Name That Tune
This week’s Name That Tune was submitted by Gabfest Maestro Will. I think this one is pretty easy, so I’m not providing any hints. However, I will say that this one movement of a larger work. A different movement of this set went on to great fame. If you can name the famous segment, I’ll give you extra credit. (OK, I guess that all amounted to a hint.)
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 know the piece immediately, send us an email at classicalgabfest@gmail.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing.
Last Week’s Results
CGF Newsletter 7
Ruth Crawford Seeger, Suite No. 1 for Five Winds & Piano, mvmt. 4
Congratulations to Listener Caspian who was confident enough to email in with the correct guess, and to Listener Eric who reasoned it out in the comments, and also to me for doing the same. Great clue there, Joey!
Listener Laurie weighed in with Ives, Ligeti, and (presumably) Alan Lomax.
Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.
TÁR: The Basics
TÁR is the new film from writer-director Todd Field, only his third feature in a ~17-year-long career (you might remember dramatic indie darlings In the Bedroom and Little Children.) In it, Cate Blanchett plays Lydia Tár, a star orchestral conductor whose career has taken her from Cleveland to New York to Berlin, where she now resides with her wife and their daughter. Tár has recently written a memoir, and the film starts with her being interviewed on stage at the New Yorker Festival by Adam Gopnik (playing himself.)
(That trailer starts with the instantly iconic, mystifying, and roundly mocked line “If you want to dance the mask, you must service the composer!” What does it meeeean??)
The movie is both long (2’37”) and stuffed: it’s got a MeToo plot, a cancel culture plot, moments when it veers to camp and horror/suspense, a character based on Gilbert Kaplan, a character who is basically the old bathtub woman from The Shining, a real estate deal subterfuged by an accordion performance, a threat made in German to a seven-year-old girl, Alec Baldwin, a scene in which Tár recreates the exact wardrobe and pose of a Claudio Abbaddo record cover, and a wolf in a basement.
In addition to all that, what makes it hard for someone like me to watch this movie is that it’s constantly distracting classical music insiders with dialogue and scenarios that are clearly researched, but are just off enough that you’re constantly having to engage the movie at the level of “you wouldn’t say that” or “that wouldn’t happen that way” or “what the literal f*ck was that?”
For example
Lydia Tár’s career: Her backstory is that prior to becoming a world-famous conductor at the helm of “Berlin” (it’s left purposefully vague which orchestra this actually is, but I think we’re supposed to assume the Berlin Philharmonic) she was a Princeton-trained ethnomusicologist who embedded with a Peruvian tribe for five years. There are many paths to the podium, but this ain’t one of them!
Lingo: During the opening interview scene, Adam Gopnik is setting up the musical focus of the movie: Lydia Tár has recorded all the Mahler symphonies separately, but never a full cycle with one orchestra. She’s almost completed this with “Berlin,” but she’s left “the big one” for last, namely, number 5.
A few things wrong here: one, there is no sense in which the fifth is “the big one” among Mahler’s symphonic output. The second, third, and eighth are all longer works and involve much more extensive forces (the eighth is called “The Symphony of a Thousand” for a reason!)
But what was even more cringey was the lingo — they kept referring to it as “the five.” That’s not a thing. It’s either “Mahler 5” or “the fifth”. “The five” is the name of a freeway that destroys the quality of life in several west coast cities.
Architecture: there is a scene that takes place in an assistant conductor’s office, which must be at least 200 square feet. I can tell you from personal experience that this was the most unrealistic part of the film. (Although at least it was windowless!)
The Critics
Many people have asked what I thought about this movie, and my response is that I can not judge it in any sort of good-bad paradigm. I still can’t really process the fact that this film was conceived of, written, financed, produced, and distributed. It seems to me too strange to exist.
Well, one thing I can say is (and this is a very unpopular opinion): I think Cate Blanchett’s acting is bad. She sounds like she’s reciting lines in a radio drama or a stage play. Adam Gopnik gave a far more nuanced, natural performance. Let me just put it this way: half of the people I saw it with were convinced that the film was a parody.
However, not everyone sees it this way! Friend of the Pod Zach Woolfe in the New York Times:
...for all its noirish, even horror-movie trappings, “Tár” is a largely realistic depiction of its subject matter. (Far more so than “Black Swan” in relation to ballet, or “Whiplash” to jazz.) Blanchett gestures on the podium like a real conductor...
[The “like” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.]
Anthony Lane in The New Yorker:
The part of Lydia is scored for hero, villain, mother, dictator, and fuckup, and Blanchett responds with perfect pitch. Her eyes are like spies, missing nothing, and her smile is a charmer’s knife. As the conductor is to the Berlin Philharmonic, so the actress is to the audience in the cinema; neither makes the grave mistake of wishing merely to be liked.
[Richard Brody did not like the movie, but of course he didn’t. Slight digression, but it’s such an odd thing that The New Yorker has a normal movie critic, and then they have this guy who is only published online (and in blurbs in Talk of the Town) whose job it is to basically disagree with everything the normal movie critic says.]
And though I wasn’t able to get the band back together to record a Classical Gabfest pod, you can hear the film discussed on the Slate Culture Gabfest, the podcast upon which the Classical Gabfest is overtly and lovingly modeled. The three hosts quite liked it and took it very seriously!
In Conclusion
OK, that’s enough here about TÁR, but I have actually written about it more extensively on willcwhite.com if you can believe it. I actually would recommend that Classical Gabfest listeners / readers go out and see it (or watch it streaming when it’s available.) It really does sit at the nexus of so much of what we discuss on the show and now in the newsletter, and again, it’s just kind of bizarre that such a film was ever made.
And if you have seen it PLEASE chime in on what you thought, whether you’ve processed that into a thumb up or down, or if like me, you’re still wading through the weirdness of it all.
Classical Mixtape
Marin Marais, La sonnerie de Sainte-Geneviève du Mont-de-Paris
This has precisely zero to do with TÁR, but this piece happened to come up in conversation with a friend the other day. He knew it because he plays early music, so it was a pleasure to introduce him to this wildly anachronistic and highly inventive orchestration. This is how I first heard it; they would play it sporadically on WGMS in D.C. when I was a kid, and it was always very exciting when they did. I even emailed the radio station (this would have been like 1996) and asked how I could get a copy, but they wouldn’t tell me! Little did they know that 25 years later, it would be as easy as typing it into YouTube.
I agree it’s bizarre that this film even exists. From the first scene to that mind-blowingly nuts final twist of the knife it was, moment for moment, the strangest thing I’ve seen since probably Lost Highway (well, at least since Magnolia). And this is coming from someone for whom Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie is a top-ten film.
Leaving aside the odd stew of classical music industry memes for a moment, as a visual narrative there were a number of things I enjoyed. For one, how the film thrusts you into new scenes, settings and situations with zero prelude or context. It forces the viewer to roll up their sleeves and connect disparate narrative threads themselves, threads that another director would neatly tie off for the viewer. In that sense it has high expectations for its audiences’ intellect, and it rewards the attentive (and the repeat) viewer. How often can you say that about a film these days? I also enjoyed some of the small character development details, such as those silent sequences of Lydia running by herself on the streets of Berlin. And those momentary auditory hallucinations that just came and went unexplained added an intriguing element of psychological suspense.
With respect to verisimilitude, like you, a lot of it initially struck me as parodic (the dialogue in the restaurant scene with the Gil Kaplan stand-in, and her subsequent on-stage assault of him, comes to mind). But on reflection it came to feel more like the narrative analogue of what in the visual arts is called hyperrealism. That is, not a faithful accounting of reality but an amplification of certain aspects of reality in order to expose a deeper truth—in this case, a certain vein of sociopathic opportunism that, at least to those of us on the outside looking in, certainly appears to exist at the highest levels of the classical music industry.
None of this really contradicts what you write. I do have a few nagging questions about your review, though. For one, is it really so impossible to go from ivy league ethnomusicologist to conductor? Google turns up one or two people who seem to have done just that (I had never heard of them, however). Also, even more picayune, regarding the size of Lydia’s office: is the music director’s office in the Berliner Philharmonie really as dark and cramped as you suggest? Small details, of course, but I am genuinely curious if Kirill Petrenko et. al. really work out of broom closets.
We have a (late?) Romantic (presumably European?) orchestral work! Years of community orchestra, don't fail me now! The structure and mood feel programmatic-- a ballet suite or other dramatic orchestral work? As part of a set with a more famous movement-- I can only think of three works this describes (which also fit the general time period and style of the excerpt). The first I can rule out- I know this isn't Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, I've played too many Halloween concerts to be unfamiliar. The second is the larger work from which is drawn Finlandia by Sibelius, and the third is one of the several Dances of the Hours by Ponchielli-- or perhaps that is infamy rather than fame. I will also add Grieg to my basket to round out three.