Friday Miscellanea

Poor John Williams, renowned film composer, sitting at home one day, working on his next film score and what does he hear but two brass players outside playing his Star Wars theme. Bowing to the inevitable, he goes out and says hi. Frankly, we could use some innocent fun this week:

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This is a very troubling story: Man Loses 14 Years of Work When Google Deletes His Blog

Artist Dennis Cooper made a horrifying discovery June 27: His 14-year-old blog—the sole home of his experimental writing, research, photographs, and more—was gone, Art Forum reports. According to Fusion, Cooper's blog was hosted by Google-owned Blogger, and those headed to denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com are greeted with the message, "Sorry, the blog at denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs." It's not all he lost: Google also deactivated his Gmail account, which held his contacts and gig offers, the Guardian reports. The only explanation Google gave Cooper, who considers his blog a "serious work of mine," was a stock message that he was in "violation of the terms of service agreement."

Seems like there needs to be an ombudsman or some other way of adjudicating this kind of thing so they can't just throw something down the memory hole willy-nilly.

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I sometimes wonder if people ever go back and read what they have written. Case in point, this book, originally published in 2001, titled: The Essential Canon of Classical Music. This is an obvious takeoff on Harold Bloom's book The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. As a matter of fact, the idea of the "canon", which Bloom defends, is a controversial one. I have questioned its application to music myself in this post. Whoever wrote the blurb for the music canon book has a vague idea that there is some controversy, so tries to cover all the bases with this:

In The Essential Canon of Classical Music, David Dubal comes to the aid of the struggling listener and provides a cultural-literacy handbook for classical music. Dubal identifies the 240 composers whose works are most important to an understanding of classical music and offers a comprehensive, chronological guide to their lives and works. He has searched beyond the traditional canon to introduce readers to little-known works by some of the most revered names in classical music-Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert-as well as to the major works of lesser-known composers. In a spirited and opinionated voice, Dubal seeks to rid us of the notion of "masterpieces" and instead to foster a new generation of master listeners. The result is an uncommon collection of the wonders classical music has to offer.

What's the problem? Well, the whole notion of a "canon", whether in literature or in music, is entirely based on the idea that there are "masterpieces". That's what a "canon" is, basically, a list of masterpieces. So if Mr. Dubal is seeking to rid us of the notion of "masterpieces" then he is attacking the idea of a canon. Slight logical problem there! This captures rather well the intense dilemma that faces people teaching in the humanities. Cultural theory, ultimately derived from Marxism, demands that objective notions of truth and good and bad and aesthetic quality must all be dethroned. Everything reduces to power and oppression.

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The Guardian reviews a new recording of early works by Philip Glass. I actually had an LP of these pieces that I bought sometime in the 70s--long since lost, of course.

It was Music in 12 Parts, composed between 1971 and 1974, that really put Philip Glass on the map. That huge, four-hour score is now recognised as one of the landmarks in the history of minimalism, alongside such scores as Terry Riley’s In C and Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. But Music in 12 Parts didn’t come out of the blue, and this collection of five early pieces by Glass, composed between 1968 and 1970, presents some of the creative background and the precursors of that defining work.

There is a funny story about Music in 12 Parts in Philip Glass' memoir. He recounts that he had composed a piece, perhaps 20 minutes long, that he called Music in 12 Parts because that was how it was constructed. He played it for a friend and at the end she asked, "where are the other eleven parts?"

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Slipped Disc has a piece on a recent example of bad behaviour in a concert:

A family of four (parents and two children) were so noisy during both the Philharmonic Concerto which opened the concert and the Fantasy on a Theme of John Field (for piano and orchestra) that I insisted on a complete repeat of the performance of the latter after the concert had finished – for which a very large percentage of the audience very kindly stayed. I would have done everything in my power to prevent the Radio Three broadcast on [the following] Tuesday had we not done this repeat performance; the disruption was greater than any I have ever experienced, even though to all intents and purposes the actual playing went very well. The repeat will of course have run up a very large overtime bill for the orchestra – whose members could not have been more cooperative, and who played both performances brilliantly.

I have never heard of a whole piece being repeated because of noise from the audience. The 21st century is turning out differently from what I expected! Classical music concerts are extremely civilized events where, up until recently, audiences tended to observe the basic courtesies without being asked. This seems more and more to be slipping away.

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A gold star to anyone who can watch this video past the one minute mark:

https://aeon.co/videos/music-might-be-quintessentially-human-but-does-it-serve-a-purpose

This is the new norm: an extremely visually busy presentation of a script that recites the simplest of rudimentary facts. Has the average intelligence of the Internet now descended to roughly the grade four level?

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Because of their new demand to register to read any articles, I am boycotting the New York Times (and the Globe and Mail who seem to have adopted the same policy), but I ran across this quote at Arts Journal that is just too good to pass up:

“For centuries, opera has been a tool of power, a spectacle developed and organized by influential Western nations and the elites within them. It is long past time for the art form to be more open about this heritage, and to make reparations for it. Using opera to understand the connections between cultures and to experiment with what can bridge them is no longer merely an aesthetic possibility; it’s a moral necessity.”

That is just so, uh, delightful. The "opera-as-a-tool-of-power" meme is, of course, straight cultural Marxism which is now, at the New York Times, the official philosophical stance. Adjust your browsers accordingly.

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 The manuscript of Bach's Prelude, Fugue and Allegro for lute or keyboard has just been auctioned off for the remarkable sum of $3.3 million. It is a lovely piece, often played by guitarists, and one I had to learn for a competition many years ago. This gives us our envoi for today. Here it is played by Edel Muñoz at the Boston Guitar Fest in 2011. He was the winner of the competition: