Friday, October 15, 2004

International Law Weekend

Attended the first full day of the International Law Weekend. I have many things to tell, but you'll have to wait until next week for the details. I'll say only this for now: you learn a tremendous amount at conferences like these, but talking about international law gets depressing when you hear all of these intellectuals speak about how every major problem is insoluble.

As one professor, an optimistic one, said to a pessimistic panelist, "C'mon! You're a creative lawyer!" I think of myself as a creative lawyer. I like to think I think out of the box. The problems of creating an accountable, workable international court system, for instance, are old and difficult and fraught with political realities that we don't like to mention, but if the Soviet Union can fall, anything can happen.

Or maybe these are formally optimistic intellectuals who have encountered reality and have crashed.

Who knows? I'm still young and optimistic enough to look at pessimism as useless.

Thursday, October 14, 2004

International Law Weekend 2004

Tonight, tomorrow, and Saturday afternoon, I will be attending the International Law Association's International Law Weekend at the New York City Bar Association.

The topics are scintillating. The opening session is entitled, "Using International Law to Interpret the Constitution". The court has, of late, been citing the decisions of foreign and international courts in its opinions. A particularly controversial example came in the case of Lawrence v. Texas, which overruled Texas's sodomy law, effectively destroying the final vestiges of laws against homosexuality. The case overturned Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 case which had upheld a similar law in Georgia. In the opinion, Justice Kennedy cited both British decisions, and (this made the originalists, like Justice Scalia, real mad), cited a decision of the European Court of Human Rights.

The two sides of the issue go something like this: those who favor the practice hold that a good court will look to all sources of law to craft an opinion that is well-reasoned and well-founded just as a good student uses as many relevant sources as possible to write a research paper. The superior courts of many countries, Israel in particular, cite foreign courts in their opinions. The originalists argue that to cite international or foreign courts (as opposed to treaties properly ratified by the U.S. Senate) is blasphemous activism, the validation of a body of law that was not made by any democratic process in the United States. Robert Bork, is, predictably, especially critical of the practice of citing international laws and decisions.

I'll have more to say about the conference in the next few days.

Malkovitch plays Copland

On Sunday, I attended the junior recital of an old friend of mine, Ben Malkovitch. Ben's a pianist and cellist, and like everyone else who is not lucky enough to four arms, he does not play both instruments at the same time. This time, he used his two arms to play the piano.

The recital was given at Hofstra University's Monroe Hall. It was a multimedia effort; Ben gave a presentation on the music he was to perform, which consisted of an interesting little Toccata by Marion Bauer, J.S. Bach's Italian Concerto, Chopin's D-flat Nocturne, Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer (sung wonderfully by another Hofstra student), and Aaron Copland's Piano Sonata, written between 1939 and 1941. The time in between the lecture and the concert was filled by a recording of Mahler's First Symphony, a theme of which arises in the Songs.

The Copland was new to me, and, I bet, new to just about everyone else in the audience. The Sonata has a experimental feel to it, but it is not weighed down by the hyper-intellectualism that pervades many atonal works. Copland was a composer who never allowed the rigor of a form to get in the way of the music. The second movement, a Vivace, is jazz-influenced, though the short motifs that form the foundation of movement tend to obscure the jazz feeling. Twentieth century composers seems to have had a tough time infusing jazz into forms that were not jazz-like; Samuel Barber tried to do the blues in the second movement of his Excursions, and, like a number of other attempts, it came out sounding pretty labored because Samuel Barber, great as he was, was not a jazz musician. Perhaps notating that which is usually improvised is a futile exercise (though Morton Gould pulled it off nicely with his Boogie-Woogie Etude.) Copland is not making such a direct attempt at writing jazz, so perhaps it takes a second listening to pick up.

Monday, October 11, 2004

Gershwin plays Gershwin

I'm sitting here listening to George Gershwin playing his own arrangements of his own songs for piano. Gershwin recorded eight of these arrangements, four from his show, "Oh, Kay!", and four from "Tip-Toes", all in 1926. I have them on a record with his recordings of Rhapsody in Blue with Paul Whiteman's Orchestra, his recording of his Three Preludes for Piano, and the first recording of "An American in Paris", Gershwin's tone tryptych of Paris in the 1920s. These recordings represent the balance of Gershwin's studio recordings.

Musicians often flock to composer recordings for obvious reasons - they provide lessons in interpretation straight from the horse's mouth. Not so with Gershwin. Gershwin's recordings are very straight, flat really. His Preludes are delivered with little of the Tin Pan Alley style which makes them such a trip when they are played with feeling. Rhapsody in Blue suffers from a different problem; it's cut short by about half. The most likely is that RCA Victor wanted to get the recording on two sides of a record (a 12 inch 78 RPM record holds about 4 minutes and 30 seconds). But the recording is of great significance because it delivers Paul Whiteman's original jazz band, which will not sound like anything you've ever heard; the wa-wa effects of the trumpets and sound effects written into Ferde Grofe's orchestration come through with a certain freshness.

Gershwin's song arrangements are great, but according to Edward Jablonski's liner notes, they were recorded with the intention of being used as dance records, so they are metronomically monochromatic. And indeed, it's hard to believe Gershwin, the great improviser, would have played them this way were he playing them at some 1920s New York house party or in some Harlem nightclub.

My favorite recording of Rhapsody of Blue is by the pianist Ivan Davis with a jazz orchestra conducted by Maurice Peress. It is part of a 2-CD set entitled, "The Birth of Rhapsody in Blue: Paul Whiteman's Historic Aeolian Hall Concert of 1924". Rhapsody in Blue was premiered at this concert, which Whiteman subtitled, "A Experiment in Modern Music". The recording recreates the original performance. The Aeolian Hall concert was a kind of overview of American popular music written in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The concert featured a collection of songs played by Whiteman's orchestra, novelty pieces for piano, including some fantastic novelty piano works of Zez Confrey, and concluded with the Rhapsody, the 22nd piece on a program which must have at least three hours. (The Confrey pieces, incidentally, are played with great pizazz by Dick Hyman, the jazz piano.) The recording comes with extensive liner notes including a recreation of the original program from the concert. Unfortunately, the recording does not appear to be in print, but it is worth hunting down.