Owsley Brown III and Jerome Hiler. Music Makes a City. "[An] enlightening documentary about how Louisville, Kentucky, became a locus for contemporary music in the mid-20th century. In striking synchronicity, a mayor, a conductor and a robust postwar generation of composers intersected to make the city a hub for visionary composition. Louisville had been battered by a flood and the Depression when Robert Whitney, a young Chicago conductor, arrived in 1937 to build what became theLouisville Orchestra. When it hit financial trouble, Charles Farnsley, the mayor and a be- liever in the Confucian notion that high culture attracts wealth and power, boldly proposed commissioning works from modern composers while honor- ing the traditional repertory. Their efforts drew local and international acclaim. By 1953, with a major Rockefeller Foun- dation grant, the orchestra was bringing in 46 originals a year, by the likes of Ned Rorem and Elliott Carter (both articulate on camera), and had its own record label, First Edition. At its peak, luminaries like Martha Graham and Shostakovich came to its stage. When it hit financial trouble, Charles Farnsley, the mayor and a be- liever in the Confucian notion that high culture attracts wealth and power, boldly proposed commissioning works from modern composers while honoring the traditional repertory.Their efforts drew local and international acclaim. By 1953, with a major Rockefeller Foun- dation grant, the orchestra was bringing in 46 originals a year, by the likes of Ned Rorem and Elliott Carter (both articulate on camera), and had its own record label, First Edition. At its peak, luminaries like Martha Graham and Shostakovich came to its stage. Aesthetic trends -- the battle between Neo-Classicists and the atonalists, for example -- are addressed, but the music is given ample room to speak for itself, in lyrical landscape mon- tages. Viewers unfamiliar with artists like Lukas Foss and Gunther Schuller will find themselves agreeably challenged. And stirred. The personalities here are as noteworthy as the soundtrack. Whitney was a tireless leader. The charismatic Farnsley, an intellectual with a populist style, after a term as a congressman (where he helped create the National Endowment for the Arts and was a proud signer of the Voting Rights Act), retired from politics to host an overnight classical-music radio program in Louisville" [Andy Webster, The New York times, 9/17/10].
Ngawang Choephel. Tibet in Song. "Ngawang Choephel, a Tibetan musicologist who was imprisoned by the Chinese for more than six years, would have had a compelling film had he simply stuck to his own remarkable story. But his documentary, Tibet in Song, is doubly powerful because he also weaves in the overall history of Tibet’s struggle, a primer on the Chinese government’s campaign to muzzle Tibetan culture and vignettes from other Tibetans who resisted. Mr. Choephel left Tibet with his mother in the years after the Chinese invasion of 1950, growing up in India, where other refugees implanted in him a love of traditional Tibetan songs. He returned to Tibet in the 1990's to try to capture this musical history on tape, but the Chinese had a head start of several decades. 'The first music I heard was Chinese Communist propaganda and Chinese pop songs,' he recalls of his arrival in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital. 'It was an unexpected, alien sound and seemed to be following me wherever I went.' He had better luck finding traditional singers in the countryside, but he was only partway into his recording efforts when he was arrested and jailed as a spy in 1995. One of the more touching aspects of this film is his account of his mother’s tireless campaign to have him freed, which finally paid off in 2002. Persistence, it seems, runs in the family" [Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, 9/23/10].
