Janos Starker, Master of the Cello, Dies at 88

NY Times April 29, 2013
Janos Starker, Master of the Cello, Dies at 88
By MARGALIT FOX

Janos Starker, one of the 20th century’s most renowned cellists, whose restrained onstage elegance was amply matched by the cyclone of Scotch, cigarettes and opinion that animated his offstage life, died on Sunday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 88.

Indiana University, where he was a distinguished professor of music, announced his death.

A Hungarian-born child prodigy who later survived internment by the Nazis during World War II, Mr. Starker appeared, in the decades after the war, on the world’s most prestigious recital stages and as a soloist with the world’s leading orchestras. He was part of a vaunted triumvirate that included Gregor Piatigorsky (1903-76) and Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007), collectively the most celebrated cellists of the day.

He was also widely known through his more than 150 recordings, including one of Bach’s six suites for solo cello for which he won a Grammy Award in 1998.

Mr. Starker played several magnificent cellos during his career — including the “Lord Aylesford” Stradivarius of 1696, a 1707 Guarnerius and a 1705 instrument by the great Venetian maker Matteo Goffriller — but he nonetheless managed to resist the seductions of the instrument to which cellists can fall prey.

The chief hallmark of his playing was a conspicuous lack of schmaltz. Effusive sentiment is an inherent risk of the cello, with its thundering sonorities and timbre so like the human voice. He also shunned the dramatic head tossing and body swaying to which many cellists incline.

“I’m not an actor,” he said in a 1996 interview with the Internet Cello Society, an online fraternity of cellists and devotees. He added, with characteristic candor, “I don’t want to be one of those musicians who appears to be making love to himself onstage.”

Unlike many acclaimed string players, Mr. Starker used a lean, judicious vibrato — the minute, rapid variations in pitch by the left hand that can enrich a note’s sound but can also border on the histrionic. Excessive vibrato, he said, was like “a woman smearing her whole face with lipstick.”

While the musical style that resulted was too dispassionate for some critics’ taste, others praised Mr. Starker’s faultless technique; purity of tone; clean, polished phrasing; and acute concern with the composer’s intent. His style was especially well suited to the Bach suites, canonical texts for the instrument, which he recorded on several occasions.

“The technical aspects of Mr. Starker’s playing are so wholly merged in the solution to problems of interpretation and style that the listener tends to forget how much technical mastery the cellist has achieved,” Raymond Ericson wrote in The New York Times in 1962, reviewing a recital at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The pitch is unerringly right, the tone is mellow without being mushy, difficult leaps and runs are manipulated with the easy unobtrusiveness of a magician.”

Through Mr. Starker eschewed romantic mannerisms, he did not stint Romantic works: he gave many well-received performances of the Dvorak concerto, the lush, haunting B minor staple of every concert cellist’s arsenal.

Nor did he neglect 20th-century music: he was considered one of the foremost interpreters of his countryman Zoltan Kodaly’s sonata for solo cello, composed in 1915 and so technically demanding that it is sometimes described as having been written by a fiend.

In these works, too, his restrained approach differed greatly from the ripe romanticism of Rostropovich and Piatigorsky.

“What I’d like to see is a little more humility and dignity displayed toward our art, and less self-aggrandizement,” Mr. Starker said of Rostropovich in a 1980 interview with People magazine. “Slava is more popular, but I’m the greater cellist.”

That was merely one of his abundant opinions on all manner of things, including conductors (Mr. Starker had enduring, well-publicized feuds over musical matters with Eugene Ormandy and Herbert von Karajan) and other eminent cellists.

Conductors, he once said, “are the most overrated people in music.”

And here is Mr. Starker on Jacqueline du Pré, the expressive English cellist whose career was cut short by multiple sclerosis: “She was an incredibly gifted cellist and a beautiful artist, but I believe she accelerated her own destruction because she expended so much energy in her performances.”

Opinion was but one area in which Mr. Starker allowed himself joyful immoderation; cigarettes and alcohol were others. He adored Scotch and by his own account consumed it with abandon. For much of his life he smoked 60 cigarettes a day, though in old age he reduced the number to 25.

He once walked out of a scheduled performance of the Elgar Concerto with the South Carolina Philharmonic because he was barred from smoking his accustomed preconcert cigarette backstage.

Unlike many world-renowned musicians, Mr. Starker made teaching a major facet of his career. In 1958 he joined the faculty of what is now the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, where he taught until shortly before his death.

His presence there turned Bloomington into a Midwestern mecca for cellists; among his former students are the prominent soloists Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi, Gary Hoffman and Maria Kliegel.

“I personally cannot perform without teaching, and I cannot teach without performing,” Mr. Starker told The Chicago Tribune in 1993. “When you have to explain what you are doing, you discover what you are really doing.”

With his bald head and menacing eyebrows, Mr. Starker looked ferocious, and by all accounts he could be ferocious in the teaching studio. He was so adamant about his students’ need for all-consuming commitment that he was once enlisted by Bobby Knight, Indiana’s long-serving, combustible basketball coach, to give a like-minded pep talk to the team.

Janos Starker was born in Budapest on July 5, 1924, the son of Sandor and Margit Starker; his father was a tailor. (The European pronunciation of the family name is SHTAR-ker; after moving to the United States, he pronounced it STAR-ker.)

Before he turned 6, Janos was given a cello; by the time he was 8 he was giving lessons to younger children. He entered the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, making his recital debut at 11; at 14 he played the Dvorak concerto with a symphony orchestra on a few hours’ notice.

As a young man, Mr. Starker was the principal cellist of the Budapest Opera and the Budapest Philharmonic.

The Starkers were Jews. Near the end of World War II, Mr. Starker and his parents were dispatched to an internment camp on an island in the Danube outside Budapest. All three survived the war, though his two older brothers, Tibor and Ede, disappeared; Mr. Starker said he believed the Nazishad shot them.

After the war, Mr. Starker worked as an electrician and a sulfur miner before making his way to Paris. There, in 1947, he recorded the Kodaly sonata; that recording won the Grand Prix du Disque, France’s most prestigious award for recorded music, bringing him international fame.

In 1948, Mr. Starker was brought to the United States as the principal cellist of the Dallas Symphony by its music director, Antal Dorati.

Afterward, he was principal cellist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in New York. (In his 2004 memoir, “The World of Music According to Starker,” Mr. Starker recalls the day his seat in the orchestra pit was changed so he would not be distracted by any attractive women onstage.) He was later principal cellist of the Chicago Symphony.

Mr. Starker’s first marriage, to Eva Uranyi, ended in divorce. He is survived by a daughter from that marriage, Gabriella Starker-Saxe; his second wife, the former Rae Busch; her daughter, Gwen Starker Preucil, whom he adopted; and three grandchildren.

His other recordings include works by Schumann, Brahms, Dvorak and Bartok.

To those who called his concert demeanor aloof, Mr. Starker had a potent antidote. Inspired by a suggestion from the theatrical producer Joseph Papp, he created a touring show, “A Special Evening With Janos Starker.”

On those evenings, Mr. Starker, armed with a chair, his cello and other essential props, took the stage. There, between musical numbers, he regaled the audience with tales from the classical-music battlefield, interspersed with sips of Scotch and companionable clouds of smoke.

George Jones, dead at 81

Brian Mansfield, Special to USA TODAY10:42 a.m. EDT April 26, 2013

(Photo: Mark Humphrey, AP)

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — George Jones, whose supple Texas voice conveyed heartbreak so profound that he became perhaps the most imitated singer in country music, died Friday at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville after being hospitalized with high fever and irregular blood pressure. He was 81.

Hank Williams may have set country music’s mythology and Johnny Cash its attitude, but Jones gave the genre its ultimate voice. With recordings that spanned 50 years, including Number One singles White Lightning, She Thinks I Still Care and He Stopped Loving Her Today, Jones influenced generations of country singers and was considered by many to be the greatest of them all.

Jones’ life also included legendary battles with substance abuse, mostly alcohol, and four marriages, including one to fellow singer Tammy Wynette and another, his last and longest, to Nancy Sepulvado.

Ultimately, though, it was that voice that won Jones two Grammys, got him into the Country Music Hall of Fame and made him an American musical icon. That plaintive voice that seemed to break down at will and wallow in sorrow. That voice of honky-tonk eloquence that held tortured echoes of heroes like Williams, Roy Acuff and Lefty Frizzell. That finely nuanced voice that offered thrill rides of emotions, with twists and turns, slippery, bending notes and sudden drops.

Jones’ performances weren’t just an emotional rollercoaster, they were the whole theme park.

 

Born in a log cabin in the “Big Thicket” region of East Texas, Jones grew up idolizing Acuff and bluegrass great Bill Monroe. In his youth, he played on the streets of downtown Beaumont for tips. He met Williams at a local radio station in 1949, and the singer advised young Jones to stop singing like Acuff and start singing like himself.

By the time he began recording for Pappy Dailey’s Starday Records in 1954, Jones had married and divorced and served a stint with the Marines in Korea. He first hit the national country charts in 1955 – the same year that Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash made their chart debuts – with Why Baby Why, a honky-tonk record featuring a double-tracked vocal. Jones’ recording eventually was eclipsed by Webb Pierce and Red Sovine’s cover, which topped the charts, while his stalled at No. 2.

His first Number One came with White Lightning, a moonshine novelty with an oddball, hiccupping hook. By this time, Jones already was a binge drinker and, according to his 1997 autobiography I Lived to Tell It All, he was heavily under the influence during the recording session and required 83 takes to get a usable version. White Lightning came out in March 1959, one month after its writer – J.P. Richardson, aka The Big Bopper – was killed in a plane crash along with Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens.

The flat-topped singer placed multiple singles on the country charts each year during the ’60s – ballads like The Window Up Above and If My Heart Had Windows; The Race Is On, with its rumbling, six-string bass solo; duets with Melba Montgomery and pop singer Gene Pitney. Occasionally, Jones topped the charts with Tender Years, She Thinks I Still Care and Walk Through This World With Me.

In 1969, Jones married Tammy Wynette – one of the most famous country music marriages ever, though it would last just six years. Jones followed Wynette to Epic Records and soon began working with her producer, Billy Sherrill, who would be responsible for his biggest hits of the ’70s and ’80s.

Jones and Wynette recorded a series of duet singles – including chart-toppers Golden Ring, Near You and We’re Gonna Hold On – that outlined a fictive version of the couple’s often-volatile relationship. The duets continued for several years after they divorced in 1975, and the two reunited professionally for a final album together, One, in 1995.

During the ’90s, Jones released an album, followed by an autobiography, called I Lived to Tell It All – the irony in the title coming precisely because so many people hadn’t expected him to.

His drinking and, eventually, his cocaine use, caused him to miss so many concerts that he earned the nickname No-Show Jones (he was also, more kindly, called The Possum).

He got in fights and destroyed motel rooms. He ventilated his tour bus by emptying the chambers of a pistol into its floor. He drove to a liquor store on a riding lawnmower when his second wife, Shirley Corley, hid all the car keys. At his most inebriated, he insisted on singing in the voice of a duck named Deedoodle.

Jones recounted multiple brushes with death in his book, but his best-known one came in 1999, when he crashed his Lexus SUV into a bridge abutment near Franklin, Tenn., while talking on his cellphone. Jones suffered a collapsed lung and ruptured liver and spent two weeks in a Nashville hospital.

Police found a partially empty bottle of vodka under the front passenger’s seat, and Jones later pled guilty to driving while impaired and acknowledged that he had fallen off the wagon.

 

Even at the height of his substance abuse, Jones’ personal troubles couldn’t always overshadow his talent.

His name has appeared on more charting singles – 168, spanning 55 years – than any other country singer’s, from 1955′s Why Baby Why to Aaron Lewis’ 2010 hit Country Boy, where he was a featured vocalist with Charlie Daniels.

He was a Kennedy Center honoree in 2008 and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012.

Jones’ greatest artistic achievement came with Billy Sherrill, his regular producer for much of the 1970s and ’80s. Sherrill, an admirer of Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” musical architecture, constructed his own masterpieces using Jones’ voice as scaffolding. Instead of competing with the singer’s dramatic delivery, Sherrill complemented it with vocal choruses, theatrical string sections and tensile pedal steel guitar lines. Sherrill’s lavish productions didn’t bury Jones, they revealed previously unheard subtleties of expression.

The pair reached their peak with the 1980 release of He Stopped Loving Her Today, widely considered to be the greatest country record ever made and one that, according to many involved with its creation, took more than a year to get on tape because Jones was so wrecked by cocaine and bourbon.

“He said I’ll love you ’til I die/She told him you’ll forget in time,” Jones sang as he began the Bobby Braddock/Curly Putman tune, needing only three minutes and 15 seconds to convey a lifetime of emotional devastation, the kind that takes hold of a man and doesn’t let go, not ever.

He Stopped Loving Her Today revived Jones’ career and perhaps saved his life. It gave him his first number-one hit in five years and won four awards from the Country Music Association, including Song of the Year twice. It also gave him the first of his two Grammys – he won again in 2000 for the post-wreck Choices.

In his later years, Jones often complained about the directions contemporary country music took, especially after radio stopped playing his records. But younger stylists revered him, particularly during country’s commercial boom of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Several, including Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson and Vince Gill sang with him on 1992′s I Don’t Need Your Rockin’ Chair, released the same year Jones was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. In the last 10 years of his career, he recorded with Shooter Jennings and Staind frontman Aaron Lewis, as well as with Dolly Parton and Merle Haggard.

Now, that voice has gone silent. They may lay a wreath upon his door. Soon, they’ll carry him away.

But we will not stop loving him today.

Roger Ebert: an appreciation

As a film critic by avocation and one with little use for Hollywood, I had mixed feelings about Roger Ebert but mostly tilted toward regarding him as part of the Establishment. Now with his passing and after I’ve had some time to review his career, particularly those aspects of it that were reflected in the Marxism list archives, I am tilting in the other direction, especially after taking into account what he had to say about Hugo Chavez. On October 31, 2003 I posted his review of “The Revolution Will not be Televised”:

Why was Chavez not our friend? It all comes down to oil, as it so often does these days. Venezuela is the fourth largest oil-producing nation in the world, and much of its oil comes to the United States. Its price has been guaranteed by the cooperation of the nation’s ruling class. Chavez was elected primarily by the poor. He asked a simple question: Since the oil wells have always been nationalized and the oil belongs to the state, why do the profits flow directly to the richest, whitest 20 percent of the population, while being denied to the poorer, darker 80 percent? His plan was to distribute the profits equally among all Venezuelans.

Now I ask you. Doesn’t this sound like an excerpt from a review that I might have written?

Two years later another Marxmail subscriber posted a link to Ebert’s review of “The Take”, Naomi Klein’s documentary on labor struggles against austerity in Argentina. Once again he comes down on the right side of the barricades:

Now here is “The Take,” a Canadian documentary by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, shot in Argentina, where a prosperous middle-class economy was destroyed during 10 years of IMF policies, as enforced by President Carlos Menem (1989-1999). Factories were closed, their assets were liquidated, and money fled the country, sometimes literally by the truckload. After most of it was gone, Menem closed the banks, causing panic. Today more than half of all Argentineans live in poverty, unemployment is epidemic, and the crime rate is scary.

In the face of this disaster, workers at several closed factories attempted to occupy the factories, reopen them and operate them. Their argument: The factories were subsidized in the first place by public money, so if the owners didn’t want to operate them, the workers deserved a chance. The owners saw this differently, calling the occupations theft. Committees of workers monitored the factories to prevent owners from selling off machinery and other assets in defiance of the courts. And many of the factories not only reopened, but were able to turn a profit while producing comparable or superior goods at lower prices.

I wearily anticipate countless e-mails advising me I am a hopelessly idealistic dreamer, and explaining how when the rich get richer, everybody benefits. I will forward the most inspiring of these messages to minimum-wage workers at Wal-Mart, so they will understand why labor unions would be bad for them, while working unpaid overtime is good for the economy. All I know is that the ladies at the garment factory are turning out good-looking clothes, demand is up for Zanon ceramics, and the auto parts factory is working with a worker-controlled tractor factory to make some good-looking machines. I think we can all agree that’s better than just sitting around.

I got a chuckle seeing Ebert’s reference to countless e-mails from Rush Limbaugh fans. So when I wrote him a snide message taking exception to his favorable review of “Crash”, Paul Haggis’s coincidence-laden fable about racial reconciliation in Los Angeles, he must have been so shocked by being attacked from the left that he rose to the bait and wrote me back defending his review. About 4 or 5 exchanges took place that day, leaving me finally with an appreciation for his lack of snobbery and willingness to engage with a lout like me.

I wonder if Ebert’s working-class roots made him more sensitive to pro-labor movies like the ones cited above and to ordinary people who crossed paths with him in cyberspace and real space. His dad worked in the power plant at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, a blue-collar town. He had lots in common with another working class kid named Michael Moore, who he publicly egged on to get political at the Academy Awards: “I’d like to see Michael Moore get up there and let ‘em have it with both barrels and really let loose and give them a real rabble-rousing speech.”

Moore has a wonderful story about trying to get Ebert to attend a screening for “Roger and Me” at the Mason’s Hall in Telluride that conflicted with Ebert’s prior engagement at the Opera House for the opening night gala of the film festival there. When Moore kept pressuring him to come to his screening instead, a clearly annoyed Ebert told him that he had spent $800 for the other event. Moore recounts what happened later that evening at his screening:

About five minutes before showtime, I looked out the window of the hall and saw a lone figure, a stout man, waddling down the street toward Masons Hall. It was none other than Roger Ebert. He walked in the door and saw his stalker standing there.

“Don’t say a word,” he ordered, putting his hand up and averting his eyes from mine. “I’m here. That’s all that needs to be said.”

“But —” I said, disobeying him — and being cut off by him in the same instant.

“I’m only here because there was this strange look in your eyes, a look that told me maybe I better be there. So here I am.” He went into the theater and took the last available seat, three rows from the back. No pressure now.

Of course the only other thing worth commenting on is Moore’s description of Ebert “waddling down”. Here goes. Pot… Kettle…

Like Moore, Ebert was a big supporter of the Democratic Party and of Obama. At the very least what can be said about these two major (in more ways than one) talents was their ability to say things in their films and reviews that cut across the Obama neoliberal agenda. I guess in this dreary epoch that’s what we can expect from all except the most unrepentant enemies of private property.

Ebert was born two and a half years before me, fortunate enough to be a young man in what were arguably cinema’s greatest years. That must have factored into his selection of the ten greatest films ever made: 2001: A Space Odyssey; Aguirre, the Wrath of God; Apocalypse Now; Citizen Kane; La Dolce Vita; The General; Raging Bull; Tokyo Story; The Tree of Life; and Vertigo. Anybody who includes Aguirre is okay in my book, for damned sure.

I think most people who get into reviewing films do so out of a real passion for them. Back in 1961, when I was a freshman at Bard, we had Friday night screenings of classic films curated by Arthur Tress, who went on to a distinguished career in photography. If being exposed to films like Eisenstein’s “Potemkin”, Buñuel’s “Un Chien Andalou”, and Jean Vigo’s “L’Atalante” was not enough to turn me into a cinephile, there was also the local movie theater in Red Hook that catered to the college. It was there that I saw Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo”, Bergman’s “Seventh Seal”, and Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim”.

I became so hooked on cinema that my field period—a midterm project that Bard eventually abandoned—for freshman year was an essay on Bergman’s films that I wrote at my parent’s home. The idea was to get internships in New York City or Washington, a hurdle too steep for a sixteen year old, especially one as immature as me.

Tress’s film gig was taken over by Jonathan Rosenbaum who was one year behind me at Bard. Rosenbaum eventually became a film reviewer in Chicago as well writing both popular material like Ebert’s and more scholarly articles with a mixture of Marxist and postmodernist themes.

If I had followed my passion, maybe I could have developed a vocation writing film reviews rather than what I have been doing for the last 15 years or so, writing them in my spare time—or even during working hours when I had my job at Columbia University. If I write them mostly out of a love for the medium than for money, I can at least say that this appeared to be Ebert’s motivation as well. It is too bad that we have so few journalists worthy of the name.

Toward the end of his life, Ebert was getting more and more into the Internet—blogging and tweeting like someone possessed. He was also quite open about the illness that would eventually take his life. This is from his last blog entry:

The immediate reason for my “leave of presence” is my health. The “painful fracture” that made it difficult for me to walk has recently been revealed to be a cancer. It is being treated with radiation, which has made it impossible for me to attend as many movies as I used to. I have been watching more of them on screener copies that the studios have been kind enough to send to me. My friend and colleague Richard Roeper and other critics have stepped up and kept the newspaper and website current with reviews of all the major releases. So we have and will continue to go on.

For years I devoutly took every one of my tear sheets, folded them and added them to a pile on my desk. The photo above [at the top of this post] shows the height of that pile in 1985 as it appeared on the cover of my first book about the movies published by my old friends John McMeel and Donna Martin of Andrews & McMeel. Today, because of technology, the opportunities to become bigger, better and reach more people are piling up too. The fact that we’re re-launching the site now, in the midst of other challenges, should give you an idea how important Rogerebert.com and Ebert Digital are to Chaz and me. I hope you’ll stop by, and look for me. I’ll be there.

So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I’ll see you at the movies.

Ring shout leader dead at 97

NY Times, April 1 2013

Lawrence McKiver, a Singer in Long Tradition, Dies at 97

By MARGALIT FOX

Lawrence McKiver, a founder and the longtime lead singer of the McIntosh County Shouters, a Georgia group representing the last community in America to perform the traditional ring shout — a centuries-old black form of ecstatic worship that marries singing, percussion and movement — died on March 25 on St. Simons Island, Ga. He was 97.

photo by Margo Newmark Rosenbaum
Lawrence McKiver leading a ring shout — a form of worship that combines singing, percussion and movement — in 1983.

His death, at a nursing home there, was confirmed by a cousin, Carletha Sullivan.

The ring shout, rooted in the ritual dances of West Africa and forged by the Atlantic slave trade, is believed to be the oldest surviving African-American performance tradition of any kind. Centered in the Gullah-Geechee region of the coastal South, it differs from traditional black religious music in repertory, style and execution.

“The shouters, historically, had a separate body of songs that were used expressly and exclusively for the ring shout,” Art Rosenbaum, the author of “Shout Because You’re Free” (1998), a book about the tradition, said in an interview on Friday. “They are not the spirituals or gospel songs or hymns or jubilees that you’d hear in the church.”

Mr. McKiver, the Shouters’ last original member, appeared with the group until he was in his mid-80s and was widely acknowledged as the ring shout’s chief custodian.

A resident of Bolden, a tiny community about 50 miles south of Savannah, he had long helped perpetuate dozens of its traditional shout songs — including “Kneebone Bend,” “Move, Daniel,” “I Want to Die Like Weepin’ Mary” and “Hold the Baby” — whose subject matter can range from the devout to the secular and from the joyous to the apocalyptic.

With the founding of the McIntosh County Shouters in 1980, Mr. McKiver introduced the ring shout to wide audiences throughout the country.

Despite its name, the ring shout entails little shouting. That word refers not to the singing but to the movement: small, deliberate steps in a counterclockwise ring. (“Shout” has been said to be a Gullah survival of the Afro-Arabic word “saut,” the name of a ritual dance around the Kaaba, a sacred site in Mecca.)

Mr. McKiver was the Shouters’ songster, as the lead singer is known. A shout typically begins with the songster singing the opening lines; other singers, known as basers, reply in call-and-response fashion. The group’s “stick man” beats a syncopated rhythm on the floor with a tree branch or broomstick as other members clap contrasting rhythms.

The circular steps for which shouting is known are by no means dancing. To avoid even the faint appearance of dance (considered sinful in some Christian traditions), shouters may neither cross their feet nor lift them high. The result — a low, measured step that is sometimes described as a shuffle — is shouting’s visual hallmark.

On the plantations of the antebellum South, where it took on elements of Christianity, the ring shout flourished covertly for generations of slaves.

“They were just doing something to keep their mind off the past tense,” Mr. McKiver said, speaking in the local dialect, in an oral history in Mr. Rosenbaum’s book. “It was their happiness. They didn’t sing it for nothing at all sad.”

After the Civil War, the tradition endured in pockets where freed slaves had settled. By the mid-20th century, however, as Gullah-Geechee communities were increasingly swept aside by gentrification, the ring shout was presumed dead.

But in 1980 two folklorists, Fred C. Fussell and George Mitchell, were astonished to find it still being performed — a robust modern link in a chain stretching back generations — in Bolden, a coastal area in McIntosh County, Ga.

In Bolden (or Briar Patch, as the community is also known), ring shouting was, then as now, a vital adjunct to worship at the Mount Calvary Baptist Church. It was typically performed there on New Year’s Eve, also called Watch Night, to shout out the old year and shout in the new.

The folklorists encouraged the people of Bolden to take the shout public; under Mr. McKiver’s stewardship, a touring group, the McIntosh County Shouters, was assembled.

Over the years, the group (typically four men and five women, all related by birth or marriage) has performed at City Center in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington and the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, S.C., as well as on many college campuses.

It can be heard on recordings, including “Slave Shout Songs From the Coast of Georgia,” released on the Folkways label in 1984, and in “Unchained Memories,” a 2003 HBO documentary built around slave narratives.

In 1993, the McIntosh County Shouters were awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Lawrence McKiver was born in Bolden in April 1915. (The family name is sometimes spelled McIver.) His mother, the former Charlotte Evans, was a shouter, as were his maternal grandparents, Amy and London Jenkins, slaves who were the wellspring of most of the shouts performed by the community today.

Mr. McKiver was educated in local segregated schools and served in the Army during World War II. Afterward he spent much of his working life as a shrimper, a job in which, he said, he “hauled till my hands be so sore till blood come out.”

Performing with the Shouters, Mr. McKiver took pains to explain to audiences the messages from slave to slave that were encoded in the lyrics of some songs.

Introducing “Move, Daniel,” for instance, he would say that “Daniel was not the Daniel of the Bible, but was a slave that had stolen some meat from the master’s smokehouse,” Mr. Rosenbaum recalled on Friday. “And the words of the shout — ‘Move, Daniel/Go the other way, Daniel’ — he understood to be instructions to Daniel about how to flee from the master’s whip.”

Mr. McKiver’s wife, the former Anna Mae Palmer, whom he married in 1934, died in 1962. Survivors include a daughter, Renelda Nelson; a son, Ricky Scott; five grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; and a great-great-grandchild.

The ring shout, which is believed to have survived in Bolden because of the community’s stability — its young people tended to settle there — seems destined to endure: Mr. McKiver’s cousin Ms. Sullivan is a member of the Shouters, as are her daughter and grandson, the group’s current stick man.

This continuity is due in no small part to Mr. McKiver’s influence.

“I know I’m the one that got the songs alive today,” he told Mr. Rosenbaum. “And I don’t mind talking with a person on my heritage. I can bravely talk about my heritage, because my people come over the rough side of the mountain. Understand?”

Hugo Chavez is dead

Hugo Chávez: poor boy from the plains who became leftwing figurehead

Venezuelan leader leaves legacy of literacy and healthcare for poor alongside crumbling infrastructure and dependence on oil

• Rory Carroll
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 5 March 2013 17.26 EST

Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela, has died after a long battle with cancer, according to his vice-president Nicolás Maduro. Photograph: George Tuley/AP

No one imagined it would end like this. A ravaged body, a hospital bed, a shroud of silence, invisible. Hugo Chávez‘s life blazed drama, a command performance, and friend and foe alike always envisaged an operatic finale.

He would rule for decades, transform Venezuela and Latin America, and bid supporters farewell from the palace balcony, an old man, his work complete. Or, a parallel fantasy: he would tumble from power, disgraced and defeated by the wreckage of revolution, ending his days a hounded pariah.

Instead, the 58-year-old leader, whose death was reported on Tuesday by his vice-president, Nicolás Maduro, succumbed to cancer at a hospital in Caracas, departing this world behind drapes of official secrecy. The boy from the plains of Barinas who loved to draw and sing and grew up to be an army officer, a coup plotter, a president and world figure, leaves an ambiguous legacy of triumph, ruin and uncertainty.

It was a surreal, slow-motion death. He announced his cancer in June 2011 to a stunned nation. The comandante, sick? He was indestructible: possessor, as Gabriel Garcìa Márquez once noted, of a body of reinforced concrete. Chávez drank more than 30 cups of black coffee a day, worked till 3am, talked on his weekly TV show without script (or interruption) for eights hours straight.

“We will beat this,” he told Venezuela, enlisting the country in his fight for survival, and, until late last year when he disappeared from view for treatment in Cuba and officials turned grave, the government insisted for a year and a half that, no matter how bloated and haggard he looked, he was recovering.

During 2012 Chávez would break spells of seclusion by appearing on TV clutching that day’s newspaper, like a hostage’s proof of life video. Many Venezuelans were convinced the cancer was a ruse, that he was faking it to wrongfoot opponents.

But he was dying. The type of cancer and its prognosis were official secrets, kept in the same vault as Fidel Castro’s medical records.

Death will return Chávez to the spotlight. His funeral promises to be a vast, tumultuous affair of weeping throngs and foreign leaders’ cavalcades. The millions of mostly poor Venezuelans who considered Chávez a champion since he was first elected in 1998 will be bereft.

“Uh, ah, Chávez no se va,” went the chant. Uh, ah, Chávez won’t go. A gleeful, defiant riposte to opponents who tried in vain to oust him. Now he has gone, but whither his “21st-century socialist revolution”, a unique experiment in power fuelled by charisma and bountiful oil revenues?

Read full article

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/04/15/hugo-chavez-and-the-venezuelan-revolution/
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/04/17/hugo-chavez-and-the-venezuelan-revolution-part-2/
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/hugo-chavez-and-the-venezuelan-revolution-conclusion/
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/finding-fault-with-hugo-chavez/
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/11/18/mike-gonzalez-on-hugo-chavez/

Donald Byrd is dead

Legendary jazz trumpeter Donald Byrd has died, says nephew

Influential musician’s nephew reports that he died on Monday in Delaware, where he lived

David Batty
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 7 February 2013 20.01 EST

The influential jazz trumpeter Donald Byrd died on Monday at the age of 80, his nephew has said.

Alex Bugnon, a jazz pianist, reported his uncle’s death on Thursday, though it has yet to be confirmed.

Bugnon wrote on his own Facebook page: “Donald passed away Monday in Delaware, where he lived. His funeral will be held in Detroit sometime next week. I have no more patience for this unnecessary shroud of secrecy placed over his death by certain members of his immediate family.”

Byrd was born Donaldson Toussaint L’Ouverture Byrd II in Detroit in 1932 and began his career with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the 1950s, performing alongside the likes of John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk and Herbie Hancock.

While his roots were in bebop he later became equally renowned for soul and funk, and particularly jazz fusion. He went on to become one of jazz label Blue Note’s most significant artists, for whom he recorded most of his releases, including the 1973 album Black Byrd, which became the label’s biggest ever seller.

Long after his commercial peak, Byrd’s influence continued to be felt in popular music, sampled by hip-hop artists including Public Enemy, Nas, the Pharcyde and Del Tha Funkee Homosapien and house producer Armand Van Helden.

Byrd’s legacy is summed up by his nephew’s Facebook tribute: “Let’s remember Donald as a one of a kind pioneer of the trumpet, of the many styles of music he took on, of music education. In sum, Donald was an avid, eternal student of music, until his death. That’s what I try to be, everyday!! Rest in peace, uncle!”

Jim Zarichny: social change is a long path

Jim Zarichny leads DSA contingent

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_22495329/boulder-activist-jim-zarichny-89-dies-before-bookstore?source=pkg

Boulder activist Jim Zarichny, 89, dies before bookstore announces closure
By Alex Burness Camera Staff Writer
Posted: 01/31/2013 10:36:28 PM MST
Updated: 01/31/2013 10:37:34 PM MST

Jim Zarichny, an activist in the Democratic Socialist movement, died of various ailments Thursday morning in his south Boulder home. He was 89.

Known for his long white beard and commitment to social change, Zarichny died just hours before Left Hand Book Collective — the progressive Boulder bookstore he helped found — announced its closure.

An activist from a young age, Zarichny was president of his Flint, Mich., high school’s junior union and participated with his parents in the 1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike of General Motors.

As a college student, Zarichny was an outspoken communist and was the subject of McCarthyist accusations during his time at what is now called Michigan State University.

In 1948, he appeared before the Michigan Senate Committee on Un-American Activities at Universities. He refused to tell State Sen. Matthew Callahan whether he was a communist, and he was sentenced to jail for the remainder of the Senate term. But the term ended the same day he was sentenced, so Zarichny never spent a night in jail.

Zarichny finished his undergraduate degree in mathematics at Columbia University in New York. After graduating, he was hired by IBM, though the company fired him soon after a background check revealed his communist tendencies.

During World War II, Zarichny was trained to be a military police officer in the U.S. Army. He was reassigned to a military hospital in Lido, India, where he admitted injured Chinese soldiers. During his time off, Zarichny traveled throughout India, relishing his conversations with locals.

In Boulder, Zarichny worked in supercomputing at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He was employed by Florida State University, but the school sent him to NCAR because it didn’t have a supercomputer.

In 1964, he was invited to attend the Pine Hill convention of Students for a Democratic Society.

He was also an active member in the Boulder chapter of the New American Movement, a Democratic Socialist group founded in 1971.

In 1979, Zarichny hatched the idea for the Left Hand Book Collective, a source for progressive literature.

His passion for activism carried well into his old age, as he appeared at Left Hand forums and, as an 87-year-old, marched in the Louisville Labor Day Parade.

During his last few years, Zarichny devoted much of his time to sorting through his personal archives, which will soon be available at the University of Colorado’s Norlin Library.

“He was an incredibly intelligent and very sweet person,” said friend and Left Hand volunteer Dave Anderson, who first met Zarichny at a Marxist study group in 1974. “He was always helping out in social movements and always concerned with what was going on in the world and how it make it a better place.”

Kathy Partridge, who met Zarichny through the New American Movement and has also volunteered at Left Hand, recalls his love of conversation and debate.

“He was known to say, ‘I am prepared to argue this item at length.’ If you were on the other side of the issue, you’d just say, ‘uh oh,’” she said with a laugh, adding that Zarichny “was deeply committed to a life of ideas and social justice.

“From Jim I learned that social change is a long path,” she said.

* * * *

Jim Zarichny introduces himself to Marxmail on July 11, 2003:

In a separate posting, I will write about the conclusions about the Civil War reached by a study group in 1958-59. Since a number of people have mentioned that they would like to know a little of the background of the writers, here goes.

I have been politically active for 67 years, so it is impossible now to discuss all of the political developments I have been involved with. For example, in 1947 or 1948 I was the first and only witness before the Michigan State Senate Committee on un-American Activities. This resulted in a defeat for the Committee and its chairperson, State Sen. Mathew Callahan, failed re-election in the Republican primary. Earlier, I had been placed on disciplinary probation by Michigan State University for passing out leaflets for an organization called American Youth for Democracy. As a returned war veteran, I didn’t know I needed permission to pass out leaflets on campus.

In 1948 (or 49) I was expelled from Michigan State University. The local newspaper ran a story saying that I attended a meeting off campus at which Carl Winter spoke. The University deemed this a violation of my probation. Carl Winter was the secretary of the Michigan CP and under a Smith Act indictment at the time. The Civil Rights Congress, with the very active participation of Coleman Young (who later became mayor of Detroit) organized a defense committee for me. Among the people who lent their names to my defense committee were Paul Robeson, WEB Dubois, and Congressman Vito Marcantonio. The Civil Rights Congress organized a national speaking tour for me. When the case was appealed to the US Supreme Court, they refused to hear it.

About that time, the people around William Z Foster were organizing a drive to get their supporters into industry. Just a few years earlier, under the influence of Earl Browder, his organization had attracted a huge number of students and middle class people. I have heard an estimate, which I believe is accurate, that about 10,000 people went into industry. I went to work in the Chevrolet plant in my hometown, Flint, Michigan. (In junior high school, I had been president of the Junior Union, and in senior high school, I had been secretary treasurer of the CIO Youth Club)

By 1950, the UAW was quite depoliticized. Out of 10,000 members, only 2000 voted in Chevrolet union elections. After the Korean War broke out, most of the UAW politicians were afraid to work with us. So we had to run our own slate with just ourselves and our close friends. But we got 500 votes on a CP slate (twenty five percent of the votes cast). We felt this was pretty good in the middle of the hysteria around the Rosenbergs and the Korean War.

A few years later, the Army-McCarthy hearings were taking place in Washington. At exactly the same time, the House un-American Activities Committee came to Flint. I was subpoenaed, but never called to testify. However, a number of the witnesses were asked about me, and this was reported in the local paper. At that time, the Chevrolet factory had hired a large number of new workers. All of them were Korean War veterans, and almost all of them were from out of town. Somebody made the claim to these guys that I had supported the North Koreans who had killed their buddies in Korea. One of them implied to me that the source was the FBI. I was attacked by the veterans and badly beaten. Others who were named in the HUAC hearings were also beaten. (The beatings were widely reported state wide by all of the major newspapers. Much to my amazement, the officials of the Ford Motor Company ran a full page ad in the Detroit Free Press deploring violence.) Chevrolet told me that if I did not return to work, I would be fired, but they offered no protection on the streets outside their plant. I returned to work. After several days, I learned that a new attack was coming. I left the plant early, but Chevrolet fired me for leaving without permission. The local union filed a grievance on my behalf. Because Chevrolet refused to settle, it went to a higher level where it was dropped by the Reuther officialdom.

In 1956, the Khrushchev report to the 20th Congress of the CPSU confirmed my worst fears. I knew that a fresh start was needed. My friends in Flint were too demoralized to do anything. New York seemed to be the place where I could find people for the project. In New York, I found a job and became a part time student in the Columbia University School of General Studies.

In 1958, about 20 young people centered around Steve Max and Jim Brook left YSA to join an almost dying study group that I was involved with. For more than a year we met in my apartment every Wednesday evening for a detailed re-evaluation of American history and the role of the American left. We took turns on giving a report and leading a discussion on the topic of the day. In a separate article, I will cover what I remember of our discussion of the American Civil War. Gradually, people dropped out. When we were down to nine members, another dropped out. He said we were getting nowhere and he was going to join the CP led youth group, which at that time was called Advance. A few years later, he surfaced as a paid informant for the FBI. He had been with us for a year. I am still surprised that the FBI would plant a paid informant in a small study group with only ten members and with absolutely no connection to any tendency. The only explanation I can give is that they had a lot of money.

When Bayard Rustin organized the march for unsegregated schools, most of our group went to Washington to participate. There they met a number of young New Yorkers who were looking for an organization. Steve invited them to join our group. Rachelle Horowitz from YPSL (the same Rachelle Horowitz who later married Thomas Donahue, the national secretary-treasurer of the A.F.ofL-C.I.O. from 1979 to 1995.) also met the same individuals. The new people could not decide which group they wanted to join and proposed a debate. About nine people came to my apartment to hear Horowitz vs. Steve Max and Zarichny. We won decisively. Overnight, we had an organization of 75 or 80 members. Suddenly we were being asked to do all sorts of things. We were asked to organize picket lines at 3 Woolworth stores in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. When Martin Luther King came to speak at the armory in New York, we were asked to furnish half of the ushers. (it was the moment in history when the Black church youth groups had collapsed and the Black preachers could not furnish enough people.)

We were organized as the FDR-Four Freedoms Club. Around that time, Al Haber and Tom Hayden were transforming the Student League for Industrial Democracy into the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They approached us and asked that we merge with them. We agreed. SDS had 120 members and our 80 brought the national membership to 200. But a problem developed. JoAnne Landy and her then husband, Sy Landy said we were Stalinoid, whatever that means, and their group of 15 withdrew bringing SDS national membership down to 185. Very soon, Steve Max became the national traveler for SDS. He had the magical organizational touch. Everywhere he went, SDS chapters sprung up.

I was officially invited as a resource person to the Pine Hill SDS convention in 1964. I attended the SDS National Council meeting at the McBurney YMCA after Christmas in 1964. It was there that Jim Brook presented the resolution that SDS organize a march in Washington against the war in Viet Nam. There was a lot of opposition to the proposal. The debate was so heated and so long that none of the other points on the agenda were reached. The primary support for the resolution came from people who had been in the Four Freedoms Club. Jim, himself, had been a key figure in our study group from the very beginning.

30,000 people came to Washington when SDS had only 3000 or 4000 members. It made national television and SDS really took off.

(Incidentally, I am a character in the cartoon strip, Ernie. Sometimes the strip is called the Piranha Club. Buddy Grace who draws the strip took the photo of myself that I sent to Les.) Jim

P.S. I later learned that Tom Hayden, who had heard of me in Michigan long before he ever met me, told his friends that he was disappointed in me. He told them that he had expected a much more dynamic person.

Butch Morris Dies at 65; Creator of ‘Conduction’

NY Times January 29, 2013
Butch Morris Dies at 65; Creator of ‘Conduction’
By BEN RATLIFF

Butch Morris, who created a distinctive form of large-ensemble music built on collective improvisation that he single-handedly directed and shaped, died on Tuesday in Brooklyn. He was 65.

The cause was cancer, said Kim Smith, his publicist and friend. Mr. Morris, who lived in the East Village, died at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Fort Hamilton.

Mr. Morris referred to his method as “conduction,” short for “conducted improvisation.” He defined the word, which he trademarked, as “an improvised duet for ensemble and conductor.”

He would often begin a performance by setting a tempo with his baton and having his musicians develop a theme spontaneously and then seize on the musical ideas he wanted to work with, directing the ensemble with a vocabulary of gestures and signals. An outstretched upward palm, up or down to indicate volume, meant sustain; a U shape formed with thumb and forefinger meant repeat; a finger to the forehead meant to remember a melodic phrase or a rhythm that he would summon again later.

He introduced this concept in 1985 and at first met resistance from musicians who were not willing to learn the vocabulary and respond to the signals; he was often in a position of asking artists to reorient themselves to his imagination and make something new out of familiar materials. But he demanded to be taken seriously, and he was. After 10 years he had made enough recordings to release “Testament,” a well-received 10-disc set of his work. After 20, he had become an internationally admired creative force, presenting conductions at concert halls worldwide and maintaining regular workshops and performances at the East Village spaces Nublu, Lucky Cheng’s and the Stone.

Mr. Morris, who also played cornet, began his career as a jazz musician in Los Angeles. After settling in New York in the early 1980s, he took his place among both the downtown improvising musicians of the Kitchen and the Knitting Factory and the purveyors of multidisciplinary, mixed-media art flourishing in the city.

Though the bulk of his conductions were with those trained in jazz or new music, many different kinds of performers could take part, as long as they had learned his method. (Five days of rehearsal was his preference.) Conduction No. 1, “Current Trends in Racism in Modern America,” was performed in 1985, at the Kitchen, with a 10-piece ensemble including the saxophonists John Zorn and Frank Lowe, the turntablist Christian Marclay and the composer Yasunao Tone. Others were for full classical orchestras; electronic instruments and music boxes; dancers, actors and visual artists; and gatherings of 19 poets (No. 27) or 15 trumpets (No. 134).

Mr. Morris occasionally used written music or texts, by himself or others — he did this with the saxophonist David Murray’s big band and octet in the early 1990s, and in more recent years with the group Burnt Sugar, an ensemble influenced by his methods, for which he conducted a version of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” — but most often he used no written material at all.

In decades of workshops around the world, and for a stretch, from 1998 to 2001, at Bilgi University in Istanbul, he taught his signals and gestures. Some of these were common to all conductors; some were adapted from the California jazz bandleaders Horace Tapscott and Charles Moffett, whom he had known early in his career (he also cited Sun Ra, Lukas Foss and Larry Austin’s “Improvisations for Orchestra and Jazz Soloists’’ as influences); many were his own.

He said he didn’t care whether people thought his music was jazz or not, although he himself saw it as derived from jazz but not beholden to it. “As long as I’m a black man playing a cornet,” he reasoned, “I’ll be a jazz musician in other people’s eyes. That’s good enough for me. There’s nothing wrong with being called a jazz musician.”

Lawrence Douglas Morris was born in Long Beach, Calif., on Feb. 10, 1947, and grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. The son of a career Navy man, he played trumpet in school orchestra, and after high school copied big-band arrangements for a Los Angeles music studio. In 1966 he served in the Army, as a medic in Germany, Vietnam and Japan. Once back home, he joined Mr. Tapscott’s big band, a creative and social hub in the Los Angeles experimental-jazz scene.

After studying music at Grove Street College in Oakland, Calif., he briefly moved to New York. In 1976 he left to play and teach music in France and the Netherlands. In 1981 he relocated permanently to New York, not long after his brother Wilber, the bassist through the 1980s and early ’90s in David Murray’s octet, did.

Wilber Morris died in 2002. Mr. Morris is survived by a son, Alexandre; a brother Michael; and a sister, Marceline. His marriage to Therese Christophe ended in divorce last year.

Conduction, with all its logistical complications and no institutional system to support it, was never a steady source of income. Mr. Morris also taught and sought commissions; he wrote music for dancers, including Min Tanaka, Diane McIntyre and Yoshiko Chuma; he worked as musical director for the short-lived ABC crime series “A Man Called Hawk”; he wrote original music for Ntozake Shange’s play “Spell #7” and for the Wooster Group and the Folger Shakespeare Theater in Washington.

One of his projects, in the early 1990s, was writing music for windup music boxes, for which he asked visual artists he knew — including David Hammons, A. R. Penck, Betye and Alison Saar, and Michael Hafftka — to create the outer shells. But he insisted that the artists not think of them as music boxes. “I tell them, ‘I don’t want to think in terms of boxes,’ ” he explained. “I want to think of them as resonating containers.”

The Death of a Culture Warrior: Sol Yurick 1925-2013

Sol Yurick

My take on a great radical writer’s contribution:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/09/the-death-of-a-culture-warrior/

Three musical titans pass on

Charles Rosen, Scholar-Musician Who Untangled Classical Works, Dies at 85
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: December 10, 2012

Charles Rosen, the pianist, polymath and author whose National Book Award-winning volume “The Classical Style” illuminated the enduring language of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 85.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Mr. Rosen at home in 2007.

The death, at Mount Sinai Hospital, was of cancer, said Henri Zerner, a friend of many years.

Published in 1971, “The Classical Style” examines the nature of Classical music through the lens of its three most exemplary practitioners. Given that these titans were working with the same raw materials — the 12 notes of the Western musical scale — as the Baroque composers who had preceded them, just what was it, Mr. Rosen’s book asked, that gave their music its unmistakable character?

full article

Galina Vishnevskaya, Soprano and Dissident, Dies at 86
By JONATHAN KANDELL
Published: December 11, 2012

Galina Vishnevskaya, an electrifying soprano who endured repression and exile as one of the postwar Soviet Union’s most prominent political dissidents, died on Monday in Moscow. She was 86.

Galina Vishnevskaya in 1961, when she sang “Aida” at the Metropolitan, one of her rare appearances in the West at that time.

Erich Auerbach/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images
Ms. Vishnevskaya with her husband, Mstislav Rostropovich, in 1959.

Her death was confirmed by a spokesman for the Vishnevskaya Opera Center in Moscow.

Ms. Vishnevskaya, the wife of the celebrated cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, was renowned both as an emotional singer with a polished technique and as a charismatic actress. She had performed in operettas and music hall revues before joining the Bolshoi Theater of Russia, the country’s premier opera company.

At the Bolshoi she breathed new life into stodgy Soviet-era productions with dynamic interpretations of Tatyana in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” Marina in Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” and Natasha Rostova in Prokofiev’s “War and Peace.” In 23 years at the Bolshoi, from 1952 through 1974, she performed more than 30 roles.

Though Ms. Vishnevskaya was rarely allowed to sing in the West at the height of her powers in the 1960s and ’70s, she drew rave reviews when she did. “Galina Vishnevskaya’s appearances at the Metropolitan Opera are like a comet’s, sudden, infrequent, capable of lighting up the sky,” Raymond Ericson wrote in The New York Times, reviewing her performance in the title role of Puccini’s “Tosca” in 1975.

In the mid-1970s, Ms. Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich were hounded by the Soviet authorities for their liberal political views and their friendship with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel laureate novelist and dissident.

In 1978, while traveling abroad, the couple were stripped of their Russian citizenships by the Kremlin. They were allowed to return to the Soviet Union and regain citizenship only in 1990 at the behest of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last head of state before the collapse of the Communist regime a year later.

full article

Ravi Shankar, Sitarist Who Introduced Indian Music to the West, Dies at 92
By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: December 12, 2012

Associated Press
The Beatles’ George Harrison with Ravi Shankar in 1967.

Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitarist and composer whose collaborations with Western classical musicians as well as rock stars helped foster a worldwide appreciation of India’s traditional music, died Tuesday in a hospital near his home in Southern California. He was 92.

Mr. Shankar had suffered from upper respiratory and heart ailments in the last year and underwent heart-valve replacement surgery last Thursday, his family said in a statement.

Mr. Shankar, a soft-spoken, eloquent man whose performance style embodied a virtuosity that transcended musical languages, was trained in both Eastern and Western musical traditions. Although Western audiences were often mystified by the odd sounds and shapes of the instruments when he began touring in Europe and the United States in the early 1950s, Mr. Shankar and his ensemble gradually built a large following for Indian music.

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