Today's Concert: Gergiev, Mariinsky, Shostakovich 9

How did Shostakovich get to fifteen symphonies instead of the nine that composers were supposedly limited to after Beethoven? Possibly by not taking the idea seriously. When he came to write the piece, at the end of the Second World War, instead of a big, serious work with vocal soloists and choir that he had hinted he was going to write, he produced a bright, jaunty neo-classical symphony of modest proportions. Just like Shostakovich to do the opposite of what was expected. This fine performance is part of a series filmed by a French crew in the Salle Pleyel in Paris. Gergiev is conducting with his famous toothpick.

Additive Rhythm, and Meter

I have been wrestling with some problems with notating rhythms recently. Perhaps I should say I have been exploring rhythmic possibilties? In my String Quartet No. 2, I decided that I wanted a particular effect in the first movement where the last beat of the measure would be slowly expanded to give a sort of limping meter. At first I wanted to do this with just a text instruction: "Repeating the chordal passage sixteen times, expand the last beat of the measure from a quarter note value to a half note value incrementally." My violinist suggested notating this precisely so I ended up with this:

Click to enlarge

That is just part of the passage. Each measure is repeated four times. The last beat of the measure grows from a quarter note, to a quarter tied to a sixteenth, to a quarter tied to an eighth and so on, until the last beat becomes a half note. The latter part of this process is shown above. Now there is no doubt that this is notationally ugly! I soon realized that the composer that had really explored this technique, known as "additive rhythm" was Olivier Messiaen. What inevitably happens if you use additive rhythms is that you destroy the meter; this kind of music is "ametric." I discovered this looking at Messiaen scores and seeing that he simply omits meter entirely. Here is an excerpt from his Catalogue d'oiseaux, "Le Chocard des Alpes."

Click to enlarge

Even where, as in the beginning of the piece, the meter is clearly 2/4, he shows no meter and there are many passages like this where there is no regular meter. Unfortunately, not showing or more importantly, not having a regular meter, is not an option in my music software, so for my most recent piece, I simply notate everything in 4/4, but the bar lines are actually irrelevant. In this passage the violin is doing a "subtractative" rhythm while the guitar does an additive one:

Click to enlarge

Deal with that, copyright bots!

Friday Miscellanea

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Controversial study shows rats prefer jazz to classical music, when on drugs:

Rats prefer the sound of silence to Beethoven and Miles Davis – except when they are on drugs. Then, they prefer the jazz.

These are the results of a controversial 2011 study by Albany Medical College, in which scientists exposed 36 rats to ‘Für Elise’ by Beethoven and ‘Four’, a brassy jazz standard by Miles Davis. The rats overwhelmingly preferred Beethoven to Davis, but they liked silence best of all.

In the second part of the experiment, the rats were given cocaine and played Miles Davis over a period of a few days. After that, the rodents preferred the jazz even after the drug was out of their system.

The research, according to scientists, showed rats can be conditioned to like any music associated with their drug experience.

I can think of no safe comment to make about this.

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"Perhaps Schoenberg's work deserves a more superficial treatment than it has hitherto received." 

Richard Taruskin. The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Kindle Locations 4602-4603). Kindle Edition, quoting Allen Shawn.

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In this new pandemic world, singing is one of the more dangerous activities: Germany clamps down on SINGING over coronavirus fears.

German authorities are warning against singing and several states have banned it from church services over fears it spreads the coronavirus. 

The 'increased production of potentially infectious droplets' involved in singing means that choirs are facing a longer shutdown even as shops and restaurants re-open, the government says. 

Lothar Wieler, the head of Germany's RKI diseases institute, says the droplets can 'fly particularly far' when singing. 

In one case, at least 40 people were infected at a church service in Frankfurt where the congregation had been singing and not wearing masks.

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Sometimes you have to ask yourself: am I paranoid? Am I paranoid enough? Or is it all nonsense? The Victoria Symphony Orchestra in Canada is throwing in the towel for all of next season: SERIOUSLY BAD SIGN: ORCHESTRA RULES OUT PLAYING IN 20/21.

It is with sadness that today the Victoria Symphony is announcing the suspension of its programming for the 2020.21 Season.

While this is heartbreaking news, our highest priority is the health and welfare of the organization’s patrons, musicians, artists, staff and volunteers. The decision to suspend all performances is in compliance with the Province of British Columbia’s COVID-19 health regulations and Restart Plan. Performances will resume when it is deemed safe to do so by the Province and its top health officials.

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This has been happening for a while, but now it is like the last indignity: Copyright bots and classical musicians are fighting online. The bots are winning.

As covid-19 forces more and more classical musicians and organizations to shift operations to the Internet, they’re having to contend with an entirely different but equally faceless adversary: copyright bots. Or, more accurately, content identification algorithms dispatched across social media to scan content and detect illegal use of copyrighted recordings. You’ve encountered these bots in the wild if you’ve ever had a workout video or living room lip-sync blocked or muted for ambient inclusion or flagrant use of Britney or Bruce. But who owns Brahms?

These oft-overzealous algorithms are particularly fine-tuned for the job of sniffing out the sonic idiosyncrasies of pop music, having been trained on massive troves of “reference” audio files submitted by record companies and performing rights societies. But classical musicians are discovering en masse that the perceptivity of automated copyright systems falls critically short when it comes to classical music, which presents unique challenges both in terms of content and context. After all, classical music exists as a vast, endlessly revisited and repeated repertoire of public-domain works distinguishable only through nuanced variations in performance. Put simply, bots aren’t great listeners. 

Michael Sheppard, a Baltimore-based pianist, composer and teacher, was recently giving a Facebook Live performance of a Beethoven sonata (No. 3, Op. 2, in C) when Facebook blocked the stream, citing the detection of “2:28 of music owned by Naxos of America” — specifically a passage recorded by the French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, whom Sheppard is not.

The takedown led Sheppard into what he describes as “a byzantine web of ridiculousness” starting with Facebook’s dispute form: “Beethoven died in 1827,” he responded. “This music is very much in the public domain. Please unblock it.”

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 And don't I know it: Drunk singers, Ravel on film and prime Viennese operetta: the addictive joys of classical YouTube.

The full addictive potential of classical YouTube needs to be experienced to be understood. And let’s be honest, there are only so many lockdown videos the human spirit can take. Which is why, on a sunny spring afternoon, in the prime of life and health, I find myself watching the late John Cage stroking bits of wire with a feather.

The haircuts suggest that we’re in the early 1980s, and a Ron Burgundy type is floating across the screen in a little box. ‘It’s been said that listening to John Cage’s music is like chewing sand,’ he explains, unhelpfully. It seems that we’ve also been watching a live performance by the German artist Joseph Beuys. And that we’re now going over to a firework display at the Pompidou Centre.

What? Why? No time to wonder, because you forgot to disable autoplay and YouTube, which sees your most secret desires, has already launched another distraction...

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 For our envoi today, first Four by Miles Davis:

And second, I was going to be very clever and put up a clip of the Victoria Symphony playing Schoenberg, but such does not exist. So here they are with the Symphony No. 8 by Beethoven:

Today's concert: Shostakovich, Gergiev, Mariinsky

After his Fifth Symphony restored his standing with the State, Shostakovich a couple of years later wrote this rather quirky, but deeply felt symphony. It consists of a dramatic slow movement that always sounds a bit apocalyptic to me, followed by two deeply sardonic scherzi. And that's it. Fairly short for a Shostakovich symphony and one of my favorites. I just stumbled across this performance with Gergiev conducting the Mariinsky orchestra in a concert at Salle Pleyel in Paris, filmed by a French crew. Pretty well directed in that there are no out-of-focus shots on someone not playing. Perhaps too many closeups of the bore of the principal flautist's instrument. Wow, does the principal flute ever have a lot of work in this piece! Gergiev is conducting with a toothpick (literally) as he sometimes does. This is a powerful, committed, driving performance where everyone is really together. Great performance.

Bach: Prelude in E, BWV 1006a

In my last post, on John Williams, a tricky little passage in the Prelude to the E major lute suite came up. This passage, an arpeggiated chord sequence, is tricky for guitarists because they have a tendency to let the thumb move the downbeat from the G#, where it belongs, to the E, where it does not belong. This becomes particularly evident at the end of the passage where, when the scalar passages return, it sounds as if the downbeat is in the wrong place. Here is the beginning of the passage:

What happens, as commentator Steven just confirmed, is that the passage starts fine as the previous measure had the thumb sounding each downbeat. The arpeggio starts fine, but over a measure or two, the feeling of where the downbeat is migrates from the first G# to the last E, on the third string played by the thumb. Even when you are aware of the problem the tendency is still there. I played it this way for years, even after a violinist friend pointed it out to me.

I have made the claim that everyone plays it wrong, including John Williams, so let's do a quick survey on YouTube to see if I'm right. Just think, a few years ago, this would have taken a long time to assemble the recordings. But now, we can do it in a few minutes. Ok, first up is Andrey Lebedev and the passage starts around the 30 second mark:

Nope, same problem. He covers the "bump" at the end when we would have two sixteenth notes, both as the beginning of the beat, with a little "luftpause." Next, Sean Shibe:

Nope, same thing. He tries to cover both the entrance into the shifted beat placement and the exit at the end with a diminuendo so we aren't quite sure what we heard. Next Mateusz Kowalski:

Extra points for cool camera angles, but no, same problem. Again, he tries to cover the transition by playing a couple of notes very softly. Next Andrea González Caballero:

Aha! She actually does keep pretty strictly to the beat placement throughout as is particularly evident from the ending of the passage which transitions into the scalar passage with no "bump." Mind you, in other respects the performance isn't great, but she gets this right. Next, fellow Canadian Drew Henderson:

He does a little rubato just before the arpeggio section which obscures things a little bit and, again, a little luftpause at the end, but for the whole section, the thumb determines the beat placement. Why am I picking just on guitarists? Ok, let's listen to Arthur Grumiaux on violin:

Uh-oh, same problem but for a different reason. In this case it is because of the change of bow, but again, the beginning of the beat migrates to the lowest note in the arpeggio. Plus, his tempo wanders around and I'm not crazy about his tone. Next, Rupert Boyd.

Good job! He keeps the beat securely in the right place, so no "bump" or need for a diminuendo or pause at the transition. How about Itzak Perlman?

Nope, same problem, but he almost sells the transition to us by ignoring the problem completely! No weak-ass diminuendo or luftpause for him! One more? How about Ana Vidovic:

Nope, same problem with a diminuendo to hide the transition. I'm almost afraid to put up Hilary Hahn as she is my favorite violinist and she even makes a specialty of the solo violin suites. Oh, what the heck.

I had to listen to that three times and I'm still not exactly sure how she does it. She starts the arpeggio section by slightly extending the first G#. For much of the section it is hard to tell where the beat is exactly, so at the end, the transition seems to come quite naturally. It works. I think that this passage is really much easier on guitar if, that is, you have good control over the thumb.

I know, I know, someone is going to say, "yeah, buddy, well just put your thumb where your mouth is! Let's hear you do it!" Fair enough, but I would need a couple of weeks to get the piece back in my fingers. And I'm not going to play the whole thing because there is some stuff later on that just kills my left hand these days. But that opening couple of pages I find quite easy, yes, even with the correct beat placement.

So, was this an interesting exercise?

John Williams: A Retrospective

Not JW the film composer, but JW the classical guitarist, let me hasten to say. When I was a young guitarist the two outstanding models were Julian Bream and John Williams, both UK guitarists (though Williams grew up in Australia for part of his early life). What about Segovia? He was actually of an earlier generation and musically felt a bit more distant to me even though my personal connection was closer to Segovia as my main teacher in my earlier days was Segovia's assistant at the Santiago de Compostela master classes, José Tomás. But as Segovia's career was winding down and Tomás was more of a teacher than performer, the artists who really dominated were Bream and Williams. Bream had a particular flair for dynamic, brilliant performances of both contemporary music and lute music, the Renaissance lute being his second instrument.

John Williams was a particular favorite of mine because of his really fine performances of Spanish music, though his technical abilities meant that he could play anything. A really influential album was his integral recording of all the Bach lute music in the mid-70s. This was the first time that anyone managed this repertoire with anything approaching ease and facility.

Williams was the first classical guitarist to have a really solid technical foundation. His father was a guitarist, which got him started at an early age, and then he benefitted from studying with Segovia in summer masterclasses from his teens. But he is really blessed with a natural aptitude. Nowadays every young guitarist seems to have a John Williams level of virtuosity, but back in the 60s when he started his career, he was almost alone in his technical perfection. Segovia had great musical character, but his technical flaws were always evident.

At the beginning of his concert career, Williams exploited his technical gifts by recording all the important guitar concertos, the ones by Rodrigo, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Villa-Lobos, Ponce, Giuliani and Vivaldi. While any guitarist could play the Vivaldi and a few could play at least the Fantasía by Rodrigo, and more the Tedesco concerto, he was probably the only one in the world at that time who could play all of them, plus the Villa-Lobos, with ease. Bream being the exception, of course, though I always felt that he was not really at his best as a concerto player.

Williams could have built a strong international career, touring all the time, but after a few years he balked at this kind of life and settled down in London where he did most of his concertizing and recording close to home. He made a few side trips into popular and fusion music, but as he says (around the 40 minute mark) in this BBC special, it was rubbish that he did it for the money: he would have made more money touring playing strictly classical. I think this is true because unlike a lot of the people doing fusion or crossover today, he already had a big international career, he just didn't like that kind of life. The documentary is almost worth watching though it tends to be rather spasmodic:

Here is a much better documentary on Williams:

Does his technical mastery tend to overshadow his musical creativity? Yes, probably. He has mentioned that the influence of Segovia was not entirely beneficial and while he does not specify, it is likely that aspects of musicality were involved. One thing interesting about Williams' approach is that once he has settled on an interpretation of a piece, with very few exceptions, he plays it exactly the same, year after year. The exceptions are just a couple: his later recording of the Bach chaconne shows a considerable growth in awareness of Baroque style. More interesting is the second of his three recordings of the Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo. The first and third recordings are exactly what you would expect: a rock-solid and musically excellent performance. But the second has a very interesting idea with the second movement cadenza. It begins with an arpeggio in the somewhat remote key of G# minor and for this recording he begins that cadenza very deliberately and very quietly, as if it is approaching from a far distance. Very powerful and effective! But radical interpretive ideas like these are rare with Williams. Actually, to be fair, they are probably fairly rare with all international solo virtuosos. I suppose if I were to compare John Williams with an artist on another instrument I might, very tentatively, suggest Friedrich Gulda on piano. They both were technical masters of the instrument and repertoire, but tended to chafe at the boundaries. Both explored musics outside of the classical realm, Williams pop and flamenco and Gulda, jazz.

So that's my mini-retrospective on John Williams. Here is a performance that shows why he is such a great guitarist:

Can anyone tell me the one interpretive mistake he, and virtually every other guitarist, makes in this piece? Hint, it has to do with the arpeggiated passage starting at the 32'' mark.

Over-Composed or Under-Composed?

I take my title from a favorite quote from Taruskin:

The twelve-tone method was invented precisely to produce the sort of maximalized motivic consistency and saturated texture that analysts look for. Clearly Schoenberg was motivated by the ideal that Shawn invokes to tout his work. But that does not make it any more pertinent or available to the listener's experience. And promoting it into a primary musical value is the ultimate poietic fallacy, the one that led modern music into the cul-de-sac sac where absurdly overcomposed monstrosities by Elliott Carter or Milton Babbitt have been reverently praised by critics and turned into obligatory models for emulation by teachers of composition.

Richard Taruskin. The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Kindle Locations 4763-4766). Kindle Edition. My emphasis.

But if you can have "overcomposed monstrosities" can you have, what, "undercomposed dwarves"? My mind briefly contemplates a Schenkerian trying to do an analysis of Steve Reich's Drumming, part one...

For much of my life I was, at least from time to time, a composer, but one with no credentials and no training apart from the urge to compose. For the last ten years or so I have worked on the tools and craft of composition, slowly moving across the landscape from a purely intuitive process to one that has come to seek out form, proportion and process. I'm still not a member of what Taruskin calls the academically-trained composer's guild as I only very briefly took lessons in composition from a member of that guild. But I now work with a creative intuition informed by an intellectual grasp of form.

Or so one hopes!

In opposition to what Taruskin calls the "poietic fallacy," the belief that all that matters is how the composition was made, I do indeed seek to create something that the listener can enjoy--perhaps not in the most superficially pleasurable manner, which I associate with music that adheres to sentimental clichés, but in the most expressive manner I can find, at least.

Ultimately it comes back to the age-old dynamic of repetition versus variety. In a lot of Schoenberg's work, he manages the amazing feat of making music that is actually very tightly-written, sound almost random in its astonishing variety. I really think that the opposite is more suitable to my aesthetic needs: to make music that has a good amount of variety sound tightly written.

But without the excessive use of drones!

Nico Muhly: Drones in Large Cycles

Falling Into Your Soul

I wasn't raised with any spirituality at all. When I was young, I tended to make fun of religious or spiritual people because it seemed ridiculous to me. As I matured I decided that anyone who was trying to be a moral person deserved all the respect I could give them, and that included a lot of religious people.

But at the same time, there is a great deal of music that is hard to understand or enjoy without acknowledging its spiritual aspects. Some examples: all that great 15th and 16th century polyphony, Bach, and the newer spiritualists like Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki. I was always aware and sensitive to this aspect of music though I thought of it as being aesthetically transcendent rather than religious or spiritual. While I am still uncomfortable with the idea of a personal god, that there is a spiritual or transcendent aspect to reality seems perfectly obvious. It has been said that the unlikeliest theory of all is that all of reality consists of nothing more than the swirl of atoms in the empty void.

Listening to some Morton Feldman recently, it occurs to me that his music could be seen as very spiritual as well. There are certain musical experiences that I don't know how to characterize except through metaphor: I think of them as "falling into your soul" as if your soul was like a well deep inside that you knew was there, but most of the time succeeded in ignoring. Much music is perfect at distracting you from it. But some music is so, what? Empty? Focussed? Extended? --that it seems to lead you to or drop you into your soul.

I guess there are a couple of ways to get there: one is through delirious ecstasy: the whirling dervishes or the music of Steve Reich or perhaps Philip Glass. But another way to get there is through austerity--think of Thomas Merton writing about the Desert Fathers who lived alone in silent prayer. Morton Feldman, in his later years, wrote music of great length and great austerity where small events loom large. This is the opposite of the approach to composition of maximum complexity. That could also lead to aesthetic transcendence, I suppose, but it never seems to.

Richard Taruskin in the Oxford History of Western Music (volume 5, p. 101) describes the later, lengthy music of Feldman as resorting to extreme measures to "preserve the specialness of the esthetic experience." He says: "Only by dint of extreme measures could the romantic sacralization of art continue into the age of science." Well, maybe. How to access the transcendental seems to call for different measures at different times in history. We are still just coming out of a long period when the "romantic sacralization of art" or perhaps, art as religion, reigned. This rather came off the rails with the First World War, when everything cultural became suspect.

Still, one of the fundamental goals of art is to, somehow, take you out of yourself. Certainly out of your daily self. This is one of the reasons that I think that the mechanical reproduction of music, enabling it to be present as a constant soundtrack to our lives, has been very much a mixed blessing. If you want to point or lead away from that kind of everyday experience, you need to do something different--but just technical innovation doesn't seem to do it. The very lengthy pieces of Morton Feldman seem to do something unusual. One commentator on a YouTube clip said they change your mind without putting any ideas into it. To me it feels like falling deep inside yourself into what we might just as well call our soul.

I honestly think that for many of us, no more needs to be said, while for others of us, nothing could be usefully said. I suppose you either get it or you don't.

At the core of a lot of transcendental music is a certain simplicity. Here are some examples:

Bach: Dona nobis pacem from the B minor Mass:

For Bach that is fairly simple music. The Prelude in C major from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier is another example:

Here is an example from Arvo Pärt: Spiegel in Spiegel:

An unusual example from Shostakovich: the first movement, Elegy: adagio, from the String Quartet No. 15. There are five more movements, all adagios.

After that, when we come to Feldman, it doesn't seem so strange. Here is his two hour piano piece, Triadic Memories:

Which is dwarfed by his Second String Quartet, usually said to be six hours long, but the Vogler Quartet whistle through it in a mere four and a half hours:

Don't you feel you have, well, earned something after listening to some of this music?

Friday Miscellanea

Trigger Warning:

Not to mention various forms of dancing...

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I'm just finishing Umberto Eco's book on the aesthetics of Aquinas which has proven very interesting. Here is a little comment he makes in summary:

Beauty, in Aquinas's aesthetics, is not the fruit of psychological empathy, nor of the imaginative transfiguration or creation of an object. Instead, it sinks its roots deep into a complex knowledge of being. And so, intellectual travail is a necessary pathway to the knowledge of beauty. [Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Aquinas, p. 201]

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Jessica Duchen has part of an interview with Maxim Vengerov over at her blog. She talks about the intense shock the pandemic is delivering to touring artists:

My last face-to-face interview before lockdown was with Maxim Vengerov. Looking back on the transcript now, it's so strange to see the list of countries, venues, orchestras, repertoire that he had coming up for the rest of this year. It hammers everything home somewhat. There was much I could not put in the article by the time I came to write it, because it was clear that none of this was actually going to happen. It was supposed to trail his big anniversary concert at the Royal Albert Hall in June - 40 years on stage (though he's only 45). That has, of course, been postponed until next April.

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As a ticket-holder, I received an email from the Salzburg Festival this week. This seems to be the important paragraph:

The only thing that is certain is that the new health regulations mean that the Festival cannot take place as planned before the outbreak of the pandemic, both in terms of programming and duration. Therefore, the Festival will present an alternative for this extremely challenging year to the Supervisory Board on 25 May 2020. We aim to publish the newly arranged programme for the summer in early June.

So I'm not holding out too much hope! I should have become a festival regular years ago...

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Alex Ross had a piece on Igor Levit that we talked about here. One of the "Hauskonzerts" that he gave was by invitation of the President of Germany and was broadcast from the presidential palace, the Schoss Bellevue in Berlin. The President himself (a largely ceremonial post), Frank-Walter Steinmeier, introduced the program which was the Waldstein Sonata of Beethoven.

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An article about Beth Morrison, responsible for a great deal of new opera production:

The Wall Street Journal dubbed her a “modern-day Diaghilev,” while Opera News’ Henry Stewart wrote that, “more than any other figure in the opera industry, Beth Morrison has helped propel the art form into the 21st century.” Indeed, Morrison, a producer of opera theater extraordinaire, and her company Beth Morrison Projects (BMP), founded in 2005, has been the powerhouse behind numerous world premieres. Included are David T. Little’s Dog Days (2012), Du Yun’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Angel’s Bone (2016) and Missy Mazzoli’s first full-length opera, Breaking the Waves (2016), a co-commission of Opera Philadelphia and BMP.

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According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, choral music is particularly dangerous these days: Two years until we hear a live choir? In COVID-19 pandemic, choral music may be too risky for a very long while.

One especially cruel cautionary tale emerged recently regarding a Washington State choir that met just as the virus was setting in. After a March rehearsal attended by 61 choristers, including a single symptomatic member, 87% of the group developed COVID-19, according to a CDC report released Tuesday. Two members died.

The problem stems from the proximity of singers, and the fact that the very act of singing propels viral droplets. Indeed, among art forms, it is choral singing that may face the most treacherous path back to normal.

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It's a topsy-turvy world and what could be more appropriate than someone turning Bach's Goldberg Variations upside down. The New York Times explains:

In March, the jazz pianist and composer Dan Tepfer found himself confined to his apartment in Brooklyn with all his bookings canceled for the foreseeable future, like musicians everywhere. So he decided to work seriously on an idea he had long been toying with.

Mr. Tepfer, 38, who also excels in classical music and has an undergraduate degree in astrophysics as well as sophisticated technology skills, wrote a computer program. He recorded himself playing Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, beautifully, on a Yamaha Disklavier, a full grand piano with a high-tech player piano function; his program then played back each variation, but flipped.

And here is the Variation 1, right-side up and then flipped:

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The Washington Post discovers Morton Feldman: As time loses its meaning, the music of Morton Feldman gains new resonance.

The dissolution months ago of our usual routines, modest and mundane as they may have been, has left many of us unmoored. The familiar beat of my day-to-day has degraded into something more like a circadian polyrhythm, and I wasn’t much of a dancer to begin with.

No wonder I’m listening to so much Morton Feldman.

Glacial, spectral, static yet constantly in motion, the sprawling works of the late mid-20th century composer have always been an acquired taste, despite their strange, luminous beauty and unparalleled scale. Feldman has always been a composer of shifting environments, an arranger of uncertainties. And in the disorienting stretch of this pandemic, I’m finding his most “difficult” works newly useful and uncannily accessible.

The Salzburg Festival had some Feldman programmed for this summer that I was really looking forward to. Alas...

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Looks like we are getting through this week's miscellanea without a single link to Slipped Disc! Let's have a couple of appropriate envois. First, Morton Feldman. A good friend of mine did a doctorate in composition with him at Stony Brook. Here is a chamber piece from 1987, his Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello:

Here, from pre-pandemic days, is Maxim Vengerov playing the Sibelius Violin Concerto with the Chicago Symphony conducted by Daniel Barenboim:

Foot Rest vs Guitar Rest

There are two basic accessories for the classical guitar that put the guitar in the best playing position. Back in the early 19th century some, Dionisio Aguado if I recall correctly, recommended the use of a table to rest the guitar on. Modern technique for a long time was based on the use of a footrest:

Which I used for about fifty years! Segovia used hand-made ones because in his day, the modern adjustable ones weren't available. Once, taking a lesson with José Tomas in Spain way back when, I forgot my footrest so I used an old wooden one of Segovia's that was kicking around--just a little wooden platform like a miniature coffee table.

But lately I have been more and more uncomfortable and I have developed sciatica in a nerve in my left leg, the one that is raised. A couple of years ago I got one of those leatherette covered cushions that is supposed to replace the footrest, but as it wasn't adjustable I couldn't make it work. I have noticed on YouTube that more and more younger guitarists are using a different arrangement, a "guitar rest" that sticks onto the guitar and holds it in position so you don't have to use a foot rest. Both feet are comfortably on the floor. So I ordered one, the "Tröster" model from Ergoplay. They are made in Germany and, due to Amazon's limited delivery to Mexico these days, it actually came from Germany. Here is what it looks like on the instrument:

I admit, I was long reluctant to try this kind of rest because I didn't like the idea of suckers on my instrument! However, they are perfectly safe and do not harm the instrument or mar the finish. They are strong rubber and stick really well. To get it off, you just lift on those little handles on each sucker and they come right off. This is a really solid and well-made product. It is very adjustable for height and angle and after a day or so I got pretty comfortable with it. I'm sure it will take a month before it is completely familiar, but I already find it better than the foot rest. Here is what the playing position looks like:

So there you go: a recommendation to young guitarists is to give the guitar rest a try. In the long run it may be a better option.

Watching some videos on YouTube I saw this one of guitarist Tatyana Ryzhkova who seems to be using the same model guitar rest. She looks a lot prettier while doing it too...

Today's Concert

This is streaming live as I post it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti1FefnBAyk

This is the first concert I have seen back with an actual orchestra--or part of one! The Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada play Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question and Beethoven, Violin Concerto with Christian Tetzlaff, Violin. Notice the social distancing with each pair of stand partners a couple of meters from the next.

Today's Concert: Hába Quartet, Smetana, Borodin, Dvořák

As the lockdown winds down, we see larger ensembles from the Frankfurt series of streaming concerts. Today is a quartet with three popular quartet movements, one each from Smetana, Borodin and Dvořák. It is nice to get closer acquainted with the musicians. I even am following the German introductions a bit better!

Brief Musings

Two miscellanea in a row? Well, why not? This is a collection of some quotes and random thoughts. If a quote, it will be attributed. If not attributed it is likely an original thought, or at least one that I read somewhere and don't recall where.

Things are not good because we desire them; we desire them because they are good.
—Aristotle, Metaphysics

If virtue can be beautiful cannot the beautiful be virtuous? (This comes from reading Eco on Aquinas whom he quotes as follows:

...the beautiful and the good are the same in any subject. For they are grounded in the same thing, namely form, and this is why the good is esteemed as beautiful. They are different notions nonetheless. For the good, which is what all things desire, properly has to do with appetite. So, too, it has to do with the idea of an end; for appetite is a kind of movement toward an end. Beauty, however, has to do with knowledge, for we call those things beautiful which please us when they are seen. [ Eco, op. cit. p. 35 quoting Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, 5, 4.]

I am looking into this idea of the interrelation of the transcendentals (the Good, the True and the Beautiful) because I have long been uneasy with the idea that there is no connection between, for example, the engagement with aesthetic things, i.e. beauty, and the good generally. This is often cited as the problem of the concentration camp guards enjoying Schubert lieder in the evening and going out and gassing Jews the next day, to put it crudely. This is one of the things that, I think, leads us as a culture into a kind of dystopian way of looking at everything. Yes, the line between good and evil may run through every human heart as Solzhenitsyn said, but I still think that asserting that there is no connection whatsoever between aesthetic quality, i.e. the Beautiful, and moral quality, the Good, is simplistic. Perhaps it is a consequence of the Enlightenment idea of aesthetics, based on the idea of the exercise of individual taste. That takes us far away from Beauty as a transcendental quality. A merely subjective liking for Schubert is not inconsistent with your day job as a Nazi. Complicated, yes, and we have to look at the notion of virtue. But to me the idea that there is absolutely no connection between virtue and beauty is extreme. We are sold this in our popular culture, of course. The locus classicus is probably the scene in The Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lector enjoys listening to the Glenn Gould recording of the Aria from the Goldberg Variations before committing horrific crimes. Message: psychopaths in particular enjoy beautiful music. But isn't this quite unbelievable? Do murdering psychopaths really enjoy transcendental music? I doubt it, because psychopathy involves the inability to have empathy for anything.

…art does not proceed from the Things that man contemplates. It proceeds from men who contemplate Things.

--Maritain, Jacques. Creative Intuition in Art & Poetry (Kindle Location 465). Cluny Media. Kindle Edition.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.
—Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

I have long had the idea that the practice of classical music (perhaps all music) involves the cultivating of certain virtues: discipline, industriousness, openness to experience, sensitivity to sound and to the effects of sound and so on. I have speculated before that you do not run into a lot of sociopaths in classical music circles (other than record company executives, of course) because the necessity of these virtues tends to cause them to self-eliminate. Recall that one of the qualities of a sociopath is that they cannot stand to be wrong, but must always find someone else to blame. This is related to narcissism, a frequent failing of our time. Sociopaths are deceitful and impulsive. At some point early on in every classical musician's life there comes a situation that a sociopath will find extremely hard to deal with. Imagine this: you are a music student and your teacher assigns you a piece, perhaps a simple piece by Bach. You go off to the practice room. There you are, all alone, just you, your instrument, a chair, a music stand and this piece by Bach. If you don't develop the focus and discipline to learn the piece, there is absolutely no-one to blame except yourself. You can try to blame the teacher or even Bach himself, but that's not going to go anywhere. So you will likely drop out of the music program in favor of a field where your lying and lack of discipline will not be a barrier to advancement. Something like politics, or business administration or journalism. Too harsh?

UPDATE: I replaced the Gould clip with one by Igor Levit because the audio quality was poor.

Friday Miscellanea

The first glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel? Slipped Disc reports on the first concert in the Czech Republic with an actual audience.

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Austria's junior minister for culture first to quit over coronavirus fall-out:

The coronavirus pandemic claimed its first political scalp in Austria as the junior minister for culture quit under pressure from theatre directors and performers over a lack of urgency in reopening cultural venues even as a lockdown has been eased.

Austria flattened its curve of infections with an early lockdown and soon announced emergency funding for companies. But while it started loosening curbs on public life a month ago and shops, bars, and some museums have reopened, no such steps have been taken or mooted for theatres and other cultural venues. The junior minister, Ulrike Lunacek of the left-wing Greens, came under fire as she seemed at times to treat the challenge of safely reopening theatres as an abstract intellectual exercise rather than an urgent requirement to save livelihoods.

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As is often the case at Slipped Disc, the headline claims rather too much: An Esa-Pekka Salonen Piece Killed My Cello:

 Five minutes before I was to go onstage I put my cello down, stepped over it on my way to wash my hands and heard a crack behind me. A large section of the front of my cello had come off. I can only guess that maybe the very corner of my right heel caught the edge? I had injured my left foot that day – possibly a broken bone since it has taken months to heal – and was not quite on balance.

Go read the whole thing.

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Here is a forlorn hope for you: Musicians are more desperate than ever. Streaming services ought to rescue them.

For way, way too long — Spotify, it’s been 14 years for you and 15 for YouTube — you have ridden on the backs of recording artists, musicians and songwriters that have provided you with content and, in turn, billions of dollars in profits, without offering them much in return.

How much profit? Spotify, which controls 36 per cent of the world streaming market, reported third-quarter operating proceeds of $60 million (all figures U.S.) in October 2019. YouTube, meanwhile, revealed its ad-revenue intake publicly for the first time in February: last year it was $15.15 billion, a 36 per cent increase from 2018’s $11.16-billion tally.

And here’s what you’ve been offering the creators in return for all that content that has enabled you to attract and retain tens of millions of loyal subscribers — paltry per-stream or pre-view royalty rates of, by platform: YouTube, $0.00069; Pandora, $0.00133; Vevo, $0.00222-$0.0025; Amazon, $0.00402; Spotify, $0.00437; Deezer, $0.0064; Google Play, $0.00676; Apple Music, $0.00783; Napster, $0.019 and Tidal, $0.01284 (all figures according to the online music distributor Ditto).

Yes, this is the dismal downside of the digital revolution in music: a very wealthy minority and everyone else impoverished.

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Alex Ross, at The New Yorker, weighs in on Igor Levit. It's a long piece and well worth reading in its entirety. Hard to excerpt, but here is a bit towards the end:

If Levit were giving concerts now, he would be playing programs that he had agreed to back in 2017 or 2018. At home, he could choose whatever pieces fit his mood an hour before he turned on his camera. That sense of urgency was especially strong in Stevenson’s “Passacaglia,” in a seething account of Busoni’s “Fantasia Contrappuntistica,” and in a two-and-a-half-hour-long traversal of Shostakovich’s Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues.

Undermining Levit’s newfound freedom was a deep dread for the future of his art. The classical-music world was already in a fragile economic state before the coronavirus struck. Now, with large gatherings forbidden indefinitely, an apocalypse looms. Levit does not face the immediate crisis that has overwhelmed so many working musicians: he is well paid for his concert appearances and recordings, and in 2018 he received the Gilmore Artist Award—a prize of three hundred thousand dollars that is given to a concert pianist once every four years. Levit says, “Those of us who are on the fortunate end of the profession have to be really, really careful about what we say, because so many people are suffering. Still, I look every day at the danger of my whole world dying. Systemically, we are in grave, grave danger. And I cannot say that music matters less, that it is not ‘essential.’ To me, it is absolutely essential. It is my reason for being.”

Just a note about Levit's politics: he is solidly on the left and has gotten criticism from conservatives. As far as I'm concerned, he can be as vocal as he wants, I don't find it offensive in the least and it certainly doesn't affect my estimation of his quality as a musician.

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The finest French orchestra in the world is based in --- Montreal! And we can believe this claim because it comes from a critic from Toronto, Montreal's rival.

If you will permit an anecdote, many years ago the Toronto Symphony decided to record Holst’s virtuoso orchestral showpiece “The Planets” and, because the yet-to-be-renovated Roy Thomson Hall had proven to be a less than ideal recording venue, the orchestra bused to Kitchener’s acoustically superior Centre in the Square.

Invited to accompany the orchestra, I reminded its then music director, Andrew Davis, that the Montreal Symphony was about to record “The Planets” as well, under Dutoit. His response? “We’re not worried.”

Perhaps he should have been. Good as it was, the Toronto recording was surpassed interpretively and sonically by what the Montrealers achieved in the Church of Saint-Eustache.

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 Let's have a double-barreled envoi today. First, Igor Levit with the Piano Sonata, op. 111 by Beethoven. I was really surprised to see that it had only 813 views, but then I noticed it was just posted two days ago.

Next, the Montreal Symphony with the "Mars" movement from Holst's The Planets:

In Search of a New Aesthetic

I am so concerned with the problem of aesthetics because, in the last century, the overwhelming aesthetic principle has been, in the phrase of Ezra Pound: "Make it New!" That is, aesthetic quality has been almost exclusively based on technical innovation. Of course, over time, as technical innovation got more and more difficult (what do you do after Stockhausen, Cage and Kagel?), composers resorted more and more to gimmicks. Counter trends developed such as minimalism and however you want to describe what people like Arvo Pärt are doing--mystic minimalism?

The problem, as I see it, is that technical innovation is not an aesthetic principle. Simply not. And neither is the idea of music written to a political agenda such as environmentalism or gender equality. Aesthetics are aesthetics. But not necessarily "aesthetics" as defined by the 18th century philosophers who brought the term into general use.

I don't usually think of myself as a multiculturalist, but it turns out I might be. My search for a better aesthetic foundation has led me to the principles of Chinese and Japanese painting and woodcuts, to the Poetics of Aristotle and recently, to the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. That might be a promising avenue because it links us to the earlier aesthetic practices of Western music. I notice that, according the Wikpedia article on Arvo Pärt:

When early works were banned by Soviet censors, Pärt entered the first of several periods of contemplative silence, during which he studied choral music from the 14th to 16th centuries. 

The spirit of early European Polyphony informed the composition of Pärt's transitional Third Symphony (1971); thereafter he immersed himself in early music, reinvestigating the roots of Western music. He studied plainsong, Gregorian chant and the emergence of polyphony in the European Renaissance.

We may actually have to re-engage with the concept of Beauty, one of the transcendentals of the ancient Greeks and the Medieval philosophers. It's funny, the idea of Beauty, even when not capitalized, seems to be among the most terrifying to contemporary artists. It is associated with kitsch and shallow sentiment. However, for millennia, beauty was not only respectable, it was a cherished ideal. How odd that we chose to dismiss it. Of course the challenge is to create beauty without creating derivative, sentimental kitsch. But that is pretty much the eternal challenge of art anyway.

This is Tabula Rasa by Arvo Pärt:

Today's Concert: Marcin Dylla, Manuel de Falla

Marcin Dylla is the finest young guitarist I have heard in the last few years. This is a performance from 2018 of the Homenaje de Claude Debussy by Manuel de Falla. The piece seems deceptively simple to play, but in order to realize all the expressive indications and bring the subtleties of the music to life, you need to be fastidious both technically and musically. This is an extremely fine performance. Listen, for example, to how he changes the timbre for the Debussy quote towards the end.

Obsolete Aesthetics

Can aesthetics ever truly be obsolete? According to present day scholarship you would certainly think so. We are often told that the field of aesthetics was invented/created/discovered in the 18th century. According to Carl Dahlhaus in his Esthetics of Music:

As a whole music esthetics represents--and this explains some of the resistance to it--the spirit of cultivated bourgeois music lovers, a spirit that rose in the eighteenth century and is threatened in the twentieth century with collapse... music esthetics is essentially a phenomenon of the nineteenth century.

Dahlhaus sees esthetics as being founded by Alexander Baumgarten in 1750.

Baumgarten appropriated the word aesthetics, which had always meant "sensation", to mean taste or "sense" of beauty. In so doing, he gave the word a different significance, thereby inventing its modern usage. The word had been used differently since the time of the ancient Greeks to mean the ability to receive stimulation from one or more of the five bodily senses. In his Metaphysic, § 451, Baumgarten defined taste, in its wider meaning, as the ability to judge according to the senses, instead of according to the intellect. Such a judgment of taste he saw as based on feelings of pleasure or displeasure. A science of aesthetics would be, for Baumgarten, a deduction of the rules or principles of artistic or natural beauty from individual "taste". Baumgarten may have been motivated to respond to Pierre Bonhours' opinion, published in a pamphlet in the late 17th century, that Germans were incapable of appreciating art and beauty.

Dahlhaus and other modern writers might mention Plato on the Beautiful as discussed in the Symposium and Phaedrus and certainly everyone knows the Poetics of Aristotle, but after mentioning them, everyone goes on to talk about the modern (i.e. since 1750) conception of aesthetics which may have died a merciful death around 1900.

They skipped a few things, though! Just as when you read up on psychology you are told that it too was something invented in the 19th century and perfected in the 20th century, the actual history is either missed entirely or severely truncated. One would think that the article on psychology in Wikipedia would at least credit Aristotle who actually invented the field in several treatises, but no, again, for modern man, psychology is a recent invention.

My view of aesthetics is that there has been some version of aesthetics in every civilization that has some kind of art. The kinds of aesthetic ideas and the way they were expressed were undoubtedly quite different in each culture and era, but the idea of theorizing, that is, discussing, the effects of art and the reception of art and the quality of art is likely truly universal.

So I tend to be interested in lots of different kinds of aesthetics. Recently I have been reading an absolutely fascinating book on aesthetics in a time when it supposedly didn't exist: The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas by Umberto Eco. Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1274), known to Catholics as the Angelic Doctor, reconciled Aristotelian philosophy with Catholic theology.

Umberto Eco is the famous author of The Name of the Rose and a highly respected semiologist--but his interests are wide and varied. It took me a while to get into the book and get used to the discussion. Eco not only discusses Aquinas' treatment of aesthetics, he also puts it in the whole context of Medieval culture and philosophy. A great deal of the discussion revolves around the nature of beauty:

Beauty arises from the conjunction of several observations of visible forms, and not from the observations alone. [The Polish philosopher Witelo, quoted on op. cit. p. 54]

Quoting Aquinas:

For good (being what all things desire) has properly to do with desire and so involves the idea of end (since desire is a kind of movement toward something). Beauty, on the other hand, has to do with knowledge, for those things are called beautiful which please us when they are seen. This is why beauty consists in due proportion, for the senses delight in rightly proportioned things as similar to themselves, the sense faculty being a sort of proportion itself like all other knowing faculties. Now since knowing proceeds by imagining, and images have to do with form, beauty properly involves the notion of formal causes.

Whew! The teleology and ontology of beauty! Eco takes dozens of pages to explain the historical context of this and how we might understand it.

Aquinas was something of a minor composer as well as being a theologian and philosopher. This is one of his most popular hymns: Adoro Te Devote.

What is it with Russians?

Canada and Russia have a lot in common: both are very large countries, geographically, and between the two of them, surround the Arctic. But whereas Canada is, let's face it, just a bit dull, Russia and its culture never cease to amaze. I just ran across this clip of Russian dancers:

Hard to believe some of that is even possible. Then there are Russian movies like Night Watch and Day Watch based on Russian science-fiction novels. Then there is the Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman who won the two highest honors in mathematics, the Fields medal and the Millennium Prize, both with million dollar awards. Despite living in his mother's apartment in St. Petersburg, he refused to accept either prize (and turned down other honors as well) because in his view they were "irrelevant."

The Russians also do some of the most realistic war movies like Admiral from 2008. It begins with a naval engagement. From around the 6 minute mark, watch as the captain takes over command of their single gun and, with the aid of the only remaining gun crew member, badly wounded, manages to land a hit on the bridge of the German ship, temporarily putting them out of action.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pxbSluvT8w

Last summer, when I was at the Salzburg Festival, I saw three of the best pianists in the world within a single week: Grigory Sokolov, Igor Levit and Evgeny Kissin. Sokolov and Kissin are Russian and Levit was born in Russia but grew up in Germany.

What is it with the Russians and why have they always had such spectacularly bad governments?

Sokolov doesn't do concerto performances any more and there aren't a lot of clips around, but this one is likely worth watching/hearing.

Today's Concert: Thomas Adès, Asyla

The English composer Thomas Adès wrote this colorful piece when he was only twenty-eight. The conductor gives an interesting introduction but if you don't speak German, the piece starts around the eight minute mark:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9YGQ86vIps

And here is the composer conducting just the Ecstasio movement with the Danish National Symphony:

Friday Miscellanea

Has the Friday Miscellanea, embroiled as we all are in the virus crisis, been sadly lacking in the whimsical lately? Why yes, yes it has.

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Over at the On An Overgrown Path blog is an excellent discussion of a requiem that is unjustly little-known:

These days warhorse Requiems are trotted out for so many routine performances, but Rudolf Mauersberger's Dresden Requiem remains unknown. Which is unjust as it is a magnificent and poignant work which ranks alongside Britten's War Requiem in its use of music to reflect on the horrors of war. Perhaps its unjustified neglect is simply because it commemorates the bombing of Dresden, an episode that many on the victorious side would prefer to be written out of history.

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 In the same blog is a wonderful homage to the incomparable harpsichordist Scott Ross with photos of his little house in Assas:

On that sleeve for his 1985 recording of the Goldberg Variations, Scott Ross is seen standing in the grounds of Château d'Assas in Languedoc. It was here that many of the harpsichordist's great recordings were made. Then, as today, the château dwelt in the twilight zone between grandeur and dereliction, and thirty years ago the recording sessions were regularly interrupted by the sound of rats scurrying across the floor. Scott Ross was born in Pittsburgh in 1951, and moved to France with his mother following the death of his father in 1964. He studied at the conservatoires in Nice and Paris, and first came to Château d'Assas in 1969 to give music lessons to the grandson of its owner Mme. Simone Demangel.

The whole essay is well worth reading, not least for revealing that Mr. Ross detested the playing of Glenn Gould.

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 The 2020 Pulitzer Prize in music goes to Anthony Davis:

Anthony Davis’s opera The Central Park Five has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music. The annually awarded $15,000 prize is for a distinguished musical composition by an American that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the previous year. The opera, featuring a libretto by Richard Wesley, \received a New Music USA grant for commission fees in 2015 and received its premiere on June 15, 2019 at the Long Beach Opera. It is described in the Pulitzer citation as “a courageous operatic work, marked by powerful vocal writing and sensitive orchestration, that skillfully transforms a notorious example of contemporary injustice into something empathetic and hopeful.”

“That’s pretty far out!” exclaimed Davis (b. 1951) when reached by telephone minutes after the award was announced. “I never thought I’d get a Pulitzer for a piece with Trump on the toilet. I’m thrilled and excited. I’d like to thank Long Beach Opera and all the people involved with the production. It was such an incredible project.”

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The New York Times relates how The Berlin Philharmonic Tests a Musical Path Out of Lockdown:

The concert — which will be repeated on the orchestra’s Digital Concert Hall platform on Saturday — was organized to conform with local health regulations. No more than 15 musicians could be onstage at a given time, making this a de facto chamber event. The players were kept two meters (about six and a half feet) apart — except for wind players, spaced five meters (about 16 and a half feet) from one another and their colleagues. 

Yet though the seating arrangement was strange — and it was momentarily odd to see a conductor and concertmaster bow to each other rather than shake hands — it was also inspiring to see musicians trying to find some way, however awkward, to keep making live art. And the program chosen by Kirill Petrenko, the Philharmonic’s music director, spoke to this moment of disruption and fear; plumbed spiritual realms; and offered consolation.

He began by leading Arvo Pärt’s “Fratres,” in a version for 12 strings and percussion. Softly rustling riffs and scratchy-sounding strings hover over an eerily subdued yet ever-present sustained low bass tone. A lone percussionist played quiet rumblings from a lower balcony near the stage.

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Over at Slipped Disc we learn of a documentary about one of my favorite pianists, Friedrich Gulda:

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And that's it for today's brief miscellanea. Too many similar articles about the virus, the effects of the virus, the impact of the virus on musician's lives, how the virus will affect our future travel plans and on and on. So let's have some clips instead. Today's envoi starts with the Dresdner Requiem of Rudolf Mauersberger:

Scott Ross in a selection of sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti:

Sometime in the early 1970s I purchased a box of the Beethoven piano concertos with Friedrich Gulda and the Vienna Philharmonic. I lost the LPs years ago, but I have always remembered the recording as my favorite of these works. Here is is the Concerto No. 4. Horst Stein is the conductor:

Today's Concert: Franck Cello Sonata

The Frankfurt Radio Orchestra people put up a new concert every day and today it is Valentino Worlitzsch, Violoncello and Elisabeth Brauß, Piano playing the César Franck Cello Sonata A major.

Make It Old

Apart from a certain ingenuity with rhythm, I suspect my principal gift as a musician is the unerring ability to always be out of step with everyone else. My outsider credentials are valid, and one example is that the motto of my aesthetic progress is likely "Make It Old" in contrast to Ezra Pound's famous modernist exhortation to "Make It New." Yes, my modernism is more like an antiquarianism. Mind you, the very phrase "make it new" which Pound used as the title for a book of essays in 1934, was actually discovered by him in an ancient Chinese manuscript, so there you go:

The actual genealogy of the phrase “Make It New” has been established by Pound scholars and is well known to those among them who specialize in Pound’s relation to China, but it is so often misdated and for that matter misquoted (tagged with a spurious exclamation mark) that its genesis is worth recounting in some detail. The crucial fact to begin with is that the phrase is not originally Pound’s at all. The source is a historical anecdote concerning Ch’eng T’ang (Tching-thang, Tching Tang), first king of the Shang dynasty (1766–1753 BC), who was said to have had a washbasin inscribed with this inspirational slogan. According to the sinologist James Legge, it is not a commonly told anecdote, but Pound was fortunate enough to have found it in two sources: the Da Xue (Ta Hio), first of the four books of Confucian moral philosophy, and the T’ung-Chien Kang-Mu, a classic digest and revision of an even older classic Chinese history. That Pound coincidentally found the same uncommon anecdote in two different places may be explained by the fact that both texts were prepared by the neo-Confucian scholar Chu Hsi (1130–1200 AD), who has perhaps the best claim as true originator of the slogan Make It New.

 I was a practicing rock and blues guitarist in the late 1960s when I discovered classical music, at the precise moment, in fact, when, according to Richard Taruskin, it was popular music that was where it was at as classical music was no longer where "serious" listeners went:

And that is why classical music is failing, and in particular why intellectuals, as a class, and even the educated public, have been deserting it. The defection began in the sixties, when all at once it was popular music that engaged passionately-adequately or not, but often seriously and even challengingly-with scary, risky matters of public concern, while classical music engaged only frivolously (remember radical chic?) or escaped into technocratic utopias. By now, the people who used to form the audience for "serious" music are very many of them listening to something else.

Richard Taruskin. The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Kindle Locations 1173-1176). Kindle Edition.

But, out of step as I was, what I heard in classical music, first Tchaikovsky, then Dvořák and finally, as I found my stride, Bach and Beethoven, was a range and depth of expression that, no matter that it was popular and ever-present, popular music simply lacked. Taruskin complains of the "packaged greatness" and smugness and dullness that celebrations of classical music, such as the impromptu performance of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven conducted by Leonard Bernstein at the fall of the Berlin wall, always seem to involve, but there was no packaged greatness in my encounter with the classical. It came in the form of scratchy old LPs and even 78s borrowed from the father of a friend. I still expect performances of the Unfinished Symphony of Schubert to skip a few bars as did the old LP that I listened to so many times!

For me part of the ineffable attraction of classical music was in the very fact that it was neglected, marginal. In the social circles where I grew up, rural Canada, there were no symphony balls, no Met galas--no symphony and no opera at all. Classical music was a minor little niche, not the expression of elite taste. Other minor little niches that I discovered over the years between my late teens and my late twenties were Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Homer, Dante (these latter in part due to Pound, in fact), philosophy and all sorts of antiquated culture. The philosophers I was drawn to were not Nietzsche or Hegel, but rather Plato and finally, Aristotle.

My career as a performer tended to show some of the same traits. Yes, I did perform the warhorses of the repertoire, no avoiding that, but every chance I got I played more esoteric music: Leo Brouwer before he became popular, obscure sonatas by Scarlatti and suites by Weiss. Even the occasional transcription of Froberger or mammoth sets of variations by really obscure Czech composers. Since what the audiences wanted to hear were tangos by Piazzolla, you can guess how my career went!

My whole life, my criteria for quality has always been connected to the unpopular because it seems clear that everything really popular involves deadly compromises. Quality, like veins of gold, is found in the obscure niches, in the neglected, in the scratchy old 78s, in the manuscripts few bother to read.

An old friend of mine says that true wisdom is always boring, likely because it states truths so timeless that we already know them, but are reluctant to admit it.

Let's listen to an old recording of the Unfinished Symphony by Schubert. This is Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in 1953: