85: Crisis at the Phil

A major allegation resurfaces involving two New York musicians

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune is submitted by Listener Bobby. Here’s your hint: This composer had eight children. 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 84
Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, Ovid Symphony No. 5, “Phinée avec ses amis changés en rochers”

Listener Eric certainly offered up a curious selection with this one! For those who don’t know, Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf was a Viennese composer living and working roughly concurrently with Joseph Haydn. In fact, the two were in the habit of playing string quartets together — with Mozart and Wanhal rounding out the foursome!

I (Will) was fascinated by von Dittersdorf as a youngster, mainly because of his name, but also because he is one of the tiny handful of composers commonly listed as writing during the Rococo period of classical music (the others being Glück and J.C. Bach in a pinch.)

Having said that, I never would have gotten to the answer (which I did) without Joey’s clue. Listener Kevin weighed in in an email, but inappropriately so, since he guessed both Dittersdorf and Wanhal. Emails are for people with secure knowledge willing to take a stance. Let that be a lesson to the rest of you: guesses belong in the comments!

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

Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

NEWS

Sadly, the news item that has swept across the world of classical this past week is this harrowing account of sexual abuse in the ranks of the New York Philarmonic, written by Sammy Sussman, the dogged young reporter who has earned a reputation for speaking truth to power (and whom some of you will remember from his appearance on the Classical Gabfest when he broke news of a scandal at the University of Michigan, where he was a student at the time.)

Sussman’s article details the travails of Cara Kizer, a young woman who was playing horn as a trial member of the Phil during their 2010 residency at the Vail Music Festival. After a concert, she was invited to a small gathering in the rented condo of another musician, Matthew Muckey. A third colleague, Liang Wang, was also in the condo with them.

Sussman writes:

When they got to Muckey’s condo, he and Wang got in the hot tub and tried to persuade Kizer to join them, but she declined. Kizer alleged that Wang brought her a glass of red wine. Wang later told the police that Kizer got her own wine.

What was not disputed is that Kizer has no memories of what happened after she drank from that glass.

Tone Prose readers are strongly encouraged to read the article in its entirety, but suffice to say: Kizer ended up accusing Muckey of Rape, with Wang accused as an abettor. The Colorado DA did not feel there was enough evidence to press criminal charges. The Phil attempted to fire both Muckey and Wang, but an independent investigator — who was encouraged by the Phil and New Yorks’ Local 802 musicians union to use a higher standard of evidence than was required by the NYP’s own statutes — also found that there was insufficient cause, and they were reinstated.

In the wake of this episode, Kizer was denied tenure, as was Amanda Stewart, the orchestra’s only other female brass player at the time (who sided with Kizer in her accusations.) Muckey and Wang continued to play in the orchestra right up until this past weekend when the scandal resurfaced, at which time they were put on leave.

The fallout of this story has been swift and the past 48 hours has seen a swirl of news items. Joey and I have done our best to keep up and we’ll try to keep track of everything that happens in the coming weeks.

For starters, the New York Philharmonic announced the temporary dismissal of both musicians. Per the New York Times:

Gary Ginstling, the Philharmonic’s current president and chief executive, said in an interview on Monday that the New York magazine report had “prompted a lot of strong feelings” and confirmed that Mr. Muckey and Mr. Wang were not playing with the orchestra at the moment.

Mr. Ginstling declined to say when they might rejoin the ensemble, or whether the orchestra would once again seek their termination. But he noted that the Philharmonic faced constraints because of the 2020 ruling, which the orchestra criticized at the time.

“The determination was through binding arbitration,” Mr. Ginstling said. “Binding is the key word.”

The orchestra committee, which represents players, said in a statement that it is “the overwhelming sentiment from the orchestra that we believe Cara” and that “we don’t believe these are isolated incidents involving Matt Muckey and Liang Wang.” The committee added that the orchestra has a culture of “not taking musician complaints seriously so musicians often do not feel safe in raising accusations of sexual harassment and assault” and called on management to take action to provide a safe workplace.

Sara Cutler, the president and executive director of Local 802, who took office last year, struck a different tone than her predecessors. She said in a statement on Monday that the decision to keep Mr. Wang and Mr. Muckey offstage for the time being “are good first steps but they can’t be the last.”

“As a woman, a musician and a new union president,” she said, “I am horrified by what was in the story and we are committing the full resources of Local 802 to erase the culture of complicity that has raged at the N.Y. Philharmonic for too long.”

Second, a particularly salacious angle has emerged, namely that at the time of the incident, Muckey was involved in a romantic relationship with Yuja Wang. In a way this detail is totally unimportant, but it’s anyone’s guess as to where it may lead.

Third, both Muckey and Wang have seen professional reprisals: Wang has been fired by the Taipei Music Academy & Festival, and by the ARD Competition in Munich. Muckey has been fired by the Oregon Bach Festival as principal trumpeter. 

I am a Composer

To lighten the mood a bit, I (Will) wanted to share some charming quotes from an autobiographical monograph written by the composer Arthur Honegger in 1952. I was drawn to this little tome after seeing a performance of Honegger’s third symphony this past weekend, the “Liturgique,” which included this quote in the program notes: “Composing is not a profession. It is a mania — a harmless madness.”

I think that’s bang on the money, so I dug up I am a Composer on Internet Archive. [I’ll have everyone know that I am NOT shirking my duty to read the work in its original language and I have ordered a used copy from the original print run.]

Let’s start here:

The profession of composer of music offers the peculiarity of being the activity and the preoccupation of a man who exerts himself to manufacture a product which no one is eager to consume. I might even compare it to the manufacture of top hats, button shoes, and whalebone corsets. The contemporary composer is therefore a sort of intruder who persists in stubbornly trying to impose himself at a banquet to which he has not been invited.

And now onto the process of composition itself, this masterly metaphor:

To be as frank as possible, a great share of my work eludes my conscious will. To write music is to raise a ladder without a wall to lean it against. There is no scaffolding: the building under construction is held in balance only by the miracle of a kind of internal logic, an innate sense of proportion. I am at once the architect and the spectator of my own work: I work and I judge. 

When an unforeseen obstacle arrests me, I leave my construction and sit in the seat of the listener, saying to myself: “After having heard the foregoing, what shall I hope for that will give me, if not the thrill of genius, at least the impression of success? What, logically, must happen to give me satisfaction?” And I try to find the next step, not the banal formula which would occur to everyone, but, on the contrary, an element of freshness, a rebound of interest. Step by step, following this method, my score is accomplished. 

And finally, the opening quote fleshed out into its full paragraph:

Composing is not a profession. It is a mania — a harmless madness, because it is rare to see an unknown composer give way to violent demonstrations and disturbances of the public peace, unless in a concert hall at the performance of a rival’s work. More often he is preoccupied, distraught, saddened by the proofs of incomprehension on the part of his contemporaries. If he is not ridiculous because of his arrogance and presumption, he will be as timid as a person afflicted by some abnormality which, it so happens, is not constantly on exhibition for all to see. And there you are!

Le plus ça change, le plus c’est la même chose!

Tone Praise

J.C. Bach, “Ach, dass ich Wassers gnug hätte”

Circling back to composers of the Rococo, here we have a bit of J.C. Bach, but I present this bit of Tone Praise not so much for the work itself as for the performer.

A couple years back, I did a recording project in London with a bunch of singers. These people were the absolute top rung of vocal musicians in the UK, but they all kept telling me that there was a really special bloke among them, a countertenor who was on the path to major fame.

This chap’s name is Hugh Cutting, and true to their predictions, I now see him cropping up all the time on my YouTube suggestions. He’s collaborating with all sorts of fancy people and coming out none the poorer in comparison.

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