Robert King

The reaction to British conductor Robert King's trial for sex offenses has been weirdly muffled on this side of the Atlantic--it was only days after his conviction that I learned he'd even been arrested, and there has beeen surprisingly little outcry from our music critics in the aftermath of his sentencing. In case you hadn't heard, King, a brilliant baroque specialist, has been accused of plying boys as young as twelve with alcohol in order to initiate sexual contact. Now, the way American justice deals with sex offenses--especially those involving minors--is a little warped. (Anyone who doubts that only needs to watch an episode of that creepy pædo-tainment series To Catch a Predator.) And so I read up on this case expecting to be horrified by the usual sex-trial theatrics, and while there was some obvious witch-hunt nonsense--

Most of the accusations allege that King got the young men drunk, with one claiming that the conductor had given him 15 bottles of beer in one hour. (To this, according to BBC News, King told the court, "I don't think I have ever seen anyone drink 15 bottles of beer in an hour.") [PlaybillArts]

--British justice seems, in this case, to have erred on the side of leniency.

Make no mistake: I am not happy that King's personal and professional reputation will be ruined. I am not happy to see him go to prison. This situation is a disaster not only for the boys and their families but for King and his, and for classical music lovers everywhere. I was horrified to hear it even suggested that Hyperion Records might withdraw King's recordings from the market (they won't, says Playbill). But when King finishes his four-year sentence, he will not, astonishingly, be barred from supervising young boys. At the risk of sounding like a patriot (perish the thought!), I cannot imagine an American court making such a judgment.

James Fenton, commenting on the story in today's Guardian, argues on King's behalf:

For the ordinary, anonymous private citizen convicted in such cases, there is the sentence itself, and there is what you might call the multiplier: you lose your job, very likely your home, you are submitted to persecution by fellow prisoners, and so forth. There are many aspects to this multiplier, which continue well after your release. Anyone who has watched the multiplier in action will be bound to feel horror at its effects. For the artist, there are all these aspects of the multiplier, and then some more. The case of Robert King has unique ramifications. The judge recognised some of these when not ruling against any future work with children. King, as a married man with a young child, was deemed to have entered a new phase in his life. And this decision is crucial to anyone who works with early vocal music. To be debarred for life from working with the male treble voice would have been a harsh fate.

It's true that the fallout for a sex offender goes far beyond a prison sentence. (See here for one extreme.) But while I find King's Ted Haggard-like sexual reëducation nothing short of miraculous, I'm not sure that it's entirely unheard of for a married man to commit sexual abuse against boys. In fact, as a gay man, I'm frankly insulted by everyone's readiness to accept the notion that a person's sexual preferences could be so easily discarded. And finally, as a lover of early vocal music, let me assure Mr. Fenton that it is entirely possible to perform Vivaldi without employing children.

I am a romantic at heart. I agree that artists are a very special people, and that Robert King is special even among artists. But to think that the debt we owe him for his music in any way mitigates the terrible debt he has incurred with these crimes goes far beyond romantic. It is dangerous and, frankly, a little grotesque.

Lives of the Great Composers: Harry Partch

At a party, my friend Burr van Nostrand is introduced to Harry Partch. "Do you like Chopin?" asks Harry Partch. "No," says Burr. "Then you're an asshole," says Harry Partch.

SPOON BOX!

Get into the Books. They have a new DVD--PLAYALL--for sale on their website, they're going to be playing a free set at this year's massive Ban on a Can Marathon (alongside such other awesomenesses as Juana Molina, Yo La Tengo, and many, many, many more), and their '05 record Lost & Safe has some of the most ingenious uses of found sound I've ever heard in music. But most importantly, they have created... the Spoon Box: The Spoon Box uses two speakers emitting low-frequency sound to make a pair of ordinary measuring spoons bounce up and down on columns of air. The piece playing on the Spoon Box in this clip also samples everyday kitchen noises so that the spoons won't feel out of place. You can even order your own Spoon Box from the Books website, and wow visitors to your home with the power of sound. Spoon Box.

Mark Adamo: Wrong About Harps

It's already a little weird that Mark Adamo's article on harp writing suggests that the instrument is "tragically ill-suited" to music "based on the transformation of the ostinato." (Joanna Newsom, among many, many others, might beg to differ.) But then there's this...

Britten, the very model of the composer who shrugged at dogma, gave us some of the most substantia and moving pages written for harp in the last hundred years: but where's the Britten harp concerto? (He wrote one for piano.) ... [W]here's the Prokofiev, where's the Schnittke harp concerto? (As opposed to their piano concerti.) Bartók? Lutoslawski? Corigliano? [Zing! - DSJ] If, as these have, you can write a contemporary concerto for the piano—an equally percussive, harmonically resourceful (albeit chromatic) instrument—why not do so for the harp?

Okay, there are plenty of reasons why composers would write piano concerti and not harp concerti. For one thing, most composers play the piano, and so they write reams more piano concerti, piano sonate, and piano etudes than anything for the harp. But Adamo's also got his facts wrong! There is most definitely a Lutosławski concerto for harp and oboe, available on a sexy Philips recording starring the Holligers. He should--everybody should--give it a listen.

(Maybe he's not counting concerti for "harp and x"? But that would be splitting hairs, and I don't think I'll accuse him of being so uncharitable.)

I probably shouldn't pick these nits. His heart's certainly in the right place--classical music is full of instruments that never get a fair shake in front of the orchestra, or end up smothered in cliché, the harp not least among them. What's more, he seems to have given the Harp Problem a lot of thought and come up with some worthwhile, even exciting workarounds.

I look forward to his concerto for tuba.

I Have a Sneaking Feeling This Isn't Gidon Kremer's Official MySpace

Unless by "Latin" he means "Latvian." I just watched Back to Bach (EuroArts), his new DVD of the Bach Partitas for solo violin, and it was an odd experience. Never having seen him play in person, Kremer has only existed for me as photographs and disembodied sound; I'd never heard him speak or seen the way he bends his knees when he fiddles. It's nice to get to "know" him. And of course the performance itself is phenomenal. I have found Kremer's recent ECM recording of the Sonatas & Partitas literally mesmerizing--no, I mean literally mesmerizing, as in, it's no use talking to me while they're playing, because at some point you'll ask me a question and discover that I have been hypnotized by counterpoint for the past three minutes and have not heard a word you've said--and while the video editing is occasionally a little choppier than it has to be, the sound is good, and I'm delighted to actually see Kremer's amazing bowstroke pick all the different lines out of a string of sixteenth-notes. The accompanying documentary is engaging enough. Kremer warms up, tunes his fiddle, makes a face after a bad take or two. In interview, he confesses that he's actually still fond of his first recordings of the Partitas (now unavailable; thanks, Philips): while he has a few interesting things to say on the subject of Glenn Gould and Bach interpretation, his urge to re-record isn't as quite like the fierce revisionism of Gould's New Goldberg-Variation Testament of 1981. Sir Simon Rattle and Sofia Gubaidulina, two more musicians I've never seen sit down for chit-chat, also put in talking-head time, and while I was glad to hear from them, I found myself wishing by the end that the gang at EuroArts had just padded the disc with more fiddle-porn. Why not show us the Sonatas, too? Ah, well. Maybe worth buying, even if you already own the CD (you do own the CD, right?), and definitely worth renting. Netflix has it! Trailer & more info here.

Incredible Shrinking Googoosh

Thanks to one of the Gregs for this amazing link. Googoosh: is there anything she can't do?

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