AVANT-GARDE FILMS IN ROCHESTER 1928

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.

© 2010 Edward C. McIrvine

Arts Spectrum column #465

January 22, 2010

DIGITAL BROADCASTS OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

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.

© 2010 Edward C. McIrvine

Arts Spectrum column #464

January 16, 2010

ISAAC ROSENFELD: A PREMATURE DEATH

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.

© 2009 Edward C. McIrvine

Arts Spectrum column #463

December 18, 2009

COPYRIGHT LAW NOW FAVORS CORPORATE GIANTS AND IMPAIRS CREATIVITY

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.

© 2009 Edward C. McIrvine

Arts Spectrum column #462

December 11, 2009