This piece is more technical than most because it was written by a conductor.Many conductors use a baton to help pinpoint this use of time, although some do not. Such an individual choice can vary with the size and style of the repertoire being performed. The beating arm is usually on the individual’s strongest side: I am right-handed, for example.A major part of the conductor’s role is to accurately show the length of each bar according to the interpretation and theoretical structure of it. A bar is a mathematical tool that helps to visually organize the music for the performers concerned.An avid audience member will notice that most bars have beating patterns that conductors utilize. The beating pattern is dictated by the number of beats in the bar. (The usual number of beats would be between two and four.) It is defined by a combination of vertical and horizontal beats. (The conductor will indicate these by moving the arm up or down or side to side.)
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In this clip a rather unusual performer plays an excerpt from Sonata VII from John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes (1946 - 48):
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Over at NewMusicBox the revolution continues with this piece: ANSWERING THE CALL: ANTIPHONY BETWEEN THE MUSIC AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS.
Our hope as composers and conceptualists is to summon the social memory of the oppressed, which bore witness to the horrors of capitalism, with its building blocks of genocide, slavery, and ecocide. These memories generate multiplicities of meanings when their call for justice summons the activists of ongoing liberation movements. Such figures animate and re-animate the call for a revolution of values, a revolution of the self and community, and ultimately, a revolution against global capitalism.
Well, that's fairly clear. I guess the question is, if every one of your presuppositions about history, economics, morality and climate science is completely wrong, does this have any negative repercussions on the music?
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The Violin Channel has the latest news: Florida’s New World Symphony To Host New 5-Day Viola Festival. Which prompts the inevitable question, what is even better than a five-day viola festival? A three-day viola festival, of course!
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Years ago I was a serious wine aficionado. Not to the point of flying in to wine auctions and buying cases of aged Pétrus, mind you, but enough so that I could distinguish the bouquet of sauvignon blanc from that of chardonnay without much trouble. One of the wine writers that I particularly enjoyed reading was Auberon Waugh, the son of English novelist Evelyn Waugh. The Times Literary Supplement has an article on some new collections of his work: Like a fine whine.
But what of the fermented juice itself? Waugh was conscious of the perils of writing about it, yet baulked at the starkness of Kingsley Amis’s observation “You can call a wine red, and dry, and strong and pleasant. After that, watch out”. In the 1970s there was a revolution in wine writing, in which anthropomorphic language gave way to a vocabulary that recognized wine as an agricultural product. The new wave found its most influential expression in the writings of the former Baltimore lawyer Robert Parker, typified in a note such as this, about a legendary Pauillac: “A dark, opaque garnet colour is followed by a fabulous nose of cedar, sweet leather, black fruits, prunes and roasted walnuts, refreshing underlying acidity, sweet but noticeable tannin, and a spicy finish”. Waugh was inclined to mock such geoponic rigour and even found another American wine writer absurd for likening a pinot noir to cherries. Yet he could still refer to an Italian red having a “beautiful hare’s blood or red garnet colour and a fragrance of freshly cut pine”.
That makes most writing about music seem rather tame, doesn't it?
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Over at The New Yorker, Alex Ross has two articles up this week. One is on Nietzsche so we will quickly divert to the other one, on new opera productions. Nothing against Nietzsche, of course, but are any of us really ready for him this morning?
Several events at the beginning of the fall music season demonstrated the virtue of projects that are driven not by celebrity allure but by a strong artistic purpose. Just as the Domingo crisis was hitting the Met—the singer withdrew from the roster on the eve of scheduled appearances in “Macbeth”—the company introduced a new production of “Porgy and Bess,” its first presentation of the work in thirty years. A brilliant cast of African-American performers infused Gershwin’s score with authority and nuance. In the same week, the New York Philharmonic mounted a stylishly enigmatic double bill of Schoenberg’s monodrama “Erwartung” and Bartók’s one-act opera, “Bluebeard’s Castle.”
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I invite you to go to Slipped Disc for the latest "musicians trying to travel by air with their instruments" scandal. This time it is six cellists, six cellos and British Airways. As always, the comments offer the most interesting entertainment.
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And that brings us to our envoi for today. I was just going to embed Schoenberg's Erwartung, his early totally chromatic expressionist work, but realized that would be as cruel as subjecting you to Nietzsche! So, yes, Erwartung for those who want to explore some Schoenberg and for those who fervently do not, an excerpt from Porgy and Bess by Gershwin.
14 comments:
A few thoughts come to mind.
For symphonies, I picked up Robert Flanagan's book on the economic condition or orchestras. Greg Sandow's mentioned the book at his blog and his incubating thesis is that there is a crisis in classical music but it's not classical music as a whole so much as it's the systemic deficit patterns of the orchestral traditions in the U.S., for instance. He wrote a blog post about how recent pieces claiming that people have always been claiming classical music is in crisis is historically dubious because negative responses to Monteverdi on the part of ars perfecta advocates weren't claims that classical music was in crisis because those terms are imposed on the historical record; the battle over Monteverdi's innovations was an intra-art-music battle.
the NMB authors are reminders that PNW native american tribes all practiced slavery ... not that anyone could know as such from activism that takes a default an implicit assumption that slavery was never practiced the world over by most cultural and political and economic traditions by the sorts of American college graduates who can only conceive of slavery in the explicitly racist form practiced in the United States.
Or as the philospher John Gray has put it in his recent writings, there are progressive humanist/socialist groups who don't grasp that the progressive social views they have are historically ideals that emerged from the Abrahamic religious traditions of Judaism and Christianity while they scapegoat those religions as having only harmful effects. They've had harmful effects, Gray argued, such as monomania and an impulse to convert with help from the state, but the impulse to coerce conversion with power from the state is a temptation for modern societies with or without a specific religious tradition.
I've made this point before, it's more than just possible to grant that how colonial expansion dealt with Native American communities is dishonest and ghastly without treating them as symbolic sacrifices to capitalists by ignoring aspects of their cultures that we, as modern Westerners, would find terrible. As the Native American author David Treuer put it in one of his books, some Native Americans regard it as terrible that so many Natives took up Christianity while others regard that as a sign of historic pragmatism on the part of Native groups. Alexandra Harmon's work on PNW tribes has been interesting reading for me for her account of how English and Native relations were, overall, decent until American developers moved into the region. There's a propensity to treat Native/white relations in terms of a myth against another myth more than to deal with the mess of the actual regional histories, which can be worse or better than the idealized overall account might have things to be.
I have always found it amusing/depressing that the implicit assumption of the progressives is that the US invented slavery!
I am more familiar with the history of English/tribal relations in British Columbia than in the American Pacific Northwest. Up in our area there was a long-standing project to crush such native traditions as the potlatch which were seen as simply unCanadian or something. These restrictions were only done away with well into the 20th century. Recently it seems as if the politically correct policies now promoted by the government end up by fetishizing the indigenous peoples, who are, in Canada, called "First Nations."
Much prefer listening to the bear play John Cage than reading about the philosophical lunacies of the 19th and 20th centuries although did skim Ross's Nietzsche article; enough N. therein to last me the rest of the year-- but I may read his Wagnerism when it's finally published; plenty of N. in that, evidently.
Nor have I added NL's book on conductors to the list: but that short article was good & informative; when conducting from the harpsichord, e.g., the conductor does it all with his eyes and head, I guess.
The bear ought to have been invited, hungry, to 'answer the call' at the NMB offices when the conspirators were drafting that nonsense. I don't know how 'repercussions in the music' can be detected in stuff that includes "rousing discourses from veterans of the Black Panther Party"-- okay, okay, not fair because that particular piece of work is the sum of what they do; emblematic, though. Still. I listened to four or five minutes of a couple of Afro Yaqui Music Collective's shows and can see that people might find a performance interesting & enjoyable enough but, gosh, the thick layer of muck they insist on accompanying the music with.
Eugene Symphony last night: Mahler's Symphony no 1, and Mendelssohn's Concerto for Two Pianos, the second one. The soloists were twin sisters, Christina and Michelle Naughton; not quite Yuja territory but perilously close (and I'm not referring to their pianism). Enjoyable enough evening and all the right notes were played but the third and fourth movements of the Mahler were the high point. First time hearing the Mahler since I learned that 'Frère Jacques' (that Mahler utilizes in the third movement) is (if it is) Rameau.
Not quite sure where the 'is the sum of what they do' came from; I know I can prose on for far too long but usually the sentences at least make superficial sense. The 'shouting Black Panther' piece is just one of AYMC's projects-- there are not shouting Black Panthers in everything they do.
in the PNW potlatches could be places where slaves were offered and received as gifts. It's not that difficult to imagine how and why Canadian policy might have decided to ban them. In the U.S. when slavery was outlawed the PNW tribes didn't bother complying with the restriction as a matter of law enforcement but they phased out slavery as market dynamics changed economic life to the point where slavery stopped being financially compelling.
One of the complaints that PNW Native American author Sherman Alexie has madd about Native Americans over the last twenty-five years is to say that the average American Indian is more socially conservative than the most socially conservative white guy. I.e. urban Native Americans with progressive and blue-state sympathies can find it terrible that non-urban Natives can take a stance they regard as too conservative. But this hardly seems like a shock. I can easily see why Native Americans would prefer the approach of a U.S. government to be as little interference on tribal issues as possible. A reverse-engineered grad school blue-state version of tribal life isn't necessarily going to be the same as actual traditional customs.
At the risk of keeping things defined in terms of American "red state" and "blue state" symbolic combat, another aspect that comes up is that there are Native Americans who converted to Christianity and accepted that as their religious tradition. Thomas Commuck, the first Native American to publish a musical work using Western notational conventions, published Indian Melodies, a shape note hymnal. For admirers of the shape note tradition of American music I would say it's a must have part of that tradition. For Native people who feel that taking on the white man's religion is bad that aspect is controversial but for Native Americans who have had Christian upbringings there's nothing about Commuck's work that makes it less American Indian. A large part of the Nez Perce converted to Christianity without it necessarily being forced upon them, although voluntary acceptance of Christian practice is another thing that doesn't necessarily come up in often white progressive accounts of Native life, something David Treuer has written about in The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee. Many Native Americans did not adopt Christianity but of those that did it can hardly be said they somehow stopped being Native Americans for it.
Which roundaboutly gets to the "go tell it on the mountain" rewrite. Ecosocialism is never going to have the same ring to it. Mahalia Jackson would never have sung that. :)
The Wagnerism book does look interesting.
Next weekend, all of Haydn's string quartets, from Saturday morning to mid-afternoon Sunday, a dozen or so quartets participating, in Oslo; livestreamed, too. The event is called Absolutt Haydn, commemorating the 35th anniversary of the Vertavo Quartet. Noticed this morning at Slipped D.
I once spent an entire summer listening to all the Haydn quartets.
On the one hand, what could be wrong with a celebration of Haydn's string quartets? On the other, who wants to or can listen more or less non-stop for 30 hours? I suppose you decide that you want to hear these particular quartets and then go to the venue two or three times that weekend.
Hey, if you can binge-watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, why can't you binge-listen to Haydn?
Ha; because my ears shut down after a while in a way my eyes don't. (Am joking but I imagine that acoustic and visual stimuli are in fact processed differently? Maybe not.)
There was an article in the New York Times this morning about an Amazonian bird called a bellbird. It has a distinctive call that Messiaen would love (that's the Guardian, as a matter of fact since there's more bird in their video).
Yes, and when ypu binge-watch or bindge-listen you do it in small chuncks of two or three hours at a tine.
Hello Bryan —
Off topic subject if I may.
What I shall be concerned with is an aesthetic matter, the arousal of emotion in the appreciation of music as music, by the character of the music itself, NOT by the music’s being associated in the mind of the listener with something not in the music and irrelevant to its appeal as music, without which association the music would lack its power to excite the emotion. The crucial issue is what role, if any, the arousal of emotions plays in the understanding, appreciation, and value of (pure instrumental) music, and, in particular, what contribution, if any, it makes to the musical value of a piece.
The important questions are these:
—Which emotions, if any, can music arouse in an aesthetically relevant manner?
—Why these and only these?
—In what way or ways does music manage to arouse them?
—What is the aesthetic significance of their arousal?
Have you read any of the books by Peter Kivy? He does take up some of these questions. One of the things he tries to do is to distinguish musical expression and reception from what he calls "garden variety emotions." He makes the claim that these emotions, love, hate, anger and so on, all have objects. One loves, hates or is angry AT someone or something. Music is in a somewhat different realm. The feelings and moods expressed in and aroused by music have no real world objects and so are of a different order. Music seems to connect with us both on a level below ordinary emotion, that is, on a somatic level. But also on a level above ordinary emotion. These are very difficult questions!
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