Classical Music Hour with Fran

I’ll be honest with you and say that it’s now been almost four years since I played with a symphony orchestra of any kind. For almost all of college, I played with the community philharmonic — I went to a small liberal arts school that didn’t have enough students to justify its own orchestra — until my very last quarter of school, in which I had a rare conflicting class and didn’t get to play the final concert of my senior year. This was annoying at the time, given the seniors in the philharmonic were usually acknowledged at the final spring concert with, like, I don’t know, a rose or something and a special round of applause. I wanted that! I had toiled through a lot, especially — especially — what became final the winter concert of my senior year in which we played… Pétrouchka.

This ballet by Igor Stravinsky was one of the single most difficult pieces I ever played. I was not a music major and I never took any private lessons in college. The percussion in Pétrouchka was not only prominent but hard. This wasn’t some typical timpani here or timpani there; this was snare drum and xylophone (!!! is this whole column a vanity project to write about pieces that have good xylophone parts? WHO’S TO SAY) and triangle. The whole shebang, and it nearly killed me. For three months, I ate, drank, and slept Pétrouchka. That’s not a joke for the most part: any time I walked around campus, I listened to it. I drove to it. I played it while I did work. I had to ground it into the very fiber of my being in order to learn it, then promptly forgot it within the weeks following the concert. Then, several years later, with a cold breeze from — I don’t know where breezes come from, the north? — I started listening to it again.

Stravinsky has made a brief cameo in this column before, in reference to Saint-Saëns walking out of The Rite Of Spring, one of Stravinsky’s most famous pieces. Stravinsky was a Russian composer, working predominantly in the first half of the 20th century. Besides The Rite Of Spring, it’s possible you know Firebird, his other most famous ballet. I wish I had good gossip for you about Stravinsky, really, but he’s a composer whose work is so deeply complex to me that I can barely emerge from the pieces themselves to dig up if he was weird or bad in some way. I did find out he got typhoid from a bad oyster once. Be careful out there, folks!!

So anyway, Pétrouchka is a ballet. It’s named for its title character, Pétrouchka, who you’re maybe like, “who the — ” but you’re likely familiar with. Pétrouchka is the Russian equivalent of Punch, as in Punch and Judy, as in the bad puppet couple. Wikipedia describes Pétrouchka’s main activities as: “He enforces moral justice with a slap stick, speaks in a high-pitched, squeaky voice, and argues with the devil.” Hm, same. The plot of Pétrouchka is, uhh, fine. It’s fine. It’s a love triangle between three puppets who have been brought to life at a street festival: Pétrouchka, a ballerina, and a Moor. That’s really it. I would love to tell you it’s more engaging than that, but hey, these Russians sure do love when puppets come to life.

You’ll start listening to to Pétrouchka (I recommend the 1962 New York Philharmonic version conducted by, you guessed it, Bernstein), and you’ll notice that it even sounds difficult. The Nutcracker ballet, for example, although written by an entirely different composer in an entirely different century, is a much more rhythmic ballet. It’s easy to find an anchor in it, a constant pulsing for dancers to grasp onto. Pétrouchka is more hectic and chaotic. Its opening minute of its first tableau, entitled “The Shrove-tide Fair” (which is the name of the Russian festival Pétrouchka mainly takes place during), is a flurry of strings and fanfare. As I previously mentioned, it’s got a whole array of percussion, but it’s also got quite a lot of other interesting instruments. Piano, for example, plays a prominent role. So does the harp! How do you even play harp? The harp is impossible. I think half the reason I struggled to learn my Pétrouchka parts in college was because I spent most of rehearsal watching the harpist.

Where Pétrouchka really gets going, by which I mostly mean, where I start to have PTSD-style flashbacks of playing xylophone, is the third part of the first tableau, entitled “Russian Dance.” Here’s the opening of the xylophone part, where you can see a triumphant glissando.

What’s a glissando, you might be asking? It’s when the xylophonist basically hits a note and then drags the mallet up the keyboard. It rules, obviously, because I think at their most tender and pure selves, percussionists often just like to hit notes.

But then the piece really picks up. There’s a piano solo. It’s moving, it’s dance-y, let’s not forget, puppets — of all things! — are coming to life. And the xylophone got… impossible… You can hear it creeping through the final thirty seconds of the “Russian Dance” — audible for, say, the whole orchestra to hear, especially if you, a 21-year-old part-time percussionist fuck it up.

You’d think from this description alone that this whole ballet is one long and frustrating xylophone part. It really isn’t — I’m profoundly exaggerating, mainly because there’s just so much going on in Petrouchka. Take later on, “The Dance Of The Ballerina,” which is a duet between a snare drum and a trumpet. It’s odd and wonderful to have a brass instrument signify the part of the ballerina, a character typically represented by a flute or a clarinet. I love it. It’s oddly militaristic and powerful for a fanfare for the central female character. What I would give to have this little minute-long melody play anytime I come to work in the morning.

This leads right into a odd and gorgeous little waltz starting with a bassoon solo. A bassoon solo! It’s whimsical and almost wistful, nearly immediately covered up by both the flute and the clarinet. What I’m trying to say is mainly: Petrouchka is weird. It doesn’t follow any conventional structures, and unlike symphonies and concertos, it’s tougher to navigate. Looking back on this piece and listening to it after a couple of years, I mainly just find myself marveling at it. It’s strange! For someone who used to have the whole thing memorized, I found myself surprised by it again and again. It’s colorful and absurd and really gorgeous in parts (especially for how generally uninteresting its story is). It’s possible you’ll listen to it and think things like, “Wait, the clarinet’s coming in here?” or, “How come there’s trombone happening here?” or, “Wow, this is a truly demanding xylophone part, and kudos to any college student who played it.” It’ll challenge you, but trust me, you’ll get through it.

Fran Hoepfner is a writer from Chicago. You can find a corresponding playlist for all of the pieces discussed in this column here.

How much better would things be without Trump?

Have you found that, no matter what the subject, the emails you receive from people you haven’t spoken to in some time invariably end up at, “So, this is really going to happen, huh? We’re really doing this?” It seems to be the case for so many of us these days. And it’s even worse when you get to the part of the conversation where you both discuss just how many unlikely things would have to happen to take us through the chain of succession until we finally got Kiefer Sutherland as president. There is, unfortunately, no hope. As was explained earlier, things will be bad. As bad as you expect things to get, that is what you are about to at minimum receive. Terrible things will happen and for at least two years — and almost certainly longer — you will have to sit there and watch them happen. But still, maybe the Republicans will impeach Trump?

Republicans Have No Good Reason Not To Impeach Donald Trump

Sure, there would be some small satisfaction in it and our intense and not entirely unwarranted dread of incineration would be greatly reduced, but guess what:

Republicans would still have two solid years of complete control of the government, only now with a properly conservative and pliant president, in Mike Pence, who will obviously sign anything Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell place on his desk. Even if a conservative grassroots backlash leads to Republican members of Congress losing their seats in 2018, most of them will be replaced with equally conservative Republicans, who will then have another two years to continue to implement the full conservative agenda…. The welfare state will be in ruins, the tax code more regressive than at any point since the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment, major industries will be freed from burdensome regulations of their environmentally and socially destructive practices, we’ll probably be at war with Iran, the Supreme Court and the judiciary as a whole will be packed with stalwart young conservatives working tirelessly to eliminate abortion access and make it illegal to sue businesses for poisoning children, America will be a “right to work” nation, and it will be a felony to be rude to a cop.

You’re not going to feel any better if you read this piece, but it is hard to imagine you can feel much worse, so you might as well go ahead and click through.

The Adventures of Liana Finck

Liana Finck is a New Yorker cartoonist. She is also on Instagram.

Wifebeaters

A shirtless rack makes a cozy hang for beatings
if a girl’s hard-pressed or steamed. Words get worn
this way: at festivals, we tuck our violence in
our bras with cash for cigarettes and pretzels.
Neon sparks in spacious skulls — girlness is a gas
to tap, so we trap its heat against our breasts,

which vent little whines when the Zipper cage flips us.
Whipped fright froths our kid lips and we run
our mouths at the carnie hand-humping his lever
below. He holds us catawampus to better glimpse
our tits while shouts burst bright on blacktop sky.
For future wives, there is only coming down

from here, so we best burn serotonin slow
and tamp fissures with new clothes. Fashion
schools us: a slut can wear her insides out,
but sleevelessness is also cloak. Wal-Mart magic:
black-strapped tongues ventriloquize sex
into ribbed white cotton — a boy sees his skivvies

laid on his mother’s lap. A hurling urge
is natural, as far as we know, so we tempt a hit
to temper it — sheer force of half-flash. No soap
will wash the bull’s-eyes off our asses, so why not
don the darts, pre-marked as prizeless. Fair games
are always rigged — even girls know that.

Rochelle Hurt is the author of In Which I Play the Runaway (Barrow Street, 2016), winner of the Barrow Street Book Prize, and The Rusted City (White Pine, 2014). She is a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati.

The Poetry Section is edited by Mark Bibbins.

Slowdive “Star Roving”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been reverting back to my high school musical tastes in the current cultural environment. The last time a cis, white, male straw man was blasting through the human rights policy and financial practices that will dictate my quality of life for decades after he dies like some sort of Baby Taz, I was a teen with a first generation iPod and unlimited suburban roads to drive down while playing it. And there’s a specific comfort I’m finding in the familiarity of playing the music I listened to during my peak adolescent angst era now that I am no longer a teen—because I’m definitely angsty again. Take the other night, for example. Apropos of nothing (other than my mood), I pulled up Bright Eyes’ “You Are the Roots That Sleep Beneath My Feet and Hold the Earth in Place” on Spotify and listened approvingly. “This still bangs,” I thought (and meant, and tweeted).

That… would not have been true twelve months ago.

Or this morning, when British shoegaze band Slowdive spontaneously released their first song in 22 years. It does the exact same job:

It’s the sonic equivalent of cramming five people onto someone’s mom’s after school basement couch and smiling at a boy you’re not sure you like yet—optimistic and uncomfortable and instantaneously nostalgic even though you’re not old enough to know what you’re nostalgic for yet.

There are certain points in my life where I’ve been able to say “here is a moment” before I really understand what the moment is. “I don’t know where I am, but it’s new and it’s important.” Right now feels like one of those in a lot of ways, and this song sounds a lot like that feeling. Damn.

It should be Friday but it’s not.

Have you had your first, “At least it’s Friday… oh, no, it’s not Friday at all!” yet of the new year? I did this morning and it was exactly as dispiriting as you would expect. But it is understandable, because this week has seemed so very long already, and we’re still not even at the point in this new America where things are Historical-Fact terrible yet. (Related: How much would you give to go back to the time where we were all, “Please, just end this election already” and park yourself in that insanity indefinitely?) Can you imagine how long every week is going to be come February? You will be “At least it’s Friday”ing on Tuesday, until you finally get used to it or we all die. Anyway, I am sorry to say that we are only at Thursday, and I hope you can focus on anything else but everything that’s happening for as long as you need to pretend that things are okay.

Here you will find a tribute to the late David Bowie from the Disintegration Loops guy. It is twenty minutes long and you will get it immediately, so maybe that will help. Enjoy.

★★ Snow and salt were still thick on the schoolyard. The trampling had done remarkably little to the old accumulation around the sidewalks. The cold had softened, and there was no particular reason not to wear the sneakers, but the chill did seep up through the soles. Thick broken chunks of ice, solid and translucent, lay roped off where they’d plunged from the Apple Store. The sun was a white disc smashed in a little at one side. The gains on the thermometer were being offset by the gathering damp. By nightfall, the pavement was wet.

Make the bad things go away.

Do you need a palate cleanser for everything you forced yourself to choke down on this terrible day? Soon enough you will get used to the taste, but for now it burns on your lips and sticks in your throat and the second you seem to forget the flavor you can feel it on your tongue again as if you were consuming it at that very moment. I may be overworking the metaphor here but let’s face it, you ate a lot of shit today. Perhaps this will distract you, however briefly. It’s from yMusic’s forthcoming First, and if nothing else it is nothing else. Enjoy.

In these troubled times maybe we can all agree on one thing.

I know it seems like a little problem, an item of no significance, particularly in the current climate when danger lurks at every corner and the destruction of the things we as a people hold dear seems, for the first time in so many years, a shockingly real possibility, so I make this appeal with all due humility and the full awareness that there are considerably more important issues to worry about but, please, would it be too much to ask for all of us to agree that in 2017 we will do everything in our power to prevent the phrase “And yet, and yet” from appearing in any written form, print, digital or otherwise? I really believe it would make a difference for the better in all our lives. Thank you.

Who’s the most bad?

President-elect Donald Trump held his first press conference in months Wednesday, and took some time to address chatter surrounding a dossier of gossip published by Buzzfeed this week. Most of the unverified allegations surrounded issues like Trump’s ties to Russia, but one salacious tidbit suggested the future leader of the free world hired sex workers to perform pee acts for him. Guess which topic the Internet has had the most fun discussing?

These Reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties To Russia

So because he is who he is, Trump took time out of his press conference to let us all know that Buzzfeed is a bad website. Specifically, a “failing pile of garbage.” Damn.

Trump: BuzzFeed is a ‘failing pile of garbage’

Within hours, Buzzfeed had updated their site’s merch section to include “failing pile of garbage”-branded goods like bumper stickers and teeshirts. One item is a $49 trash can:

I called in senior Awl political correspondent Kelly Conaboy to discuss the decision to merchandise this moment with me. Is it a good burn? An okay burn? Here are the minutes from our meeting:

Kelly: seems crazy that they aren’t donating the money from this stuff

Christine: right like $49 for a trashcan and youre gonna……keep it?

what a fun joke!

Kelly: support uh independent journalism

There you have it. Just like Meryl Streep told us at the Golden Globes.

UPDATE: About an hour after this post went up, Buzzfeed added the following statement to their “Failing Pile of Garbage” merch: