So, two orchestras in two days, both at Lincoln Center - the Budapest Festival Orchestra under Iván Fischer, and the New York Phil under Alan Gilbert. The former program was Haydn and Stravinsky, the latter Beethoven, Sibelius and Nielsen. Why was the former so much more fun?
Perhaps it's because Fischer's a marvelous showman. The concert started with the orchestra - missing its first violins - beginning Stravinsky's "Scherzo à la Russe." Fischer materialized from somewhere, encouraging the audience to clap along. (Really? Really!) Then violinists flowed in from both sides, taking up positions on risers at either corner of the front of the stage, standing, like serenading soloists, arriving in place just in time for their part to come on. We'd stopped clapping by then, but the circle was complete, everyone in the hall was engaged. For the immediately following "Tango," two of the second violins tussled over an instrument and began to dance. Then Haydn's "Oxford" Symphony (no. 92), suddenly serious but with that characteristic twinkle in Papa Haydn's eye: Fischer milked the playful, profound pauses. After the interval, Haydn's C-major cello concerto, then the suite from "The Firebird," a journey through foreboding and enchant
ment to magic and public celebration. My heart's still racing with joy.
I bought my (ridiculously cheap) ticket for this concert because of the "Firebird," and because my father has taught me to love Haydn (and because my Japanese friend had told me that Fischer was all the rage in Japan), but by the time the concert rolled around there was an additional impetus.
Times opera critic Anthony Tommasini had completed his semi-serious compiling of a list of the
top ten classical composers, and while Stravinsky was included, Haydn had been somewhat guiltily dropped. He couldn't after all include all four of the Viennese, Tommasini explained. And besides, Haydn was included after all through his influence on Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Hmmm.
Beethoven was the only one of the New York Philharmonic concert's composers to make Tommasini's list (we heard a rather bombastic interpretation of the eighth symphony), but a different kind of promotion was going on. Alan Gilbert spent time with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra before taking up the baton
here in his hometown, and is a great advocate for Scandinavian music. In particular, we learned from the program, he thinks Carl Nielsen's symphonies deserve to be better known, indeed to be staples. He's "an even greater symphonist than Sibelius," we read in the program, "and that's really saying something!" And Sibelius, we learned, only entered the playlist a few decades ago because of one of Gilbert's predecessor
Philharmonic Music Directors, Leonard Bernstein. In the next few years, Gilbert intends to introduce all of Nielsen's symphonies to New York.
I bought my (ridiculously cheap) ticket for this concert because the Nielsen symphony on the program was the second, "The Four Temperaments." Once upon a time, I wrote a
whole article on the tradition of the temperaments, and it still has a special place in my heart. I knew Nielsen's symphony from CDs, but had never heard it performed. It's a doozy! Some interesting thematic development happens as each movement (named after a humor:
Allegro collerico, Allegro comodo e flemmatico, Andante malincolico, Allegro sanguineo—Marziale) finds and then integrates a contrary mood, just as the humors were thought to do. In fact, the theory of the temperaments has affinities with the four-movement symphony, with its contrasting but calibrated movements, and distinct but interrelated themes.
Should Nielsen displace one of Tommasini's other two post-romantic composers (Claude Debussy and Béla Bartók) in the list? Probably not. But the world wouldn't end if we replaced the occasional Beethoven symphony with one of his. Or with one by Beethoven's teacher, Haydn.
So what to do? We found old Spirographs on eBay. I signed up, learned the best sets are just a year younger than me, and - once the Christmas rush was over - scored two nearly complete sets, which makes a near perfect set for my nephew - and there's most of a set left for me, too.
A bunch of friends came over last night to help me celebrate my birthday with a dinner. Casting about for a menu I decided to try for a culinary tie-in to all the places I've lived - 9 countries, and 4 US states! I managed all except one of the states, albeit one where I spent 9 years.
Good company (sorry about the picture), much wine and a Skype visit by my parents helped make for a memorable evening. Thanks, everyone!
ment to magic and public celebration. My heart's still racing with joy.
Philharmonic Music Directors, Leonard Bernstein. In the next few years, Gilbert intends to introduce all of Nielsen's symphonies to New York.
A Snow Day meant no class meetings today. Instead, I puzzled out how to convey (that is, after first somehow understanding) the complicated kinship rules of the Yolngu people who are our first object of study. 
These diagrams from Howard Morphy's 1984 Journey to the Crocodile’s Nest: An accompanying monograph to the film “Madarrpa Funeral at Gurka’wuy” help show the weave of patriliny and matriliny - a little!
My friends who've been in New York the last month are weary of snow, but I'm delighted we're getting more of it. We had a dusting last night, and another this afternoon, an amuses gueule for what was to come. 
I thought the storm might have missed us when I headed into Avery Fischer Hall at 7:30 (details tomorrow - tonight was the first night of an orchestral double header), but when the concert was over: blizzard! 
And Prospect Heights 45 minutes later, oh my! Big flakes hurrying skitteringly by (wiggly lines record twirling, surely), our front gate had become a padded quilt, the kitchen window an impressionist igloo wall.
Both of my classes started today, bright and early: they're back-to-back 8-9:40 (Exploring Religious Ethics) and 10-11:40 (Aboriginal Australia and the Idea of Religion). The former started with the first of Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Dekalog" films, a haunting story with an uncondescending sense of the comforts of religion in the face of the tragic limits of human knowledge. The latter worked from an empty map of Australia I drew on the chalkboard - all desert! - with all its big coastal cities facing gamely outward, to this lovely map of a fully hospitable continent.
my friend's mother's place to a sort of museum district, the quietly impressive complex of the Menil Collection.
the experience of that space within a space (actually outside of space, since the vault's ceiling is invisible in the dark, all light either radiating from luminous glass or natural light washing down the far concrete walls). The suggestion that it's a kind of reliquary box doesn't quite describe it; it feels as much like a kind of extraterrestrial mausoleum of a vanished earthly civilization. I explored it from every angle like a reverent moth, unable to keep pace with waves of feeling: wonder, sadness, desolation, joy, calm... as it seemed old and new, intimate and grand, abstract and concrete, dead and alive. The frescoes themselves are only a small part of it, necessary but not sufficient.
Getting here I've learned that, while you can't bring even a water bottle or a tube of toothpaste into an airplane terminal these days, you can take someone else's child to another state without anyone batting an eyelid. I'd been fretting. Surely someone would want to know why I was traveling with a little Ethiopian girl (and with a different surname)! Someone should want to know! Another of my best friends has worked for several years in Family Court in New York, and I've heard of many cases where a child was taken out of state - and beyond the reach of the State Courts - by an irate parent who had been denied custody or visitation rights. (Many of the "missing children" on milk cartons are in fact kidnapped by family.) Nothing can stop a car driving out of state, but I would have thought that at an airport (not least because of the vast apparatus of airport security) there would be some checks.
Paddy Sims, is the subject of an interesting film I should be able to get my hands on. The art dealer/filmmaker David Betz had been fascinated but perplexed by Sims' description of his painting as depicting the "lifting up of the Milky Way," until he happened on an old photograph of a ritual in which a log wrapped in black materials was ceremonially lifted up by a group of men reenacting the work of the ancestors. (In desert Australia the Milky Way is perceived not as a stream of white but as the black shapes within a sky awash with stars.) Aha!
Everyone hates "wintry mix" - a stew of freezing rain, snow and sleet. It certainly make for unpleasant walking - slush in all its slushy forms. But when you look up you sometimes see some lovely ice sculptures.
I'm working on the syllabus for my new course, "Aboriginal Australia and the Idea of Religion," which I'll be teaching along with "Exploring Religious Ethics" in the semester which begins next week. It's a course I proposed soon after returning from Australia in 2007, but it hasn't had to move from idea to practice before now. What was I thinking? Actually, I know what I was thinking: representations of Aboriginal culture play a decisive role in Durkheim's Elementary Forms, Freud's Totem and Taboo and Eliade's Sacred and Profane. Tracing their views to their sources, and comparing these in turn with more up to date studies, could shed light on the theory of religion, its history and the problems in its practice. We might learn something about Aboriginal traditions, too!
worth exploring in their own right. But how teach that, especially as a novice in the field, and thousands of miles from the territories of the Dreaming? Quite a challenge not to pull an Eliade myself.
were accused of colluding with the women. Had not earlier scholarship shown that Ngarrindjeri culture lacked the codes of secrecy characteristic of many other Aboriginal peoples. And besides, women don't have sacred knowledge, do they?
Seems like I haven't been away that long - the streets are full of Christmas trees! I thought at first that they had been buried in the snowdrifts, and only just reappeared like Ötsi as the snow started to melt. The truth is a bit more prosaic: there wasn't room on the sidewalks to throw them out, or on the streets for the mulching trucks. But this is pleasing in its own way: the Christmas trees got to stay longer in people's apartments...
Some highlights of the Stuart Collection of site-specific sculptures at UCSD. Robert Irwin's "Two Running Violet V Forms" (1983), whose translucent blue dances with the colorless color of the eucalyptus.
(I didn't notice the blue UCSD bus when taking this picture!)
Nam June Paik, "Something Pacific" (1986):
John Baldessari's entrance to Geisel Library, "Read/Write/Think/Dream" (2001): as students go in and out of a vestibule (with giant images of students, pencils, palm trees and surf), glass doors in primary colors slide back and forth (a little like the tide) to make more colors.
Alexis Smith, "Snake Path" (1992) leads up to Geisel Library;
Bruce Nauman, "Vices and Virtues" (1988) wrap around this building. FAITH/LUST starts a series (alternating lights at night) which continues with HOPE/ENVY, CHARITY/SLOTH, PRUDENCE/PRIDE, JUSTICE/AVARICE, TEMPERANCE/GLUTTONY, and FORTITUDE/ANGER.
the latest installation of Do Ho Suh's "Fallen Star."
