< World Premiere > ELLIOTT CARTER : Concerto for Orchestra Thursday 5 February, 1970 Philharmonic Hall, New York, NY New York Philharmonic, cond. Leonard Bernstein Associated Music Publishers, 1972 (HL50225800) “I had been thinking about writing a work which treated most of the players in the orchestra as soloists, when the commission from the New York Philharmonic started me off. In casting about for a plan, a dramatic and musical structure for such a multiple concerto, I came across St. John Perse’s 'Vents'  (Winds), a long poem about America which suggested a way of ordering a piece. I realized at once, of course, that the broad, Whitmanesque rhetoric of the poem could only partially be reflected in the music whose main aim was to give individual, human expression to a great variety of players; yet the poem’s fluidity and its changes of character offered a useful model.” — Elliott Carter

“If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. And every now and then I wonder what I want them to say. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize—that isn’t important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards—that’s not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school. I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others. I'd like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison. I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity. Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that's all I want to say. If I can help somebody as I pass along, If I can cheer somebody with a word or song, If I can show somebody he's traveling wrong, Then my living will not be in vain. If I can do my duty as a Christian ought, If I can bring salvation to a world once wrought, If I can spread the message as the master taught, Then my living will not be in vain. Yes, Jesus, I want to be on your right or your left side, not for any selfish reason. I want to be on your right or your left side, not in terms of some political kingdom or ambition. But I just want to be there in love and in justice and in truth and in commitment to others, so that we can make of this old world a new world.” — Dr. Martin Luther King : "The Drum Major Instinct" Sunday 4 February, 1968

< World Premiere > MICHAEL TORKE : Ash Friday 3 February, 1989 – Ordway Center, St. Paul, Minnesota St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, cond. by John Adams Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. (HPS1138) “In trying to find a clear and recognizable language to write this piece, I have chosen some of the most basic, functionally tonal means: tonics and dominants in F minor, a modulation to the relative major (A-flat), and a three-part form which, through a retransition, recapitulates back to F minor. What I offer is not invention of new "words" or a new language but a new way to make sentences and paragraphs in a common, much-used existing language. I can create a more compelling musical argument with these means because, to my ears, potential rhetoric seems to fall out from such highly functional chords as tonics and dominants more than certain fixed sonorities and pop chords that I have used before. My musical argument is dependent on a feeling of cause and effect, both on a local level where one chord releases the tension from a previous chord and on the larger structural level where a section is forced to follow a previous section by a coercive modulation. The orchestration does not seek color for its own sake, as decoration is not a high priority, but the instruments combine and double each other to create an insistent ensemble from beginning to end. Only occasionally, as in the middle A-flat section, do three woodwind instruments play alone for a short while to break the inertia of the ensemble forging its course together.” — Michael Torke

The Logic of Destruction Timothy Snyder Sunday 2 February, 2025 What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together. The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government deny all of this, and are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation. For them, only a few people, the very wealthy with a certain worldview, have rights, and the first among these is to dominate. For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions. The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide them with services are conspirators within a “deep state.” We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes. All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now. The federal government has immense capacity and control over trillions of dollars. That power was a cocreation of the American people. It belongs to them. The oligarchs around Trump are working now to take it for themselves. Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow. Think of the federal government as a car. You might have thought that the election was like getting the car serviced. Instead, when you come into the shop, the mechanics, who somehow don’t look like mechanics, tell you that they have taken the parts of your car that work and sold them and kept the money. And that this was the most efficient thing to do. And that you should thank them. The gap between the oligarchs’ wealth and everyone else’s will grow. Knowing what they themselves will do and when, they will have bet against the stock market in advance of Trump’s deliberately destructive tariffs, and will be ready to tell everyone to buy the crypto they already own. But that is just tomorrow and the day after. In general, the economic collapse they plan is more like a reverse flood from the Book of Genesis, in which the righteous will all be submerged while the very worst ride Satan’s ark. The self-chosen few will ride out the forty days and forty night. When the waters subside, they will be alone to dominate. Trump’s tariffs (which are also likely illegal) are there to make us poor. Trump’s attacks on America’s closest friends, countries such as Canada and Denmark, are there to make enemies of countries where constitutionalism works and people are prosperous. As their country is destroyed, Americans must be denied the idea that anything else is possible. Deportations are a spectacle to turn Americans against one another, to make us afraid, and to get us to see pain and camps as normal. They also create busy-work for law enforcement, locating the “criminals” in workplaces across the country, as the crime of the century takes place at the very center of power. The best people in American federal law enforcement, national security, and national intelligence are being fired. The reasons given for this are DEI and trumpwashing the past. Of course, if you fire everyone who was concerned in some way with the investigations of January 6th or of Russia, that will be much or even most of the FBI. Those are bad reasons, but the reality is worse: the aim is lawlessness: to get the police and the patriots out of the way. In the logic of destruction, there is no need to rebuild afterwards. In this chaos, the oligarchs will tell us that there is no choice but to have a strong man in charge. It can be a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras, or a conniving Vance who, unlike Trump, has always known the plot. Or someone else. After we are all poor and isolated, the logic goes, we will be consoled by the thought that there is at least a human being to whom we can appeal. We will settle for a kind of anthropological minimum, wishful contact with the strong man. As in Russia, pathetic video selfies sent to the Leader will be the extent of politics. For the men currently pillaging the federal government, the data from those video selfies is more important than the people who will make them. The new world they imagine is not just anti-American but anti-human. The people are just data, means to the end of accumulating wealth. They see themselves as the servants of the freedom of the chosen few, but in fact they are possessed, like millennia of tyrants before them, of fantastic dreams: they will live forever, they will go to Mars. None of that will happen; they will die here on Earth, with the rest of us, their only legacy, if we let it happen, one of ruins. They are god-level brainrotted. The attempt by the oligarchs to destroy our government is illegal, unconstitutional, and more than a little mad. The people in charge, though, are very intelligent politically, and have a plan. I describe it not because it must succeed but because it must be described so that we can make it fail. This will require clarity, and speed, and coalitions. I try to capture the mood in my little book On Tyranny. Here are a few ideas. If you voted Republican, and you care about your country, please act rather than rationalize. Unless you cast your ballot so that South African oligarchs could steal your data, your money, your country, and your future, make it known to your elected officials that you wanted something else. And get ready to protest with people with whom you otherwise disagree. Almost everything that has happened during this attempted takeover is illegal. Lawsuits can be filed and courts can order that executive orders be halted. This is crucial work. Much of what is happening, though, involves private individuals whose names are not even known, and who have no legal authority, wandering through government offices and issuing orders beyond even the questionable authority of executive orders. Their idea is that they will be immunized by their boldness. This must be proven wrong. Some of this will reach the Supreme Court quickly. I am under no illusion that the majority of justices care about the rule of law. They know, however, that our belief in it makes their office something other than the undignified handmaiden of oligarchy. If they legalize the coup, they are irrelevant forever. Individual Democrats in the Senate and House have legal and institutional tools to slow down the attempted oligarchical takeover. There should also be legislation. It might take a moment, but even Republican leaders might recognize that the Senate and House will no longer matter in a post-American oligarchy without citizens. Trump should obviously be impeached. Either he has lost control, or he is using his power to do obviously illegal things. If Republicans have a sense of where this is going, there could be the votes for an impeachment and prosecution. Those considering impeachment should also include Vance. He is closer to the relevant oligarchs than Trump, and more likely to be aware of the logic of destruction than he. The oligarchs have likely factored in, or perhaps even want, the impeachment and prosecution of Trump. Unlike Vance, Trump has charisma and followers, and could theoretically resist them. He won’t; but he poses a hypothetical risk to the oligarchs that Vance does not. Democrats who serve in state office as governors have a chance to profile themselves, or more importantly to profile an America that still works. Attorneys general in states have a chance to enforce state laws, which will no doubt have been broken. The Democratic Party has a talented new chair. Democrats will need instruments of active opposition, such as a People’s Cabinet, in which prominent Democrats take responsibility for following government departments. It would be really helpful to have someone who can report to the press and the people what is happening inside Justice, Defense, Transportation, and the Treasury, and all the others, starting this week. Federal workers should stay in office, if they can, for as long as they can. This is not political, but existential, for them and for all of us. They will have a better chance of getting jobs afterwards if they are fired. And the logic of their firing is to make the whole government fail. The more this can be slowed down, the longer the rest of us have to get traction. And companies? As every CEO knows, the workings of markets depend upon the government creating a fair playing field. The ongoing takeover will make life impossible for all but a few companies. Can American companies responsibly pay taxes to a US Treasury controlled by their private competitors? Tesla paid no federal tax at all in 2024. Should other companies pay taxes that, for all they know, will just enrich Tesla’s owner? Commentators should please stop using words such as “digital” and “progress” and “efficiency” and “vision” when describing this coup attempt. The plotting oligarchs have legacy money from an earlier era of software, which they are now seeking to leverage, using destructive political techniques, to destroy human institutions. That’s it. They are offering no future beyond acting out their midlife crises on the rest of us. It is demeaning to pretend that they represent something besides a logic of destruction. As for the rest of us: Make sure you are talking to people and doing something. The logic of “move fast and break things,” like the logic of all coups, is to gain quick dramatic successes that deter and demoralize and create the impression of inevitability. Nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them. What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. Sometimes self-government just means elections. And sometimes it means recognizing the deeper dignity and meaning of what it means to be a people. That means speaking up, standing out, and protesting. We can only be free together.

Mayday at the DOJ Harry Litman Thursday 30 January, 2025 The Department of Justice is in the gravest crisis of its storied 150+ year history, and whether it will emerge with anything like its previous institutional strength and integrity is far from clear. Twice before, the Department has faced a crisis from within. Both times, presidents sought to corrupt its mission for self-serving ends. Both times, political appointees of the Department—as it happened, Republicans—stepped up, putting the DOJ’s institutional interests ahead of the personal welfare of the president. The first episode was the famed 'Saturday Night Massacre' of 1974 during the Watergate investigation, when President Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Both Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused the president’s order and resigned. (It was Robert Bork, the then Solicitor General, who ultimately carried out the order, with the acquiescence of the other two.) The refusals led more or less directly to Nixon’s resignation. It was a defining moment for the Department, still invoked today as one of its finest hours. The second episode occurred in 2021, at the end of Donald Trump’s first administration. Trump sought to strongarm the Department into writing a false letter to Georgia election officials to further the plot to steal the election. In a dramatic Oval Office showdown, the entire Department leadership, led by acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen, told Trump that they would all resign if he installed Jeff Clark as a puppet AG and went ahead with his plans. Trump relented, and again the Department reaffirmed its institutional strength. Both of those crises were events of high drama when the continued institutional integrity of the Department of Justice was on the line. The current crisis has not yet reached a white-hot moment of showdown, and that may never happen. That is because, stung by his failed shakedown the last time around, Trump already has stacked the deck by installing lackeys to issue the orders. For that reason and others, including the servile see-no-evil Republicans in Congress, the institutional attack he has initiated is considerably more menacing, and the outcome considerably more in doubt. Most importantly, there is no DOJ appointee in place to play the role of Richardson or Rosen by standing up for the Constitution above the president. It was the Trump hand-picked acting Attorney General, James McHenry, who temporarily led a Justice Department unit dealing with immigration during Trump’s first term, who carried out Trump’s order to fire the 12 career prosecutors who had worked for Jack Smith. An even more breathtaking example here is Ed Martin, the just-appointed acting United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, who has ordered up an ill-defined “investigation” into some of the conduct of the January 6 prosecutions, demanding a “comprehensive and assertive” interim report by Friday—a laughably short turnaround that precludes any sort of thorough analysis. And he ordered the top officials in the office to oversee the investigation of their colleagues, adding a graceless insult to the injury of the project itself. This rub-their-noses-in-it move is a repeating trope of the hostile takeover of the DOJ we are seeing unfold. Ed Martin is a charter Stop-the-Steal election denier, who represented Proud Boys and other rioters and served on the board of the “Patriot Freedom Project,” a group dedicated to raising money to support the marauders. He attended the January 6 rally and tweeted that there was “nothing out of hand” about what happened at the Capitol that day. He has no business being involved in any DOJ investigation involving the offenders. Trump is no great strategic thinker. But he has a deft instinct for sowing chaos, which he does by bundling together a plethora of outrageous acts at once. That has been his general MO for his first 10 days in office, and his specific approach to DOJ. It’s all part of the blueprint of Project 2025, which Trump disavowed during the campaign but has clearly become his Administration’s operator’s manual. With so many bombs exploding at once, it’s very hard for institutionalists to effectively make the case or even explain to the American people why Trump’s conduct threatens constitutional rule. Moreover, there is the additional challenge that much of the country has been conditioned to see Trump’s reprisals as tit for tat for the Department’s prosecutions of him. Readers of this Substack know that my organizing approach to Trump’s treacheries is to start with the lie. It’s a sort of iron law of Trump knavery that the last 10 days have repeatedly illustrated: there’s always a lie at the core. Here, the core lie is the claim that the prosecutions of Trump and his gang of constitutional hoodlums were politically motivated and not meritorious. It’s clear that embracing the falsehood is a required article of faith for anyone in the administration, including AG nominee Pam Bondi, who advanced it, repeatedly and casually, in her testimony, along with general diatribes against the Department for “weaponizing” prosecutions. But the claim is a vicious slander, and one that goes to the heart of the department’s identity. Its proponents’ sole basis for making it is that Trump was the defendant. The fact—the plain fact that we must insist on again and again—is that career DOJ lawyers are highly professional, scrupulous, and dedicated to the public good; and they were all those things while working under Jack Smith. And in the very rare exceptions when they are not, there is a supervisory and disciplinary structure to come down hard on them. The Department does not tolerate much less countenance politicized prosecutions, which directly contradict its operating credo of doing justice without fear or favor. The image of a systematically corrupt Department of Justice from line prosecutors to the attorney general always has been a dark Trump delusion. For all DOJ alums who know how the Department actually operates, it’s galling to have to make this essential point over the raucous shouts of the Trump chorus. There is a way to prove that in Trump’s cases. It’s just that, as with rebuttals of so many of Trump’s irresponsible diatribes, it requires meticulous explanation and a fair hearing, both of which have become very scarce commodities under Trump’s malign influence, along with that of the right-wing media ecosystem that parrots every lie. Prosecutors habitually invoke “the facts and the law” as the sole guides to their conduct. It’s such a bland, widespread mantra that it tends to go in one ear and out the other. But in fact, it’s the north star of prosecution without fear or favor. The simple, indispensable point is that the charges against Donald Trump and his co-conspirators were grounded securely in the facts and the serious violations of federal law that they established. And of course, Trump and company have cited no facts or law in support of their claim. The sole point of “proof” is that Trump was the defendant, and the implicit argument is that a Democratic administration that prosecutes a prominent Republican must be in the tank. Jack Smith rebutted these charges while he still could at the end of his Volume One report to Merrick Garland. He did so with the simple avowal that the dismissal of the charges in no way turns on “the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution – all of which the Office stands fully behind.” A final contrasting feature of this current crisis is that, in contrast to the others that necessarily played out in a matter of days or hours, this one has no clear showdown point. Indeed, while the firings were meant to settle scores with career staff for doing their jobs, their intended effect is no less to chill the rest of the Department to frozen nitrogen levels. Department attorneys know today that their jobs are threatened if they pursue investigations that possibly undermine Trump’s personal interests. The goal is pernicious: to rot the Department culture from the inside and convert it to an instrument of personal service to the President. The crisis will be unfolding for the next several months, as Trump, Martin, and company (presumably to include Bondi) pursue their relentless campaigns of reprisal. I will have much more to write, but it’s critical to keep foremost in mind that this is a Manichean battle between forces of good and forces of evil. One side is correct and righteous; the other is lying and wicked. If history, or political culture, or congressional courage, or all of the above, can’t suffice to deliver an eventual repudiation of Trump’s scurrilous claims, the Department will have been permanently crippled. It is on all of us to keep up the volume on this issue. Today’s debacle with the withdrawal of the over-aggressive OMB order is a useful reminder that Trump will blunder, and he has only the thinnest of margins in Congress to work. An important counterblow, one that all of us can strike, is to insist on the lie at the heart of the DOJ takeover and never to give ground. The day will come when the episode, like the January 6 insurrection itself, will be broadly understood to have been driven by the self-serving lies of a petty would-be autocrat. But for the moment, the horizon is stormy, and the endpoint is difficult to discern.

< World Premiere > ELLIOT CARTER : String Quartet No. 3 Tuesday 23 January, 1973 – Julliard School, New York The Julliard String Quartet Associated Music Publishers, 1973, 1998 (AMP 7303) Awarded the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Music “My String Quartet No. 3, commissioned by The Julliard School for the Julliard String Quartet, divides the instruments into pairs: a duo for Violin & Cello that plays in rubato style and a duo for Violin & Viola in more regular rhythm. The Violin–Cello duo presents four different musical characters – an angry, intense 'Furioso' ; a fanciful 'Leggerissimo'; a 'Pizzicato giocoso'; and a lyrical 'Andante expressivo' – in short sections one after the other in various orders, sometimes with pauses between. The Violin–Viola duo, meanwhile, presents the six contrasting characters: 'Maestoso'; 'Grazioso'; 'Pizzicato, giusto mechanico'; 'Scorrevole'; 'Largo tranquillo'; and 'Appassionato'. During the Quartet each character of each duo is presented alone and also in combination with each character of the other duo to give a sense of ever-varying perspectives of feelings, expression, rivalry and cooperation.” — Elliott Carter

< World Premiere > ROBIN HOLLOWAY : The Consolation of Music, Op. 38, No. 1 (for unaccompanied SSAATTBB choir) Monday 22 January, 1979 – Queen Elizabeth Hall, London The BBC Singers, cond. John Poole Boosey & Hawkes Ltd., 1979 Words : Robert Herrick (1591-1674) & William Stroud (1589-1671)

< World Premiere > BÉLA BARTÓK : Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta Thursday 21 January, 1937 – Basel, Switzerland Basler Kammerorchester, cond. Paul Sacher Universal Edition, 1937 "In the summer of 1936, the 55-year-old Béla Bartók, having by then achieved considerable international fame as a performer, composer, and ethnomusicologist, tackled a formidable array of compositional challenges in his 'Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta', a work of astonishing synthesis, organicism, and technical brilliance." — Christopher Gibbs

< World Premiere > RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS : Sinfonia Antartica (Symphony No. 7) Wednesday 14 January, 1953 Free Trade Hall, Manchester, England Hallé Orchestra & Choir, cond. John Barbirolli Margaret Ritchie, Soprano solo

Go Ravens!

< World Premiere > KAIKHOSRU SHAPURJI SORABJI : Piano Sonata No. 2 Monday 13 January, 1922 Kammersaal, Musikverein, Bödendorferstrasse, Vienna Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, Piano

< World Premiere > ROBIN WALKER : I have thee by the hand, O Man (A Madrigal for 40 Voices a cappella ) Friday 10 January, 2003 Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, England The Tallis Scholars, cond. Peter Phillips

< World Premiere > ALFRED SCHNITTKE : Penitential Verses (for unaccompanied SSAATTBB div. choir) Monday 26 December, 1988 - Moscow USSR Ministry Culture Chamber Choir, cond. Valery Polyanski Compozitor Saint Petersburg, 2017 (No. 6993) “The importance of the theme of repentance to Schnittke is shown in his 1987 work 'Penitential Verses', a large scale composition for unaccompanied choir which, at around 40 minutes duration, is comparable in scale to his 'Concerto for Mixed Choir' (1984-1985). The work, written for the 1000th anniversary of the founding of Russia, was inspired by a collection of early Russian literature which includes these spiritual lines or poems by anonymous monks. Although thematically these texts might seem to offer much less variety than those of St. Gregory of Narek (whose words Schnittke used in his 'Choir Concerto'), the music employs essentially the same techiques and is characterized by the same degree of technical virtuosity. In both pieces there are very strong echos of the Russian sacred repertoire of the 19th and early 20th centuries; this imparts a sense of belonging to a tradition which, in turn, provides much of the music's strength.” — Ivan Moody

< World Premiere > COLIN MATTHEWS : A Rose at Christmas (for unaccompanied SATB div. choir) Friday 21 December, 1990 St. Albans Church, Birmingham BBC Singers, cond. Simon Joly Text: Shakespeare's 'Love's Labour's Lost', Act 1, Scene 2 Faber Music Ltd., London, 1990

< World Premiere > KAIKHOSRU SORABJI : Toccata Seconda per pianoforte, KSS57 Wednesday 16 December, 1936 Stevenson Hall, Glasgow, Scotland Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, Piano solo

< World Premiere > ERNST PEPPING : Die Weihnachtsgeschichte des Lukas (for unaccompanied SATB div. choir) Sunday 13 December, 1959 – Göttingen, Germany Göttinger Stadtkantorei, dir. Ludwig Doormann Bärenreiter Verlag, 1959 (BA3947)

< World Premiere > CHRISTOPHER BROWN : Hodie Salvator Apparuit, Op. 28 - A Sequence for Christmas (for unaccompanied SSAATTBB choir & soli) Wednesday 9 December, 1970 – St. Andrew's Church, London Salterello Choir, cond. Christopher Seaman J. & W. Chester, Ltd., 1976 (CH55008)

< World Premiere > KAIKHOSRU SORABJI : Le Jardin Parfumé, KSS35 Tuesday 7 December, 1976 – Wigmore Hall, London, UK Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, Piano solo J. Curwen and Sons Ltd., 1927 (999.019)

< World Premiere > RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS : Mass in G minor (for unaccompanied SATB-SATB choir & SATB soli) Wednesday 6 December, 1922 – Town Hall, Birmingham City of Birmingham Choir, cond. Joseph Lewis J. Curwen & Sons, Ltd., 1922

< World Premiere > KAIKHOSRU SORABJI : Symphonic Nocturne, KSS97 Thursday 3 December, 2015 Miryzaal, School of Arts, Koninklijk Conservatorium Gent, Belgium Lukas Huisman, Piano solo