Friday Miscellanea

Another week in the ongoing crisis that is 2020! Well, since the murder hornets didn't get us, let's hope the aliens don't either.

Ancient Greek Chamber Music

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Why teach music in school?

Learning an instrument or singing, or even just listening to or experiencing music – live or recorded – allows us to connect with others, to make music and fulfil a fundamental human need to be creative. The additional benefits are wide-reaching and may well include cognitive function, academic attainment, etc, but the experience of learning and doing music for music’s sake – for the sheer joy of music – must never be underestimated.

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Somebody doesn't like the new Teodor Currentzis recording of the Symphony No. 5 by Beethoven.

Admirers of Currentzis at his most provocative, impulsive and downright f-u are already comparing him to Furtwängler. Myself, I find the Andante aesthetically offensive and the rest mostly annoying.

My feeling is that if you are going to do a new recording of this much-recorded piece, I expect you to do something different with it. Otherwise, why bother?

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If Leonard Cohen had been from St. Petersburg rather than Montreal...

 

This is one of my favorite songs, not least for the lyrics, of course.

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Meet the Mozarts via a new edition of the letters.

It’s 1771, you’re in Milan, and your 14-year-old genius son has just premiered his new opera. How do you reward him? What would be a fun family excursion in an era before multiplexes or theme parks? Leopold Mozart knew just the ticket. ‘I saw four rascals hanged here on the Piazza del Duomo,’ wrote young Wolfgang back to his sister Maria Anna (‘Nannerl’), excitedly. ‘They hang them just as they do in Lyons.’ He was already something of a connoisseur of public executions. The Mozarts had spent four weeks in Lyons in 1766, and, as the music historian Stanley Sadie points out, Leopold had clearly taken his son (10) and daughter (15) along to a hanging ‘for a jolly treat one free afternoon’.

Mozart’s letters deliver many such jolts — reminders that, however directly we might feel that Mozart’s music speaks to us, he’s not a man of our time.

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Jeremy Reynolds in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette responds to the New York Times piece on blind auditions: Equality or equity: Orchestral auditions should be more 'blind,' not less.

The Pittsburgh Symphony’s music director, Manfred Honeck, said in a phone call from his home in Austria that he fully supports the diversification of orchestras, but that musicianship must remain the principal factor in judging an audition, whether screened or unscreened. For Mr. Honeck, an audition often comes down to whether somebody “plays stylistically in the way we are searching for” rather than a technical assessment.

“I don’t know that diversity hiring would change things much, as my impression is the highest caliber Black musicians out there are getting jobs,” Mr. Grubs said.

“There just aren’t very many of them.”

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This sounds pretty bad: 'The situation is grim': Toronto concert venues look to government funding for survival.

The president of the Canadian Live Music Association, Erin Benjamin, says the live music industry is being challenged in a way it's never been in its history. 

"It's a catastrophe. We're losing venues by the day," she said. 

According to the Canadian Independent Venue Coalition, which has launched an online campaign to support Canadian venues, without government support, more than 90 per cent of independent venues are at risk of shutting down forever.

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Speculation on 12 Ways The Pandemic Will Change Classical Music:

6. Audience sizes will be between 50-70% smaller, and multi-day performance runs will become the norm.

I suspect that a lot of this is just wind, but if it goes as projected, then the giant tech companies will have more power than ever over what people see and hear.

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The perfect envoi today is the Exsultate, jubilate K.165 that Mozart wrote when he was just sixteen:

 

New Dilemmas

I’m going out of town for a couple of days just for a little change and I’m trying to decide what to take with me as far as technology goes. Options: my old MacBook Pro on which I can run Finale and get some composing done, my fairly new 15.6 inch Chromebook, or my new iPad with keyboard case. Time was you just grabbed some clothes and your toothbrush. I can blog with all three, but each has drawbacks. Take the iPad with keyboard—it is handy and portable, but I am a long way from getting used to it, which is why I am writing this post with it. Just above the backspace key is a delete key which shuts down the screen. I hit it remarkably often as I have to backspace a LOT. Plus all the weird little keys like the ones for punctuation and odd signs are all different from where I am used to because with my desktop I have a 

Spanish keyboard which is very handy because it has all the accents. Maybe I’ll take the iPad and one laptop. I’m starting to see why people are converting over from laptops to iPads with keyboards.

I’ve had this iPad for almost a month and while at first I was wondering why people liked them so much and what you could do with them, now I am seeing how your iPad becomes part of you. You can do everything with them and lots of things you never suspected. The first revelation was when I tried reading with the Kindle Reader on the iPad instead of on my Kindle. Oh my, how very much more beautiful and clear everything is on the iPad. The retina screen is just great. Then there is web browsing: the portability means that you can just look up a recipe and grab the iPad on the way to the kitchen. It goes everywhere you go and yes, it can do just about anything. Watch YouTube anywhere, blog on the run, whatever.

The iPad is a boon to creativity. I think the first time I saw one was an ad Esa-Pekka Salonen did for Apple showing how he used one in composition. But you can use it for photography, film-making, writing, and lots of other creative activities such as digital drawing and illustration.

I see that the iPad has a Clips app, which does videos, as well as iMovie. What’s the diff? 

Let’s wrap this up with an envoi. This is Hilary Hahn playing the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony conducted by Paavo Jarvi (aha, this keyboard won’t give me the umlaut).

This entire post was done on an iPad with Boriyuan keyboard case.

The Orchestra

That article in the New York Times about making orchestras more "diverse" ("To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions") got me thinking about the nature of orchestras in general. I have also been watching some of the new set of videos of Valery Gergiev conducting the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater playing symphonies by Shostakovich shot in Paris. Excellent productions, not only in the high quality videos, but also the discipline and passion of the mostly young Russian musicians. Here is an example, the Symphony No. 1:

This is a symphony composed in the Soviet Union in 1924-25 when the composer was only nineteen, performed by an orchestra of Russian, not Soviet!, musicians under a Russian conductor, shot in Paris by a French crew. Is that diverse enough?

I'm not sure what the New York Times would require of a Russian orchestra in terms of skin color, but no, there are no black musicians in the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra. Perhaps there are just very few black residents in Moscow. There are certainly many women musicians and I imagine there is a variety of representatives of the ethnic minorities in Russia.

What this kind of identity politics misses when it looks at an orchestra is the incredibly diverse achievement it already is. The instruments of the orchestra have an amazingly wide variety of origins. The bowed string instruments originate somewhere in Central Asia, no-one knows exactly where or when. The double reed instruments like the oboe were brought back to Europe in the Middle Ages by the crusaders. The cymbals are Turkish in origin. The glockenspiel and marimba percussion instruments come from Indonesia.

The orchestra is a kind of synecdoche of Western Civilization; in many ways it is a model of a successful society. It is characterized by the fusion of an astonishingly broad range of skills and artistry from the design and construction of the instruments (the violin design is from the workshops of Cremona, Italy in the late 17th century) to the technical skills of the performers who train for decades to achieve this level of precision. Oboe players have to spend a significant amount of time making their reeds with special machines because professional level players can only use custom reeds. Some flute players even cut their own sound holes. There is a particular street in Paris where the best people to do bow re-hairing work. The symphony orchestra is a remarkable achievement in so very many ways even before the first note is played.

Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of all is that this group of very different individuals, in terms of their different instruments, geographic origins, course of studies, personality, age groups and so on, this very diverse group of individuals, is able to be pulled together into an ensemble with perfect coordination.

What bothers me about articles like the one in the Times with passages like these:

But orchestras must be a part of changing the landscape, too, by getting rid of blind auditions.

Change can be unnerving. Might the gains female players have made be reversed if the screen comes down? Might old habits of favoring the students of veteran players return? Orchestras will need to be transparent about their goals and procedures if they are to move forward with a new approach to auditions — one that takes race and gender into account, along with the full spectrum of a musician’s experience.

Change, change, change! Observe the underlying and hidden assumptions here: things as they are, are untenable, we must change. The present situation is very bad and violates fundamental human rights. Diversity must be imposed at any cost. What is missing in this is how long it has taken to develop the practices and traditions of the orchestra and how fragile they are--like civilization itself. Orchestras are standing on the brink right now and the New York Times is concerned about racial quotas.

The orchestra, as an institution is fundamentally good. It is the product of hundreds of years of development in terms of the instruments, the techniques to play them, the repertoire contributed by composers, the subtleties of orchestration, the financial support and construction of suitable performance spaces and on and on. Unless we appreciate all that, we should not be demanding fundamental change.

The worst opinion pieces always start with some supposedly unchallengeable assumption that is always, always wrong. The Times subhead says:

If ensembles are to reflect the communities they serve, the audition process should take into account race, gender and other factors.

Why should ensembles reflect the communities they serve? What community does the Emerson Quartet reflect? What about individual artists? What changes when you move up to an orchestra? The only thing that I can see is that an orchestra is a better political target than, say, Yuja Wang. The assumptions underlying the statement that "the audition process should take into account race, gender and other factors" are multitudinous and treacherous.

Domentico Scarlatti: Sonata K. 241

I was asked by reader to do some analytical discussion of this piece to help him in doing a "visual music" analogue. It took me a while, but I am finally getting around to it. To get started, here is a performance by Scott Ross:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G36y3JMWAA

The score is easily available here:

IMSLP350314-PMLP404110-Scarlatti,_Domenico-Sonates_Heugel_32.300_Volume_5_36_K.241_scan.pdf

This is a tarantella, a relentless, fast dance usually in 6/8.

Scarlatti, in the opinion of Richard Taruskin, exemplifies the Enlightenment in music. He called what he did "ingenious jesting with art" which is to say allowing his tremendous curiosity and imagination to run free. Scarlatti typically uses succinct two-measure phrases, often repeated, and his harmonic devices are bold. In this sonata, for example, after firmly establishing G major with arpeggiated tonic harmony he cements it by alternating tonic with subdominant and viiº6 chords. This is followed by a rocketing sequence that takes us through the circle of fifths by tonicizing D, A, E and finally B, always with the viiº6 harmony. He wanders back for a few measures, into D major, A minor and B minor before arriving at the climax of the first half with the appoggiaturas on A# that strongly establish B minor as the key ending the first half.

Despite the fact that every single one of his keyboard sonatas is in binary form, with each half repeated, every one is formally unique, due to his remarkably fecund imagination. Even for Scarlatti, who usually moved to the dominant at the end of the first half, this sonata is exceptional in the movement to B minor, which is the relative minor of the dominant, D. One characteristic element of Scarlatti's form is what some theorists call the "FOP" or "far-out point," the most harmonically remote area. In this case it is the key of D minor reached early in the second half which then reverts to G major but not before passing through A minor.

Incidentally, Scott Ross, who in an amazing feat recorded all five hundred and fifty-five sonatas in only eighteen months, must have been in a particular hurry the day he recorded this one, because he omits the repeat of the first half.

Due to the sheer quantity of these sonatas and their individuality, it is hard to generalize about them. You need to get to know them as individuals. Somewhere Charles Rosen speculates that Scarlatti is the kind of composer who could have invented Classical style and then gone on to something else in the afternoon!

The Tide of Memory

Music is really the embodiment of time. Every sound is a vibration, waves of compression in the air. The speed of those vibrations, called Hertz after Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, is the pitch of the note. So each individual note is a vibration at a particular speed--textured time, in other words. Pulse is the same thing at a slower speed. The note A that we tune to vibrates at 440 times per second. The typical pulse of electronic dance music is 120 times a minute. But it is all about time.

Time is the life of the universe: without time mountain ranges would never erode, the tides would never advance and recede and we would never live and die.

What prompts this? A couple of things: reading Marcel Proust for one. His mammoth novel is all about time, in search of lost time, remembrance of things past, the conservation of the past. We are fascinated by the past, both our individual pasts and the long, dusty history of humanity at large. A cave was recently discovered in central Mexico containing human-made tools dating back 30,000 years. This is twice as old as the previously understood time-line of immigration to the Western hemisphere. Who made them? Absolutely no idea.

But at the same time, other news stories tell us of the rioting and destruction in many US cities. Another impulse in humanity is to destroy the past, to wipe out all traditions and institutions on the theory that they contain traces of evil or simply are evil.

Two impulses: one to preserve and understand the past and the other to destroy the past. I think I know which one I prefer. Those who destroy the past are left with no books, no culture, no traditions. This is all the better for their search, not for truth or understanding, but simply for power. After you have set the clock to zero, then the way is clear to realize whatever plans you have, victims be damned.

I won't apologize for these observations even though I didn't quite justify them in terms of musical interest.

A good choice of envoi is The Shadows of Time by Henri Dutilleux with L'Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France conducted by Mikko Franck:

A Plan For Listening: Week 2

Last week I got you started with a listening plan. Have a look at that post for the basic idea. Here is what I suggest for week 2.

Two more composers: this time from slightly later. Bach's dates are 1685 - 1750 and Mozart's from 1756 - 1791--yes, he died young. This week we are going to listen to some Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827) --good heavens, that means that this year is his 250th birthday! and some Franz Schubert (1797 - 1828 ) --he died at only thirty-one. Both Beethoven and Schubert were mostly active in Vienna, Austria, as was Mozart for that matter. For the better part of two centuries this was the musical place to be. Beethoven was hugely famous and a big success with the upper classes. He took up where Mozart left off and essentially expanded and developed what is known as the Classical Style, music that is characterized by clarity, elegance and expressivity, though he took it to a more intense level. Here is a justly famous piano sonata by Beethoven, nicknamed the "Moonlight" Sonata. The first movement is typical of Beethoven in that it seems to grow from the most simple and fundamental musical essence. The pianist is Claudio Arrau.

I said Beethoven lent greater intensity to the style and an example is the furious finale to his String Quartet, op. 59 no. 3. This is the Borealis Quartet with a video presentation that helps you follow what each instrument is doing.

As that amounts to twenty-five minutes already, I am going to leave Beethoven for now and move on to Schubert. Unlike Beethoven he was almost completely unknown during his brief life. One of his most loved symphonies was not even performed until forty years after it was written and long after he was dead when Robert Schumann stumbled across it in a drawer at the symphony society. Between the ages of seventeen and thirty-one, when he died, Schubert wrote a thousand pieces of music, including six hundred songs. Let's listen to one of those songs. The poem is by Goethe and Schubert set it when he was only eighteen. Follow the link for the text and background. Here is a performance by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau who recorded every one of Schubert's songs. Lieder and opera can be difficult genres for people today to get into, because of the unfamiliar way they use the voice. You should read the poem before listening to the performance.

Schubert wrote piles of music in every genre, including the symphony. His "Unfinished" Symphony is in only two movements instead of four like most symphonies. But in those two movements he achieves a depth of expression we rarely hear. He once said to someone at a soirée who complained that his music was sad that "all music is sad!" This is the Chamber Orchestra of Europe conducted by Trevor Pinnock:

Saturday Just For Fun

Even the first headline was wrong. Blind auditions were to prevent all sorts of bias, to prevent people voting for their friends, their relatives, their students, friends of their students and on and on. And yes, it also prevented bias against women players. The "diversity" in the second headline is really only referring to skin color, which means that it is advocating a policy that is simply racist.

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Ok, that got too serious towards the end. So let's have some comic relief. This is the worst performance ever of a wedding march:

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Via Slipped Disc we learn that Yuja Wang doesn't just wear hot pants and short-shorts on stage, it is also her preferred lounging gear:

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A debate: Will the pandemic have a lasting effect on the arts? Well, duh.

Chronicle classical music critic Joshua Kosman and movie critic Mick LaSalle debate the question. 

Kosman: But look, when artists have to do something different from what they normally do, that is a change in the artistic landscape. Shakespeare’s a good example. In the musical world, my favorite example is the 17th century German composer Heinrich Schütz, who began his career writing big elaborate pieces for lots of singers and instrumentalists. Then the Thirty Years War devastated Europe to the point where he was lucky to compose for one singer and one instrument, and you can absolutely watch him adapting his aesthetic, thinking, “What can I do with these measly resources that’s as subtle and impressive as what I used to do on a large scale?” 

LaSalle: I’ll give you that — if this lasts 30 years, artists will have to adjust. But I think a closer example would be the 1918 Spanish flu. It killed millions and yet had little or no impact on the arts. Why? Because once it was over, people just wanted to forget about it.

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There seems to be something wrong with universities today: Minds Stocked Only with Opinions.

Part autobiography, part defense of impractical intellectualism, and part cultural lament, Lost in Thought forces us to contemplate the ways in which we might salvage thoughtfulness—perhaps not through our universities but in spite of them. In fact, now that the solvency of many schools is no longer guaranteed, Hitz’s elegant invitation to seek out intellectual fulfillment in any quiet corner, not just in library stacks, could not come at a more opportune moment. 

As Hitz explains, “much of what counts as education in the contemporary scene is the cultivation of correct opinions,” whether the “much-maligned education supported by progressive activists, education that seeks primarily social and political results” or the “conservative mirror image of progressive activism: the promotion of correct opinions about free markets.” Whatever the political flavor, Hitz argues, faux-academic sloganeering has infiltrated our institutions of higher education.

I can't quite see this happening in well-founded music departments because of their commitment to aesthetic quality and the obvious consequences of any relaxation of that commitment--see the organist's attempt at the wedding march above for an example.

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We only had one envoi yesterday, so let's have a few today. First, from the Verbier Festival's virtual concerts is one devoted to Evgeny Kissing, streamed a week ago. This is a mammoth five-hour presentation devoted to the artist with a host of performances and interviews.

I hope I haven't already posted this one: Canadian guitarist Drew Henderson with a spectacular performance of three sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti:

How about some opera? This is a concert performance of Lucia's cavatina from Lucia de Lammermoor sung by Anna Netrebko with Yuri Temirkanov conducting the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. Now that's bel canto.

Friday Miscellanea

I'll bet that got your attention! This is from a piece by James Lileks, who, if you don't know him, writes pretty acerbic but hilarious stuff sometimes. The bit about music is down a ways and consists of a long fisking of an article about white supremacy in music. Here is a taste. The passage in italics is from the article he is commenting on.

It’s time for us to recognize that engaging with these institutions, that contributing to the belief that our participation in composer diversity initiatives is doing anything to reshape the institution of classical music, and that classical music is an agent of cultural change instead of a placeholder to prevent composers of color from forming our own cultures, is ultimately furthering colonization and prevents us from creating artwork capable of real, genuine expression.

Fantastic! Everyone who’s not white stop participating in those peculiar “composer diversity initiatives” that White Supremacists have cleverly developed to colonize things. Form your own cultures! Break free of all the hideous strictures that prevent people from composing music. We can form militias that strike back against the roving gangs of Boosey & Hawkes who break down the doors in the garrets and burn the scores of the colonized..

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The Friday Miscellanea used to be so carefree and whimsical, but it is hard to find those kind of items these days. Take this piece, for example: PC Culture is Destroying Creative Freedom.

Totalitarian regimes — from Germany’s Third Reich to the Soviet Union to Communist China— have consistently imposed censorship on the freedoms of thought and expression of their citizens. And today, we can witness the same pattern repeated here in America through “cancel culture.”

Hailing from a country where freedom of speech is widely prohibited, I can tell you this: once you have lived for years under conditions of censorship and you now have complete freedom of expression, you do not want to go back to censorship. And yet here I am, watching as America falls more and more into self-censorship.

Yes, there are certainly a list of topics and ideas that I assiduously avoid here, but I don't feel any such restriction when I am writing instrumental music. So far. Mind you, arranging for performances has become rather problematic!

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Over at Slipped Disc, Max Raimi, violist with the Chicago Symphony, explains what is wrong with the New York Times piece arguing against blind auditions. You should read the whole thing as it is hard to excerpt, but this quote focuses on what was bothering me in the Tommasini article:

A significant percentage, very possibly a majority of our auditions, end up with us failing to hire a musician.  I am currently on the audition committee to find a new Principal Viola.  We have had two rounds of auditions—prelims, semis, and finals—and have heard well over 100 candidates.  We even tried out two of the more promising players, having them play a few concerts as Principal.  The committee and our Music Director, Riccardo Muti, have been in agreement that none of the candidates meet our standards.  Mr. Tommasini’s premise, that there is any number of more-or-less interchangeable candidates who can fill the openings in our major orchestras and the decision of which of them to select is essentially arbitrary is a fantasy.

Yes, despite Juilliard, it is not the case that there are herds of "people who are essentially indistinguishable in their musicianship and technique.” As Max Raimi points out, there is a sleight of hand there in including musicianship alongside technique. Yes, there are lots of accomplished technicians, but an orchestra, as well as a string quartet, is looking for someone who is musically compatible and can play the notes.

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Looking around for something cheery and whimsical, I went to The Atlantic and found this: The Song of the Summer Is in Chaos.

What does summer sound like this year? I can only speak for myself, and the answer is that summer sounds like a cartoon character singing over a scratched reggaeton CD. “Mequetrefe,” by the Venezuelan experimental musician Arca, has lately been my default get-moving song, though the places I have to get moving to are mostly the couch and the grocery store. The song is a mess of glitchy noise, with a catchy, hopeful groove that disintegrates and reconstitutes. Restless energy, unpredictable disruption, and sunshine—it’s very now.

Here is the song he is talking about:

 

About the best thing you could say about that is that it is mercifully brief.

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We have a new Beethoven biography from Laura Tunbridge reviewed in The Guardian:

Tunbridge’s pithy A Life in Nine Pieces is different and welcome: a biography presented through the focus of nine different compositions, each casting light on aspects of Beethoven’s life, character and, given equal and readily comprehensible attention, the music. Her choices span early to late repertoire: from one of his first successes in Vienna, the Septet, to the Grosse Fuge, via Symphony No 3 “Eroica”, the opera Fidelio, and the Missa Solemnis. Tunbridge, an Oxford professor here publishing her first non-academic book, writes clearly, explaining technical terms on the go and with ease: never an easy combination.

More interested in reality than myth – with Beethoven, there’s rather too much of it about – she is particularly sharp-eyed, and refreshing, on the practicalities that shape any artist’s life. How to make a living is a priority. “Reference is made throughout this book to the sums Beethoven earned,” reads the first introductory note. “He was strapped for cash,” she observes baldly, in those or similar words, more than once. How to find a venue, how to get a score published, how many rehearsals can be squeezed in (usually only one, leading to some disastrous premieres), how much tickets should cost, how to wheedle rich sponsors into donating, how to deal with the uncomfortable business of self-promotion: all make the difference between food on the table or hunger, performance or silence. Ask any composer working today. The issues have not changed.

Exactly!

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From an economist, a fresh idea about arts funding: The Arts Need a Bailout, Too.

Arts vouchers are similar to education vouchers except that they cover the arts. The government would hand them out to each American and allow state and local governments to specify which institutions and individuals would be eligible to receive such vouchers as payment. Unlike direct grants to arts institutions, arts vouchers give consumers a big say in where aid goes. They could be more popular with voters, because they give each one a direct benefit — namely, cash in pocket (yes, they would have to spend it on the arts, but it’s still cash).

Most of all, vouchers would recognize that planning authorities, even at state and local levels, don’t always know which artistic forms will be popular. If some reallocations are inevitable — for instance out of nightclubs and into outdoor bluegrass festivals — vouchers will allow those preferences to be registered quickly.

Obviously, if state and local governments specify a narrow set of eligible recipients, arts vouchers aren’t much different than direct grants. In that case, little is lost. Still, one hopes that vouchers can be used more imaginatively. Imagine the city of Detroit allowing vouchers to be spent not just at the Detroit Institute of the Arts but also on hip-hop, street art and outdoor theatre.

Of course for the classically-minded this poses a few problems. Does Kanye West need to be bailed out to the same extent as the Chicago Symphony? How do we decide? Classical music has always been something more than a popularity contest. Right?

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Pop music isn't so much about the music any more: From Rihanna to Kanye West: Why Music’s Biggest Stars Aren’t Focused on Actual Music

Creating new albums is less important than leveraging fame to launch businesses that can boost profits, feed fans eager for news and extend celebrity beyond the shrinking shelf-life of music careers. This is a sign of how the economics of the industry have changed (streaming isn’t lucrative in the way that CDs once were, and there’s no longer stigma associated with “selling out”). It also indicates how music as a stand-alone art form has lost clout as a cultural force and become more of a promotional tool. 

Roughly 20% to 50% of the typical superstar’s income now comes from revenue unrelated to music activities, music-industry executives say. When A-list acts aren’t touring, things like cosmetics lines, American Idol judgeships and sponsored Instagram posts can account for the lion’s share—80% or more—of income. That’s up dramatically from a decade ago when such side hustles usually didn’t exceed 10% or 20% of income and were negligible for most artists, insiders say.

That's likely behind the Wall Street Journal paywall, but you get the idea.

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For our envoi, a piece I have not heard for many years, the early Septet by Beethoven:

 

Music Theory and Meta-Music Theory

Yes, I know I said I was going to do more educational posts for a wider readership, and I will. On Sunday I will put up another post on listening. But I will also continue to post on things that interest me as a composer.

Music theory is an often-puzzling topic for me as I suspect it is for many composers. I am reminded of a Shostakovich anecdote. He was sitting down to breakfast with a friend and commented that the cook making the eggs in the kitchen was like a musicologist (or music theorist) in that he worked with the eggs and prepared them to eat, but it is we that actually enjoy them. Some composers also have a significant role as theorists and Schoenberg comes first to mind. But most composers, when they speak of theory at all, do so rather cryptically. For them it is what Glenn Gould once called a "centipedal" question. The centipede was standing by the road one day when someone came along and said "I have often wondered, since you have so very many legs, which one do you actually start with when you walk?" This question was so troubling for the centipede that he didn't know how to answer it and thinking about it he froze by the side of the road, unable to move.

Music theory comes in many varieties: the kind of Roman numeral harmonic analysis we learn in first year theory, but also the kind of rudimentary counterpoint one learns using the "species" method. Then there is structural analysis or form functional analysis. There is also the kind of specialized analysis that is associated with the identifying of rows in serial music. Schenkerian analysis has become very popular as have some varieties of what is called "psychological" analysis. Analysis depends on some kind of underlying theory. For example, the Roman numeral harmonic analysis depends on a highly developed method of labeling chords according to their role in harmonic progressions and according to their inversion. The theory of chord inversion originates with Jean-Philippe Rameau in his treatise of 1722. It is elaborated by the harmonic practice of J. S. Bach in his chorale harmonizations and has been refined over the centuries since.

Modern compositions such as the Rite of Spring by Stravinsky which is based on the use of Russian folksong and the octatonic scale did not receive a real theoretical explanation, or partial explanation at least!, until the 1960s. In general the practices of composers like Haydn and Mozart were only partially understood for a long time. Rules of thumb under the term: "sonata-allegro form" were applied, but the truth is that for every so-called theoretical "rule" there were more exceptions than anything else. I think that we are still struggling a bit with some pieces by Beethoven and Chopin.

At the end of the day, music theory, while certainly useful and interesting, is of only modest value to the ordinary listener and not much more to the composer. I can safely say that while I have read a great deal of what Schoenberg has to say about composition, I don't find that it has the slightest influence on what I write.

What you do as a composer when you sit down to write something is look for inspiration--but no, it doesn't actually work that way. What you do is wait and hope for something to come along, some idea that will give you an opening. It can come from any source, but for me it often comes from imagining some kind of musical idea. Once one comes along that seems promising I start writing. It is not an intellectual process however. I just write stuff and if it seems the right stuff I keep it, but often it is not right and I throw it away. Schoenberg once said to a student, pointing to the eraser end of a pencil that this end was more important than the other end, that you write with. I often sketch on paper because music software can be so limiting.

When I am writing I stumble across things that I really like and I try to figure out what make that particular combination of notes so pleasing so I can do it again or develop it in some way. This is a kind of theorizing I suppose, but the difference with conventional music theory is that this is very local and specific while music theory in general tries to be general and universal.

Ok, let's listen to something. This is the Missa Salve Regina by Tomas Luis de Victoria.

Proust, Music and Structure

Reading Marcel Proust's giant landscape of a novel makes me muse about musical structure. A lot of structure in music comes from the dance and from song, which means that the structure is more akin to poetry than prose. We don't use iambic pentameter much, but we sure use 4/4 and eight and sixteen measure phrases a lot. At least that was the norm in 18th century music. In the 19th century music got more "prosy" with more irregular phrases and wandering themes.

Proust's Remembrance of Things Past is one digression after another, one parenthetical thought modifying another parenthetical thought inside a giant digression--and by "giant" digression I am thinking of one that went on for some two hundred pages. A single sentence can contain digressions so vast that you have to search back to find the verb, or even the subject noun! But while extreme, this kind of parenthetical approach to the novel is not unique: I can think of one other case. That would be The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, published in 1767. That too is characterized by digressions within digressions so extreme that while the book begins discussing the birth of Tristram Shandy (who is also the narrator), the digressions are so extreme that we don't actually reach said birth until volume three. Proust's approach is very different, but the time structure is so complex because of the regressions and digressions that you never quite know where you are: "In Search of Lost Time" indeed, as the original title in French literally translates.

The composer whose music this reminds me of, sort of, is Allan Pettersson whose great shaggy dog symphonies similarly seem to keep winding around themselves. Of course a digression in language is a semantic phenomenon, something not possible in instrumental music, but still, there is something of a similar feel possible in music. The most magical moments in Proust are when the original topic suddenly reappears and you realize that you are just coming out of a digression. A similar effect occurs in Pettersson when one of his monolithic boulders of a theme reappears after a long stretch of other material. Here, have a listen to his Symphony No. 7. This is a 2017 recording with Daniel Harding conducting the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra.

A Plan For Listening

Back when I started this blog a lot of it was devoted to music education in one form or another. I realize that in recent years I have wandered away from this kind of thing and perhaps I need to bring it back. A lot of readers might benefit from this kind of information.

So let's start with something basic: a listening plan. As I recently demonstrated to myself, you can get a lot done with a little planning. The exact opposite of a planned investigation of something is what we do on the Web: just surf around randomly. When you do that you tend to fall victim to the Web hucksters and bait and switchers. Have you noticed that YouTube recently has become dominated by them? Just about every clip offered up is deceptive to some extent. Top ten this, worst that, most embarrassing the other. It is like a kind of evil carnival of crap.

I think the solution is to not be a feckless wanderer, but to plan things out a bit. If you were going on a vacation you would most likely do a little planning: book a hotel, arrange a flight, decide where you would most like to visit. Only a few of us would just jump in the car and start driving (though that can be interesting on occasion).

So here is a basic plan for listening that should take you from acquaintance with the fundamental kinds of music with the emphasis on classical music, to an appreciation of some of the more challenging varieties. Let's organize it by weeks assuming that you can set aside one hour a week to just listen. Hey, one benefit is that it will get you into a peaceful, possibly meditative, environment for a short while at least. And if you are still trapped at home, at least it will give you something to do.

What you will need: a private place free from interruptions. That means no phone, no messages, no WhatsApp. Somewhere you can shut the door and just be by yourself. If you want a partner, that's fine as well. But listen, don't talk. Next, you need a decent sound system. These days that means either a good set of speakers for your computer or a good set of earbuds or headphones. Please don't try and do your listening with your built-in laptop or iPad speakers. For one thing, they really don't have any bass. The good news is I don't have to send you out to your local record store to buy anything because a) there is no local record store any more and b) everything is on YouTube. Yes, I know I was just dissing YouTube, but if you are searching for something in particular it is quite good--just not for random browsing.

Ok, now that you are all set, where do we start? Classical music is huge and I'm not going to restrict the listening to just classical. What do I mean by huge? One thousand years of notated music compositions by thousands of composers. That's a million pieces of music at least. But, thankfully, they are not all equally significant, great, important or delightful for the listener, however you want to think of it. You can listen to one fugue by Bach and get more out of it than listening to a hundred fugues by his contemporaries. So let's start week one with a mini-survey of a few pieces by some of the composers who really stand out from the crowd.

Week One: J. S. Bach. Well, yes, this obscure Saxon organist in the 18th century somehow manages to get himself at the top of every list of great composers. And it's not through adroit marketing as he never had any. He just writes really wonderful music. I'm going to pick three pieces to give you an over-view. He wrote a set of pieces in all the keys for keyboard, largely for the education of his sons. If you want to know about keys, here is a good Wikipedia article. But let's get right to the music. Here is the Prelude and Fugue in C major from book one (yes, he wrote two books) played by Friedrich Gulda:

Here is a piece for solo violin, the Siciliana from the Sonata No. 1 played by Hilary Hahn:

At the other end of the spectrum here is his Magnificat for vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra with the Netherlands Bach Society conducted by Jos van Veldhoven.

The whole piece is twenty-eight minutes long, but you can listen to just the first two pieces which are a bit over five minutes total.

Next composer is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart whom I am sure you have heard of. Amadeus was an excellent film about him from the viewpoint of his rival, Salieri. Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria and became famous from age nine when he went on a two-year tour of Europe with his father and sister. There is likely no more famous child prodigy in any field than Mozart. He received his first opera commission, from La Scala in Milan, when he was only fourteen! He wrote lovely, graceful and dramatic music in every important genre from the piano sonata to the string quartet to the symphony and opera. Let's listen to a little divertimento he wrote when he was only sixteen. There are three movements, quick, slow, quick and the second one has some of the most beautiful harmonic clashes you will ever hear. Ton Koopman conducts the Amsterdam Baroque Orchesta.

Near the end of his life Mozart wrote three great symphonies in one summer. The last of them, Symphony No. 41 in C major, ends with a finale movement that I don't think anyone has ever topped for sheer transcendental joy. He combines several different themes in a way that seems to rise into heaven. The rumor is that the angels in heaven, when they wish to praise God, play Bach. But when they just want to have fun, they play Mozart. Sorry, Blogger won't embed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoJTJMv2iNY

That only comes to forty minutes of listening, but it is hard to find anything to follow that finale! So let's stop there for this week.

Public Service Announcement

I didn't realize when I walked into the first meeting of my Philosophy 100 class many years ago that it would have as much impact as it did. My other courses were things like Music History, Music Theory, German Literature, Linguistics and English. But none of the courses and professors had as much long term impact as the philosophy one. Mind you, English came close. The philosophy professor was a new hire, probably no more than thirty years old. The class had only 20 or so students (that same class in the same university today has 300 students) and he taught it like a graduate seminar. Each week we were assigned readings from people like Thomas Aquinas, David Hume and Bishop Berkeley (I'm afraid I forget the others) and the following class we would argue about them. I'm pretty sure this is exactly how Plato taught at the Academy. A lot of the course seemed to revolve around questions of epistemology: how do we know what we know and do we really know it? The reading from Berkeley was really memorable. It was one of the dialogues between Hylas and Philonous about the principles of human knowledge. I won't go into the details, but suffice it to say that we were all outraged at the absurdity of Berkeley's claims and went into class to argue them. We crashed and burned. The professor won every argument because he was trained in how to argue philosophically. The whole course was like that and it was pretty much the only one in my many years at university in which critical thinking skills were not only taught, but actually practiced.

Occasionally the professor would begin a class with what he would call a "public service announcement." One day he cautioned us against hard contact lenses, for example. Today I would like to follow his example and offer a few public service announcements. Forgive me if they wander away from strictly musical questions!

1. Borrowing one from Jordan Peterson's book 12 Rules for Life, his rule 8 is "Tell the truth--or at least, don't lie." This is a really good one and it has an epistemological dimension. When you lie to someone you are giving them false knowledge instead of real knowledge. The consequences can be terrible. You can judge this by what happens when someone lies to you.
2. Read something worthwhile every day. A few months ago I realized that I had gotten out of the habit of reading actual books in hard copy. I would get up every morning and read a few newspapers and blogs online before getting into my emails. I was still reading light fiction on my Kindle so I wasn't a complete cyberslug, but close. So I resolved to start the day by reading something meaningful before doing anything else. It was an excellent plan as since then I have read a Schoenberg biography, a book on musical analysis, another on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, another on music in Java and now I have started the biggest project of all: Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. This is a 3,000 page novel that hardly anyone actually finishes. When people talk about it they always mention the bit about the madelaine, the little pastry the taste of which brings back all the narrator's memories of his time in Combray when he was young. Yes, it is a nice bit, but the reason it is mentioned so often is that it is on page 48! And that's as far as many people get. I have been trying to finish it for, believe it or not, about forty years. I have gotten as far as the beginning of volume two (in English translation) but no further. I am reading ten pages a day, so in three months I will have finished volume one.
3. Never vote for a socialist. It may seem a good idea as they are always promising nice things like healthcare and free tuition, and they always seem to be really, really ethical and so on. But let's take a Canadian example that should be remote enough from most people's experience to be able to be viewed objectively. Back in 1944, after considerable social unrest, Saskatchewan elected its first socialist government, also the first in North America. Over seventy years later, it is still trying to recover. Here is an illuminating article: Saskatchewan is still struggling to overcome 70 years of socialism. A quote: "Canada’s breadbasket – which had 921,000 people in 1931 – still had just 968,000 in 2006. Meanwhile, Alberta (the neighboring province) grew from 731,000 people to nearly 4.4 million today. Saskatchewan ex-pat oil executives in Edmonton and Calgary jokingly called their former province, “the old country.” Proof of the Saskatchewan diaspora was made evident by fans wearing green at Roughrider games in every city. Some still left in the homeland, drove with novelty license plates which read, “Soviet Saskatchewan Smothered in Socialism,” complete with a hammer and sickle."
4. Try to save 10% of your income for a future rainy day. When you have enough saved up open a brokerage account and buy some stock indices. The best one to start with is the S&P 500 which trades under the symbol SPY. Just buy it and forget it. From time to time, buy more. After a while you might look into getting an aggregate bond ETF as well. This strategy, by the way, is more successful than 92% of all active money managers, so don't bother paying them to advise you.
5. How about some musical ones? Practice slowly, really listening to what you are doing.
6. Listen actively, not passively. In other words, don't put something on just to be sonic wallpaper in the background. If it is suitable for that purpose it is not worth listening to (except maybe if it is by Erik Satie...). If is is worth listening to, then turn it up and really listen.
7. Don't worry, things are never as bad as they seem and especially don't worry that we are all doomed by climate change. It ain't so. The models are not successfully predictive and they are based on faulty data.
8. And finally, quoting from Kanye West, the thing to remember is, Don't Believe Anything You See On The News.

And that was our public service announcement. Now for some nice music. We should always either play or at least listen to some Bach every day (hey, that should have been number nine) so here is Misha Maisky with the Cello Suite No. 2.

Friday Miscellanea

This has not been a very productive week for posting, I'm afraid! Sorry 'bout that. Lots of housekeeping to do: after putting it off for years I finally updated my Mac OS from 10.11, whatever that one was called, to 10.15 Catalina. I wanted to both update my Finale music software and try out Sibelius and both required a more current OS. The only downside I can see so far is that the new Calendar wiped out all my reminders about birthdays and utility bills in my old Calendar. AGH!

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With all the dispiriting news of the effects of the pandemic on the music world we have been forgetting that it is the 250th year since Beethoven's birth. The Guardian has a piece with cultural figures picking out their favorite Beethoven: 'The nearest to God we get': stars pick the Beethoven work they cherish.

‘Written after recovering from an intestinal disorder’

Katie Mitchell, director

Beethoven String Quartet in A minor, Op 132 – written in 1825 after he recovered from a nearly fatal intestinal disorder – is my favourite because of its strange third movement. Marked molto adagio, it is about 20 minutes long (depending on your recording) and alternates between slow funereal sections in the key of F and joyful fast movements in D marked “Neue Kraft Fuhlend”, or “feeling new strength”. It is these unexpected leaps of regrowth coming out of the slow sad sections that always fill me with possibility if I am feeling low. A study in hope.

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I was going to attend at least one of Igor Levit's complete Beethoven piano sonata cycle at Salzburg in August. Slipped Disc informs us that he will be giving all eight concerts at the Berliner Festspiele:

From 25 August, Igor Levit will play Ludwig van Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas over eight concerts in the Philharmonie’s main hall. The Staatskapelle Berlin and Daniel Barenboim will perform Mozart’s last three symphonies. Cellist Nicolas Altstaedt will perform Bach’s solo suites in the Philharmonie. Trumpeter Marco Blaauw will accompany the film “Moving Picture (946-3)” by Gerhard Richter and Corinna Belz with music by Rebecca Saunders, at the Zoo Palast cinema. The festival end on 23 September with a Wolfgang Rihm premiere, “Stabat Mater”, performed by Tabea Zimmermann and Christian Gerhaher.

The question is, how are they managing the seating in the hall?

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On the other hand, we are also told that there will be no musical events in Philadelphia before March 2021:

Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney on Tuesday announced a moratorium on most large public events in the city through Feb. 28, 2021, to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

“I know this news will be disappointing for many Philadelphians, it was not an easy decision to make,” Kenney told a news conference. “But as we continue to battle COVID-19 and try to restore some sense of normalcy in our city, we know there will be many difficult decisions to come.”

The mayor said the moratorium will apply to events of 50 people or more on public property, including but not limited to festivals, parades, concerts, carnivals, fairs and flea markets.

Apparently this does not affect events in private halls?

 

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One really gets the impression that certain employment policies in the arts are designed, not for fairness, but simply to achieve an ideological end: To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions.

During the tumultuous summer of 1969, two Black musicians accused the New York Philharmonic of discrimination. Earl Madison, a cellist, and J. Arthur Davis, a bassist, said they had been rejected for positions because of their race.

The city’s Commission on Human Rights decided against the musicians, but found that aspects of the orchestra’s hiring system, especially regarding substitute and extra players, functioned as an old boys’ network and were discriminatory. The ruling helped prod American orchestras, finally, to try and deal with the biases that had kept them overwhelmingly white and male. The Philharmonic, and many other ensembles, began to hold auditions behind a screen, so that factors like race and gender wouldn’t influence strictly musical appraisals.

Of course, this wasn't the solution to everything. When I was a graduate student in performance at McGill way back when, one of my fellow students was flautist Tim Hutchins. Even then they were holding blind auditions, first in Canada, and then international. After his Canadian audition, no-one was chosen, but he later won the international audition and has been principal flute for the Montreal Symphony ever since. The obvious lesson here was that the Canadian auditions were a mere formality. No wonder Canadian musicians sometimes despair at actually getting work in their own country! So what is the problem with blind auditions today?

American orchestras remain among the nation’s least racially diverse institutions, especially in regard to Black and Latino artists. In a 2014 study, only 1.8 percent of the players in top ensembles were Black; just 2.5 percent were Latino. At the time of the Philharmonic’s 1969 discrimination case, it had one Black player, the first it ever hired: Sanford Allen, a violinist. Today, in a city that is a quarter Black, just one out of 106 full-time players is Black: Anthony McGill, the principal clarinet.

The status quo is not working. If things are to change, ensembles must be able to take proactive steps to address the appalling racial imbalance that remains in their ranks. Blind auditions are no longer tenable.

At first it seems hard to disagree with the logic here, but it is necessary to accept the principle that equity demands that membership in an orchestra reflect the demographics of the community--a quota system in other words. Should not the onus be to explain why you are going to remove current musicians who have won their places fairly? Let's take this a step further: my envoi today is a performance by the Emerson Quartet. If it seems reasonable to force orchestras to reflect demographics in their makeup, then why should string quartets be immune? Shouldn't the Emerson Quartet, four older white men, be instead refashioned to include a woman and a person of color? Shouldn't all string quartets be thus reformed? Oh, you think that string quartets should be allowed to freely select their members as they do now? Then why should an orchestra be any different?

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 WQXR, a New York radio station, has a two-parter on the rise and sputtering out of "crossover." Part One: CDs and Happy Accidents.

It is a story about what we, the music-buying public, think we think about classical music. It’s about new technologies, and how classical music got flipped and turned upside down. It’s about the corporate greed of the 1980s and the consumer excess of the 1990s. It’s about the music industry’s private hell of the 2000s. 

We’re talking about classical crossover. 

It was the success of The Three Tenors that encouraged an explosion of crossover-centric acts in the ’90s, among them Cecilia Bartoli and Andrea Bocelli. It was artists like these, Barbero contends, who “didn’t redefine classical crossover, but actually redefined classical music.” Before, a classical artist would stick to the core repertoire, and dispense some popular goods every once in a while, as a treat — it was like a Christmas bonus for the label. But after 1990, that crossover power became the norm; the expectation was that you’d crank out hit after hit, and maybe you’d do an entire Wagner or Mozart album. Crossover became such an integral pillar of label success that PolyGram eventually clove its classical department in twain, with “core” on one side and “crossover” on another.

And the sequel: Part Two: Hot n' Corny.

This decade of classical crossover dominance suffered a slow death, and started with big egos and bad ideas. Chief among them, in Barbero’s opinion, were the new pop executives in charge of the classical division, the kind of executives that replaced employees that actually knew something about the music. Classical divisions, which in the wake of the CD revolution swelled to massive numbers of employees, were shrinking as decision makers let pop divisions subsume them. “Labels had gotten so small, they shed most of their staff,” said Barbero. “And so they were essentially like divisions of pop, and the pop guys don't have anything to do with opera. They hear it for a second and they completely shut it down.” This lack of knowledge combined with an increasing reliance on sex appeal, and laid bare discriminations in the process.

There is a third part yet to come.

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The Problem of Shostakovich?

The sheer extremity of the music is another striking feature, whether conveying manic elation, aggression, mockery or despair... Whatever is meant by profundity in music—the abstract quality above all that, together with beauty, makes people want to listen to it—Shostakovich achieved only intermittently. The constraints within which he had to operate fashioned his stream into a different course. We will therefore derive the most satisfaction from his work if we accept that it is best understood as a permanent and eloquent description of a monstrous tyranny, and recognise that in general it is unhelpful to divorce it from that context. 

At its best, this merging of music and historical commentary creates works of enduring power, and we may take as an example the justly famous 8th quartet, written “in memory of the victims of fascism and war”. It is spell-binding from start to finish. Although it begins with a homage to Beethoven, the piece is full of autobiography and self-quotation; it unmistakably evokes both the suffering of the Jewish people, which this most philo-Semitic of composers treated as a synecdoche for all mid-20th century human miseries, and the omnipresent fear of the secret policeman. Shostakovich had lived through both, and for that reason among others the work is invariably a success in performance.

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And that gives us our envoi for today: the String Quartet No. 8 by Shostakovich:

 

How I Should Be Composing

This is really fascinating! According to an article in the Wall Street Journal today, this is how actual professional cultural creators work: The Data-Driven Tech Engine at the Heart of Hollywood’s Content Factories.

America’s studios, creators and marketers are relying, more than ever, on digital platforms that allow them to gauge what audiences like—and would like to see more of. They’re not just looking for test screenings, either. They’re looking to check in with potential audiences at every stage of production, from before a script is written until the moment their new TV show, film or music video debuts.

Netflix is projected to spend more on new and acquired content in 2020—$17 billion—than Apple Inc. spent on research and development in 2019.

With stakes that high, minimizing risk when creating new content “at scale” means treating it like any other mass-market product. Executives, producers, writers, directors and marketers need to be able to consistently craft programs that are more likely than not to find their target audiences. Critical approval and industry awards—even box-office blowouts—while nice, aren’t the endgame for most.

I've totally been doing it wrong. But of course, there is a lot less at stake in a new composition by Bryan Townsend as compared to a new film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe or a new tv series on Netflix. Actually, I'm not sure if anything is at stake if you mean income. I used to just throw my royalty checks from my books on guitar technique and transcriptions in a drawer as it was hardly worth cashing them. And the royalties from my compositions were so paltry that I told my publisher to let them accumulate until it was worth the trouble. As far as outlays go, I have been thinking about buying the Sibelius music software (which is a pricey $599) as it apparently handles quarter-tones much better than Finale which I have been using for twenty years or so. Yes, I am thinking about writing something for prepared quarter-tone guitar.

But taking to heart the kind of procedure outlined above, obviously what I should be doing is preparing a sketch or two and submitting them to the critical views of my readers so I will know what they will like. Then I will know how to proceed. Right? I just started sketching out some ideas for my String Quartet No. 3, so why don't you have a look and tell me what you think?

Click to enlarge

Let me just walk you through that. At the top is a projected title for the possible piece. A very long time ago I used the title "Unbounded Vision in Blue and Purple" for a weird little piece for flute and guitar and sketched out a couple of others with similar titles. The reference is to visual art. This one, abbreviated to "UV in Grey & White" might be a subtitle for the piece. Below that is a collection of pitches that consist in a central pitch of D extending upward in semi-tone, tone, semi-tone, tone, semi-tone steps which is a segment from the octatonic scale. Then the same series of intervals are used to extend down from the D. I whimsically call this a "hypo-octatonic" scale after the terminology for Medieval and Renaissance modes. Below that I have the two octatonic scales on D, one beginning with the semitone and the other with the tone. Below that again, I have the two endpoints of the original scale but this time used as the central point in hypo versions. To the right is a sketch of a possible overall structure: one movement in five sections of roughly three minutes each with some ideas as to the content. At the extreme bottom left is a condensation of the material used in a new version of my old piece, "Unbounded Vision in Blue and Purple," this time rewritten for violin and guitar. The guitar largely arpeggiates the chord (fingering shown) while the violin is largely restricted to the C and B flat pitches. In the original version I was experimenting with the elimination of the idea of pitch-class, the notion used in nearly all Western music, that all multiples of a given frequency are the "same."  That is, all As whether 110, 220, 440, 880 or whatever, are the "same" note. If you eliminate that concept, then every note is itself.

So whaddayathink? Scrap it? Go forward? If you are my "target audience" you must have some thoughts?

Ok, yes, this is a bit satirical, but actually when a piece nears completion, I often find the reactions of some close musical friends to be quite useful.

There is a little caveat at the end of the article that gives me hope:

One obvious pitfall of reducing art to surveys and data is that it gives producers and executives too much leverage over the creatives they rely on to generate hits. And the biggest hits often gain popularity because they head off in a new and unexpected direction, representing the vision of a single person or small creative team. They might not benefit from these modern-day focus groups.

Clive James on Music and Politics

I mentioned a while back that I'm reading Cultural Amnesia by Clive James, Australian critic, broadcaster and journalist. It is a rather substantial book, over 800 pages, organized in a very interesting way. He has a long list of writers, poets, musicians, philosophers and other cultural figures and he has organized this list into alphabetical order. Then he writes an essay on each figure, but ranges widely in each essay. So you never quite know what you are going to stumble across. For example, in his essay on the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke he gets into a lengthy discussion of Bertolt Brecht which leads him into art and politics. Then he gets into music:

In my first year in London I heard Walter Gieseking play at the Festival Hall. I was not much bothered by his connection with Nazi Germany. If I had known then just how much of a Nazi he had been, I might have walked out, but I would have missed some good Beethoven. At least Gieseking was a German. Alfred Cortot was a Frenchman, and therefore would have been something worse than a Nazi sympathizer even if he had just played the piano at Parisian soirées well peopled with grey and black uniforms—a Sacha Guitry of the keyboard. Actually he did more: he was an active collaborator, denouncer and thoroughgoing rat. But he is not famous for it and probably shouldn’t be. After Rubinstein, two of the major players of Chopin are Rachmaninoff and Cortot. Rachmaninoff fled from totalitarianism and Cortot stayed to profit: but they both sound wonderful. At Covent Garden and the Festival Hall during my first years in London, you could hear German conductors who had been forced to flee and others who had chosen to stay: I heard, among others, Rudolf Kempe, Karl Böhm, Hans Knappertsbusch, Herbert von Karajan and Otto Klemperer. Everyone knew that Klemperer went into exile and that Karajan had a Nazi party number, but who knows now, of Kempe, Böhm and Knappertsbusch, which one stayed on in the Third Reich? (Trick question: they all did.) And who cares?

James, Clive. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (pp. 619-620). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

I have to say I feel a certain affinity with Clive James and Australians in general. Like so many involuntary Aussie immigrants, my family arrived in Canada as criminal deportees, exiled from England, Nottingham to be precise, for poaching the King's deer. That was in 1740 so we might have been the first Townsends in what was then Upper Canada and is now Ontario. Anyway, I like the brash directness of Australians. He goes on:

Well, of course we should care. The question is how. In the brains department, and therefore in the area of moral responsibility, conductors traditionally rate above performers. Hearing and watching Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sing Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” with maximum purse-lipped projection of the umlauts, I had no trouble resisting the impulse to throw her a Hitler salute as a reminder of the sort of audience she had once wowed in Berlin. But if Furtwängler had been conducting the band it might have been a different matter.

James, Clive. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (p. 620). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Let's listen to a little Gieseking, shall we? This is his 1951 recording of the Moonlight Sonata.

 

Friday Miscellanea

The fetishization of the Goldberg Variations continues: Lang Lang delivers two versions, concert and studio. From the press release:

Pianist Lang Lang has conquered a musical Everest, realising a lifelong dream with his brand-new recording of J. S. Bach’s monumental keyboard work Goldberg Variations. Set for release on Deutsche Grammophon on 4th September, Lang Lang gives two complementary performances. The first was recorded in a single take in concert at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Bach’s workplace for almost 30 years and his final resting place; the second was made soon after, in the seclusion of the studio. The two recordings, purchased together as part of a super deluxe edition, make this a world-first simultaneous live and studio album release.

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The Toronto Symphony becomes the latest to cancel: Toronto Symphony Orchestra cancels 2020-21 season, announces plans for smaller events.

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Here is an interesting article on something that is not often publicly discussed in the music world: After Corona, pay inequality among musicians will be unsustainable. The argument is fairly long and involved, but this captures the core of it:

Footballers attract attention because they earn colossal wages. But unlike CEOs, those wages are determined by the specifics of their performance week-to-week, which in turn demand extreme talent, focus and self-discipline. They are also market-driven: by-products of the huge worldwide demand and excitement their performances attract. There is a big difference between a Premier League player and a professional lower down the leagues.

A bigger gulf, you might say, than that which exists between a professional string player who sits in an ensemble and a soloist who commands a five-figure sum for playing a concerto in front of it. It’s known that top-end opera stars can attract fees of around €15,000 a night and there are string-playing soloists who are not far behind. These musicians may be those hit hardest by the crisis, with no salaries to fall back on. But they are also emblematic of the inequality that exists in our own industry, whereby largely state-funded charities pay more to visiting musicians for a few hours of work than many of their dependable full-time employees will earn in four months.

The hidden claim here is that the difference between a top-notch soccer player and professional players in the lesser leagues is significant while the difference between a classical soloist and a rank-and-file orchestral player is not very significant. The one is market driven and the other is not. There is also the interesting side claim that CEO salaries are also not really market driven.

In the long term, something bigger has to change. Wages in Premier League football have been inflated by unprecedented demand and a huge influx of cash from various sources. Many classical music organisations, in contrast, have seen their economic models steadily undermined just as soloist fees have rocketed. As the realities of our new situation sink in, we must ask ourselves if it’s necessary to make one section of our professional community inordinately rich, while the rest risk destitution.

Classical music and free markets are always uncomfortable bedfellows, but despite the fact that classical music can only survive with substantial subsidies, either from private patrons or government, the pay for soloists vs for orchestral players is not arbitrary. Orchestras hire famous soloists for very pragmatic reasons: they attract big audiences. This kind of argument is just the old socialist myths recycled.

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I always enjoy those stories of how someone discovered classical music. Here is one from Daniel Johnson:

It wasn’t until I went to the grammar school that I could make friendships and develop independent tastes. It was only then that music — real music, though it never occurred to me to call it “classical” — suddenly hit me with the force of an aural revelation. Although it was a couple of years later that I read Nietzsche, without knowing it I already subscribed to his credo, articulated in The Birth of Tragedy: “Only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world eternally justified.”

How did I discover music, by far the most intense manifestation of this aesthetic phenomenon? Music coincided with puberty, with the discovery of love and, especially, death. Still vivid in my memory is the Funeral March from Beethoven’s Eroica, played at the obsequies of the murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. That symphony was one of the first records I owned, soon to be surpassed in my personal pantheon by the Ninth. Even more suggestive was Mozart’s Requiem, which I sang with the choir and which I instantly felt familiar.

Hey, let's drop the phrase "classical music" and just call it "real music." 

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Now here is a good idea: the Montreal Symphony is going to give a concert in a vacant parking lot at the Montreal airport. After all, most airport parking lots are empty these days!

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And a thumb-sucker from Alex Ross at The New Yorker: Musicians and Composers Respond to a Chaotic Moment. He starts by describing this music video:

You can probably imagine what he would write--the first thing I thought of was Jimi Hendrix' version of The Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock and Ross mentions it right away in paragraph two. He goes on:

The prevalent sensation of the world cracking in two—Willa Cather said this of the year 1922, and it might be said of 2020 as well—is palpable enough that I’ve been wondering how soon the rupture will leave traces in the work of composers. The lack of any immediate opportunity for performance has made it unlikely that composers will sit down to write the hour-long symphony they’ve been meaning to tackle, yet the coronavirus pandemic and its attendant isolation have already yielded some notable experimental scores. The turn toward protest may inspire a wave of work in a much different register. The strangeness of this moment lies in how it has pulled people both toward an extreme inwardness and toward an outward explosion of feeling. The radically expanded vocabulary of music since 1900 is equipped to span that divide.

The last sentence is the interesting one, or at least its underlying assumptions: that music has a vocabulary, i.e. semantic content, and that whatever it is can have something to do with a sociological divide. Still, whatever it means, it sounds good.

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The Japanese have been doing a lot of research on how orchestras can handle the problems of performing during the pandemic: Reshaping the concert stage.

The critical situation for Coronavirus peaked earlier in Europe than in Japan so we had been able to gather guidance from the European orchestras that had restarted, as well as scientific and medical institutions. However, I spoke to several Japanese medical advisers and decided to hold experiments specific to Japanese orchestras and halls, because there have been different infection and mortality patterns in Japan that might be specific to our situation – our custom of wearing masks and the humidity in Japan.

European trials have recommended distances of 1.5m and 2m (including studies by Freiburg University in cooperation with Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and Berlin’s Charité Medical University with seven Berlin orchestras). We started with 2m between musicians, each with their own stand. This meant that only one person from each section could be at the front, as there wasn’t enough space for two people on the front desk. The number of players in each section was 8–7–6–5–2: a total of 29. With 2m distancing, they were spread far apart and filled the stage, so there was no room for any more – either strings or winds. We also kept 2m between the conductor and front desks, and there was an acrylic board between us.

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 Remember a few years ago, Sting did an album of Dowland? Recently the ensemble of countertenor Iestyn Davies, violist Jonathan Manson and lutenist Thomas Dunford returned the favor by doing the Police tune "Every Breath You Take" as an encore: