Arts
The Michigan Daily
Tuesday, July 27, 1982
Page 7
Records
Pete Shelley - Homosapien'
(Arista)
Ah, now this is a pleasant surprise.
Usually when there's a difference bet-
ween the import and domestic versions
of an album, it's usually at our expense.
Not this time, though. For a change,
Arista has replaced three melancholy
tunes from the import Homosapien with
more upbeat selections - most notably
the absolutely essential "Witness the
Change."
And that small rearrangement seems
to have made a world of difference.
While the import album seemed an un-
convincing mismatch of hit singles and
tentative also-rans, the new additions
fill in the gaps to make the domestic
version of Homosapien an album of
seamless warmth and vibrancy.
It seems ages ago that Shelley
disbanded his seminal punk-poppers
The Buzzcocks and threw us all for a
dance-floor loop with the unexpectedly
electronic pulse of the dance-club hit
"Homosapien."
Now, this new sound has fallen into
place as just another phase in his
musical development, making it
clearer than ever that Pete Shelley is
first and foremost a pop songwriter, a
fact that won't be influenced at all by
whatever musical trends he should
choose to explore. His current elec-
tropop endeavours act as a foil to his
raw, biting melodies and raspy war-
bling much the same way that The Buz-
zcocks' rough crunch counterbalanced
his eternally adolescent outlook and
sweetly melodic tunes with such a
deliciously sweet tension.
That sort of tension and songwriting
talent is just the sort of stuff that is so
obviously missing from most elec-
tropop, where the temptation is so
dangerously handy to scour the music
clean of any of its rough edges and
allow the technology to write "songs"
for you. Shelley, though, knows how to
use those rough edges to get across the
all-important human facet of his work;
as long as he's got that pure
songwriting talent he'll be a far call
above most merely functional elec-
tronic music. And just asa true pop star
should, Shelley makes it all sound so
easy on Homosapien.
-Mark Dighton
Visage-'The Anvil' (Polydor)
Waita minute. Did I miss something?
Wasn't Visage supposed to be the dan-
ceable offshoot of Ultravox?!?
After their unconvincing debut
album, I thought they finally made
good on that promise with the EP that
spawned the frenetic dance club hit,
"Frequency 7." Now, they seem to be
retreating from the gimmicky im-.
mediacy of the EP to once again em-
brace the dry artifice-as-all-purpose-
outlook of Ultravox.
With their foundation still firmly in
Eurodisco, Visage can hardly help but
be danceable, but they insist on doing
everything in their power to put icy
dampers on the damn-all release so
essential to good dance music.
Their attempt to combine the easy
accessibility of dance music with the
thematic complexity they take to be Art
may sound great ... but it just doesn't
feel anything. -Mark Dighton
Letters show man behind the myth
By Ben Ticho
T HERE IS something curiously
fascinating about the correspon
dence of celebrated people. Perhaps
because they were never intended for
the self-consciousness of publication,
compiled letters evoke a sense of im-
mediacy and authenticity that
biographies and even autobiographies
seldom achieve..
Given the prevalence of artificially.
contrived public images and miscon-
ceptions, glimpses into actual (if
sometimes mundane) business tran-
sactions, social courtesies, and per-
sonal quarrels, satisfies the deep-
seated curiosity about what celebrities
are (were) "really" like.
Igor Stravinsky, the renowned and
enigmatic Russian composer who died
in 1971, presents an almost ideal subject
for such curiosity. Interest in the com-
poser of L'Oiseau de Feu (The
Firebird), Oedipus Rex, Petrushka,
and many other innovative works has
revived during this, the centenary an-
niversary of his birth. Robert Craft's
volume of selected Stravinsky
correspondence (the first of three) of-
fers a set of diverse and unique per-
spectives on the life of this cbntrover-
sial figure.
Craft arranges the book in nine sec-
tions, each dealing with a different
correspondent and each thus revealing
a slightly different view of Stravinsky.
The divisions follow a loose
chronological order with some overlap-
ping, starting in the 1910-30s with letters
R and telegrams to and from his first wife -
Catherine, French composer Maurice
Delage, Russian music editor Vladimir
Derzhanovsky, French writer and
playwright Jean Cocteau, and Ernest
Ansermet, the French conductor who
served as one of Stravinsky's most im-
portant early musical patrons.
Stravinsky, who studied with fellow
Russian Rimsky-Korsakov (composer
of Sadko and Scheherazade), moved to
Paris a few years prior to the start of
World War I. In France, Stravinsky
became acquainted with Delage and
other proponents of brashly contem-
porary music, including Maurice Ravel
(Bolero) and Eric Satie.
Though well-known (if not always
appreciated) in Europe, Stravinsky did
not really achieve true acceptance in
the United States until after he im-
migrated to this country, one of the
many European artists fleeigg from
World War II. His experiences here are
presented through correspondence with
French-born conductor Nadia
Boulanger, American ballet patron
Lincoln Kirstein, English poet W.H.
Auden, and American conductor
Robert Craft himself.
By then the "grand man" of new
classical music, Stravinsky settled in
Hollywood, leading a far richer life
than the difficult years he spent as a
near-unknown in Russia.
Perhaps the best aspect of Craft's
persona arrangement is that it clearly
shows Stravinsky from so many
angles-musically, artistically, of-
ficially, personally. The letters demon-
strate that a composer's lot is by no
means encompassed by composing, or
by his compositions themselves;
(seemingly) endless negotiations must
be made for performances, program
selections, casting, ballet adaptions, set
designs, financial arrangements, and
of course the personal meetings to
arrange all the arrangements. In-
vitations and thanks thus fill a good
portion of the book.
It is interesting to watch a great piece
of music germinate from a friend's
Stravinsky
... composing correspondence
suggestion, as was the case when Kir-
stein suggested that a third work be
written to accompany the Apollo and
Orpheus ballets; Stravinsky eventually
wrote Agon to complete the well-known
trilogy.
Equally revealing are the con-
tributions from Catherine Stravinsky,
who suffered not only from a
debilitating disease, but also from the
knowledge of her husband's ongoing in-
fatuation with another woman, Vera
See STRAVINSKY, Page 10
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