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A year-end list of memorable performances, with some preliminary thoughts on music, money, and power.
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A year-end list of memorable performances, with some preliminary thoughts on music, money, and power.
December 30, 2011 | Permalink
Photo: Morris's Socrates, by Gene Schiavone
Last month, Björk inaugurated a My Favorite Records feature on the blog. This month's list is by the choreographer, dancer, and director Mark Morris, one of the most purely musical people alive. He writes: "Not the same list as Greatest Music of All Time, or What's on My iPod, or Listen to This Because It's Good For You. These are all thrillers that I keep returning to."
EUIS KOMARIAH The Sound of Sunda (GlobeStyle)
M. S. SUBBULAKSHMI Live at Carnegie Hall, U.S.A. (Saregama)
NELLIE LUTCHER The Best of Nellie Lutcher (Blue Note)
J. S. BACH Concertos for Two and Three Pianos; Gaby Casadesus, Robert Casadesus, Jean Casadesus, various orchestras and conductors (Sony)
MOZART Così fan tutte; Bernarda Fink, Graciela Oddone, Marcel Boone, Werner Güra, Véronique Gens, Pietro Spagnoli, René Jacobs conducting the Concerto Köln (Harmonia Mundi)
RUTH ETTING Ten Cents a Dance (ASV/Living Era)
SCHMIDT AND JONES The Fantasticks: Original Cast Album (Decca Broadway)
BOB WILLS AND HIS TEXAS COWBOYS For the Last Time (United Artists)
PROKOFIEV The Five Piano Concertos; Alexander Toradze, piano, with Valery Gergiev conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra (Philips)
HAYDN The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross; Benita Valente, Jon Humphrey, Jan DeGaetani, Thomas Paul, Juilliard String Quartet (Sony)
IVOR CUTLER An Elpee and Two Epees (Universal UK)
LOU HARRISON Concerto for Organ with Percussion Orchestra, Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra; David Craighead, organ, Eudice Shapiro, violin, with William Kraft conducting the Los Angeles Percussion Ensemble (Crystal)
December 23, 2011 | Permalink
Younger classical critics at the New York Times are traditionally subjected to a kind of hazing ritual in which they are directed to attend multiple performances of Messiah around the city. (I hasten to add that more than a few of these renditions are excellently played and sung, and keep many a free-lance musician solvent through the holidays.) Zachary Woolfe is the latest to run the gauntlet, and is kind enough to quote my own effort, from 1993. Back then, I observed that the text of the Hallelujah Chorus is derived from the Book of Revelation, which paints a picture rather different from the wholesome scene of celebration that most Messiah performances evoke:
I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth....
And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war.
His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself.
And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God.
And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean.
And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.
And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.
Perhaps the Messiah organist on crack was trying to recapture some of that apocalyptic atmosphere.
The inaugural edition of Make Music Winter, which unfolded in New York yesterday, included Thruline, a delightful musical installation by the composer James Holt. For one hour in the early evening, musicians from the chamber orchestra The Knights were positioned at all forty-four stops along the F subway line, each one playing the prelude from Bach's G-major Cello Suite. Holt further explains the project on the MATA blog. I didn't make it all the way to Coney Island, but I caught quite a few Thruline performances in Manhattan, enjoying the peculiar sensation of riding the subway with no destination in mind. I'm not sure how many commuters fully grasped what was going on — it was sometimes difficult to hear the players from inside the car, unless you were positioned near the door — but I liked the idea of a subliminal Bachian occupation. The video above shows Guillaume Pirard at the West 4th Street stop, detouring into the Sarabande before resuming the prelude as the doors close. Below are Lev "Ljova" Zhurbin at West 23rd and an unidentified cellist at Delancey.
...that Beethoven avoided high notes in his middle period. Perhaps they should have studied more than five works?
December 21, 2011 | Permalink
Among many curious details that I had no space to mention in my Gesualdo piece is the fact that Fabrizio Carafa — the legendarily beautiful young man whom Gesualdo murdered in 1590, on the same night that the Prince killed his no less legendarily beautiful wife — was a grandfather of a pope. I have been unable to pin down the date of Fabrizio's birth, but he was probably around thirty when he died. He married very young — his wife, Maria, was only fourteen — and amongst his other activities managed to father five children. After the unfortunate events of 1590, Maria Carafa became devoutly religious, entering the Dominican convent of Santa Maria della Sapienza. Her daughter Porzia, born in 1589, married Francesco Pignatelli, and their son Antonio ascended to the papacy in 1691, as Innocent XII (pictured). He is generally considered to have been a benevolent and reformist pope, noted for his attempts to curtail nepotism. Less cherished in memory is the principal Carafa pope, Paul IV, whose short reign (1555-59) was one of the bleakest in the history of the Vatican. Among Paul IV's first acts was the monstrous papal bull Cum nimis absurdum, which established the Jewish ghetto in Rome and forced Jews to identify themselves by wearing the color yellow. There was a great celebration in the streets when Paul IV died; rioters mockingly disfigured a statue of him by placing a yellow hat on top of it and then lopping off the head. The succeeding pope, Pius IV, pardoned the protesters and ordered the execution of two of the late pope's nephews. Pius IV's niece was, as it happens, Carlo Gesualdo's mother.
December 21, 2011 | Permalink
(As ever, via The Rambler.)
December 20, 2011 | Permalink
Pope Benedict XVI — amid recent pronouncements about the need for "adequate mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth" — has indicated that the twelfth-century composer, theologian, and poet Hildegard von Bingen would be made a Doctor of the Church, with an official canonization to follow. Interestingly, it's an open question whether Hildegard achieved sainthood in an earlier era. A commission gathered evidence of her miracles in 1233, but four years later Pope Gregory IX found fault with the format of the presentation and asked for more detail. The commission revised its work, adding reports of new miracles attributable to Hildegard's influence. Evidently, the amended submission either disappeared in transit or was never sent, for in 1243 Pope Innocent IV inquired again about the status of the case. At that point, the process stalled. In the fourteenth century, there was another attempt to declare Hildegard a saint, followed by another mysterious delay. Reports Johannes Trithemius: "Having carefully read over the testimonies submitted to him, [Pope John XXII] made no difficulty about canonizing the virgin, as I am assured by the apostolic writing, although this event, longed for by many, was not brought to pass." As Anna Silvas writes, in her book Jutta and Hildegard, Hildegard began to be widely recognized as a saint, whether or not John XXII or a later pope was able to complete the official process. Her feast day was celebrated in Rupertsberg, the site of Hildegard's convent, and her name appeared in the sixteenth-century Roman Martyrology.
It would seem that Benedict XVI has decided to clear up the confusion once and for all, in recognition of Hildegard's singular historical status. In an audience last year, he praised "this great woman, this 'prophetess' who also speaks with great timeliness to us today, with her courageous ability to discern the signs of the times, her love for creation, her medicine, her poetry, her music, which today has been reconstructed, her love for Christ and for his Church which was suffering in that period too, wounded also in that time by the sins of both priests and lay people, and far better loved as the Body of Christ." One week later, he spoke of Hildegard again, stressing her willingness to "combat the abuses of the clergy." He also quoted a remarkable letter that Hildegard wrote to Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, assuming the voice of God to reprimand him for his schismatic resistance to Pope Alexander III: "You will be sorry for this wicked conduct of the godless who despise me! Listen, O King, if you wish to live! Otherwise my sword will pierce you!"
December 20, 2011 | Permalink
On the theory that there is no such thing as too much Gesualdo, I am offering more pictures from my expedition last June into the violent and visionary world of the Prince of Venosa. (See this post at the New Yorker website for the original set.) Giancarlo Vesce took the above picture of the Gesualdo castle in October. The renovation is apparently making rapid progress.
December 18, 2011 | Permalink
The first movement of Vivaldi's Bassoon Concerto in F, RV 490, from Concerti per fagotto, vol. 2; Sergio Azzolini, bassoon, with L'Aura Soave Cremona (Naïve).
This CD is a visceral delight from beginning to end.
December 17, 2011 | Permalink
Image from Diesel bookstores in California.
Make Music Winter, the winter-solstice counterpart to Make Music NY, will make its debut on Wednesday. I'm particularly excited about The Knights' musical occupation of the F line to Coney Island.... A heavy-duty new-music weekend is under way in New York. Tonight, ne(x)tworks and the JACK Quartet give the second of two performances of Spellbeamed, a new piece by composer-harpist Zeena Parkins; the Talea Ensemble surveys microtonal scores; and the New York Philharmonic delivers the second of a pair of CONTACT! events, with an Alexandre Lunsqui premiere and, less novel, a rendition of HK Gruber's Frankenstein!!, which the St. Louis Symphony played at Carnegie as recently as 2009. (Could we have more actual new music on CONTACT!?) Tomorrow there's a Xenakis concert at Greenwich House.... The nonprofit radio collective free103point9 announces an open call for works celebrating John Cage's radio compositions.... Worth a listen: a CBC Inside the Music program devoted to Louis Armstrong's private tapes, on which Terry Teachout drew for his Armstrong biography, Pops. If you're pressed for time, at least stick around for the moment when Lucille Amstrong tells her husband to turn off the machine, saying, "Posterity my ass.".... Housing Works is introducing a cool new series called Safe Space, pairing musicians with writers. The first event, involving Jonathan Biss and Adam Haslett, is on Jan. 9.... If you're buying books this season, I encourage you, more than ever, to shop at independent bookstores. Although you may pay more, you will be supporting book culture. Richard Russo's scathing op-ed about Amazon.com might be an incentive.
December 17, 2011 | Permalink
Photo: El Sodre en la Antártida.
Sometime yesterday, a chamber ensemble from the Orquesta Sinfónica del Sodre, the Uruguayan orchestra, landed at a Chilean base in Antarctica. From there, the musicians set off by land toward the Artigas Base, a Uruguayan scientific outpost, where they are scheduled to give a concert today. I'm not sure how many classical ensembles have performed in Antarctica before, but the organizers describe their expedition as "unprecedented." The program includes the final movement of Schubert's "Trout" Quintet, Vivaldi's "Concerto alla rustica," the Boccherini Minuet, the Fuga y Misterio from Piazzolla's María de Buenos Aires, and various works of César Cortinas, Eduardo Fabini, Gerardo Moreira, Violeta Parra, Carlos Gardel, and the Chicago-based composer Elbio Barilari — whose news alert about the event was forwarded to me by Andrew Patner. Residents of Chilean, Chinese, South Korean, and Russian bases were also planning to attend. Those who read Spanish can follow a dedicated blog. The concert is linked to the hundredth anniversary of Roald Amundsen's arrival at the South Pole and to ongoing celebrations of Uruguay's bicentennial.
Antarctica may seem a silent continent, but it has other musical resonances. The inset photograph shows Beethoven Peninsula, on Alexander Island, which lies off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. It's the bulbous, whitish form in the right-center of the picture, with swirls of black in the middle. Some features of the peninsula are the Brahms Inlet, the Rameau Ice Shelf, the Verdi Ice Shelf, the Bach Ice Shelf, the Mendelssohn Ice Shelf, Ives Ice Rise, the Boccherini Inlet, the Franck Nunataks, the Arensky Glacier, and mountains named after Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Schumann, Strauss, Borodin, Gluck, Copland, and Grieg (1052 meters, the tallest in the area). To the south of the Bach Ice Shelf lie the Shostakovich Peninsula, the Stravinsky Inlet, and the Monteverdi Peninsula, the last including Rossini Point, the Britten Inlet, and the lovely Fauré Inlet. Many other composers, Mahler and Bartók included, reside elsewhere on the island. Messiaen was overlooked, but he has a mountain in Utah. As the son and grandson of geologists, I feel duty-bound to direct the reader's attention to C. M. Bell's 1973 paper on the geology of the peninsula ("A vitrophyric palagonite-tuff from Mount Strauss has a groundmass of pale brown vesicular palagonite," etc.).
How did all these mountains, inlets, and ice shelves acquire their names? A couple of years ago, I contacted David Searle, son of Derek Searle, a leader of the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey in the nineteen-fifties. The younger Mr. Searle explained: "[My father] was responsible for the names with Dr. Brian Roberts of the Foreign Office and the Scott Polar Research Institute.... He was base commander at Horseshoe Island in Marguerite Bay (north of Alexander Island) from 1956 to 1957 and surveyed that island. Because there were so many unnamed features on Alexander Island, they chose to have the theme of classical music for consistency and because much of the landscape was very grand. My father was not classically trained, but did enjoy his classical music." He died in 2003, at the age of seventy-five. There is, of course, a mountain named after him.
Previously: The corner of Strauss and Stravinsky.
December 16, 2011 | Permalink
I recently made brief mention of a paper by the musicologist Michael Lorenz, in which he announced the discovery of a hitherto unknown godson of Mozart, named Wolfgang Amade Nebe. I asked Dr. Lorenz for more details, and here they are:
The discovery of Mozart as godfather resembles an unknown room that suddenly opens in Mozart's life. The godchild's father, Andreas Nebe (b. 1741 Hettstadt in Saxony, d. 1811 Vienna), was a servant of Count Karl Joseph von Palm-Gundelfingen (1749-1814), and he must have made Mozart's acquaintance in the Count's house. Palm was a great lover of music and also was one of the subscribers of Mozart's 1784 concerts in the Trattnerhof. The baptism took place on May 30, 1787, in the Piarist Church of Maria Treu, the parish church of the suburb Josephstadt (of Bruckner fame). Mozart could not be present, which was obviously caused by the fact that on this very day he received word of his father's death. Therefore he was substituted by the state official Johann Sattmann, a friend of Nebe or Mozart or both (see the picture above, the key passage in the baptismal entry reading: "anstatt und im Nam[en] des H[errn] Amadeus Wolfgang Mozart Kapellmeisters").... The only person [among the guests] who could be linked to Mozart was the midwife Sophia Stadler (1724-1790), the mother of the two legendary clarinet players Anton and Johann Stadler.
December 14, 2011 | Permalink
"The Prince of Darkness"
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, Dec. 19 and 26, 2011.
On the night of October 16, 1590, a palace apartment near Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, in Naples, was the scene of a double murder so extravagantly vicious that people are still sifting through the evidence, more than four centuries later. The most reliable account of the crime comes from a delegation of Neapolitan officials, who inspected the apartment the following day. On the floor of the bedroom, they found the body of Don Fabrizio Carafa, the Duke of Andria, whom a contemporary described as a "model of beauty," one of the handsomest young men of his time. The officials' report stated that the Duke was wearing only "a woman's nightdress with fringes at the bottom, with ruffs of black silk." The corpse was "covered with blood and pierced with many wounds," including a gunshot that had gone "straight through his elbow and even went through his breast, the sleeve of the above-mentioned shirt being scorched." The visitors observed another gunshot wound, to the head— "a bit of the brain had oozed out"—and there were wounds on the "head, face, neck, chest, stomach, kidneys, arms, hands, and shoulders." Underneath the corpse, they found a pattern of holes, "which seemed to have been made by swords which had passed through the body, penetrating deeply into the floor."
Lying on the bed was the body of Donna Maria d'Avalos, the famously alluring wife of Don Carlo Gesualdo, the Prince of Venosa. Her throat had been cut and her nightshirt was drenched in blood. The officials noted other wounds, to her face, right arm, right hand, and torso. Interviews with eyewitnesses left no doubt about who was responsible for the murders. Gesualdo, a twenty-four-year-old man with a narrow face, had been seen entering the apartment with three men, shouting, "Kill that scoundrel, along with this harlot! Shall a Gesualdo be made a cuckold?" After a time, he reëmerged, his hands dripping with blood. Then he went back into the room, saying, "I do not believe they are dead!" And he did more violence. The report ended with the observation that Gesualdo had left town.
A prince being a prince, there matters rested. Yet Gesualdo paid a posthumous price for the killings. In the decades after his death, he became a semi-mythical, even vampiric figure, about whom ever more lurid tales were told. It was said that the sexual organs of the slain lovers had been mutilated. It was said that the bodies had been left to rot on the steps of the palace. It was said that a demented monk had violated Donna Maria's corpse. And it was said that Gesualdo had murdered an alleged illegitimate child of the lovers by having the baby suspended in a bassinet and swung to the point of death. None of these stories appear to be true, with the possible exception of the first. Still, the biography of Gesualdo contains enough evidence of bizarre behavior—not only the slayings themselves but later intimations of dealings with witches and of sadomasochistic relations with young men—that the prevailing picture of him as an uncommonly sinister character seems apt. Mentioning the name in the area of Piazza San Domenico Maggiore can still cause a momentary widening of the eyes.
Gesualdo also wrote music, publishing six books of madrigals and three books of sacred pieces. He turned out to be one of the most complexly imaginative composers of the late Renaissance, indeed of all musical history. The works of his mature period—he died in 1613, at the age of forty-seven—bend the rules of harmony to a degree that remained unmatched until the advent of Wagner. They constitute a "kind of musical no-man's land," to quote from liner notes that Aldous Huxley wrote for a pioneering 1956 LP devoted to Gesualdo's madrigals. (Huxley once performed the dangerous experiment of listening to Gesualdo on mescaline.) The composer's most influential fan was Igor Stravinsky, who, in 1960, wrote a piece called "Monumentum pro Gesualdo," and, eight years later, contributed a preface to Glenn Watkins's scholarly study "Gesualdo: The Man and His Music." The fascination has hardly abated in recent decades. There have been no fewer than eleven operatic works on the subject of Gesualdo's life, not to mention a fantastical 1995 pseudo-documentary, by Werner Herzog, called "Death for Five Voices." Last year, Watkins, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan and a luminary of American musicology, published a second book, "The Gesualdo Hex: Music, Myth, and Memory."
The origins of "Gesualdo fever," as Watkins calls it, are not hard to discern. No novelist would have dared to invent a savage Renaissance prince who doubled as an avant-garde musical genius, although Gesualdo has appeared in fiction with some regularity, most recently in Wesley Stace's novel "Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer." The lingering question is whether it is the life or the work that perpetuates the phenomenon. If Gesualdo had not committed such shocking acts, we might not pay such close attention to his music. But if he had not written such shocking music we would not care so much about his deeds. Many bloodier crimes have been forgotten; it's the nexus of high art and foul play that catches our fancy. As with Gesualdo's contemporary Caravaggio, who killed a man by stabbing him near the groin, we wonder whether the violence of the art and the violence of the man emanated from the same demoniac source.
During a stay in Italy last June, I visited the main sites of Gesualdine legend: the neighborhood of Piazza San Domenico Maggiore; the nearby church of Gesù Nuovo, which houses Gesualdo's opulent tomb; and the hilltop town called Gesualdo, some sixty miles east of Naples, where the Prince fled after the killings. My guide was the congenial Giancarlo Vesce, a professor of veterinary anesthesiology at the University of Naples, whose father grew up in a village not far from Gesualdo, and who has taken an interest in the lore. "The soil in this area is volcanic, and makes the crops strong," Vesce told me as we drove out of Naples, in the sometimes hair-raising manner that seems essential to travel in southern Italy. "Everything here is strong, like Gesualdo."
The Gesualdo castle has been undergoing renovation for many years—it suffered heavy damage in the earthquake that devastated the region in 1980—and is not open to the public. Vesce, after elaborate negotiations with local notables, succeeded in getting us inside. It is a formidable hexagonal
structure, commanding a wide panorama. After the murders, the story goes, Gesualdo went on a tree-cutting rampage, so that he would have an unlimited view of potential threats. (The law could not touch him, but he may have feared vengeance from the families of the lovers.) Inside, the structure is filled with rubble and dust; the renovation has been making slow progress. Still, I could faintly imagine the castle of Gesualdo's day: a place more austere than grand, its chapel consecrated to solitary devotions, its bigger rooms given over to madrigal evenings of a darkly playful nature. Naturally, one hears rumors of Gesualdo's ghost haunting the premises. I detected no occult energies at work, although I would prefer not to be alone in the ruin late at night.
A castle has stood atop the hill since the seventh century. The Gesualdo family, of Norman descent, became lords of the town in the early twelfth century, and a series of advantageous marriages added wealth and power to the line. The Venosa title was bestowed in 1561, when Gesualdo's father married Giroloma Borromeo, a niece of Pope Pius IV and a sister of Cardinal Borromeo, who played a dominant role in the Counter-Reformation. Gesualdo was slated for the clergy until his late teens, when the death of his older brother destined him for public life. About a year after the gruesome end of his first marriage, Gesualdo inherited the princedom and became one of the richest men in the Kingdom of Naples. Within three years, he had married again, to Eleonora d'Este, a cousin of Alfonso II d'Este, the Duke of Ferrara.
The second marriage seems to have been little happier than the first. Gesualdo reportedly engaged in abusive behavior and found sexual satisfaction elsewhere. What mattered most to him, undoubtedly, was that he was able to gain entrance to the glittering Ferrara court, and, above all, to its élite circle of musicians. The Este dukes may have been a typically ruthless lot—Robert Browning did Alfonso II no injustice in imagining for him a chilling monologue ("That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive")— but they had faultless taste, and lured scores of major artists to Ferrara. At one time or another, the court hosted the poets Ludovico Ariosto, Battista Guarini, and Torquato Tasso; the painters Cosimo Tura, Lorenzo Costa, and Dosso Dossi; and the musical masters Josquin Desprez, Adrian Willaert, and Cipriano de Rore, among many others. Alfonso II employed a trio of virtuoso female singers—the concerto di donne— famed for their ability to execute the most esoteric musical designs.
Gesualdo travelled to Ferrara for his wedding, in 1594, and stayed there for most of the next two years. Its culture plainly mesmerized him. An associate of Alfonso II, who accompanied Gesualdo, reported to the Duke that the new in-law could not stop chattering about music: "He makes open profession of it and shows his works in score to everybody, in order to induce them to marvel at his art." The Prince had been steeped in music from an early age; his first published piece dates to 1585. Furthermore, Gesualdo was not pursuing mere gentlemanly refinement: he aimed to work wonders. Alfonso's informant concisely summed up the emergent Gesualdo style when he wrote, "It is obvious that his art is infinite, but it is full of attitudes, and moves in an extraordinary way."
To a degree, Gesualdo the composer was typical of his time and place. In his youth, the dominant mode of the day, in music and in other arts, was Mannerism: a rebellion against Renaissance humanism that emphasized flamboyant stylization, formal shock tactics, technical virtuosity, and intimations of the dark and the irrational. Giorgio Vasari called it the "modern style," praising its vigor and dynamism. This was the period of Rosso Fiorentino's feverishly sensual Biblical scenes, of Tintoretto's cinematically swirling crowds and battles, of the wan, gaunt faces of El Greco. In music, Mannerism expressed itself through spirited, even exaggerated, responses to the nuances of poetic texts: abrupt contrasts, outré harmonic progressions, and other disruptions of the smoothly churning surface of the high-Renaissance style.
The madrigal, a short secular piece for a small group of voices, became the favorite vehicle of musical Mannerism. The scholar Susan McClary, in her 2004 book "Modal Subjectivities," singles out as a turning point "Il bianco e dolce cigno," a 1539 madrigal by Jacques Arcadelt, a Franco-Flemish composer who prospered in Italy. The text presents a typical Renaissance double-entendre, comparing the cry of a dying swan to the "joy and desire" of sexual oblivion. At the climax, the voices split into an ecstatic series of wavelike lines— "the first graphic simulation in music of orgasm," McClary proposes.
The Este court at Ferrara was the headquarters of Mannerist innovation. In the late sixteenth century, the language of music was undergoing an epochal transition: composers were setting aside the established modes, or scalelike organizing patterns, that had regulated music since the medieval period, and were moving toward a simplified network of major and minor keys. (That system solidified in the early seventeenth century, notably in the new art of opera, and it still governs most Western music.) Yet alternatives were in the air. In 1555, the Ferrara-centered composer Nicola Vicentino published a knotty treatise, "Ancient Music Adapted to Modern Practice," that was, ostensibly, a revival of Greek musical theory. Vicentino's ruminations on Greek categories—diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic, each involving progressively narrower intervals—led him to divide the octave into thirty-one tones instead of the usual twelve. The composer invented two keyboard instruments, the archicembalo and the archiorgano (super-harpsichord and super-organ), on which his microtonal shadings could be realized.
A posthumous inventory of the Gesualdo castle lists a copy of the archicembalo, suggesting that the Prince had Vicentine tendencies. Although he did not specify microtones in his scores, he may have taken an interest in the Vicentino system because it encouraged free movement from one chord to another. Freedom is a hallmark of Gesualdo's style. To put it in modern terms: if a piece is in A minor, one would expect to hear such related chords as D minor and E major, whose notes overlap with the A-minor scale. One would not expect, say, C-sharp major, which is alien to the key. That chord sounds defiantly at the outset of one of Gesualdo's greatest works, the A-minor-ish madrigal "Moro, lasso, al mio duolo." No wonder Gesualdo's music began to resurface in the nineteenth century: such spooky progressions are a Romantic standby.
Gesualdo, no less than Schubert or Wagner, makes these swerves with an explicit purpose. The text of "Moro, lasso," like Arcadelt's "Il bianco e dolce cigno," plays on the double meaning of morte, earthly and sexual release:
I die, sinking, in my sorrow
And the one who can give me life
Kills me, alas, and does not wish to give me aid.
O woeful fate!
The one who can give me life, alas, gives me death!
In this case, though, sensuality gives way to an agitated, seething atmosphere. As Watkins writes, Gesualdo has gone beyond the Mannerist principle of creating spectacular effects; he is an expressionist, deploying both words and music to summon buried psychological states. Even though he had no apparent contact with the world of opera, his madrigals have the vividness of dramatic scenes. A 1628 commentary states that Monteverdi, the first great master of opera, "tried to sweeten and make more accessible" Gesualdo's style. When, in Monteverdi's "Orfeo," a messenger tells Orpheus that his beloved Eurydice is dead, the harmony takes a sudden dismal turn, as if catching the Gesualdo chill.
The picture of Gesualdo as an avant-garde visionary is irresistible, but in some ways it is anachronistic, ignoring the complex currents of late-Renaissance music. Dinko Fabris, a leading Italian musicologist who accompanied Giancarlo Vesce and me on our visit to the castle, set forth his view of the composer at lunch. "We always want to be surprised by Gesualdo, because of this myth of him as an experimentalist," Fabris said. "But he was a conservative— as conservative as it was possible to be in this time. Monteverdi was the radical, the new. There is a very curious letter from the poet Guarini, in which he says he prefers Gesualdo to the modern style because he is 'so far from the hardness of Monteverdi.' For Guarini, Gesualdo is so nice, so easy! Exactly the opposite of what we now think."
At a time when younger composers were emphasizing the melodic potential of a solo line—the signature of the early Baroque—Gesualdo revelled in the venerable art of polyphony, in which each voice has equal importance. And, as Susan McClary shows, he clung to the medieval modes, wrenching maximum expression from a language that was on the wane. In "Moro, lasso," the tenor voice follows the contours of the Aeolian mode while the other voices veer away. Indeed, the movement of the tenor increases the tension of the piece—it "suffers extraordinary stress," McClary writes, "as though tied to some instrument of torture worked by means of a slowly turning crank."
Gesualdo's madrigals are devilishly difficult to perform live, with singers apt to stray from the pitch as the chords wheel about. (Things go easier in the recording studio, where performances can approach perfection through multiple takes: the groups La Venexiana, the Kassiopeia Quintet, and the Concerto Italiano have come particularly close.) I recently watched the New York vocal ensemble Ekmeles rehearse two madrigals from Book V—"Se vi duol il mio duolo" ("If my grief makes you grieve") and "Mercè grido piangendo" ("Mercy! I cry as I weep")—in preparation for a concert at Columbia University's Casa Italiana. At one point, the singers exchanged ideas about what they called "scary" moments, of which there were many. The question of how to articulate a sixteenth-note passage in the first madrigal led to a discussion of its deeper meaning. The tenor Matthew Hensrud commented, "The 'ardor' of this—it's sex, not war." Jeffrey Gavett, the group's leader, said, "Yes, except that with Gesualdo the line isn't exactly clear."
Gavett had compounded the difficulties by asking the singers to adopt a version of Nicola Vicentino's intricate tuning system. To modern ears, its harmonies can sound either exceptionally pure or exceptionally weird, or both at once. In Gesualdo's music, it's disconcerting enough to hear a G-sharp-major chord after an E-minor one—as happens in "Mercè grido," in the midst of the line "Would that I might tell you ere I die, 'I die!' " In Ekmeles's rendition, the moment was made all the more unearthly because the pitches kept shifting underfoot. In modern tuning, the note B-sharp is the same as the note C-natural, but here they diverged slightly, and when the soprano sang them in close proximity the air in the room seemed to ripple, as in a sci-fi movie. Although scholars may question the wisdom of performing the madrigals in this manner, there are so many unknowns around the Prince of Venosa that the idea cannot be ruled out.
The final stage of Gesualdo's short life was, in some ways, ghastlier that the beginning. If any readers have found the story insufficiently lurid so far, let them now be satisfied. In 1603, two women of his household were tried for sorcery by local authorities, and, under torture, confessed. One of the alleged witches said that she had given the Prince potions of menstrual blood, and that after sexual intercourse with him she had inserted a piece of bread into her vagina and then served it to him in a sauce. (The trial record contains the phrase "soaked with the seed of them both.") Both women were imprisoned in the castle, which cannot have improved the domestic atmosphere.
The master of the castle was prey to an array of ailments, real or not, and pursued curious remedies. According to one chronicler, Gesualdo was "afflicted by a vast horde of demons which gave him no peace, for many days on end, unless ten or twelve young men, whom he kept specially for the purpose, were to beat him violently three times a day, during which operation he was wont to smile joyfully."
There is no way to avoid thinking of such episodes when listening to Gesualdo. Perhaps we are meant to. More than a few commentators believe that the last two collections of madrigals— Book V and Book VI, both published in 1611—are autobiographical. Gesualdo possibly wrote the poems himself, or had them written to his specifications. They dwell so often on themes of torment, pain, sadness, and death that, without the incessant variety of the music, they would become monotonous. Gesualdo may have been the first composer in history to write a kind of musical diary. "I do research in pain," Giancarlo Vesce said to me. "I work very hard to save animals from pain, but I know the sound of it. In Gesualdo's madrigals, I can tell that voices are suffering. Gesualdo is the highest expression of pain in music."
Glenn Watkins, a scholar not inclined toward melodrama, accepts that the madrigals are confessional in nature. Yet he rejects the picture of Gesualdo as a "violent psychopath." Instead, the composer's flagellation ritual might be "a manifestation of an exorcism, intended to rid the body of demons." Watkins views Gesualdo's late works as recollections of suffering and acts of penitence. Two pieces of circumstantial evidence support this more sympathetic picture. One is a painting called "Il Perdono" ("The Pardon"), which is in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Gesualdo, and shows the Prince kneeling beside Cardinal Borromeo. The other is Gesualdo's monumental, twenty-seven-part setting of the Responsoria— texts from the Catholic evening services for Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Those services are known as the Tenebrae, or "shadows"; in the old Catholic rite, candles were extinguished, one by one, until the church was enveloped in darkness.
The Responsoria cycle, also published in 1611, is Gesualdo's masterpiece, his cathedral of shadows. As Watkins says, it is a Passion in all but name. The tortuous harmonies of the madrigals are put to sacred ends; throughout, Gesualdo displays a madrigalist's alertness to verbal detail, evoking the betrayal, trial, and Crucifixion of Jesus with a flair that might have caused a scandal if the work had been performed more widely. (It was probably heard only in his private chapel or in Santa Maria delle Grazie.)
"Tristis est anima mea," the second responsory for Maundy Thursday, begins with desolate, drooping figures that conjure Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane ("My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death"). It then accelerates into frenzied motion, suggesting the fury of the mob and the flight of Jesus' disciples. There follows music of profound loneliness, radiant chords punctured by aching dissonances, as Jesus says, "I will go to be sacrificed for you." The movement from inner to outer landscape, from chromatic counterpoint to block harmonies, humanizes Jesus in a way that calls to mind Caravaggio's New Testament paintings of the same period, with their collisions of dark and light. Even though Caravaggio renounced Mannerism and heralded the Baroque, the two artists seem close in spirit, not only because of their bloody life stories but also because of the primitive fervor of their religious iconography.
The madrigals are densely packed, hyper-tense; listening to many of them at one sitting can be nerve-racking. The Responsoria—which were splendidly recorded by the Hilliard Ensemble, for ECM, in 1990—unfold in a more open-ended way, joining together into a vast structure that looks ahead to Bach. Some of the sharpest dissonances appear early on, in the passages depicting Jesus' betrayal, with a piercing semitone clash assigned to Judas. The most disquieting of the pieces is "Omnes amici" ("All my friends have forsaken me"), which lurches from one key area to another, never settling in place for long. One suspects that Gesualdo is identifying with Jesus' persecution, not least when a particularly stomach-churning progression accompanies the line "And [they have] given Me vinegar to drink." At the midpoint of the cycle, in "Tenebrae factae sunt" ("Darkness covered the earth"), a sombre stillness descends.
The responsories for Holy Saturday bring a gradual lightening of mood, even as the imagery stays focussed on the tomb. The language is cleaner, cooler, more ancient-sounding. Renewed delirium might have been expected in the second-to-last setting, "Aestimatus sum" ("I am counted among them that go down to the pit"), but, a few twists and turns aside, the music takes on a strange luminosity. For in death there is release: "I am become like a man without help, free among the dead."
The first modern composer to take an unhealthy interest in Gesualdo was the troubled English eccentric Philip Heseltine, who wrote a slew of subtly potent songs under the pseudonym Peter Warlock. After a long history of mental illness and dabblings in drugs and the occult, he came to an untoward end in 1930, apparently gassing himself in his apartment. Four years earlier, Heseltine had collaborated with the Scottish critic and composer Cecil Gray on the book "Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, Musician and Murderer," a mixture of biography, analysis, and speculation. One section of the volume is devoted to a Thomas De Quincey-like panegyric to Gesualdo's brutal handiwork, setting forth a satirical thesis about the connection between music and murder: "The beginning of the decline of murder as an art dates from precisely the same period as the development of music as a personal expression. . . . In definite relation to the increased difficulties attendant upon the practice of murder, music has become more and more sadistic. In place of inflicting the utmost pain upon a single individual, we outrage the ears of thousands."
That mordant proposal contains a kernel of truth. More than a few twentieth-century modernists cited Gesualdo as a lonely prophet, a musical explorer whose discovery of uncharted land went unheeded. Watkins, in "The Gesualdo Hex," catalogues dozens of allusions to the composer's music as well as dramatizations of his life: the list includes Warlock, Stravinsky, Peter Maxwell Davies, Alfred Schnittke, Wolfgang Rihm, and Salvatore Sciarrino. The most recent operatic response, Marc-André Dalbavie's "Gesualdo," had its première at the Zurich Opera, last year. The production, which I saw on video, did not stint on kinkiness, with a hunky Spanish baritone on hand to deliver the whippings. Even so, Dalbavie's score is the most artful of the Gesualdo operas, its mercurial language faithful to its subject's ambiguities, its dreamlike finale disclosing a kind of primeval tonality. The example of Gesualdo has emboldened composers not just to invent new sounds but to reinvent old ones.
So it was with Stravinsky, who became enamored of Gesualdo in the early nineteen-fifties, his interest encouraged by his young American friend Robert Craft. Stravinsky went so far as to copy half a dozen of the madrigals by hand. In the same years, he was abandoning the neoclassicism of his middle period in favor of an idiosyncratic version of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method. To describe Stravinsky's late music as "atonal" is, however, a misnomer: in a way, he was delving deeper into the past, reawakening the ghost harmonies of the late Renaissance. Watkins can speak of this aspect of Stravinsky's career with authority, because he knew Stravinsky and discussed Gesualdo with him. Watkins was editing Gesualdo's religious pieces at the time, and persuaded Stravinsky to fill in a missing bass part in two motets. The hieratic sacred pieces of Stravinsky's last years— "Canticum Sacrum," "Threni," and "Requiem Canticles"—may all contain echoes of Gesualdo. Watkins writes, "Both Gesualdo and Stravinsky rang down the curtain with a sacred work that resonated personally, privately, and at the same time served the potential function of a formally prescribed public ritual."
Stravinsky's cryptic tributes to Gesualdo have a counterpart in a recent piece by Georg Friedrich Haas, an Austrian composer who balances avant-garde legerdemain with an almost Wagnerian feeling for large-scale musical architecture. Haas has long been attracted to microtonal divisions of the octave, and, in the eighties, made electronic realizations of Gesualdo madrigals in Vicentino's thirty-one-tone tuning, as Ekmeles has lately done. Haas, in his Third String Quartet (2001), reënacts the old Tenebrae ritual in secular form, directing the performers to play in a space that has been thrown into total darkness. Toward the end, Haas briefly quotes one of the tenderest settings in Gesualdo's Responsoria, "Eram quasi agnus" ("I was like an innocent lamb led to the slaughter"). The players are instructed to adjust certain notes up or down, in accordance with the secret chromatic art of Ferrara. The music of the deep past materializes in the present, as if time were bending in the blackout.
"He creeps inside and grabs your soul and is in no hurry to let go," the Australian composer Brett Dean has said of Gesualdo. There is no denying the creepiness of "Gesualdo fever." A feminist critic might conclude that male artists are getting a vicarious thrill from the composer's acts of violence, and, indeed, relatively few women have shared in the fascination of the story. A sociologist might guess that the cult of Gesualdo is, on some level, a reaction to the popular stereotype of classical music as an effete art. Say what you will about Gesualdo, he was irrefutably badass.
A Renaissance historian, though, might advise that the business of the murders has been blown out of proportion. On the moral spectrum of the time, it was nothing too extreme. Perhaps Gesualdo had little choice but to do what he did: his reputation, and the reputation of his family, would have suffered if he had become known as a cuckold. The killings may have been the frantic, overcompensating action of a music-obsessed young man who ultimately had no deep connection to other people or to the outside world.
There is still more to be learned about that grisly night in Naples. During my visit, Dinko Fabris passed along news: recent research indicates that the location of the murders was not, as had long been believed, the Palazzo Sansevero, a gloomy five-story pile on the eastern side of Piazza San Domenico Maggiore. The scholar Eduardo Nappi, searching the archives of the Banco di Napoli, has uncovered evidence that Gesualdo had been renting an apartment just to the north of the palazzo, in another building in the Sansevero complex. It's now an unpreposessing structure that has been painted a deceptively innocent storybook yellow.
This change in the scene of the crime may seem trivial, yet it adds one more tragic layer to the story. Fabrizio Carafa, the comely, cross-dressing duke whom Gesualdo slew so lustily, was the son of a noblewoman who, after the death of her first husband, married the Prince of Sansevero. In other words, Gesualdo made the additional faux pas of killing his landlord's stepson. Beatrice Cècaro, another researcher, proposes that the families of the victims, overcome by horror, renounced vengeance and instead rededicated a chapel that stood next door to the murder site—the same chapel in which Gesualdo and Maria d'Avalos had been married.
That chapel became, after decades of expansion, the Cappella Sansevero, one of the most enthralling and unsettling religious spaces in Europe. Giancarlo Vesce took me there, after we returned from Gesualdo. "You must be prepared for this," Vesce said, as we entered the chapel. I found myself confronted with Giuseppe Sanmartino's 1753 sculpture "Veiled Christ," a terrifyingly beautiful depiction of Jesus in the tomb, his body wrapped in a confounding marble simulation of a flowing veil. "Look at the vein standing out in his forehead," Vesce whispered. "The exposed ribs, the sunken stomach, the holes in his hands and feet."
The "Veiled Christ" was done at the behest of Raimondo di Sangro, the brilliant alchemical prince, who, in his residence at the Palazzo Sansevero, conducted all manner of experiments in biology, medicine, physics, and mechanics. In the crypt of the Cappella are Raimondo's "anatomical machines"— male and female skeletons onto which stunningly accurate models of the circulatory system have been imposed. Although the models are now known to be artificial creations, Neapolitans long believed that they were the products of monstrous vivisections. No one had forgotten the story that a man and a woman had been slaughtered in the palace many years earlier. Does the Cappella Sansevero reverberate with centuries of crime and cruelty? Does Fabrizio Carafa lie interred behind one of its walls, as Cècaro suggests? After four centuries, the legend of Gesualdo is still growing. When La Repubblica reported the latest discoveries, it noted, "Like a black cloud blown by the wind, the curse begins to move beyond Piazza San Domenico Maggiore."
I would have lingered in the chapel, but Vesce was tapping his watch. "We must not be late for il principe," he said. I had an appointment to see Francesco d'Avalos, the Prince d'Avalos and the Marquis of Vasto and Pescara, who is a direct descendant of the family of Gesualdo's murdered wife. (His great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was Maria d'Avalos's uncle.) D'Avalos is also a composer and conductor of some repute; a couple of decades ago, he made a series of recordings with the Philharmonia Orchestra, in London. The prospect of meeting a Neapolitan composer-prince with family ties to Gesualdo was irresistible, as it has been to other amateur detectives before me. Werner Herzog's "Death for Five Voices" includes a visit to the d'Avalos palace, giving a glimpse of the very bed in which the murders were committed. Or so Herzog claims.
The Prince lives with his wife, Antonella, in the Palazzo d'Avalos, a largely abandoned sixteenth-century building in the middle of Naples. Vesce and I pushed open a tall gate, crossed a weedy courtyard, and rang a bell. A young man opened the door: it was d'Avalos's son, Andrea, who had come from London to help take care of the property. After directing us toward a massive, crumbling staircase, Andrea vanished. Not for the first time that weekend, I had the feeling that I had stumbled into an Italian neorealist film. (At one point, Bernardo Bertolucci was planning to make a Gesualdo movie, entitled "Heaven and Hell.")
At the top of the stairs, we went through another door and up another flight of stairs, until we reached the d'Avalos apartment. Paint was peeling from a few places on the walls; a layer of dust covered the tables and bookcases. All the same, the composer's study was a bright, cozy space, stocked with engravings, art books, scores, and CDs. Although the temperature had hit ninety degrees, and the apartment lacked air-conditioning, d'Avalos was wearing a white dress shirt and a black suit.
He is now eighty-one, and has been in poor health. He spoke hurriedly and indistinctly, and although his English is fluent, I had trouble following him. I felt guilty for having barged into his home, but d'Avalos was eager to show me his music. He brought out a score of "Maria di Venosa," a symphonic drama that he composed in 1992, in honor of his unlucky ancestor. We looked at the opening pages, which depict Gesualdo nearing death, beset by Maria's ghost. I noticed a serpentine sequence and suggested that it was Gesualdine in character. I did not fully grasp d'Avalos's reply, but it included the word Todestrank— "death potion." He was referring to a menacing progression in Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde," signifying the drink that Isolde serves (or thinks she serves) to Tristan and herself in Act I. D'Avalos then got out his 2005 book "The Crisis of the West and the Presence of History," a treatise on twentieth-century music, and drew my attention to a discussion of Schubert and Wagner. He was tracing a continuity across the centuries—the science of eerie harmony that runs from Gesualdo's time to the present day.
D'Avalos went to his computer and paged through YouTube videos of his compositions. We listened to a 1973 piece for string orchestra entitled "Sonata da chiesa," or church sonata, which consists of little more than a sequence of sustained chords, in unstable, shifting relations. It is not unlike Gesualdo in method, yet the effect is gentle and wistful.
I nodded at Vesce: it was time to go. Before we left, though, I had to ask about the bed. Herzog's film is not the only source of the rumor that d'Avalos possessed the murder bed; one scholar had assured me that d'Avalos once placed a tape recorder next to the bed and left it running overnight, and that when he listened to the tape the following day he heard a mysterious singing voice, which he transcribed for his "Maria di Venosa" score.
"Non è vero," d'Avalos said, when I mentioned the bed. He spoke more clearly than before. "It is not true. Nobody knows which bed it was."
His wife, who had joined the conversation, told me, "È una storia"—"It's just a story." She smiled indulgently.
The Prince was racked by a cough, and Vesce and I said goodbye. We made our way down the ancient stairs, parts of which had turned to dust. The heat and glare of the Neapolitan summer smacked us as we opened the outer door. Yet the memory of those pensive chords stayed with me: a wordless message, an ambiguous reply, drifting backward in time.
Bonus: A Gesualdo photojournal.
December 12, 2011 | Permalink
In my Rick Perry post below — I hope never to use that phrase again — I commented that Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign popularized the use of Coplandisms in the political-ad business. For an earlier example, see the common-man coda of the 1976 Gerald Ford ad above. Below are a few ads for Nixon's 1968 campaign, which go in a different direction. For a man who criticized modernist tendencies in twentieth-century music, Nixon certainly allowed his operatives considerable latitude in harmonizing his message. The first ad seems to suggest that Nixon will restore a clear tonal center in a kooky atonal world, but a slightly jarring raised fourth at the end hints that he, too, has a modernist edge. The second ad meanders through several styles and ends on a sassy discord. The legendary "Nixon for American Youth" ad speaks for itself.
December 11, 2011 | Permalink
From Copland's FBI file. Click to enlarge.
A few days ago, I mentioned a musical irony undercutting an odious new TV ad by Rick Perry, the Texas governor and presidential aspirant. While Perry bemoans the fact that openly gay men and women are now allowed to serve in the American armed forces, the soundtrack gestures toward the "Americana" style of Aaron Copland, and in particular his immortal Appalachian Spring. You can see what I mean by comparing the ad itself — if anyone has moral qualms about accumulating hits for Gov. Perry, there is the option to vote "dislike," as more than half a million people have already done — to the opening and closing sections of Appalachian Spring. This observation is now making the rounds, although it's been somewhat distorted in the process: the music is not by Copland, although it certainly attempts to get close.
The irony is, of course, that Copland was gay, and tended strongly to the ideological left, as the above communication from J. Edgar Hoover suggests. In 1953, at the insistence of a Red-baiting congressman, his Lincoln Portrait was dropped from a concert celebrating Eisenhower's inaugural, and later that year the composer went before Joe McCarthy's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. As the decades passed, the cloud over Copland lifted, to the point where both Margaret Thatcher and Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf felt free to serve as narrators for Lincoln Portrait. Whoever put together Perry's ad is hardly the first to appropriate Copland's style in questionable fashion, although I don't recall encountering it in an anti-gay context; that may be some kind of creepy innovation. In The Rest Is Noise, I noted that Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" campaign film in 1984 employed a Coplandesque score; after an excerpt from the book appeared in The New Yorker, the composer/arranger Alan Foust, who worked on the ad, wrote to me explaining how it came about. Since then, Coplandisms have been a cliché in campaign commercials from all points on the political spectrum.
See also: The Bernstein Files.
More: Ford and Nixon.
December 10, 2011 | Permalink
David Lang, in liner notes for a fine new Bridge recording of Morton Feldman's Piano and String Quartet (with Vicki Ray and the Eclipse Quartet), describes the dress rehearsal for the premiere of Feldman's Coptic Light, at the New York Philharmonic in 1986: "The orchestra, reacting to the music's extreme focus and restraint, booed him, threw their orchestral parts around, and literally barked at him like dogs." The incident recalls the Philharmonic's notorious misbehavior at the 1964 premiere of Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis — an episode meticulously recounted in Benjamin Piekut's recent book Experimentalism Otherwise. (Here's a pdf excerpt.) The current Philharmonic is, happily, more professional in its approach to new music.
December 10, 2011 | Permalink
A press release from the Metropolitan Opera reveals that James Levine has withdrawn from all Met engagements through the end of the season, and that he will make no commitments in the 2012-13 season. "While his condition has greatly improved in recent months," the release says, "it is uncertain exactly when he will be fully recovered and able to return to conducting." Whether Levine will really be able to carry on as music director, as his affecting but ultimately baffling statement suggests, remains to be seen. Fabio Luisi will take over Wagner's Ring in April and May, two performances excepted.
Levine's statement in full:
December 09, 2011 | Permalink


text:
Ms Leou is an author and illustrator.
She writes about her own cat by the name Lulu.
The real Lulu, just like the one in the story has no tail (she was born like this).
The real Lulu likes to pretend she is a tiger.
Ms Leou has written three books so far.
The illustrations in her books are very detailed.
Since Ms. Leou had shared with us that Lulu's third adventure would be published in September this year, our students had fun making predictions about the new book, based on what they already knew about her, and shared these with the author as well:
"We learned that all the Lulu adventures take place in Hong Kong. We think that also the new story will take place in Hong Kong but in a different part. Maybe even Sai Kung? We were thinking, maybe Little Jade starts school at HKA and Lulu visits. She might even meet some of the Sai Kung cows.
We learned that Lulu always meets different characters in her stories. We think she will meet more characters in her new adventure.
We learned that Lulu likes going on adventures and that there is always a celebration in the stories. We think she might go with Little Jade to buy a lantern for Chinese New Year.
We noticed that each book has a different color (red, blue, green). We think the next book will be yellow or purple."
Everyone is looking forward to Lulu's third adventure - and finding out whether we were right with some of our predictions. We will know in September.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
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Funny cat videos: Cats sleeping in strange places
We all know cats rule the internet, particularly when it comes to funny cat videos.
Our feline friends don't have to try particularly hard to go viral but a bunch of them have taken it to a new level by attracting millions of YouTube views just by being asleep.
Admittedly, the ones in the video have dozed off in some pretty amusing positions.
Which begs the question: What is your cat's favourite sleeping position and what does it say about them?
1. A cat on the back
This is a more relaxed, content cat. A cat's tummy is an area he or she would usually try to protect but this pose is saying "I trust you completely".
It's also a test of that trust – can you resist tickling him or her on the tum? It's probably best to, if you don't want to end up with some nasty scratches.
2: Protective paw
Some cats and kittens nap with one or both of their front paws over their face.
It's most likely an attempt to shield from the light but it also most certainly means "leave me alone, I'm dog-tired".
3. The clothesline
Does your cat head straight for your unwashed laundry when it's time for a nap? It's not just because it looks like a comfortable place to rest but probably because, believe it or not, your body odour puts your cat at ease.
4. Synchronised snoozing
If you have more than one cat, you might notice that, from time to time they sleep in unison, often in strikingly similar poses.
This shows that they are happy in each other's company and get along swimmingly. Like synchronised swimmers, if you will.


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A particular strength to support neuroscience research is through Horizon's in vivo models. We use our gene editing platform to generate these models, which are powerful tools used to investigate not only the impact of genetic modifications on the cognitive behavior of complex systems, but also to explore whether there are neurological side effects of therapeutics for drugs treating other conditions.
Dong M. et al. (2014). DAG1 mutations associated with asymptomatic hyperCKemia and hypoglycosylation of α-dystroglycan, Neurology. 2015 Jan 20;84(3):273-9
Kuldip D. et al. (2014). Phenotypic characterization of recessive gene knockout rat models of Parkinson's disease, Neurobiology of Disease 70 (2014) 190–203
Shannon M. Hamilton, et al. (2014). Fmr1 and Nlgn3 Knockout Rats: Novel Tools for Investigating Autism Spectrum Disorders, Behavioral Neuroscience 2014, Vol. 128, No. 2, 103–109


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Duty and service to country, community and people are the theme of this year's Tongan Language Week which runs from September 2 until September 8. Read more
Residing in Ōtāhuhu,aka Little Tonga, John Pulu and his family mostly communicate using the Tongan language at home. The Pacific Broadcaster feels this is the best way for Tongan people living in New Zealand to preserve their traditional language due to Aotearoa being so diverse and English used most commonly elsewhere. Read more
Waka Hourua is New Zealand's national Māori and Pasifika suicide prevention programme, funded by the Ministry of Health. It is led by Te Rau Matatini, the National Centre for Māori Health and Le Va, specialising in Pacific mental health and wellbeing. Read more
Abe Mora's camera has become his passport to a world he never knew existed. The New Zealand-born Abe, of Cook Islands descent never once dreamt he would be travelling the world as a photographer to the rich and famous, considering his humble upbringing. Read more
High visibility and helping young people to really understand the new Pacific Vision and how they each contribute to that vision whether they are at school, church or university is essential for it to succeed. Read more


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One of the fundamental features of GST is the seamless flow of input credit across the chain (from the manufacture of goods till it is consumed) and across the country.
1. What is input tax credit?
Input credit means at the time of paying tax on output, you can reduce the tax you have already paid on inputs and pay the balance amount.Here's how-
When you buy a product/service from a registered dealer you pay taxes on the purchase. On selling, you collect the tax. You adjust the taxes paid at the time of purchase with the amount of output tax (tax on sales) and balance liability of tax (tax on sales minus tax on purchase) has to be paid to the government. This mechanism is called utilization of input tax credit.For example- you are a manufacturer: a. Tax payable on output (FINAL PRODUCT) is Rs 450 b. Tax paid on input (PURCHASES) is Rs 300 c. You can claim INPUT CREDIT of Rs 300 and you only need to deposit Rs 150 in taxes.
2. Who can claim ITC?
ITC can be claimed by a person registered under GST only if he fulfills ALL the conditions as prescribed.
a. The dealer should be in possession of tax invoice
b. The said goods/services have been received
c. Returns have been filed.
d. The tax charged has been paid to the government by the supplier.
e. When goods are received in installments ITC can be claimed only when the last lot is received.
f. No ITC will be allowed if depreciation has been claimed on tax component of a capital good
A person registered under composition scheme in GST cannot claim ITC.
3. What can be claimed as ITC?ITC can be claimed only for business purposes. ITC will not be available for goods or services exclusively used for: a. Personal use b. Exempt supplies c. Supplies for which ITC is specifically not available
4. Reversal of Input Tax Credit
ITC can be availed only on goods and services for business purposes. If they are used for non-business (personal) purposes, or for making exempt supplies ITC cannot be claimed . Apart from these, there are certain other situations where ITC will be reversed.ITC will be reversed in the following cases-
1) Non-payment of invoices in 180 days– ITC will be reversed for invoices which were not paid within 180 days of issue.
2) Credit note issued to ISD by seller– This is for ISD. If a credit note was issued by the seller to the HO then the ITC subsequently reduced will be reversed.
3) Inputs partly for business purpose and partly for exempted supplies or for personal use – This is for businesses which use inputs for both business and non-business (personal) purpose. ITC used in the portion of input goods/services used for the personal purpose must be reversed proportionately.
4) Capital goods partly for business and partly for exempted supplies or for personal use – This is similar to above except that it concerns capital goods.
5) ITC reversed is less than required- This is calculated after the annual return is furnished. If total ITC on inputs of exempted/non-business purpose is more than the ITC actually reversed during the year then the difference amount will be added to output liability. Interest will be applicable.
The details of reversal of ITC will be furnished in GSTR-2. To find out more about the segregation of ITC into business and personal use and subsequent calculations, please visit our article.
5. Reconciliation of ITC
ITC claimed by the person has to match with the details specified by his supplier in his GST return. In case of any mismatch, the supplier and recipient would be communicated regarding discrepancies after the filling of GSTR 3. Please read our article on the detailed explanation of the reasons for mismatch of ITC and procedure to be followed to apply for re-claim of ITC.
6. Documents Required for Claiming ITCThe following documents are required for claiming ITC: 1. Invoice issued by the supplier of goods/services 2. The debit note issued by the supplier to the recipient (if any) 3. Bill of entry 4. An invoice issued under certain circumstances like the bill of supply issued instead of tax invoice if the amount is less than Rs 200 or in situations where the reverse charge is applicable as per GST law. 5. An invoice or credit note issued by the Input Service Distributor(ISD) as per the invoice rules under GST. 6. A bill of supply issued by the supplier of goods and services or both.
All these documents are to furnished at the time of filing form GSTR-2.
7. Special cases of ITC
a. ITC for Capital Goods
ITC is available for capital goods under GST.However, ITC is not available for- i. Capital Goods used exclusively for making exempted goods ii. Capital Goods used exclusively for non-business (personal) purposes Note: No ITC will be allowed if depreciation has been claimed on tax component of capital goods.
b. ITC on Job Work
A principal manufacturer may send goods for further processing to a job worker. For example, a shoe manufacturing company sends half-made shoes (upper part) to job workers who will fit the soles. In such a situation the principal manufacturer will be allowed to take credit of tax paid on the purchase of such goods sent on job work.ITC will be allowed when goods are sent to job worker in both the cases:
- From principal's place of business
- Directly from the place of supply of the supplier of such goods
However, to enjoy ITC, the goods sent must be received back by the principal within 1 year (3 years for capital goods).
c. ITC Provided by Input Service Distributor (ISD)
An input service distributor (ISD) can be the head office (mostly) or a branch office or registered office of the registered person under GST. ISD collects the input tax credit on all the purchases made and distribute it to all the recipients (branches) under different heads like CGST, SGST/UTGST, IGST or cess.
d. ITC on Transfer of Business
This applies in cases of amalgamations/mergers/transfer of business. The transferor will have available ITC which will be passed to the transferee at the time of transfer of business.Please visit our other articles discussing ITC under GST in detail.
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General History Of Dominican Republic Condensed
The Dominican Republic is an island in the Caribbean that has a rich and unique history starting with the Indigenous Taino People, The Spanish Conquest, Haitian Rule to the present time.
1.Before Written History | 2.Arrival of the Foreigners | 3.More Recent History | 4.And Now Ciudad Colonial… | 5."List of the Firsts" | 6.Cultural Treasures
Before Written History
Before the Europeans arrived on the island of Hispaniola and claimed they were the so-called "discoverers" of the entire island, it was occupied by the Taino Indians.
The Tainos lived on the island they lovingly called Quisqueya. In the Taino language this means "Land for which there is none better".
The peaceful Tainos (they did war with neighboring tribes such as the blood thirsty Caribs) almost entire demise coincided with the arrival of the Spaniards and their abuse of these original inhabitants of this small island. These "savages", as the Europeans thought of them, who had ruled the island, now lost their way of life and eventually most lost their lives because of this invasion of the Whites. The Taino nation was doomed the moment Christopher Columbus landed.
The Arrival of the Foreigners
Christopher Columbus, in Spanish Cristóbal Colón, to the island on the ship La Santa María. There were two other ships that accompanied him, La Pinta and La Niña. He found the island first on October 12, 1492.
Columbus first landed on one of the islands in the Bahamas. Later that year also found Cuba and an island he called La Isla Espanola (he was on the western side of the island). When Columbus returned to Spain he left some of his men behind to look for the gold he thought was on the island.
When Columbus made his second voyage, he returned to find most of the people he left on Hispaniola had vanished. Dead.
His fleet of 17 ships continued traveling along the coast toward the east. Finally, stopping to create a fortified post, Christopher left his brother and some men who were to search inward for the promised gold. Columbus traveled continued his quest searching elsewhere for the gold he promised the Queen.
By the spring of 1494 the island Hispaniola was colonized. The island Columbus declared to be "the most beautiful island the human eyes have ever seen" is where he wanted his remains entered to rest forever.
The first Europeans settled in 1496.
The brother of Christopher, Bartholomew Columbus founded Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, officially on August 5, 1498. The city, originally named La Isabela, is the oldest European city founded by Europeans in the "New World". It is the oldest colonial city in all the Americas.
Santo Domingo was the place of origin for much of the exploration and conquest of the New World throughout its first century of existence. The "discovery" of Puerto Rico by Ponce de Leon, the conquest of Mexico by Cortez, and the first sighting of the Pacific Ocean by Balboa, all started here in Santo Domingo.
The famous pirate Francis Drake invaded in 1568 and weakened the Spanish domain over Hispaniola (or Hispaniola) in 1568. The Spaniards abandoned the city and it was left to Drake and the pirates for more than 50 years. It remained this way until the French invaded the west side of the island in 1655. After many treaties and forced annexations the part of the island originally called by Santo Domingo was less than half it's original size.
Commanded by Toussaint Louverture, the Haitians took over the island in 1822. They ruled the island for 22 years, fighting for their lost independence.
The Spaniards again became independent of Haitian rule on February 27, 1844. Thanks to their leaders Juan Pablo Duarte, Francisco del Rosario Sánchez and Ramón Matías Mella. This was when the Spanish part of the island became known as the Dominican Republic. The Haitian's were totally defeated in 1861 and sent to their own side of the island. The struggle to keep control the country even after Spanish independence was gained was on going.
More Recent History
In 1916 The United States of America, wanting to have more power and influence in the Dominican Republic, used World War 1 as an excuse to bring in the Marines. They came to "protect" the country against the "bad" European powers.
The USA changed the infrastructure to best benefit them. Dominican Republic had its first, somewhat, free elections in 1924 which put Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in power.
The US finally decided to leave the Dominican Republic to itself and left. Soon Trujillo was able to gain power and in 1930 he took over completely. The Trujillo dictatorship ended on May 30, 1961 with his execution by ambush. He died one of the richest men in the world.
After this there were many political and economic problems. The US Marines returned in 1965 to occupy the country because they said the uprising was the fault of the Communists. USA left when Dr. Joaquín Balaguer was elected president once again (many say the election was fixed). Through all these political struggles and civil wars the country becomes independent.
1992 marked the 500th anniversary, El Quinto Centenario, of Christopher Columbus' opening of Las Americas to the colonization of the Europeans.
The Columbus Lighthouse, Faro de Colón, with an approximate cost of 400 million Dominican pesos, was erected in honor of this occasion. This massive structure is in the shape of a cross and houses the remains (so it is said) of Christopher Columbus along with many other exhibits.
This building is amazing to see by day and the spectacular lights form a cross in the heavens at night (the lights are only shown on special occasions because of the electricity problems) that can be seen for long distances.
See many old pictures of Santo Domingo and Dominican Republic.
And Now Ciudad Colonial…
Colonial Zone or Zona Colonial is the oldest city in Las Americas on the island of Hispaniola in the country of Dominican Republic. It is a small town located in the capital city Santo Domingo de Guazmán. It is bordered by Río Ozama and the Caribbean Sea. There are many historical sites that were built during the time of exploration, exploitation, and colonization of the "New World."
Much of the original city can still be seen today. The cathedral, monastery, university and hospital are among many of the "firsts" that happened here. The 16th-century buildings, homes and churches where one can see the old world Spanish architectural styles of the period. Many are still in excellent condition and are a wonder to behold.
Colonial Zone (and the surrounding sectors including San Miguel, San Lázaro, Santa Barbara, San Anton, San Carlos, Atarazana, and Cuidad Nueva) is a wonderful mix of the past and present. The old and new intertwine to make a unique travelers experience.
Live the history. Walk our streets. Visit our Museums and Historical sights. Dine in our restaurants. Meet our people. Dance to out music. You will make lasting memories. Something you may remember for a lifetime. Here in the land of firsts in "The Americas"
The "Firsts"
The city of Santo Domingo was the seat of many historic events and many of the monuments that are here are from the first 50 years of the European Conquest of America. This is why we have the title
"The Cradle of America".
1. First Map: drawing of the northeast coast by Christopher Columbus (1493)
2. First European Villa in the Americas: La Isabela (1494)
3. First Religious Order: Friar of San Francisco (1494)
4. First Mass officiated in the Americas: January 6, 1494.
5. First Capital of the Americas: Santo Domingo (1496-98)
6. First Monastery: San Francisco (1502)
7. First Hospital: San Nicolás de Bari (1503)
8. First House of Contracts (1503)
9. First University: Universidad de Santo Domingo (1538)
10. First Cathedral: Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación (1541)
Cultural Treasures
There are many cultural treasures located throughout Dominican Republic. In 2010 there was a vote by the held by the International Bureau of Capitals of Culture. They help people to notice important cultural locations throughout the world. This year they focused on Dominican Republic. There were 27 candidates for the treasure, and most were in the Colonial Zone. They received 18,420 votes.
This is a list of the places voted for and the number of votes received. You can find information about these locations in the Colonial Zone Sights section.
1) Alcázar de Colón – 4344 votes
2) Catedral – 2560
3) Fortaleza Ozama – 2369
4) Museo de las Casas Reales – 1275
5) Jardín Botánico – 1117
6) Malecón – 1092
7) Palacio de Bellas Artes – 1024
8) Barrio Chino – 972
9) Calle Las Damas – 485
10) Palacio Nacional – 443
11) Hospital San Nicolás de Bari (ruinas) – 308
12) Panteón Nacional – 284
13) Parque de los Tres Ojos – 246
14) Altar de la Patria – 238
15) Hostal Nicolás de Ovando – 223
16) Monasterio de San Francisco (ruinas) – 208
17) Faro a Colón – 196
18) Alcantarilla Colonial – 193
19) Iglesia del Convento Dominico – 184
20) Calle El Conde – 181
21) Casa de Juan Pablo Duarte – 125
22) Reales Atarazanas – 116
23) Casa de Tostado – 66
24) Parque de la Independencia – 49
25) Ceiba de Colón – 46
26) Urna original de los restos del almirante Don Cristóbal Colón – 39
27) Palacio Consistorial – 37


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Feature Requests
Share ideas, discuss and vote on requests from other users in community
Create promo codes from API
Rodrigo Baldasso shared this idea 5 years ago
Under Consideration
I'm developing a system integrated with google adwords that would display a custom promo code for a client. However, WHMCS doesn't allow the creation of promo codes from the API and only get a list of them.
I want to be able to create promo codes with all the options (expiry date, allowed usage and etc.)
Andre Bellafronte ● 3 years ago
This feature will help a lot!
Jason Christensen ● 3 years ago
Definitely a must! :)
Patrice Poliquin ● 2 years ago
I was looking for it. I'll just reverse engineering this by creating my own MySQL request :(
Andrea Boero ● 1 year ago
Same need here...
Mysql INSERTs is just what we want to avoid...
Jordan Idler ● 1 year ago
I would like to boost this, This is needed, please add it
Leave a Comment


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A couple of weeks later Melissa reached Johnny's gym and started her fitness programme. Days went by and Johnny was slowly trying to get close, and Melissa started getting comfortable with him. Soon she had to depart, but Johnny didn't let her go just like that, he called her on a date in a cruise and proposed her. Everything went well, until she had to bid goodbye promising to meet a year later.
Johnny thought about it, took his time to make decision. This was his chance to get his life back on track, he needed someone to mentally support him and it had to be Melissa.. A pea sized amount of foaming shaving cream and a new razor all it look for Johnny to look smart again.
The next evening he called Melissa for a date. Upon meeting, his clean shaven looks bowled her over.. and then he said in Johnny Bravo style " I'm pretty, you're pretty, lets go home and stare at each other...."
This post is a part of the Protest Against Smelly Stubble Activity in association with BlogAdda . I'm accepting this tag from SIMRAN KAUR, And I would like to tag FEW MILES/ SOMEONE IS SPECIAL, SIVARANJINI BALASUBRAMANIAN, UMAMAHESWARI ANANDANE, SIMRAN KAUR and GANGA BHARANI


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Ohhhhh…this is a loaded question. This week's meme from The Broke and the Bookish says:
I asked the contributors of our blog to give me the stories and books they have read that remind them the most of Halloween.
If you have read some of my past posts (such as Haunted Week is Coming! or Graveyards I Have Known) you will be quite aware as to how much I don't like being scared – and this absolutely includes books. I have a very vivid imagination, so reading anything remotely scary, even during the sunniest of days, will cause me to have crazy, intense dreams that night, that is, if I sleep at all. Yes, it has gotten better since I am long past childhood, but I Just. Don't. Go. There.
As such, it is kind of funny that I would attempt a top ten of books that would get one ready for Halloween. Be that as it may, here goes (in order as I thunked them up).
- The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson. When I think of scary books, I always think of this one first. I was spending the night with a friend in middle school (sounds like the makings of a horror film already) and she had this book. I thought I could handle it since she was there. Nope. Can't tell you how far I made it, but it wasn't far. Pig eyes? Flies? It REALLY happened? 'Nuff said.
- Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. I recently acquired this book, but I haven't cracked the cover. I am planning on reading it during Haunted Week which starts tomorrow. Anywho, I have read Poe before, but what I remember best is when the local public radio station, KERA, aired some old radio shows for fun. One of them was Poe's The Black Cat. One of his best, I think.
- Dracula by Bram Stoker. Everyone knows Dracula, but how many of you have actually read it? We chose this one month in a book club I was in a few years ago. I was really surprised as to how much I liked it. I do remember the part where Dracula is described climbing out of his window and descending the castle like a lizard. Also, all of the spider catching and eating is somewhat unsettling.
- The Diviners by Libba Bray. This is a brand-spanking new book that I just read (review is coming). It's the cat's whiskers, I'll tell you that. People have powers, there's a spooky graveyard, ouija board, tarot cards, and a house that is waiting for the return of Naughty John. Creepers GALORE.
- The Little Broomstick by Mary Stewart. This is one of my all-time favorite books. I discovered it when I was a kid. For someone who was such a big wussy when it came to scary-ness, I sure loved books about witches. At my library, they would put all of the "Halloween" books out for the month of October and that's it. Once I figured out where they were hidden, it was like my own treasure trove of awesome. This book is deliciously creepy and intense.
- Arise (Hereafter #2) by Tara Hudson. ANY book that takes place in New Orleans and involves ghosts, St. Louis Cemetery #1, a voodoo ceremony and demons gets placed automatically on this list.
- The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. This is one of my new favorites. It's actually, for the most part, the sweet side of the graveyard; a toddler boy unknowingly escapes the brutal murder of his family by taking refuge in an old graveyard at the top of a hill. The ghosts become his family, teachers, guardians.
- I know I should include Stephen King on my list, but, to be honest, I haven't read much. I did read Carrie in high school, and also a book of short stories (Night Shift, I think? Is that the one with the yard guy who eats whatever the mower spits out? And the baby in the crib?). Again, I just don't go there.
- Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley and Me, Elizabeth by E. L. Konigsburg. Another witchy book that I loved when I was a kid. You can also check out The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder or The Little Leftover Witch by Florence Laughlin.
- Any book with photos of sharks in it. I realize this isn't very Halloween-y, but they do scare me. I don't even like touching a photo of a shark. (Heck, it gave me the heebie jeebies to point at the photo with my mouse!) I am sure Jaws had something to do with it (saw the movie, did not read the book), and my daughter thinks it's HILARIOUS.
Whaddya think? Do you have a limit as to what or how many horror books you will read, or do you love it all?


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Never thought I would get a Magazine cover when I started shooting a number of years ago. But low and behold I got one! Thanks to the crew over at Nalu Magazine in Japan for running my shot. I took this image a year ago at Polihale Beach on the westside of Kauai. Went out to camp with my lovely lady and we awoke to some awesome conditions the next morning. The Sun was just rising over the mountain and it gave that water the blue shimmer that pretty much made this shot. Hopefully some more to come! Camera used was a Canon 5Dmk2 + 10-17fisheye + SPL Water Housing. Aloha.
This is where I hope to share with you my most recent work on a day to day basis. Nothing fancy, just rad stuff as its happening. Hope you enjoy.