Friday, October 25, 2019

Friday Miscellanea

Blogging is an ever pleasing delight and it was particularly interesting this week when music historian Ted Gioia left a comment critiquing my critique of a recent column he wrote for Lapham's Quarterly on Bach. This is the best thing about blogging. We can express opinions and hash them out with others in a civil manner. Thanks very much to Ted for his comment and to all the others who leave comments here. It adds immeasurably to the value of the discussion.

Now I'm waiting for musicologist Richard Taruskin to leave a comment taking me to task for something I said about Stravinsky! I would probably just faint dead away...

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Heather MacDonald in Quillette gives what appears to me to be the fairest summary of the Plácido Domingo affair: The Defenestration of Domingo.
The feminist nostrum that “the personal is political” was false from its inception. It has now become a warhead aimed at the edifice of a civilization deemed too male. Institutions like the Metropolitan Opera, LA Opera, or the Philadelphia Orchestra should be the prime defenders of that civilization. When, instead, they surrender to furious irrationality and sacrifice our greatest artists to avoid a wholly imaginary threat, they betray their most fundamental mission. I am cutting off my support for the Metropolitan Opera; other donors who care about our musical inheritance should do the same.
At least cowardice in the face of feminist grievance appears to be predominantly an Anglo-American affliction. So far, Domingo’s future engagements in Moscow, Vienna, Hamburg, Valencia, Milan, Cologne, Krakow, Berlin, Madrid, and Munich have not been cancelled. The director of the Vienna State Opera, Dominique Meyer, said over the summer that Vienna would honor its contracts with Domingo, who is “valued both artistically and as a human being by all in this house.”
It seems to have been pretty much a North American disease.

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The Wall Street Journal takes the unusual step of publishing a straight-ahead review of three new classical piano recordings--with no political hook! What's next, the Babylon Bee becoming America's paper of record? Oh, wait, I think that already happened.
Clever packaging, deft promotion and imaginative musical content may help draw attention to classical recordings. But in order for an album to distinguish itself artistically, it must communicate an almost subliminal connection between a performer’s skills and a composer’s inspiration.
Three very different young pianists have new releases out this month that exhibit that kind of elemental kinship: 36-year-old Swiss keyboard artist Francesco Piemontesi, 26-year-old Italian virtuoso Beatrice Rana, and 25-year-old American composer-performer Conrad Tao.
I heard Francesco Piemontesi play the late Mozart Piano Concerto KV 595 in Salzburg in August accompanied by the Mozarteum Orchestra and he did an excellent job.

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Math is a deeply frustrating subject for many elementary and high school students. But Seattle public schools are gearing up to accuse math of a litany of more serious crimes: imperialism, dehumanization, and oppression of marginalized persons.
The district has proposed a new social justice-infused curriculum that would focus on "power and oppression" and "history of resistance and liberation" within the field of mathematics. The curriculum isn't mandatory, but provides a resource for teachers who want to introduce ethnic studies into the classroom vis a vis math.
Read the whole thing for the full picture. I don't just mention this to cast a pall over your week, but because while in this context the ideas seem particularly idiotic, something similar crept into the new musicology a long time ago. This is the politicization of math, but there are those who did something similar with music theory. Yes, C major is likely imperialistic, dehumanizing and oppressing. If you buy the political package. But you can make it all go away by just seeing that that is all that it is: a political agenda with which you need not agree. This public service announcement was brought to you by my Grade V teacher who insisted that we learn fractions: BECAUSE!

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You know how much I love an aesthetic debate? Well one has just erupted in the mainstream media over the super-hero blockbuster films versus, well, the "regular" cinema. On one side we have the great filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola of "Godfather" fame along with the guy who got the ball rolling, Martin Scorsese, director of a gallery of great films. The AP has the story: In Scorsese and Coppola, Marvel meets formidable foes.
Plenty of rumbling has followed since Scorsese, in a magazine interview earlier this month, suggested Marvel movies aren’t cinema but “something else” — theme park rides uninterested in “trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.” Coppola doubled down over the weekend, telling journalists in France, gathered to see him accept the Prix Lumiere, that Scorsese was not only right but that he didn’t go far enough. Marvel films, he said, are “despicable.”
Read the whole thing. For me, I lost interest a while back in films where ridiculously overpaid actors stand around in even more ridiculous costumes uttering the occasional quip in between absolutely ridiculous "action" sequences where computer-generated imagery is used to depict things that violate the laws of physics. It wasn't just the Marvel blockbusters that ruined the movies, it was CGI. Just look at the second "Matrix" movie. Hey, this is a bit like how the computerized drum machine ruined pop music, isn't it?

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Over at Slipped Disc we find Daniel Barenboim lamenting the failure--or is it celebrating the success?--of his political orchestral project West-East Diwan.
Twenty years after he co-founded with Edward Said an orchestra of young Arabs and Israelis, Daniel Barenboim has spoken openly about the Diwan as a dream that has, so far, failed.
In a sombre 20th anniversary interview with the German press agency Barenboim said: ‘The orchestra exists (but not as) an orchestra for peace… We can not do that.
‘Today we cannot play in most Arab countries or in Israel…’
He takes credit for the training and experience the orchestra has given to many young musicians but is frustrated by the lack of political progress.’
I think, if he had asked, I would have said that this is an airy-fairy idea that may be musically interesting but politically will have no effect at all. If the lack of peace is of political value to politically powerful people, then a few musicians aren't going to make any difference whatsoever.

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Top architect Jean Nouvel is suing one of his former clients, the Philharmonie concert hall in Paris, in a dispute over the cost of building the venue, which opened in 2015.
In a complaint filed in the Paris court on October 14, his company Ateliers Jean Nouvel counters a 170-million-euro ($190-million) claim lodged by the Philharmonie de Paris against his company.
The concert hall argues the architect's firm owes them the money because of budget overruns during the building of the hall, sources told AFP Monday.
But the counter-claim filed by the architect's studio describes that demand as "exorbitant" and "unjustified", according to documents seen by AFP.
The cost of the building rose from 173 million euros when the project was announced in 2006 to 386 million euros by the time it opened on January 14, 2015. Each side blames the other for having mismanaged the project.
And isn't the next stage when someone announces that the acoustics are crappy anyway?

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Yesterday was American composer George Crumb's 90th birthday. In honor of the occasion, here is the first movement of his string quartet Black Angels which features a really remarkable panoply of sounds and textures:


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I spent the summer of 1979 in New York and I remember discovering this FM radio station that seemed to play nothing but Haydn quartets and the occasional piece by Webern. It probably wasn't the NPR station that this article is about, but it sure gave me an idea of how remarkable the New York radio scene was. Humanity is Not an Algorithm: What We Lose with WNYC’s Cancellation of New Sounds.
On the airwaves since 1982, “New Sounds” bills itself as “New York Public Radio’s home for the musically curious,” telling us to “free your listening from the limits of genre and algorithm.” Avant garde giant Laurie Anderson was the show’s very first guest. Here was a space on the radio where tuning in could take you to Olafur Arnalds’ otherworldly field recordings of his native Iceland that he transformed into glistening electro-acoustic singles on the album Island Songs. It was a place for Pulitzer Prize winner and Bang On a Can co-founder Julia Wolfe’s Fire In My Mouth, a multimedia orchestral work that compiles archival information collected about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911. Premiered by New York Philharmonic earlier this year, Fire in My Mouth is a musical exploration of this tragedy for full orchestra, women’s choir and unusual instrumentation that includes 100 pairs of scissors.
The latest news is that the show will NOT be cancelled due to the considerable outcry that greeted the announcement.

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Norman Lebrecht offers a little insight into the politics of the avant-garde over at Slipped Disc: WHEN PIERRE BOULEZ STOPPED SPEAKING TO ME. Go read the whole thing. Boulez was upset that Lebrecht thought that George Crumb was a better composer than he was. There is a nice little critique of Boulez:
Without stretching the contrast, Boulez is a relic of an empirically discredited movement. He has not composed a work of substance for 18 years. His pseudo-scientific theories of musical progress are laughed off by today’s composers. Not one of his works is standard repertoire. Boulez is starting to resemble Arthur Scargill and Egon Krenz, true believers whose creed collapsed.
Crumb, on the other hand, is one of the few composers to change the perception and function of new music in the last third of the 20th century. His electronic string quartet, Black Angels, was an ear-opener to America’s Vietnam generation, suggesting that Haydn’s art form could grapple with post-nuclear conflict. Hearing Angels inspired the formation of Kronos and other front-line ensembles; it has been recorded four times and performed, I suspect, more than any modern string quartet.
That last bit isn't true, of course. I would guess that the Quartet No. 8 by Shostakovich is performed far more often than the Crumb.

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For our envoi today, let's have tenor Plácido Domingo in one of the great tenor arias, "Nessun Dorma" from Turandot by Puccini:


9 comments:

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

I tend to hold Joseph Campbell most blameworthy for a consolidation and standardization of a lot of pop culture level film.

Bryan Townsend said...

I'm pretty sure you mean James Cameron, director of Titanic and Terminator films and not James Campbell, professor of comparative mythology?

Marc in Eugene said...

Conrad Tao was here as soloist at the Symphony a couple of years ago. I recall something of Ravel's, and something familiar of Liszt's although I don't know what; very promising, at that point.

Now I'm trying to figure out how Jos. Campbell is responsible for the decay of popular movies.

Marc in Eugene said...

If you buy the political package. But you can make it all go away by just seeing that that is all that it is: a political agenda with which you need not agree.

For the time being, anyway. And if you're not associated with the NBA.

I saw something in the Guardian this morning about the Marvel/anti-Marvel melodrama; didn't read it but maybe I will since you have noticed it also. The anti-Marvelists have won by default so far as I'm concerned since I've never seen one of their opponent's movies.

Bryan Townsend said...

Agh, sorry I meant to say "Joseph Campbell, professor of comparative mythology"! Was he possibly an inspiration for George Lucas and the Star Wars movies?

I had a discussion with a young singer a while back who said that I simply had to watch the films comprising the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so I watched most of them, all that were available on Netflix. I think Scorsese is correct, they are entertaining in a way similar to the way an amusement park ride is entertaining. Thrills and chills for a couple of hours. And that's it.

I think we were in a cultural cold war, but it is turning into a cultural civil war...

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

yes, Joseph Campbell is exactly who I've been referring to. I chose the wording "consolidation and standardization" with care. Lucas has been advertising his debt to Campbell's monomyth since practically the first release of the first Star Wars film so it's hardly unknown that he's used that monomyth as a formula that has influenced subsequent genre work.

But then I see the Godfather trilogy as drawing on a different set of pulp fiction cliches and I don't see that Lucas is necessarily lesser than Coppola for drawing on pulp fiction cliches. Coppola's films are simply not as meticulously formulaic in terms of storytelling. That's the main difference, moreso than the matter of whether or not Coppola was adapting Conrad or Puzo novels.

Bryan Townsend said...

I think I see your point: you don't see a whole huge difference between Coppola and Lucas or Cameron and Scorsese or Marvel superhero films. They are all rehashing stereotypes, clichés and monomyths at slightly different levels of sophistication.

It ain't Ingmar Bergman!

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

and they all are simply following up on the precedent set by Wagner, of course.

The opposite of sophistication isn't cliche, though. Haydn could use some patently trite ending phrases and make that the start of a movement in one of his string quartets. Adorno pointed out that Haydn and Mozart could use ridiculously trite gestures and bring out unexpected possibilities from them.

Putting Bergman on some "other" level of sophistication is one of the things I think some artists and scholars are reacting to in our time. Death cheating at a game of chess is pretty cliche if you stop and think about it for even one second. That doesn't mean Bergman's work isn't art but I would suggest that, per my glancing reference to Adorno on Haydn and Mozart, art doesn't come from avoiding every cliche but in what you do with the cliches that you do use and the reasons why you use them.

The total serialist/atonalist school of music attempted to fully and finally forsake everything they regarded as musical cliche and ... look how niche that music is. We are blessed and cursed to live in the age of recorded music so there's a different crisis to "it's all been done" that we face at a more literal level than earlier epochs on the one hand, and on the other hand we are more aware of just how many options we have compared to other eras of music that were, to go by the recorded legacies we have available, considerably more monolithic by comparison to ours. It may be enough for filmmakers like Lucas or the Wachowskis to seem innovative at the popular cinema level because all they've done is transpose cliches from one region of popular cinema to another and audiences who aren't as steeped in Hong Kong action films as others could see The Matrix and think there's anything particularly daring or new about it as if it were a revolutionary film. It's fun, thanks in no small part to Huge Weaving, but the sequels were trainwrecks.

But Haydn's music shows us that we shouldn't underestimate the artistic possibilities of giving people a lot of fun.

Bryan Townsend said...

Oh yes, I entirely agree with you about Haydn! Artistry very often consists in using familiar material in unfamiliar ways. With Bergman, I was thinking of something like Fanny and Alexander, which is a remarkable piece of filmmaking. I find some of Haydn's finales to be just such astonishing fun that it is equally amazing that they are still true artistry.