Friday Miscellanea

In this piece on David Hockney I ran across this interesting passage:

‘Nobody’s taking any notice of the avant-garde any more,’ Hockney notes. ‘They’re finding they’ve lost their authority.’

He’s probably correct about that. For the past decade or two, it has been hard to say what the cutting edge might be. In a world without rules it is impossible for anyone to break any. ‘They thought they would get authority by damaging the other, earlier establishment,’ Hockney suggests. ‘But by doing that you damage all authority.’

Hockney himself has never been a member of the avant-garde, or any other team; more an expeditionary force of one, determinedly pursuing his own explorations. The centre of his interest has always been what he calls ‘the depiction of the visible world’. And his crucial skill has been drawing, which he was thoroughly taught at Bradford and practised late into every evening, thus developing an extraordinary virtuosity.

He laments the neglect of drawing in recent art education. ‘People had been drawing for 40,000 years, and they gave it up in 1975. It’s almost funny. But they couldn’t give it up really. You can’t: it’s always back to the drawing board!’ By that, he means that any new way of seeing the world will have to be produced by the human eye, heart and hand, working together.

 One wonders about the situation in music.

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A soupçon of philosophy? Reading about the revival of interest in the music theories of Hugo Riemann, I ran across this:

a "tonal idea," as Riemann seems to be conceiving it, is an amalgam of a Fregian "thought" and an "idea". It is both objective and subjective at the same time: objective in that another person can hear and grasp it, but subjective in that it is nevertheless a mental occurrence, an object in consciousness. ["What Is a Function?" by Brian Hyer, in The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Riemannian Music Theories, p. 129]

What Riemann is referring to by a "tonal idea" are the harmonic functions subdominant, dominant and tonic. Yes, they are heard objectively, but they are still ideas, not simple objects in the world. As soon as you start really asking yourself what is meant by the idea of harmonic function, you can get very perplexed (a typically philosophical reaction). The Frege mentioned is Gottlob Frege (1848 - 1925) a very important philosopher of language and logic.

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Here is something kind of interesting: the Wall Street Journal has an article about a Boston start-up that, basically, organizes house concerts for starving music students. Wait, is that right? Yeah, pretty much:

Users sign up to attend free events on Groupmuse’s website, which provides information such as the age range of attendees and whether the event is BYOB. The events are free, although organizers request donations for the musicians.

Groupmuse began in Boston, where it has hosted over 275 events, but it is now aggressively expanding into New York City. Last week, there were four Groupmuses in New York and 18 world-wide, including in Canada and South Korea.

The WSJ presents it as being about "Chamber Music for the Millennial Generation" but it really sounds like another way of exploiting classical musicians early on in their careers when they can be convinced to play for the "exposure". To which I always want to say, don't Jerry McGuire me, "show me the money!" It is a pretty interesting article, though, for two things in particular. One is that the piece played in the particular evening reported on was the String Quartet No. 8 by Shostakovich. Another is that the piece that turned on the founder of Groupmuse to classical music was the Grosse Fuge by Beethoven, played in another home setting. Now there's a couple of pieces that leave a mark on the soul!

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A few days ago I posted that I was upgrading my sound system to a Harmon/Kardon integrated unit. The system arrived yesterday--pretty good as I only ordered it last Saturday--so I can report on the sound. I spent about five hours listening to a variety of music from solo piano to full orchestra. The system looks a bit like an undiscovered Cylon model, especially with the string of blue indicator lights on the right side and the featureless black front. Or maybe a big, big brother to a black Bose system. The readout screen, which is on the angled top, is impossible to see if you are sitting down a few feet away. You can only read the track and timing if you are actually standing in front of the unit, looking down. Too bad, because sometimes I just browse through a CD and I like to know which track I am at. Also, with long pieces, I like to check the timing as it can be a clue to the form. The system is a high-quality, no-frills setup, something Harmon/Kardon is known for. Mind you, in a concession to the 21st century, they have an add-on dock that plugs in for your iPhone or iPod. Not compatible with iPhone 5, by the way, but with just about everything else. If you leave that off, then the system is a perfect design: pretty much a featureless black oval with some lights on the right and an angled plane on top with the readout. In the bottom middle is the CD slot. The machine smoothly sucks in the disc and, when it is ejected, holds it firmly until you remove it so it won't fall on the floor. What I am saying, is, the dock and readout aside, this is a beautiful, well-designed system.

The sound is excellent. I'm not an audiophile exactly, but it is great to listen to. Everything is very clear and spacious, great top end and low bass, really good definition and presence. Just a lovely system. Seems very worth the reasonable price tag.

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Tom Service at the Guardian has an article up about conductor Herbert von Karajan that might be worth reading. It contains a number of clips of him rehearsing and conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. The Guardian has completely revamped their classical music site and you can find Tom's symphonic and contemporary surveys at the bottom of the page.

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Courtesy of Norman Lebrecht we have this rather odd, but fascinating, rendition of the Rite of Spring (the first few minutes, at least) on Caribbean steel drum orchestra. Yes, that's right. Go have a listen! What is really scary is that the musicians seem to be playing the whole thing from memory! Is that because they don't actually read music?

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Violinist Kyung-Wha Chung's return to the concert stage in London after more than a decade due to an injury was not entirely without incident. She got a two-star review in the Telegraph and made the news because of her berating a child and her parents due to coughing during the performance. I think that while it is proper for the performer to take notice of excessive noise from the audience, it must be done with grace, not venom. Segovia, confronted with paroxysms of coughing during a concert, would, between pieces, take out a handkerchief from his pocket and cough discretely into it as a model for the audience. Narciso Yepes, trying to deal with a crying baby in the back row, took a very leisurely few minutes to tune between pieces during which he tracked down the offender and glared at her until she took her child out. I'm sure there are lots of other methods.

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That's it for this weeks Friday Miscellanea and I want to end with one of the pieces I listened to last night on my new sound system: