Dave Read

Tanglewood Learning Institute opens June 2019

Article updated Feb. 6, 2019 by Dave Read

Opening in June 2019 Tanglewood’s new Linde Center for Music and Learning, home to the new Tanglewood Learning Institute and its 140 programs. Photo: Winslow Townson.

The 2019 Tanglewood season will be highlighted by the opening of the Tanglewood Learning Institute, housed in the Linde Center for Music and Learning, four new buildings on the rise above Seiji Ozawa Hall. Besides supporting the Tanglewood Music Center, the educational component of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summertime activities in the Berkshires, these additions to the Bernstein campus will be the locale of a broad array of programming and will transform Tanglewood into an all-season facility, available for event rental. Tanglewood Learning Institute will also offer programs in Boston beginning in fall 2019, as well as a series of online learning programs to be announced next year.

Fourth Tanglewood milestone since 1937

This opening represents the fourth major milestone in the festival’s history, building upon Serge Koussevitzky’s founding of both Tanglewood, as the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in 1937, and of the Tanglewood Music Center, the BSO’s acclaimed summer music academy, in 1940, and the opening of Ozawa Hall in 1994.

2019 Tanglewood schedule

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has released the schedule for the 2019 season at Tanglewood, which will be remembered for the opening of the Tanglewood Learning Institute, the four buildings overlooking Seiji Ozawa Hall on the Leonard Bernstein camopus.

Music director Andris Nelsons will be present for the month of July, conducting 13 programs, including the world premiere of a new work by Kevin Puts, The Brightness of Light, based on letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz on July 20, and a concert performance of Wagner’s complete Die Walküre on july 27 and 28. Details of programs in the Tanglewood Learning Institute will be announced on Feb. 7, 2019.

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Sharon Springs Poetry Festival

No way would I have learned about the Oct. 6 concert at Hancock Shaker Village performed by Paul Muldoon, with Rogue Oliphant if I hadn’t escorted my sisters to the environs of Joe’s Diner, on the last day of their week at Oak and Spruce, Maggie’s timeshare. So, be kind to your sisters and good things will happen for you. (Cool video included with my report on the show, linked above)

It was an awesome show, and writing about it led me to details of Mr. Muldoon’s upcoming appearance at the heretofore unheard-of Sharon Springs Poetry Festival, founded last year by Muldoon, just in time for me to book a spot in a workshop led either by Muldoon or Billy Collins. Also appearing in a variety of roles are Anne Waldman and current US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (she and Collins named for two terms in that post). Happiest hard decision of my life: choosing one poem for the workshop!

Paul Muldoon with Rogue Oliphant, Hancock Shaker Village, Oct. 6, 2018.

Important to keep in mind that whatever poem I carry in is not as important as what I may learn about making poems from Muldoon/Collins and the ten other participants. I would love to talk with Mr. Collins about my poem The Living and the Dead, which is my response to his poem Winter, which I think I heard read by Garrison Keillor on the much-missed Writer’s Almanac.

At the time (of first hearing or reading), I was in the midst of about a year-long dilemma of how to attribute the phrase I got from Herman Melville’s Piazza Tales that are the basis or catalyst for my poem Pivot of Spring. I hadn’t figured out a way to proceed yet, then I’m stopped in my tracks when the penultimate line of Winter includes “the living and the dead,” which also closes James Joyce’s story The Dead. That assemblage of five utterly common words was put to such powerful effect by Joyce that, for me, the phrase would be forever Joyce-branded.

Where’s the attribution? If I had fretted so much about repurposing a Melville phrase, did Billy Collins, too? Honest to god, I came this close to asking Don Hall about it – and felt immediately like a teenaged squealer, busting my buddy or my sister, just to see them squirm!

My solution (months later) was to preface the poem with a mini-essay that put the poem into the context of how it occurred to me, which led me to think that I may be on to something, a prose and poetry hybrid, with the poem ineluctably following the prose, rather than the prose serving as an exegesis of the poem. The prose addresses, instead, how an odd phrase, from a 150 year old short story, can become embedded in someone’s imagination, only to assert itself years later, and spark an ordinary little poem.

I sent them both to Don, who replied in the best way possible. Besides saying something along the lines of “good for you, getting poems while walking – Frost and Stevens used to but I never did.” Alright, there’s a rush from being mentioned in the same breath as those two, even if he only was being polite. As for the poem itself, the Melville phrase amounting to two of six total lines, Don wrote, “I like about half the lines, the others would make me grumpy.” Of course I did not ask him to clarify which lines work.

(More after the festival)

Paul Muldoon with Rogue Oliphant at Hancock Shaker Village

Article updated Oct. 10, 2018, by Dave Conlin Read

Ed. note: Click the linked text for information about Paul Muldoon’s Sharon Springs Poetry Festival, Oct. 18-19.

Listening to a poet say his poems is an opportunity to glimpse words at work. Words were at play when Paul Muldoon with Rogue Oliphant held forth in the rectangular wooden barn upslope from the round stone one at Hancock Shaker Village, October 6, 2018.

Said to be “The most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War,*” Paul Muldoon dazzled the audience with a dizzying array of word play, while his “loose affiliation of composers and musicians” transformed the barn into a CBGB satellite. (*The Times Literary Supplement)

The amiable Muldoon speaks softly and slowly; his voice a good vehicle both for holding the audience’s attention and for carrying them to Ireland, home already to four Nobel Literature laureates, including Seamus Heaney, Muldoon’s college tutor.

Chris Harford, on guitar and vocals, was an apt foil for Muldoon; one resembled a staid professor while the other stayed true to rock star form. Muldoon would wander away from the mic for long stretches, sometimes after saying the lyric a cappella, then leaving the band to animate it – with ballsy bass lines, insistent drum taps, sick guitar solos and wailing fiddle licks.

song v. poem Dylan or Roth?

On fiddle and guitar was David Mansfield, whom we first saw in concert when Bob Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue played two shows in Springfield. Speaking of Dylan, here’s what the late poet Donald Hall told me about him getting the Nobel: “Curiously, when I read Bob Dylan on the page, the words make no sound! Poetry-sound is utterly different from music. When he sings them, I reckon that they make a good noise!…Phil Roth should have won the Nobel, and now he never will.”

I don’t mean to disparage Dylan, whose bandwagon I’ve been riding practically since it left the station – but, just like him, I know there’s a difference between a poem and a song. This project of Muldoon’s is worthy of widespread attention, because it is so much fun, with such great music, audiences may wind up falling in love with language itself. Then they’d become better listeners, they’d pay closer attention …

Funny thing about this concert is that it concluded with a song, Comeback, that describes the way the season at Tanglewood now opens: heavily-hyped shows by remnants of rock royalty – a sad spectacle often, but excusable when the royalties, too, have dried up.

Introducing it, Muldoon referred to The Who – competing remnants of which have played there the last two seasons, taking up the space and time that should be reserved for musicians with something new to say – as they themselves did when they dropped by five days before Woodstock!

The Irish Arts Center in NYC is the locale of Muldoon’s Picnic, which convenes on the second Monday of the month, featuring Rogue Oliphant and – as Chris Harford puts it, “Paul’s literary friends, like Salmon Rushdie and Joyce Carol Oates.”

Links:

Title Poem

Poems aimed toward the market are to be kept from the sort of view hereby afforded, much to my chagrin, so let’s put on a happy face and list titles of poems I’ve worked on recently. Whatever “recently” means!

Ars Poetica, v 18.10,
Ars Poetica, v 18.10a,
Cape Cod Post Card
In Sight of Music
There Is No Theft In Poetry
“belief system” is the Dumbest Oxymoron
Salsa, or more food for thought
Incipient Decadence
Buster Browns
Pivot of Spring
In re: Music
Haiku Washington sotto voce: Dateline Washington
Afterparty
This Month’s Prompt
All that’s left
Animated by Grief
Backyard Agriculture
Buoys and Gales
Children of the Fifties
Dead Too Early
Hail! Martha
Imagine That
In the Merry Month of May
Leap to Childhood
Midnight Mass
Shudder and Echo
To my Parents
Tubers and Rain
Until the Mist
Yes Mom, I’ll be Brief
all that’s needed for poetry
Ars Poetica, v. MCMXIII
Ars Poetica, v. 18
Cinquain for Amy Lowell
First Among Equals
How To Epigram
Oh My Allen Ginsberg
Wrong Day for Reading
Before God Is Told
Emily, forgive me
God Hates Sects
I Broke Down
I Fined God
If God
Phys Ed
Spring Fever
Spring Logic
The Day That Won’t Fade
Valentine
While September Slips
Worst Case Scenario
Dispersal of Sadness
Epitaph
Hockey Dad
Martha
Mourning Meditation
Dear Mr. President
Farewell Address
I Hear the Media
Lincoln
Memorial Day
News Item*
The Outer Borough Colonel, Old Bone Spur
Ars Poetica 00
Epitaph for Donald Hall
Home from the Hospital
Interruption
Let America Be America
poetry predates the academy, perhaps
Poets Resist
Son and Father Alignment
Untitled axiom
All Souls Day
At the Window
Haiku New England
Wake-up Call
Admonition to a nephew
Beatnik Ode
Become the World
Blessed is He
Constitutional
Buoyancy
Epigrams
Grief Wants
I Remember Snow
Ignorance
Just Sayin’
Metaphorically Speaking
Midnight Salon
Prisoner of Freedom
Quid Pro Quo
Savoring Poetry
Sidewalk Manners
The Living and The Dead
The Mississippi of the Mind
Tourist Trap
What’ll We Do With The Hapless
Words are like that
Write Brain

Wynton Marsalis Quintet and Ellis Marsalis Quintet at Tanglewood, Sept. 2, 2018

By Dave Read – Wynton Marsalis is every bit the national treasure that Leonard Bernstein was and it seems that we in the Tanglewood orbit keep getting luckier. This was dubbed the Bernstein Centennial Summer, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra segment of it was bookended with concerts by artists representing the city of New Orleans, currently in the midst of its own Tricentennial celebration!

The opening weekend of the 2018 Tanglewood season included Harry Connick, Jr. in concert and the Sept. 1 concert by the Wynton Marsalis Quintet and Ellis Marsalis Quintet closed it in a manner that makes an already memorable season unforgettable! (Producers for the Sept. 2 show in the Shed requested no reviews so – mum’s the word!)

Wynton Marsalis Quintet at Tanglewood Sept. 1, 2018; Hilary Scott photo.

Somebody ought to profile those two quintessential American musicians – wouldn’t you love to read a study that compares and contrasts the lives and work of Leonard Bernstein and Wynton Marsalis? To all appearances they are utterly different, yet exactly alike as American musical artists.

Donald Hall, their late poet peer, who also performed in the Koussevitsky Music Shed (as a guest on the 2008 A Prairie Home Companion), wrote about “…poetry’s continuous assertion that opposites are identical.'” I don’t think he’d mind if we substituted ‘music’ for ‘poetry,’ in order to properly align these Tanglewood Fellows, Bernstein and Marsalis.

The quintet headed by Ellis Marsalis, father of Wynton, played a flawless opening set, almost equally divided between covers and original material. The patriarch of the first family of New Orleans musicians (son Brantford has also headlined shows here) is an impressive presence with a deft but airy touch on the piano, with a minimum of talk between pieces.

Wynton Marsalis’ deep Tanglewood roots

This was a home game for Wynton, who recalled being in the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra under the direction of Leonard Bernstein for a performance of the Prokofiev Fifth in 1979. Marsalis, while singling out Gunther Schuller and trumpter Roger Voisin, besides Bernstein, for praise, stated simply that Tanglewood changed his life. Before the concert, we heard someone talk about the 1999 program here with the BSO and Seij Ozawa plus Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra combining to perform the Peer Gynt Suite, which Duke Ellington adapted for jazz orchestra.

The concert attracted a lage Lawn audience, but a rather sparse gathering in the Shed. Perhaps Ozawa Hall was the more suitable venue for this program?

Bernstein Centennial Celebration at Tanglewood, August 26, 2018

By Dave Read – The Bernstein Centennial Celebration at Tanglewood, the culmination of the Summer of Lenny in the Berkshires, was a three hour variety show that wrapped up with the rafter-rattling Finale from Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection.” But, since it would’ve been too tidy for this event to dissolve into silence, host Audra McDonald returned and began singing Somewhere, from West Side Story, and by the time the curtain did drop, that chestnut had been made refulgent by Ms. McDonald, three operatic soloists, a dozen gang members (Jets, Sharks), a few conductors, scores of instrumentalists, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.

Tanglewood is where Leonard Bernstein’s nonpareil career got crucial early boosts from Serge Koussevitsky and Aaron Copland in 1940, and where it ended in 1990 with his final performance, six weeks before his death. The Leonard Bernstein Office asserts that the centennial celebration includes more than 2,300 events around the world. It is such a big deal that it was the Google doodle for August 25, 2018:

Tale of two Tanglewoods

There is some irony in the realization that Highwood House, setting for Highwood’s Ghost, the piece John Williams composed for the Bernstein Centennial, serves today as a sort of dividing line in the stratification of the Tanglewood audience. It’s the Jets banding together against the Sharks; it’s Upstairs, Downstairs. One audience nestles under a canopy to nosh canapes over by Highwood House, while the other one swarms the lawn around the Shed!

The event was recorded by PBS for airing in December. We chatted with a member of the film crew, wondering if he had worked any of the televised Tanglewood shows, such as the Tanglewood 75th Anniversary Gala or Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble? That was a lucky question because it turns out he was on the crew hired in 1995 by Sony to record a Wynton Marsalis program – which many people hoped would lead to something along the lines of Leonard Bernstein’s wildly popular and successful Young People’s Concerts, which aired on CBS from 1958 until 1972.

We will add photos, video, and copy to this report, so please, stay tuned!