I’m off an a quick jaunt up north. Check out Instagram Stories if you’re interested.
Some notes:
Finished a short piece on Mrs. Davis for a publication. After it’s out, I’ll do a deep dive into the series in this space. I spent enough time watching it and thinking about it, I might as bring something else out of it!
Here’s an excellent article from the New Yorker about the Louisville Orchestra. The occasion for the piece was a recent concert of the orchestra with cellist Yo-Yo Ma in…Mammoth Cave.
The beginning was intensely dramatic. Audience members, numbering five hundred, walked down the sixty-eight steps of the cave’s Historic Entrance. Inside, voices floated out of the murk: members of the Louisville Chamber Choir and of the orchestra were singing a wordless, rising-and-falling chant that started out as a unison and then grew in polyphonic complexity. After walking a quarter mile or so, spectators took up positions on the sides of Rafinesque Hall, one of Mammoth’s largest internal chambers. The orchestra was to one side; Tines and the choristers paced about; Ma sat at the center. The acoustics were, needless to say, reverberant, yet individual lines remained distinct. Despite the damp, cool surroundings, the sound had an unexpected warmth.
Interesting! But the piece goes into the origins of the ensemble, which once again reveal that people are complex:
To understand why Louisville, Kentucky, has a lofty status in the world of contemporary classical composition—a status reaffirmed the other day, when Yo-Yo Ma and the Louisville Orchestra presented a première inside Mammoth Cave, Kentucky’s chief natural wonder—you have to go back to 1948, when a singular character named Charles Farnsley became the city’s mayor. Deceptively folksy in manner, Farnsley professed nostalgia for the Confederacy and sported a Southern gentleman’s string tie. At the same time, he gravitated toward the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, dismantling aspects of segregation and promoting adult education. Most unusually, he adored modern classical music—the more dissonant the better. A writer for High Fidelity visited him in 1953 and found him demonstrating Ampex tape recorders at the public library. “Play me some Stravinsky and Villa-Lobos and some Edgard Varèse, boys,” he hollered.
In 1948, the Louisville Orchestra, which had been founded eleven years earlier, was in financial crisis. Farnsley, who had audited classes with the émigré Jewish-German musicologist Gerhard Herz, at the University of Louisville, offered a radical suggestion: Why not use some of the money that had been slated for celebrity soloists to instead commission new works? Supporting composers, Farnsley said, would be “a much greater, more lasting service to music.” More practically, he believed that such a policy would attract national press and boost the city’s profile. He even spoke of establishing a record label, which, he thought, would drum up revenue. Robert Whitney, the orchestra’s gifted and furiously hardworking young music director, endorsed the plan, although he wondered whether the audience would be able to keep up with Farnsley’s enthusiasms. The mayor, one associate reported, “doesn’t like any music that was written before 1920.”
Thus began the Louisville revolution, which riveted the classical world in the nineteen-fifties. After a decade, the orchestra had commissioned a hundred and thirty-two scores and recorded about a hundred. No American ensemble had ever done anything comparable, and none has done so since.
Have you heard about the guy who goes out and pays day laborers and food stand owners to spend the day at Disneyland? It’s so fantastic. There’s a TikTok account, but I don’t have that contraption on my contraption, so here’s the Instagram account.
Charlotte was Both 