MEMETERIA by Thomas May

Here’s my recent essay for the Metropolitan Opera’s Season Book on the most controversial opera of the season:

Behind the Headlines
In the world of opera, it’s common for a new work to take some time to establish its place in the repertoire. Just think of Così fan tutte, written in 1790 but largely ignored until the mid-20th century, or Les Troyens, which didn’t reach the United States until more than a century after its composition. A generation has passed since the 1991 premiere of John Adams’s second opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, but for the most part the work is still known solely by its controversial reputation. Apart from that original production, only two other full stagings have been seen in the U.S., and both of these took place within the past three years (at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2011 and Long Beach Opera in spring 2014).

Photo by Monique Blanchard

My latest piece for City Arts :

The Smith Tower celebrated its 100th birthday earlier this month, and to mark the architectural anniversary visitors were able to enjoy the Tower’s Chinese Room and the vistas from the Observation Deck for the original admission price collected in 1914—a budget-busting 25 cents.

Of course, Smith Tower is always just “there,” part of the ever-present scenery of daily life in downtown Seattle. Maybe on your checklist of show-off-the-city items for visitors. But try for a moment to ignore the familiarity of icons like this.

Because architecture is so integrated into our everyday patterns, it’s easy to take the urban landscape for granted—buildings, facades, interiors, walkways, skylines—yet at the same time they profoundly influence the way we experience those everyday patterns, at however unconscious a level.

It’s the mission of the Seattle Architecture Foundation (SAF) to “awaken people to these…

Stephen Stubbs

My profile of Stephen Stubbs, one of this year’s recipients of the Mayor’s Arts Awards in Seattle, is now live on City Arts:

When he was coming of age in his native Seattle in the 1960s, Stephen Stubbs experienced a sea change in popular music that glorified the image of the troubadour. Countless musicians picked up a guitar, accompanying themselves to songs intended to be authentic, from the heart.

Stubbs was among them—only the instrument he was plucking was a lute. At Nathan Hale High School, Stubbs had belonged to a madrigal choir, which stoked his curiosity about Renaissance music.

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“Back from the cordial grave I drag thee”

Poetry’s ties with romance are ageless, but nowadays the connection tends to evoke sappy clichés and, at worst, Hallmark card-style confections. So why not add some panache by filling your quiver with lines from the great poets?

Or maybe not… Over at The Hairpin, Lizzy Straus recently compiled a list of first lines from Emily Dickinson poems not likely to be very useful as pickup lines. These especially should probably be excluded from your speed-dating repertoire:

144 – I never hear the word “Escape”
260 – I’m nobody! Who are you?
303 – Alone I cannot be
332 – Doubt me! My dim companion!
336 – Before I got my eye put out
339 – I like a look of agony
407 – One need not be a chamber to be haunted
456 – A prison gets to be a friend

Carthage in Berlioz’s Les Troyens: ROH production by David McVicar (photo: Cooper)

The science journalist Ed Yong sums up two recent studies showing the significance of social interconnection:

Now, two teams of scientists have independently shown that the strength of this cumulative culture depends on the size and interconnectedness of social groups. Through laboratory experiments, they showed that complex cultural traditions — from making fishing nets to tying knots — last longer and improve faster at the hands of larger, more sociable groups.

Psychologist Joe Henrich, lead author of one of the studies, brings up the implications of these findings for the Internet era:

“Innovations like literacy, writing and mail allowed us to access the thoughts of people in distant places and times,” says Henrich. “Extend that to the Internet, and things should only speed along even more.”

Jong points out an additional issue suggested by the two studies:…

(Percy Byssshe Shelley, portrait by Alfred Clint, 1819)

Nowadays the received wisdom seems to follow the Oscar Wilde line — literally, that is, without his archness — that “all art is quite useless.” Especially when the art in question is poetry and, even more, music. This alleged uselessness is then either trumpeted as a glorious thing — a refuge from the brutal world of commerce — or turned into a weapon to arm Philistines (“uselessness” abused).

A recent example of the former strategy is the poet and scholar Meena Alexander’s musing, in an address to the Yale Political Union last April, that poetry stands apart from the everyday world of historical reality: “The poem is an invention that exists in spite of history. Most of the forces in our ordinary lives as we live them now conspire against the making of a poem.”

Noah Berlatsky challenges Alexander by arguing…

My latest article for Listen magazine is now live.
This was an especially inspiring assignment. After another season of doom and gloom about the future of music, discovering how motivated these young musicians are — how determined to make the most of their gifts — gave me a real boost:

The inspiring players of Carnegie Hall’s National Youth Orchestra debunk the myth of the ‘death’ of classical music.

It’s a ploy that always generates controversy: announce the death of “classical music” (however you define it), furnish your obituary with a sauce of ominous statistics and watch your site traffic explode. Another death knell hit the blogosphere and Twitterverse this January, courtesy of a Slate article titled “Requiem: Classical Music in America Is Dead,” which came illustrated with a gray-haired conductor stationed in front of a tombstone. Predictably, the piece triggered a raft of
indignant but thoughtful counterarguments in response.