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Robert Philip's Performing Music in the Age of Recording is a brilliant analysis of how this has affected performance style. It is also incidentally, for much of the time, the best account I know of how musical life in general has changed since the introduction of vinyl and long-playing records in the 1950s, which made it possible for records to invade everyone's home. But it starts even further back with the end of the nineteenth century, when recording was invented by Thomas Edison, who recited "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into his new machine. The book is full of fascinating detail cogently presented on rehearsal practices and standards, recording on piano rolls, the different instruments used in orchestras, the way records are edited, and the contrasting musical ideals of performers. Philip is large-minded, tolerant, and sympathetic to various positions, and consistently judicious.
His main thesis is that recording has directed performance style into a search for greater precision and perfection, with a consequent loss of spontaneity and warmth. Various expressive devices once common in the early twentieth century have been almost outlawed: "portamento" (sliding from one note to another on a stringed instrument); playing the piano with the hands not quite together (Philip calls this dislocation); arpeggiating chords (not playing all the notes of the chord at the same time but one after another), and flexibility of tempo.
In retrospect, the fate of the Freedom Center may have been sealed three years ago with the decision to create a clearly defined parallelogram, bordered by four streets, in which both the memorial and a cultural complex were to sit. Since this was the site of the twin towers, it may have been inevitable that the block would be seen as hallowed.
Gretchen Dykstra, the president of the memorial foundation, which will build and own the memorial and cultural buildings, said the governor had now "provided clear direction that the memorial quadrant should be devoted to telling the story of Sept. 11th."
"Memorial quadrant"?? If only the limits of this farce were as clearly delineated. How is that quadrant any more "hallowed" than the other eight-plus acres of the site? It seems like only yesterday that the "footprints" were the sacred squares that had to be defended at all costs.
How and by whom was this quadrant defined? By the MTA, who cordoned it off in an effort to keep its sacred revenue stream as more than just a memory. And to whom are the MTA and its proxy, the LMDC, beholden? To the governor who just undid their three year's work on the IFC and the master plan "in a stroke."
The town house as a building type in fact reaches back to Crete and Pompeii, a city built almost entirely of these narrow-fronted single-family structures. Le Corbusier describes them in great detail in his 1923 Towards a New Architecture. He admired them for the great variety of space and light they allowed within a standardized plan, which fit in with his theories about the potential industrialization of housing, and the relationship of the part to the whole in the house and the city. Leon Battista Alberti and Andrea Palladio also wrote at length about town houses, and in his 1516 socialist tract Utopia, Renaissance scholar Sir Thomas Moore described his ideal city Amaurote as composed of town houses: “The houses be of fair and gorgeous building, and on the street side they stand joined together in a long row through the whole street without any partition or separation.”
As a former Dutch colony, New York City inherited the town house type originally from Amsterdam, though the local variations derive equally from London precedents. The stoop is of Dutch origin, while the common half-level dropped floor is drawn from the London type. These references persisted—perhaps too persistently. From the massive construction of brownstones and classical townhouses in New York in the late 19th and early 20th century, one can count one hand the number of modernist takes on the town house. There’s the glass block front of the Lescaze House of 1937 on the Upper East Side; the lacy stone façade of Edward Durrell Stone’s own uptown house; George Nelson’s streamlined Fairchild House of 1941 at 17 East 65th Street; Philip Johnson’s Miesian Rockefeller Guest House of 1950, in Midtown; and Morris Lapidus’ home and office at 256 East 29th Street, of 1950. The great breakthrough in modern town houses in New York are the ones by Paul Rudolph, primarily his own mirrored extravaganza, designed in 1972, overlooking the East River.
Governor George Pataki removed the International Freedom Center last month before L.M.D.C. or the public could weigh in on the museum’s content. Pataki’s decision — a response to calls from some victims’ family members to limit cultural activities in the memorial quadrant — evoked the resignation of L.M.D.C. board member Roland Betts.this new term "memorial quadrant" seems to be part of a recent re-branding of the "foot print" or "the basin" identification of the area formerly known as ground zero. this has all the looks of a common land grab. extending the boarders of the ground zero memorial to include the entire basin as sanctified land and an attempt to restrict who has a say about what happens there driven by a small but aggressive conservative group identifying them selves as "an alliance of 15 major 9/11 family groups" under the voodoo charm of debra burlingame and her take back the memorial website (and who ever else that entails).
Betts, one of the original — and most influential — members of L.M.D.C. board and a close friend of President George W. Bush, quietly handed in his resignation letter last week. At his final L.M.D.C. board meeting, Betts told fellow board members, “There’s no question that L.M.D.C. has been deeply wounded here,” according to the New York Times.
L.M.D.C. has been hemorrhaging employees since president Kevin Rampe resigned last May. The new L.M.D.C. president, Stefan Pryor, wields far less power than Rampe because on the day Pryor was promoted, Pataki appointed his right hand man, John Cahill, as Downtown redevelopment czar, a position that reports directly to the governor.
Since the spring, many of the key staffers surrounding the 130 Liberty St. deconstruction have bowed out, including Amy Peterson, who directed the deconstruction plans, L.M.D.C. spokesperson Joanna Rose, who took a post as Pataki’s spokesperson and Kate Millea, who developed the controversial community action plan.
a clueless jeff jarvis/buzzmachine on the demise of the IFC
Will the cultural and performing arts centers at the new World Trade Center ever be built, or have the plans been tossed out with the International Freedom Center? When NY1 sought out answers from Gretchen Dykstra last week, the Memorial Foundation’s president and C.E.O. ducked the question a few times.
The future of the cultural buildings has come into doubt since Governor George Pataki summarily removed the International Freedom Center, a museum planned for the Snohetta-designed cultural center, from the W.T.C. master plan last month. Pataki dropped the museums after some victims’ family members criticized the proposed content. With the Freedom Center gone and the Drawing Center, a Soho-based museum also slated for the cultural center, searching for a new home, the fate of the Snohetta building is anything but certain.
The alliance of 15 major 9/11 family groups calls upon the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and its chairman, John Whitehead, to move forward with Governor George E. Pataki’s historic mandate that the World Trade Center Memorial and memorial quadrant be solely devoted to honoring the victims and heroes of September 11, 2001 and telling the story of that day and of those who came to our aid, as well as the story of the first attack on the Trade Center in 1993.15 major 9/11 family groups want the memorial quadrant...
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We urge the LMDC to give the American people what they want, deserve and are contributing to by their tax dollars and private donations: a memorial which honors the lost, tells the true and inspiring history of that day and conveys a message of hope which survives the survivors. We believe that story would fill several Snohetta buildings. Further, we urge the LMDC to turn over all curatorial decisions pertaining to the memorial quadrant to the institution responsible for building, operating and paying for the memorial: the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation.
via tbtm
s for santiago? i noticed the serpentine foundation forms from the path train yesterday. just one thing:
There is a potential snag, however. A lawsuit filed last month by the Coalition of 9/11 Families seeks to halt the project on the ground that it violates a federal law requiring that historic sites not be used for transportation projects unless there are no feasible or prudent alternatives.