I don’t know if lunchtime announcements are made anymore in my school’s dining hall. But if they are, I don’t suppose the designated boy or girl (the school is co-ed now) is stepping forth at the sound of the chime, waiting for the chatter of voices and the clatter of utensils to subside, taking in the sweep of the hall with its spacious extensions to left and right and its lofty ceiling, raising his or her voice’s pitch above its lazy comfort zone, and remembering to space out the words a little. I’m pretty sure he or she is detaching a mike from its stand and lowering pitch to a confidential level (he) or a breathy, throaty hemi-demi-semi whisper (she). And if any of the sweet voices in the a cappella group belongs to an aspiring classical singer, he’s got a whole personality re-make ahead of him.

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And a couple of little tails to recent posts:

1): To “Weill/Brecht 1 and 2” (Sept 7 and 21): Fortuitously, the current issue of The New York Review of Books (dated Oct. 25) carries an essay-review, by Adam Thirlwell, of Michael Hofmann’s new translation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. This famous novel was first published in 1929—in other words, exactly contemporaneously with the emergence of Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny. It’s been on my have-read-about-it, must-get-to-it list for at least 40-odd years now. Reading again about it now, just as I’ve revisited the Weill/Brecht collaboration, I’m made more aware than ever before of the birth of the Epic Novel alongside that of the Epic Play—a novel that refused “any idea that a self possessed an interior,” and that would “exist independently” and “be concretely there,” abjuring the “dead exploration of psychological ambiguity” in favor of a totally objective epic form that progressed according to the principle of montage. This manner of story telling, based on an objectified view of character action and events, on social rather than personal meaning, and on minimizing (though, in truth, not entirely eliminating) a narrative “through line,” was in the cultural air of Weimar Germany and Austria in those years. Anyone intrigued by the work of Brecht and Weill, or by Weimar culture in general and its present half-life, will find this article of interest. And Döblin’s novel, too, which I will be getting to any day now.

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2) My promised last round-up on the subject of Carmen Jones (see the post of Aug. 24):

The “original 1944 Broadway cast recording” has about 50 minutes of excerpts, which, according to my old Gramophone Encyclopedia of Recorded Music (Third Edition, 1948), were first released by (American) Decca in an album of six 78s. (The same source also discloses that “Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum“ (“Les tringles des sistres tintaient”) was released as a Victor 10-inch single, backed by Arlen’s “Right as the Rain,” sung by Gladys Swarthout. That might be one to seek out, particularly inasmuch as while Carmen leads the number in the original opera, she doesn’t participate in it at all in Carmen Jones, where it’s given to Frankie, who is either Frasquita or Mercédès—I haven’t quite doped that out.)