Listening to change, listening to Alban Berg's Close o' close my eyes at parting

Was listening to Alban Berg's Close o' close my eyes at parting, a 1 minute song written in two versions.
The first was written in 1900, followed by a redo in 1925. My grandmother was 12 for the first version but she was a proud mother for the second.
My mother was 12 when the second version was written.
I see a certain numerical symbolism in this, but this musical miracle in two settings also made me think how much can happen in a relatively short time.
My father was 7 for the second serving of this song, my grandfather was an accomplished young pianist  for the first but a WWI invalid for the redo of  Close o' close my eyes at parting. 

But the music! Listen to these two short pieces, with the words and a score perhaps in front of you.The first version, Massig bewegt, Moderate, calm, is a neoclassic song, with a twist. It's metered in 5/4, not exactly your usual 1900 fare. The song has no key signature, nor does it really care, all it does is to step up and down with predictable yet unnerving interval symmetry. it almost feels as if something was brewing, so that even this mild sonnet contains seeds of war, the DNA of the XX century. Enter the 1925 Close o' close my eyes at parting. 3/4 not 5/4, again no key signature; the up and down of the voice (and piano's singing) resembles the earlier version but there is a corruption of symmetry, a deterioration of rhythm, an aggression on tonality. It's the end of the world!But, no wait, at the end of the piece a "g" from the very end of the register tells us that this is not the end, just the beginning of something similar to a pagan hell.

Why did Berg go from one extreme (mellow melody) to the depths of Wozzeck, Jack the ripper in Lulu? Was it Berg alone or all of us? Did we ever recover from the dead winter of '900's wars and Stalingrad, Treblinka, Auschwitz? Did we just pretend, when the Beatles came on board, with Elvis before them, and the Stones, were we cured? Does anyone even care anymore? Does anyone ever sing Close o' close my eyes at parting? in its 1900 version?

I have been reading a newspaper every morning before leaving home for over 50 years. I can hardly imagine doing without one. Oh, wait, I am doing without one! The Plain Dealer became Plain and there are no real news to read.  Just sports, national, international, local, high school, retirement home tournaments, kindergarten challenges, and bedroom arguments. Who won? What happened? Let's dissect a meaningless game and devote 20 pages to it, since the TV news only spend 80% of available bandwidth to broadcast pretty much the same stories you find in the Plain.

The Plain

In fact, I  noticed that the online version of the paper has small TV screen-like windows where two individuals, a lady and her male partner in crime tell you what you already heard on TV the day before. The reality is simple, we don't have a football team, just the side effects of it. In random order these are: a concussed quarterback, a tax to pay for the stadium, an additional disbursement to pay for improvements of various types (a TV screen, you bet, the biggest in town, so you can watch TV at the stadium instead of from home).
How does this belong to culture in NEO? It does, for this is the culture of NEO for a lot of people. It does, since the Browns produce a humorous Monday, the notoriously hardest day of the week.
There is nothing wrong with sports or with a newspaper devoting tons of space to sporting news. In a country where I previously lived there is a daily full-length paper that only deals with sports. Let's call this paper The Dealer, it deals in sports and it does so with grace, the paper edition being in hard-to-miss pink!

The Dealer

Culture in NEO: Beginning of a blog

Culture in NEO: Beginning of a blog: OK, the weather can be a pest, and downhill skiing is not an option. But when it comes to theater, music or other arts (think museums!), we ...

Tale of two Franklins

I already mentioned the Franklin fiasco. For those who don't know about it, check the hyperlinks in my previous blog. To make things clear, this is the David Franklin, former CMA director and villain in chief after being run out of Cleveland by a justly hostile environment made of people who don't like what he did to one of our angels. But enough of this, there are pages of ink leaked from our pens elsewhere. 

I noted another Franklin story that has not hit the web yet, but I think I will. I attended the pretty good Shostakovich-Beethoven mini-festival at Severance to note a new pattern: when Franz W-M is conducting, the first clarinet of the orchestra, Frank Cohen, is not playing. I noticed that he plays whenever our conductor in chief is out of town or indisposed. 

Several interpretations come to mind. In a normal city with a normal musical environment and music critics, I would assume that the two have poorly matched schedules or a virus that infects one country at a time. The pendulum of sneezing and coughing may first hit Salzburg and Vienna, take a United flight to Cleveland, infect the woodwind player while the conductor is recuperating, and repeat the cycle at almost metronomic intervals. Why is this unlikely? Do your math....  

Beginning of a blog

OK, the weather can be a pest, and downhill skiing is not an option. But when it comes to theater, music or other arts (think museums!), we in NE Ohio are second to none. If you adjust the quantity and quality of arts and music in Cleveland by income, population and level of general education, you may find out that we are at the very top of the cultural pile. New York is obviously better, but after dividing by several million people and the income of folks living in (most parts of) Manhattan.....Unfortunately, we also have a propensity for scumbags or just plain mediocre folks. See below for the scummies, I will hit el mediocre musicale sometime  soon.

All this culture, and yet we live in a state of ignorance; examples? Here you go: People here are never happy, they feel "blessed". At the stadium people pray for their team (man! And so they should!). And our beloved players often cross themselves when they score! The English language spans from a few folks with Oxonian or Shakespearean phrasing to the majority barking out tons of "like I said". Hell is heck, god is gosh. Why is hell a swear word? Why can't one say, at least, "I feel blessed because I am not in hell". And why is Hell often capitalized? What the Hell is going on with you guys? You can'st say "god" because it's an insult to deity, but you can do godly things in the settings of a football game? 

The language changes, we google everything. That's great. But the use of what we are given back by Palo Alto is becoming a tragedy of errors. Part of this is sheer ignorance, you can blame the schools or the parents. But all this heck and all this gosh, no, this is US not the schools. We need to clean up our language and our brain from all the garbage of pseudo religion, fake respect (are first generation Kenyans in New York African-American? Does anyone outside of Princeton know where the Caucasus is? If people knew that Stalin was a true Caucasian, would this "definitional" nonsense go away?), good manners (May I help you? is nice, but when it becomes part of a job description I kind prefer What do you want?), more of the politically correct respect (can't crack a Jewish or African-American joke unless you want to get ostracized; but you can safely state that the Balkan population lives in a permanent state of war; that Iranians are part of a an Evil Empire), all this shows our homogenization, our cultural instability, dependence on cheap interpretation of religion. But we have, for those who want, tons of splendid concerts, museums, theaters. And I can stomach a lot of ghosh with a good Shosta!

Errata corrige
As soon as I published an almost optimistic blog on culture in Cleveland, the Plain Dealer comes to the rescue of the Mistake on the lake credence, as it happened last week with the David Franklin fiasco. The news agents that censured  Rosenberg (the PD) also censured the news itself, first, and after this was made trivial by Cleveland's Scene, managed to write a most annoying and defensive editorial.