I had heard that he was quite ill, but it still came as a jolt just one week after writing this post, to read that Gyorgy Ligeti died today at the age of 83. My concert today at USC will be dedicated to his memory. As Alex Ross put it, Ligeti was "widely and justly considered the greatest of them all." [Update 6/15: The link to Alex Ross' blog will bring you to further links on Ligeti's legacy. If you only have time to read one, let it be this summary by Ethan Iverson. The Ligeti obit written by Richard Dyer in the Boston Globe includes a wonderful quote about the "Arc-en-Ciel" Etude, which I played last Monday in my recital here for the Southeastern Piano Festival....the pianist Stephen Drury was performing the etude during a festival in Boston at which Ligeti was in attendance, and Ligeti told Drury, "It should sound like Bill Evans playing Chopin at five o'clock in the morning." Wish I'd known that quote in time to tell the audience last Monday!]

The 2006 Spoleto Festival is wrapping up this weekend, but another, increasingly well-known festival is just cranking up in Columbia. This one is for piano lovers: the 2006 Southeastern Piano Festival, under the artistic directorship of Marina Lomazov of the University of South Carolina piano faculty, and running from June 11-18. This is the fourth season of the festival. The primary focus of this event are the young pianists from around the region, ranging from grades 8-12, who spend the week in Columbia having master classes with the USC piano faculty and guest artists. But there are also a number of public concerts featuring those guest artists.

I'm delighted to be participating in the Festival this year. On Monday afternoon, June 12th at 4:30 I'll be doing a brief recital with some comments about programming issues. The program I'm doing is one I've done a number of times, interspersing each of the movements of Maurice Ravel's suite "Miroirs" with a "mirror" work from more recent times. I last did this program in New York City in November and blogged about it here. My Columbia concert on Monday is free and open to the general public.

Other concerts have admission prices, but they are all great bargains considering the panoply of talent on display. Full details on all aspects of the Festival can be found on its website. A brief overview: Sunday evening at 6 PM is a concert with all the members of the USC piano faculty, including Dr. Lomazov. Tuesday evening is a recital by a young up-and-coming competition winner, Di Wu. Wednesday evening is Ann Schein, who taught for many years at Peabody Conservatory and the Aspen Music School. Thursday night is the marquee event, a recital by Van Cliburn gold medalist Jon Nakamatsu.

Even the classes by the piano faculty and guest artists are open to the public, and I highly recommend these if you would like the chance to hear the talented young musicians who have been accepted into this program, and to witness a creative spark lit (one always hopes) under some of them in the classes. It's always fun to see and hear the moment when a musical concept clicks in the mind of a young student, when that student can realize an idea in sound. [update 6/11: click here for more on the Festival and Jon Nakamatsu's visit to Columbia from an article in the State.]

For quite a few years now, I haven't wavered from the conviction that Gyorgy Ligeti is the greatest composer currently inhabiting our little planet.  Last night did nothing to shake that belief.  Present Music gave its final concert of the season in Milwaukee, and on the program was Ligeti's astonishing  "Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedűvel"  from the year 2000, for mezzo-soprano and four percussionists. Sitting in the middle of the percussion-oriented program, surrounded by crash-bang, high-caloric-low-nutrient fare from Christopher Rouse and Sven-David Sandstrom, the subtle mastery and sonic imagination of Ligeti's work burned through me like a laser. It's light-hearted and generous of spirit, but its simple textures are mystifying and mesmerizing. Ligeti at 83 is beyond all "-isms." His Hungarian-ness, his Central European-ness, is unmistakeable and links his music to the entire classical tradition that has come before. But his absorption of unbelievably diverse musical influences and their easy refraction through that tradition makes him unique in a world full of ungainly fusions of musics pretending to be successful compositions, like Dr. Mephisto's seven-assed Galapagos tortoise. [update 6/7: here is the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's review of the concert.]

On May 18, the House of Representatives approved an increase in the National Endowment for the Arts' budget in Fiscal Year 2007 to $129.4 million.

Just to put that in perspective: the financially strapped city of Berlin is aiming to reduce the municipal subsidy to its three opera houses to a mere $126 million by 2009.

The March 20, 2003 attack on Dora Farms near Baghdad  (the attempt to kill Saddam Hussein at the outset of the Iraq War) utilized (wasted might be a better word) at least 36 Tomahawk missiles. At a cost of $750,000 apiece, that comes to $27,000,000. That represents two and a half months of federal arts funding in America, thrown out the door in a couple of hours.

To appreciate the true financial cost of the Iraq War, well, let's just say the meter is running. Now imagine, just as a wild sort of fantasy, that all the money allocated for the Iraq War would instead be directed to the NEA. (Crazy, I know, but bear with me here.)  If maintained at the current budget level, that would mean that the NEA would be funded through the year...4215. Yes, I know, you have to factor for inflation. So let's be conservative and say the NEA would be safe at least till the year 3000.

On a less fantastical note, the $285 billion for the Iraq War would be enough to allow nearly 38,000,000 children to attend the Head Start program, or enough to hire nearly 5 million additional public school teachers for one year.  Remember all this next time some blowhard gets riled about some controversial art and starts attacking NEA funding as being a horrible waste of taxpayer dollars. Perspective is always useful. That's you, Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, I'm talking to...for voting for the (thankfully, failed) amendment to cut NEA funding by $30 million.