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: