A re-formed Reform

No sooner had I asked the universe this question of Muslim extremism in ma previous entry than I received an answer in a commentary in the Washington Post today by Reza Aslan, an Iranian born scholar. The article today asserted that Obama cannot be the best choice for the presidency because of his lack of experience in foreign relations.

But, more important than this hypothesis, is that the article led me to research Dr. Aslam. As it turns out, he wrote an interesting book that I ordered today. In it, he theorizes that what is going on in the Middle East is an inner struggle, one for the reigns of Islam, one which will determine in what direction the future of the religion goes. I have said this for a long time, that the biggest problem with Islam is that it didn’t have a Reformation. But, it looks as though the circumstances at hand point to the possible fact that we are in the very midst of Islam’s Reformation. That would be nice. Difficult but nice.

Below is the New York Times Book Review of Dr. Aslan’s book:

The Jihad Is a Civil War, the West Only a Bystander
New York Times
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: May 4, 2005

For many in the West, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center turned a page in world history. They signaled the onset of a monumental struggle between fundamentalist Islam and modern, secular democracy, what the Harvard scholar Samuel P. Huntington has called a "clash of civilizations."

Not so, Reza Aslan argues in "No god but God." "What is taking place now in the Muslim world is an internal conflict between Muslims, not an external battle between Islam and the West," he writes. "The West is merely a bystander - an unwary yet complicit casualty of a rivalry that is raging in Islam over who will write the next chapter in its story."

That history, grippingly narrated and thoughtfully examined, takes up nearly all of "No god but God." Mr. Aslan, an Iranian by birth and a doctoral student in history and religion at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has written a literate, accessible introduction to Islam (or, more accurately Islams), carefully placing its message and rituals in historical context. Complete with a glossary and an annotated bibliography, it could easily serve as a college textbook.

Mr. Aslan is, in a certain sense, a fundamentalist. The Christian sense of the word is meaningless in Islam, of course, because Muslims believe that the Koran was dictated by God and, therefore, that its words are literally true. But like the puritanical Wahhabists of Saudi Arabia, whom he reviles, Mr. Aslan looks to the first Muslim community in Medina, established by Muhammad 1,400 years ago, as a model for reform today. His Medina, though, is a communal, egalitarian society dedicated to pluralism and tolerance. The problem with Islam, Mr. Aslan argues, is the clerical establishment that gained control over the interpretation of the Koran and the hadith: the anecdotes describing the words and deeds of Muhammad, passed on by his followers and their descendants. Less than two centuries after Muhammad's death in 632, there were some 700,000 hadith circulating throughout the Muslim world, "the great majority of which were unquestionably fabricated by individuals who sought to legitimize their own particular beliefs and practices by connecting them with the Prophet." The stoning of adulterous women, to take a notorious example, originated not in the Koran, but in the virulent misogyny of Umar, one of Muhammad's first converts and later the ruler of the caliphate, who simply claimed that this form of punishment had accidentally been left out of the Koran. Although women in the Medina community were given the right to inherit the property of their husbands and to keep their dowries as their own personal property, later scholars decided that the Koran, when instructing believers "not to pass on your wealth and property to the feeble-minded," had women and children in mind.

One of Mr. Aslan's most important chapters deals with the centuries-long struggle between traditionalists and rationalists over the proper interpretation of the Koran. The outcome weighs heavy on the world today. The rationalists saw the Koran as both the word of God and a historical document whose meanings change through time. For the traditionalists, the Koran is fixed and eternal. Therefore, "what was appropriate for Muhammad's community in the seventh century C.E. must be appropriate for all Muslim communities to come, regardless of the circumstances."

The traditionalists won. The power to interpret the Koran came under the control of religious scholars, collectively known as the ulama, who ended the era of consensus and free reasoning that, up to the 10th century, had defined Koranic inquiry.
If this sounds like a remote quarrel, it is not. Mr. Aslan says it is now being played out again throughout the Muslim world. This, he argues, is the real jihad, not holy war against the West, but the internal struggle for Islam's soul, with reformers pitted against reactionaries in Tehran, Cairo, Damascus and Jakarta, as well as in Muslim communities in the West. "Like the reformations of the past, this will be a terrifying event," he writes. "However, out of the ashes of cataclysm, a new chapter in the story of Islam will emerge."

This has a heroic ring to it, but Mr. Aslan acknowledges that the outcome is in doubt. He places his hopes in the like-minded liberals who, he suggests, constitute Islam's silent majority. "The fact is that the vast majority of the more than one billion Muslims in the world readily accept the fundamental principals of democracy," he writes. Like the reformers in Iran, they are committed to "genuine Islamic values like pluralism, freedom, justice, human rights, and above all, democracy."

This may be, but Mr. Aslan, in his polemical conclusion, tends to assert rather than present evidence. His impassioned plea for an Islamic form of democracy, although moving, sounds sophistical. Religion and the state, in his view, cannot be separate. The very concept is alien to Islam. "At its most basic level, the Islamic state is a state run by Muslims for Muslims, in which the determination of values, the norms of behavior, and the formation of laws are influenced by Islamic morality," he writes. Yet somehow pluralism, human rights, equality of the sexes and religious tolerance would prevail, because, ultimately, these values already exist in Islam.

As Mr. Aslan acknowledges, Iran's halting steps toward a synthesis of Islam and democracy have been discouraging. The example of the Taliban casts a very dark shadow over the idea of an Islamic state. But the tide of history, Mr. Aslan insists, is moving in the right direction, sweeping Islam back, after 1,400 years, toward Medina.

I wish I could say that I am surprised by Bhutto’s being killed. I think, as I am sure many do, that it is a terribly sad commentary on life in 2007.

I do not know enough to comment on whether she was a shining star, snuffed out by extremism or her political rivals. That would be assuming too much, I think. She was originally deposed because of her own corrupt prime ministership, and was said to have punished her political rivals after having been voted into office. Since I know so little, I do not want to do the typical, human thing and make a martyr out of her, claiming that she was Pakistan’s only chance, or that she was perfect somehow. People do tend to be more perfect in death than they ever were in life, after all.

But, I will say this: I watched Mrs. Bhutto being interviewed several times before her death and I can say that I really liked her. She had that sort of Bill Clinton likeability. You just couldn’t help but be a part of her charisma train.

I am getting so sick of Muslim extremism. Just sick of it. Isn’t anyone else getting that way? It seems like a bunch of backwards hicks are constantly getting their way. It just doesn’t make any sense. It would be like allowing some hillbilly with three teeth in his mouth make all of the decisions only because you’re somehow afraid of him.

How are we going to tell these suicide bombers and all of their kind that we aren’t going to take this lying down anymore?

Munich Installment Two

For some reason, I have let you hang, unable to tell the greatest horrors of this trip.

At the end of the week, on that Monday just before I came back to Pforzheim, I sang an agency in Munich. As I write and begin to tell this story, a bad taste is starting to form in my mouth, my dander is raised, and I am starting to get that slightly sick feeling. You guessed right, the audition was a bad experience, a really bad one. Someday I will trust my instincts as they told me before both of these auditions to run away and fast. I decided, somehow, for myself, that these were experiences that I needed to have in spite of their discomfort, and gave it the old college try even knowing, instinctively, before I even began, that they would be asses. I am not quite sure whether this was self-fulfilling prophecy or not To even consider I did this to myself is enough to “cook my noodle” at this point, so I will not venture into that void of voids.

I sang before a panel of four people. I sang through “Gott! Welch Dunkel hier” my flagship aria. I believe that I sang it acceptably, perhaps not the best of all of my attempts, but it was also not horrible. I knew something was awry when the initial response to this eight minute tour de force was “Do you have any Mozart?”

Huh? Mozart? Ok, for those of you out of the seen or not total music nerds, asking me, or any Heldentenor for that matter, to sing Mozart would be like asking a linebacker to improvise some modern dance version of swan lake complete with scarves. No one in their right mind would want to hear my voice sing Mozart. It would just be bad. Mozart is all about long, floating melodies, vocal acrobatics, diminuendos, that kind of stuff. Heldentenor repertoire, in contrast, is like a horn call, or drum beats. It would be like asking Metallica to give us their best rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon—yeah, they could do it, maybe, but who would want to hear it?

“Uh…No, I don’t. I have started to look at Tamino again, but no, I do not have any Mozart to present today.” With confused and somewhat blank looks on their faces, they asked me to sing Max’s aria from Der Freischütz. The lightest of the arias I offer.

I sang it well. Again, nothing to write home about, but I am sure it was not atrocious.

They called me down to the little, lone chair that sat before their exaggeratedly long table so they could give me the potential good or bad news. I honestly thought, especially considering they asked to hear a second piece, that they might have liked it. Dear J., you can be oh so wrong sometimes. The tag team verbal stoning started with one of the women. The following is an assortment of her comments. When reading them, imagine a sort of clap of thunder and lightning after each phrase. Maybe even the ornery laugh “the Count” from Sesame Street, but much more evil. No, think the evil, parallel universe “Count” who punctuates little phrases like “Two! Two bad arias.” With a sinister paugh and maybe a side of baby sacrifice. When I personally think of this woman, I see her stirring a huge cauldron of hate out of which pops each comment, in a bubble that pops and some Lord of the Rings voice stage whispers them while “witchy” simply stirs away, a permanent sneer and evil eye painted on her hateful face.

“You are not singing in the right Fach. You should be singing Mozart.”
“You are pushing your voice so much that it really hurts to listen to.”
“Your voice is over-worked.”
“You should just be singing in choruses.”

Then she said “you quite your job in Pforzheim?”
“Yes, I quit my job to go back to America and finish my doctorate.”
“And in which area is your doctorate?”
“Vocal pedagogy,” I say.
When I say this the other woman from the Munich office looks over at the guy from Stuttgart and apparently is having trouble holding back a guffaw of some kind.

My only reply was a stunned, and intentionally trailing off “Ok…”

She tags one of the guys, as I lay, helpless in the center of the mat. Yes, I gave a good fight against “Witchy Dominatrix”, but her final body slam left me momentarily motionless, the breath having been knocked out of me.

He jumps in and begins the pummeling without even a hello or how do you do. At least buy me dinner, bitch.

“If you keep singing like this you will lose your voice.”
“You are not a Heldentenor.”
“A real Heldentenor would have blown the roof off of this place. If he were singing next to you, we wouldn’t even hear you.”
And his crowning achievement, a statement that got permanently wedged in the broken record of my psyche, forever to played and replayed: “Honestly, I do not mean to be mean, but from a tenor to a tenor, I have to say that I am shocked, simply shocked by what I have just heard.”

Note: when someone says “I don’t mean to be mean” expect what comes next to be real, real mean.

I think this was the part when the ambulance was called and the doctors all rushed up to the ring where they determined that it was that last pile driver that had simply driven the life out of me. K.O. folks, and we all go home.

Run away…

It was on the trip home that A. called to see how it went. She was on break from doing a Walküre at the Staatsoper in Vienna and was in Berlin eating at her favorite Indian restaurant. She had an audition in Weimar the next day, and felt the stopover was worth it. That must be some awesome Indian food. Her words were very encouraging, saying that there are some very important people, including the Dream Agent that obviously believe in my talent and that I should just keep going. She said that she had had an audition just before she won her first role in Bayreuth where they also had told her she should sing Mozart. That helped to hear, especially considering how well she is doing now, NOT singing Mozart.

Now that you are either reeling from great Schadenfreude, or in the darkest of depressions because of honest-to-goodness empathy, I want you to know that things were not all that bad. They were balanced by some good news form that week, too.

The Dream Agent had recommended that I go have a lesson with this famous Heldentenor specialist in Munich. I did that. It went well. Very well. She was able to identify immediately the 3 or 4 things that I know I need to work on. She is confidant that these fine-tuning things will be relatively easy to fix and that our work will go very fast.

I got home to Pforzheim after the week in Munich to find a message on the answering machine from the Dream Agent, wanting to know how I liked the lesson. I called him, told him about the auditions, and let him know that I liked the lesson very much. He was soooo nice. He was very consoling about the auditions, and simply said that people just don’t know what they are talking about. He also gave me the best news that I have had in a while, that the teacher in Munich had immediately called him after my lesson and was very excited about my voice, told him that I have a great instrument, and that she thinks that the problems will be fixed very quickly. Then, in a great surprise, and as a sort of saving grace for all that bad that had happened in Munich, he simply said: “When she gives me the green light, we will start going about finding the right house for you.” Cool. Before, he had said that he was interested. Now, it is for sure. Very cool. That means I really have two agents now! And one of them is big time. Me: stoked.

I have already made the arrangements to temporarily move to Augsburg to begin my lessons and coachings. I found a very cheap place from a friend of Chris and mine. He is giving it to us at cost. So, all is well in Denmark and things are on the up.

No, this is not the way that I had anticipated that everything would develop, but I am open to what the Guy Upstairs is working on, and will do what I think is necessary in order to make it happen. I just see it as another step in my adventure. Imagine if I had done the auditions and no one had been interested? That would have totally sucked. I consider this a better-than-average place between complete failure and stardom. I hope you agree.

XMas

Genau

This guy articulates well what the main argument is: deciding according to "worse case scenario."

Christian Soldiers

I came back from Munich on Monday. I sang for two agencies there and had a lesson with this teacher that the Dream Agent recommended. I was able to stay the whole week, thankfully rent-free at the apartment of a friend of mine who is doing a gig at the Wiener Staatsoper. She and her husband have the most amazing DVD collection and like to read, so I was pretty much set.

The auditions were complete and utter horror stories from which I am still reeling. Why do mean people have to exist? I still do not understand the amount of pettiness there is in this business.

In a Maelstrom of inevitability, my train arrived in Munich on Sunday, more than a week ago now. I found A.’s apartment shut up as though someone thought not to return for some undetermined long stint. In December, that translates as ‘I found the apartment bitterly cold inside.’ But in an hour or so, my extremities began to dethaw, a big cup of tea spurring them on.

That next morning, I sang for the notorious opera agent Haase. In 2003, when I sang for him last, I finished my aria, he walked to the door, opened it, showed me out, and as I passed him, said “We cannot work together.” Ok… And, I am going back to him for what reason? Why in the world would I sing for someone who treated me like shit last time? That was a question that seemed especially poignant after the second audition with him.

I warmed up at about 8:15 AM A.’s place for 15 minutes before heading out for my audition. (8:15 AM is an ungodly hour for me and most tenors of the world to be singing. I believe the Italians say it best: “A tenor doesn’t even spit before noon.”) Then, at the audition, I had to wait for another 1.5 hours before I sang, with no chance to warm up after the cold trip over… This is not good. I sang Florestan’s aria for Herr Haase, and, I must say, I sang it rather well considering. After I finished the piece perhaps most famous only because of the great number of people who cannot get through it at all, Herr Haase said, obviously unimpressed:

“You know, Mr. F, many people want to be soloists. I think that if you pursue this, you will just be frustrated. Yes, you could sing in Pforzheim, or Regensburg or Ulm, but not more. I do not know if you would earn enough at these places to live. That is my decision.”

At times like these, there is a secret desire for a comeback that I never dare say…something to the effect of “You cannot foresee with any certainty what the future will bring. And, it’s Dr. F, not Mr.”

I think the only thing that I really disagreed with there was his assumption that, after one hearing, he could chart my entire career as a singer. I do agree with him that I could be a soloist in a D-House such as the ones he mentioned. Where we diverge, though, is that he assumes I could never progress beyond that. Unfortunately, Mr. Haase did not want to take the chance on me as representing someone that sings in small houses is probably not lucrative enough for him.

The Munich story is so long. I will just give you this first installment, so as to muster up the energy to tell you the second and third parts soon. All in all, Munich has emphasized what I have thought all along: that this adventure which will eventually see my career lifting off the ground is one which will take many turns, will require unending persistence, and that same amount of energy but to the second power.

Onward.

Step One: Get Agent

There are always milestones that happen in this rode to a new level. When I finally signed the letter of resignation for my job in the chorus and sealed into reality that my future would be “anything other than this”, somewhat by intentionally pushing myself up against the wall in order to force myself to move from a comfortable position, taking the risk to become something truly more, I was scared. I was truly scared, really, that I would be sitting on my butt at this point, getting absolutely nothing, thinking ‘I should never have left the chorus.’ These kinds of milestones tend to pass somewhat antic-climactically, one challenge overcome and the sights almost immediately on the next.

But yesterday, when I had my first audition since 2003 for a German agent, I knew that something significant was taking place. I went in with confidence. I was nervous, yes, but confident. I sang through the first aria (Florestan) and she said, with great energy in her voice “You are a REAL Heldentenor!” Cool. Someone else noticed.

Normally, in auditions, you sing through maybe one piece or two. I sang through my entire audition repertoire, four long, extremely difficult Heldentenor arias. The agent seemed very enthusiastic and wants to work together. She even said “I think I may have a Siegmund for you.” Siegmund (from Walküre) would be my absolute ideal role to begin my career. Thirty minutes later, the audition was over, and, exiting the hall, I re-entered the real world.

I have an agent!

Finding someone who is interested in representing me and sending me to auditions that she hears about through her “magic agent channels of communication” is something that, until this point, I have not been able to do. And, on the first try, after 4 years of waiting and working, the first one is interested. I have to admit that I, even considering this anti-climactic nature of looking at my own successes, find this unbelievably, fucking cool! Now, as I go out and sing for other agents, a lot of the pressure is taken off. When I audition now, I won’t be so much focused on whether or not I am worthy, but, rather, focused on what is important, namely, whether this agent is able to recognize my potential and use it to his and my advantage.

I thank God for this. This feels so good!

Something else kind of neat happened…the pianist followed me out after the audition and asked I he could have my card. Interesting. My fried B. knows him and I guess he arranges all kinds of concerts. That would be nice…some gigs.

Success. Ok, now I keep going.