Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born in (today’s) Czech Republic in 1856. He died in London in 1939, an escapee from Nazi occupation of Austria, from cancer of the jaw due to heavy smoking. Sometimes a cigar isn’t just a cigar.

“Father of psychotherapy” indeed he was. The theory that persistent illnesses might have a mental/emotional origin was radical. “Repressed contents” might fester and lead to physical symptoms, as Freud saw in case after case of (usually women at first) hysteria (another gender-charged word), panic attacks, agoraphobia, depression, were cured by talking and bringing to light certain major emotional traumas that had been buried or blocked.

The core idea really does hold, even today, despite images of the neurotic upper-east-sider, such as Woody Allen, going three times a week for decades and making no progress.

I personally think a balance needs to be struck between releasing of “blocked” material from the mind, and what may become a “rehearsal of trauma” that can grind these moments even deeper into the psyche.

Freud is also famous for identifying certain classic developmental stages that start in infancy (perhaps even in the womb), such as the “Oedipal” complex, anal/oral fixations, innate drives that are sexual and destructive in nature. Id, ego, super-ego: all these commonplace words are due to his work.

Did you know that Freud advocated for the use of cocaine as both stimulant and pain reliever?

And of course, his seminal work on dream interpretation that, for me, really finds its best exponent in the different work of Carl Jung.

Over the many years, some have seen fit to discredit some or all of Freud as too unscientific (by modern standards), too fixated on sex, etc. But there is no denying the enormous influence of this one man.

“The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.”

© 2014 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

 

Arnold Schoenberg was but one of the many classical composers brought to Hollywood to gussy up the movies with their music. Some were successful, witness Korngold, the child prodigy whose music always sounded like “movie” music anyway, and Copland, whose music to The Heiress is classic.

However, when one hears the name Schoenberg, one usually doesn’t think of soundtracks, even though in the scores of Bernard Hermann for instance (think Psycho), you encounter a great deal of dissonance that doesn’t seem to bother anyone today.

At any rate, when Irving Thalberg, head producer at MGM, was casting about for a score for Romeo and Juliet, he asked Arnold to write something “lovelier” for his 1936 movie, Schoenberg calmly replied: “Mr. Thalberg, I don’t write lovely music.” The score wound up being by one Herbert Stothart.

Thalberg died that year, at age 37, presumably not as a result of the interchange with Schoenberg.

© 2014 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

 

There’s a very candid, funny memoir from 1973 called “First Your Money, Then Your Clothes—My Life and Oh! Calcutta!” written by one Raina Barrett (stage name), a divorced high school teacher from Westchester who had the nerve to join the cast of the then-scandalous Broadway musical “Oh! Calcutta!”

Born Pauline Kelly (from Detroit), then married to Mr. Clark, a high school football coach, she chafed against the limitations of the suburban ethos as it was (and still is) widely understood. And she chafed in just about the most visible way possible, by joining, at age 33, those other naked thespians in what has become a symbol of the hippy-dippy 1970s. (The show opened in 1969). She did the 1972 movie version also.

Bail money was at the ready when the show opened, in case of vice raids. Apparently, the noise of helicopters and trucks was deafening outside the theater. Audiences were absolutely convinced that real sex would be and was being shown on stage, though Raina laughs that off: all simulated. One scene was so provocative that it was cut, however, after its participants allowed that they were “really” doing it. The entire cast was screwed, no pun intended, by the producers.

Merv Griffin wanted her for his talk show, to undress but only be shown from the neck up, so he could capture the audience response. She declined. Then Johnny Carson called. She said “I won’t undress, but I have a great story about Merv Griffin.”

She gave it all up for a career in acting, after community theater became unsatisfying. Then, she was told that she wasn’t a “real” actress because she removed her clothing. Catch-22.

She had left her husband for the sultry seductions of one “Ricardo,” who lived in Greenwich Village, and gave her her stage name. He was a satyr with a permanent erection and sex drive, if Barrett is to be believed, but she gladly went along for the, um, ride. Multiple partners, orgies, and all this is now regarded as “history.” I feel old. Life/art/imitation/metaphor.

She said of promiscuity “The way I see it, sexual freedom is good for one thing only. It guarantees you a good choice. But you still have to choose. I’ve tried promiscuity and it doesn’t work.”

Many of us were promiscuous without the platform of a Broadway musical. I agree with Raina.

© 2014 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

 

Jean Barraqué (1928-1973) is one of France’s most neglected composers, partly due to the limited number of works he left behind. After studying with Messiaen and Langlais, he created a seething romantic Piano Sonata in 1952, using his own brand of “serial” technique. He then destroyed probably about 30 previously completed compositions because they no longer represented his “new” understanding of how to compose.

Now, I am not a rubber-stamp fan of Serialism, which involves the systematic alteration of every “level” in the music, not only notes and motives (Beethoven and many others did that), but also dynamics, rhythms, touches, tempi. In fact, some of the hardest-core Serialists would tell you that they were just exploiting what had been latent all along in the transformation of musical material. They were “merely” extending it to these other domains.

Unfortunately for audiences, the complexity of these maneuvers seemed appreciable only if you were a member of the “in” circle of professionals. Barraqué managed to overcome this alienation through the intensity of his emotion, which he channeled into the technique. Instead of using just one tone row, he invented a concept called the “developing series” in which the row would morph slightly and become a new row, then perhaps again, during a composition, like genetic mutation.

He has very few works available for listening, some vocal chamber music, a concerto for vibraphone and clarinet, one electronic work, and an epic cycle called “La Mort de Virgile,” most of which was never realized.

He was in a car crash in 1964, and his apartment burned to the ground, along with many compositions, in 1968. Then he died at the too-young age of 45 in 1973. British music critic Paul Griffiths wrote a great biography of him entitled “The Sea on Fire” (2003).

© 2014 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

 

The French woodwind tradition is legendary, but can you imagine what it was like to be the person who played the most famous flute solo in the world for the very first time?

I’m referring to the opening notes of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, which was premiered in Paris on 22 December 1894. The flutist was eighteen-year-old Georges Barrère (1876-1944). He was born in Bordeaux and he died in New York after decades of service with the New York Symphony, under Walter Damrosch (that orchestra merged with the NY Philharmonic). Griffes dedicated his Poème (1918), and Edgard Varèse his Density 21.5 (1936) to him.

The Prélude was composed not to illustrate literally but to reveal interior states of emotion that might be activated by reading the famous poem of Mallarmé. Like most poets, he didn’t really “get” why it would even need music, but when he heard it he said he was “deeply enchanted.”

In the poem, a faun of Grecian antiquity is playing his Pan pipes, he pursues some nymphs and naiads unsuccessfully, he then naps and has sensual dreams.

Although Mallarmé did enjoy the tone-poem, I imagine even he would have been shocked, as was most of cultural Paris, by the explicit choreography the “mad genius” Nijinsky brought to the work in 1912. The scene that caused the uproar was at the very end. The Faun appeared to be masturbating while lying on a scarf dropped by one of the nymphs.

The Symbolists abhorred such directness, extolling suggestion above all else. To that end, many of its lesser practitioners created volumes of rather vague stuff. However, the theory is valid: that the “true” poem is merely unlocked by the words on the page and their resonances in the reader.

There’s no going back to this mindset in our age.

© 2014 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

 

Could anyone alive today work for the New York Times for 35 years the way (Justin) Brooks Atkinson (1894-1984) did? Most people only know him from the Broadway theater that bears his name. His principal occupation was drama critic.

Yes, this one man had the “make or break” power that determined the fate of many a show.

Lest you think that he pronounced from some holier-than-thou throne, he begged to be allowed in the Navy in WWII, but was refused. So, the NYT sent him as a war correspondent to the Pacific. Then post-war Russia.

He was an early encourager of Eugene O’Neill, considered a classic today; attitudes were quite different at the time the work was brand new. He also came out of retirement in 1965 to write a rave review of “Man of LaMancha,’ which the show used abundantly in its publicity.

He wrote numerous books, most of which one can find at the Library for the Performing Arts at LincolnCenter. Filled with humor and wisdom, they offer, for instance:

“The most fatal illusion is the narrow point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.”

And: “In every age ‘the good old days’ were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them.”

Investigate!

© 2014 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

 

Is gossip an evil human pastime? A harmless way to share information (or misinformation)?  It isn’t going away anytime soon, especially with our technology enabling instant proliferation. At least when Hedda or Louella planned to smear someone, you had to wait for either a newspaper or a radio broadcast. Now, TMZ, the internet, and armies of creeps are waiting in the bushes. Your trash isn’t safe either.

Gossip is idle talk or rumor, especially about the private personal lives of others. We seem to have an inflated over-evaluation of “celebrity,” even involving people of no particular distinction whatsoever. But gossip applies to non-celebrities too.

I recall distinctly standing by the small flight of steps leading up to the door to the Methodist church in Perry, Ohio, when I was five years old. I heard the small-town busy bodies saying things about my French Moroccan/Jewish mother that I didn’t understand, but I felt were wrong. All the while, the sanctimonious pastor greeting his flock. With some of the wives he had, shall we say, more than a counselor role.

A lifelong dislike of hypocrisy and chatter was born in a few such instants. I thought “Peyton Place” was actually about Perry, but it’s really about “Anywhere.”

Psychologists say that gossip may even be necessary, from a societal standpoint, in that it assists communities in forming “indirect reciprocity”: I do something for you and you do something for someone else. This leads to the possibility of larger groups cooperating, hence surviving, due to trust and bond formation.

The word gossip comes from an Old English root, referring to the (once) all-female presence in the room of a childbirth, and the small talk occurring during the labor and delivery. Does this seem sexist to you? Men gossip too, though if they had to give birth, I feel there would be a lot more widely available birth control methods.

Judaism considers gossip spoken without a constructive purpose (whatever that is) as a sin. Islam equates it to “eating the flesh of one’s dead brother.” (How do they know that? Yikes!)

The master poet WH Auden said: “Whispering neighbors left and right/Pluck us from the real delight,/And the active hands must freeze/Lonely, on the separate knees.”

Think before you speak, please.

© 2014 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

 

Time for me to temporarily resurrect another human you may be unaware of: Jessica Mitford (1917-1996), of the distinguished Mitford clan. British author, journalist, activist, she renounced many of the privileges of her upper-crusty family (including an adherence to Hitler) and became an ardent Communist; she was called the “red sheep” of the family. She ran away from home to fight in the Spanish Civil War. She emigrated to the US and became an American citizen in 1944.

Perhaps her most famous book is “The American Way of Death,” published in 1963, a scathing exposé of the funeral industry and its unscrupulous practices of bilking those who are in the midst of grief. When Evelyn Waugh complained that she did not have “a plainly stated idea of death,” she asked her sister to tell him “Of course I’m against it.”

She then dismantled the “FamousWritersSchool” in a long article in the Atlantic Monthly (1970), exposing the false promises of that magazine-ad “writing” course.

In 1973, she took on something that still shames the US in the world’s eyes—our capital punishment system. That was called “Kind and Usual Punishment,” a neat inversion of our phrase “cruel and unusual punishment.”

She was fired, then reinstated via trial, from her teaching post at San JoseStateUniversity for refusing to sign a “loyalty oath.” Her course, “The American Way,” was one of the most popular on campus, investigating controversial areas of American life such as McCarthy-ism and Nixon/Watergate.

A couple of favorite quotes: “Objectivity? I’ve always had an objective!” and “You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.”

© 2014 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs

 

Elvis died, age 42, before his father did, a fate no parent wants to experience: surviving your own child. Before Madonna, MJ, the Beatles, there was Elvis, yet he never performed abroad. Television was his friend. He said: “I never danced vulgar in my life. I’ve just been jiggling.” And he was in 33, count ’em, movies. Nominated for 14 Grammys, won three. And he served in the military for two years. Beyoncé won’t be doing that.

Although I was too young for the initial hysteria, they say that the immense magnetism of a live performance by him survived, even into the “bloated” drug-addled late years. Sadness of the artist-persona who is given too much too soon, and yet has the temperamental imbalance many feel is a prerequisite to true creation. Have we romanticized all this? Or is there a germ of truth therein?

“I don’t know anything about music. In my line, you don’t have to,” he supposedly uttered. Seems possible to me. He was just overtaken by rhythm, as he said on many occasions, and it was a “whole-body” tidal wave. That’s what so shocked the prim 1950s America that had barely absorbed early rock music. There were fewer options, comparisons to be made, and so he became one of the “one-namers.” The King. Cher’s (another one-namer) career has lasted through six decades, largely because she is grounded and doesn’t abuse her health.

Born in Mississippi, moved to Nashville at age 13 and the rest really is history. Graceland has more visitors than any US attraction, with the possible exception of the Disney theme parks.

Think about fame before you say you really want it or place people on pedestals. There’s always a room waiting at the Heartbreak Hotel.

Elvis and I will be fishing with Franz for a month, back in September.

© 2014 by Frank Daykin, for Innovative Music Programs