jwilzewske: celebrity

Showing posts with label celebrity. Show all posts

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Stalking: An Occupational Hazard for Chamber Musicians?

I am not absolutely certain that I’m being stalked. But I’m pretty sure somebody was following me after our quartet’s last performance. What should I be doing about this? I don’t know who to talk to or call about this.”
— Anonymous.

This is outside the scope of things I have any personal expertise in. The links below may be helpful to you, though.

Current U.S. statistics on stalking are here. More than one million women and almost 400,000 men are stalked annually in the United States. Eight percent of women and two percent of men in the United States have been stalked in their lifetime. Although stalking is a gender-neutral crime, most victims (78 percent) are female and most perpetrators (87 percent) are male. In the course of managing a stalking episode, 28 percent of female stalking victims and 10 percent of male victims obtained a court protective order. Sixty-nine percent of female victims and 81 percent of male victims had the protection order violated. Eighty-one percent of women who were stalked by a current or former husband or cohabiting partner were also physically assaulted, and 31 percent were also sexually assaulted by that partner.

The average duration of stalking is 1.3 years. Most stalking, however, lasts about one month. Statistically, the median (31 days) is way lower than the mean (470 days in the U.S.). The statistical distribution has a long tail toward the right (longer durations). Two-thirds of stalkers pursue their victims at least once per week. Seventy-eight percent of stalkers use more than one means of pursuing, contacting or interfering with the victim. Have a look at this article by Mullen’s group in Australia for more information. (The stats are qualitatively similar in other countries, although duration distributions by stalking type, comparative prevalence by stalking type, and other details differ quantitatively from country to country, or even by region within each country.)

Stalking, Table.1 from Mullen et al., 1999

There are no statistics maintained on epidemiology of classical musicians as targets of stalking or as stalker perpetrators, although undergraduate musicians or conservatory students probably experience stalking rates comparable to other university students (about 20%). Possibly members of small chamber music ensembles might be more vulnerable on account of the small number of members in the group, and the absence of budget such as a large orchestra may have for security and other services.

Stalking behavior is not motivated by any one thing, and therefore no one strategy is effective protection against all the various types of stalking and types of stalkers. Effective strategies are ones that take into account the particular circumstances and identity, if these are known (that is, the history of any prior relationship with the pursuer; the chronology of events; the methods the pursuer is using).

R isk assessment in stalking situations is currently limited by a lack of prospective studies of representative samples. Clinicians and the legal decision-makers do not, however, have the luxury of deferring action until such evidence emerges. They must, for the present, depend on integrating knowledge from stalking research, borrowing from the systematic studies of risk in other areas, and drawing on clinical experience... The longer stalking has lasted, the longer it is likely to persist. Nearly 50 percent of stalking situations amount to a short burst of intrusive behavior lasting only a few days and not extending beyond two weeks. This form of harassment is typically perpetrated by a stranger. In contrast, stalkers who persist for longer than two weeks usually continue for many months.”
— Paul Mullen et al., 2006.

Even if no physical violence has occurred, the anxiety and fear and implied threats are a form of harm. You do not know what the stalker might do next.

B eing stalked can induce depression, anxiety, and chronic stress. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) describes the psychological sequelae of stalking... To our knowledge, however, the utility of [PTSD] treatments in the management of stalking victims has yet to receive empirical support.”
— Paul Mullen, Michele Pathé, and Rosemary Purcell, Stalkers, p. 221.

Don’t assume that there is just one pursuer. Some celebrities attract multiple pursuers, either serially or concurrently. Classical musicians may not have as great a likelihood of this as other celebrities, but the risk of it is surely not zero.

Do inform others about what is happening and what you are concerned about. Neighbors, co-workers, friends, and other ‘proxies’ who are not aware of the victim’s situation and who think they are being helpful can unwittingly disclose the information that a stalker wants to know.

If you have children who could be potential secondary targets for the pursuer, do have a calm, serious discussion with the children about the subject and instruct them how to be safe. In the U.S., you can contact VictimServices.org’s 7x24 hotline at 1-866-689-HELP (4357) for advice.

The Mullen-Pathé-Purcell book is especially good. It covers strategies to defend against and manage stalking behaviors; protecting personal information; declining and terminating contact; classifying different types of stalking and stalkers and risks associated with each; false stalking and delusions of being stalked; stalking-by-proxy, such as ordering/cancelling goods and services. Proxies utilized by stalkers may include your current or past employers, doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, hairdressers/cosmetologists, gyms/fitness clubs, banks, schools, churches/synagogues, and other intermediaries.

The book provides comprehensive discussion of morbid infatuations and other psychopathologies; incompetent suitors and intimacy seekers; acquaintances and friends. It counsels us to avoid any further discussions or correspondence with the pursuer—do not indulge them in argument or negotiation; do not deliver your termination message incrementally, in ‘let them down slowly’ instalments. The imperative is to be decisive, be firm.

The 12-page 2006 paper by Mullen and co-workers is excellent. The pdf is downloadable free here.

Recognizing possessiveness, hypersensitivity, dependence, jealousy, and mood swings in friends or business acquaintances can help to identify the potential for stalking and may be instrumental in your decision to terminate contact with the person, as a means of preventing stalking by someone who is known to you. According to Mullen and Pathé, ex-intimates are the stalking victims most likely to be threatened and assaulted. A history of domestic violence and/or jealousy before separation have been reported to increase the risk of violence in this group. Statistically speaking, and despite some famous examples to the contrary, stranger stalkers present the lowest risk of assaulting their victims.

Do be selective about disclosing personal details, including home address or phone numbers or email addresses. A post-office box provides security to prevent theft of confidential materials from a private letterbox at your home.

Do get an electric shredder for your home and be careful to shred all of your mail before placing it in the recycling or rubbish bins. Don’t take the same route to work or concert hall or other destinations; don’t do anything that’s readily monitored, in which your routine daily patterns can become known in a manner that may make it easier for a pursuer to harrass or attack you.

Do get a whistle. Get a small mace or pepper spray if legal in your area.

Do avail yourself of some musician-specific guidance for your use of MySpace, FaceBook, and other social networking sites, available on pages 206-208 of Frances Vincent’s book. Her blog is here.

Do consider hiring under-cover security services, such as Bo Dietl & Associates, for at least a few days or for covering your next several performances. They can discreetly monitor the performance venues and monitor your comings and goings, to ascertain whether there is or is not suspicious stalking-type activity. On a short-term or intermittent engagement basis such services are not tremendously expensive, and the reassurance that can come from their expert observations (esp. if they find no evidence of stalking) is huge. And, if in fact there is someone stalking you, they are expert in engaging law enforcement, the courts, forensic healthcare, and other appropriate authorities to deal with it in an expeditious, definitive way. With far more flexibility than the authorities can muster, an under-cover security service can devise counter-measures to stop the person, or to precipitate circumstances and evidence that will make the pursuer chargeable under the anti-stalking laws. Tremendously good value. Here are some more suggestions:

If you are arriving or departing from a performance in separate vehicles, make sure each person is accompanied/escorted between the performance venue and the transportation.
If you are not accompanied while en route, be sure and phone someone to let them know when you are departing and when you expect to arrive.
Leave your mobile phone turned on. If it has a GPS feature, leave that turned on as well.
If no one will be home when you get there, arrange to go to someone else’s house/apartment and stay with them, instead of going directly home to an empty house.
Let doctors, lawyers, hairdressers, dentists, etc., know the importance of maintaining your security. They may be able to arrange off-street parking so that you are less visible. Ask them to instruct the receptionist not to allow any information about you to be leaked out.
Check to be sure the library, gym, video shop, etc., will not give out information about you.
Sell your car and buy a different one if feasible, so that the stalker will not recognize you (for awhile).
Make sure you check the car before you get in, to make sure no one is in it.
If you are being followed drive directly to the nearest police station.
Don’t always drive the same way home. Don’t always take the same subway or bus home.
Put the car away immediately when you arrive home, out of sight if possible.
If you believe someone is stalking you, call the police.
Arrange for your mail to be redirected to a post office box. You will need to fill in a Mail Redirection form from the Post Office.
Call ‘fire’ instead of ‘rape’ or ‘help’.
Put 911 into your mobile phone directory so that it can be speed-dialed. Note that, when contacting 911 from a cellular phone, you must identify where you are (i.e., tell the dispatcher your exact address or location). From a hardwired landline phone, the address pops up on the dispatcher’s computer automatically. But with cell phones, the computer doesn’t know where the phone is. 911 calls placed from cell phones are routed to the closest 911 operations center based on cell tower site location that’s closest to where you are calling from. And although technology has made advances in getting cellular phone calls to the appropriate police/fire agency, the process is not 100-percent accurate. If you call 911 on a cell phone, it will be associated with the nearest mobile phone repeater cell antenna tower, which may be miles away from where you are. The software will not route to the correct 911 center closest to you but instead will route to the 911 center that is closest to that cell tower. Then, if you are not able to speak freely or if you hang up or an attacker damages your phone, the dispatcher will not have your address information available, and it may take many minutes to locate the approximate address where your cell phone transmissions came from to send you help. Help would be dispatched from a 911 center needlessly further away from you, possibly some miles beyond that cell tower, to a destination that is so vague as to offer minimal chance of locating and assisting you in a timely way. Uggh.
For the reasons noted in the previous point, put other emergency numbers into your mobile phone, for each of the cities where you perform.

Please be safe. Don’t ignore or discount what’s going on or pretend that it’s not happening or that it will go away. Contact one of the social services agencies in your area who have responsibility for sexual harassment prevention and management, or one of the national services whose URLs appear in the list below. Bo Dietl & Asociates provide a number of security and investigative services to performing musicians. Thank you for your CMT comments and questions!

Categorizing Stalking, Fig.1 from Mullen et al., 2006

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Bronfman and Everest: Balakirev’s and Ravel’s Virtuosic Fantasies

In the U.S. the new season of DiscoveryChannel’s documentary, ‘Everest: Beyond the Limit’, is currently being broadcast as an ongoing series of television programs. Each episode shows climbers—young and old ones, highly-skilled ones and relative novices—risking their lives trying to reach the summit of Everest. Not surprisingly, the drama revolves around the steepest, riskiest, most hostile parts of the climb. We viewers feel a [morbid?] fascination with the ever-present possibility of catastrophe—a fascination equal to the admiration we feel for the climbers’ endurance and achievements and successes. The spectacle of the natural beauty that’s connected with the pursuit captivates us, too, as does the diversity of humankind when (self-) driven to these extremes——when (self-) driven to accept such suffering and risk, in pursuit of an extreme, world-class goal.

‘Summits’ of a different kind—musical comparables to Everest—are in store when pianist Yefim Bronfman performs on Friday evening in the Kansas City Friends of Chamber Music Master Pianists Series. The program includes Balakirev’s ‘Islamey’ and Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, among other works. The program requires a capacity to play these technically demanding works—prodigious athleticism—but never decoupled from the capacity to play with interpretive skill. In other words (and to paraphrase Stephen Pettitt, music critic of The Times in London), true virtuosity requires as much poetry as athleticism—or so Bronfman implies, in devising a program like this.

A virtuoso is a musician who can play with panache a score of seemingly impossible technical difficulty... The north face of the Eiger has been conquered. The musician has, once again, triumphed over impossible adversity... A significant part of the musician’s craft has to do with the acquisition—through many hours, many years, of arduous, repetitive practice—of a very particular athleticism, one that enables the accurate playing of a large number of notes within a small amount of time while still making a pleasing sound. Virtuoso playing is a high-wire act, and the sensation it delivers to the audience similar. Surely he’s going to fall off at that speed, we think. When he gets to the other side intact we still think it a miracle. … Surely some dark magical force must be at work to enable such superhuman miracles of execution. … Indeed, is what seems like virtuoso playing necessarily that? Don’t misunderstand me. Even if its purpose is simply to thrill its audience, much as a particularly adroit footballer thrills with a piece of consummate skill, there’s nothing wrong with this showy variety of virtuosity. It’s fun to hear — and see — a violinist skate across a Paganini Caprice now and again. Yet it’s hardly a test of the most insightful musicianship. The player isn’t required to see between the notes, because between the notes there lies precisely nothing. There’s no insight into the human condition. No miracle of contrapuntal logic. Just a musician showing off his or her amazing skills. But maybe we should recognise more generously than we do the exercise of the inconspicuous brand of virtuosity... Virtuosity need not be a matter of playing lots of notes brilliantly at all. The truth is that all serious music worth the playing and singing, no matter how physically simple it might seem, requires a certain virtuosity of the mind. … Although the notes in Mozart might come relatively easily, the contextualising of them, the weighing of them, the nuancing of them, does not. Mozart demands such precision of touch, colour and phrase that an interpretation can fail on the slightest contextual faux pas. Moreover, it’s the performer who must find a personal context, since playing Mozart is no more a matter of choosing one correct way than is playing anything else. Control and freedom need to co-exist in perfect balance, so that the mysterious eloquence of the music is allowed to emerge, the player opening a window on to the soul of a miraculously gifted person. That is true virtuosity.”
— Stephen Pettitt.

In 1928, Ravel wrote, “ ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, piano pieces after Aloysius Bertrand, are three romantic poems of transcendental virtuosity.” Well, Mozart can be technically demanding, too—the two-part cadenza of the opening allegro of K 466, for example. But we usually think of the virtuosity required for Mozart as predominantly interpretive virtuosity. Similarly tough: revealing the emotion in Chopin without falling into cliché, or articulating the voices within Bach without being stilted and suppressing the emotion or creating a fugue-pastiche. Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la nuit’ imposes demands that are simultaneously interpretive and technical/athletic——hideously, dauntingly so. Aloysius Bertrand’s prose-poems, ‘Gaspard de la nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot’, were published posthumously in 1842 and re-issued in 1895, when Ravel’s friend Ricardo Viñes discovered them and introduced them to Ravel. Later Ravel returned to the poems and was captivated by their grotesque, hallucinatory imagery as an evocative subject for a piano composition.

And what about ‘Islamey’—composed in 1869 by Mily Balakirev, then 32 years old? The first theme is a folk dance from the Caucasus. The prevalent augmented seconds lend a south Asian ‘islamic’ aspect. The central section is lyrical and derives from an Armenian folk song. The slow, exotic middle section contrasts with the energetic outer parts. In the third section, Balakirev reprises the thematic material of the opening, culminating in a pyrotechnical coda. ‘Islamey’ is comprised of variations with increasingly, insanely, demonically complex elaborations. (Maybe we should note that Balakirev had a nervous breakdown in 1872, three years after composing this piece?) So our definition of ‘virtuosity’ gets worse: virtuosity is defiant and risky; it tempts fate; it scoffs at danger. It wouldn’t be virtuosic if catastrophe were impossible. You have to work without a safety net! (Balakirev punched out—became a railway clerk for awhile; worked as a school inspector until 1883; then returned to music as Director of the Imperial Chapel and conductor of the Imperial Musical Society, where he remained until retiring in 1895.)

I n music, no less than in athletics, audiences thrill at witnessing exceptional feats of physiological accomplishment, and they fête and reward those who
afford them such thrills.”
— Jane O’Dea, p. 40.

H e did not appeal to the emotions, except those of wonder—for his playing was statuesque, cold, beautiful, and so masterly that it was said of him, with reason, that he would play with the same care and finish if roused out of the deepest sleep in the middle of the night.”
— Sir Charles Halle, review of Thalberg, quoted in O’Dea, p.39.

In ‘Performance as an Extreme Occasion’, Edward Said writes that the contemporary concert is an extraordinary event, highly specialized and totally alienated from ordinary life. Before the mid-20th century performers were often also composers, and listeners were also often amateur musicians. Today the audience is marginalized. The specialized artist so ‘owns’ the work today! The recital has come to be an occasion for the display of extreme ability—on a level that’s totally alien to the listeners, most of whom are neither familiar with the scores nor play any instrument or sing. Their ‘regression of hearing’ (Adorno’s phrase) is manifested in “the listener’s poignant speechlessness as he/she faces an onslaught of such refinement, articulation and technique as almost to constitute a sado-masochistic experience.”

The audience has become more passive and concurrently we get this spectatorly cult of virtuosity. But why has social power recently captivated the imagination of popular culture—and academic anthropologists as well? Surely it’s not just a consequence of fewer practicing amateurs! Is it instead a society-wide reaction to our diminishing power as individuals? Is it a reaction to the decimation of social cohesiveness by the recent emergence of long-tailed, fragmented, web-based culture? Is it a backhanded way to oppose the ‘colonization’ of our selves—that is, an endorsement of and vicarious participation in demonstrations that individual victory over mass culture is still possible—more than gazing at an athlete/artist’s literal victory over physical difficulty?

Stanley Barrett asserts that the answer can be found in the effect of the past 100 years’ warfare throughout the world; the end of old colonialism and emergence of new forms of colonialism under the guise of multinational corporate globalization; the information and technology revolution, mass culture and cultural fragmentation. “The notion of a homogeneous, cohesive, geographically-bounded local culture consisting of people who share a putative common ancestry is obsolete,” he says. The diversity of distinctive cultures and identities “has become constricted, and ‘culture’ has become the new equivalent of ‘race’: difference-as-inferiority; new structures of exploitation and domination; new relations of power saturated with new possibility of inequality and disparities.”

I hope that hearing Bronfman perform on Friday may shed additional light on these issues. Me, I’ll be listening from a moderate elevation, at ‘Base Camp #3’!

T he question of the relationship of the individual person or subject to domination carries ‘resistance’ to the level of consciousness, subjectivity, intentionality, and identity.”
— Sherry Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject.

Everest: Cairns (memorials to those who have died on the mountain)

[Mr. Bronfman was born in Tashkent, in the Soviet Union, on April 10, 1958. Bronfman immigrated to Israel with his family in 1973, and made his international debut two years later with Zubin Mehta and the Montreal Symphony. In Israel, he studied with pianist Arie Vardi, at the Samuel Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University. In the United States he studied at Juilliard and the Curtis Institute—with Rudolf Firkusny, Leon Fleisher, and Rudolf Serkin. He made his New York Philharmonic debut in May l978 and his New York recital debut in January 1982 at the 92nd Street Y. Bronfman became a U.S. citizen in 1989. In 2006, Bronfman partnered with Emanuel Ax in Mozart's ‘Concerto for Two Pianos’ conducted by Lorin Maazel. Early in 2007 he premiered Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto, written for him and commissioned by the New York Philharmonic. In addition to solo recital appearances, he recently served as the Pianist in Residence with the Berlin Philharmonic and completed recordings of all the Beethoven piano concerti and the Triple Concerto with violinist Gil Shaham and cellist Truls Mork with the Tönhalle Orchestra Zürich under David Zinman for the Arte Nova/BMG label. Bronfman is a “Perspectives” artist at Carnegie Hall during this 2007-08 season.]