181: Heartland

Chinese brass, Missourian renewal, and America’s worst conductor

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune was submitted by Listener Eric. Here’s your hint: the composer was unhappy with the premiere of this piece and abandoned the work for the rest of his life. No Googling!

As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing.

Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 180
Carlos Chávez, Piano Concerto

This was a big-time stumper, but those who guessed American were right — you just didn’t go far south enough into the Americas! Listener Eric guessed Hanson, Sessions, and Mennin. Listener Jeremy guessed Hohvaness, Thomson, and Walton.

As a reminder, my (not so great) clue was that the composer’s most famous work is his second symphony. For those who don’t know, Chávez’s second symphony is a little shorty called the “Sinfonía india.”

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to submit a YouTube link OR upload your own 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

Conn Job

From the Guardian:

John Paulson, a hedge fund billionaire and one of Donald Trump’s earliest Wall Street backers, is planning to offshore an Ohio manufacturing plant to China despite heavy pushback from employees.

Conn Selmer, the largest US manufacturer of brass and orchestra instruments, told the union it planned to offshore most work at its Eastlake, Ohio, plant to China by the end of June 2026, eliminating 150 jobs.

United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2359, which represents the 150 employees, said workers were informed of the closing when it first sat down to bargain over their new union contract last month.

Union workers say Conn Selmer opened a facility in China last year and gradually shifted their workload to that plant, though workers were told the new facility would not affect workload in Ohio.

“Almost immediately they started taking parts from certain product lines,” Hines said. He noted co-workers began complaining about brass metal coming from China that had to be scrapped due to poor quality.

Paulson made a significant portion of his wealth by betting against the housing market that crashed in 2008. A longtime Trump donor, he served on Trump’s economic policy team during his first presidential campaign and raised $50.5m for the president at his Palm Beach home in April 2024. He was in the running to serve as secretary of treasury during Trump’s second term but withdrew because of “complex financial obligations”.

Paulson, like Trump, has publicly criticized offshoring. “We can’t have American producers closing American factories and offshoring. We need to protect American jobs and protect American manufacturing,” he said during an interview with CNBC in September 2024.

Meet Me in St. Louis

This is a great video about the top-to-bottom refurbishment and build-out of Powell Hall, home of the St. Louis Symphony. A few comments:

1. The YouTuber who made this video was given extensive access to the hall and had a lengthy sit-down interview with SLS music director Stéphane Denève, all while having barely 300 subscribers. Either the SLS administration is totally genius for plucking a talented rando from obscurity, or this shows the extent to which classical music is truly pathetic.

2. Notice where they staged that Denève interview — amidst the richly adorned splendor of the old concert hall lobby. Not in the new modern/minimalist wing. Just sayin’!

3. The land use around the hall is enough to spill gallons’ worth of urbanist tears. Stroads and parking lots as far as they eye can see. Bring back the streetcars and make St. Louis great again!

Botstein

Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College who moonlights as a conductor (music director, in fact, of the American Symphony Orchestra), has come in for a lot of heat in the past couple weeks after the latest drop of Epstein files revealed that Botstein’s connections to the deceased sex trafficker were much more extensive than previously thought.

Before I go further, I’ll just remind everyone that this is not a new story. Here is coverage from the New York Times in May, 2023:

It may seem, at first blush, an unlikely connection: Leon Botstein, the president of Bard, one of the country’s most progressive colleges, and Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced billionaire accused of sexually abusing teenage girls.

But reporting from The Wall Street Journal this week showed that Dr. Botstein did not just pursue Mr. Epstein hoping to raise money, he did so repeatedly. He made frequent visits to Mr. Epstein’s Upper East Side townhouse, and Mr. Epstein and his entourage hopped by helicopter to Bard’s lush campus in the Hudson Valley.

Dr. Botstein said in interviews with The New York Times that the visits were all about funding for Bard — for the school’s commitment to social justice, its prisoner education program, its liberal arts mission. Bard calls itself “a private college for the public good.”

“People don’t understand what this job is,” he said, adding, “You cannot pick and choose, because among the very rich is a higher percentage of unpleasant and not very attractive people. Capitalism is a rough system.”

Here is an update from the Times from this past February 6:

But the latest batch of documents related to Mr. Epstein released last week by the Justice Department shows that Mr. Epstein’s ties to Bard’s president, Leon Botstein, went beyond the college’s finances.

The president, for example, ended one 2013 email to the sex offender, “Miss you.”

In early 2017, Dr. Botstein and Mr. Epstein appear to have worked together to buy an expensive watch, eventually leading to confusion about whom it was for and who would pay for it.

Mr. Epstein connected the filmmaker Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, with Dr. Botstein as one of the couple’s daughters, Bechet Allen, was considering colleges. The family thanked Mr. Epstein for “getting Bechet into Bard” in one email. (A spokesman for Dr. Botstein said the applicant was accepted on her own merit.)

The documents also show that Dr. Botstein’s office had planned out a trip to Mr. Epstein’s island in 2012.

Botstein denies that he visited the island, but now we have another Times update from February 9, which suggests that the visit may well have happened (though it cannot be proven) and drops this unbelievable nugget:

In several emails to Mr. Epstein, Dr. Botstein mentioned or quoted Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist. “Nabokov became famous and admired only at the end,” Dr. Botstein wrote to Mr. Epstein in a lengthy March 2013 note in which Dr. Botstein wrote about how he was haunted by early criticisms of his work in music. Mr. Nabokov wrote “Lolita,” a 1955 novel about an intellectual who becomes sexually obsessed with a 12-year-old. Mr. Epstein kept a first edition of the novel in his Manhattan townhouse.

In that message, Dr. Botstein also wrote, “I greatly cherish this new friendship and I have real admiration for how you go about doing things.”

I am in no way qualified to judge what did or did not happen or what Botstein’s “real” motivations may have been for nursing this “friendship.” As a conductor, I do understand what it means to have to fundraise, and how that might lead to unfortunate games of footsie with unsavory or problematic characters.

But I’m not sure Botstein will be able to weather the storm again in 2026 the way he did in 2023 given the new revelations. Academia seems to be the one area of American civic life where people are actually seeing consequences for their connections to Epstein.

And what of the American Symphony Orchestra? I have long wished to see Botstein toppled from his position there, but simply because he is such an atrociously bad conductor. So bad, in fact, that my most circumspect Classical Gabfest co-host was willing to go on record saying as much.

Tone Praise

Carl Vine, The Anne Landa Preludes

I’ve been aware of the name Carl Vine for a while now, but it’s only recently that I’ve spent any time digging into this contemporary Australian composer’s works; happily, I’ve found much to admire. Please sound off in the comments if you are a Vine knower.

Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)