images sounds so so banale, was out of this world. And yet it IS and WAS our world and alas may well be still.
All this so called conventional wisdom- where does it get anyone? All this so-called 'human' intelligence. Where, what, how, why? All this destruction. Why? Well- America has a lot to answer for. And America rarely ever really answers! I remember back way/when when most pro-active youth were just 'sprogs' and the British Foreign Office seemed like a relic from East Berlin in 2002. I had walked the terraces of its gorgeous 'palm court' in London and I wept that the great history of the Foreign Office had been decimated as if Lawrence of Arabia had never been. Had never breathed, had never. Walked. The British made so so so many mistakes in foreign policy throughout history as did almost everyone else in the world. But the saving coup de grace was that: not that it bent over backwards to understand other cultures. NO! It demonstrated an equality of respect. Of endurance. Of responsibility. Above all a humanity that couldn't possibly be misunderstood.
Funny....I've never heard HAL be so so so quiet in so so long a time.
