Friday Miscellanea

Do concert programmes cheat the public? As you can tell from the spelling, this is from a British newspaper and in Europe, you typically have to pay a significant sum to get a program.

In this, the final week of the Proms, I had the pleasure of seeing the great German violin virtuoso Julia Fischer. She not only played brilliantly, but unlike some of her peers, had commanding stage presence. So, in the interval I paid my £4, and bought an official programme to find out more about her. 

It was a mine of information. Useless information. It listed all the orchestras she had performed with “in recent seasons.” There they all were, from the Cleveland Orchestra to the Leipzig Gewandhaus and many others. But wait, there’s more. The next paragraph listed the orchestras she had played with “this season.” And in case you were wondering – I wasn’t – these included the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra to name but two.

I have written about this problem before, but I can't find the post. The biographies of musicians are so hilariously bad that I wrote a parody of them. Just as David Lister says in the article, the information we really want to know, where is the artist from and where did she study and with whom, is always omitted in favour of a dreary list of competitions won and orchestras and conductors with whom she has played. We don't care!

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The Weekly Standard is an odd place to find an article on Bartók, but this one by musicologist George B. Stauffer is pretty good. One very interesting comment from my point of view is this one, describing Bartók as:

one of the world’s first systematic ethnomusicologists, collecting, transcribing, and publishing vast amounts of traditional music that was soon to be lost to the industrial and technological onslaught of the 20th century

As I am coming more and more around to describing myself as a traditionalist, someone who is always trying to reconnect with the foundations of music, this is an important clue as to the source of some of the aesthetic quality in Bartók's music: it wasn't just sterile abstraction because it drew inspiration from the foundation of traditional musics.

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Here is an interesting look into an historical moment: the rise of psychedelia:

In 1969, the story goes, the ‘alternative snake-oil salesman’ Leary telephoned Huxley’s widow to say that the Grateful Dead had arrived in Los Angeles and would she put the band up? A concert violinist, Laura Huxley had never heard of the freaky rock‘n’rollers. (‘We should be grateful to be alive, not dead,’ she told Leary.) The Dead were set to descend with their fuzzboxes and feedback, but Mrs Huxley shooed them away. Her husband would not have cared for the Dead’s weird sound, preferring instead Renaissance madrigals.

Between 1953 and his death in 1963, Huxley took acid some ten or 12 times only. The psycho-chemical expeditions were self-experiment in the name of science, yet Huxley was credited with setting in motion an international psychedelic movement causing the mental derangement of millions of people. Jim Morrison and his humourless California band the Doors named themselves after The Doors of Perception; the Beatles included Huxley’s photograph on their Sergeant Pepper album sleeve. Whether he liked it or not, Huxley was hip.

Sadly, this is true. During the 60s the dangers of psychedelic drugs were not yet evident, but their hipness was. So many people, like myself, who probably should not have experimented with them, did, and the world became a much wackier place.

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You may have noticed that I take great pleasure in poking holes in sacred cows (sorry for the mixed metaphor!). It is a particular trait of a certain kind of philosopher as we see in this delightful tribute to Frank Cioffi, professor of philosophy at the University of Essex. Apart from the kind of clarity we see in this quotation, the essay offers a brilliant elucidation of the problem of scientism and the true nature of philosophy. Be sure to read the whole thing!

I was studying English and European literature in my first year at college, but my friend Will and I were considering switching to philosophy, partly because of Frank. We went to see him in his office for advice. I don’t remember him giving any ... Some years later, I went back into his office to ask permission to switch from one course to another. “Which courses?” he said indifferently. “I’m meant to be reading Foucault, but I want to do a course on Derrida.” “Man” he replied “that’s like going from horseshit to bullshit.” In fact, as others can confirm, the latter word was his most common term of reference and it also expresses his approach to philosophy: No BS.

No BS. Let's take that as our polestar in navigating the dangerous waters of music aesthetics as well.

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This goes out to all those people who deny there are objective aesthetic standards in music. This is Miss Mississippi Hannah Roberts playing some kind of zapateado in the talent part of the Miss America competition:

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I know this is going to upset the Music Salon readers who are 2Cellos fans and/or Lang Lang fans. But this video presents such a long list of aesthetic mishaps, excesses and clichés that it really is a classic:

Let's list a few:

• excessive head-banging
• redundant arm-waving
• farcical piano-lid shutting
• shock mood changes with no musical reason
• pointless piano glissandi
• truck-driver modulation towards the end
• a panoply of arpeggiation with lots of diversity but little musical sense

Yes, some music can be performed as if it is a circus or vaudeville act, but does poor Paul McCartney deserve this?

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Here is a little tune from one of my favorite bands, Spinal Tap:

And you thought they just did satires of heavy metal!

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Unexpectedly! Sometimes we hear classical music in the oddest places as this item from Slipped Disc shows us:

This just in from Morris Robinson, principal artist at Houston Grand Opera:

Walking to the store here in Uptown NYC, I see a young brother halfway leaning out the window of his massively tinted, new model Nissan, sittin on them shiny thangs (Rims). He has on a black wife beater, tattoo’d throughout his neck, shoulders and arms … baseball cap on slightly tilted … chillin.

His radio is blasting, and I remove my ear buds because I THINK I hear something, but I’m really not sure.

Me, being the bold brother that I am, walked right up to his car door and asked, “Is that the Lacrymosa from the Mozart Requiem?” He turns down the radio, and asks “What you say?”

“Lacrymosa, Mozart Requiem?”

He says, “Oh. Yeah dawg!”

I smiled, put my ear buds back in, and walked off.

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 That gives us our envoi for today. The Lacrimosa from the Requiem of Mozart. Performed at the Lucerne Festival in 2012. Claudio Abbado, conductor, Lucerne Festival Orchestra, Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks and the Swedish Radio Choir.