Friday Miscellanea

MEA CULPA! I FORGOT TO POST THIS THIS MORNING! 

The artist can mislead the public more easily than can a man of any other profession, for setting aside the affinity of the herd for all that is superficial, a sort of halo surrounds the painter; he profits by a number of institutions very favourable to mediocrity, which give a certain importance to the métier as such, and are readily turned to account by the adroit

--Julius Meier-Graefe (1867 - 1935) This quote is from 1904.

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I've always been fascinated with Leonard Cohen, and not just because he was a fellow Montrealer: Leonard Cohen: Hippie Troubadour and Forgotten Reactionary

IN THE EARLY ’70s, Leonard Cohen was in crisis. His life felt meaningless, although, in theory, it shouldn’t have. He’d spent the past decade doing all the things people were supposed to do in the ’60s. He’d joined shadowy religious orders and dabbled in Eastern mysticism. He’d written a sexy experimental novel that thrilled the young and enraged the establishment. He’d reinvented himself as a singer-songwriter and played to crowds of ecstatic flower children. He’d taken all the drugs, smoked all the cigarettes, slept in all the iconic hotels—the King Edward, the Chelsea, the Chateau Marmont. If the ’60s counterculture were a mountain, he was the rare mountaineer who’d made it to the summit.

Read the whole thing for a thoughtful look at an artist that has a lot of relevance for us today.

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A problem that refuses to go away: TENOR STOPS MID-CONCERT IN BIRMINGHAM TO STOP PHONE SNAPPERS

The tenor Ian Bostridge shocked Symphony Hall Birmingham last night by stopping after the third song in Britten’s Les Illuminations to denounce the CBSO’s new audience rules, which read:

“We are very happy for you to take photographs and short video clips at our concerts, but please refrain from recording the whole performance.”

Bostridge, a thoughtful, courteous man, stepped forward and – clearly fuming – requested that audience members turn off their phone cameras. He said taking photographs was ‘extremely distracting’ for a performer.

For the love of all that's holy...

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This could well be true: An education in music makes you a better employee. Are recruiters in tune?

One of the most powerful traits instilled by a music education is a deep sense of professionalism. 85% of survey participants identified the trait as the skill that most influenced expectations of themselves and others, and the quality of their work. 

A common industry saying about rehearsal reflects this attitude of consistency and punctuality – “early is on time, on time is late, and late is left behind.”

Other notable skills included autonomy and self-direction, resilience and perseverance, and creativity.

Learning an instrument fosters disciplined, focused attention, a highly valuable skill in other contexts. ArtBitz/Shutterstock

Participants attributed the development of these strengths to the disciplined and focused attention required to learn music, and the intrinsic motivation needed to practise and perfect an instrument over a long period of time.

You are not likely to learn these sorts of skills in too many other places.

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You get industrialized mass production: What Happens to Songwriters When AI Can Generate Music?

If you think 100,000 songs a day going into the market is a big number, “you have no idea what’s coming next,” says Alex Mitchell, founder/CEO of Boomy, a music creation platform that can compose an instrumental at the click of an icon.

Boomy is one of many so-called “generative artificial intelligence” music companies — others include Soundful, BandLab’s SongStarter and Authentic Artists — founded to democratize songwriting and production even more than the synthesizer did in the 1970s, the drum machine in the ’80s and ’90s, digital audio workstations in the 2000s and sample and beat libraries in the 2010s.

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Our first envoi really has to be Leonard Cohen:

 

Here is Ian Bostridge with Britten's Les Illuminations, op. 18

Here is a piece you rarely hear, the Septet in E flat major by Beethoven:

And now, if you will excuse me I have to go decolonize my bookshelf.

Today's Listening: Bruckner, Symphony No. 8

I've been listening to the Symphony No. 8 of Bruckner quite a few times lately. The main reason is that a performance of the piece by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Riccardo Muti on August 15 is the finale of my visit to Salzburg this summer and I want to become really familiar with the work. And, if you are wondering, nope, no tickets are available, it is sold out. Yes, already. So don't tell me that classical music is dying--only in some places. I have always rather liked Bruckner ever since singing in the university choir in a performance of his Te Deum. Sure, I fell under the spell of Mahler for a while--didn't we all--but I did come to my senses. Bruckner comes at the apotheosis of Western Civilization when it was frankly luxuriating it its accomplishments. With Mahler we are starting to feel the loss of confidence and premonition of the cataclysm that is soon to come.

Here is Günter Wand and the NDR Elbphilharmonie in a performance from 1987 in the Lübeck Cathedral.

Perfection Achieved

I taught myself how to write by writing letters to the editor of the Globe and Mail in Toronto. You had to address an issue of the day in pithy and original prose and not exceed 800 words. I got so that I could get quite a few letters published. And now, in the limited world of musical discussion on the Internet, I think I have achieved beatitude. Yesterday Rick Beato put up a particularly wacky video titled "What Is Wrong With Everyone?" Here it is:

Assuming that the comments are sorted according to Top Comments the first comment you will see is this one, attributed to Speusippus:

I was quantized once, but I got over it. Then I went all Pythagorean...

For some obscure reason way back in the early days I chose the nom de plume of Speusippus, the nephew of Plato, as my YouTube identity. You can tell it is me from the photo, the same one I use here. So that is my comment. Now here is the beatitude, it is the first ranked of 11,461 comments!! So that was a very cool comment but I bemoan how huge Rick Beato's appeal is compared to mine. Maybe I should be more wacky and hysterical?

Is AI Knowledge?

I'm reading Edmund Husserl's book The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness right now and he is a turgid writer--one suspects that all phenomenologists have to attend a special class in inspissated prose. In any case, noticing that the Brave browser now has an AI component I decided to put it to the test so I asked:

Summarize Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of time

The reply:

Edmund Husserl, a prominent philosopher, described phenomenology of time as a study of the structures of experience and consciousness. He believed that time is experienced as a continuous flow, which he called "internal time-consciousness." It consists of three aspects: retention (past), impression (present), and protection (future). This model emphasizes the subjective, lived experience of time, rather than objective, physical time.

Which I was initially very impressed by. But then I noticed:

Actually, isn't anticipation of future events called "protention"?

It answered:

Yes, you are correct. I apologize for the mistake. The term "protection" in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of time refers to the anticipation or pre-awareness of future events. It's a form of intentionality that prepares us for what is about to happen. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

So I said:

But you said "protection" again?

The reply:

 I apologize for the oversight. Yes, I mistakenly used the term "protection" again. The correct term is indeed "protention," which refers to the anticipation or pre-awareness of future events in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of time. Thank you for your patience and for helping me improve my response.

So here is what I think: AI seems to temptingly facilitate the task of summarizing the thoughts of an obscure philosopher, but it is not actual knowledge because the fact that it is a mechanical sifting of acres of prose floating around on the internet means that both the source of the information and the methodology of how it is collected are unknown or at least obscure. So it isn't genuine knowledge because it is both unreliable and possibly unjustified.

I'm going to put up my review of the Husserl book alongside a fascinating new book on the rap producer J Dilla titled Dilla Time because, oddly, they often are talking about the same thing: how we perceive time.

 

 

 

Friday Miscellanea

This seems like a good thing: Brooklyn Museum Names Cellist Niles Luther First Composer In Residence

Luther is kicking off his residency by composing three musical arrangements to accompany the exhibition Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo (feat. Takashi Murakami), which opened today.

The museum said, “While not aiming to precisely replicate sounds of 19th-century Tokyo (then Edo), Luther’s compositions deftly incorporate traditional Japanese scales, modes and techniques to evoke the era’s ambiance as reflected in Utagawa Hiroshige’s prints. Drawing on his own experiences in Tokyo and collaborations with Japanese instrumentalists, Luther blends Eastern and Western musical elements to capture the essence of Hiroshige’s work, underscoring its lasting relevance. In this way, Luther’s music serves as a link between eras.”

I took a similar approach in setting the poems in my collection Songs of the Poets. The texts were drawn from a wide variety of poets and I tried to find a suitable musical style as an analogue to the poem. Mind you, in the case of a translation from an Aristophanes comedy, that meant using stylistic ideas from a Rossini opera buffa! 

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Finally: In praise of the viola.

What’s special about this release is the eclectic menu assembled by a young Jamaican-American, Jordan Bak, who is clearly going places. Bak opens with a three-minute Chant by Jonathan Harvey, dinking back and forth between tonal and post-tonal contemplation. A Romance by Ralph Vaughan Williams, discovered among posthumous papers, is just what I need in these stressed-out times. 

Bright Sheng reimagines a South China folksong about a woman missing her lover in moonlight. It’s called The Stream Flows and it has vivid imagery. Augusta Read Thomas has made several alternate versions of her successful 2018 Song Without Words. The viola original still works best.

The album’s two most substantive, and sumptuous, pieces are by British composers. Arnold Bax’s viola sonata of 1922 is massively mellifluous, rippling with tunes that sound half-remembered and might even be original. Imagine Copland and Holst taking a country walk. The finale is so satisfying.

Gosh, I wish I could write something "massively mellifluous"!

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I think they should have named it "Odio" instead: Udio. But here is the problem: for me, music is an intrinsic good, something that is good in itself. For most people, I guess, music is an instrumental good, something that adds a bit of flavour to life, puts a nice soundtrack in the background. Not for me. But this gives me problems that perhaps others don't have. For example, I tried to watch The Two Towers movie the other day but I turned it off after a few minutes, largely because of the music. I can't watch a Tolkien story with Wagnerian style music. But, on reflection, I realize that this is just an indicator of how the film itself, especially in the characterizations, is also shifted far away from the books. So I can't watch it for that reason as well. In that way, the music is a valuable warning sign. Your milage may vary.

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A Secret Code May Have Been Hiding in Classical Music for 200 Years

But even discounting those final revisions, the Opus 132 that the world came to know was not exactly the Opus 132 that Beethoven handed to his copyist. The composer littered his original score with unusual markings that the copyist simply ignored. Below one staff, for example, Beethoven jotted “ffmo”—a tag that wasn’t a standard part of musical notation, and wasn't used by any other major composer. In another place, he drew an odd shape like an elongated diamond, also a nonstandard notation. None of these marks made it into even the first clean copy, let alone the published version. Almost no one would see those marks in the roughly 200 years after Beethoven first scribbled them down.

Then, one evening in 2013, the violinist Nicholas Kitchen was in New Mexico coaching a quartet through Opus 132. Kitchen is a man of obsessions; one of them is playing from a composer’s original handwritten manuscripts, rather than printed music, so he had a facsimile edition on hand. The errant “ffmo” caught the eye of the quartet’s cellist. “What’s this?” he asked.

As soon as Kitchen saw Beethoven’s mark, something in his brain shifted; later, he would tell people that it was as if someone had turned over a deck of cards to reveal the hidden faces behind the plain backs. Suddenly, he had a new obsession. Over the next several years, he would come to believe he had discovered Beethoven’s secret code.

As a performer I have always been fascinated by the idea that there are special hints and instructions from the composer that somehow fell through the cracks.

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Here, thanks to a commentator, is the nightmare of Spotify:

Questions have arisen about Spotify’s possible inclusion of AI-generated music in its artist radio playlists. This comes after Adam Faze, studio chief of FazeWorld, on Twitter shared a playlist of 49 songs that appeared to be the same track, but with different artist names, song titles, and album artwork.

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Over at The New Yorker, Alex Ross asks What Is Noise? and in the process reveals quite a lot about himself:

With a universal definition hovering out of reach, the discourse concerning noise often starts with the personal. My history with the thing is fraught: I hate it and I love it. As a child, I was extraordinarily sensitive to loud sounds. Family expeditions to Fourth of July fireworks displays or steam-railway museums routinely ended with me running in tears to the safety of the car. When, in early adulthood, I moved into the noise cauldron of New York City, I was tormented by neighbors’ stereos and by the rumble of the street. I stuffed windows with pillows and insulation; I invested in industrial-strength earplugs; I positioned an oversized window fan next to my bed. This neurosis has subsided, but I remain that maddening hotel guest who switches rooms until he finds one that overlooks an airshaft or an empty lot.

All the while, I was drawn to music that others would pay money to avoid. Having grown up with classical music, I found my way to the refined bedlam of the twentieth-century avant-garde: Edgard Varèse, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti. In college, I hosted a widely unheard radio show on which I broadcast things like Ligeti’s “Poème Symphonique”—a piece for a hundred metronomes. When someone called in to report that the station’s signal had gone down, I protested that we were, in fact, listening to music. Similar misunderstandings arose when I aired Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape No. 4,” for twelve radios. When I moved on to so-called popular music, I had ears only for the churning dissonances of Cecil Taylor, AMM, and Sonic Youth. I became the keyboardist in a noise band, which made one proudly chaotic public appearance, in 1991. At one point, my bandmates and I improvised over a tape loop of the minatory opening chords of Richard Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten.”

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‘Misguided wokeism’ puts people off opera, says top London conductor. I think we were just talking about this.

“I think opera in many quarters is seen as something elitist,” Pappano told BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life. “The [British] politicians, for instance, don’t come to the opera house, they used to, whereas in Italy, the president of the republic would come and there’d be big applause, it would be celebrated by the audience ... in Germany too.

“Here it’s looked on with great suspicion. That drives me nuts, I have to tell you. England is a haven for culture whether it is pop culture or classical culture, literary culture, theatrical culture, this is one of the great addresses and yet we’re embarrassed by it.”

Pappano said the opera industry had had a “rough time because the money becomes less and less every year”.

“Why be embarrassed about something that is a treasure?” he said. “The Royal Opera House, the English National Opera, the Welsh National Opera are beacons, they’re internationally recognised and centres of excellence, you know, honing talent.”

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We have a couple of obvious choices for envois today. First up Jordan Bak, viola, with through the filtering dawn of spreading daybright by Jeffrey Mumford. There wasn't anything on YouTube from his new album and the title of this piece almost sounds like one I might have chosen!

Next, Nicholas Kitchen and the Borromeo Quartet with the third movement from the String Quartet 132 by Beethoven:

Lastly the Lachrimae Pavan by John Dowland played by Elizabeth Pallett:

Going Down with the Ship?

There is a kind of drumbeat of despair that accompanies the discussion of classical music in the public fora--at least in North America. There are so many voices: Ted Gioia, Greg Sandow, me in posts like this Classical Music's "Business Model" and a host of others. Let me offer some thought-provoking propositions:

• A certain model of society, in the US often called the "blue model" seems to be undergoing a severe disruption witnessed by people simply leaving: Chicago, New York, California.
• Unfortunately for classical music, these are also main cultural centers for classical music, but they are less and less able to fund the costs, never mind the reasons why
• Classical music is often described as the music of white elite taste
• So the question is, does classical music and high art generally have to go down with the ship of progressive ideals?
• Doesn't it make sense to perhaps separate the fine arts from the DEI model? They are strange bedfellows at best
• I am making a number of assumptions here: that classical music is basically music of long-standing value that doesn't need to be and in fact should not be fused with the progressive project to transform society.
• That classical music has over long stretches of time thrived in socially conservative environments and could do so again.
• That the association of classical music and the fine arts in general with the progressive project is actually of fairly recent vintage, dating from between the world wars.

So, I had this passing thought and I'm just throwing it out there so you can kick it around. Here is some suitable listening music. Stravinsky, Symphony in C, Leonard Bernstein conducting the Israel Philharmonic.

Reviewing YouTube

The other day I recommended three philosophy channels on YouTube and I want to start this post by re-recommending one of them. I just started watching Prof. Victor Gijsbers series of videos on epistemology and they are really great. Here is the third one:

 You should get a couple of things from this clear, balanced and well-argued clip: epistemology, along with logic and ethics (and probably aesthetics as well) is a normative discipline, i.e. it is not about digging up knowledge so much as it is about discovering why you should be seeking knowledge. The other main point is that the search for knowledge is an intrinsic good, not an instrumental good (of course it could be both). Like friendship and love and kindness and things like that, the search for knowledge, not the simple possession of it, is intrinsically good.

So, let's do some searching for aesthetic knowledge cleverly disguised as a review of some classical guitar videos. I used to do what I called micro-reviews of music videos, almost exclusively of pop music, but it got tiresome and I had the feeling that it was a bit, well, cruel. This is what often restrains criticism: some poor musician is striving to deliver a fine performance and some nasty ankle-biter (avoiding the use of the obvious term) has the nerve to criticize their sincere efforts, even if obviously flawed. But, assuming the logic of the bell curve, most performances will be mediocre, a few will be excellent and a few will be horrifically bad. This is true despite the best efforts of all the marketing and promotional people.

I have the most appropriate expertise to review classical guitar recordings rather than pop music or orchestras or pianists or violinists, but there is a caveat. A producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that I had done a lot of work with called me up one day to ask my opinion of some pianists. I asked him why me, I'm a guitarist? His answer was that he certainly would not ask me my opinion about guitarists even though that is my instrument. The reasons for that are well-founded. The music world is very competitive and one's view of rivals is distorted by this. One does not ask one soprano their opinion of another soprano! The other main reason is that well-established performers have arrived at certain decisions regarding style and interpretation and therefore they have little interest in how other artists work nor do they have much empathy for differing approaches.

But these issues aside, I think I might have some useful views on classical guitar performers these days as I retired as a performer a long time ago so I don't see anyone as a 'rival' any more and second, I take a more objective interest in performance and interpretation as I am no longer giving performances. So, let's have a look at some classical guitar clips on YouTube. I will try to focus on recent ones, but an older one might creep in.

David Russell has recently done music videos of all the Bach lute suites on location in some beautiful places in Spain and Portugal (he has lived in Spain for many years). He is the most well-known member of the second generation of British guitarists the first of which consisted of Julian Bream and John Williams. Bream has passed away and Williams has retired so Russell is really the most prominent British guitarist of his generation even though he has lived most of his life in Spain. He attended the Royal Academy and won the Julian Bream prize twice. He has had a very successful career and performs at guitar festivals all over the world. Here is his performance of the Lute Suite no. 3 (which you will have to click over to YouTube to view):

Nothing wrong with that, right? Technically perfect, musically assured, all together a fine performance. Now go back and just listen to the gavottes, starting at the 18:16 mark. I want to focus on those because I learned and performed them a year and half ago so they are fresh in my mind. Ok, so what do you think? First of all, to my ear, they are just a bit too quick. This is a frequent problem with performances of Bach. His music is often technically difficult so performers sometimes mistake this for being music that calls for a virtuoso approach. This is a misunderstanding, of course. Bach's music is not difficult because he intended a virtuoso display, unlike a lot of Vivaldi or Paganini. No, it is difficult because the musical ideas are original and texturally complex. So, this brisk tempo rather misses aspects of the music. Sometimes I think of it as like being frog-marched through the piece in handcuffs! As we reach the end of the first section we find another problem: there is absolutely no acknowledgement that we have come to the end of a section with a cadence and a repeat from the beginning. I'm sure David is aware of the structure, but he just does not let that cause any deviation in his rigid tempo. These observations apply to the whole performance. The main aesthetic ideal here seems to be perfectly clean technical perfection at the expense of musical expression. You might speculate as to the psychological reasons for this, but I won't. So while we can certainly admire the result of many years of disciplined practice, I find it very hard to listen to Bach played as if musical expression were of no importance.

Here is really recent video, just posted a couple of weeks ago. Jan Depreter at the Antwerp Guitar Festival. Again, I want to focus on just part of the performance so I can make detailed observations instead of vague generalizations. Let's listen to the Weiss Passacaglia and the first part of the Bach Chaconne.

We cannot accuse Jan Depreter of a rigid performance. There is lots of expression in the dynamics, the articulation, the tone-color and in the tempo. However, we might consider if all this is appropriate? Quite a lot of it, yes. Performances of Baroque music certainly do not need to avoid expression! However, the kind of ubiquitous vibrato we hear in this performance does not strike me as a very Baroque type of expression. There were also some missed opportunities to shape rhythms and phrases in ways reflecting what little we know about performance practice. For example, a piece like this with its obvious French antecedents could well benefit from some inégale. Now let's have a listen to the Chaconne, which begins at the 4:31 mark. In the first minute I notice six places where he failed to insert a very obvious ornament such as filling in a third, a couple of trills, a couple of mordents, and so on. Instead, we had the ubiquitous vibrato and chords rolled in a romantically guitaristic manner. Again, ok, but not terribly Baroque and frankly, after a while, tiresome.

Another new clip: this was posted just eight days ago. This is Cristina Galietto playing the Romanza by Paganini.

Here we have a performance entirely appropriate to the music--honestly how could a guitarist from Napoli get it wrong? Her tone is warm and her dynamics are finely shaded. She thoroughly understands the music and is delicate when needed and aggressive when needed. It is a treat to hear a performance so expressive of the musical content, not feeling as if it is applied a posteriori with a butter knife.

Let's hear Scott Tennant play the Sonata K. 322 by Domenico Scarlatti.

I met Scott at one of the Toronto guitar festivals. He is a superb guitarist and placed very well in the competition. This is an excellent performance with loads of clarity, but also the right observation of musical expression. Absolutely nothing wrong with it. But just for fun, let's compare this to an older recording of Scarlatti by an absolute genius. Less precise, but wow. This is Leo Brouwer with K. 544.

I didn't review any of the vast mass of mediocre performances and didn't happen to stumble across any of the really awful ones--if I had, that would have felt cruel!

Any thoughts from my commentators?

UPDATE: I just ran across this clip from a few years ago by Xuefei Yang playing some music from Latin America. Just to show that you don't have to be from Napoli to play Paganini or 18th century Leipzig to play Bach--you can be Chinese and be a master of Latin American style. This is really excellent: