I wanted to link to a couple of lovely livestreamed performances that I listened to this week from the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra, but it appears that as soon as the concert ends they take it off the web. Too bad, because the concerts, conducted by a young Russian conductor (whose name I did not write down) were very good. The strings of the orchestra joined by a young Belgian violinist, played music by Arvo Pärt, Tchaikovsky and a Latvian composer. Keep an eye out for more of these livestreamed concerts.
If you think of Classical Music as a vast and imposing monolith, with both words capitalized, it isn’t an easy thing to take on within a single encounter. Individual pieces, on the other hand, are like people — each one quirky and distinctive, and each one carrying the promise of a lifelong acquaintance.
What strikes me about this list, in fact, is that just as with people, not all of those acquaintances panned out. In other words, this is not at all a list of my favorite music (although there’s some overlap). Some of the works here have been a permanent source of joy and sustenance; some were the subject of intense but short-lived passion; some I communed with once and then never encountered again.
Read on for his interesting selection of several pieces that continue to play an important role in his listening experience.
Easily the most important opera of the last half century, “Einstein on the Beach,” at least at first, meant far more to those who witnessed it than to the art form itself, which couldn’t have cared less. Almost nothing about what composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson put onstage was opera.
“Einstein” has no narrative. “Einstein” has no Einstein, even though a great many onstage are dressed in the iconic image of frizzy-haired scientist. “Einstein on the Beach” has no beach. Glass’ relentlessly fast and loud score is four hard-driving hours of Minimalism. Spoken text comes from the sputtering of mid-1970s New York AM radio, cut up. Sung text consists of a chorus counting rhythms or the solfège syllables of pitches. Wilson’s images revolve around a train/spaceship, trial/prison and field, although at one inexplicable point, a revolutionary Patty Hearst, rifle in hand, finds herself in the action.
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The pickings are very slim this week and I was sick in bed for a couple of days so I didn't do as much preparation as usual. Here are a couple of nice envois. First the Vivace from the Bach Concerto for Two Violins in D minor:
And now the Symphony No. 6 by Tchaikovsky performed by Valery Gergiev conducting the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater:
I'm sorry, I don't have much for you today--or this week even. I've been busy with other things. Today, for example, I have been re-organizing my office and despite being at it for several hours, there is still lots to do. I got a new shelving unit that first I had to put together. I had to remove all the books from another shelf and move it to another room where it is going to hold most of my DVDs. Now I have a huge stack of books I have to go through and decide which to discard. But progress! Every couple of years you really have to reorganize your office--if you are like me at least. You want different stuff in different places. Also, over time, things become very disorganized. Anyway, that was today.
I ran across this photo of the Semperoper in Dresden, their opera house. My lord, it makes the Teatro Real in Madrid look like a barn in comparison:
Semperoper, Dresden
I am hoping to spend a month in Dresden sometime soon and look forward to attending operas in that opera house.
And here is a 2008 production of Verdi's Rigoletto from the Semperoper:
First up, an economist's list of Best classical music recordings of 2020. I found most of his choices both surprising and interesting. And I am likely to pick up the Morton Feldman box of piano music for myself.
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Via Slipped Disc, the numbers on just how bad things are for musicians:
A report by UK Music shows that musicians , on average, lost two-thirds of their income in 2020.
Concert earnings are down by 85%.
The individual impact is disastrous. Before Covid, the average musician earned £23,059, about three-quarters of the national average.
‘Finland is less of a spoiled nation than Sweden, there are fewer temptations. They’ve lived in a dangerous place, been skilled in diplomacy and managed to handle Russia. Therefore they are more introverted and work on their own. Sweden has succeeded in its economy and could afford to hire foreign conductors.
‘Here we have the ratpoison that Finland couldn’t afford. Elias Canetti said: “Success is ratpoison for art.”‘
A famous writer once said something similar. When asked what was better for one's writing, success or failure, he immediately answered, "failure." But he said he preferred success.
The opera, like all cultural institutions, has been shuttered since the pandemic began and there is no date yet for resuming its operations. However, members of the chorus have said, through a spokesman from Shaham, the Israeli Actors’ Association, of which they are a part, that the opera announced its plan to lay them off now – after breaking off negotiations on a new contract – as a way to save money by hiring replacement singers at cheaper rates as freelancers in the future.
Opera is one of those words that contains so much historical and symbolic weight and prejudice that you have to clamber through dense, thorny tangles before you even get to what it might actually be, and if there is anything really left, other than it being a segregated leisure pursuit for the entitled.
What I hate about statements like that is that behind them is the urge to smear everything that is not the lowest common denominator. It is a kind of crude cultural Marxism that says if something is refined, subtle and expensive then it is for the "entitled" meaning those people who are to blame for the fact that the rest of us are "oppressed." The article itself is not bad, but the use of the term "entitled" rankled.
Almost all record labels producing classical music CDs today require artists to pay them, as companies are unlikely to earn enough profit on sales to cover their costs. John Anderson, the owner of Odradek Records, a label which uses a pioneering anonymous selection system to choose its artists, told me, “Not even huge stars get their CDs for free anymore.” Costs can range from about $6,000 to release with a small label, to up to $70,000 for a recording with a major label (including a worldwide publicity blitz). At any price point, records are not expected to pay for themselves, but rather to increase the artist’s prestige, hopefully leading to more concerts with higher rates. (According to the German violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann, DG even receives a cut of some of its artists’ future performance fees.)
Yes, this was certainly my experience. Don't get sucked in by your vanity.
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Here is Triadic Memories by Morton Feldman from the new box set recorded by Philip Thomas:
It grows on you. And here is the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 by J. S. Bach played by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra:
I think that this is the first beach vacation I have ever taken and may be the last. Yes, unless you are into such decadent activities as swimming and sunbathing, beaches are pretty dull places. And there is horrible music everywhere. It's like it's a, I dunno, party town or something. Oh, right! But it is pretty idyllic and a nice place to relax:
Plus there is good seafood like this lobster the size of a small dog:
The scenery is all sky and ocean (those darn clouds are hard to sketch):
The view from my terrace:
No concerts, of course, but then again, there aren't any concerts pretty much anywhere.
I'll be back home tomorrow so blogging might return to normalcy.
A little late today because I was on an airplane this morning.
Singer Mary Bevan details in The Guardian just how awful the virus lockdown has been for self-employed musicians:
We are trained to sing everything from opera to oratorio, madrigals to musicals, in many different languages, all of which have to be to the highest possible standard in order to meaningfully convey the text. The mental load can be exhausting, and many musicians find it hard to maintain relationships and friendships when our job requires you to travel often and for weeks at a time. I’ve missed weddings, birthdays and holidays. I’m not complaining – most of us are workaholics and love the high-pressure nature of our work. My point is this job is a labour of love which no one undertakes lightly, and certainly none of us are in it for the financial security it offers. (Over half of musicians surveyed by the Musicians Union in 2012 earned less than £20k per annum. Only 5% of those surveyed earned over £50k.) But what do you do when your means of earning anything at all is suddenly taken away?
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Here is a little teaser for Igor Levit's new album containing a lot of music rarely heard in concert including this piece by Morton Feldman, his last for piano:
I must admit that I have a special fondness for the ethereal music of Feldman.
Around the turn of the millennium, he had been one of the most feted stars on the classical scene, his success reflected in loud ovations, Grammys, a MacArthur “genius” grant and a concerto for Yo-Yo Ma. A Lincoln Center festival was devoted to his polyglot music, works like “La Pasión Según San Marcos” and “Ainadamar.” A once-in-a-lifetime prize beckoned: The Metropolitan Opera commissioned a new opera from him.
But though he started work on a retelling of the Iphigenia myth, about a father who sacrifices his daughter, nothing clicked, and the collaboration with the Met fizzled. He missed other important deadlines. A work in which he repurposed material developed in collaboration with a colleague drew accusations of plagiarism. Over the past 10 years, he has been all but silent.
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According to the Wall Street Journal the big musical innovators for 2020 are the Korean pop boy band BTS:
Well that was really, uh, beige. Michael Jackson blended with Katy Perry's millennial "whoop" in a kind of generic stew. Why does the WSJ like them?
In July, BTS broke the Guinness World Record for staging the biggest virtually attended livestream music performance, which attracted fans from over 100 countries. They miss the real thing, though. “That feeling [of being onstage] is really the best thrill I probably get in life. Even if I leave one day, I think I’ll be back for this,” says Jin, 27, of being onstage in front of BTS’s devoted fans, officially dubbed ARMY. The name stands for “Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth,” though the demographics of the band’s fan base now extend well beyond that age group.
In part thanks to the ardor of the ARMY—which one count estimates as high as 48 million, based on online commentary by unique authors—the band is often called “the Beatles of the 21st century.” The group has exploded the familiar boy band recipe, taking the concept of fandom into new territory and developing the South Korean genre known as K-pop into a global force.
I guess we are still exploring just how commercialized music can be and still be styled "music."
Further proof that the automobile has emerged as an unlikely savior of arts and culture in Southern California: Pacific Opera Project will become the second opera company in the region to stage a drive-in production when it opens “Covid fan Tutte” on Saturday.
Based on “Così fan Tutte,” Mozart’s lighthearted take on romantic fidelity, the POP production has an English libretto by Artistic Director Josh Shaw, who retooled the story for a thoroughly modern pandemic.
“Covid fan tutte” unfolds on a Southern California golf resort where two women are spending their quarantine. After the women fall for local caddies, a rich resort member bets the caddies that the women won’t remain truly faithful. When the caddies are furloughed, they return in disguise in an attempt to seduce their girlfriends — and prove that the women won’t stray.
Which goes to show that musicians will find a creative way out of the current difficulties, no matter how daunting the prospect seems at the moment.
For some time, the professional orchestra has battled for survival. Not only does it make no financial sense, it is more often than not perceived as an elitist pastime, with the musicians lucky to enjoy such a ‘hobby’. Orchestras are increasingly required to justify their existence and prove that they are essential to the communities in which they live. Now in the era of COVID-19, these problems have magnified. Many freelance musicians are out of work, barely able to make a living at present. There was a brief month of excitement when concerts could return with restricted audiences, but as of this week venues have to close their doors again.
During lockdown, orchestras fumbled around in the darkness trying to be heard and seen online competing with the myriad offerings on YouTube, Netflix, Prime and more. When they did make it onto a social media platform, did they begin to look like an anachronym, unable and reluctant to adapt to the full potential of the multi-media age?
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Time for some listening. Here is a really out there performance of Ligeti with Barbara Hannigan and Simon Rattle conducting the London Symphony:
And for balance, the Prelude and Fugue in B major from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach performed by Diego Ares:
The activity of composing music is always a battle between instinct and intellect with each as a check on the other. I don't know about other composers, but one lurking concern with me is always whether I have not, inadvertently, managed to compose something that is very like another piece of music. If I have unconsciously plagiarized someone I hope that it is Prokofiev and not Prince, Salonen and not Scriabin. Paul McCartney went around for months, sure that "Yesterday" was a melody he had heard somewhere as his instinct had produced something so well-crafted it was hard to believe it was not already composed by someone.
It is one of the functions of the musical intellect to examine what you are composing for traces of another's work. But you have to start with instinct because that is what can explore the unknown. For many composers they access instinct through improvisation, but that usually doesn't work for me. In my case, ideas sometimes just wander through my mind and inspire me to follow them up, on an instrument, in a pencil sketch, or with music software.
The intellect also is of considerable assistance in working out the form and structure of the piece, though my sense is that I need to access a lot more instinct in that area as well. So, instinct and intellect, both essential to the compositional process.
One thing I have been enjoying lately is allowing my instincts free rein in the area of sketching. I got some colored pencils recently to add to the graphite ones I have been using and, almost without thinking about it, the first thing I did was to create a small abstract sketch, followed by several more. These are pure instinct and quite fun. Here, I will, risking great personal embarrassment, put up a couple.
Now, of course, there is virtually no technique or craft involved, I am just fooling around with pens and pencils, but that is the whole point. It is nearly 100% instinct. An idea, with a contrasting idea. But I rather like them and I like creating them. Now I know why Schoenberg spent a significant amount of time learning to paint. It develops different creative channels.
I have been a musician for over fifty years, so I have so many layers of listening and playing and so many years of studying music from every conceivable angle that it is pure pleasure to do something, notionally creative, that is completely unconnected to music. And that hopefully will feed back into my musical creativity.
Here's what I'm listening to today: the Violin Concerto No. 1 by Sergei Prokofiev with Lisa Batiashvili and Iván Fischer and the Berlin Philharmonic. Prokofiev is one of the few 20th century composers who could write a really good melody, as we hear at the very beginning.
I was just glancing in Paul Johnson's Art: A New History, a book I heartily recommend, when I ran across this quote from the long-lived Katsushika Hokusai (1760 - 1849 thereby spanning the lives of both Mozart and Chopin), perhaps the greatest Japanese artist:
Since the age of six I have had the habit of drawing the forms of objects. From about fifty I have published my drawings, but none was of much value until I was seventy. At the age of seventy-three, I began to get a slight grasp of the forms of birds, animals, insects and fish, and how grass and trees grow. When I am eighty my art may improve, by ninety it may be really worthwhile, and at a hundred divine. At a hundred and ten every dot and stroke will live.
Well, that was quite a week, wasn't it? And I hear that there was some sort of election? No, not the British Columbia provincial election, that was a couple of weeks ago. But never mind, we have more important things to discuss starting with an interesting performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations as a ballet:
That's just a sample, but the pianist, Pavel Kolesnikov, has a new recording just released and reviewed in The Guardian:
Just when you think there are enough recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, here comes one that makes the music sound fresh off the page. The pianist Pavel Kolesnikov says he had “shied away” from performing Bach until he was invited to collaborate with the dancer and choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker on the Goldbergs; the result, with De Keersmaeker dancing and Kolesnikov playing live, has been seen by a few lucky European audiences this year.
Recorded in the studio, Kolesnikov’s performance stands alone: there is certainly no sense of the equation being less than perfectly balanced. The theme sings softly and simply – and then the first variation bursts out, speaking clearly, the two melodic lines chasing each other down the keyboard like kittens. These contrasts of texture, between softness and defined edge, at first make it feel as if the music is going in and out of focus – but that’s not quite it, because every single note is set forth by Kolesnikov with crystal clarity. It might rather be that we are moving in and out of Kolesnikov’s head: some variations feel “public” and consciously articulated, while some unfold as if privately.
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Over at Slipped Disc we are alerted to a new height (or bottom?) in artist marketing with this cover for a Scarlatti recording:
And it is fairly clear that the performance itself is not by a real pianist at all, but a MIDI file.
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The Berlin Philharmonic did a rather unusual encore the other day, after the government announced a new ban on concerts. Here they are conducted by Kiril Petrenko in a performance of John Cage's 4'33 for any instrument or combination of instruments.
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You can watch online performances of the Vienna Staatsoper at this link:
And on a completely different note, here is an essay on the role of "theory" in the teaching of the humanities: Who’s Afraid of Theory?
The Theory Wars, that is the administrative argument over which various strains of 20th-century continental European thought should play in the research and teaching of the humanities, has never exactly gone away, even while departments shutter and university work is farmed out to poorly-paid contingent faculty. Today you’re just as likely to see aspersions on the use of critical theory appear in fevered, paranoid Internet threads warning about “Cultural Marxism” as you are on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, even while at many schools literature requirements are being cut, so as to make the whole debate feel more like a Civil War reenactment than the Battle of Gettysburg. In another sense, however, and Butler’s partisans seem to have very much won the argument from the ‘80s and ‘90s—as sociologically inflected Theory-terms from “intersectionality” to “privilege” have migrated from Diacritics to Twitter (though often as critical malapropism)—ensuring that this war of attrition isn’t headed to armistice anytime soon.
Read the whole thing for an informative and sympathetic look at the history.
In Japan, where you are enjoined not to yell “Bravo”, people are making “Bravo cards” to be waved in the air instead; one orchestra is selling a “Bravo towel” in its foyer. And to understand Japanese rules on concert seating, look no further than the chequerboard-like pattern of “Ichimatsu-monyo”, a textile named after its most ardent fan, one of the great Kabuki actors of the 18th century.
Let's conclude with a note of optimism from Opera America’s Marc Scorca: “I believe that in the next years as we come out of this crisis, there will be a blend of a return to some of the old and incorporation of the new. That blend will be healthy for opera in the United States.”
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And for sheer amusement value, here is an ad that has been popping up everywhere lately:
I have to give a trigger warning up front. Though we try to avoid politics in every respect except as it directly affects the music business and musicians, I am going to just wander into politics a bit in this post. I offer as an excuse that, as a Canadian, I do have quite a different perspective on American politics. Someone left a note on my desk yesterday about how every American, distraught over the election, will be alloted a "Canadian Emotional Support" person and I guess, in our office, that would be me! I have to say that Canadian election campaigns are much shorter, typically six weeks or so, and less emotionally fraught. I suspect that part of the reason is that we simply refuse to discuss the more difficult issues.
But let me back up a bit. Way back in 1996 or 97 I went to the American Musicological Society annual conference which that year was held in Baltimore. The high point for me was almost meeting Richard Taruskin who had a debate with my then-thesis advisor over neo-classicism and its connections with fascism. I don't even remember which sides they were on. Traveling to Baltimore and spending some time just wandering around the city was an unusual experience for me. I was not used to American cities as, apart from Toronto, they are quite different from Canadian cities. How is that you ask?
Let me offer up two bits of anecdotal evidence. I lived for quite a while in Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, and while I was there as an undergraduate music student, I used to usher at symphony concerts occasionally. The conductor of the orchestra then was Paul Freeman:
He is an American, born in Richmond, Virginia, and obviously black. As is his wife. I remember some of us ushers greeting his wife, who was usually sitting in row seven, saying "hi Mrs. Freeman." We had not been introduced, so how did we know that this black lady in row seven was Mrs. Freeman? Easy, in that whole 2,000 seat symphony hall there were precisely two (2), black people. The conductor and his wife. Back then many conductors in Canada, as with university professors, were imported from other countries. Not just the US, the previous conductor in Victoria was Lazlo Gati, from Hungary. I think we are finally hiring Canadian conductors now. I should mention, by way of context, that in the whole city there were probably fewer than ten black people. Victoria does have a very large population of people of Asian descent however.
Ok, back to Baltimore. At the conference there were about five hundred musicologists and graduate students in musicology from all over North American. In that whole herd there was one (1) black person, a young man in his thirties. I don't recall his specialty. As I wandered around the city I noticed something else odd: in every service job, all the employees, or nearly all, were black. The people behind the counter at the hotels, the people serving in restaurants and so on. Everywhere you went.
Now I draw no conclusions from this as I am an outsider and don't quite know what to think. In Canada, especially Quebec where I lived for over a decade, we have politicized language instead of skin color and with problematic results.
I will say this: there seem to be some profound problems in some cities in the US such as Baltimore, Detroit, and recently Portland OR, Seattle, and San Francisco. Mind you, I claim no Canadian superiority. Both Montreal and Vancouver have profound problems as well. Montreal, though few Canadians know about it and even fewer will admit it, has serious problems with corruption and the Mafia.
All I will say is that it might be time to try some new approaches to some old problems.
Some music? This is Paul Freeman conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra with Derek Han soloist in the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major:
I might have mentioned that I have taken up some new hobbies: fountain pens, sketching and journaling. That last one, "journaling" is a relatively new, though very popular, hobby. It used to be called, "keeping a journal" or "writing in a diary", though those are rather out of fashion. I did keep a journal decades ago when I was going through some emotional turmoil. That is not the case, now, I just wanted to do more non-digital things and writing in a journal with a fountain pen, as well as sketching, fulfills that need quite well. Writing haiku seems to have crept in as well.
Working with these new hobbies, which we might glorify by calling them new avenues of creative activity, has caused me to notice some interesting things. In all creative activities there is a balance or division between the craft of the activity and the creation in the activity. For example, I am a complete novice at sketching so nearly all the effort is devoted to simply learning the basics of the craft. Risking personal embarrassment, I will share a couple of still-life sketches:
As you can see, I am struggling to achieve a rudimentary realism. So here is a little chart of creative activities with my estimates of how much effort or time goes into simply working on the craft and how much into actually creating something:
Craft/Creation
Haiku: 10/90
Playing guitar: 70/30
Sketching: 90/10
Music composition: 30/70
Are these numbers surprising in any way? Not the sketching or the haiku, presumably. In playing guitar, after fifty years on the instrument, I find that I have to spend about half my time just trying to preserve and slightly improve my technique and a good part of the rest of the time, when I am playing pieces, is also devoted to technical issues. My creativity in interpreting music on the guitar was probably all worked out decades ago and now I am just trying to keep my hands in shape.
Music composition is an interesting division. I have been a musician over fifty years, as I said, and in that time I always did a little composition. But I have only composed in a serious way in the last ten or twelve years. So I still spend quite a bit of time on the craft, by which I mean basic organizational activities. In fact, it is pretty hard to tell where craft leaves off and creation begins in music composition. A big part of creativity these days consists in making discoveries in the area of what might be called "craft" or using craft in new or unusual ways. And, ironically, some of the most so-called "advanced" musical ideas, such as extended techniques, can often sound very dated these days because they were so overused in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Of course "over-used" is one of those phrases that is applied so subjectively that it doesn't tell us too much. It is largely a matter of aesthetic taste.
Speaking of "taste", is the having and deploying of aesthetic taste more craft or creation? I guess it could be either. And I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
For a suitable envoi, here is a piece for solo guitar I wrote a long time ago when I was still puzzling over the craft of composition. I was also puzzling over how to do a suitable video! This is "Chant" from my Suite No. 1 for guitar. In it I was simultaneously assimilating the influence of Gregorian Chant and Chopin.
