William de Leftwich Dodge

Murals by William de Leftwich Dodge (1867-1935) decorate many public buildings: the Onondaga County Court House in Syracuse, NY; City Hall in Buffalo, NY; the State Capitol Building in Albany, NY; and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

After a life of international travel, Dodge and his wife, Francesca, built a home in Setauket on the north shore of Long Island. Their dream house, in the Greek Revival style, they called Villa Francesca. In this painting, along with Francesca Dodge, notice the iris and roses of spring. In the center of the fountain, Pan plays his flute as the gargoyles spray jets of water at his feet. An idyll indeed.

Stepping In the Fountain At Villa Francesca, c. 1916, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.

Did The Beatles Destroy Rock and Rock?

HOW THE BEATLES DESTROYED ROCK ‘N’ ROLL :
An Alternative History of American Popular Music
By Elijah Wald New York, Oxford University Press: 2009 81.64 WAL

Vibe, and Spin are gone: Rolling Stone is in trouble. Say goodbye with no tears. The popular music press, broadly defined, is a story told by men, for other men.

“It is often said that history is written by the victors, but in the case of pop music that is rarely true. The victors tend to be out dancing, while the historians sit at their desks, assiduously chronicling music they cannot hear on mainstream radio. And it is not just historians. The people who choose to write about popular music, even while it is happening, tend to be far from average consumers and party goers and often despise the taste and behavior of their more cheerful and numerous peers.” (Wald)
Some men who make their livings playing music understand this. Bandleader Vincent Lopez, in 1924: “The success of the public ballroom depends on whether it is favor with the women patrons.” And Little Milton in the 1990s: "Basically, for every woman that comes, you can figure that she’s going to have at least three men to follow that one woman." Elijah Wald, man though he is, is also an iconoclastic chronicler of the music scene. His choice of title grabs the reader, but though it is the end point of his tale it is not deceptive. Wald builds an alternativ e narrative of 20th century popular music that is fascinating and persuasive.
The craze for ragtime (a two beat music) arrived shortly after commercial recording, capturing and disseminating a new era in sound. The switch to a four-beat based music and the new respectability of public dancing let a thousand dance bands flower. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band (all white) played to the popular prejudice that the new style was the product of untutored inspiration, as did James Reese Europe and “His Superior Colored Musicians.” Eubie Blake: “Europe’s orchestra was filled with readin’ sharks. The popular 1910s dance tea, of Vernon and Irene Castle brought Europe’s band to the concert hall with them.
It was John Philip Sousa who coined the term “canned music”, so great was his frustration at the lack of a system for collecting royalties from the sale of the early cylindrical recordings of his marching band. In general, these early recordings were made by journeymen musicians, not stars and this was accepted as a good thing at a time when sheet music sales were an important source of musical income. If a tune became too closely associated with one performer, others would not need the sheet music to play it and the audience wanted live music (and dancing) as a primary form of entertainment.
Wald is always careful to take account of what audiences were listening )and dancing) to, and what cross-influencing went on among musicians. His book is an antidote to Kierkegaard’s maxim that we live life forward but understand it backwards. This leads him to a reappraisal of the Paul Whiteman Band of the 1920s, that commissioned and premiered Rhapsody In Blue. Wald tells his story forward, not slant.
The rise and fall of the big bands can be understood in terms of economics. During the Great Depression when all work was scarce, musicians banded together and toured widely, working for meager wages and performing constantly. After World War II ended, plentiful jobs and higher wages made big bands less profitable and less attractive.
Mitch Miller, a prolific record producer in the 1950s, made Columbia Records into the top seller of popular hits through an eclectic selection of musical sources, from folk, blues, hillbilly, and Latin and African music, which he then assigned to a very carefully and narrow selection of artists and studio musicians. One amusing bit of information is that “Come On-A My House”, Rosemary Clooney’s 1951 novelty hit was written by Ross Bagdasaran who would go on the create the group Alvin & The Chipmunks
The title is only a small part and the penultimate one at that, but Wald’s larger points, reiterated throughout the decades of changing musical styles are that working bands have always been required to play a range of music to please live crowds than recording artists and that while the Beatles borrowed from black musicians, as Paul Whiteman had four decades earlier, the result was not the same. Where Whiteman’s arrangements led to a greater appreciation of black music in the 1920s, in the 1960s white music became ‘progressive’ and black music was relegated to a narrow corner, known successively as soul, disco, and hip hop. And just before the Beatles took America by storm, girl groups and female songwriters had been achieving unprecedented success. a sign that times were changing.

Notice that How The Beatles Destroyed Rock And Roll is published by Oxford University, also publisher of Dusty: Queen Of The Mods, another recent unconventional and rewarding book on popular music. If these two books represent a trend, it is a welcome one.

Edward Steichen At Lake George

Photographer Edward Steichen shot The Big White Cloud Over Lake George in 1903. It and numerous other works by Photo-Secessionists are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Turner To Cezanne II: The French 'Paysage'

FRENCH LANDSCAPE AND THE MODERN VISION by Magdelana Dabrowski New York, Museum of Modern Art: 2000 758.144 DAB

The period of 1880-1920 in France saw familiar landscapes, both urban and rural become a subject of intense scrutiny from painters and photographers (armed with the latest invention - the camera). As more and more people migrated to cities for work and the national government embarked on an aggressive program of road and railroad building, people from the cities were able to vacation in the country. No museum in the United States has a collection better suited to illustrating the relationship between the painted landscape and the photographic one.

THE FAUVE LANDSCAPE by Judi Freeman New York, Abbeville Press: 1990 758.109 FRE

Also the product of a museum exhibition, The Fauve Landscape originated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The time period is narrow, about 1904-1908, but the artists ranged widely in search of subject matter, throughout France and Belgium, an invading army -armed with paint brushes instead of weapons. Lush, high-voltage colors applied to canvas with brio, and it was the bright colors and the vehemence of their application that earned these artists their nickname that translates as 'the wild ones.'

THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE: A Historical Geography by Graham Robb

New York, W. W. Norton: 2007 944 ROB

"I was brough up in an age when the French, still more or less ignorant of their own country, had not yet begun to travel." - Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954)

The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard wrote that we live life forward but understand it backward. Graham Robb inverts this notion to reveal how recently the France we think we know came into existence.

In the first millennium the place then known as Gaul was divided in two, between the land of Oc and the land of Oil, depending on how people pronounced the word 'yes', the division corresponded roughly to the influence of the Franks in the north and west and that of the Romans, followed by the Burgundians, in the south. People worked the land differently and raised different crops: in the north there were open fields, in the central area were woods, and in the south people favored a patchwork of fields enclosed by hedges and paths.

Rural France, which was most of it until the 20th century, had two seasons: the season of labor and the season of idleness. The calculus of caloric expenditure determined how people went about their work and moved from place to place. Isolationism proved to be a good strategy for keeping scarce resources, especially precious food, at home, so there was little interest in commerce. During the long winter season people huddled together, even including their animals, doing as little as possible to conserve heat and food - hibernation, Robb calls it. For centuries it was left to pilgrims, peddlers, beggars, and bandits to roam the poorly charted countryside. When Sir Walter Scott published his novel Quentin Durward (1823) his invented descriptions of the charms of the Loire Valley brought tourists there. The well to do lived in the bourgs, or cities. The enterprise of smugglers kept borders porous and spread some small wealth to the countryside as a result.

Families organized themselves around basic necessities in ways that the middle classes found embarrassing and distasteful, explaining the blank spots in official histories. Marriages were only formalized when needed to legitimate children, giving rise to the maxim "A woman gives birth after three months, but only the first time." Youngsters were often dispatched on their own to the city, where they earned their keep as servants, prostitutes or pimps to the rich. When hospitals began to be built during the 19th century, their construction often included a tour d'abandon, a revolving barrel that allowed parents to abandon their babies with no questions asked.

How difficult was it, to get around in the Ancien Regime? Louis XIV, the Sun King and instigator of grand infrastructure programs, including the laying out of royal boulevards, never traveled without his own crew of road-menders. Though the rich traveled by coach, it was not unusual for an unlucky passenger to be thrown from a coach as it hit a bump. The poor traveled by foot or, if they were lucky, might have the use of a dog cart. Pilgrimages were the only tourism that most people got to experience, which explains the revelry and bartering that accompanied the praying, and the attempts of the Church to suppress them.
Like transportation, communication was slow and laborious and contributed to the patchwork of place and identity. Robb dubs novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) his "century's greatest expert on gossip and pre-industrial communications" for his theory that gossip traveled cross country at nine miles per hour.

Following the French Revolution, the new central government divided France into 91 administrative departements, small enough so that citizens could travel to their government offices in a single day. It also created the post of national Inspector of historic monuments to foster a sense of national pride. Prosper Merimee (1803-1970), author of Carmen, held the post from 1834 to 1852, spending three full years on the road. Thanks to his efforts, Vezaley, Saint-Denis and Strasbourg Cathedral were saved from the wrecking ball.

Robb is entertaining as he explains the recent origins of 'ancient' traditions. La Cuisine barely existed until economic development invented it to promote local foodstuffs. The Tour de France, a formal event since 1903, merely ratified what amateurs had been doing for decades. Millions had been liberated from the confines of their villages by the invention of this cheap "mechanical horse." If you owned a bicycle, Robb reminds us, you could broaden your search for work or a mate, "which is why the bicycle has been credited with increasing the average height of the French population by reducing the number of marriages between blood relations."

The nation's school system, under the Third Republic, sought to eradicate illiteracy. Smarting from a disastrous defeat at the hands of the Germans in the War of 1870, the government also used the schools to force children to give up their local patois and to learn standard French. The draconian program has been called "interior colonization" as humiliation and corporal punishment were routinely used.

Illustrations in order of appearance: Longivy: Le Soir; Le Crachin, Morgat; Le travail aux Champs.

These illustrations and more by Henri de Riviere (1864-1951) are available at the website http://www.henri-riviere.org/