Harp Competition Really About People

For the past two weeks Bloomington, Indiana, specifically Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, was the center of the harp world, as the eighth USA International Harp Competition unfolded. A triennial event, this year USAIHC attracted 39 competitors from around the globe, all of them young women between the ages of sixteen and thirty-two.

My partner and I are not harp cognoscenti, but we have always enjoyed getting acquainted and interacting with international students. Thus we volunteered to host a harpist, which is how nineteen-year-old Agné Keblyté (photo) from Lithuania ended up staying with us. What a delight she was! Indeed, the homestay experience was universally fun and rewarding for hosts and guests alike.

For us, the competition wasn’t the true centerpiece of the two weeks. Rather, it was the people themselves: the music school officials, from deans and faculty stars to student harp movers, who worked tirelessly to pull off this major international event; the harpists, performing through successive stages of elimination (Agné got to Stage 2); the host families, making sure their harpists not only got to the competition venues relaxed and on time but also had a chance to see something of the real Bloomington; and the guest performers, both young and experienced, who entertained our community brilliantly.

Competition on this level draws only the best, so the notion of “winners” and “losers” does not apply. All of the harpists were accomplished and performed beautifully. I gained an appreciation of the harp as a solo instrument, whereas previously I had seen it only as an instrument somewhere back in the mass of the symphony orchestra. In particular, a guest recital by the 2004 gold medal laureate, Emmanuel Ceysson, brought this home. Ceysson, still under age thirty, took up his current position as principal harp of the Paris Opera Orchestra not long after winning the USAIHC prize. And what a marvel he was to watch—and hear—in recital!

Another highlight was a “stars of tomorrow” recital given by five harpists, all national junior champions under the age of sixteen. Later, seeing them frolicking with the harp competitors at a pool party reminded us that these incredibly talented young people are, underneath the formal wear and beyond those elegant instruments, just kids—kids who like splashing one another in the swimming pool, chowing down on hotdogs and chips, and laughing and joking with one another in half a dozen languages.

In the end it always comes down to people.

June and Gypsy

When actress June Havoc died a few weeks ago at age 97, an era truly ended.

End-of-an-era labels are easily applied without justification, but this case is different. June’s long career began in vaudeville, and she was one of the few remaining performers who could make that claim. But there are other reasons that make her end-of-an-era label spot on.

Born Ellen Evangeline Horvik in Vancouver, British Columbia, she was the apple of her mother’s eye — and the root of her stage mom’s hopes for success in vaudeville. Ellen/June actually was American, her mother, Rose Thompson, having married a Swedish American named John Olaf Horvik. When Rose divorced John, it was Ellen as a child vaudeville star who, along with a sister named Rose Louise, kept income flowing for the struggling family. Ellen’s stage name was “Baby June.” The “June” stuck even after she fled her stage mother’s overbearing presence in 1928, when she was about 15.

Rose Louise, called Louise in the family, took over the “baby” franchise, which she soon outgrew. Mama Rose’s hopes could have been dashed right then, as vaudeville was in its death throes. But vaudeville was being superceded by burlesque, and it was there that Rose Louise blossomed — as Gypsy Rose Lee, the iconic stripper.

June and Gypsy’s story was immortalized in the hit stage musical Gypsy, which premiered on Broadway in 1959. It featured a book by Arthur Laurents, music by Jule Styne, and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, based on Gypsy’s own 1957 self-titled memoir. Gypsy’s was the flashier story — especially with the titillation of her having been a striptease artist — and she could write it. (She also wrote mystery novels, notably The G-String Murders; I have a copy on my bookshelf.) But June’s career post-vaudeville was not without note.

As June Havoc, Ellen Horvik gained a measure of fame on Broadway in shows such as Sigmund Romberg’s Forbidden Melody in 1936 and later Rogers and Hart’s Pal Joey. In the Forties she moved to Hollywood, where she starred in Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947, see photo) and other films, continuing to play various roles well into old age, and well after her more famous sister, Gypsy, had died in 1970 at age 59.

June Havoc’s long life and career was a quintessential Hollywood tale — an overbearing mother, a more-famous sister, and a somewhat tawdry undercurrent of marriages and divorces, all overlaid by the sequin-studded success of show biz. June even wrote about it herself, a couple of times. Predictably, she used her first memoir, Early Havoc, as the basis for a stage play of her own, Marathon ’33, which played briefly on Broadway, starring Julie Harris.

Update or Adapt a Classic?

Recently I saw a university production of George Bernard Shaw’s 1905 play, Major Barbara. Shaw’s usual themes of capitalism versus socialism and class conflict are front and center in this comedy-drama about a Salvation Army major whose father is a successful arms manufacturer.

One might think that setting this play in the 1960s—the Vietnam War era and a time of major social upheaval—would work well. However, in this updating the play was still set in England, which experienced the Vietnam conflict only peripherally. And Britain’s social upheaval of this period was centered mainly in fashion and popular music.

Leave aside the dreadful British accents and the apparent direction to the actors to speak their lines fast and loud, which rendered half the dialogue in this production incomprehensible, and what remained was a staging that jarred against the play’s central themes. Sure, the Sixties fashions were fun for both actors and audience, but in other respects Shaw’s work was almost wholly obscured, at best reduced to flash and drivel.

Shaw’s play, in hindsight, is piquant not only because of the playwright’s sharp-tongued dialogue but also because the themes in 1905 seem prescient. World War I loomed less than a decade into the future when this script first hit the boards in London. American audiences likely found the play even more pertinent when it opened on Broadway in 1915.

If the play were to be set in the Sixties, a full-out adaptation might have made more sense, moving the action from England to the United States and tweaking the dialogue accordingly. America in that era was feeling the effects of an unpopular war and a cultural revolution, the latter driven not merely by music and fashion but by the civil rights and women’s rights movements—all of which have more resonance to Shaw’s themes than what was happening in Britain at the same time.

Whether to produce a classic such as this one as it was written, to update it mainly by moving the action to a more recent time, or to adapt it more deeply presents many challenges. Will the original seem outdated? Will an updating hold too many anachronisms to be effective? Will a comprehensive adaptation go too far and lose the thrust of the original altogether? These are difficult questions.

The British Sixties setting of Major Barbara in this instance failed to consider these questions sufficiently, and so the update came off as superficial and did little justice to Shaw’s ideas, quite apart from massacring his language.

Separation of Church and Stage

A touring production of Jesus Christ Superstar recently hit town. Despite its longevity, this early Seventies hit for the duo of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice still stirs controversy. One inevitable criticism of this particular tour stemmed from Ted Neeley’s seemingly endless reprise of his role as Jesus. Neeley, who starred in the 1973 film of the rock opera, is now 67 and arguably far too old to play a 33-year-old Christ. But the main criticism is one of even longer standing, namely, that Jesus belongs in church, not on stage.

There are two problems with this argument. The first is that, as it usually is made by conservative Christians, it tends to be cover for their real criticism, which is that the Webber-Rice Jesus is “just a man,” something that Mary Magdalene emphasizes in the Act I song, “I Just Don’t Know How to Love Him.” Tim Rice has been quoted as saying, “It happens that we don’t see Christ as God but simply the right man at the right time at the right place.” The Christian Right condemns this view, which also is emphasized by the omission of the resurrection from the story on stage.

Expanding this argument to a more general one of “leave Jesus in church where he belongs” is simply spurious. Jesus has long been on stage in ways wholly approved by conservative Christians. Consider, for example, the mystery plays of medieval England, biblical cycles performed by roving bands of amateur actors during the Middle Ages and later, and passion plays. The most famous example of the last is the epic that has been performed in Oberammergau, Germany, once a decade since 1634. Add to these live events the myriad of films featuring Christ and the list of “approved” theatrical appearances by Jesus is endless. Perhaps the film most passionately embraced by the Religious Right in recent years is Mel Gibson’s 2004 sadomasochistic “The Passion of the Christ,” which is a veritable blood bath.

A second difficulty I have with the argument that Jesus doesn’t belong on stage stems from the theatrical element inherent in the religious practices of most churches. Looked at in stage terms, preachers perform much as actors do, robing (getting into costume), climbing into the pulpit (going on stage), and holding forth (performing). The most adept and elaborate of these church-theaters tend to be those occupied by the same conservative critics decrying stage Christs. Consider the megachurches, the traveling theater of tent revivals, and the elaborate staging that backs the most strident of the rightwing televangelists. Talk about theater!

Few topics — including the Bible and Jesus — are off limits as theatrical fodder, which is as it should be — and as it should pertain to all art forms. The arts are the expressions of culture. All viewpoints deserve expression, and that inevitably leads to controversy. Controvery ought not lead to suppression, however.

(The photo shows Jesus and John from a 1900 production of the Oberammergau Passion Play.)

Flash Mob Performance Art

Mass performance art is a fascinating product of the Internet age. For the uninitiated a bit of background may be helpful. “Performance art” itself is defined as art created by the performance of one or more individuals. It began in the modern sense in the 1960s, Yoko Ono among the practitioners. For many it was a response to the question, What is art? Pop Art could make art using everyday objects and images, from Andy Warhol’s soup cans to Claes Oldenberg’s giant Typewriter Eraser, which stands in the National Gallery of Art sculpture garden in Washington, D.C.

Why, then, should not an artist mingle visual art and theater, often impromptu street theater, and produce performance art? A popular term from the time was a happening. Performance art often seems simply to happen spontaneously. At least that is the viewer’s perception. Often, however, the artist has given considerable thought and preparation to the creation of the performance moment, how it should look, and what it should mean. Performance art can incorporate all of the senses, using color, movement, music, and so on — or their opposites: stillness and silence. The “living statues” or silent robotic-type individuals one occasionally sees on the streets, usually with a basket for monetary contributions at their feet, are engaging in a form of performance art.

Flash mobs are a 21st century innovation on the performance art theme. They began about 2003, with Manhattan being credited as the first site. Indeed, flash mobs tend to be big city phenomena. Individuals communicate with one another over the Internet and often anonymously about what, where, and when a performance will take place. Some flash mobs engage in a short rehearsal before the actual event, but the unrehearsed form is as common if not more so. Also, as a performance unfolds observers sometimes join in and become performers themselves.

A number of examples can be found on YouTube. For example, a flash mob of about two hundred danced to “Do Re Mi” from The Sound of Music in the central railway station in Antwerp, Belgium. London boasts what organizers hope to be an annual winter “No Pants Subway Ride,” coordinated by Improv Everywhere. Their tagline is “We cause scenes.”

Performance art comes in all sorts of forms, and flash mobs demonstrate the mass creative power that can be unlocked through electronic communication.

Nesser to Grieg to Rubenstein

The other day I was reading Swedish mystery writer Håkan Nesser’s book, Borkman’s Point. His detective, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, who drives a small, elderly Opel with an up-to-date, high-end stereo, comments on a northerly drive that he needs to hear “something Nordic”: “Cold, clear and serene. Sibelius and Grieg.”

The power of suggestion later that day led me to rummage in the CD cabinet for something to listen to as I fixed dinner. What came to hand was a Chicago Symphony recording of Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, orchestrated by Alfred Wallenstein. What I had forgotten about this CD was the pianist: Arthur Rubinstein.

The music was suitably stirring — cold, clear, serene, and Nordic — but listening to it also stirred memories of hearing Rubinstein in concert more than forty years ago.

Rubenstein (1887-1982) would have been seventy-nine in the spring of 1966, when I was a high school senior and somehow acquired tickets to a concert he gave in San Antonio, Texas. I recall going to the performance with my girlfriend (later wife) and another of our classmates. The program has long since escaped my memory, but I recall vividly the thrill of seeing this piano virtuoso at work.

Rubenstein, a Polish Jew, was born the eighth and youngest child of a businessman in Łódź. He evidenced interest in the piano during an elder sister’s lessons and by age four was studying and playing in Warsaw with Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim, who became his mentor. By age ten in 1897 he had moved to Berlin to continue his studies and in 1900 made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic. In 1904 he launched his career in earnest in Paris. (The photograph shows him in 1906.)

Rubenstein led an amazing career that ended in 1976, when he was eighty-nine, and then only because his eyesight had begun to fail during the Seventies. I count myself fortunate to have seen and heard him a decade before his retirement. He died in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1982, about a month shy of his 96th birthday.

January 28 will mark the 123rd anniversary of Rubenstein’s birth. I have several recordings of him that should be suitable to play for that occasion.

Blue Moon: Blue, Blue, Blue

When two full moons occur within the same month, the second is called a “blue moon.” The infrequency of the occurrence has made it a subject of folklore as well as scientific investigation. A common expression is “once in a blue moon,” that is, rarely.

Most years twelve full moons occur, approximately once monthly, over the course of the year. But the common calendar (called the Gregorian calendar) is not precisely aligned to the lunar cycle. Thus every two or three years there is an “extra” full moon.

Various explanations are given for this full moon’s designation as “blue.” One is that in Old English belewe can mean either “blue” or “betrayer.” Because early clergy were responsible for calculating the date of Easter based on the full moon, some years they may have needed to explain whether a particular full moon was actually the “Lent moon” or a false one, a “betrayer moon.”

Are blue moons actually blue? Rarely. But certain moons, not necessarily full moons, in past ages did seem to be bluish in color. The perceived color change probably was the result of other substances in the atmosphere, such as dust or ash from volcanic eruptions. One story is that in December 1883 geologist W. Jerome Harrison reported viewing an “electric-blue” crescent moon against a copper-colored sky from his home in Birmingham, England. He attributed it to lingering atmospheric debris from the explosion of Krakatoa, a volcano in Indonesia. Krakatoa’s spectacular eruptions began in May 1883, culminating in the destruction of the volcano island in August that year. In addition to the volcanic explosions, subsequent tsunamis devastated the region.

Blue moons also have been the subject of popular songs, often with blue given the connation of sadness, sometimes mixed with the sense of rarity. The most popular example is Rogers and Hart’s “Blue Moon,” which begins: “Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone, / Without a dream in my heart, / Without a love of my own.” But then a new love comes along, and the song includes the line, “And when I looked the Moon had turned to gold.” When the tune was first composed by Richard Rogers, it was given different lyrics and originally intended to be sung by Jean Harlow in the 1933 MGM film, Hollywood Party, which featured a number of the movie stars of the era. The song went through other versions — for example, repurposed for the film, Manhattan Melodrama in 1934 — until Lorenz Hart finally gave it the familiar lyrics after that film was released. Since 1934 “Blue Moon” has become a standard ballad, recorded by popular singers including Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Elvis Presley.

There also is the bluegrass song, “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” written by Bill Monroe in 1947, in which the blue moon is told to “Shine on the one that’s gone and left me blue.” Monroe, often called the “Father of Bluegrass,” is credited with popularizing the genre, which takes its name from his band, the Blue Grass Boys. Monroe’s home state of Kentucky has the nickname, the “Bluegrass State,” based on the prevalence of bluegrass, a smooth meadow grass of the Poa genus. Bluegrass seedpods turn from green to a purple-blue hue, which gives this grass its name.

A blue moon rising on New Year’s Eve welcomed in 2010. The next blue moon should occur in 2011 — plenty of time for any aspiring folklorists or songwriters to get a new composition ready.