[Update 1/23: Just as I thought at the time along with several others trading comments on Facebook during the Inauguration, the music we were hearing from Messrs. Ma et al was indeed a recording...there were several visual cues that seemed to indicate at the time, but since I had not read any confirmation of that either in the MSM or the blogosphere, I started to doubt my conclusion...today's New York Times confirms the performance was a "play-along." Not really a big deal to me either way, still glad that sort-of-classical music got such a prominent spot at this moment in American history. Weather and circumstances and the very nature of chamber music made this solution pretty much essential, I think.]

Just a quick hit here about Tuesday's inauguration of Barack Obama and the music therein, specifically "classical" music's little moment in the sun. The John Williams arrangement of "Simple Gifts"? Pretty nice arrangement, I thought, and to hope for more or something different would be unrealistic. That puts me at odds with Mark Swed in the LA Times who found the Williams arrangement "hokey" (I don't agree, I mean we are talking John Williams here, and I thought it was a fairly elegant realization) and Anne Midgette at the Washington Post who thought Williams wasn't hokey enough. She writes that Williams  "made the mistake so many popular artists do when confronted with classical music: rather than write what he is good at, he corseted himself in a straitjacket of what he thought he was supposed to be doing." A metaphor for the debate over the size and scope of the economic stimulus package?



Meanwhile, how 'bout that Aretha Franklin? I thought pretty darn impressive considering the difficulty of keeping those vocal chords limber and lubricated in the freezing cold. Unfortunately this version of "My Country Tis of Thee" modulated up a half-step in the final minute, which given the conditions, was probably a half-step too far.

Now that we have a President Obama, the arts community is jostling for position with hands open to get a piece of the bailout. Things have actually gone much farther with that, with real discussion about the role of the arts in our national culture, and this is a good thing. My email has lately been swamped with attachments for an online petition to get Obama to create a cabinet-level "Secretary of the Arts." I haven't signed any of these because, quite frankly, I have very mixed feelings about that idea. In general I believe the music world is already tilted too much to the "management" side and not the folks who actually make the music; ditto other arts, probably. The idea of a cabinet-level arts agency tells me that a lot of arts administrators are going to get work. Am I excited about that? Not really. Plus I'm not sure about the giant bullseye that creates for conservatives to shoot at.

On the other hand, some of the proposals I've seen out there call for something much smaller, more targeted, more goal-oriented: something like a White House Arts Advisor that would be roughly equivalent to what already exists for the sciences. Tyler Green in his blog makes by far the most persuasive case for this that I've read. This is something I can get behind.

In any case high-level meetings have been underway with the Obama transition team. Some of those are detailed in this story from Musical America and this very interesting summary by Deanna Isaacs in the Chicago Reader.