You don’t always have to make a racket to get noticed.
One of the most notorious pieces ever “composed,” John Cage’s “4:33,” was given its debut at Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, NY, on this date 70 years ago.
You probably know it, even if you think you don’t. Somebody walks out to a piano, closes the lid, produces a stop watch, and sits absolutely still for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. At the end of the allotted time, the musician stands up and takes a bow.
At the first performance, some snickered, others scoffed, but Cage’s piece is now world famous. It turns out “4:33” is more than just the wacky stunt it appeared to be. Any perceptive listen who joins the musician in his or her silence soon realizes the passing time is not silent at all, but full of sounds. People coughing, chairs creaking, the central air kicking on, extraneous noise from the street or lobby. It really does force you to be aware of your surroundings. In its way, 70 years later, in our crazy digitized, wireless world of constant distraction, “4:33” is more necessary than ever.
It’s interesting that this experimental work, which some would regard as not for every day, is in its truest sense “every day music.” Cage has taken a lot of guff over the years (I had a colleague at the radio who refused to acknowledge his centenary), but he was one of the most influential musical thinkers of the 20th century.
Ironically, it took a composer by the name of Cage to get us thinking outside the box. Me, I’ll have “4:33” on infinite repeat all day.
Original version for piano
Transcribed for orchestra – and performed by the Berlin Philharmonic
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” leave all your troubles behind for a musical cruise to the Mediterranean.
We’ll have a work by Charles Camilleri, Malta’s national composer – his “Mediterranean Dances” of 1961. Also, John McLaughlin’s “Mediterranean Concerto” of 1985. McLaughlin, who’s made his home in Monaco for the past 40 years, is better known as a jazz or jazz fusion artist. His infectious concerto is ambitious in scope, about twice the length of those ordinarily devoted to the guitar.
Pack your suntan lotion. We’re headed to the Mediterranean basin for “Mediterranean Muse” – one hour later than usual, due to the length of this week’s opera (Handel’s “Almira,” beginning at 3 pm) – this Sunday night at 11:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Before American composers like Jerome Moross and Elmer Bernstein made the western distinctly their own, the task of scoring the genre fell largely to European émigrés. This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll take a look at some outside perspectives on how the West was won.
Literally the godson of Richard Strauss, Max Steiner came from Vienna, where he studied with Johannes Brahms and Robert Fuchs. In Hollywood, he wound up scoring such classics as “King Kong,” “Gone with the Wind” and “Casablanca.”
Among his over 300 film projects were a number of westerns. One of these was “They Died with Their Boots On” (1941), which starred Errol Flynn as George Armstrong Custer and Olivia de Havilland as Libby, the woman who becomes his wife. Steiner’s score features familiar folk material, some old-fashioned faux “Indian” music, and one of his characteristically lush love themes.
Born in Ukraine in 1894, Dimitri Tiomkin was a pupil of Alexander Glazunov. He came to revolutionize the sound of the American West, when he wrote the music for “High Noon,” the first of his “ballad” scores. Advanced word, based on an early screening for the press, was that the picture would be a failure. However, Tiomkin had such faith in the theme song, sung in the film by Tex Ritter, that he hired Frankie Laine to record it, and the record became a world-wide hit. In fact, his score is largely credited with having saved the film.
Tiomkin was recognized with two Academy Awards: one for Best Original Song, and one for the score itself. It was the first time a composer won two Oscars for his work on the same movie. It also changed the way western scores were done. In the 1950s, Tiomkin became THE western composer of choice. He produced a number of subsequent ballad scores, including that for “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (1957). Asked how it was that a composer from Ukraine could write so convincingly for the American West, Tiomkin quipped, “A steppe is a steppe is a steppe.”
Another unexpected source of classic western music, Franz Waxman was born in Upper Silesia. He arrived in the U.S. by way of Germany. Nonetheless, as part of the composer’s varied and prolific output, he did indeed score a number of films in the genre, including “The Furies” (1950), a peculiar noir-western hybrid. Walter Huston, in his final film, plays a cattle baron who remarries and throws his empire into jeopardy. Barbara Stanwyck is his strong-willed daughter.
Hungarian-born composer Miklós Rózsa scored many films with historical settings – “Quo Vadis,” “Ben-Hur,” and “King of Kings,” among them. However, to my knowledge, his only western was “Tribute to a Bad Man” (1956). James Cagney stars as a rancher who doles out some frontier justice.
Finally, we’ll hear music by Ennio Morricone, from arguably the most operatic of all spaghetti westerns, “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968). As a reaction to Tiomkin’s ballad scores and the neo-Coplandisms of Elmer Bernstein and the rest, Morricone brings his own quirky sensibility to bear on the classic western iconography. Get ready for indelible motifs for harmonica and banjo, but also an unexpectedly moving elegiac arioso, underscoring the close of the American West with the arrival of the railroad.
Better wind your pocket watches. Old World composers go west this week on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies. The train arrives this Saturday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, our chummy discussion of Dino De Laurentiis’ “Orca” (1977), which was to have taken place this evening on @[100063986017424:2048:Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner], has been postponed. Keep a glittering eye on Roy’s Facebook page for further developments.
Someone left Richard Harris’ fish cake out in the rain.
Would you believe Ryan Reynolds as Arnold Schoenberg’s grandson?
Another random discovery last night on Netflix: “Woman in Gold” (2015), a Helen Mirren film that somehow escaped my notice. Mirren plays Maria Altmann, an 82 year-old Jewish refugee living in Los Angeles in 1998, who fights to reclaim from the Belvedere Museum in Austria a portrait of her aunt, painted by none other than Gustav Klimt, that was stolen from her family sixty years earlier by the Nazis. Assisting her in her quest for justice is an untried underdog lawyer, played by Ryan, whose grandfather happened to be one of the 20th century’s most influential composers.
The painting in question was originally titled “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” more commonly known, both for simplicity’s sake and, for the Nazis, to hide the subject’s inconvenient ethnicity, as “Woman in Gold,” but described by one of the characters in the film as “The Mona Lisa of Austria.” Predictably, Austrian bureaucrats throw up any impediment they can to retain ownership of the painting.
Following the pattern of every rogue cop movie ever, young Schoenberg’s gruff boss (Charles Dance, who’s the actor you call for these things when Christopher Plummer is too busy) goes from bemused indulgence to forbidding him to pursue the case any further. In response, Schoenberg quits the firm and rides his scrappy gumption all the way to the Supreme Court – and beyond. Every time either he or Altmann are on the verge of throwing in the towel at the latest setback, they get one another riled up again and off they go.
The entire exercise is diverting enough for a slow evening when you’re not feeling particularly demanding, and it may get you thinking about injustices past and present, and the struggles for restitution for the survivors or descendants of families who lost everything, but I’m afraid on the whole the execution is rather TV movie-like.
All the traditional elements are in place; all the beats fall where expected – the very opposite, in fact, of Arnold Schoenberg’s music. There is lip-service paid to Schoenberg’s revolutionary twelve-tone method, but it’s telling that the only Schoenberg we actually hear is “Transfigured Night” – Schoenberg for people who think they don’t like Schoenberg. Tonal, romantic, and entirely movie-friendly. To compound the irony, the film’s unremarkable score is cranked out by Hans Zimmer and company.
Mirren is fine, as always, and I did get some enjoyment out of all the unexpected casting choices, as many familiar faces turn up, some for only a single scene – Charles Dance, Jonathan Pryce, Elizabeth McGovern, and Allan Corduner (who played Arthur Sullivan in Mike Leigh’s Gilbert & Sullivan homage “Topsy Turvy”). Katie Holmes has little to do as the crusading lawyer’s understandably concerned, but always supportive wife.
As for the lawyer himself, Schoenberg’s grandson, Reynolds does okay, especially when called on to be a fast-talker, but it’s hard to buy him as the actual real-life E. Randol Schoenberg. He has my respect for trying something different, I thought after the enormous success of “Deadpool.” But it turns out “Woman in Gold” was released the year before!
While we’re considering the timeline, the film is a Weinstein production, so I had to check the dates to see if Harvey’s recent woes may have had something to do with its comparative obscurity. But Weinstein’s sins didn’t really boomerang in a big way until 2017 – two years later. Then I thought maybe Covid had thrown a wrench in its distribution. Nope, that would have been 2020. Maybe I just wasn’t paying enough attention.
The director is Simon Curtis, whose credits include “My Week with Marilyn” (2011), for which Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh earned Oscar nominations for their portrayals of Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier, respectively, and television adaptations of “Cranford” and “David Copperfield.” He also directed the most recent “Downton Abbey” movie. Ah, so he’s actually married to McGovern!
In the end, “Woman in Gold” is not much better than a by-the-numbers courtroom drama in which justice is inevitably served. (If you think that’s a spoiler, it’s recent history and the outcome has graced many a headline.) There are some lovingly shot Klimts, beside the predictable outrages, once the Nazis march into Austria, and also some fleeting suspense. Closer to the present, there’s the infuriatingly smug Austrians on the board of the Belvedere Museum who stand between Altmann and her stolen property. The film is well-intentioned, but winds up being fairly anodyne. Good for undemanding viewers who enjoy the kind of easy fuzzies you get from watching a Penny Marshall or Rob Reiner movie.
All told, it was definitely better than “Orca.”
A couple of parodies that actually hold Schoenberg in greater affection:
