Friday Miscellanea

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on composer/impresario Paola Prestini that is likely worth your time:

Born in Trento, Italy, and raised in Arizona by a single mother, Prestini was one of only three women in her composition class of 50 at Juilliard, where her taste for experimental opera and large-scale multimedia works put her at odds with the school’s more conservative teaching. In 1999, while she was still a student and thinking ahead to staging her own pieces after graduation, she co-founded the scrappy production company VisionIntoArt; its ups and downs gave her a real-world education in getting music in front of an audience. A decade ago, Prestini met Kevin Dolan, a Washington, D.C., tax lawyer and arts patron looking to launch a venue for emerging talent. Seven years and $16 million later, National Sawdust opened its doors. Today it boasts a staff of 16 (10 of them women) and hosts seven diverse performances a week. Prestini dreams of opening satellites in London and Tokyo.

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Curious about the Reigning Divas of Carnatic Music? Well, so was I!

India’s national instrument, the Saraswati veena, has been patronized by many artists over the decades. Even the legendary vocalist M.S. Subbulakshmi was a trained veena player. In recent times, the undisputed queen of the veena is Jayanthi Kumaresh, who hails from a family of Carnatic music practitioners. Her mother Lalgudi Rajalakshmi was also a noted veena player. Her maternal uncle was the famous violin maestro, the late Lalgudi Jayaraman. Known for her technical expertise, strict classicism and authenticity, Kumaresh’s music has gained considerable global popularity. Kumaresh is also a composer. Her albums, like Mysterious Duality (2013), and her work with the Indian National Orchestra, a syndicate she formed along with 20 other musicians in 2011, have shown her to be a composer of high musical standards.

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The Globe and Mail has a thoughtful article on the reign of Charles Dutoit in Montreal before his fall from grace:

An old story caught up with the board and administration of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra last week, as allegations of psychological abuse of players by former music director Charles Dutoit were spelled out in detail in two francophone newspapers.

The scenario resembled that of many recent accusations of sexual misconduct – including those against Mr. Dutoit – with one important difference: The players' complaints of bullying from the podium were made very public 15 years ago, and ignored.

An open letter alleging the abuse, in April, 2002, was the precipitating factor in Mr. Dutoit's abrupt resignation days later. "The reality of life in the MSO for most players," wrote Quebec Musicians' Guild president Émile Subirana, "is unrelenting harassment, condescension and humiliation by a man whose autocratic behaviour has become intolerable."

Regarding the way marketing and promotion can lead to abuse:

As shown by the Dutoit case, and by that of James Levine at the Metropolitan Opera, selling your leader as an indispensable wizard makes it hard to control him if he steps out of line. It also confuses the public about what an orchestra is. It's not a band of puppets waiting to be activated by an inspired pair of hands. It's a gathering of individual artists, who together maintain the sound, traditions and personality of the ensemble. However great the conductor, nothing would be heard without the craft, dedication and art of the players.

There is a complex relationship between the conductor and the orchestra. I was just talking with someone about her experiences. For quite a few years they had to contend with an erratic and abusive conductor. He was finally replaced with another, much easier to work with but, at the end of the day, rather boring! Some of the best conductors can be temperamental, but as long as it does not become actual abuse, that probably gives better results than a conductor who is bland and mediocre.

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And the soap opera that is the Oregon Bach Festival just keeps a'coming:

Destrubé said he couldn’t continue as program director. “I have … relinquished my role as program director of the Berwick Academy,” he said by email. “As it was I who invited Jaap ter Linden, also at the suggestion of several of the other faculty members, and as the OBF/UO administration decided to un-invite him following your article, unjustifiably in my opinion, I felt that my position as program director was untenable. As simple as that.”

It's complicated, but as best as I can make out, the festival administration's hypersensitivity to anything outside the strict parameters of political correctness, combined with their utter lack of a sense of humor, seems to be causing a string of firings and resignations.

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Once a meme gets firmly rooted, it is hard to get rid of it. Case in point, the ongoing complaint that classical music programs are larded with compositions by dead, white males to the exclusion of women and people of color. While there is certainly truth in this, the explanation of why this is so and the social justice ideology surrounding it are both deeply flawed. Let's look at this recent example: Systemic Discrimination: the Burden of Sameness in American Orchestras.

Classical music lovers feel a rush of excitement each year when orchestras release their plans for an upcoming season. Marketing brochures feature glossy photos of conductors and soloists, hopefully enticing patrons to swoon over the year’s top-flight catches. But many listeners also take a closer look at the musical programs. And every year, social media platforms explode with disappointment as one orchestra after another tries to sell a season riddled with music by dead white men.

I like that "riddled with" phrase: it suggests that white men are akin to termites or a deadly virus. Crude claims like this are the norm:

Simply put, lack of diversity on concert programs is built into the institutional structure of American classical music organizations, leading to systemic discrimination against women, people of color, and other historically underrepresented musicians.

Let's dismantle this, shall we? First of all, the buzzword "diversity" is simply code for saying that concert programs, membership in orchestras, conductors, soloists, and in every other aspect, classical music organizations must mirror exactly the gender and racial makeup of the society as a whole. Why is this? It is nothing more than a numbskull's concept of "justice." I think that one of the best ripostes to this kind of argument was Jordan Peterson's to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's virtue-signalling action of making sure exactly 50% of his cabinet were women. His reason? "Because it is 2015." Peterson's comment was that this was idiotic because what you have to select for in cabinet posts is not gender balance, but competence. Justice is not served when group identity trumps everything else. Similarly, we should apply a multivariate analysis to these other claims. For a variety of reasons that undoubtedly include child-bearing and raising, education, social biases, interests and the fact that men and women tend to have different goals, European music history has vastly more male composers than female ones. There are no women composers of the stature of Bach, Mozart or Beethoven. Now, if you want to simply decide by fiat that your music history starts in the year 1950 or 2000, then fine. I'm sure that you can find a great number of women composers. But good luck getting audiences to attend your concerts! Oh, and the whole notion of "systemic" discrimination is only hauled out when you can't find an actual individual to blame.

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So if you don't get to shoehorn in women composers and composers of color just because they belong to "oppressed" identity groups, then how do they enter the canon? Just the way dead, white males did, through merit. Joseph Haydn is not widely performed because he is dead and white. If that were the case then his brother Michael, also a prolific composer, would also be widely performed. He's not and the reason is that Joseph is the far better composer. The process of canon formation is a constant one and there are always people advocating for the addition of neglected composers. A good case in point is a recent article by Alex Ross in The New Yorker about neglected composer Florence Price who was a woman and partly black.

Price was born in 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas, and grew up in a middle-class household. She returned home after attending the New England Conservatory, one of the few conservatories that admitted African-Americans at the time. Her early adulthood was devoted largely to teaching and to raising a family. Life in Arkansas was oppressive; lynchings were routine. In 1927, Price moved with her family to Chicago, where her horizons began to expand. She divorced her husband, who had become abusive, and struck out on her own. Until then, her compositional output had consisted mostly of songs, short pieces, and music for children. She increasingly essayed larger symphonic and concerto forms, winning support from Stock, a conductor of rare broad-mindedness.

Beginning in 1931, Price wrote or sketched a total of four symphonies. The First and the Third have been published by A-R Editions, under the scholarly guidance of the late Rae Linda Brown, and recorded by the New Black Music Repertory Ensemble and the Women’s Philharmonic, respectively. The Second was apparently never finished; the Fourth, whose score turned up in the St. Anne house, will receive its première by the Fort Smith Symphony, in Arkansas, in May.

And that is how it starts. Over time, the music of Florence Price may or may not find a niche in the repertory. What will determine that is the collective aesthetic judgement of performers, conductors, critics and audiences.

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Here is a piece by Paola Prestini for solo cello with pre-recorded cellos and electric bass titled "Mourning" from a larger piece titled Body Maps. The cellist is Jeffrey Ziegler.

And here is the first movement of Florence Price's Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major. Blogger doesn't want to embed, so just follow the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv1P_qAjKR8