Friday Miscellanea

From the indispensable Norman Lebrecht comes these two posts on, yes, composers in cars, some of them fast:

http://slippedisc.com/2014/09/10-composers-in-fast-cars/

http://slippedisc.com/2014/09/more-composers-in-fast-cars/

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Here is a post by Alex Ross about a recent volume of the writing of Ellen Willis who had some things to say about pop music and revolution in connection with Woodstock:

What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from the commercial exploitation of blues. It is bourgeois at its core, a mass-produced commodity, dependent on advanced technology and therefore on the money controlled by those in power. Its rebelliousness does not imply specific political content; it can be — and has been — criminal, fascistic, and coolly individualistic as well as revolutionary. It can simply be a more pleasurable way of surviving within the system, which is what the pop sensibility has always been about. Certainly that was what Woodstock was about: ignore the bad, groove on the good, hang loose, and let things happen. The truth is that there can't be a revolutionary culture until there is a revolution. In the meantime, we should insist that the capitalists who produce rock concerts offer reasonable service at reasonable prices."

There are certainly grass-roots art forms, such as old-time fiddling, bluegrass and lots of different kinds of folk music. But 99% of what we hear is commercial product delivered to us through some form of mass media. The question is, can music created within a commercial context still have artistic content? That is the question that doesn't seem to be asked. The statement "bourgeois at its core" strongly implies a Marxist reading, but I rarely find those satisfactory.

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 Also found at Alex Ross' site is this clip of a piece by John Luther Adams for out-of-doors performance. I can't embed it here, so you should go there to listen. I didn't listen to all of it, but browsing through, he seems to be channeling what R. Murray Schafer was doing twenty or more years ago. And I don't mean that as a compliment. Drones, even when delivered in interesting spaces with different colors are ... boring.

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I'm of two minds about this lengthy essay by Alex in The New Yorker. It is rather too sympathetic to the thinkers in the Frankfurt school of critical theory, but it is hard to argue with this observation:

If Adorno were to look upon the cultural landscape of the twenty-first century, he might take grim satisfaction in seeing his fondest fears realized. The pop hegemony is all but complete, its superstars dominating the media and wielding the economic might of tycoons. They live full time in the unreal realm of the mega-rich, yet they hide behind a folksy façade, wolfing down pizza at the Oscars and cheering sports teams from V.I.P. boxes. Meanwhile, traditional bourgeois genres are kicked to the margins, their demographics undesirable, their life styles uncool, their formal intricacies ill suited to the transmission networks of the digital age. Opera, dance, poetry, and the literary novel are still called “élitist,” despite the fact that the world’s real power has little use for them. The old hierarchy of high and low has become a sham: pop is the ruling party.

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Time to hear some music. Here is Spacedrum by Yuki Koshimoto performed on an odd musical instrument called a "handpan":

It is a bit like a really compact gamelan, isn't it?

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In a report from the UK, it seems that 70% of musicians work without a written contract. That was certainly my experience in Canada as well where, with the exception of orchestral musicians, no-one ever had a contract. I deeply regretted this on occasion. Once an entire tour was threatened when one of the sponsors withdrew after a verbal agreement. The business side of music really does need to be treated as a business, but too much emphasis on this makes musicians uncomfortable!

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The Guardian reports on this year's classical music awards from Gramophone magazine. Among them is:

British-based harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, for his anniversary tribute to CPE Bach. His recording of JS Bach’s second son’s Württemberg Sonatas “wonderfully convey the sense of the younger Bach flexing his muscles in the new musical language that he was involved in creating,” wrote Andrew Clements.

So let's end by listening to one of those sonatas. Here is the first one, in A minor, played by Bob van Asperen: