I like to have a bit of whimsy in the Friday Miscellanea, which these days is hard to come by. So I will cobble up a bit of my own. I read somewhere recently that typical initial small talk conversation in the US is "So, what do you do for a living?" signaling the focus on work and material achievement. Here are some of my own observations from other countries:
- Mexico: "Do you have any children?" or "How many children do you have?" Indicating the focus on family.
- Canada (ex-Quebec): "How's it going, eh?" Indicating the distinct possibility that it may not be going so well.
- Québec: "Ça va bien, lo?" The same, but in French.
* * *
Columbia Artists, the home of so many great musicians for so many years, is shutting down:
The agency, founded in December 1930, has represented many of the leading conductors, among them Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, James Levine, Eugene Ormandy, Antal Dorati and Otto Klemperer. Its pianists included Vladimir Horowitz and Van Cliburn. and its singer roster had Leontyne Price, Renata Tebaldi, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Risë Stevens, Marian Anderson, Richard Tucker and Jussi Björling.
The agency’s website lists its current roster as including conductors Seiji Ozawa, Valery Gergiev and Mirga Gražinyte-Tyla; singers Isabel Leonard, Russell Thomas and Brenda Rae; and pianist Maurizio Pollini.
* * *
The Guardian used to be a good place to find informative articles on music, and, after a hiatus, it looks like that might be returning. Here is an excellent article on Sibelius:
Few composers dominate their country’s music more completely than Jean Sibelius (1865-1957). His emergence as a composer of international stature in the first decades of the 20th century went hand in hand with Finland’s struggle for self-determination and independence. If, in the decades after his death, his music was dismissed as conservative, he is now accepted as one of the greatest and most original symphonic composers since Beethoven.
Certainly the optimism returned with the Fifth Symphony, premiered in 1915 as a four-movement work, and revised four years later into the three-movement form in which it’s known today. The famous rocking theme of its finale, one of the most memorable in all his works, was inspired by the sight of swans migrating over Ainola, the house in the Finnish countryside where Sibelius and his wife lived for more than 50 years. His Sixth Symphony, first performed in 1923, was different again: almost neoclassical in its transparency, use of modal harmonies and avoidance of traditional symphonic rhetoric, and sometimes seems closer in spirit to Renaissance polyphony than to anything in the symphonic tradition. And the Seventh took that reconfiguring of what a symphony could be still further, compressing all the functions of the form into an organic single movement, as though symphony and tone poem had finally fused.
* * *
Here is a really unusual story, Maria Kolesnikova, one of the leaders of the opposition in Belarus, was kidnapped by masked and armed men in the center of Minsk. It turns out that she is also a classical musician, a flute-player and conductor. Slipped Disc has the story.
* * *
Sorry for all the bad news, but it is hard to find anything else these days! In Sweden, one in three musicians is changing professions:
A survey of 964 musicians in Sweden shows that one-third are making plans to change their profession.
Some 49% have not sought financial support from available corona funds.
Around 17% sought funds but did not receive any.
That means two-thirds have gone without any state subsidy.
* * *
At least Boris is trying to do something: U.K. Pilot Scheme Could Allow Tested Audiences Into Theaters.
Addressing a press conference at Downing Street on Tuesday, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, “Theaters and sports venues could test an audience, all audience members, one day and let in all those with a negative result, all those who are not infectious. Work places could be opened up to all those who test negative in the morning to behave in a way that was exactly as in the world before COVID.”
* * *
Finally something other than the crisis: Darwin’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful: What’s Musical about Biology and Why Does That Matter?
Cecil Sharp, absorbed in the mysterious creativity of oral tradition among ordinary people, instinctively saw the link between song-making and nature: he looked at the dynamic forms of the starling swarms as both beautiful and orderly and instantly saw both of these qualities as—what else to call it?—musical. He was not saying, as so many Romantic artists and critics of the 19th century said, that music was “inspired by” nature or even, as the philosopher Eduard Hanslick said about Beethoven’s Prometheus Overture, that its form grew, not “haphazardly” but in a manner that was like nature: “in organically distinct gradations, like sumptuous blossoming from a bud.” The argument that there is both an aliveness and a wholeness to organic life which is potentially recognizable to musicians in musical terms has in the past been easier to make for those immersed in the invisible, mycorrhyzal webs of oral traditions than in the architectural solidity of art music, with its notations, institutions, theories and formal pedagogies. But let’s not get stuck in these academic distinctions. Undeniably, folk music and art music exist in distinct habitats and have distinct histories, like alligators and bacteria, but as forms of life and as embodiments of living processes common to both, it makes more sense to refer to them both in one breath.
It's a bit long and complicated, but hey, at least it's not about the plague!
* * *
My favorite Canadian music critic, Arthur Kaptainis, has a piece on the just-departed ex-head of the Canadian Opera Company: The COC after Neef: Let the rebuilding begin.
What Neef failed to do spectacularly is build an audience. It is a failure that one might attribute to the vagaries of the economy, the advent of livestreaming, the price of parking or any number of standard-issue excuses that have potential validity anywhere. But there is a central and specific explanation for the underperformance of the COC: a parade of supposedly innovative productions that required a manifesto from the stage director to understand and a six-pack of Red Bull to sit through.
To some readers this conclusion might appear to be just a little tainted by personal opinion, so let us look at the numbers, some of them represented in a helpful article published in 2019 by Ludwig van Toronto. In 2014-15 Neef cut back the COC season from seven mainstage productions to six (one of these being a double bill). He did this despite the company’s residency at the Four Seasons Centre, a beautiful house at a perfect downtown intersection with excellent subway access in a metropolis that was deemed to have surpassed Chicago in size by population.
* * *
A piece from The New Yorker, not by Alex Ross: How Can We Pay for Creativity in the Digital Age?
According to a 2018 survey conducted by the Music Industry Research Association, MusiCares, and the Princeton University Survey Research Center, American musicians earned a median income of twenty-one thousand three hundred dollars from their craft the previous year. A 2014 study by an arts advocacy organization showed that only ten per cent of America’s two million art-school graduates make their primary living as artists.
There’s still plenty of money to be made in art, or writing, or music. It’s just not being made by the creators. Increasingly, their quest for personal artistic fulfillment is part of someone else’s racket.
It's an interesting read, but one of those headlines that promises something it fails to deliver.
* * *
It's a short miscellanea this week as I've been busy writing other posts, and a string quartet. So let's have a bouquet of envois. First, here is one of my favorite Sibelius symphonies, the Fifth Symphony with Jukka-Pekka Saraste conducting the Oslo Philharmonic:
No comments:
Post a Comment