Arts Spectrum

RON RASH IS BURNING BRIGHT IN THE FIRMAMENT OF AMERICAN AUTHORS

2010-03-15T10:49:00.005-04:00

In the New York Times (March 8, 2010), Janet Maslin reviewed Ron Rash’s new collection of short stories, beginning “Ron Rash was the seasoned author of nine books of fiction and poetry before his 10th, the stunning 2008 Serena, established him as one of the best American novelists of his day.” March 9 was the release date for Burning Bright, and I bought it at Malaprop’s Bookstore. I finished reading it on March 10. Two years ago, I did the same thing with Serena. Literally, I couldn’t put the books down.

I first met Ron in 2004 at the Hendersonville Library, where he read from his poetry and intrigued us with the first two pages of his then-forthcoming second novel Saints at the River. I immediately read two books of his poetry and his first novel. One Foot in Eden is set on the Jocassee River before Carolina Power turned it into Jocassee Lake. The plot is heart-rending, and I cried over it. Considering the virile masculinity of his poetry, I was surprised that he was totally convincing when writing in a feminine voice in one of the five sections of that novel. One Foot in Eden is barely 200 pages in length. Every word signifies in Rash’s novels, just as in his poetry.

Since then, I have read all eleven of his books: his poetry (Eureka Mill, Among the Believers and Raising the Dead), his short stories (The Night that Jesus Fell to Earth, Casualties, Chemistry and Other Stories and Burning Bright) and his novels (One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, The World Made Straight and Serena).

Saints at the River is set post-World War II on a fictional river that highly resembles the Chattooga. It begins in the first person of a thirteen-year-old girl as she drowns in the river, and then necessarily shifts point of view. Wealthy tourists, newly arrived environmentalists and pragmatic Western Carolina natives populate the novel. The nuances of each character are depicted by his or her use of language. Vocabulary and construction reflect background.

The World Made Straight concerns the modern-day descendants of two families (one pro-Union, one pro-Confederacy) that were involved in the Shelton Laurel Massacre in Madison County during the Civil War.

Serena takes place in Haywood and Jackson Counties during the 1930’s. Rapacious lumber barons include a young anti-heroine of mythic grand ambition and her husband. Think “Macbeth.” Their goal is the clear-cutting of as much of the virgin mixed hardwood forest as possible before the Department of the Interior creates Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Janet Maslin listed Serena as one of the ten best books she reviewed in 2008.

Ron Rash’s ancestors have lived in Southern Appalachia since the 1700’s. He was raised in Boiling Springs, SC. After 2003 when he became the Parris Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University, he moved near Sylva. He now lives at most a few miles from land that his ancestors owned, perhaps even on it. He has internalized the history of the region, and his works provide a fictional and poetic representation of Southern Appalachian culture that is unparalleled. At the time of his WCU appointment, he commented on his own writing by quoting Eudora Welty: "One place understood helps us understand all other places better."

If you want to understand the geology, botany and history of this region, read Wilma Dykeman’s exemplary 1955 work of non-fiction, The French Broad. If you want to understand the people, read Ron Rash’s poetry, stories and novels. I highly recommend you start with Among the Believers, Burning Bright, Serena and One Foot in Eden.

Arts Spectrum column #468

March 15, 2010

CHIARA QUARTET AND OPAL QUARTET PRESENT AN AMERICAN WEEKEND

2010-03-13T07:30:00.000-05:00

For most of twenty-five years, I lived in Rochester, New York. Here, the Garth Fagan Dance Company got its start. The Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra was a major symphony orchestra presenting concerts at Eastman Theatre. The Eastman School of Music’s two student orchestras also performed there. Chamber music concerts were frequent at the exquisite middle-sized Kilbourn Hall of the Eastman School of Music as well as at other venues. I heard my first complete cycle of Beethoven quartets presented one season by the Cleveland Quartet in the days when Donald Weilerstein was first violin.

For two brief periods, I lived in the Connecticut suburbs of New York City. I was ninety minutes from the cultural riches of Manhattan. The Paul Taylor Dance Company, the New York City Ballet and the Joffrey Ballet were among my favorites. There were operas at the Metropolitan Opera House and at New York City Opera (where Beverly Sills presided). There were visiting symphony orchestras at the acoustically wonderful Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic at their acoustically challenged Avery Fisher Hall. Finally, there were many chamber music concerts at a variety of venues.

When I retired ten years ago to Western North Carolina, I expected to encounter strength in visual arts and in fine crafts. I was not expecting the profusion of chamber music that I have experienced. I have been delighted with concerts in Asheville, Hendersonville, Brevard, Waynesville, Hickory and Boone as well as in neighboring Greenville, SC and Spartanburg, SC. (Greenville is closer in time to Asheville than Carnegie Hall is to New Canaan, CT).

On the weekend of March 5-7, 2010, I had to choose among concerts by the Chiara Quartet, the Lomazov/Rackers Piano Duo, the Opal Quartet and an all-Chopin solo piano recital by Doug Weeks. I can’t make it to all the high-quality offerings that are offered in Western Carolina. I elected to attend the two string quartet concerts, and was not disappointed.

On March 5, the Chiara Quartet appeared as part of the Asheville Chamber Music Series. Members of the Chiara include first violinist Rebecca Fischer (whose father was cellist in the Concord Quartet) and violist Jonah Sirota (whose father Robert heads the Manhattan School of Music). The program included works by Haydn, Robert Sirota and Beethoven. Since I was still recuperating from surgery, I appreciated Beethoven’s Opus 132, whose middle movement is entitled “Heiliger Dankesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit” (“Thanksgiving to the Divinity by a Convalescent”).

On March 7, I returned to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville for a Sunday afternoon presentation by the Opal Quartet. This young quartet contains three principal players from the Asheville Symphony Orchestra (violinist Amy Lovinger, violist Kara Poorbaugh and cellist Franklin Keel, all graduates of the Eastman School of Music) and violinist Qiao Chen Solomon.

What was special about the weekend was the repertoire. The Chiara Quartet featured Robert Sirota’s Triptych, an engrossing piece written after September 11, 2001. The Opal Quartet featured Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 5, a work in which Glass rises above minimalism, using that technique as only one arrow in his well-loaded quiver of compositional skills.

This was not a weekend for old warhorses, but a time to revel in American composers of the 21st century.

Arts Spectrum column #467

March 13, 2010

FORTY-SEVEN DAYS

2010-03-13T07:00:00.005-05:00

Regular readers will have noticed that Arts Spectrum has been strangely silent in recent months. Since moving the column to the web after eight years of print-based journalism, I have established a policy of publishing weekly. There were forty columns in forty weeks beginning March 27, 2009. Then there were only three postings in December, two in January 2010 and none in February or March (until today). What was going on?

Perhaps this poem will explain:

Forty-seven Days

First sighted on birthday seventy-six
perhaps never seventy-seven?

She says “don’t name it” as if a name bestows reality
on a twelve-centimeter monster.

I protest, acknowledge and own Malvolio,
after patient decades growing, let’s get rid of him
FAST.

Fifteen days hiatus while MD’s vacation in
Aspen? Aruba? Argentina? mid-winter bliss.

Two more scans: not this, not that.
Good as it gets.

Anchor in a safe cove
that meditation chose.

The large intruder departs
taking one kidney as a trophy
of his Olympic quest for mortality.

What is this cove I speak about? Guided meditation led me to adopt as my “safe haven” during the day of surgery my favorite anchorage in the whole world, one that stimulated another poem a few years back:

Otter Cove, Lake Superior

On late arrival, almost dangerous dusk
we weave our wake past granite hazardous ledges
and touch the velvet wheel to face the wind
no longer strong midst sheltering slopes.

The battened sails now nest in lazy jacks,
the rattling roar of anchor chain is past,
the loudest sound the burbling cataract
where water sorts between three falls.

Beaver slaps his tail and dives
to join his family snug in lodge below;
moose drink here, and shy deer forage close
alongside awkward woodland caribou.

As sun slants slowly beneath four walls of pine,
the August sky displays its Northern lights.
We’re snugged at anchor, joining but two boats
in space would hold two hundred craft.

A sense of peace, and distance from the horde
settles now upon my tired crew.
Danger overcome,
now we’ve solitude.
Ted McIrvine ©2007

Add six weeks of recuperation to the 47 days between initial detection of the cancer and the ensuing surgery, and you can understand why Arts Spectrum was silent for three months. It is good to be back.

© 2010 Edward C. McIrvine
Arts Spectrum column #466
March 15, 2010

AVANT-GARDE FILMS IN ROCHESTER 1928

2010-01-21T17:23:00.007-05:00

This remembrance of the late Hildegarde and Sibley Watson was originally published December 15, 2002 in the Times-News of Hendersonville, NC.

Last month, I was poring over traditional Appalachian carols, characteristic French noels, German Lutheran alternative tunes to well-known carols, English hymns by Arthur Sullivan and Gustav Holst, even a carol by jazz great Dave Brubeck (in 5/4 time, no less, with drums). From my pile of Christmas music, out popped a little carol for voice and piano inscribed to me by American composer David Diamond. Entitled “A Christmas Tree,” this 1970 composition is a setting of a poem of the same name by E.E. Cummings. The music is most appropriately dedicated to Hildegarde and Sibley Watson.

Suddenly my thoughts leapt to an entirely different topic: the movie The Fall of the House of Usher filmed in 1928 in Rochester, NY. David Curtis calls directors James Sibley Watson Jr. and Melville Webber “the first truly avant-garde American filmmakers.” This 14-minute film and the later Watson film Lot in Sodom remain landmarks in filmmaking. The cinematography is by Watson and goes beyond the effects used by Murnau and other German expressionists. The use of miniatures, superimposed images and the almost total avoidance of subtitles are outstanding for the silent film era. The adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe short story is by Sibley Watson, Webber and E.E. Cummings.

In 2000, The Fall of the House of Usher was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry to preserve America’s best films. Dale Davis of the New York State Literary Center remarked on the relationship of the films to Watson’s other major achievement, the literary journal The Dial. Along with Scofield Thayer, Sibley Watson had revived the transcendentalist political magazine The Dial and converted it into a literary journal that was without equal in its period (1920-1929). The journal was the first to publish E.E. Cummings and Marianne Moore’s poetry and the first to publish T.S. Eliot in America. Ezra Pound, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal and Thomas Mann reported from Europe, as The Dial published American authors Hart Crane, Amy Lowell, Kahlil Gibran, Sherwood Anderson, and Van Wyck Brooks during the first year alone. It was from that aesthetic background that Watson entered filmmaking.

My first exposure to The Fall of the House of Usher is unforgettable. In 1975 James Sibley Watson seldom left his house in Rochester due to illness, but his vivacious wife Hildegarde was very much present in artistic circles. Discovering one day at a dinner party that a number of her younger friends had never seen her husband’s movies, Hildegarde arranged a special showing at the George Eastman House for a month later. Hermine Weill, another grand lady of Rochester, hosted a dinner after the screening, and (almost fifty years after the filming) two-thirds of the cast attended! Melville Webber had passed on, but Hildegarde Watson and Herbert Stern came to dinner and reminisced about the filming. Herbie even wore the very clothes that he had worn for the film.

Composer David Diamond (in the 1970s on the faculty of Juilliard School of Music but living in Rochester five days of the week) knew of the intimate connection of E.E. Cummings to the Watsons. Scofield Thayer, James Sibley Watson, and E.E. Cummings had attended Harvard College together, and Cummings had lived at the Watson house in Rochester for several years to assist with The Dial. So it was particularly meaningful for Diamond to dedicate a setting of a Cummings poem to Sibley and Hildegarde Watson. And my copy of “A Christmas Tree” will always bring back to me a rush of memories of composers, poets, filmmakers, and actors that I knew during my twenty-five years in Rochester.

Arts Spectrum column #465
January 22, 2010

DIGITAL BROADCASTS OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

2010-01-16T16:00:00.004-05:00

Early on, I recognized several things about high-tech digital approaches to the distribution and storage of serious music:

(1) The rapid evolution of the Internet would result in a transition in the preferred formats for transmission and storage.
(2) The market for popular music would dictate the “winning” formats.
(3) Niche markets such as classical music and jazz would have to accommodate.

Consider the storage of recorded music. In my time, I have owned 78 rpm shellac discs, 45 rpm and 33-1/3 rpm vinyl Long Playing discs and digital Compact Discs. My music library consists of some 600-odd CD’s and 100 LP’s that I haven’t the heart to abandon. I don’t intend to transcribe the CD’s or LP’s to MP3.

I am not a Luddite. I first used a mainframe computer 50 years ago using machine language. At Xerox, I had on my desk a $75,000 research prototype of the world’s first personal computer beginning in the early 1980’s. My administrative assistant had a duplicate unit at her desk, and we used the Arpanet long before the World Wide Web was conceived.

MP3 simply does not have the audio quality that I require. MP3 is optimized for playing rock, rap and C&W music on low-cost players. For serious jazz or classical music aficionados with high fidelity equipment, there are higher-quality music recording formats. If I transcribed to them, the quality would be there but I wouldn’t know what to do with all the commentary printed on liner notes and CD inserts. So for the time being, I continue to buy CD’s ... usually chamber music purchased after concerts directly from the artists ... and think about shifting to digital storage.

But I have shifted from listening to National Public Radio on my Bose radio to listening to simulcasts on my Imac. The icon for WCQS (88.1 Asheville) is in my Itunes menu, and so are icons for WNCW (88.7 Spindale) and WDAV (89.9 Davidson). I am researching the purchase of external speakers with higher audio quality. Speakers have always been the weak link in any high fidelity system, and you can’t spend too much money on upgrading them.

Listening online to a variety of NPR stations, both in North Carolina and nationwide, makes me realize how many have shifted emphasis to programs such as Talk of the Nation, Car Talk and This American Life. News, humor and commentary seem to be crowding out classical music and jazz on these stations.

One North Carolina station stands out with its continued commitment to classical music. That is WDAV, associated with Davidson College. General Manager Benjamin K. Roe arrived at WDAV in July 2008 after twenty years with National Public Radio in Washington, DC, where he was producer of Performance Today and served as Director of Music and Music Initiatives. Among his accomplishments there was an Internet portal that provides access to streaming music on NPR stations nationwide.

Since Roe’s arrival, WDAV has taken over production of National Public Radio’s World of Opera and in collaboration with South Carolina ETV/Radio will co-produce a new program Carolina Live, a weekly two-state regional review of classical performances similar to Performance Today. WDAV shows signs of becoming the Carolina regional powerhouse for classical music programming.

Other stations continue to provide gems of programming. Dana Whitehair, General Manager of WNCW 88.7 Spindale, recently emailed me to say that at 8:00 pm on Monday, 1/18, WNCW will re-broadcast the 1983 Eastman Philharmonia world premiere of Joseph Schwantner’s New Morning for the World. This piece celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr. in the same way that Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait celebrates the 16th President, through narrative readings that punctuate the piece. I attended that 1983 concert in Rochester, NY, conducted by David Effron and featuring baseball great Willie Stargell narrating the Martin Luther King, Jr. passages in an exemplary fashion. This is a fine piece of 20th century music. You may be sure I will be listening online Monday night, MLK Day.

Arts Spectrum column #464

January 16, 2010

ISAAC ROSENFELD: A PREMATURE DEATH

2009-12-18T10:00:00.001-05:00

This week I reprint an updated version of a column that originally appeared in the Times-News in November 2002.

Isaac Rosenfeld had דזשאָיע דע וויוורע. I dare to use Yiddish for the term “joie de vivre” because the World Wide Web, not conceived until well after his premature death, allows me to translate French to Yiddish online, even though I do not know the Hebrew alphabet. Rosenfeld, who was as well versed in Yiddish as in English, would have been amused.

I met Isaac Rosenfeld when I was an undergraduate physics major at the University of Minnesota and he was a faculty member in the English department. At the time, that department was outstanding: Allen Tate was there, Robert Penn Warren had just left for Yale and his influence continued, and a coterie of promising young faculty included Saul Bellow, John Berryman, Morgan Blum and Isaac Rosenfeld. All these younger faculty taught undergraduate courses such as the “world humanities” course in which I was enrolled.

Saul Bellow and Isaac Rosenfeld had grown up together in Chicago, ambitious children of immigrant Jews from the Russian Pale of Settlement, friends and competitors. Bellow claimed that Rosenfeld was the only fourteen-year-old in Chicago to have read all of Immanuel Kant. Rosenfeld’s early New York success in the 1940’s led Bellow (still in Chicago) to consider that he had been left in the dust. Yet Bellow is the Nobel Prize winner, while Rosenfeld left only his voluminous journals and five incomplete book manuscripts when he died at age thirty-eight, ten years after his one novel was published.

The English department at the University of Minnesota in the 1950’s was a magnet for literature students. I often ate in the dormitory cafeteria with graduate students who considered Rosenfeld to be the golden boy among the young faculty. A poet and essayist who was profusely published in the Partisan Review and other national literary magazines, he was considered possibly the next great American novelist. One reviewer compared his first novel Passage from Home (1946) to Henry James’ What Maisie Knew.

The course that I took from Rosenfeld focused on late nineteenth century art, literature and philosophy, and he chose to spend almost half the term on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. He linked Marx, Freud, and other writers of the time to that monumental work that combines literature with philosophical thought and political commentary. Only much later, after moving to Western North Carolina, did I discover that Rosenfeld had taught War and Peace the previous summer at Black Mountain College. He had provided me my first encounter with the influence of Black Mountain College. Then while I was in graduate school I received word that he had died from a heart attack at age thirty-eight.

Even to his closest friends, he became known as an author who had not lived up to his potential. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky declared in a 2000 newspaper interview that his favorite poem was a Yiddish translation of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Pinsky attributed the translation to Saul Bellow, who promptly corrected him. The ironic poem, a loose translation of Prufrock into Jewish cultural terms, is the work of Isaac Rosenfeld, and can be accessed at zemerl.com. Here it is for my readers who are literate in Yiddish:

Der shir hashirim fun Mendl Pumshtok

Nu-zhe, kum-zhe, ikh un du,  
Ven der ovnt shteyt uf kegn dem himl  
Vi a leymener goylm af Tisha b'Av

Lomir geyn zikh  
Durkh geselakh vos dreyen zikh  
Vi di bord fun dem rov

Oy, Bashe, freg nisht keyn kashe,  
A dayge dir

Oyf der vant fun dem koshern restorant  
Hengt a shmutsiker betgevant  
Un vantsn tantsn karahod

In tsimer vu di vayber zenen  
Ret men fun Marx un Lenin

Ike ver alt...ikh ver alt...  
Es vert mir in pupik kalt

Zol ikh oykemen di hor, meg ikh oyfesn a floym?  
Ikh vel tskatsheven di hoyzn  
un shpatsirn bay dem yam,

Ikh vel hern di yam-moydn  
zingen khad gadyo

Ikh vel zey entfernv  
borukh-habo.

Arts Spectrum column #463
December 18, 2009

COPYRIGHT LAW NOW FAVORS CORPORATE GIANTS AND IMPAIRS CREATIVITY

2009-12-11T10:00:00.003-05:00

After eight years and 423 Sunday columns, Arts Spectrum ceased appearing in print in March 2009. It continues on the web, keeping abreast of the visual and performing arts scene in Western North Carolina through weekly columns with no revenue.

The search for a sustainable financial model for serious journalism is time-consuming. Currently concentrating on support for Arts Spectrum, I am reprinting some past columns. This week's post is an edited version of two columns that originally appeared in the Times-News in September 2004. The focus is on changes in copyright law that favor large entertainment corporations, impair creativity, and violate the intent of the U.S. constitution.

Steamboat Willie, released in 1928, was the cartoon movie with synchronized sound that made Mickey Mouse a star. Walt Disney’s fame began with that creation. At that time, copyright protection lasted for 28 years, and could be extended for a second 28 years. The copyright on Mickey Mouse would have expired in 1984, after which the material would pass into the public domain and could be used or adapted by anyone. Since 1984, we could all be making our own Mickey Mouse sweatshirts and selling them, without getting permission or paying royalties to Walt Disney.

It was self-serving that Walt Disney, Inc. lobbied in 1976 along with other entertainment corporations for changes in the laws of intellectual property that extended existing copyrights by 19 years. In 1998 the “content industry” (Fox, Disney, Time-Warner and others) lobbied congress for the “Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act” that added another 20 years. Mickey became exclusively Disney corporate property until 2018.

The United States Constitution, Article I, section 8, clause 8, states that “Congress has the power to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

Intellectual property law is a balancing act, resulting in a fair contract between creators and society. Constitutionally, the goal is to promote progress. In return for that progress, the creator is given “for limited times” the power to control his creation and extract royalties. In 1790, Congress decided that “limited times” meant 14 years plus one renewal for a total of 28 years. There were two legislative changes between 1790 and 1909, when the copyright duration became 28 plus 28, the term in effect when Walt Disney was motivated to create Mickey Mouse.

That appeared to be sufficient incentive for fifty years to cause artists and authors to create. However since 1962, with corporate lobbying for extensions, there have been eleven more changes in law so that now corporate-held copyrights will last for 95 years.

In the view of legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, a constitutional expert, recent changes in copyright law have only benefited the corporate holders of copyrights on old material. They have not benefited the creative artist, and in fact hinder creativity.

New media and new technology require changes in copyright. Lessig recognizes that the position in 1790 (when America had 174 publishers, printing presses and a law governing only maps, charts and books) is different from the position in 2004 (when anyone can be a desktop or Internet publisher, and copyright needs to encompass music, records, architecture, drama, film and computer programs). However, he feels that the changes that have been enacted have favored the corporate entertainment industry, and have actually hindered creativity, which was the constitutional intent of establishing copyright in the first place.

Lessig is the author of two important recent books regarding copyright: Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999) and Free Culture (2004). In these works, he points out that checks and balances are at the center of the American concept of constitutional government, and should be at the center of American law controlling intellectual property. He condemns the extension of copyright duration by a factor of three, far exceeding what is needed to reward individual creativity, and also questions the extension of copyright protection (originally governing copies) to include control of “derivative works” in an encompassing manner not envisioned in the Constitution. Corporate lawyers now mount vigorous attacks on actions formerly considered “fair use.”

An example is in order. In a 1990 documentary about stagehands at the San Francisco Opera, a television set in the corner of the screen displayed 4.5 seconds of The Simpsons. Filmmaker Jon Else thought this would be covered under the “fair use” doctrine that allows small samples of a copyrighted work to appear in other works without permission. To be safe, he contacted Fox to obtain clearance, was initially denied permission and ultimately was quoted a licensing fee of $10,000. Else erased that 4.5 seconds of The Simpsons from the TV in his movie, eliminating an amusing touch that illustrated the backstage ambiance during the opera.

I began by describing Steamboat Willie, the work that made Mickey Mouse a star. But was it even a Walt Disney creation? Earlier in 1928 Buster Keaton released his last independent silent film, Steamboat Bill, Jr. Disney’s cartoon was a parody of the Keaton film, done without obtaining permission because everyone in that age built on previous work. Were Disney creating his product of genius today, Keaton’s lawyers would sue him, claiming this was a “derivative work” that infringed Keaton’s copyright. Beyond that, the contemporary song Steamboat Bill inspired both films. If they created these films today, both Keaton and Disney would be arguing with the corporate owners of the song about rights and royalties.

As Lessig points out, much of art is adaptive and derivative from prior works of art. If rapacious corporate legal maneuvers continue to prevent artists from building on previously published art, the ability of individual artists, composers, authors and performers to create will be impaired. The extension of the legal concept of copyright control may benefit the “information industry” with its vast reservoir of copyrighted films, music and publications, but individual creators are under attack.

Arts Spectrum column #462

December 11, 2009

DID THE ARTS RESPOND TO 9/11?

2009-12-04T10:00:00.004-05:00

But these outpourings were naive art by amateurs or transient spontaneous works by professional artists. In our time, high culture seems to have become retrospective in nature, and unable to react rapidly to events in the news.

Early in the twentieth century, slow reaction was not the case. The poet Wilfred Owen wrote powerful poetry regarding World War I from the trenches of Flanders before being slain. Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica was a contemporary comment on the brutality of the Fascist rise to power in Spain in the 1930’s, while Berthold Brecht’s play Mother Courage told and ominously foretold the sufferings of common people in European wars. North Carolinian Randall Jarrel’s poem “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” was a graphic response to the sacrifice of young life in World War II. And the abstract expressionist school of painting was based on a life-affirming post-World War II American optimism after the defeat of the authors of the Holocaust and despite the continuing threat of nuclear war.

From a report in New York Magazine (September 24, 2001) we learn that “If the consensus is correct, the arts may change dramatically… In Western society, the response of art to a change in social conditions is never uniform and rarely obvious… If there is to be a profound change in art, however, its early harbinger will be impatience - even disgust - with the broad worldview that has sustained art during the past 40 years.”

That sounds like the start of something interesting. Perhaps rapid reaction to critical contemporary events will arise again in the arts. The re-examination of American values and actions now underway may incline the artistic world to value-based gut reactions and away from clumsy deconstructionist evaluations.

Arts Spectrum column #461

December 4, 2009

RIVER ARTS DISTRICT HAS A BOFFO STUDIO STROLL

2009-11-20T14:00:00.005-05:00

The freight trains didn’t park over the level crossings this year, the trolley shuttle worked and the parking areas weren’t muddy. To top it all off, the weather was summer-like in Asheville. Everything cooperated to make this November’s River Arts District Studio Stroll a joy.

With more than 130 industrious artists, crafters and instrument makers now creating on the Right Bank of the French Broad River, there are more studios than ever. I visited six of the eleven buildings in one day. It appeared to be a record turnout of potential art patrons, their children (including some really young children) and more dogs that I recall seeing at previous strolls. These take place twice a year, on the second weekends in June and November. My goal at this year’s November Stroll was to meet some recent arrivals and to revel in the company of people who prize creativity.

Alwin Wagener creates decorative and functional hand-forged iron works in his Wagener Forge studio in the Wedge. A member of the Southern Highland Craft Guild, he has taught at Warren Wilson College and the John C. Campbell Folk School.

A winner of many competitions during the years he taught art in California, Bernie Segal retired to Fairview. He now has a sculpture studio in the Riverview Station.

Una Barrett is a talented young jewelry maker who graduated from the highly regarded craft program at Haywood County Community College. Barrett was in Riverview Station when I last saw her work, but has now relocated her Relics of a New Age workplace to the Phil Mechanic Studio.

Sally Sweetland is a painter and art teacher who has settled here, with studio space in the Riverview Station and a teaching affiliation with Fleta Monaghan in that building.

“Strings Attached” is the title given by Madison J. Cripps to his marionette business, which has been in the River Arts District less than three months. Cripps sells handcrafted puppets and provides puppet performances.

David Kabler and Mitch Rumbelt operate Eyesore Video in the Wedge. This guerilla filmmaker specializes in underground music cinema, and films almost exclusively in Asheville.

Acme Industrial Thinking was formerly in the Wilkie Arcade, but has gratefully moved into the Wedge. They revel in creative projects, and proudly displayed the props that they created for films by Eyesore.

I watched two of Robin Rector Krupp’s hourly demonstrations in her studio in the Warehouse Studio Building. Krupp formerly illustrated (and wrote) children’s books but now concentrates on painting full sheet watercolors of “Wild! Animals.” A natural teacher, she adjusted each demonstration to be appropriate to the audience. An adult audience heard about how to paint the wild animals. who seldom hold a pose. Krupp works from thousands of photographs that she takes in the wild and at zoological parks. She will be a visiting artist during summer 2010 at the Western North Carolina Nature Center. A later audience had several young children, so the artist concentrated on describing how a children's picture book evolves from original watercolor illustrations through a long process of creation and editing.

Mary Charles Griffin, Barbara Fisher and Laurie McCarriar got a quick wave of my hand at the Warehouse. Each of these artists deserve full coverage, as do Constance Williams, Barbara C.L. Perez and so many other talented River District Artists that I dropped in on but have not yet written about. I will never run out of interesting artists and crafters so long as I hang out in the River Arts District. The next stroll will be June 12-13, but many artists accept visitors on Fridays, Saturdays or by appointment.

Arts Spectrum column #460

November 20, 2009

FROM TINY SHINY TO HEAVY METAL

2009-11-13T15:00:00.003-05:00

The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design is one of those small jewels that make this area so special. This regional center of the University of North Carolina studies Twentieth Century Studio Craft in America, working collaboratively with UNC-Asheville, Appalachian State University and Western Carolina University. This is the appropriate location for such a center since southern Appalachia is world-renowned for its indigenous fine crafts.

In the decade since its inception, CCCD has sponsored national panels and events, achieving a reputation as the primary site where history and criticism of craft are treated with the same academic rigor that is applied to art history and criticism in universities. A major effort has used a private grant of $500,000 to fund the writing of Makers: A History of American Studio Craft, the first-ever undergraduate textbook on the subject of Studio Craft. When the University of North Carolina Press releases this peer-reviewed book in 2010, I shall have more to say about this landmark effort.

The Center has grounds and a short hiking trail with intriguing public sculptures by David Tillinghast (Earth Mound and Underground Bell), Harry McDaniel (Fiddleheads), Roger Halligan, David Nash and others. I am surprised at how few people are aware of the Center’s small public gallery and the quality of the exhibitions that are mounted there.

The current exhibition, entitled Different Tempers: Jewelry & Blacksmithing, is an intriguing exhibit curated by art historian Suzanne Ramljak, editor of Metalsmith magazine. Taken as a whole, it is a study in scale. The work of fourteen fine craftspeople from eight states is on display, running the gamut of metalsmithing. There are pieces of coldworked precious metal jewelry and there are massive forged steel pieces. “From tiny shiny to heavy metal” was the flippant description passed on to me by CCCD director Dian Magie.

Button is an imaginative piece of jewelry created by Melanie Bilenker of Philadelphia, PA using ebony, resin, Ms. Bilenker’s hair and precious metals. Massive Wrought Cuff I is a piece of blackened silver wrought by Natasha Wozniak of Brooklyn, NY.

Moving to a slightly larger scale is David Clemons of Little Rock, AR. His sculpture The Trees We Construct to Conceal our Strange Fruit is a disturbing piece composed of a silver sculpture surrounded by a steel cage with botanical details. Only upon close approach do you detect the poem Strange Fruit by Lewis Allen, made famous by Billie Holiday. The poem is written into the plastic base and only observable from above. The poem gives new significance to the silver chains and the tree motif of the sculpture: slavery and lynching.

Larger still, and entirely made of steel, is Tacitocypriose by Maegan Crowley of Dolores, CO. I liked the way in which this piece depicted the mysteries of botany: how does a plant know to grow its roots down and its flowers up? What happens at the transition between these two growth instincts?

Albert Paley of Rochester, NY is nationally known for his gates and his exterior sculptures. In the current CCCD exhibit, Paley is represented by forged steel andirons and a medium-sized (for Paley) recent sculpture. In Asheville, we already have his weathering steel sculpture Passage at the Federal Building, executed in 1995. If you can’t easily get to downtown Asheville, this grand piece (37 feet high, 23 feet wide and 16 feet in depth) can be seen at a sculpture website.

The Different Tempers exhibit runs at CCCD through December 11, with gallery hours 10:00 am to 5:00 pm Monday through Friday. The Center is located on the grounds of the Kellogg Center on Broyles Road in Henderson County between Route 64 East and South Rugby Road. Consult CCCD’s website or call (828) 890-2050 for directions.

Arts Spectrum column #459
November 13, 2009

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, THE MUSIC CRITIC

2009-11-06T10:00:00.004-05:00

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856 and moved to London in 1876. Growing up in an impoverished genteel Irish Protestant family with a drunken father, an opera singer for a mother and the Irish impresario George John Vandaleur Lee as a family friend, Shaw had been steeped in music. From his arrival in London until 1895, his major income came from music reviews. By 1890 he was the principal music critic for The World under the pseudonym Corno di Bassetto.

Shaw wrote plays prolifically but except for the American run of The Devil's Disciple (1897) without success until 1904. (His second play, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, might have succeeded but was banned during Victoria’s reign.) His major successes occurred rapidly in the Edwardian era: John Bull's Other Island in 1904, Man and Superman and Major Barbara both in 1905 and The Doctor's Dilemma in 1906. Pygmalion came in 1914 and was commercially successful. After that Bernard Shaw’s witty musical criticisms continued but in reduced volume. In July 1917 he remarked: “As I am only half a critic now, I act up to that character by going to only half an opera at a time.”

His insight into music was remarkable. Upon the centenary of Mozart’s death, he summarized: “Mozart came at the end of a development, not at the beginning of one … in art the highest success is to be the last of your race, not the first. Anybody, almost, can make a beginning: the difficulty is to make an end – to do what cannot be bettered.”

His style as a reviewer was vigorous, opinionated and frequently provocative. In March 1893 he remarked: “The concert began with Schubert’s unfinished symphony, which on this occasion ought to have been his uncommenced symphony.”

Shaw’s reviews praised Mozart, Gluck, Wagner, Richard Strauss and Edward Elgar, and heaped scorn on Mendelssohn, Brahms and all Slavic and Bohemian composers. He had a gift for operatic criticism. In 1894 he presciently stated: “Italian opera has been born again … Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Puccini and Verdi … Puccini looks to me more like the heir of Verdi than any of his rivals.”

Unlike today, when symphony concerts primarily feature the great works of dead masters, nineteenth-century concerts and operas were largely of new music. The established Brahms, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Verdi and Wagner and the under-forty Elgar and Strauss were all live composers introducing new symphonic works. The critics of England and Germany divided into two camps: those believing Johannes Brahms to be the successor to Beethoven and Richard Wagner to be a vainglorious fool, and those believing that Brahms was trivial and Wagner was the apotheosis of the romantic era. Shaw came down vigorously on the side of Wagner.

Wagner

vs.

Brahms

Some of his most entertaining comments bear on this contretemps. In an 1888 review of a performance of a Brahms piano concerto, he wrote: “Brahms’s music is at bottom only a prodigiously elaborated compound of incoherent reminiscences, and it is quite possible … to struggle with his music for an hour at a stretch without giving such an insight … as half a dozen bars of a sonata by Mozart.” Much later, in 1936, Shaw recognized that it was unnecessary to be anti-Brahms in order to be pro-Wagner. He footnoted that review in an anthology: “The above hasty (not to say silly) description of Brahms’s music will, I hope, be a warning to critics who know too much. … I had not yet got hold of the idiosyncratic Brahms. I apologize.”

In 1894, Shaw explained why it was incorrect to analyze Ring of the Nibelungen as an opera: “Wagner abandoned operatic composition altogether, and took to writing dramatic poems, and using all the resources of orchestral harmony and vocal tone to give them the utmost reality and intensity of expression, thereby producing … ‘music-drama,’ which is no more ‘reformed opera’ than a cathedral is a reformed stone quarry.” In 1898, Shaw published The Perfect Wagnerite, one of the classics of music criticism. The book contains commentary on both the musically revolutionary Ring and the politically revolutionary Richard Wagner (exiled for a time for his actions and sentiments).

Shaw himself was politically outspoken as a pacifist. In a 1919 article regarding the future of British music, he details the blow to the fine arts that was dealt by compulsory military service in the Great War of 1914-1918. “Consider what the state of music would have been if Sebastian Bach had been engaged in the Thirty Years War?” he asked.

The rest is history: accolades for his drama (the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature) and vilification for his socialism and pacifism. Yet these two aspects of George Bernard Shaw’s character were inextricably entwined. We could not have had one without the other.

Wagner (Clementine Stockar-Escher, 1853)

Brahms (Carl Jagemann c. 1860)

Arts Spectrum column #458

November 6, 2009

SKIP ROHDE: AN APPRECIATION

2009-10-30T12:01:00.001-04:00

Skip Rohde, who is currently serving reconstruction projects in Iraq as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is a many-faceted person. One facet is artistic insight. Another facet is an analytic mind. A third facet is a dedication to his country. A fourth facet is a commitment to serve humanity around the world. Each facet has an internal coherence that appears sufficient to describe a successful life, but we must consider all facets to fully appreciate this admirable artist.

Rohde’s artistic facet showed up early. Skip’s father was a career officer in the United States Navy. His parents found it necessary to provide him with butcher paper for his large-scale crayon artwork. Otherwise, his art would appear on the walls of the many houses they occupied.

Rohde’s analytic facet dominated when he chose to study engineering at Tennessee Technological University. His artistic facet resurfaced and he transferred to Memphis State University as a fine arts major, but he was uncomfortable with undisciplined “touchy-feely” instruction. His view of art is different. “Painting requires an analytic side, and then a lot of trusting your gut,” he has explained. He wanted the formal technique. He returned to Tennessee Tech and completed an engineering degree.

His patriotism surfaced upon graduation. He became a Naval officer, spent several years at sea and then transferred to Naval Intelligence. He studied Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California and later served in San Diego (where he met his wife Janis, also the child of a Navy family) and other locations including Misawa, Japan.

His service to humanity began during his 22-year naval career. He was a peacekeeper in Grenada and in Sarajevo. Reflecting on Sarajevo, Rohde says, “I think a lot about photojournalist James Nachtwey, who produces photos with a viewpoint. I want to make pictures that make a difference.” From Sarajevo is his “Grand Re-Opening,” demonstrating hope through the gaily-colored awnings at the outdoor restaurant, alongside jarring signs of artillery damage and a yellow tape indicating that the building in the left foreground might fall down at any moment.

Retiring in 1999, Skip and Janis moved to our area. Skip added a BFA in painting (UNC-Asheville) to his BS and MBA, and began working in a roomy and inviting studio in the River Arts District where he creates narrative art. An early critic of the Iraqi War (which he states was promoted through the flawed use of hand-picked raw intelligence against the advice of the professional intelligence community), he drew notice locally with his Bush League political satire series. At the same time, he visited local retirement communities and painted the Old Times series that depicts aging in America. “The Dancers” shows a real couple that met late in life. Dancing dangerously (she in heels) on the side of a craggy hill, the painting is an appreciation of late love.

All these facets then came together, when Rohde was asked to assist in redevelopment in Iraq. Not only did he go, but he later extended his tour and will not be back to stay in Western North Carolina until April 2010.

Recently, he visited home, wife and friends during a two-week furlough. I caught up with him dusting cobwebs from the large windows of his Cotton Mill studio, giving his two dogs the pleasure of visiting the location in which they have spent many happy hours, and stretching a couple of small format paintings that he had brought home in his luggage. He told me “It feels good to be slinging paint again.” One new painting shows a coffee shop with pastries in a display case and a sign “Please Keep Weapons Away from Glass.” An acrylic entitled “Waiting” depicts a woman and her son awaiting action on a visa request.

Commenting on the effect on his art of several years spent improving the infrastructure of a backward and corrupt country, Skip says, “My approach will not change at all, but my subject matter will.” He mused that after he returns in April for good, it will take months or even years for the full experience to be incorporated into his art.

Rohde’s art is direct, clear and concise, leaving little room for ambiguity. “But there is a subversive element that will always come through in my work,” he says. Subversive, perhaps, in the eyes of those who believe in “my country right or wrong,” but profoundly patriotic to those of us who believe in the constant struggle to preserve the best of American democracy while improving the lot of humanity elsewhere. Skip Rohde is a remarkable human being, performing remarkable service and creating remarkable art.

“Grand Re-Opening” 24”x30” oil on canvas © Skip Rohde

“The Dancers” 60”x40” oil on canvas © Skip Rohde

“Waiting” 31”x23” acrylic on canvas © Skip Rohde

Arts Spectrum column #457

October 30, 2009

FALL COLORS, ART AND ROCKING CHAIRS

2009-10-23T10:00:00.002-04:00

Western North Carolina may not be Vermont, but our fall colors are certainly superior to what most people see in their Southeastern hometowns. When “leaf time” arrives the bed-and-breakfasts, inns, restaurants and boutiques greet daytrippers from the Piedmont, the weekend crowd from neighboring states, and a liberal dose of tourists from Florida or further afield.

Not surprisingly, galleries and artists want to take commercial advantage of the added traffic of the “leafers.” So the Gallery Guild of Henderson County, in collaboration with the Arts Council of Henderson County, fixed the dates of their “Henderson County Open Studio Tour” as October 10-11 this year. That posed a problem for me, because the “Church Street Art and Craft Show” in downtown Waynesville was held on that Saturday and twenty-seven artists from Black Mountain, Swannanoa, Fairview and East Asheville participated in the “East of Asheville Studio Tour” on the same weekend.

I had to make a choice, and Henderson County won out this year. Having formerly lived in Hendersonville, I am familiar with many of the 26 artists and all ten of the galleries that participated in this year’s self-guided tour. It was too much for one day, so I hopped and skipped about, briefly touching base at familiar territory but also paying attention to new artists and artists who have made recent changes in location or style.

Dave Goldman is an interesting recent arrival in our area. Formerly an oceanographer, he left mid-career in order to paint full time. His work for several years has been primarily “imaginary landscapes and seascapes.” His work can be seen at Number 7 Arts, the co-operative art gallery in Brevard, and at the ®evolving Arts Gallery in Hendersonville. His landscapes are very well painted oils, but I find them a little commercial, intended to appeal to the buyers he meets at Southeastern art festivals that are a regular part of his sales effort. Personally, I was more attracted to his recent mixed media collages, which use darker colors and incorporate found objects such as chains and wires. They are edgier paintings that seem more personal to the artist.

Sue Fazio recently made a major commitment to encaustic painting. If you are familiar only with her earlier oil paintings, I recommend that you consult www.suefazio.com to see images of her recent work. Fazio is a painter who continues to show admirable development, each year incorporating more of her own sensibility into her painting.

I spent a liberal amount of time that Saturday taking in the quite wonderful “Chair Show” at Hand in Hand Gallery in Flat Rock. This exhibit will stay up through November 29 and is worth a trip. Fine crafters David Voorhees and Molly Sharp, owners of Hand in Hand, invited other crafters and selected artists to submit entries that incorporated the “chair” theme, and the resulting exhibit is full of works that are bubbling with humanity. There are practical chairs such as Mona Grabon’s “Painted Chair” and Kevin Felderhoff’s “Mountain Laurel and Rhododendron Root” bench. There are useless but charming chairs such as Del Holt’s “Beach Chair” filled with sand and an attached starfish. There are photographs of chairs such as Robin Smith’s “Primary Colors.” There is jewelry incorporating tiny swings and chairs by Pegi Pike and Laura Dahl. There are paintings such as Mike Gilboy’s “Power Nap.”

To my mind the finest entries are two “haiku” constructions by Henry Mitchell. Each construction incorporates wood pieces silhouetting a chair, and each includes a haiku, written out in stylized wooden letters that are in the Roman alphabet but shaped to appear like Asian characters. The chair silhouette itself also resembles a Kanji. In “Rocker” illustrated at the right, the second line of the haiku is “arc to arc from rest to rest,” a wonderful evocation of a rocking chair. I will leave the other two lines as an exercise for the reader to puzzle over.

That is what filled my day on Saturday, October 10. What about Sunday? I spent October 11 looking at the fall foliage up on the Blue Ridge Parkway. After all, I moved to Western North Carolina not just for the beauty of the arts but also for the beauty of nature.

“Living Well” © Dave Goldman

“Rocker” © Henry Mitchell

Arts Spectrum column #456

October 23, 2009

ECHO GALLERY TO HOST GRAND OPENING OCTOBER 23

2009-10-16T10:00:00.005-04:00

A new art gallery has just opened in Asheville. Entitled the Echo Gallery, it is a co-op run by its six founding members, all of whom are already well established in working studios in Asheville. These six now seek a retail presence for their work and that of invited guest artists.

Photo artist Laurie McCarriar’s “Reed Creek Flow” is shown to the right. This is typical of her works, which often dwell on the verge, at the interface between water and land, on the French Broad River and its tributaries. McCarriar is a River District Artist, as are painters Genie Maples and Barbara Fisher, both also represented at the new gallery. Ms. Fisher’s new paintings demonstrate a considerable break with her style of recent years, much less geometric and with interesting new gestures. This is an exciting departure by a talented established local artist. A new Fisher painting is shown below.

The other three founding members of Echo Gallery are fine crafters. Lori Theriault describes herself as a ceramist, while Anna Kolosike is distinctly a ceramic sculptor. Susan Webb Lee is a textile artist. The quality of their work is exemplified by “Tree Platter” by Theriault and “Words to Live By,” a recent piece by Lee, both shown accompanying this text.

Yes, a new art gallery has just opened in Asheville, and that is notable for two reasons.

Firstly, it is notable when a gallery opens in the current economy. Gallery retrenchment and gallery closures have been more frequent than gallery openings. Fine art and fine crafts are considered by most consumers to be discretionary purchases, and discretionary spending is definitely hurting in the wake of the financial downturn.

The current atmosphere of uncertainty in the United States is a fallout of the fiscal misconduct and greed demonstrated by leaders of our under-regulated financial system. I was recently in Toronto, where construction proceeds apace in both commercial and not-for-profit sectors. A recent $180M opera house with modernist architecture by Diamond and Schmitt and this year’s Frank Gehry-designed expansion of the Art Gallery of Ontario are the pride of the city. What is the difference between Toronto and, say, Miami? Canadian banks have much higher reserve requirements than American banks, were unable to play frivolously with our money, and therefore have been hurt far less than their American counterparts by the bursting bubble.

Secondly, it is notable that the new gallery is not downtown. The co-op members have chosen a very attractive storefront location in Town Square at Biltmore Park, near the upscale housing development. Whether such a location can generate the clientele and sales that a downtown gallery commands is an open question. The demographics of South Asheville suggest that Town Square may prove just as attractive as Biltmore Village for boutiques and galleries, and these have certainly proven viable in Biltmore Village.

However, tourists visit both downtown Asheville and Biltmore Village on a regular basis. Foot traffic is well established. Whether a new South Asheville shopping area can attract tourists and casual foot traffic, only time will tell. Being close to the new Barnes & Noble bookstore should help.

The Echo Gallery will have a Grand Opening on October 23 from 6:00 to 9:00 pm. The gallery is located at 8 Town Square Boulevard, Suite 160. Call (828) 687-7761 or visit their website at www.EchoAsheville.com for more information.

“Reed Creek Flow” © Laurie McCarriar

“Big Bang” © Barbara Fisher

“Tree Platter” © Lori Theriault

“Words to Live By” © Susan Webb Lee

Arts Spectrum column #455

October 16, 2009

AN APPRECIATION OF ALICIA DE LARROCHA AND WILMA FINE

2009-10-09T11:00:00.002-04:00

The research and writing that goes into New York Times obituaries is exceptional. They are capsule biographies. When someone dies whose path has crossed mine, I nearly always discover something new and interesting about her. So it was that I read with interest Allan Kozinn’s 600-word obit of Wilma Cozart Fine (who died in Harrison, NY on September 21 aged 82) and his much longer appreciation of Alicia de Larrocha (who died in Barcelona, Spain on September 25 aged 86). In the current sorry state of journalism, only the New York Times has the presence to use their music critics to write obituaries of people who figured in the musical world.

I met Alicia de Larrocha only once, although I heard her several times as soloist with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. Music Director David Zinman was on a quest to conduct every Mozart piano concerto. Over several years, he used many fine soloists. I remember Andras Schiff, Emmanuel Ax, Rudolf Firkušný, André Tchaikovsky, Peter Serkin and Gary Graffman playing Mozart. Others may have included Martha Argerich, Garrick Ohlsson and Andre-Michel Schub, but definitely included Alicia de Larrocha. On one visit, she asked to have dinner with board members and supporters of the orchestra. The “library” of the Rochester Club was the scene, and the diminutive de Larrocha (she was 4’9”) was a most gracious host. She circulated during cocktails, showing great personal interest in her eighteen guests and then held court at dinner. She was the sole focus.

As for her performances, Allan Kozinn states it well: “it was in music that demanded focus, compactness and subtle coloristic breadth that Ms. de Larrocha excelled. Her Mozart performances (were) carefully detailed and light in texture...” Many aficionados will remember her for her fine performances of the music of Albéniz and Granados; I treasure most my memories of her Mozart.

I never met Wilma Cozart Fine, but our paths crossed on the campus of the University of Minnesota. Mrs. Fine was a record producer who, along with her husband C. Robert Fine, ran the classical division of Mercury Records in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. Going to class, I would walk past the back of Northrup Memorial Auditorium, then the home of the Minneapolis Symphony (now the Minnesota Orchestra), and see several semitrailer trucks loaded with specialized equipment. I would know that Antal Dorati and his orchestra were recording.

Those were the days when Mercury became famous for the quality of its records, using the term “Living Presence” borrowed from a Howard Taubman record review that praised the Fines. A graduate of the University of North Texas in music education and business administration, Mrs. Fine had served as Antal Dorati’s personal secretary at the Dallas Symphony and then the Minneapolis Symphony. Maestro Dorati was highly interested in the technology of recording, and embraced the Fines’ use of new techniques that included microphone technology and the use of 35-millimeter motion picture film to replace magnetic tape, giving their master recordings a remarkable permanence.

In the 1990’s, Mrs. Fine came out of retirement in order to bring back to life some of her 1950’s vacuum tubes and interface the ancient front-end equipment to modern digital recording. She oversaw the remastering of the Mercury Living Presence recordings onto compact disc. We will always be indebted to Wilma Cozart Fine for the quality of her recordings of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony and Howard Hanson’s Eastman Rochester Orchestra as well as her Minneapolis recordings. The very best surviving master recordings of the 1950’s and 1960’s are those of Mercury; all other companies’ master recordings have faded with their magnetic tapes.

Arts Spectrum column #454
October 9, 2009

CREATIVE ENERGY IN ORIGINAL ART

2009-10-02T20:00:00.002-04:00

Last week’s column drew more comments than anything I have written in years. There seems no doubt among my readers that a Western North Carolina author will win the Nobel Prize in Literature or that Santa Fe will eventually be known as “the Asheville of the West” (although my forecast that visitors to New Mexico will have to bring their own water drew a wry comment that there would be an option of buying water from Coca-Cola). The bulk of the discussion focused on two of my many predictions:

1. The importance of viewing “original art” will diminish as copying technology is refined. Three-dimensional digital scanning will allow texture and brush strokes to be recorded in their entirety. A marking technology will be developed so that these “depth” features can be reproduced in prints.

2. The “genuine originals” of art will be placed in vaults, and will be of value only to scholars and the same collectors who value the handwritten manuscript of a novel.

Robin Rector Krupp pointed out the difficulty of reproducing folk art, where the original may be on tarpaper, corrugated cardboard or reclaimed shingles.

I got an email from Daniel Smith, who paints “hyper realistic original oils” and is represented at Red Step Artworks on 3rd Avenue just off historic Main Street in Hendersonville. He queried: “I wonder now how they will be able to "Capture/Scan" the energy that went into the painting. Although the 3-d repros will look, physically, like the original, some viewers, not knowing they are looking at a repro, will ‘feel’ that something is missing.”

This got me thinking about the noun “energy.” Artists use that word to denote “psychic energy” or “creative energy,” a concept that is alien to the scientist but meaningful to other artists. Perhaps creative energy taps into Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious” or perhaps it taps into the primordial quantum entanglement that caused everything in the universe to be part of one master wave function ever since the Big Bang. Whatever the mysterious entity is, there is little doubt that the act of creation leaves behind more than the marks on paper, board or canvas (or shingle, for that matter). We may as well call it creative energy; it is just as real in 2009 as the neutrino was when Wolfgang Pauli posited a particle with zero mass, zero charge and zero angular momentum in 1930.

Daniel and I had a conversation about creative energy. What is there that cannot be scanned? In his art, there is often a pencil drawing under the paint, and sometimes another painting under the new one. I thought of Willem de Kooning continuing to paint on a canvas that his fellow artists thought was finished, until eight months later every square millimeter of the image that they had admired had been covered over.

More profoundly, there can be a separation between conception and execution. The right brain has an artistic idea. The left brain participates in executing the idea, perhaps using freehand drawing or a grid to get started, and then later brush strokes, palette knife and fingers. Artistic energy was expended in the ideation, but more was added in the execution. We talked on, considering examples where the creative energy of two artists becomes combined. I cited Skip Rohde’s powerful “In Memoriam,” that uses Michelangelo’s “Pieta” as its model for an image of a dead soldier on an American flag on his mother’s lap.

Beyond these considerations is the simple fact that the artist has touched the canvas of the original. What did he leave there that cannot be reproduced? His energy. It is a mystery, but I accept it is real. I thank Daniel Smith for bringing this to my attention.

“Caboose” and “Robot” © Daniel Smith

A 35-YEAR FORECAST FOR THE ARTS

2009-09-25T17:37:00.005-04:00

In my first career, I conducted research and managed R&D in large corporations. Just six years after completing my doctorate, I was one of three editors for a study put together by Ford Motor Company. The other two editors were an economist who directed Ford’s Economics Office, and Frederick Hooven, a very farsighted engineer and inventor who became an important mentor to me. Fred also played piano and harpsichord.

The report on “The Future of Transportation” looked ahead more than thirty years to the year 2000. Responsible for scientific forecasts, I divided technology into three areas: materials, energy and information. I missed the importance of composite materials but my other two forecasts were substantially correct. I predicted that petroleum fuels would be dominant in our society until about 2000 but would have to be superseded by 2030. I predicted that the rapid development of electronics and software would lead to major advances in Information Technology. Advances in computation, communication and digital control would dominate our progress between 1964 and 2000.

The study led to Ford beginning research on sodium-sulfur batteries for electric cars. Believing my own forecast about IT, I shifted my attention to research on artificial intelligence, and then installed one of the first process control computers used in Ford’s manufacturing. Impatient with the slow pace of innovation in the auto industry, I then left for Xerox Corporation.

What does all this have to do with the arts in Western North Carolina? Having once been 67% correct in 35-year forecasts, I wondered if I could predict the 35-year future of the arts. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, so here are my major conclusions:

1. A Western North Carolina author will win the Nobel Prize in Literature sometime before 2040.

2. Regional theater will thrive with vitality and new plays, while Broadway will continue staging revivals and dull Andrew Lloyd Weber musicals.

3. “Fusion music” will gradually become mainstream in classical concerts. This genre’s composers combine the best of classical formalism with the highest quality bluegrass, rock or other popular style.

4. A center for serious bluegrass music, Southern Appalachia will become an important source of fusion music.

5. Audiences everywhere will continue to complain about “new music,” even though many of the composers they are complaining about have been dead for more than fifty years.

6. Asheville will in good faith continue to promote a new Performing Arts space with good acoustics, but the opening concert will not occur until 2020, five years after some resident music lover volunteers a naming gift of at least $18M.

7. So long as I perambulate about our area, I will continue to discover the lasting influence of Black Mountain College on every aspect of our cultural life.

8. The importance of viewing “original art” will diminish as copying technology is refined. Three-dimensional digital scanning will allow texture and brush strokes to be recorded in their entirety. Giclée printing (or another marking technology) will be developed so that these “depth” features can be reproduced in prints.

9. Beginning about 2020, prints will replace originals at major museums. The “genuine originals” of art will be placed in vaults, and will be of value only to scholars and the same collectors who value the handwritten manuscript of a novel.

10. Decentralization of the art world will be a result of these improvements in “copying” art and of enhanced communications. The importance of the current major arts centers such as New York and Los Angeles will be reduced.

11. The availability of water will result in a rise in importance of the Great Lakes states and other water-rich locations as business and cultural centers. Water scarcity will limit the expansion of the Southwest. By 2030, visitors to New Mexico will be required to bring their own water for drinking and bathing.

12. After 2035, Santa Fe will be called “the Asheville of the West.”

Have a happy future in the land of the French Broad River and do not complain about last week's rain.

Arts Spectrum column #452

September 25, 2009

VERONIKA HART'S IMAGINATIVE REALISM

2009-09-18T10:01:00.005-04:00

This column is based on one that originally appeared March 30, 2008 in the Hendersonville Times-News. With some modification, it appears here in order to introduce my broader on-line audience to Veronika Hart’s art and her revised website.

Veronika Hart is a relative newcomer to Western North Carolina. She formerly lived in the metropolitan New York City area, where she exhibited and won awards in the Connecticut suburbs of New Canaan and Greenwich, in Westchester County and in New York City proper. She has also exhibited in Washington, DC. About a dozen of her oils, including several borrowed from their current owners, were included in her first North Carolina exhibit, entitled “Africa: Portraits of Power,” at the YMI Cultural Center in Asheville in the spring of 2008.

Hart spent the first fifteen years of her life absorbing two cultures: Europe and Africa. The interior of her parents’ house in Tanganyika was furnished in a purely European fashion: European books, European art, European furniture. But the moment she went out the door, she was immersed in the sights, sounds and human interactions to be found in East Africa in the 1950’s and 1960’s. At age 15 she moved to Germany to study art. There she encountered for the first time motorcars, electric lights and - even more shocking - abstract expressionism. Feeling no kinship with abstract painting, she shifted her attention in Art School to illustration in order to continue with her realistic brush strokes.

Hart’s fine art pieces are mostly large format oil paintings on canvas, many 50” x 72” or larger, in a style that is termed “imaginative realism.” Drawing upon her experience as a medical illustrator in Europe and her later work creating illustrations for recordings, books and advertisements in New York, she continues to paint in the representational style that she has followed since she was a child in Tanganyika and Tanzania. But her fine art depicts in realistic detail scenes that are purely in her imagination, scenes of African people and animals in symbiotic relationships and sometimes flowing into each other. Her themes primarily reflect issues of contemporary and recent East Africa, themes of peaceful accord, of wildlife conservation, and of the strength of African women.

Painted from a photograph of the three Hart children with two of their African minders, “Ela and Omari” is photographically real, as are some other paintings that we saw last spring. But most thought provoking are those that stray from reality. “Race (Two children with Leopards)” and “Zebra Children” both comment on the threat of modern industrialization to traditional African wildlife. In “Zebra Children,” the two zebras meld into each other, and the two children, protecting the zebras, share body parts with the animals in a natural organic manner. “The Spirit of Mama Simba’s Children” shows a human mother and a lioness merging, protecting a human child and a lion cub that similarly merge.

An outstanding triptych is titled “Finding Balance.” Each panel addresses an environmental concern, and the lush painting of the cheetah, the elephants, and the African buffalo (being ridden by a powerful female) is a thing of joy.

If you missed the YMI exhibit last year, you will want to go online to her website at www.veronikahart.com (Veronika with a "k"), study her art and make arrangements to see it in person. If you did visit the YMI exhibit last year, the website will allow you to rekindle the joy you experienced when you first saw Veronika Hart’s stunning paintings.

Arts Spectrum column #451

September 18, 2009

MALAPROP'S HOSTS READING FROM A FINE ANTHOLOGY OF SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN POETRY

2009-09-11T16:00:00.003-04:00

Southern Appalachia is a vast region whose coves and bottomland were settled primarily by Scottish Protestants who chose to live on the fringes of civilization and accepted a harsh frontier life in order to have privacy and independence. These and other Celtic and English immigrants brought with them traditions of song and story telling. Only with the arrival of industry and improved transportation beginning in the 1930’s did the Appalachian culture begin to blend into a homogenized American culture. But there remain vestiges of the old Appalachian culture, including a body of unique poetry. After lecturing on “Appalachian Culture and Poetry” to a 1987 Elderhostel program in Highlands, NC, Marita Garin recognized the need for an anthology of poetry representative of our region.

Garin has spent the majority of her adult life in Appalachia. She raised her children in Johnson City, TN, and later lived in Hendersonville, NC before moving to her present home in Black Mountain in 1988. Between 1989 and 1993, she collected poetry but initial efforts to secure a publisher were unsuccessful. The project was put in storage until April 2004, when she had an epiphany. Listening to the howling wind at the Craggy Gardens Visitor’s Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway, she thought: “This is the sound of Appalachia, this is the voice of all the hardship, struggle, heartache, hard work, and determination that comes from living in these mountains.”

Thus inspired, she met success. In 2008, McFarland & Co. published Southern Appalachian Poetry; An Anthology of Works by 27 Poets. On Sunday, September 6, Malaprop's Bookstore in Asheville had a poetry reading during which Marita Garin told the saga of her editing and five poets each read three or four poems.

Don Johnson is a native of West Virginia who has long taught at East Tennessee State University. The ongoing theme of his poetry is “finding the way home.” Representative was “1946,” a haunting evocation of untreated Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome in a World War Two veteran from Appalachia.

Mary Kratt, now of Charlotte, NC, grew up in Beckley, WV. Much of her poetry is about Appalachian women. The audience favorite was “I’d Have Waited a Lifetime for You, Greer Garson” based on memories of a War Bond rally in Beckley during World War Two.

Gregory Dykes has East Tennessee roots that date from the 1790’s on both sides of his family. Growing up in Jonesborough, he later lived and taught in both Tennessee and Western North Carolina. His poem “It Is...” is a reflection about his grandfather. He states that “If a Southern Appalachian theme does exist ... it is the telescoping of cultural change within the region in the 20th century and the confusion, irony, and ... trauma which come with it.”

Hilda Downer would agree with that analysis. This North Carolinian who grew up in the town of Bandana read her intense poem “So much has come and gone that the Appalachians never existed.” The poem begins:
“There are people living now
fading in and out of composition classes
who have no memories
and no childhood
recorded in black and white.”
and ends with the line:
“We were too easy to kill and already extinct.”

The final poet at the reading was novelist and poet Robert Morgan, now at Cornell University where he heads the writing program. A native of Zirconia, NC, he has in recent years spent time back in Henderson County whenever he can. “Broomsedge” is a poem he wanted to write for as long as he can remember. The 21-line poem delivers a message spoken by the bright grass of worn-out fields. The vivid imagery includes lines such as:
“the broomsedge whisks and strokes bright
rumor from the air, a vowel,
a long slow ease of song below
the threshold of song, an ancient
lull almost unheard ...”

Other poets in the anthology include Fred Chappell, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Nancy Simpson and Ron Rash. Buy Southern Appalachian Poetry; An Anthology of Works by 27 Poets. You’ll like it.

Arts Spectrum column #450
September 11, 2009

THE GROUP OF SEVEN

2009-09-04T12:01:00.007-04:00

Last summer, I spent three weeks north of latitude 45 in the land of my birth, the “True North, strong and free” as Canada’s national anthem calls the country. One week of that trip was north of latitude 50, and stimulated much thought about the “Group of Seven” painters who were inspired by Tom Thomson. This year, I viewed and canoed some of the locations they painted, but also viewed and studied over 400 paintings by these eight painters at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the McMichael Canadian Collection. I could write a monograph about my reaction to their art, and perhaps I shall. In the meantime, I will provide the briefest of introductions for those unfamiliar with these very important painters.

Who were these people? They were artists in a new country who broke with the European tradition of tidy civilized landscapes (cultivated fields, tame rivers, oft-climbed Alpine mountains) to present distinctly Canadian wild landscapes. Backpacking, canoeing and using snowshoes when necessary, they went to previously unvisited locations to depict the light patterns filtered through struggling trees in the thin soil of Georgian Bay, Muskoka and Algonquin Park. They painted the grandeur of pre-Cambrian rock outcroppings in the Laurentian Plateau, the vast cliffs of formidable Lake Superior, the Algoma region, the Canadian Rockies and later the Arctic.

Tom Thomson (1877-1917) was a superb outdoorsman, a professional wilderness guide, and a self-taught painter whose bold brush strokes and use of undercolor distinguishes his painting. He inspired the others, but died in a canoeing mishap three years before the “Group of Seven” held its first exhibition, so is officially not one of them. The shed in which he lived has been moved to the grounds of the McMichael gallery. The illustration shows Thomson's "Byng Inlet, Georgian Bay."

Lawren Harris (1885-1970) was the most visionary of the Group. His paintings became more abstract and geometrical with time, particularly after his visits to the Canadian Rockies and the Arctic. In 1932, he discontinued representational painting altogether and became an abstract painter. Along with five other members of the Group of Seven, he is buried on the grounds of the McMichael Canadian Collection with (most appropriately) a triangular rock as a headstone. Harris was an heir to the Massey-Harris fortune. In 1914 he built the Studio Building on Severn Street in Toronto with six high-ceilinged north-lit studios. In this building (which still stands), some members of the Group of Seven lived and painted their large finished oils, working from field paintings that were most often on 12”x12” birch panels. Many of these panels are at the Art Gallery Ontario, where some can be compared with the resulting large final paintings. The illustration shows Harris's 1926 painting "North Shore, Lake Superior."

A.Y. Jackson (1882-1974) continued in the tradition of the Group of Seven long after the other members went separate ways. He was an inspiration to many Canadian artists and the subject of an excellent 1941 documentary film by the Canadian Film Board that shows the artist in his late fifties canoeing to his chosen site for fall colors and then painting in the Studio Building. That 18-minute film is shown at the McMichael gallery.

J.E.H. MacDonald (1873-1932) was born in England but had embraced his new country. As a senior designer at a Toronto graphic design firm, he was a shy leader who brought together several members of the Group. His death signaled the end of the period when they could be considered a group.

J.H. Varley (1881-1969) and Arthur Lismer (1885-1969) had also come to Canada from England, while Frank Carmichael (1890-1943) and Frank (Franz) Johnston (1888-1949) were born in Canada. Johnston moved to Winnipeg shortly after the 1920 show that gave the group its name, and was replaced by A.J. Casson (1898-1992). Edwin Holgate (1892-1977) and British Columbia artist Emily Carr (1871-1945) shared the inspiration of the Group, and Harris communicated extensively with Carr. "Serenity, Lake-of-the-Woods" is a 1922 painting by Johnston.

The importance of these artists cannot be overstated. Robert Blue (1946-1998) instructed his classes at the Art League of Los Angeles that to understand plein air, they must study the Group of Seven. Serious landscape painters should consider examining this large body of art in Toronto and visiting northern Ontario to paint on location as they did.

Several of the Group served as military artists in the Great War from 1914 to 1918. After their return, the Group rented a boxcar, fitted it out with living accommodation, and until 1923 positioned it on various railroad sidings in the Algoma region north of Sault Ste. Marie. From their boxcar, they would canoe or hike to the sites they wished to paint. The Algoma Central Railway now runs excursions to the Agawa Canyon, so modern artists need not live in a boxcar in order to paint where the Group of Seven painted. It may be a thousand miles from Asheville, but the trip is worthwhile.

Arts Spectrum column #449
September 4, 2009

FLUTES WITH SQUARE HOLES

2009-08-28T16:00:00.002-04:00

Usually I associate “square holes” with round pegs and not with flutes, but when Leonard Lopatin explained to me how he came to invent the SquareONE Flute, it made sense to me.

Lopatin is no amateur, either as a flute maker or as a flautist. After receiving his degree at the Juilliard School of Music, he promptly became a member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, playing piccolo and third flute. He might still be happily making music in New York City thirty years later had it not been for his temperament and his versatility. In addition to being a musician since childhood, Lenny had been a tinkerer. At age twelve, he had taken apart and put back together his first flute. As he told the British Flute Society’s journal, “It was only much later that I realized that this was not something all kids would think to do; it seemed normal to me.”

When he asked his teachers and instrument technicians why flutes were built the way they were, he was not satisfied with all the answers. By the time he was in high school, he was keeping a notebook with ideas related to flute design. In 1978, while touring with the Metropolitan Opera, he had the idea of square tone holes. The concept is appealing from the point of view of physical acoustics. With round holes, the vibrating column of air varies in length across the width of the hole. With square holes, the vibrating column of air has the same length at every location across the width of the hole. Ergo, a flute with square holes should resonate with a purer tone, require less effort by the flautist, and produce less extraneous noise.

There are many flute makers in the world, most of whom create flutes as custom instruments made to order. Since no flautists were ordering flutes with square holes, there was little chance that flute makers would be interested in testing his ideas. Lopatin himself would have to learn how to make square holes and square caps. A flute maker must be a combination of skilled silversmith, precision machinist, acoustical engineer and musician. Becoming one is normally done through a five-year apprenticeship.

After the 1978 Met season, Lopatin used the off-season to begin learning his new occupation. He worked in the newly opened shop of experienced flute maker Bickford Brannen and his brother Robert Brannen in Woburn, Massachusetts. Lopatin returned to New York for one more season at the Met, and then resigned to apprentice full-time at Brannen Brothers, a firm that is now renowned in the industry. Lopatin later struck out on his own as a flute maker, while performing occasionally with the Boston Pops and other groups. In 2002, he moved his machinery from the Boston area to Asheville, where the Lopatin Flute Company now occupies a studio at 122 Riverside Drive in the River Arts District.

Theobald Boehm was the flautist and inventor who changed almost everything between 1831 and 1847. The key system was radically altered. The bore became tapered rather than cylindrical. The walls were reduced in thickness and the hole placement was changed. Albert Cooper and Johan Brögger made minor adjustments in the twentieth century, but the instruments remained close to those of 1850. Lopatin’s instruments may represent the most radical change in the design of flutes since Boehm.

Lopatin makes flutes both of the traditional design and in the SquareONE design using the usual silver or gold alloys. He constructs instruments primarily on commission. He recently began making piccolos using the traditional African blackwood (known as grenadilla). Still a musician as well as an instrument maker, he plays second flute with the Asheville Symphony Orchestra and has issued two CD’s featuring performances on his flutes. Squarely in the Holiday Spirit! is a collection of songs and carols performed on SquareONE flutes. Squarely Baroque is a compilation featuring Bach, Telemann and other baroque composers. More information is available at www.lopatinflutes.com or at (828) 350-7762.

Arts Spectrum column #448

August 28, 2009

ARRINGTON WILLIAMS CONTINUES ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM IN THE RIVER ARTS DISTRICT OF ASHEVILLE

2009-08-21T07:00:00.001-04:00

What do Jackson Pollack, Black Mountain College and a total solar eclipse have in common? They were all major influences on the artistic development of Arrington Williams, one of Asheville’s River District Artists. His card reads “Arrington Williams, Abstract Paintings of Energy and Light” and his paintings convey a sense of light that arises from his life history.

John Arrington Williams’ early years in Virginia were idyllic. His father was headmaster of Christ Church School on the Rappahannock River and then the Blue Ridge School in Green County, Virginia, seven miles down from Skyline Drive in the Blue Ridge Mountains. At one school, he had access to boats. At the other, he had access to horses. Coming of age in the 1960’s, he checked out the University of South Carolina (one semester) and George Washington University (two semesters) before dropping out but staying in Washington taking studio courses at the Corcoran Gallery.

He studied with William Woodward (now a noted muralist whose works are included in the White House Permanent Collection) and Frank Wright (a figurative painter and printmaker who is now professor emeritus at George Washington University). From them, Williams learned drawing and representational painting. But it was Thomas Downing (1928-1985), who taught at the Corcoran for only three years (1965-68) who had the major influence on Williams’ future art. Downing was an exponent of color field painting, which had evolved out of Abstract Expressionism. Williams became enamored of the Washington Color School, Abstract Expressionism, and in particular Jackson Pollock. To this day, Arrington Williams’ paintings have paint splatters as a signature feature.

I have grown to expect the influence of Black Mountain College to show up everywhere in the cultural life of Western North Carolina. Tom Downing was a student and later a colleague of Kenneth Noland, co-founder of the Washington Color School of painters. Noland was a native of Asheville who had studied with Ilya Bolotowsky and Josef Albers at Black Mountain College beginning in 1946. So Arrington Williams has an artistic lineage that makes him a grandchild of Black Mountain College.

How does the full eclipse of the sun enter our narrative? On March 7, 1970 a total solar eclipse was observable in North America from Mexico to Newfoundland. Totality occurred along the coastline of the Carolinas and later Cape Cod. Along with some friends, Arrington Williams drove down the sand from Virginia Beach to Corolla, NC. In that era, there was no road to the northern limits of the Outer Banks. You had to drive through the dunes. His experience of seeing ribbons of light on the sand, of seeing the Corolla lighthouse automatically turn on, and of viewing with the naked eye the sun’s corona, were life-changing.

So works such as “Journey of Light,” the series of 5’x3’ paintings that he began in 1997 and that have been born slowly over time, had their genesis in Abstract Expressionism, Black Mountain College and a solar eclipse.

Arrington Williams is dedicated to gestural painting. He primarily uses acrylics, but his pigment choices and his use of clear glaze overcoatings make the finished paintings resemble oil paintings. He had lived in England (where he met his wife) and in the Washington area and elsewhere before settling in Asheville in 1998. He shared studio space in the River Arts District with prolific artist T.L. Lange until Lange’s death in 2001 at age 36. Williams returned to the River Arts District with his own studio (#230 Riverview Station) at 191 Lyman Street. His studio is open most Fridays or by appointment. He can be reached at (828) 319-9094. Further information may be found at his website www.arringtonwilliams.com.

Rose Elegante, Light 38 & Fantasy Dream 1 © Arrington Williams

Arts Spectrum column #447

August 21, 2009

REMINISCENCES OF THE BREVARD MUSIC CENTER’S 2009 FESTIVAL

2009-08-14T11:00:00.006-04:00

After the Brevard Music Festival closes, it takes a week for me to come down from Cloud Nine and make a summary assessment of the season. The seven weeks are a supercharged time period, during which wandering the campus brings me into contact with many starry-eyed young musicians, some experiencing for the first time a community of like-minded and like-talented peers. Before discussing some trends at Brevard that are harbingers of things to come, I want to recall the high points of my season:

• The all-student Brevard Sinfonia nailing its performance of Edward Elgar’s “Enigma Variations” under the baton of Grant Llewellyn.

• Brandon Garbot playing Saint-Saëns’ “Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso.” Garbot, a fifteen-year-old violinist from Portland, Oregon, was one of five winners of the Jan & Beattie Wood Concerto Competition for the second year in a row.

• Keith Lockhart conducting Tchaikovsky’s Symphony #5 with the Brevard Sinfonia and Symphony #6 with the BMC Orchestra.

• A concert in which the three living BMC musical directors (Henry Janiec, David Effron and Keith Lockhart) each conducted one work.

• A pair of chamber music performances at the Porter Center: William Preucil and Bruce Murray playing Beethoven’s "Kreutzer Sonata" and five days later Andrés Díaz playing Zoltán Kodály’s "Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello."

Olga Kern was spectacular at the sold-out season finale playing the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto, but a leading soloist playing her signature repertoire with a first-rate orchestra is not unique to the Brevard Music Center. Unique to a first-rate training music festival are the sort of events listed above, and the emotions surrounding them. Following the Elgar performance, the student orchestral musicians swarmed their conductor, exultant in knowledge of how well they had performed and feeling a connection with Maestro Llewellyn. During the two faculty chamber music recitals mentioned above, you were aware of the rapt attention paid by the many students in the audience.

I heard Brandon Garbot not only in the concerto competition but also sharing concerto honors with Annie Bender in front of the string group I Musici di Brevard. Fourteen youth from thirteen states and China comprised I Musici this year. That geographic diversity was testimony to how this formerly regional teaching festival has become a national and international destination of the highest caliber.

I regret having missed hearing Tchaikovsky's Symphony #4 with the Transylvania Symphony Orchestra. Scheduling the three most important Tchaikovsky symphonies with the three orchestras at BMC is a sign of the individual stamp Maestro Lockhart is putting on his tenure as Music Advisor. This integrated planning provides his personal direction to both the high school program and the conservatory/university program.

The “three music directors” concert was the first time in history that a Brevard Music Center concert was broadcast live on radio. WDAV 89.9 Classical Public Radio (affiliated with Davidson College) set up broadcast facilities for that week. Recently appointed WDAV General Manager Benjamin K. Roe assured me that they would be back in the future. This station shows signs of evolving into a regional powerhouse. In addition to its round-the-clock broadcasting of classical music, WDAV provides real-time “Internet streaming” and on-demand stored program material. Archival material, including the BMC concert and interviews with the three maestros, can be found at www.wdav.org.

My Classical Voice of North Carolina colleague Laura McDowell and I each reviewed seven events during the 45 days that the Brevard Music Festival lasted. You may find all these reviews at cvnc.org/calendar/BMC-2009reviews.html.

Arts Spectrum column #446
August 14, 2009

LIVE CONCERTS WILL CONTINUE; CANNED MUSIC WILL CHANGE

2009-08-07T12:01:00.001-04:00

Live performances will always occupy a treasured place in my life. A live concert has immediacy, transience and a sense of risk that cannot be recorded or transmitted. During the best live performances, you share with others in the audience an ephemeral moment. You sense a personal contact with the performer.

Anyone who has seen Vladimir Horowitz come onto a stage will know what I mean. Looking out into the audience, Horowitz seemed to be sizing us up, saying to himself “Who’s here? What kind of people are these? How shall I play Mozart tonight for them?” Seeing him create the illusion of a piano chord that swells in volume (an impossibility on a hammered instrument), One knew that this was not added electronically during an editing session but rather was a result of the incredible control he had over individual fingers. Horowitz would strike the top note of a chord infinitesimally before the other notes in order to create this illusion of a chord that increases in volume after the attack.

Clearly we benefit from the invention of recording technology, broadcasting technology and the Internet. I grew up at a time when radios in Canada were licensed, revenues went to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Lorne Greene was the “Voice of Doom” on the evening news broadcasts. In the 1940’s, each major city in Canada had its own CBC Symphony Orchestra, perhaps not as prestigious as Toscanini’s NBC Symphony Orchestra but nevertheless a source of broadcasts that introduced me to the orchestral repertoire.

When I was a child, 78-rpm records of 12” diameter lasted six minutes per side and very few operas had even been put on record. The shellac discs were easily broken, and “record changers” often marred the surfaces by dropping needles carelessly onto the grooved surfaces. My family owned an album of “Favorite Piano Concertos” with twelve-minute segments from the first movements of each of eight concertos. I treasured these glimpses of repertoire that I would perhaps never hear live.

Then came the birth of Long Playing records. The floodgates opened. I bought Béla Bartók’s second piano concerto after listening to it in Schmitt’s Music Store in Minneapolis. (In those days, you were allowed to go into a booth and preview records.) I bought János Starker’s recording of Zoltán Kodály’s “Sonata for Solo Cello.” I had happily discovered twentieth-century Hungarian music.

After being educated as a physicist, I participated in research on early laser materials (dilute ruby), never imagining that we would one day see low-cost lasers reading music from the surfaces of optical discs. The development of the Compact Disc made my LP record collection obsolete, but I now had room for fifteen Wagner opera recordings (including two Rings) to replace my previous six recordings on LP.

Fast forward to the present. The Compact Disc is vanishing as a mass distribution format. Direct file transfer from the Internet will become the dominant technology for the dissemination of music to the mass market. The communication industry seeks maximum revenue and profit, not maximum quality. The mass market (popular music) accepts MP3 audio quality (MPEG Layer-3 format with a data compression ratio of ten to one). However, MP-3 file quality is unacceptable for classical music, since the recordings are audibly inferior to existing CDs. Other formats with less compressed data can be free of audible loss, but as yet the infrastructure is lacking for easy distribution, and there is still doubt about the ultimate digital format. Standards and infrastructure will arrive. Classical CD’s will then become at best a niche market of private label discs sold by mail or after concerts by the musicians involved.

And what of broadcasting? After the sale by the New York Times of WQXR’s spot on the radio dial, New York City will have only one radio station dedicated to classical music, a possibility once unthinkable. NPR affiliate WNYC plans to continue WQXR high on the dial with classical music while emphasizing more talk show content on WNYC.

All of us may soon find our traditional sources of classical music drying up. Whether we want to or not, in the future we will depend upon the Internet for broadcast classical music and to buy recordings. More about this in a future column.

Arts Spectrum column #445

August 7, 2009

"I SOLISTI DI BREVARD" IN CONCERT

2009-07-31T15:00:00.002-04:00

The string ensemble entitled I Solisti di Brevard has a name modeled after the Italian chamber orchestra I Solisti Veneti, founded in Padua in 1959 by Claudio Scimone and famed for its performance of baroque music. Every year since Brevard Music Center initiated I Solisti di Brevard in 2004, I get excited thinking about their annual concert, which always comes towards the end of the seven-week festival. This year, the event will be on Monday, August 3 at the Porter Center of Brevard College.

The ensemble is made up of string players under eighteen years of age, and is a testimony to the quality of the younger players at Brevard. The creation of I Solisti di Brevard was a part of Brevard Music Center’s added emphasis on chamber music and small ensembles. In 2004, Artistic Director David Effron was expanding chamber music activities as a third category, supplementing the existing orchestral and operatic endeavors. As in all activities at Brevard Music Center, the intent is to give young music students a taste of the professional life. The life of a modern serious musician often involves ensembles much smaller than the classic symphony orchestra or even the pit orchestra of an opera house. I Solisti di Brevard not only supplements their experience with larger ensembles, it has become an ensemble of prestige for young string players.

Each summer after three weeks at Brevard Music Center, I Solisti di Brevard musicians are selected through an audition process. The result is a remarkably capable group of twenty to twenty-four players. The shape of a typical orchestra is 6 first violins, 5 second violins, 4 violas, 3 or 4 cellos, 2 double basses and a harpsichord. Each string section is less than half the size of the corresponding section of a symphony orchestra.

I Solisti di Brevard presents a concert of baroque and classical music with a focus on the period of the High German baroque. Past programs have included Alessandro Scarlatti, Arcangelo Corelli, Antonio Vivaldi, Heinrich Ignaz Biber and George Frederick Handel as well as Johann Sebastian Bach. One year the entire program was Bach.

The keyboardist is generally not chosen from the High School Division of the Brevard Music Center. In past years, members of the faculty and talented older BMC students provide that continuo. Various string and keyboard faculty have also soloed with the group, as have vocalists, although some solo parts have been handled by the young members themselves.

This chamber orchestra is made up of the very best string players of high school age who are at Brevard for the summer, and their verve and excitement are palpable. Generally, they are playing “standards” of the baroque repertoire, but they are meeting the works for the first time. You get a demonstration of how exciting great music is to a young mind. Seldom do you get such a fresh look at the works that stand as one of the milestones of Western music.

While large orchestral forces can compete with nature at the outdoor Whittington-Pfohl Auditorium, a chamber orchestra is heard better inside and in a more intimate hall. You will know where to find me on Monday: at the Porter Center cheering on I Solisti di Brevard.

Arts Spectrum column #444

July 31, 2009

SOLOISTS OF TOMORROW AT BREVARD

2009-07-24T08:00:00.001-04:00

At the Whittington-Pfohl Auditorium of the Brevard Music Center on Sunday evening, July 19, the finals of the Jan & Beattie Wood Concerto Competition were held. Each of twelve finalists performed a single movement of a concerto, accompanied by piano. These twelve had won out among 74 instrumental students who went through the preliminary judging. At the end of the evening a blue ribbon panel (Keith Lockhart, Bruce Murray and Ken Lam) selected five musicians who will perform their works again, this time with orchestra. The winners also receive a scholarship for next summer’s Brevard Music Center.

Asheville artist Robin Rector Krupp attended with me. Among her artistic talents is the ability to do quick sketches, and five of her illustrations accompany this report, showing some of the competitors in action.

The order in which the competitors performed was chosen by lot. First up was Chia-Jung Lee playing Carl Nielsen’s Flute Concerto, one of the finest works in the recent flute repertoire. Rudy Chen then performed Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto #3, my personal favorite from the twentieth century. Midori Samson (a high school student) played Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto. Hedy Lee gave us Rachmaninoff’s lyrical Piano Concerto #2.

The fifth musician to take the stage was pianist Xiao Wang performing the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s monumental Piano Concerto #2. Robin Krupp’s sketch caught the posture, the power and the intensity of this pianist. Next, Alex Samawicz played the well-known Haydn Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra.

After a brief intermission, Brandon Garbot presented Camille Saint-Saëns’ virtuosic Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. Following Garbot was David Hagee, performing the Thom Ritter George Concerto for Bass Trombone. High school age violinist Annie Bender chose the third movement of Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra.

We were into the home stretch with just three more musicians to hear from, and the audience had lost none of its enthusiasm. Claire Mashburn played Charles Tomlinson Griffes’ Poem for Flute and Orchestra. Yifei Deng gave us the William Walton Concerto for Viola and Orchestra. High schooler Joshua Paulus finished the evening with the Mozart Concerto #4 for French Horn and Orchestra.

Each year, this free concert provides an opportunity to hear some of the best instrumental students at the Brevard Music Center, and each year more BMC fans join the large number of students who attend. Very few left without waiting to hear the judges’ decision. And the winners were (in alphabetical order):

• Yifei Deng, viola
• Brandon Garbot, violin
• David Hagee, bass trombone
• Claire Mashburn, flute
• Xiao Wang, piano

My personal favorite among these was fifteen-year-old Brandon Garbot, who was also one of last year’s winners in the Jan & Beattie Wood Concerto Competition. He has been concertmaster of the Portland (OR) Youth Philharmonic Orchestra for the last three years, and during this summer’s Brevard Music Festival he studied with William Preucil, concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra. He is an impressive young violinist that I expect we shall hear more from.

That said, I want to hear again the Thom Ritter George Concerto for Bass Trombone, an interesting work by the prolific but little-known American composer. That concerto was written early in his career when Dr. George studied at Eastman School of Music with Wayne Barlow and Bernard Rogers. It was about the time that ESM professor Emory Remington revolutionized orchestral trombone. Remington designed a large bore orchestral trombone and taught many of the mid-century’s finest orchestral trombone players. This concerto was surely influenced by the “trombone aura” surrounding Remington at Eastman, and should be heard more often.

Deng, Garbot, Hagee, Mashburn and Wang will perform their concerto movements with the BMC Orchestra under conductor Ken Lam in a concert (not free) that will begin at 7:30 pm on Friday, July 31. I look forward to hearing the five winners perform but will miss hearing the other seven. They were all very good. Think of it: they had one chance in five of passing the audition to come to Brevard in the first place, then one chance in six of beating out the competition to become a finalist. These are our “Soloists of Tomorrow,” as the concert has been dubbed.

Arts Spectrum column #443

July 24, 2009

THE DÍAZ BROTHERS VISIT BREVARD

2009-07-17T11:00:00.003-04:00

Heredity has been known to play a role in musical ability. Think of the minor composer J. Michael Haydn who was the younger brother of Franz Joseph Haydn, or Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, the sister of Felix Mendelssohn. Among performers, think of Peter Serkin, the son of Rudolf Serkin, or the four Chicago-born siblings Timothy, Janet, Phillip and David Ying who for twenty years comprised the Ying Quartet, now the quartet-in-residence at the Eastman School of Music. (Timothy Ying played his last concert with the quartet on April 26 of this year. The new first violinist is Frank Huang.)

In 1972, the Chilean violist Manuel Díaz moved his family to the United States where he began a long tenure with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. His family included two sons. In another example of talent abounding in one family, Roberto studied viola while Andrés studied the violoncello. They are now at the peak of successful careers as performers and educators, but once again took time out of their busy schedules to visit Brevard Music Festival. Andrés Díaz delivered a chamber music concert last Monday and Roberto Díaz followed suit on Wednesday. The Díaz brothers are always an inspiration for the Brevard Music Center students. During the summer of 2001, Andrés performed the world premiere of Gunther Schuller’s "Concerto for Cello and Orchestra" in Brevard, and for several summers the Music Center welcomed the Díaz String Trio, in which violinist Andrés Cárdenes joins Andrés and Roberto.

Andrés Díaz is Associate Professor of Music at Southern Methodist University. For fifteen years, he pursued an active solo career touring with the late collaborative pianist Samuel Sanders (who was also the favorite pianist of cellists Leonard Rose, Yo-Yo Ma, Lynn Harrell, Jacqueline du Pre and Mstislav Rostropovich). He collaborated with BMC faculty for two works on Monday, July 13, but the feature of his chamber concert at the Porter Center was Zoltán Kodály’s “Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello (Op. 8).” A János Starker recording of this work has been in my collection for 56 years (first an LP bought in 1953, then a CD of a 1970 performance). The work is unfamiliar to many, not surprising since it is so difficult and seldom performed. The cello strings are “detuned” to A, D, F# and B, allowing the open strings to provide a “drone” in this 1915 composition, which is modal, quotes Hungarian folk tunes and incorporates astonishing double stopping.

Roberto Díaz is now President of the Curtis Institute of Music, where he joined the faculty in 2000. He was principal viola of the National Symphony under Mstislav Rostropovich, and previously played in the Boston Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra. For the first half of his Brevard Music Center appearance this year, he was accompanied by a talented young Curtis School piano student, Andrew Tyson, who showed great sensitivity in de Falla and Brahms selections. Following intermission, Roberto became second viola to Mary Persin when he joined the Biava String Quartet to play Mozart’s "String Quintet in G minor, K. 516."

Before intermission, Díaz and Tyson departed from the printed program to play a short piece in memory of “the patron saint of Brevard,” Linda Candler. The work was a transcription of a song Beau Soir by Claude Debussy, which exhorts one to enjoy life “For we are going on, as this stream goes on: The stream to the sea, we to the grave.” A most appropriate sentiment.

Roberto Díaz was playing the same Amati viola that was used for the concert career of famed violist William Primrose. Primrose was a teacher of Manuel Díaz, who in turn was Roberto Díaz’ first viola instructor. It is all in the family, indeed.

Arts Spectrum column #442

July 17, 2009

BEN LONG’S FIRST AMERICAN FRESCOES

2009-07-10T09:00:00.001-04:00

The Episcopal Parish of the Holy Communion in North Carolina’s “High Country” has an interesting parish history that I will leave you to read elsewhere. I will discuss only the Ben Long frescoes that have caused this parish’s two tiny church buildings - Holy Trinity (Glendale Springs) and St. Mary’s (West Jefferson) – to become known as the “Churches of the Frescoes.”

Benjamin F. Long IV was born in Texas, but grew up in Statesville, NC. He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who later studied at the Art Students League in New York City. Somewhat later, he moved to Florence, Italy to apprentice himself to Pietro Annigoni, following in the footsteps of his grandfather McKendree Robbins Long (1888-1976), who also attended the Art Students League and then studied academic painting in Europe.

Ben Long’s career took an unexpected twist when he met Pietro Annigoni. The Italian painter in oils had shifted his attention to the ancient medium of fresco. Long worked with Annigoni for almost eight years, learning fresco painting and practicing oil painting on his own. Following his apprenticeship, he worked in Europe for a while. In 1980, he relocated to Asheville, NC and since then has divided his time between Europe and America.

I have not had the privilege of seeing Long’s European frescoes, but his North Carolina works show keen artistic insight as well as technical mastery. To date, close to twenty frescoes have been completed in our state, in Charlotte, Morganton, Crossnore, Wilkesboro, Statesville and Montreat. But his first four North Carolina frescoes, now steeped in thirty years of aging, are perhaps the most impressive.

Over the Fourth of July weekend, I revisited the three frescoes in St. Mary’s Episcopal Church and “The Last Supper” at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church. This visit reinforced my previous belief that these are world-class art, combining a modern sensibility with an ancient satisfying medium.

"Mary Great With Child” is on a panel to the left of the altar in St. Mary’s. The model was a local young woman who is portrayed above a very low horizon, with the moon eclipsing the sun above her head, the feminine blocking out the masculine. “John the Baptist” is on a panel to the right of the altar. Again the horizon is low, and the dove (the Holy Spirit) appears above his head. A bumblebee that annoyed the young artist (then in his twenties) and his assistants is immortalized in the lower right corner.

“The Mystery of Faith” was created directly on the wall behind the St. Mary’s altar. The crucified Christ is depicted in realism while the risen Christ is shown in an aethereal fashion that defies classification. (The figure has dreadlocks and is of uncertain racial origin.) The third part of the mystery, that “Christ will come again,” is indicated through mysterious symbolism (apparent upon close inspection only) that hints at our lack of understanding of the exact meaning of the liturgy.

Over at Holy Trinity, Long clearly did not feel intimidated by the fact that Michelangelo had created a “Last Supper.” The recorded narrative that the church provides as interpretation of the painting adds a richness to the characterization of each of the disciples (for whom local people modeled). The other details, spilling out of the corners of the painting, are provocative. And the eyes of St. Thomas (on the far right end of the table) follow you wherever you go, doubting your faith and your fidelity. This is a modern narrative painting of the first order.

Personally, I prefer St. Mary’s for its total artistic effect. With light from side windows that are clear glass and a branch-like leading, the altar area is an aesthetically appealing space, complemented by the art in the remainder of the church. But take the trip for yourself and make up your own mind.

Arts Spectrum column #441

July 10, 2009

BREVARD MUSIC CENTER OPENS ITS SEVEN-WEEK SEASON

2009-07-03T09:00:00.004-04:00

Lovers of classical music in Western North Carolina take a deep breath when late June arrives. Each year, the Brevard Music Center Institute and Festival presents a tightly compressed seven-week extravaganza of music. Throughout its 73-year history, the organization has been dedicated to providing young musicians with a superior educational experience through exposure to top-notch teachers and an introduction to the hectic life of a professional musician.

BMC’s continuity of purpose has been aided by the continuity of its direction. BMC has had only four Artistic Directors. James Christian Pfohl began the enterprise in Charlotte in 1936, and then in 1945 moved it to Brevard where it was renamed the Brevard Music Center. Henry Janiec of Converse College succeeded Pfohl in 1964, and in 33 years as director developed an outstanding regional summer teaching institute with a particularly strong operatic program. David Effron of Indiana University was Artistic Director from 1997 to 2007, during which time BMC further strengthened its orchestral program, drew more students from across the nation and internationally, and began a new chamber music program alongside the orchestral and operatic programs. Beginning last season Keith Lockhart, the noted conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra and the Utah Symphony, has taken over the direction.

Evidence of the growing status of BMC can be found in two statistical measures. Only one student out of each five applicants was accepted this year. The accepted students came from forty-one states and ten foreign countries. The 245 students in the college division and the 176 students in the high school division are truly an exceptional group of young musicians.

This is the tenth consecutive year that I have attended the opening orchestral concert of the Brevard Music Center’s seven-week season. Each year, I am amazed at how quickly the Brevard Music Center Orchestra develops a sense of tight ensemble, and June 26 of this year was no exception. Two-thirds of the BMC Orchestra are college division students, the other one-third are faculty. For people not used to performing together as an ensemble, these musicians from all over rise to high standards in an extremely short time. Their quality is a tribute to the conservatories and universities, and especially to these individual students, their drive and dedication.

Violinists of the Transylvania Symphony Orchestra

rehearsing at the Brevard Music Center

The seven weeks are jam-packed with concerts. In addition to the BMC Orchestra, concerts will feature all-student ensembles: the Brevard Sinfonia (college age), the Transylvania Symphony Orchestra (high school), the Transylvania Symphonic Band (high school wind and percussion) and I Solisti di Brevard (high school string players). The season contains seventeen ticketed concerts at the Whittington-Pfohl Auditorium (an outdoor venue with permanent seating under a roof) and eleven chamber music concerts at the acoustically fine Porter Center of Brevard College. In addition, the beautiful 180-acre campus is home to numerous free events.

The string ensemble entitled I Solisti di Brevard has a name modeled after the famous Italian chamber orchestra I Solisti Veneti, founded in Padua in 1959 by Claudio Scimone and famed for its performance of Italian and other baroque music. The players are chosen after the first few weeks, and their concert (this year scheduled at the Porter Center on Monday, August 3) is one that I always look forward to. These young people play with obvious joy, and their zest makes the performance doubly enjoyable.

While the public performances are subordinate to Brevard Music Center’s educational mission, BMC provides some of the finest musical performances of the entire year in Western North Carolina. Even if the season did not include outstanding conductors (Lockhart, Effron and Janiec) and famous guest artists (William Preucil, Andrés Diaz, Roberto Diaz and Olga Kern), these concerts, or at least some of them, should be on your “must attend” list. The website is http://www.brevardmusic.org/

Arts Spectrum column #440

July 3, 2009

®EVOLVING ARTS GALLERY OPENS IN HENDERSONVILLE

2009-06-26T08:00:00.001-04:00

Julie Spalla and David Lookingbill previously operated Desert Moon Designs in Asheville’s River Arts District. Their decision to move their working studios and sales gallery to a high-ceilinged historic building at 511 North Main Street in Hendersonville was done with forethought and with carefully crafted guidelines for the operation of the gallery and policy for other artists seeking representation there.

The ®evolving Arts Gallery is a welcome addition to Hendersonville, which has seen galleries closing, changing mission, retrenching, or departing Main Street far too often in recent years. Touchstone Gallery has closed, as has Divine Stained Glass Studio. Silver Fox Gallery has deemphasized their fine art and now emphasizes high quality home decor. Wickwire Gallery closed their second location, reducing the amount of wall space for large-format paintings. Conn-Artist Studios gave up their second-floor toehold on Main Street in order to move a few miles south. In the midst of all these retrenchments, a bright new gallery gladdens the heart just by its very existence and the confidence in the future that the owners have shown.

The ®evolving Arts Gallery will accept only original art created within the last two years. No work of fine art will be shown that is produced in giclée or other prints. No work of fine craft will be shown that is produced in quantity. Initial emphasis will be on local and regional artists, although artists from other parts of the country will be considered. As a matter of policy, the gallery will include emerging and mid-career as well as established contemporary artists.

Attending the June 5 opening reception, one found an inviting space that can be rented to host performing arts events for small audiences. Also planned are special events for the community’s non-profit agencies. The space is uncrowded, and the layout and decor provide good viewing of the sculptures, fine crafts and paintings that constitute the opening exhibition.

Several of the artists and crafters already in the gallery were colleagues of Spalla and Lookingbill during their days in the River Arts District. Ceramic artists include Jenny Mastin and Joey Sheehan, while Barbara L. Perez has clay and bronze sculptures on display. Paintings by Fleta Monaghan and Ralston Fox Smith of the RAD are also on display.

I enjoyed other artists whose work is new to me. Works by Michelle Davis Petelinz included “Sinuous Rhythms II,” composed through applying polymer clay to an 18” bamboo bowl and then painting with acrylic and ink. Jeff Pittman paints familiar landscapes in both acrylic and oil: “Sam’s Gap View” and “Sky over Cold Mountain” were prominently displayed near the entrance. Ila Seltzer’s work in cotton batik was a revelation.

The owners are themselves artists. Julie Spalla’s paintings and sculpture currently on exhibit include the mixed media “Flight” illustrated on the left.

Gallery director Spalla and Assistant Director Lookingbill are intuitive, drawing upon their Native American background to build an atmosphere that promises collaboration with artists fortunate enough to be represented. A sense of spirituality and reverence guides every aspect of this venture. For example, the gallery starts each day with a thought, quote, meditation or intention to guide the actions of the owners and the staff.

The ®evolving Arts Gallery is open Monday through Saturday beginning at 11:00 a.m., closing at 6:00 p.m. except for Fridays when they will stay open until 8:00 p.m. Their website is only partially available as yet at http://therevolvingartsgallery.com/

Arts Spectrum column #439

June 26, 2009

MALE ARTIST’S MODEL TELLS ALL

2009-06-19T09:30:00.004-04:00

I had never thought about being a celebrity. I had thought even less about being an artist’s model. But when Connie Vlahoulis asked me to be a “celebrity model” for the portrait class that was being taught at the Conn-Artist Studio by Ruth Goldsborough, how could I refuse? I donned my Cornell University doctoral robes for the occasion. As I am not now in academia, I have little occasion to display the European style velvet cap, the rich red robe with blue chevrons and the hood with its flash of carnelian and white. Playing “dress up” was part of the attraction for me.

Ruth Goldsborough’s instructional style is an interesting mix of advice, demonstration, exhortation and example. She spent much of the class time roaming the room and giving specific advice to each of the seven students about their unique problems. I heard “If you put the eyes that far apart, you will not be able to get his shoulders on the page,” “think about the collar” and “just a bit of color in the eye,” and on my short breaks was able to see the value of her advice. She was heading off problems before they arose. Her advice is sometimes combined with demonstration, through a sketch quickly done in pencil to show a student some aspect of composition that he has missed.

Occasionally, she teaches by exhortation. She held up a drawing of a skull and inquired whether all of the students had done their homework of drawing that skull. She pointed out that it is the skull that gives the shape and character to the face, and that if you don’t thoroughly understand the bones, you can’t really paint a face.

Despite spending so much time in student interaction, Ruth was also teaching by example, with her own easel and her own portrait underway. She used pastel to produce a nearly finished work during the three-hour class. The students were allowed to use whichever medium they wished. Photographs were taken from the locations of each of the seven student easels, so that reference images of the model could be taken home in order to finish the student work.

How do I react to my first experience as an artist’s model? Some other recent “celebrity models” found holding a pose for fifteen minutes at a time for three hours to be difficult, so I planned ahead. Knowing that I would have to hold my head and eyes still, I needed something to think about that would not require frequent reading. I took with me a poem that I could ponder, a sestina that I am not satisfied with. While it is not clear that I will ever be satisfied with my efforts in this form, I made some progress: I decided to replace one of the six key words with a different word. The thought that went into the poetry kept me in an almost-meditative state, and I was complimented on my posing. Whether or not I am successful as a celebrity, at least I am successful as an artist’s model.

For more about courses at the Conn-Artist Studio, 611 Greenville Highway, Hendersonville NC, consult their website at http://www.conn-artist.com/

I should mention Goldsborough’s other credentials. A painter since her teens, she has developed a sure technique with pencil, charcoal, oil, watercolor or pastel. After supporting herself by her art for over a half century, she is still available as a portrait painter, being one of the 75 artists represented by The Portrait Source, located in “Little Rainbow Row” at 2760 Greenville Highway, Flat Rock, NC (http://www.theportraitsource.com/). Ruth is probably the only artist in that lineup who is 91 years old.

Arts Spectrum column #438

June 19, 2009

RIVER DISTRICT ARTIST AND ART EDUCATOR FLETA MONAGHAN

2009-06-12T08:00:00.007-04:00

The semi-annual Studio Stroll in Asheville's River Arts District occurs this weekend. During most of the year, many River District Artists have very limited hours or are available only by appointment. These are their working studios and they can’t drop their brushes to host casual visitors. But on the second weekends of June and November, every working studio in the area opens its doors. This year more than 110 fine artists and fine crafters will be expecting company at eight sites that were formerly warehouses.

Do not overlook Riverview Station, the furthest flung building. Numbering on Lyman Street is a little confusing. Riverview Station at 191 Lyman Street is around a right-angle corner and more than a half mile from the Warehouse Studios at 170 Lyman Street (which housed the first River District Artists). There are two parking areas at 191 Lyman, serving Riverview Station (North) and Riverview Station (South). About eight artists are in the South section, including painter Ginger Huebner and award-winning jeweler Una Barrett. In the North section there are three. This column will concentrate on the activities of one of these artists, Fleta Monaghan. At #310, 191 Lyman Street, Fleta Monaghan operates “310 ART Gallery” and “River’s Edge Studio.” The gallery displays her art, while the “River’s Edge Studio” in the same space houses instructional classes for adult painters.

If you visit this weekend, there will be no students’ easels crowding the space, just the art. Some craft pieces will be on display by her colleagues who share the building, some paintings by a few of her advanced students will be hanging, and the art of Fleta Monaghan will be there in abundance.

Monaghan paints both abstracts such as Sky Vision and Earth Vision (each 20”x16” oil paint and oil pastel on canvas) but also landscapes such as French Broad in Early Autumn (16”x20” oil on canvas).
Monaghan sells her paintings from her studio, and also is represented by The ®evolving Art Gallery, the new gallery in Hendersonville that was recently opened by Julie Spalla and David Lookingbill, who are “alumni” of the River Arts District.

Monaghan has a passion for teaching adults. She received a BFA (magna cum laude) from UNC Asheville and a Masters’ degree in Art Education (straight A) from Western Carolina University. She offers elementary courses on oil paints, acrylics, color selection, color theory, landscape painting and abstract painting. River’s Edge Studio also hosts other instructors who teach drawing, pen and ink, watercolor, encaustic, pastel and Sumi-e (Asian ink and wash painting). The theme is university-level education for the adult learner.

Intermediate and advanced students attend studio and critique sessions, small classes that paint for four hours and then offer mutual constructive criticism. I sat in on the first hour of one of the studio sessions. I was impressed by the serious approach to art taken by her students. Each of them displayed his or her unique approach. One favored abstracts. Another was painting in a surreal style. Yet others were painting florals, large animals, imaginative realism, and traditional realism. There were many calls on their teacher to discuss details of technique or color choice. The affection they held for her was obvious.

To learn more about 310 ART and the classes offered at River’s Edge Studio, consult Monaghan’s website:
http://www.fletamonaghan.com. For maps and directions to the River Arts District and this weekend’s Studio Stroll, consult: http://www.riverdistrictartists.com.

Illustrations © Fleta Monaghan

Arts Spectrum column #437

June 12, 2009

CAROLINA PAINTER AND SCULPTOR HENRY MITCHELL

2009-06-05T09:00:00.006-04:00

Carolina artist Henry Mitchell counts eight generations in America. Tracing ancestry to Nimrod Mitchell in Washington County, NC, his forebears moved to Laurens County, SC after being granted land patents for having fought in the Revolutionary War. After receiving an undergraduate degree from Furman University, Henry has lived in the Carolinas except for military service, a year at Westminster Theological Seminary and graduate work in painting at the University of Minnesota. While employed as a furniture designer for Woodcrafters in Weaverville, he lived in Buncombe and Henderson Counties before moving back to South Carolina into a comfortable older house in Greenville.

Mitchell's work is spiritual and moving. He lives the artistic life, thinking constantly about how to communicate his deepest feelings. After receiving his MFA, he concentrated on painting for twenty years, sculpture for twenty years, and recently on constructions. All three modes of creation are always on his mind and available, depending upon the artistic insight.

Abraham and Isaac, a Henry Mitchell wood sculpture from the 1970’s on the grounds of the Snail’s Pace, Saluda NC.

After the start of the Iraq War, Mitchell created wood sculptures, each a memorial to 100 dead Iraq War service personnel, using powered tools in addition to the usual hand tools, because “the violence of the technique served as a metaphor for the violence of the times. I did not want to make a politicized statement, rather a testament of mourning for all the slain and suffering.”

Recent acrylic paintings arise from a deep concern for the environment that is being destroyed through development. Paintings such as September Cove and September Afternoon, of the Henry Tatham dairy farm before it became an office park, depict images that now exist only in the memories of long-time residents.

Mitchell sculpts, paints and draws in his back yard where his lightweight tent “studio” consists of two connected geodesic domes. His recent work is made up of “objects lost, abandoned and forgotten” by our throwaway society. After collecting the objects on his frequent mountain hikes or while walking about town, he forms these into wall-hanging collages and then paints over the artifacts.

Abide, a Henry Mitchell construction from the collection of Robin Rector Krupp, Asheville NC.

Glad, a recent Henry Mitchell construction still in the artist’s possession.

Mitchell states that his prime influence has been Raoul Hague, the 20th century American sculptor born in Turkey to a family who became refugees from the Armenian Holocaust. Hague’s carving style “juxtaposes roughly worked and polished areas on the surfaces of mostly female figures in stone or wood” according to the best sources, and that also describes Mitchell’s sculptures. His paintings are more conventional landscapes, while his constructions demonstrate a style that is uniquely his.

Despite his being one of the most significant artists of our region, Henry Mitchell has not been locally represented since Touchstone Gallery closed. His work is represented by River Gallery in Chattanooga, TN and Jeffrey Greene in New York, NY. You may contact him by phone at (864)616-8262 or email him at henry@henrymitchellsculptor.com.

Arts Spectrum column #436

June 5, 2009

BLUE RIDGE CONFERENCE HALL IS A SENSIBLE COMPROMISE FOR HENDERSONVILLE MUSIC

2009-05-29T08:00:00.003-04:00

Maestro Thomas Joiner discusses the new hall

with the press during a rehearsal of the HSO

On May 23, 2009, the Hendersonville Symphony Orchestra (HSO) performed for the first time in its new home, the Blue Ridge Conference Hall on the Flat Rock campus of Blue Ridge Community College (BRCC). On the previous Tuesday, the press was invited to attend a rehearsal, at which HSO Music Director Thomas Joiner, HSO board president Don Hupe, BRCC president Molly Parkhill and BRCC vice-president David Hutto provided details about the collaboration of the orchestra with the college during the architectural preparation and construction of the new space.

The space is called a “conference hall,” a name that immediately telegraphs that it will be a compromise multi-purpose facility intended to house meetings, banquets, corporate functions and charity auctions as well as concerts. The good news is that the acoustics are quite good. The compromises show up in lighting, air conditioning and sight lines, and not in the acoustics.

Not only is the new space a major acoustic improvement over the previous venues (Hendersonville High School’s auditorium and First Baptist Church’s sanctuary), but also it is an operational improvement for the orchestra’s musicians and management. Rehearsals now use the same space as the performance. There is a concert Steinway on stage, adequate storage space on campus, and simplified orchestra logistics.

During the rehearsal, members of the press were permitted to evaluate the acoustics, prowl the hall and even visit the stage. I chose to sit in the woodwind section and reminisce about playing clarinet in the Manitoba Schools Orchestra many years ago. The stage acoustics that I experienced in the new hall allow musicians to hear each other, enabling the tightness of ensemble that was previously achieved by the HSO only when they travelled to the Porter Center (Brevard) or the Peace Center (Greenville, SC).

The hall acoustics are also very good, better than I had hoped for in a multipurpose space. An acoustical engineer retained by Mr. Hutto positioned sound absorbing panels after the hall was completed and the floor carpeted, and this final tuning of the hall’s acoustics left no quirky problems anywhere. The orchestra sounds more integrated if you sit at least six rows back, but that is true of many halls. The hall is live, but the decay characteristics are good and I could not detect any resonances.

That is not to say that the new space is perfect. The flat auditorium floor leads to poor sight lines. A single riser (for percussion and brass) might be accommodated, but two risers might destroy the stage acoustics since the shell above the stage is rather low. There is too much air conditioning noise. Perhaps the orchestra should chill the hall before performances and at intermissions, then run the a/c on a low setting during concerts to minimize the air handling.

Hendersonville, after an audacious initiative to support a new downtown concert hall, has abandoned the proposed Mill Center for the Arts (and its dramatic architecture, which excited some of us but was unpalatable to more conservative tastes). A revamped committee has now adopted a position of study and retrenchment. I do not expect to see a dedicated concert hall appropriate for orchestras and other large ensembles built in Hendersonville in my lifetime. So logic tells me to rejoice that the Blue Ridge Community College and the Hendersonville Symphony Orchestra in close collaboration have ensured that the multipurpose Blue Ridge Conference Hall was designed and built with very good acoustics. It will make our concert experiences more enjoyable.

For more views of the new hall and a discussion of its layout, go to

http://www.blueridge.edu/technology/conference/conference_hall.php

Arts Spectrum column #435

May 29, 2009

OPERA HOUSE IN TORONTO IS ARCHITECTURAL AND ACOUSTIC SUCCESS STORY

2009-05-22T16:00:00.007-04:00

Nobody ever says that staging grand opera is easy. Nor do they say that grand opera is a bargain. The cast of singers is large. The orchestral resources are large. The backstage technicians are many. The sets require great stagecraft. And in addition to putting together talent, people and innovative production planning, you need an opera house.

A dedicated opera house is designed to provide the optimum acoustics for live voices on a stage and live musicians in an orchestra pit communicating to a live audience in seats that are close to the stage. There is no provision for uses other than opera and ballet. There is no accommodation for amplified sound. There is no compromise of any kind in a genuine opera house. A genuine opera house does not come cheap.

These thoughts ran through my head on May 9 as I settled into my seat in Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. Opened in 2006, the Four Seasons Centre is the first real opera house in Canada and one of few on the North American continent. On a $31M site donated by the Province of Ontario, the architectural firm Diamond and Schmitt have created a $180M modernistic building that contains a traditional auditorium configuration based on European opera houses.

Modernism is most apparent in the ancillary structures. The five-story high “City Room” is an architectural gem that can be used for pre-performance talks on opera and ballet days, and can be rented for other meetings on days without a performance. The glass façade that fronts the City Room on University Avenue brings views of the city into the foyer, and presents a lighted beacon of the arts to the metropolis outside.

The opera house is located at the corner of Queen Street and University Avenue, one of the busiest streets in the metropolis, and is directly above a subway line. To insulate the performing space from external noise, there is an entire "building within a building." The auditorium, stage and orchestra pit are an isolated structure resting on more than 450 rubber acoustic isolation pads that damp all vibrations.

The Four Seasons Centre displays its City Room in this photograph:

For more views inside the new opera house, go to the Canadian Opera Company’s web site at http://www.coc.ca/AboutTheCOC/FourSeasonsCentre/PhotoGallery.aspx

From the 21st century City Room, you enter the auditorium, whose 2,071 seats are arranged in a proven classical design: a five-tiered horseshoe shape. The furthest seat in the fifth ring is less than 130 feet from the stage. Three-quarters of the seats are within 100 feet of the stage. The seat placement was determined through 3-dimensional computer modeling, resulting in excellent sight lines. Modernism is seen in the auditorium in its use of modern materials and some technical details such as air conditioning vents located under the seats to keep air-handling noise muffled.

Getting seats at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts is not to be taken for granted. The Canadian Opera Company boasts that it has sold 99% of all available tickets during its first three seasons in the new opera house. Working through a Member of the President’s Council (persons who contribute $2,250 or more per year to the Canadian Opera Company), I was able to get good seats for a fine performance of Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While no principal stood out from the rest, the entire cast, including members of the Canadian Children’s Opera Company, performed well under the baton of British conductor Ann Manson. An Australian team created the direction, set design, costumes and lighting in an outstanding production originated for Houston Grand Opera and mounted to great effect in Toronto.

As mentioned, opera is not cheap. My seat cost Cdn$136 (about US$118), a middle priced seat in a hall scaled for most performances from Cdn$60 to Cdn$290. But by comparison with the other world-class opera houses that I have attended (Vienna State Opera, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, La Scala, and the Metropolitan Opera) as well as some lesser but satisfying houses, it rates to be a bargain. The Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts is an outstanding piece of architecture that provides the Canadian Opera Company with a home in which to grow in stature and reputation. Plan ahead and see for yourself when you visit the cosmopolitan city that is the modern Toronto.

Arts Spectrum column #434

May 22, 2009

AN ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN ITALIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION: TWENTY YEARS IN PREPARATION

2009-05-15T16:00:00.002-04:00

Ned Condini has mastered the translation of poetry between Italian and English, in part because he is himself a poet and in part because he is both Italian and American. His literary output includes poetry, short stories and novels, as well as adaptations of others’ work into both Italian and English. Born in Turin, he studied in Italy and England. For decades, he shuttled between Italy, England and the United States. After adopting American citizenship in 1976, he lived in northern New Jersey until he and his wife Marilyn moved to Etowah in Western North Carolina’s Henderson County in 2004.

The Modern Language Association of America published Condini’s An Anthology of Modern Italian Poetry earlier this year. This is his magnum opus of translation, twenty years in preparation, covering the period from Italian unification in the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. The 427 pages present the poetry in his English translation with the original Italian text on facing pages.

“In the English language, my man is William Butler Yeats,” Condini told me recently, in a wide-ranging discussion of modern literature. He expressed great admiration for John Berryman (“a mind like that of Robert Lowell”), Wallace Stevens and Pablo Neruda. He recommended John Ciardi’s translation of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and regretted that Dante was no longer required reading in Europe.

Just as there have been social and political tensions in Italy ever since the Unification, so there have been conflicts within the world of Italian poetry. Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912) was echoing Dante when he used terza rima (three-line stanzas with the chain rhyme the pattern a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c, d-e-d) in “Foxglove.” His contemporary poet Gian Pietro Lucini (1867-1914) used free verse in the sarcastic “Song of the Young Hero.”

In my early reading of the collection, I have also been impressed by the quality of Corrado Govoni, Guido Gozzano, Camillo Sbarbarro, Maria Luisa Spaziani, Pier Paolo Pasolini (especially the political poem “Gramsci’s Ashes”) and Giorgio Guglielmino (visual poems incorporating images and words). I am sure more pleasant surprises await; I must sip the poetry and not pour it down too fast.

Here is Govoni’s “Cavallo” in Condini’s brilliant English translation:

Horse
Wild springtime of the horse!
At each elastic step of his
on purple hooves that imprint moons of noise
a dusty hawthorn smokes, a mud bush blooms

The challenge of translating poetry stuns me. Poetry entails an economy of language and a precision of thought that already is difficult to reproduce in translation. Further complication is engendered by the presence of stanza structure, meter and sometime rhymes that work in the original language but may or may not work in another language. Comparing the originals with the translations, it is clear that Condini has used many techniques. Strictly rhymed originals often are rendered in unrhymed English in order to accommodate the best word choice. Six-line original stanzas become four-line English stanzas. But throughout, Condini gives us good English poetry.

Despite my limited hundred-word tourist vocabulary in Italian, I am currently keeping this collection of Italian poetry by my bedside and browsing through, reading the Italian aloud and then the translation. The book is a bargain at $11.95 from your local bookstore or the Modern Library Association. You are paying 32 cents each to meet thirty-eight remarkable poets. An Anthology of Modern Italian Poetry (ISBN 978-1-60329-032-6) will give you many hours of pleasure.

Arts Spectrum column #433

Illustration “Florence at Sunset” courtesy Wikipedia Commons

May 15, 2009

RIVER DISTRICT ARTISTS MOVE TEMPORARILY UPSTREAM

2009-05-08T15:00:00.005-04:00

Noting that the New York Times has called Asheville the ‘Paris of the South,’ many people have concluded that the River Arts District is the Left Bank. Left Bank? The French Broad River is very much in view in Asheville, separating West Asheville from Downtown. Squeezed between Downtown and West Asheville, not too far from the former burley tobacco auction houses, is an old warehouse district. There on the Right Bank of the French Broad River, in the flood plain, is the River Arts District (RAD).

The French Broad River
(whitewater in Madison County

downstream from Asheville)

In 1994, the first artists arrived, renting space for working studios in what is now the Warehouse Studios at 170 Lyman Street. After arriving in Hendersonville in 2000, I became aware of Studio Strolls that opened up studios to visitors on two weekends a year. When I first visited the RAD, perhaps twenty painters, sculptors, jewelry makers, potters and other artists were working in the Cotton Mill Studios, Curve Studios and other buildings on both sides of a disturbingly active railroad line. (One year, a train parked in the district during the semi-annual Studio Stroll, blocking both connecting roads for hours.) Interest boomed beginning about 2003 and by the time I moved to Asheville in 2007, one hundred artists were there. Now more than 120 artists of all kinds (including dancers and musical instrument makers, contemporary crafters, avant garde sculptors and painters) work in twelve buildings, six of which are owned by artists. The RAD is Asheville’s answer to New York City’s SoHo district.

The Cotton Mill Studio
(one of twelve buildings housing

artists in the River Arts District)

Upriver from Asheville, twenty-five miles south by road (more by the tortuous French Broad) lies Hendersonville, a popular retirement community amidst the agriculture area dominated by apple orchards. Hendersonville also has many fine artists and a number of galleries. On Friday, May 1 in the lobby of the Blue Ridge Performing Arts Center on the main floor of the old Skyland Hotel building at 6th and Main in Historic Downtown Hendersonville, the Arts Council of Henderson County awarded prizes and officially opened the exhibition “River District Artists.” This is a groundbreaking event: the first time that the River District Artists of Asheville have held a collective exhibit outside the River Arts District itself.

Lochie Overbey, the chair of the Arts Council of Henderson County, made remarks, as did Janice Lierz, chair of the Asheville Area Arts Council and Eileen Black of the River District Artists before Jim Faucett, Executive Director or the ACHC, officially opened the show and invited the crowd of perhaps 150 people to move upstairs to the D. Samuel Neill Gallery.

I spotted perhaps twenty RAD artists that I knew, and I have no reason to doubt that in attendance were more than forty of the sixty artists who have works in the exhibit. I was pleased to see not only Hendersonville gallery owners Ann Oliver, William Gordon, David Voorhees and Constance Vlahoulis but also other key people active in the cultural affairs of Hendersonville. I chatted with Bob Wiley of Hendersonville Chamber Music, Elaine Ciampa of the Hendersonville Film Society, George Alexsovich and Harry Sparshott.

I met for the first time Kate Brighton, the theatrical producer and artistic director who recently bought the Blue Ridge Performing Arts Center and is reviving the Absolute Theatre Company that used to operate when she previously lived in Hendersonville in the 1990’s. I also met Julie Spalla of the Revolving Arts Gallery, a new gallery that will be opening soon next to the Mast General Store in Hendersonville. Galleries have been disappearing or retrenching on Main Street. Touchstone Gallery, A Show of Hands and Divine Stained Glass are no longer there and the Wickwire Gallery has dropped its second location. So it is good to see Brighton and Spalla defying the recession by initiating new cultural ventures.

“River District Artists” will be on exhibit now through June 20 at the Neill Gallery in Hendersonville at 538 North Main Street, 2nd Floor, open Tuesday to Friday from 1:00-5:00 pm and Saturday from 1:00-4:00 pm. You may find out more about the River Arts District at their extensive website: http://www.riverdistrictartists.com.

Arts Spectrum column #432

May 8, 2009

BENEFIT EVENTS FOR MUSIC AND ART EDUCATION IN WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA

2009-05-01T12:00:00.002-04:00

Last weekend in rapid succession, first visual artists and then musicians took time and devoted their talent to assist in funding the arts education of our young people in Western North Carolina.

On Saturday April 25, 2009, the QuickDraw Benefit in Haywood County included a buffet at the Waynesville Inn Golf Resort accompanied by a silent auction (during which thirty arts and crafts items were sold) and concluded with a live auction of paintings that had been completed on the premises during the “One-Hour Artists” event that provided excitement before dinner. Nineteen artists began with easels, pigments, brushes and canvas or paper arrayed before them. One hour later they put down their brushes in front of a completed painting. They were then given fifteen minutes to dry, mat and frame the art.

The large crowd milled about the room to see how their favorite artists were progressing. I tracked some distinguished artists from Buncombe, Henderson and Transylvania Counties: Ann Vasilik, Sarah Sneeden, Kelly Welch and Pamela Haddock. Not only were they intent and fast; they were producing thoughtful and high quality work. Soon I was watching several artists from Waynesville - Jo Ridge Kelley and Luke Allsbrook – and Ken Umbach from Murphy. Young artist Juan Pablo Peña Mejia, also from Waynesville, had volunteered his effort out of gratitude for assistance in his art education that he had received from the QuickDraw program.

More than 50% of the sale price from the auctions supports the Haywood County schools’ art education. Well over $9,000 was netted from this year’s event. Judging from their accents, many of the bidders have retired to the area from other parts of the country, and it is to their credit that they think so highly of their adopted community that they support art education.

The next day, Sunday April 26, 2009, the Asheville Area Piano Forum held their Spring Benefit Concert. The Asheville North Seventh-Day Adventist Church donated the use of their sanctuary, which had pleasing acoustics and a nice ambiance. The program featured eight of Western North Carolina’s finest pianists. Most teach in area colleges or have local teaching studios. Others have retired from high profile careers elsewhere.

With performers Susan Kincaid, Karen Boyd, Polly Feitzinger, Virginia McKnight, Anna Hayward, Teresa Sumpter, John Cobb and Susan Fehr, it was not surprising that the performances exhibited an exacting quality. The pianists’ choices of virtuoso repertoire made one think that there was perhaps a little friendly rivalry. If so, we benefited from it.

There were familiar classics such as Beethoven’s “Variations on God Save the King” played by Susan Kincaid and Schumann’s “Variations on the name Abegg” played by Anna Hayward. And there were twentieth-century works such as Ernst von Dohnányi’s fiendishly difficult “Capriccio in F minor, Op. 28 #6” played by John Cobb and “Sonatine pour Yvette,” a 1962 work by Catalan composer Xavier Montsalvatge played by Teresa Sumpter, a new faculty member at Mars Hill College. I hope to hear more Montsalvatge, who is clearly an overlooked twentieth-century composer of major talent.

All performers contributed their effort. Proceeds from this year’s fall benefit will go half to the Asheville Symphony Orchestra’s piano fund and half to the AAPF Student Assistance awards. The AAPF raises its main support for the Student Assistance awards at its fall benefit concert, which will be at Diana Wortham Theater on September 27 featuring two pianos and twenty pianists.

The children of Western North Carolina are the future of the arts for our area and beyond. How pleasant to see youth education supported in both the performing and the visual arts in the course of one weekend here in the mountains.

Arts Spectrum column #431

May 1, 2009

PAMELA HADDOCK DEMONSTRATES WATERCOLOR TECHNIQUE

2009-04-24T14:00:00.006-04:00

The Art League of Henderson County used to hold its monthly meetings on weekdays at the Opportunity House, on Asheville Highway in Hendersonville. Weekday afternoon permitted a good turnout of members, many of whom are retired amateurs and full-time professional artists. That pattern was broken when the Opportunity House expanded its duplicate bridge schedule. Bridge players occupied all parking spaces early in the afternoon and many Art League members were forced to park elsewhere. Delivering paintings or mobility-impaired members became a serious problem.

For a while, the ALHC tried using other locations. Supplemental evening programs to accommodate painters who worked weekdays were also tried. Now the regular monthly meetings have returned to the Opportunity House on Sunday afternoons. We can only hope that the bridge program will not expand to Sunday afternoons, since the Opportunity House’s meeting room and hallways provide such good space to display the work of members and featured guests.

Water colorist Pamela Haddock delivered a demonstration of her technique for the April 19 meeting. Haddock lives in the Sylva area, in the “real” Western North Carolina. (In the opinion of people living in the coves and on the ridges towards the Great Smoky Mountains, Asheville is simply the gateway to the west.) Many of Haddock’s landscapes are drawn from this picturesque area.

In less than one hour, Haddock completed a 20”x30” painting, starting with a drawn pencil sketch on 140lb cold press paper that had been thoroughly wetted front and back and placed on a composite board to be held in place by surface tension. While the white areas were somewhat dried, even they were still damp. Using large brushes and rapid gestures, she introduced pigment profusely. The water still on the paper blended the colors. Scratches and hard edges were used to add detail. The result was a rapid-fire quality painting.

Haddock has that unusual ability to lecture while painting, with a dry sense of humor that leavened the afternoon. The time passed quickly and informatively. Several knowledgeable ALHC members asked penetrating questions about some of the unusual aspects of her technique, including where to get the composite board she uses (“Lowes”) and about the Fredrix Watercolor Canvas that is the surface for several of the other paintings now at the Opportunity House for April. In addition to cold press paper and the watercolor canvas, she also uses Strathmore Illustration Board Vellum for some paintings.

Among the paintings on display are the superb “Daylily Dance” and “Sunset Storm,” both painted on canvas. “Daylily Dance” gracefully evokes the movement of the flowers in the zephyr winds. “Sunset Storm” catches the magic moment when the sun, setting behind you, underlights the clouds. Both of these paintings are art of the moment, with an inner life of transience captured by the artist.

In addition to the booth that she maintains at Woolworth Walk in downtown Asheville, Pamela Haddock sells her work through her website pamhaddock.com. This is such a comprehensive and fine website that I have not attached illustrations to this column. Going to her site and making your own choice of paintings to examine online will better serve you. Clicking on “Hendersonville Show” will display the art now on the walls of the Opportunity House. (But be warned: the colors on the screen do not do justice to the colors in the original of "Sunset Storm.") Clicking on “Browser’s Gallery” will display other recent work. There is also a link to WoolworthWalk.com.

The Art League of Henderson County recognizes that there are dedicated artists in the region at all skill levels in two-dimensional media. Calling itself “WNC's All-Inclusive Art Group,” the ALHC welcomes members ranging from the most timid and tentative amateur to the most flamboyant and confident professional. It is a friendly group with workshops and group activities that are helpful to all members. Readers living anywhere in Western North Carolina can find out more at artleague.net.

Arts Spectrum column #430

April 24, 2009

THE JOSEPH PATELSON MUSIC HOUSE WILL BE MISSED, BUT SOLICLASSICA AWAITS IN ASHEVILLE

2009-04-17T16:00:00.004-04:00

There it is, in my personal address book: Joseph Patelson Music House, 160 W. 56th St., New York, NY. At the end of April, I will erase the entry. After more than sixty years of operating at that address, the legendary Patelson’s is shutting down.

From 1985 until 2000, I frequently visited my son Ted, who was then living in New York City. Before a concert at Carnegie Hall, we would often drop by Patelson’s. This justly famous music store is immediately across 56th Street from the stage entrance to Carnegie Hall. If the impending concert was by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, we might be rubbing shoulders with oboist Lothar Koch. Waiting to ask a question of one of the sales associates, we would suddenly realize “that’s Beverly Sills over there browsing in the stacks.” All the Manhattan-based musicians and all the visiting musicians knew and respected Patelson’s.

One day in 1990, I asked about Dussek piano sonatas. (Dussek is the German or English spelling of the Bohemian surname Dusík.) The clerk immediately recognized the name (not every musician does).¹ Gesturing to some student collections, he said, “You don’t want the sonatinas, do you?” Told that I was looking for middle and late sonatas, he scurried behind the scenes to the extensive stacks. Shortly he reappeared with Volumes I and II of the Musica Antiqua Bohemica edition of the complete Jan Ladislav Dusík piano music, published by Supraphon in Prague. The clerk apologized that someone else had bought Volume III, which contained “Elégie harmonique” and “Le retour á Paris,” but pointed out that the Opus 35 sonatas were in Volume II. This is but one example of Patelson’s extremely knowledgeable staff.

In 1938, Joseph Patelson took over ownership of a Cooper Square music shop. In 1947, the store was moved to its current location in a nineteenth-century carriage house. Joseph Patelson died in 1992. His son Daniel took over but died in 2004. Daniel’s widow strived to cope with the changing scene of Internet sales and free downloads of public domain classical music, but it was a losing battle. The current recession was the final blow.

Karen Sams, who opened SoliClassica in Asheville in 2008, says that Patelson’s was one of the models for her store. Like Patelson’s, SoliClassica contains music for all instruments and an extensive inventory arranged where possible in open bins. Sams says that “musicians need a place to browse and to find inspiration.” She points out that sheet music bought on a whim will later turn out to be a gem that was simply waiting for the right time to shine in the life of a musician.

The closing of Patelson’s is yet another sign that mass marketing is driving out the humane and civilizing influence of independent bookstores and music stores. Just as we in Asheville are fortunate to have Malaprops Bookstore, we are now blessed with SoliClassica, arguably the most complete and finest source of sheet music in the Southeast.

So I will erase Patelson’s from my address book. In its place now is SoliClassica, 114 Fugazy Center, 1550 Hendersonville Rd., Asheville NC 28803, telephone (828) 277-4111. Drop by to meet Karen Sams or Marion Sprott, her knowledgeable assistant. And do browse a little.

Arts Spectrum column #429

April 17, 2009

^1. Jan Ladislav Dussek was a talented Bohemian pianist and composer who had the misfortune to be born between Mozart and Beethoven, and thus has been overshadowed by those giants. Dussek was a favorite of Marie Antoinette in Paris in the 1780’s. He was a friend of Haydn, Clementi and the young John Field in the 1790’s in London, where he attracted large concert audiences. He returned to continental Europe and Russia after 1800. The best of Dussek’s piano sonatas, such as Opus 35 #3 and “Elégie harmonique,” are superior to the weakest of Beethoven’s.

WENDY WHITSON PAINTS INSIDE THE LANDSCAPE

2009-04-10T16:00:00.006-04:00

In 1996, North Carolina native Wendy Whitson was living in Atlanta and pursuing a successful career in graphic design, including work for McGraw-Hill and for a large architectural firm. She was following her own dictum to “enjoy whatever you are doing until the next thing comes along.” During a weekend in Asheville, she visited Marie Hudson and Betty Clark in the River Arts District’s Warehouse Studio and noted with interest that these two ladies were making a living as fine artists. Whitson and her husband moved to Asheville in 2000, but her commercial career continued to absorb her creative energy, leaving no room for fine art.

In 2003, it was time to resume painting. Whitson sold her graphic design business and scouted for studio space. She heard of an available studio in the River Arts District’s “RiverLink Building.” Only when she arrived at the building did she realize that this was the Warehouse Studio in which she had seen Marie Hudson working. She promptly leased the space in which she still works and sells her acrylic paintings.

Whitson says, “When I saw this studio, I felt peacefulness. This is the time; this is the place. I was coming back to myself.” She had painted both figurative and abstract art during her studies at East Carolina University, and planned to draw on her past.

For an exacting artist like Whitson, however, the transition was not quick. She had a passionate interest in landscapes, but needed to develop her abstract-impressionist style. Her acrylics are mostly large-scale paintings inspired by an actual scene but releasing the color that she sees inside the location. She spent a full year painting before she was satisfied with a work and placed it for sale.

When Whitson paints flowers, she likes to concentrate on one specimen among a mass of flowers. That one flower is treated realistically; the rest feel like that flower but are abstract. That approach can be seen in “Queen’s Anne Lace.”

Whitson’s paintings are heavily layered. She always starts with a random grid that is dripped onto the canvas, and then paints as many as ten or eleven layers on top of that grid. “The grid represents God’s master plan for everything we find in nature. What I am painting is nature,” she says. The result is a feeling of place represented semi-abstractly.

She used to work on three to five paintings at a time, but in recent years finds that she is actively engaged with no more than two new works. She may be preparing the grid for the next effort, and always has ten more ideas simmering on a back burner, but she is happy with one or two works dominating her thoughts.

You can see more at wendywhitson.com or visit Wendy Whitson’s studio between 11 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Some of her paintings will be at the Arts Council of Henderson County’s “River District Artists” group show from May 1 through June 20, 2009. She will also be represented at the Haen Gallery in a “Collectors’ Circle” show sometime in July.

Paintings accompanying this column © Wendy Whitson: “Cosmos,” “Queen Anne’s Lace” and “On the Parkway.”

Arts Spectrum column #428

April 10, 2009
corrections added April 17, 2009

SARAH SNEEDEN OF CEDAR MOUNTAIN

2009-04-03T21:00:00.006-04:00

The building is on Route 276 in Cedar Mountain, at the entrance to Sherwood Forest. It was a cowshed before Sarah Sneeden converted it into “Sarah’s Studio.” Only a few miles from one entrance to the DuPont State Forest, it is most appropriately located for the working studio of an artist noted for her mountain landscapes.

Sneeden frequently takes off for an afternoon in the DuPont State Forest or another location that she may have identified as ripe for scenic explorations. Sometimes it is a mass of flowers in a farmyard; other times it is a picturesque road. Using primacolor pencils, watercolors or pastels, she sketches her thoughts on site. In this way, she records some critical moment of clouds or lighting in a way that a camera cannot.

“Painting on location is like a smorgasbord. You get to choose what you paint,” she once explained to me, “Photography is like being on a diet.”

Armed with the results of her frequent field trips, she spends most mornings in the studio (which has no telephone) working at an easel to create the oil paintings for which she is justly renowned, paintings such as “Butterfly Watch,” a detail from which is shown to the right.

It was forty years ago that this native of Pennsylvania adopted a home in the woods, near her current studio, and began earning a living as a single artist. Her income arises from landscapes (many sold through Wickwire Gallery on Hendersonville’s Main Street and others from her studio) and also from commissioned portrait painting. Just as the artistic merit of her landscapes arises from an eye for the moment in nature, her portraits result from an analysis of the character of the subject. Often she will walk an adult into the DuPont State Forest and take seventy or more photographs of them in a site that she considers appropriate to the individual. She studies young children in their natural environment, their own rooms, in order to uncover insights into the child’s interests. She sometimes depicts toys or other objects, and sometimes just hints at these in her final painted portrait.

For her own pleasure she paints some offbeat scenes, such as street scenes from Asheville’s Belle Chere Festival or Hendersonville’s Apple Festival. These do not sell as rapidly as the landscapes, so her studio is cluttered with paintings that she did for the sheer joy they brought her. Among these are many paintings of circus performers. She loves the circus, and makes a pilgrimage each year to see the Big Top.

It is not only circus animals that she has a passion for. Sometimes family pets are included in her portrait painting. She reports that owners are quite exacting about their pet’s appearance. One woman was painted while seated with her favorite Dalmation. After completing the oil, Sneeden decided that it would be improved by repositioning the dog slightly.

“Have you ever thought of what it is like to move every spot on a Dalmation?” she asks.

Since we are only a few weeks past the vernal equinox, it seems appropriate to end this column with Sarah Sneeden’s recent landscape entitled “Step Into Spring.”

Arts Spectrum column #427

April 4, 2009

SCRIABIN IN THE MORNING, SCRIABIN IN THE EVENING

2009-03-30T21:00:00.001-04:00

Occasionally, some old friend who is retired in Palo Alto or Ann Arbor asks me how I stand to live in such a small community as Asheville. They understand the appeal of Blue Ridge Mountains scenery, but assume that we have no culture. A generalization such as “this is the Paris of the South” does not satisfy them. The impressive cultural credentials of other people who have chosen Western North Carolina as their retirement home do not convince them. They think we are all misguided. So I try to erode their skepticism by a continual drizzle of small reports on activities here.

I could cite Saturday, March 21, 2009 as an example of the cultural richness of our area. In the morning, I went to a meeting of the Asheville Area Piano Forum in Weaverville. In the evening, I drove 75 minutes “down the hill” to Greenville, SC for a Masterworks concert of the Greenville Symphony Orchestra.

The Asheville Area Piano Forum is similar to the piano teachers’ associations that other communities have, except the Asheville group accepts serious amateur pianists in addition to the professionals and educators. Fred Flaxman, host of the syndicated public radio program Compact Discoveries, presented the March 21 program. He discussed lesser-known composers, illustrating their music not with recordings (as he does on his program) but with live performances by various members of the Forum. Among the selections were Alexander Scriabin’s Etude in C# minor (Opus 2#1) played by Polly Feitzinger and Scriabin’s Prelude and Nocturne for the Left Hand (Opus 9) played by Deborah Belcher.

Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (1872-1915) was a Russian pianist and composer whose compositions went through three distinct phases in his short life. His early style (Opus 1 through 29) was inspired by Chopin. He then moved to unusual harmonies and textures, ending in a period of atonal composition that presaged Arnold Schönberg.

Influenced by theosophy, mysticism and Russian Symbolism, he imagined an ultimate composition that was to include dance, aromas, light shows and music, integrated through his color circle (see illustration). The work was envisioned as being one week in length, to take place with the Himalayan Mountains as a backdrop. It was never written.

After a period of neglect, his music in recent decades has appeared frequently in piano recitals. His major works for orchestra are also still in the repertoire, although seldom scheduled.

The Greenville Symphony Orchestra is the only symphony orchestra in the region that regularly mounts a generous string section (over fifty) in a large hall with good acoustics (the Peace Center Concert Hall). Edvard Tchivzhel is music director. This fine Russian conductor, touring the United States with the State Russian Symphony Orchestra in 1991, defected with the help of friends in Greenville. He considers this community to be his American home. Since taking over the orchestra in 1999, he has built a fine ensemble. He frequently schedules sprawling romantic works. On March 21, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade was coupled with Alexander Scriabin’s Symphony #2 in C minor, Opus 29. For many of us, it was the first hearing of a significant but little-known symphony from Scriabin’s early romantic period.

How many other places in America could you start and end a Saturday with Alexander Scriabin?

Arts Spectrum column #426

March 30, 2009

PATRICIA WELLBORN’S EXPERIMENTAL LANDSCAPES ARE A WINNER

2009-03-27T15:30:00.003-04:00

The mountains of Western North Carolina have been home to Patricia Wellborn for twenty years now. They provide a constant source of peace, strength and inspiration to this Henderson County artist. But she paints her landscapes not only from her local experience. In 2006, she studied with Steve Almone on Monhegan Island, Maine and painted New England scenes. Every year she visits New Mexico, and reports “I find the sharp contrast between the clear, stark beauty of the Southwest and the soft hazy colors of the Blue Ridge very exciting.”

Although she claims that it is a challenge to represent on paper the varying illuminations of different regions, the resulting body of work demonstrates that she has the eye to do so. Consider three recent juried exhibitions in our area.

• In 2007, at the 62nd Juried Exhibition of the Watercolor Society of North Carolina, her “Runoff” won the St. Cuthbert’s Mill Award. The work showed an understanding of Southwestern light, dry and stark.
• In 2008, when the Western Carolina Branch of the League of American Pen Women asked me to judge their exhibit of member’s visual art, my first choice was her “Surf at Monhegan,” a work so evocative of the Maine coast that I swore I could hear the crashing water.
• Also in 2008, the Friends of Carl Sandburg at Connemara joined Hendersonville’s Wickwire Gallery in sponsoring “Connemara Visions” judged by William Jameson of Charleston, South Carolina and Saluda, North Carolina. His “Best of Show” award went to Wellborn for “Shed at Connemara,” an eye-catching depiction of light and shadow that was unquestionably representative of the Southern Appalachian region.

Wellborn majored in Studio Art at the University of North Carolina-Asheville and continued her

studies with Carrie Burns Brown, Patricia Cole-Ferullo and Harry Thompson. Her first solo exhibit was in 1994. She won “Best of Show” at the Transylvania County Art League in 1993 and 1996, and at the Art League of Henderson County in 2000. The North Carolina Arts Council gave her a Regional Artist Grant in 1998 for a painting trip to a Benedictine Abbey (the Christ in the Desert Monastery) near Abiquiu, New Mexico.

Between 2000 and 2005, she sold real estate and did very little painting. Then she kicked over the traces and spent the summer painting in New Mexico. When she returned to North Carolina, she once again painted landscapes full-time. In 2006, First Congregational Church in Hendersonville provided an opportunity for us to see landscapes created during the first ten months after she returned to full-time painting.

Some of her best work qualifies as mixed media since she often adds acrylic accents and sometimes combines other elements such as handmade paper or “found” paper. “I like the play of transparent watercolor against the opaque acrylic,” she says. Occasionally, one sees the influence of Pat Cole-Ferullo in the underlying esthetic, the drive to extract the heart of an outdoor scene and represent it semi-abstractly. But the technique and the specific details of the vision are distinctly Pat Wellborn.

Over the past seven years, my newspaper columns commented favorably on many of her paintings. In 2002, I reported that Patricia Wellborn’s Forest Floor “is a lovely representation of ferns, where the power of acrylics is used to accent the watercolor painting with pleasing bright color highlights. She uses acrylics judiciously to good effect, often in conjunction with other paints. Her Rapids shows a good eye for the appearance of rocks as water flows over them apace.”

I commented in 2006, “a group of

collage or mixed media paintings entitled Petroglyph Series incorporates numerous icons such as the mischievous flute player Kokopelli painted in acrylic. I liked especially Petroglyph Cliff and the collage entitled New Mexico Doorways.” About her 1998 paintings near Abiquiu, NM (Georgia O’Keefe’s winter home), I reported Wellborn was musing that people err in thinking that O’Keefe invented bizarre colors. “She painted what she saw,” Wellborn said, and in that tradition her colors from New Mexico are also sun-drenched and gaudy.

Patricia Wellborn primarily paints in her studio, working from sketches and color studies done on location. The underlying theme of all her paintings, as well as her major source of inspiration, is her love of nature. She exhibits at the Asheville Gallery of Art at 16 College St. in Asheville, North Carolina and at the Conn-Artist Gallery at 611 Greenville Highway in Hendersonville.

Arts Spectrum column #425
March 27, 2009

COMMENTARY ON WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA ARTS WILL CONTINUE AS ARTS SPECTRUM COLUMN MOVES TO THE WORLD WIDE WEB

2009-03-27T15:00:00.005-04:00

For more than eight years, my Arts Spectrum column appeared each Sunday in the Times-News of Hendersonville, NC. Devotees are used to turning to page three of the Lifestyle section to read commentary on the creative and performing arts in Western North Carolina. For budgetary reasons, the newspaper will discontinue publishing my column as of the end of March. It is time to make a transition that is inevitable; Arts Spectrum has moved to the web at artsspectrum.blogspot.com.

Newspapers are in trouble because of revolutionary changes in the modes of information distribution. The Rocky Mountain News and the Arizona Citizen have shut down. The Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune are bankrupt. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the daily Christian Science Monitor are now available only on-line. It is rumored that McClatchy will close the Sacramento Bee, the Fresno Bee and the Miami Herald if purchasers are not found. The Washington Post is restructuring due to declining revenue. The New York Times recently raised cash by selling part of its new 2007 building in Manhattan, and in addition sold a $250M stake in the company to Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú in order to reduce debt.

In a blog entitled “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” Clay Shirky comments: “When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution...Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.” Shirky continues: “For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues.” (www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/)

Recognizing that the communication changes that began forty years ago are accelerating, and are as dramatic as the changes caused by the invention of movable type by Gutenberg in 1450 and the introduction of the octavo book by Aldus Manutius in 1501, Arts Spectrum will now become a very small example of those “special cases” to which Shirky alludes. Arts Spectrum will appear online and will rely on sponsorship instead of newspaper advertising revenue to continue its mission to Western North Carolina.

There are advantages to being digital:
• Illustrations can accompany commentary on visual art.
• Columns can expand beyond 560 words when needed.
• Publication frequency may become more than once a week.

There are also disadvantages:
• So long as it is a blog, there will be no supervising editor.
• Financial sponsorship must be arranged.

Discussions are underway to find a web home for Arts Spectrum where it might enjoy both editing and a not-for-profit umbrella organization so that sponsorship and contributions would be tax-deductible. Historically, Arts Spectrum has concentrated on Henderson, Transylvania and Polk counties, but coverage of Asheville and Buncombe County is likely to increase in the future if sponsors favor those important arts destinations.

Four hundred and twenty-three Arts Spectrum columns were published over ninety-nine months in the Times-News. One-third of these covered visual arts and fine crafts, another one-third covered music, and the rest covered literature, drama and film. That balance is likely to continue because in my mind the “spectrum of the arts” is broad, and Western North Carolina contains remarkable examples of every part of that spectrum.

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review (Jan/Feb 2009), David Hadju observed that arts criticism in nearly all American newspapers has become lighter in tone, progressively more commercial, and shorter in length. I give my previous employers credit on two out of three of those trends. I was never pressured to lighten my tone. Only once was a change requested to avoid offending an advertiser (a motion picture theater chain). However, a new layout that gave the Times-News a fresher look required more white space and my column’s word count shrunk by 20%.

Hadju quotes Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic as saying “Criticism has always been a mixture of opinion and judgment...now as the Web sites and the blogs have proliferated, we have entered a nightmare of opinion-making...(which)...has been responsible for a collapse of the distinction between opinion and judgment.”

For the nonce, while I am an unedited blogger, I shall try to guard against the sins of shallow opinion. For the longer term, I seek to become part of a digital world of responsible arts criticism. I welcome your continued or new patronage.