By the way, the chattering wind entrance at the beginning of chiavi in mano inspired a similar moment in my 2006 chamber concerto City of Shadows, though I used quartal rather than triadic harmonies, in a similarly quick harmonic rhythm. My goal was to give that sudden surprising lift that chiavi in mano achieves.

The Mozart fragment was a great musical thought experiment. When it started, I thought it might be early Haydn, then wondered if it were CPE Bach, then decided it might actually be JS, then some little classical pileup made me think that couldn’t be right either, it had to be later. Mozart I never guessed.

I need to try harder to listen with Yehudi’s ears (and Bebo Valdes’s, for that matter), I know I’m parsing his observation the completely wrong way. I’m listening to Allegeri’s Miserere and thinking how nakedly repetitive it is, Clearly I shouldn’t be looking for the individual traits he listed divorced from all others, I’m never going to understand what it means for music to be aggressive or affirmative if I think Miserere is aggressive. There’s a lot I do, at least in some way have a shallow understanding of. His comment on texture and instrumentation explains why film scores and new age records sell. It’s time to immerse myself in music again, and learn to listen with less rigidity.

There are some Leonard Bernstein records with some spoken word content, and I’m wondering if there’s anything like that with Ellington? That would be a treasure.

I’m listening to Sinatra sing “Nice ‘n’ Easy” as I try to type this… and I’m thinking: this is as affirmative as Sinatra gets. He was famously an aggressive guy, drawn to violence, and a tender vulnerable love-lorn soul all at the same time. But this is his light swinging side that Bebo rejoices in. Sinatra’s finger snapping on that song is also wonderfully gentle, almost serene, “nice and easy,” so to speak. It reminds me of Duke Ellington instructing his audience to snap on the 2 and 4 beats — never on the one or three, which as could be considered “aggressive,” as Duke wonderfully cautioned. Something is beginning to make sense here in Yehudi’s general observation, I think.

I think you intended those questions to be— not rhetorical, but something to spend a lot more time with, rather than answer immediately, but I’m so tempted to attempt an answer. That coupling of rhythm and power especially comes very close to what I had come up with an incomplete answer for.

I thought one way to finding out the source of where a metaphorical tempo might come from was to think of the reasons people say “I can’t keep up.” One’s workload, culture change, technological change, current events, and one’s position (social or otherwise) in comparison to perceived peers came to my mind, and I’m sure there’s more. And if it’s useful to think of there being an overall tempo to American life, changes in any one of these can perhaps change other things. If you’re spending a couple more hours a week learning about and getting used to using new technologies and information systems, maybe you’ll have less time, and less patience for music that takes more than one listen to understand. And as one becomes accustomed to things being immediately understandable, there’s little patience for anything else. The art that becomes popular will reflect this more and more, validating this quickening of cultural tempo, and further accelerating it. Technology changes, and to stay competitive in many workplaces, individuals need to spend new time adapting to the technology, companies need to implement it to improve productivity and lower costs. I can go on and on, but one very specific thing I want to note is how hipsters, who today think knowing things is cool, often listen to serious music sometimes out of competition more than love of art. If you know more, you have more references to drop, but you need to keep up, be a little bit faster about learning than everyone else otherwise you’re going to embarrass yourself by not knowing enough about Josquin des Prez or a new gypsy-punk band. We can think of this “tempo” as feeding competition, making it very difficult for many people to slow down to appreciate something without feeling like they’re falling behind.

This is very speculative of me, though! And it fails to explain a lot of things, it’s a very limited perspective.

I know I’m looking at this too simply because I’m trying to figure out of “Nice ‘n’ Easy” is what Mr. Wyner would call affirmative or aggressive and I’m thinking about that powerful brass section, and wondering if that’s “marching band.” I’m missing the point, somehow…

The easy, exquisitely virtuosic banter about mastery and the deft illustrations in real sound, all characterize a radical competence of craft that have not germinated in the following generations as much as we would like to assume.

Thank you Chris and thank you Yehudi for a life well lived and now shared.

George Mathew

Just as you posted your comment, I was reading a wonderful evocation of “the tempo of American life” from just 50 years ago.

This is Bebo Valdes, the exiled Cuban pianist, today approaching 90, speaking with Ben Ratliff of the New York Times about a Frank Sinatra record from 1960, “Nice ‘n’ Easy,” arranged by Nelson Riddle.

Here’s Bebo: “Nobody can play music like that except in America, that kind of swing, that time. It’s impeccable. The most difficult thing in the world is to play slowly and keep time. When I listen to this, I see American black people dancing.”

Ratliff wondered if Bebo felt a Cuban influence on Sinatra’s timing.

Bebo says: “I think it’s really an Italian influence… No, it’s just that a lot of things like that are called American really come from the Antilles. Like his incredible sense of swing. Yet America, from the Thirties to the Fifties, gave a lot of music to the world, of which we are all the children.”

So I am answering your beautifully mysterious question with another set of puzzles: what are the relations between art and culture? between rhythm and power? between influence and empire? And what has happened to the sound and tempo of American life in the last 50 years?

In the meantime, of course I’m all for El Sistema, in America and everywhere — the program, that is, born in Venezuela to train the vast mass of children to play the classical string instruments. See: El Sistema and El Sistema — the US version.

(Or I want to say “what we need in the United States is a program like El Sistema.)”