Virtuosity vs "performing" virtuosity.

I recently saw a concert of cello and piano and it was a quite good and quite enjoyable concert. Apart from the Sonata for cello and piano by Debussy it lacked much musical substance, but that is par for the course these days. The ensemble was very good indeed and there was loads of musical expression. But in retrospect, there was one element perhaps worth commenting on. We are in difficult times for classical musicians where the market is limited but the number of young artists striving for recognition is all too abundant. So what do you do? Well, you become a technical master of your instrument, of course, but in addition to that you are counseled to "brand" yourself, to use commercial marketing techniques, to upgrade your stage presence--in Yuja Wang's case that may involve wearing performing costumes that are, well, risqué.

But there are other things you can do. And this is my topic for today. You need to be a virtuoso, of course, but equally importantly you need to signal to the audience that you are a virtuoso. I am reminded of the old story of Wanda Landowska, the early maestra of the harpsichord. One person who viewed her performing scores said that there were little notes here and there that said things like "look up," presumably to signal to the audience a transcendental moment. So this is certainly not new. But it has, until recently, been fairly uncommon in classical soloists. But the cellist in the concert I saw was an avid practitioner. He didn't just end a note, he "threw it away" with abandon. He "looked up" quite often to signal how moved he was by the music. Oh, and looked down and to the side as well as there were emotional highlights everywhere. We were witnesses to, not only a virtuoso performance but also the performance of virtuosity. Every gesture he made seemed to be exaggerated for emotional effect.

This is really not necessary for the virtuoso performance, but it is intended to charm the audience. As long as they think it is authentic and inadvertent. If we go back a few years and watch another cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich, playing the Shostakovich cello concerto we can watch someone playing far more difficult and profound music without any of the added spice of miming emotional expression.

The concert I saw on the weekend ended with the Sonata no. 1 for cello and piano by Felix Mendelssohn and as we were leaving the hall I'm afraid my evil twin took over and I commented to my friends: "Whenever someone feels the urge to play Mendelssohn I usually counsel them to repress that urge and play Shostakovich instead--we will all be better off."

Friday Miscellanea

Not so miscellaneous today: before going to Thanksgiving dinner yesterday with friends, I had a couple of free hours so I listened to most of the St. Matthew Passion by Bach. What an amazing work! This is the version I heard:

I grew up with the Klemperer recording, but this version is very much better. There are two small orchestras, two mixed choirs, two sets of four vocal soloists and six boy sopranos. The way Bach uses these forces is really remarkable. There are frequent montages where the choirs interject short, brisk phrases into a texture that might be one or both orchestras with obbligato solo parts, or a chorale like texture with the melody of the boy sopranos floating above, within a narrative carried by recitatives from a host of characters: Judas, Pontius Pilate, priests, bystanders and, of course, Jesus with his surrounding halo of strings. This is as close as Bach ever got to opera, but it is nothing like opera. Oddly enough, the montage sections remind me of Stravinsky's Petrouschka.

Speaking of the Netherlands Bach Society's project to record all of Bach, I have listened to many recordings so far and I have been impressed with nearly all of them. No big stars, but very accomplished and committed musicians. Listening to this it is hard to see classical music as a dying genre, no longer of any relevance as a recent series of YouTube clips would have us believe!

Here are a few recent recordings in the series:

Today's listening

One of those innumerable, terrific symphonies by Joseph Haydn:

And a photo I took yesterday. There are clusters of morning glory everywhere right now. November in Mexico.

Friday Miscellanea

Finally something interesting: two new pieces by J. S. Bach. No, not newly written of course, but newly discovered. Here is the New York Times:

In 1992 Peter Wollny, then a Harvard graduate student in musicology, was researching his dissertation at the Royal Library of Belgium when he came across two unsigned music manuscripts so strikingly original that he had copies made and set them aside. 

“This is actually how I work,” Wollny said Tuesday. “Whenever I find something that poses a scholarly problem to me, I keep it. Even if it takes three decades, I don’t put it aside.”

Wollny began to develop a hunch about who wrote these two anonymous, undated works for organ: Johann Sebastian Bach. But finding evidence required years of musical detective work, and it was not until this week, 33 years after the random discovery he made while doing research on one of Bach’s sons, that he officially announced the discovery.

And here they are:

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As is often the case, the subhead is a nice summary: Cultural products are more than ever a class of financialized assets, whose owners are even further removed from artmaking

THE HISTORY OF THE MUSIC industry is a history of conglomeration. For decades, the business has been ruled by a dwindling number of corporations, each controlling an enormous market share that grows larger with every new merger or acquisition. Today just three record companies—Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group—control more than 80 percent of all recorded music released through a recognized label. And they do so with a collective iron fist, jealously guarding access to their vast catalogs, whether through album sales, streaming platforms, radio airplay, or commercial licensing. The Big Three’s disproportionate market-making power, according to scholar and musician Aram Sinnreich, has all the trappings of an oligopolistic cartel. And in turn, streaming itself, once a domain of renegades and upstarts, has consolidated around its own Big Three: Together Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music account for 90 percent of all streaming subscriptions.

I guess my problem is that I have no interest in music as an industry--only as an artform. But this is where we are.

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The answer is "no". Granderson: AI can perform a song, but can it make art?

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Here is a particularly fine exemplar of human-created music. Jean Rondeau playing the Tombeau for M. Blancrocher from the new Louis Couperin collection:

A lovely recent performance of the Debussy Sonata for Cello and Piano:

And finally, the Piano Sonata no, 8 by Sergei Prokofiev:

Friday Miscellanea

I'm just not keeping up with The Guardian, which is why I missed this article: In an era of AI slop and mid TV, is it time for cultural snobbery to make a comeback? (hat tip to On an overgrown path).

The lowbrow dominates culture and anyone who questions the status quo is dismissed as an elitist killjoy. But with bland algorithmic content on the rise, perhaps we consumers should start taking our art a bit more seriously

That subhead neatly summarizes the argument so we can probably skip reading the article. But yes, speaking as one who never left cultural snobbery, it is always a good time to take notice of cultural things that are not actually crap. Sure, they take a bit more time. Reading Don Quixote takes more time than watching Netflix, but perhaps not if you factor in the time spent trying to find something to watch on Netflix. Thanks to On an overgrown path for the delightful use of the word "enshittified." Yes, the enshittification of culture and, well, social institutions in general, is far advanced.

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 Alex Ross posts a tribute to substack:

Of late, an increasing number of voices, some new and some thoroughly familiar, have converged on Substack. Such erstwhile blogging heavyweights as Steve Smith, Tim Rutherford-Johnson, and Joshua Kosman are in residence. The great Paul Griffiths, who has been observing new music longer than most of us have been alive, has launched what music!

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The Atlantic avers: How to Make Music Popular Again. And follows that clanger with an even more mistaken subhead:

The rise of headphone listening has changed us profoundly—and maybe not for the better.

No, no, no, they have it all wrong. If anything, music is too popular, or, more accurately, there is too much popular music. About the only ray of sunshine is the widespread use of headphones which has saved so many of us the torture of listening to other people's music. If only we could make the use of headphones mandatory in all public spaces.

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YouTube paid out $8B to the music industry in 12 months. I guess that's good news. Mind you, I would love to see a breakdown of who got what. If Taylor Swift got seven of the eight billion, well...

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Now for some listening. One cannot be too familiar with the symphonies of the always inventive Joseph Haydn. Here is his Symphony No. 31, nicknamed "Hornsignal" and yes, there are lots of horns.

You also cannot be too familiar with the symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich. Here is the 8th with Alain Altinoglu conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. This clip just appeared on YouTube six days ago.

For our last envoi, not a symphony but a serenade by Mozart. Even when writing music for diversion or background to a banquet, Mozart was simply incapable of writing anything less than superbly beautiful.

Rick Beato on Sleep Token

I said in my Friday Miscellanea post that I didn't see much worth commenting on. But just now, I did. More and more I find Rick Beato to be worth following because he often surprises. When it comes to popular music I'm usually a curmudgeon because the mass-produced industrial music we hear in just about every public space drives me right up the wall. But of course, there is a lot, well, some, really good "popular" music being created. Probably not really popular, but really interesting. And Rick Beato has just found some for us:

Yep, everything he says there is true. This really doesn't sound like anything you have heard before and yes, it really is beautiful. But deep in the harmonic structure, it reminds me very much of Debussy if he were alive today, living in London and working with a drummer named "II".

Friday Miscellanea

 A very good article on Luciano Berlo's Sinfonia this week in the New York Times: His Music Saw Our Age of Information Overload Coming

“Sinfonia” remains one of Berio’s most popular and indelible pieces. It appeals to lay listeners yet continues to fascinate experts. Throughout its five movements, the piece shows an inventive, clearly audible approach to form, an unsentimental melodiousness and extraordinarily skill in orchestration. Its most radical section is the third movement, which feels presciently overstimulating.

The piece “reflects a world marked by crises and conflicts — themes that remain profoundly relevant today,” De Benedictis said. “Wars, the destructive effects of capitalism (even more evident now than in 1968), the disintegration of the fundamental principles of coexistence, the frenzy of a fragmented and disjointed existence.”

At the opening of the third movement, a loud chord is followed by at least three distinct musical quotations in the space of seven measures: a climbing brass motive from the fourth movement of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra; the coldly biting flutes, sleigh bells and inviting violin phrase from the opening of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony; and cresting music from the second movement of Debussy’s “La Mer.”

What makes the article particularly useful is that it offers a host of music clips as examples.

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This kind of reminds me of the Hofstadter book of years ago Gödel, Escher, Bach: Bach is a Strange Loop

Prelude

Every night, ten-year-old J.S. Bach reached his little fingers through a locked bookshelf with a latticed front, rolled up a book of sheet music inside, drew it out, and copied it by moonlight, for he was not allowed a candle. It took six months for him to finish this difficult endeavor, only for the copied manuscript to be found by his older brother and taken away.

This was a child who had music pouring into and out of his ears since before he could talk. As little as we know about his life story, this fact is undeniable. Something was going on inside his head, strongly, forever. So does it make sense to look at his life in terms of events, or something more, something equally internal?

Allemande

Even if you hate classical music, you’ve heard Bach’s six cello suites. At least, the prelude of the first suite, in movies and on television. Like in Master and Commander and Family Guy and The Hangover Part II. And in this American Express commercial showcasing household objects making frowny faces and smiley faces. In fact, it’s often heard in commercials advertising financial services. “In the case of recent television commercials, Bach has more or less taken on a single function: reassurance,” said musicologist Peter Kupfer. “It is no coincidence that most companies that use Bach in their commercials offer financial or insurance services (including American Express, MetLife, and Allstate), thus requiring a message of trust.”

There is a paragraph or two for each of the six movements of the Cello Suite No. 1, so you should read the whole thing.

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Frankly, looking in the usual places, I don't see anything else over the last week worth comment. Your mileage may vary, of course. But let's just move on to the envois. First up, of course, the Berio Sinfonia:

And the Bach Cello Suite No. 1:

Here is the Charpentier Te Deum, the drum-friendly interpretation:

And finally, in my travels in Oaxaca the last couple of weeks I stumbled across the 1969 film of The Battle of Britain. An all-star cast for a film that I have never known before. The main casting problem was that the average age of the pilots that flew in the Royal Air Force in 1940 was twenty! They simply couldn't find many actors that young. The best lines were from Laurence Olivier as Air Chief Marshal. When they finally turned the tide and were shooting down a lot more German planes than the Germans were shooting down British planes, he was asked to comment on a statement from the German ambassador in a press conference that the British numbers were simply wrong. Olivier said "I have no interest in propaganda. If we are right, they will give up. If they are right, they will be here in a week."