Halloween Note

Dear colleagues,

I’m very sorry to miss Halloween in Springfield. It’s fabulous that we have families and kids coming in costume by the building! Thanks to a number of colleagues for arrangements — and very much to Fairouz Fahema, Mary Schaefer, Faris Almaari and the countless others.

I’m sending along a classic. In February 1920, in the cinema Marmorhaus on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm, the silent German horror movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari premiered.

Dark and spooky were in vogue in those days. Expressionism was becoming the style. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was one of the founders of “The Bridge” (“Die Brücke”), a group of early expressionists. The eerie image above, Trees on a Mountain Slope, is a Kirchner wood carving from 1920. It’s part of the permanent collection at the MoMA in New York.

Expressionist music was defined by Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951) and his two students, Anton Webern (1883-1945)  and Alban Berg (1885-1935). The soundtrack for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari included music by Schönberg.

Here’s Webern’s Five Pieces for Orchestra. If it sounds like it could be a film score, you might recall the 1973 horror-thriller The Exorcist.

*****

It’s 150 years since the birth of Charles Ives (1874-1954). Ives hailed from Danbury, Connecticut. The man was born restless.

Ives’s musical experience started as a four-year-old banging on the family piano. His father dispatched young Charles to drum lessons. He loved contact. Later at Yale, Ives played American football.

After college, he worked  in New York for the insurance company Mass Mutual. On the side, though, Ives got busy with politics, advocating a 20th amendment to the Constitution. Ives wanted voters to submit their own legislative proposals to Congress, with the ten best selected annually and put to national referenda.

He stayed with music all the while. Ives became one the most influential American composers of the 20th century, a traditionalist obsessed with pushing boundaries.

Here’s Ives’s Concord Sonata, published in 1920. From 1906, here’s Central Park in the Dark. Ives loved leaning into dissonance.

If you’re in the mood for something Halloween-ish and at least a bit more contemporary, try the podcast Night Vale. It’s set in the fictional American desert town of the same name and spins quirky tales of the strange and supernatural.

******

I’m starting meetings at RFE/RL in Prague. We’re looking for partnerships and leverage to support our work across the region — and to enhance our relationship with funders in Washington. We’re  meeting here with extraordinary Russian and Iranian colleagues, and a fine China watcher.

Let’s find ways to deepen our coverage of Russia, Iran, and China in the Middle East and North Africa. Add North Korea to the mix and you have what The Economist calls “the quartet of chaos.” Cooperation between the four will be on the mind of the next U.S. president, regardless of next week’s election outcome.

Dubai is next this trip, on Saturday. I’m back the middle of next week with a full report. We’ll have much to discuss.

My best, Jeff