The Bad Boy of Music & The Most Beautiful Woman in the World

Like many Hollywood stories, this one is encrusted with the usual legendary bons mots and self-serving anecdotes, but Louis B. Mayer, who had seen “Ecstasy,” would be quoted as saying, “You’re lovely, but . . . I don’t like what people would think about a girl who flits bare-assed around the screen.”

Mahler: The World as Will and Idea

For all its professional, emotional and physical crises, Mahler’s life was exemplary for an artist who, no matter how loud the outside world might pound on the walls of his concentration, vigilantly maintained an unobstructed direct line to his creative self, keeping it uncorrupted and unblocked to the end.

The "Son" is Father to the Man

What drew me to the Austrian composer’s eponymous Opus 9 Chamber Symphony of 1906 were its explosive energy and the staggering, acrobatic virtuosity of its instrumental writing. Schoenberg’s bounding, fast moving themes weren’t so much “stated” as they were launched like some daredevil circus performer shot out of a canon. The hyperlyricism of its melodies sounded as if all of “Tristan” had been compressed into a tiny plutonium sphere, just one neutron short of going super-critical.

Commencement Speech

Being a composer invited into a public gathering is always an anxiety-producing experience. There is always that little homunculus sitting on your shoulder, muttering cryptic and often insulting remarks and reminding you that, no matter how much you’ve composed or now matter how grand the honor you may be receiving, “you’ll never be as good as Bach.”

Marcel Proost’s Tea Party Climate Change No-fly Zone

“Yeah, don’t you remember that song, “The Icebergs Are Melting?” He tweaks his voice up to a falsetto, strums an imaginary ukulele and, to my horror, starts singing.

Marcel Proost in the dark

“Relax, Marcel, it’s me. Just coming by to say hi. You got some light bulbs in there, or are you hiding out from the feds again?”

He opens the door, still in the dark, and I can hear strange, moaning music coming over his loudspeakers—tone clusters and sudden shrieking glissandi on violins and cellos.

The Big Kahuna

The Metropolitan Opera is one very large institution, sort of the Pentagon or General Motors of classical music. It’s the Big Kahuna in every way.

The Original Cast Recording

Instead of composing reasonably modulated lines that allow the vocal musculature to periodically relax and recoup its strength, I gave Chairman Mao lines that started on a high wire and just mercilessly stayed there. I must have been thinking at the time that if Mao were going to be heard by a billion Chinese he would have to sing very loud and very high—all the time.

Stravinsky's Arm Farts

The young composer-to-be rushed home to his family summer place in the Ukrainian countryside and practiced the technique assiduously until he was so successful at it that his parents forbade him to indulge in such an indecent accompaniment. (“Igor, stop that this instant, or go to your room!”)

Launching the supertanker

The charming old stories of Mozart scribbling out the overture to “Marriage of Figaro” an hour before the premiere and dropping ink-wet parts onto the players’ stands may or may not be true, but they for sure are the worst possible model for any composer who hopes to get a decent performance of his or her own music.

Piloting the Aircraft Carrier

Rehearsing and performing supersized oratorio pieces, especially when they involve the added complications of staging, can be daunting. Keeping the disparate forces united and continually aware of the inner pulse becomes the first order of business. At such times the conductor can feel less like a sensitive interpretive “artiste” and more like the commander of an aircraft carrier or a jumbo jet tasked with piloting it through unknown terrain, sometimes at perilous speeds.

"How Could This Happen?"

The Nativity story is one of the simplest and most sincere in the Bible. Images of the scene in the stable of Bethlehem, with Mary and the infant surrounded by astonished peasants and placid farm animals, emphasize the humble circumstances of this particular birth. I pinned to the wall above my worktable several images by Giotto and other medieval and early Renaissance painters to remind me of the power of simplicity in rendering this myth.