My life-changing 1944 introduction to Aaron Copland
Posted in Letter from Berlin, Memory Lane, Music, People on May 17th, 2008 No Comments »
Archive for the 'Memory Lane' Category
A note on Copland’s setting of "I Bought me a Cat"
Posted in Life and culture, Memories, Memory Lane, Music, People on Dec 30th, 2007 3 Comments »
[This afternoon at the Komische Oper zu Berlin, the American baritone Kevin Deas sang this captivating little song Aaron Copland adapted as one of his "Old American Songs", and when I got home I emailed him this addendum:]
Dear Mr. Deas,
as Berlin correspondent for www.MusicalAmerica.com I attended - and enjoyed - your concert this afternoon at [...]
A substantial addendum on Stockhausen (at 70)
Posted in Life and culture, Memory Lane, Music, People on Dec 9th, 2007 2 Comments »
[From my hard disk I've excavated some Stockhauseniana I put together in 1998, which has definitely not lost its relevance to this inordinately intricate personality:]
Although Karlheinz Stockhausen at 70 has probably become globally the most famous living German composer (his only rival: Hans Werner Henze), comparatively few people actually know his music. During the early [...]
An incongruously larky footnote on Stockhausen
Posted in Memory Lane, Music, People on Dec 8th, 2007 No Comments »
This afternoon I actually started a bloggery, skimming the cream off the many times over the past half-century when Karlheinz Stockhausen’s path and mine crossed, but eventually I gave up on it for what I’d originally thought of as a casual stroll down Memory Lane unexpectedly touched off such an avalanche of recollections, from locations [...]
How Aaron Copland came by that odd surname
Posted in Life and culture, Memory Lane, Music, People on Dec 1st, 2007 No Comments »
Howard Pollack’s 690-page biography Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man documents in some detail (the index cites me seven times) one of my life’s most enriching friendships with that almost saintly man, which began soon after I emerged from the University of Texas at 19 as a brand-new Bachelor Musicae and [...]
Tallulah Bankhead on Norman Mailer (1948)
Posted in Life and culture, Memory Lane, Music, People on Nov 10th, 2007 No Comments »
Young Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead turned him into an overnight celebrity but it appeared early enough for its publisher to have serious problems with a pungent monosyllable that peppered the manuscript. Mailer had written naturalistically about the robust young Americans in uniform he’d known during World War II, and for him [...]
Deutsch: Arsch; English: arse; American: ass
Posted in Commonplace Book, Letter from Berlin, Life and culture, Memory Lane, People on Nov 1st, 2007 No Comments »
Back during the period when German television strove mightily to adopt and adapt the lucrative magic formula that had created such American advertising bonanzas as the pioneer talk shows of Jack Paar, Dick Cavett, et al., I once with stricken eyes watched Cavett’s interview, conducted in Cologne by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk’s chief honcho Werner Höfer [...]
My latest love poem to my Berlin, my Germany
Posted in Commonplace Book, Letter from Berlin, Memory Lane, People, Politics, Reflections on Nov 1st, 2007 No Comments »
When a day begins with one unexpected pleasant surprise, it has the same effect upon me that William Wordsworth’s rainbow had on him. When two further unexpected surprises bless the day, that rare benison gooses me into at least mental writing - in this event into what involuntarily took form between my ears during a [...]
Not everybody’s Germany, but definitely mine
Posted in Events, Letter from Berlin, Life and culture, Memory Lane, Music, People, Politics on Sep 30th, 2007 No Comments »
When I went over into eastern Berlin Sunday night to cover a premiere at the grand old State Opera on Berlin’s showpiece boulevard named Unter den Linden (because of the quadruple columns of trees marching down the center separator green strip, I had to take the subterranean U-Bahn because yesterday I got a call from [...]
Psychoanalysis & the Viennese way of doing things
Posted in Life and culture, Memory Lane, People on Sep 23rd, 2007 No Comments »
The innumerable cross-connections over the course of my eighty-three years sometimes take even me by surprise. The other evening here in Berlin I dined with a Swiss-born Californian and member of the Cal Tech faculty in Pasadena, Andreas Aebi, I’ve cherished as a friend for thirty-five years now - and my subsequent Skype-talking about that [...]
