Completion of "A Career"

From Laurel Fay's wonderful and indespensible Shostakovich: A Life:

"The final movement of the [13th] symphony, "A Career," was dated 20 July 1962, a date that... Shostakovich would commemorate for the rest of his life." (pg. 229)

In honor of the man and his music, and in the spirit of continuing the celebration (and turning this into a yearly thing), posted below is 5th movement (NB- the first video begins at the end of the 4th movement). I plan on listening to the movement and spending a moment or two reflecting on the text. As Shostakovich said, "Every morning, instead of morning prayers, I reread–well, recite from memory–two poems by Yevtushenko, "Boots" and "A Career." "Boots" is conscience. "A Career" is morality. One should not be deprived of conscience. To lose conscience is to lose everything. And conscience needs to be instilled from earliest childhood." (pg. 229)

Babi Yar Remembrance Day

Lies

Lying to the young is wrong.
Proving to them that lies are true is wrong.
Telling them
            that God’s in his heaven
and all’s well with the world
                             is wrong.
They know what you mean.
                        They are people too.
Tell them the difficulties
                          can’t be counted,
and let them see
                not only
                        what will be
but see
       with clarity
                   these present times.

Say obstacles exist they must encounter,
sorrow comes,
             hardship happens.
The hell with it.
                 Who never knew
the price of happiness
                      will not be happy.
Forgive no error
                you recognize,
it will repeat itself,
                      a hundredfold
and afterward
             our pupils
will not forgive in us
                      what we forgave. 

"Lies" by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1952; Translated by Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (revised)

~ ~ ~

September 29 marks the first day of the Nazi massacre of Jews at Babi Yar. While these original killings lasted three days, and were followed by two years of essentially non-stop murders, 10/29 is set aside as a day of remembrance. Take a moment to listen to the incredibly powerful first movement of Shostakovich's 13th Symphony:

Completion of "A Career"

As some of you may know, I recently completed my thesis on Dmitri Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony. I quote from Laurel Fay's Shostakovich: A Life:

"In his score, Shostakovich dated the completion of the movements... The final movement of the symphony, "A Career," was dated 20 July 1962, a date that... Shostakovich would commemorate for the rest of his life." (pg. 229)

In honor of the man and his music, and in the spirit of continuing the celebration, posted below is the Yevtushenko poem Shostakovich set. I plan on listening to the movement and spending a moment or two reflecting on the text. As Shostakovich said, "Every morning, instead of morning prayers, I reread–well, recite from memory–two poems by Yevtushenko, "Boots" and "A Career." "Boots" is conscience. "A Career" is morality. One should not be deprived of conscience. To lose conscience is to lose everything. And conscience needs to be instilled from earliest childhood." (pg. 229)

Career The clergy maintained that Galileo Was a wicked and senseless man. (Galileo was senseless.) But, as time demonstrated, He who is senseless is much wiser. A fellow scientist of Galileo's age Was no less wise than Galileo. He knew that the earth revolved. But - he had a family. And he, stepping into a carriage with his wife, Having accomplished his betrayal, Considered himself advancing his career, Whereas he undermined it, For his assertion of our planet Galileo faced the risk alone And became truly great. Now this To my mind, this is a true careerist! Thus - salute to the career! When the career is similar To Shakespeare and Pasteur, Newton and Tolstoy, And Tolstoy. Leo? Leo! Why was mud flung at them? Talent is talent, brand them as one may. Those who cursed them are forgotten. But the accursed are remembered well, All those who yearned for the stratosphere, The doctors who perished fighting cholera, They were pursuing a career!

I take as an example their careers.

I believe in their sacred belief.
Their belief is my courage.
I pursue my career
By not pursuing it!

Pre-Concert Conversation

Bored? Lonely? Miss me? Don't have plans for Halloween? Genuinely interested in Shostakovich's visit to Louisville 50 years ago? Then do I have a link for you! WUOL, our friendly neighborhood NPR station (well, one of them) has provided for download the pre-concert conversation I took part in a few weeks ago. Enjoy!

NPR and Criticism

Not long ago, I read an article criticizing NPR's "Top Songs of the Year (So Far) list for being too "white." The author contends that "it's not that NPR doesn't like black music. It merely maintains a strict preference for black music that few actual living African-Americans listen to." Maybe so, maybe not. In my opinion, anyone who genuinely wants to keep a pulse on "black" music (more or less defined by the article in terms of what it's not: white, indie, guitar-driven, college educated, alive, young, local, and hip/fresh/non-retro) doesn't use NPR. Listening to NPR for current trends in rap/ hip-hop makes less sense than buying The New Yorker strictly for the cartoons. And I can see some merits in the author's point that "In matters of musical taste, everyone has a God-given right to provincialism and conservatism, even those NPR listeners who consider themselves cosmopolitan and liberal," although I think forcing yourself to consume music you do not like simply to be "cosmopolitan and liberal" is asinine. 


And I was doing well even through the comparison of the NPR "Best Music..." list with the fact that "...in 2009, the No. 1 song on the Billboard charts has been by a black or female artist—or by groups featuring both blacks and whites or men and women—a total of 41 out of 42 weeks." What got my dander up was the article's snippy "Who are the progressives again—the public radio crowd or the Top 40 great unwashed?" So, "progressive" equals "listening to music that prominently features black or female artists?" And the "great unwashed," because of their support of this music (isn't that what the chart statistics are proving, support?), are more progressive? Breaking "progressive" into such simplistic (and borderline racist) terms does no one any good. More over, it trivializes the complexities of production and consumption of race in music into antagonistic binaries. I'm not going to defend NPR and what they chose to conceive of "black" music, but in their exposure of non- mainstream "black" artists, they inform their listeners about the entire spectrum of "black" music, a spectrum that takes far more into account that Top 40 hits.


However, I will criticize NPR for its endorsement of Bernstein's recording of Shostakovich's 5th Symphony. And, for its sales pitch: "In the remarkable finale, Shostakovich achieves one of the greatest coups of his symphonic career: a "victorious" closer that drives home the expected message and at the same time makes an entirely different point — the real one." This whole trope of Shostakovich study was begun with the fraudulent memoir "Testimony," and was continued through a slew of noxious, pseudo-musicological "interpretations" that I won't even mention by name on my blog. This trope persists, in program and liner notes and pre-concert lectures (last weekend I saw a legitimate conductor spew some of this same nonsense before Shostakovich's 10th Symphony), and most frustratingly, in legitimate scholarly publications by scholars who did not critically analyze their sources. It's a serious historiographic problem, and one that I will return to soon.




"..An entirely different point- the real one." Please. Aside of being elitist and overly dramatic, and ignoring for sake of time the hermeneutic implications of such statements, sticking to such an interpretation with Bernstein's recording, BERNSTEIN'S!, the fastest one I have ever heard **, is mindless. The tempo at the end is so fast, so stereotypically reliant on traditional symphonic gestures of closure that the possibility for other interpretations doesn't even exist... and that does a huge disservice to Shostakovich and intelligent consumers of art music.



** Compare Bernstein's (8:53) with Rostropovich's (12:04)

Babi Yar Remembrance Day- Sept. 29

Lies

Lying to the young is wrong.
Proving to them that lies are true is wrong.
Telling them
            that God’s in his heaven
and all’s well with the world
                             is wrong.
They know what you mean.
                        They are people too.
Tell them the difficulties
                          can’t be counted,
and let them see
                not only
                        what will be
but see
       with clarity
                   these present times.

Say obstacles exist they must encounter,
sorrow comes,
             hardship happens.
The hell with it.
                 Who never knew
the price of happiness
                      will not be happy.
Forgive no error
                you recognize,
it will repeat itself,
                      a hundredfold
and afterward
             our pupils
will not forgive in us
                      what we forgave. 

"Lies" by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1952; Translated by Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi (revised)

~ ~ ~


September 29 marks the first day of the Nazi massacre of Jews at Babi Yar. While these original killings lasted three days, and were followed by two years of essentially non-stop murders, 11/29 is set aside as a day of remembrance. While doing research for my thesis (on Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13), I've learned a bit about the historical event. I'll refrain from imparting details or commentary of my own, save that it was horrific, on par with the Nazi camps at Buchenwald and Auschwitz, the Allied firebombing of Dresden, or the atomic weapons blasts in Japan. [I suppose I'll add one bit of commentary, and that's for everyone to read that list and remember that history is always written by the winner.] I'll also spare you from emotional education or political criticism (sans an entreaty to take a moment and think), as these have already been made by people far beyond my poor power to add or detract: