In conversations with Rolling Stone, instrument sellers Sweetwater, Guitar Center, and Reverb reported a bang-up year for online sales. In 2020, online-only store Sweetwater surpassed $1 billion in revenue for the first time in the company’s 42-year history. It also served over 1.5 million customers in 2020, up from a million in 2019. CEO Chuck Surack says shipping out 15,000 to 20,000 orders a day was normal for most of the year, resulting in about a 40 percent increase from the previous year. And when “Black Friday stuff picked up” the numbers increased to 22,000 to 24,000 orders a day, peaking at about 30,000.
I hope this doesn't mean I have to go back to teaching beginners again...
Longtime readers know that I'm pretty selective when it comes to popular music, but these two songwriters have been favorites of mine for many decades. Now Bob Dylan is a more well-known artist, but I think that Leonard Cohen is just as interesting and important a musician. Plus, way more dark! Yes, compared to Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan is a happy-go-lucky minstrel. Cohen was once on a Canadian talk show and when questioned about his supposed pessimism he said, "A pessimist is someone who thinks it is going to rain--I'm soaked to the skin."
Let's compare a couple of songs. Here is "Desolation Row" by Bob Dylan:
Ok, that's a bit dark. But let's listen to "Everybody Knows" by Cohen:
And that's not even his darkest song. Here is "Darkness."
Encouraged by the positive reception to yesterday's eccentric post, Short-Squeezing in the Cave: An Epistemological Meditation, I offer a whimsical post that will have some musical content. Herewith my list of Really Difficult Tasks:
Doing a jigsaw puzzle based on a Mark Rothko painting.
Doing a harmonic analysis of a piece by Morton Feldman.
Explaining the Zen koan about the "one hand clapping" to the audience at a Grigory Sokolov concert. (Sokolov is renowned for playing six encores after every concert. Why six? Because he can: no-one is going home as long as he is willing to keep playing.) Here are three of six encores from a concert in March 2019.
And just for guitarists: playing the Prelude No. 1 by Villa-Lobos without squeaking.
Every now and then I get inspired to do a post that is, how shall I put this, "out there." Way out there. It's all part of the magical charm of The Music Salon that sometimes we not only go off the rails a bit, we actually forge our own rails.
I was reading a Wall Street Journal story about the recent short-squeeze frenzy on Wall Street where a group of small retail investors actually shook the hedge fund world to its foundations leading the most unlikely pair, far-left Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez AND far-right Senator Ted Cruz to make similar supportive tweets for the little guys. What is this, Alice in Wonderland? Not only that, but the WSJ titled its story GameStop, Bitcoin and QAnon: How the Wisdom of Crowds Became the Anarchy of the Mob which is way too prolix for the sober Journal.
In this case, their method was buying shares and options of GameStop in order to squeeze short sellers who were betting the stock would drop. The result was a buying frenzy that lofted the stock’s value into the stratosphere, well beyond any price at which it reflected a plausible future for the fundamentals of GameStop’s business.
Let me try and explain that a bit. You can make money in various ways in the stock market. Leaving aside the complicated situation with options, you can either buy a stock with good prospects, watch it go up, and then sell it at a higher price, or you can sell a stock (that you have borrowed from a brokerage) that you think has poor prospects (like GameStop), watch it go down and "cover your short" by buying shares at the lower price so as to return them to your brokerage. In both cases you pocket the difference. Using call or put options is a way of leveraging your profit--or loss, of course.
Now the situation with GameStop and a few other small companies or companies on the rocks like AMC, the cinema chain, is that some hedge funds had shorted the stocks so thoroughly that the stocks were as much as 140% short! This means that there were more shares sold short than actually existed. There really ought to be a regulation against this. But the consequence was that the hedge funds that were short the stock were uniquely vulnerable because if the stock started climbing steeply, they would have to cover their short at a higher price, i.e. lose money. You can only borrow shares to short temporarily (I'm ignoring margin rules here, which vary). Somebody noticed and shared it with a whole bunch of small investors over the internet who started furiously buying the stock. It doesn't take much to send a stock like GameStop soaring: today it is up 400% at this writing.
On a personal note, I once saw a stock that really was an absolute no-brainer: during the carnage of the Internet Bubble in 2000 shares in Salon, the media company, actually dropped to as low as they could go: one penny a share. I looked at this and thought, geez, buy those shares and if it goes to two cents tomorrow, you have a 100% profit! So I thought about buying a few hundred thousand shares. Alas, way back then, buying large quantities of shares involved very high trading costs, so I gave up the idea. But now, Robinhood and even big guys like Charles Schwab have NO TRADING FEES. And this definitely contributes to the frenzy.
I left a comment on the above story:
I have this strange mélange of images: a lonely hermit, solitary in his cell trading GameStop shares in his Robinhood account. It is like Cistercians of the Strict Observance all of a sudden had fiber optic connections. What a weird situation epistemologically. The Internet is reality while the ordinary physical world is almost irrelevant. Reminds me of the short story from 1909 by E. M. Forster: "The Machine Stops."
It also reminds me of the Plato's Allegory of the Cave where people cannot see the world as such, but only shadows on the wall of their cave. It is an image that seems ever more relevant today. The Internet in all its glory is still just digital wisps, like shadows on the wall of a cave. We only glimpse reality at a distance. The only reality that we are really sure of is that of our immediate surroundings. And these days for most people, those immediate surroundings are our own homes that we occasionally venture out of. So we spend all of our time in our own little caves, looking at shadows on the wall over our iPads, laptops or computer screens.
It is as if we are inside a giant machine that is feeding information to us. What if, one day, The Machine Stops?
And now for our musical connection. The link above is to the Wikipedia article on the prophetic short story by E. M. Forster written in 1909. About the same time, Schoenberg was undergoing a crisis in his life and out of it came one of the first atonal compositions, his String Quartet No. 2, here performed by Ann Moss and the Hausmann Quartet:
UPDATE: I should perhaps mention what is so risky about shorting stocks. I have done it myself in the past, but only on rare occasions. If you buy a stock in the ordinary way, which is known as being "long" a stock, the most you can lose is the value of the stock. If you buy 100 shares of a $5 stock, the most you can lose is $500 if it goes to zero. BUT, it is different with a short position. Say you short a hundred shares of a $5 stock and a bunch of crazy guys on the internet bid that stock up to, oh, $200 a share? If you have to cover your short, i.e. buy shares to return them to your broker, then you are going to be out, not $500 but 195 X 100 or $19,500. Theoretically, there is no limit to how much you can lose on a short! Which is why some big hedge funds just lost billions of dollars.
I'm not afraid to acknowledge that this is not the most popular blog on the Internet. Just one of the best! Heh! I have over 1.7 million accumulated page views, but this year will be the 10th anniversary of the blog, so that is no big deal. Some of the more popular blogs get that many in a couple of days. And don't even mention Twitter (please!). I usually get between 15,000 and 20,000 page views a month, which I regard as really pretty good for a very specialized site.
But in the last few days I have seen a huge leap in traffic: yesterday over 4,000 page views and already today, over 2,000 and it's not even 9 am yet where I am. So I had a look at my Stats and here is what I found, over the last 30 days, this is how my traffic breaks down:
Usually my largest volume is from the US, the UK, Russia, Germany, then it varies, perhaps Canada and some other European nations. It is not surprising that so much traffic comes from non-English speaking countries as there is a little widget on the right hand side that will translate the blog into many languages. And countries like Russia and Germany are music superpowers so I talk a lot about music in and from those places. I even talk a lot about music from Sweden sometimes. But I can't quite see why nearly 50% of my traffic recently has been from there. Anyone have any ideas? Should I start looking for commissions from Swedish orchestras? (Yes, yes!)
In any case, in honor of my Swedish visitors here is Esa-Pekka Salonen with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in a performance of the Symphony No. 4 of Jean Sibelius (and one of my favorite filmed performances of a Sibelius symphony):
The Guardian has a review of a new lockdown album release by Igor Levit--does this guy never sleep? It includes Palais de Mari, the piano piece by Morton Feldman we were just discussing the other day:
Levit’s latest release, recorded in lockdown in May 2020, is Encounter (Sony), a double album of Chorale Preludes by Bach and Brahms in the versions by Busoni, together with shorter works by Brahms (arr. Reger) and Reger (arr. Julian Becker) – you get the idea – and a work by one composer pure and simple: Palais de Mari by Morton Feldman.
This is a collection of music rarely performed in the concert hall, and even less often heard together. The entirety, nearly two hours of intense listening, begins quietly and ends, pared back to nothing in Feldman’s half-hour meditation, in near silence.
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The most dangerous language to sing in? German! Slipped Disc has the story:
Research by the Japan Association of Classical Music Presenters has revealed that two languages spread more Covid infection than any other.
Guess which?
German.
And?
Italian.
Both emit twice as many aerosols as, for instance, Japanese. French is also pretty bad.
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We mentioned before that dustup between a Schenkerian scholar and some who wanted to cancel him. Norman Lebrecht has an update: THE FIGHTBACK BEGINS AGAINST CRITICAL RACE THEORY.
Professor Timothy Jackson’s lawsuit against the University of North Texas is more than just a bid to clear his name of slurs that were spouted by a howling mob of musicologists who sought to cancel his career.
According to the National Association of Scholars,
Jackson’s lawsuit also illustrates the damage that Critical Race Theory (CRT)—the intellectual background for radical academic social media campaigns—has done to scholarship. CRT seeks and succeeds in annihilating scholarship that analyzes the actual substance of any domain of inquiry. In this case, CRT scholars seek to replace actual Schenkerian musical analysis with ritual condemnations of that analysis. Western music theory is taken to be prima facie invalid on the grounds that Schenker allegedly said something unpleasant about blacks in the course of his lifetime. The very premise must be rejected if scholarship is to survive.
As always at Slipped Disc, the comments are interesting.
Last September, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) published an account of how a large number of faculty and graduate students initiated a social media campaign against Professor Timothy Jackson of the University of North Texas (UNT), demanding sanctions against him up to and including that he be removed from his tenured position at UNT. The participants in this campaign included music theorists nationwide, as well as faculty and graduate students at UNT. His colleagues’ grievances were based on his defense of the music theorist Heinrich Schenker, and by extension modern music theory as a whole, from the spurious charge of “systemic racism.” They sought to punish Jackson harshly for exercising his right to free speech on an academic subject matter within his professional competence—and they sought to punish him for saying what any fair-minded, amateur observer would take to be the common-sense truth.
When it began live streaming chamber music concerts in June last year, London’s Wigmore Hall was hailed as a beacon of hope for players and audiences alike.
In an interview with the Financial Times, the venue’s chief executive and artistic director John Gilhooly has now laid bare the cost of the initiative, which has included performances by the likes of Steven Isserlis, Mitsuko Uchida and the Heath Quartet, and which continues into 2021.
He explains that staff costs and copyright charges for each performance come to around £3,000, plus artists’ fees. While the concerts are free to view, audiences have donated some £750,000 via the hall’s digital broadcast fund and the number joining its membership scheme has increased by a quarter.
‘All that we have received has been ploughed back into paying artists their full fee and investing in programming,’ Gillhooly told the newspaper, adding that the hall aims to have raised £1 million by the time of the scheme’s anniversary later this year.
Although a significant amount of money, this would represent only around one-seventh of the hall’s usual income over the period. A quarter of the Wigmore Hall’s staff have been made redundant since the start of the pandemic, which has seen venues across the UK closed to audiences for much of the past year.
The main advantage of live streaming, according to Gilhooly, it its ability to reach wider audiences. He is downbeat, however, about its prospects as a financial saviour: ‘Apart from the deluded, no one can say streaming concerts pays.’
I'm going to make a donation.
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Michael Andor Brodeur is the new classical music critic for the Washington Post, replacing Anne Midgette. Here he alerts us to twenty-one up and coming composers: 21 for ’21: Composers and performers who sound like tomorrow. Here is a sample:
Originally from Washington and now based in New York City, Figgis-Vizueta, 27, knocked my comfiest socks off during the quarantine with “Music for Transitions,” a raw, scraping yet soaring solo piece commissioned and premiered by cellist Andrew Yee. Since then, I’ve been hooked: The Julius Eastman-inspired “Openwork, Knotted Object”; the haunting “No Words” for clarinet and electronics; the “reaching sap-slow toward sky” thriller of “Placemaking” — her music feels sprouted between structures, liberated from certainty and wrought from a language we’d do well to learn. Coming in 2021 are commissions for the JACK quartet and North Carolina-based ensemble earspace. inticomposes.com.
I left it in the original formatting so you could follow all the links.
Russia for me has been a perplexing mixture of astonishingly rich culture and astonishingly bad government. Over at New Left Review, Sophie Pinkham weighs in with NIHILISM FOR OLIGARCHS.
For a century, Russian and then Soviet culture electrified the world. From Tolstoy to Tarkovsky, by way of the Ballets Russes, the Constructivists, Eisenstein and Babel, Russia and its successor reworked and destabilized poetry, the realist novel and the short story, post-figurative art, orchestral music, dance, cinema, theatre, science fiction. During the Cold War, writers like Pasternak, Shalamov, Brodsky and Sinyavsky/Tertz reminded foreign readers that Russian literature had not lost its vitality, even as tamizdat—dissident Soviet works published abroad—was wielded as an anti-communist cudgel. What is the position of Russian culture today? In quantitative terms, Russian cinema still produces some two dozen ‘international festival’ films a year; comparable numbers of contemporary Russian novelists and poets appear in translation. Russian musicians, dancers, and choreographers headline the world’s elite concert halls and ballet theatres.
In the 1990s, the old landscape of cultural trade unions and government commissions was subjected to brutal shock therapy. The cultural infrastructure of the Soviet period—universities, orchestras, theatres, museums, film schools, fine-arts academies, research institutes, publishing houses—survived in skeletal form, unevenly supported by private funding, to produce new generations of the artistic, literary and cinematic intelligentsia.footnote1 Russian cultural producers desirous of money and prestige scrambled to reinvent themselves. Now one had to cater to the market, play up to the new private cultural prizes, cultivate an online following, find a patron—or resign oneself to scraping by in what was left of the old system.footnote2 Meanwhile the Russian Ministry of Culture remained a crucial funder for the arts, with the attendant problems of political pressure.
I don't want to summarize her complex evaluation of the current situation, so if you are interested, follow the link.
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After all that we need some charming and diverting music, do we not? Here is Hilary Hahn with the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 1:
And for something completely different, here is a production from Opéra Nice of Philip Glass' opera Akhnaten. I warn you, though, if you listen to much of this you will have a bunch of stubborn earworms!
In case you were wondering what Grigory Sokolov has been up to with so many concerts cancelled. I know I was worried that he had moved to the Bahamas and grown a beard, but no. He actually played a special concert in December in Geneva to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the United Nations. It looks like the audience was just a few UN functionaries. But never mind! We can listen to it.
Amazing program: all Schumann in the first half and pieces I don't know. Four fugues? A lot of short pieces. Second half: four polonaises by Chopin. Unique program. His practice in the last few years is to devote one half of each program to a single composer. I haven't gotten to the end of the concert yet, but it looks as if he didn't play any encores.
UPDATE: As I listen to the program and notice there are something like eight people in the audience I wonder about the economics of it. Lemmesee, I once calculated that Sokolov's fee for a recital is perhaps €50,000 (in Euros because he only performs on the European continent). Divided by eight auditors that comes to €6,250 per person. That's a pricey ticket! Usually he plays 2,000 seat halls and fills them.
I'm so happy to be contradicted so quickly! Right after my post about Víkingur Ólafsson, the brilliant Icelandic pianist, in which I complained about how places like Finland and Iceland seem to produce so many more great musicians than Canada despite having a fraction of the population. And right away a Canadian commentator recommends the young Canadian pianist from Calgary, Jan Lisiecki, who also has seven recordings with Deutsche Grammophon. That'll teach me!
Actually, what I think it really shows is how great a medium the Internet can be when free comments are allowed. You learn stuff.
So here is the Wikipedia page on Jan Lisiecki and let's listen to some of his clips. First a Chopin ballade:
Then a Mozart piano concerto:
Finally, a Beethoven piano concerto:
He has recorded all the Beethoven piano concertos for Deutsche Grammophon.
Now here is the funny thing: I read the Toronto Globe and Mail and some other Canadian newspapers every morning. But I have never seen the name of Jan Lisiecki! Why is that? And if you look at his bio, you see that, apart from one program on the CBC in 2009, almost the entirety of his career has been in Europe where they seem to really appreciate him. And why wouldn't they? The question that comes to mind is why is he so little heard in Canada?
What really astonishes me about this pianist is not so much that he is a fine pianist, he certainly is, but that he, along with, it seems, innumerable other fine musicians, comes from Iceland. Iceland! Let me remind you that Iceland has the population of a modest, medium-sized city like Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, where I lived for quite a few years. That is, a bit over 300,000 souls.
Now the very existence of Finland is, or ought to be, deeply embarrassing to Canadians as, like us, it is a fairly small nation, wedged in beside a large and powerful nation, but at the same time manages to be a musical superpower. The number of world-class orchestras, such as the San Francisco Symphony with Esa-Pekka Salonen (who was also music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic), that have Finnish musical directors is astonishing. And then there is the host of instrumentalists and soloists. And Sibelius! Finland has a population of only 5.5 million people. Where do they get all these musical talents from?
So given that Finland alone ought to give we Canadians cultural conniptions, as it achieves so much more in the world of music than we do with a population one-seventh of Canada's thirty-eight million, what can we make of Iceland? Good grief, with the population about the same as Victoria, Iceland just keeps turning out musical superstars in both the pop and classical fields.
One of the latest is someone they are calling Finland's Glenn Gould: Víkingur Ólafsson. Now that really does add insult to injury. We in Canada don't have anyone in Glenn Gould's class any more. Not just in Victoria--anywhere in Canada. True, we do have one world-class conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and conductor in several other places, but name for me three great Canadian composers. Ok, one?
Mr. Ólafsson has seven or so albums released by Deutsche Grammophon. Not only are no Canadian pianists (or players of any other instrument) so blessed, it is pretty hard to think of a young pianist (he is thirty-six) from anywhere that has achieved so much. All right, Igor Levit, age thirty-three, is in this league, but darn few others.
And Ólafsson comes from Iceland where there are only 334,000 people! However do they do it?
Here he is with the Etude No. 5 of Philip Glass:
And a Bach Prelude:
A Debussy Prelude:
And finally, part of the Rachmaninoff Third Concerto:
Back in the Middle Ages there was black notation, white notation and colored notation, all of which you can see in the Music Salon logo/illustration at the head of the page. Sadly, what we seem to have now is black music theory and white music theory: Music professor sues university for punishing him over defense of ‘racist’ composer. We have mentioned this case before, but here is a refresher:
Timothy Jackson followed through on his threat to sue the University of Northern Texas for investigating him in response to his defense of a 19th century composer.
The “distinguished university research professor” accused the Board of Regents of First Amendment retaliation in response to Jackson’s criticism of a black peer who called Heinrich Schenker (above) “an ardent racist and German nationalist.”
He’s also claiming defamation by a graduate student and 17 colleagues in the Division of Music History, Theory, and Ethnomusicology. They promoted claims that he engaged in “particularly racist” actions and “platform[ed] … racist sentiments” in the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, a UNT-produced publication that Jackson co-founded.
The journal published a “symposium” issue in response to work by Hunter College Prof. Philip Ewell that claimed Schenker’s ideas exist “to benefit members of the dominant white race of music theory.” Most of it criticized Ewell’s arguments, with Jackson saying his black peer’s claims were part of a “much broader current of Black anti-semitism.” (Schenker was Jewish.)
The journal’s ordinary academic actions “incited an academic mob” that is demanding Jackson’s firing and the shuttering of his journal and associated Center for Schenkerian Studies. They accuse Jackson of racism simply for defending a composer and criticizing a black peer, the suit claims.
You should probably read the whole thing to get the complete story. I can see similar conflicts happening across academia if more traditional scholars refuse to knuckle under to the wholesale transformation of their fields by the progressive agendas. Honestly, I can't see how scholars in the humanities can do the most important part of their job, transmitting the cultural heritage of Western Civilization to new generations of students, while being forced to conform to these agendas. Cancelling Beethoven, Bach and Mozart because they are dead white males in favor of almost any living black or woman composer is where the battle lines will be drawn, I imagine. The current case is like an opening salvo, just to range in on the opponents. Well, should be interesting at least.
Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 would seem to be an appropriate envoi, though in a few years it might be Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 that we are turning to!
We do have some reading today starting with this fascinating piece of sociological research: The New National American Elite. It is worth reading the whole thing, but here is the meat of it:
The Anglo American Protestant patricians in every region and state shared a common Anglo American and Trans-Atlantic culture—but not a common national culture. Instead, they had regional cultures separately based on a common British and European heritage. This is so peculiar that it needs to be explained.
Let us begin with what they shared: Trans-Atlantic culture. From the earliest days of the republic, the wealthy elites of even the most remote and Godforsaken parts of the South and West could afford to vacation in Europe. They would bring back the latest French and British fashions to rural Mississippi or Wyoming. Before the self-consciously regional Prairie Style of Frank Lloyd Wright, there was never any indigenous American architecture, just wave after wave of faddish European styles: Palladianism, Greek Revival, Gothic, Romanesque.
I think this is of some relevance to the changing fortunes of classical music, the basic canon of which was, like fashion or architecture, brought from Europe by the regional elites. The situation now is different:
Membership in the multiracial, post-ethnic national overclass depends chiefly on graduation with a diploma—preferably a graduate or professional degree—from an Ivy League school or a selective state university, which makes the Ivy League the new social register. But a diploma from the Ivy League or a top-ranked state university by itself is not sufficient for admission to the new national overclass. Like all ruling classes, the new American overclass uses cues like dialect, religion, and values to distinguish insiders from outsiders.
More and more Americans are figuring out that “wokeness” functions in the new, centralized American elite as a device to exclude working-class Americans of all races, along with backward remnants of the old regional elites. In effect, the new national oligarchy changes the codes and the passwords every six months or so, and notifies its members through the universities and the prestige media and Twitter.
Constantly replacing old terms with new terms known only to the oligarchs is a brilliant strategy of social exclusion. Woke speech is simply a ruling-class dialect, which must be updated frequently to keep the lower orders from breaking the code and successfully imitating their betters.
What stands out in all this is the exclusion, not only of the "lower orders" but of tradition generally whether it is manifested in the canonic classical music repertoire or in any of the institutions devoted to the preservation and transmission of high culture: conservatories, humanities departments in universities, libraries (now becoming digital) and eventually even art museums, now enjoying considerable popularity.
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From Slipped Disc comes the news that the Salzburg Easter festival is off due to the general lockdown. Fingers crossed for the summer festival...
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And speaking of culture and the American elite, the inauguration of the new American president was not celebrated with any classical musicians. Slipped Disc, again, has the story. I must confess that I didn't watch the festivities, as I usually don't, but I recall classical musicians such as Yo Yo Ma being frequently heard at previous inaugurations. But nowadays, only pop and country artists are heard.
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Alex Ross weighs in on recent books on Beethoven in a piece in The New Yorker: Keep Beethoven Weird.
Is it possible that Beethoven felt confined by his own incipient myth—that he sought freedom, in a sense, from being Beethoven? The hammering splendors of his so-called heroic period, which began with the “Eroica” in 1804 and lasted intermittently for about a decade, at once began to hold audiences in thrall, but they constitute only a fraction of Beethoven’s output and grow scarce in the late period. The Ninth Symphony, with its tragic-gestured first movement and its world-embracing choral finale, is the obvious exception; yet Beethoven felt uncertain about the piece after its première, and evidently contemplated replacing the “Ode to Joy” with a purely instrumental finale, for which he had already made sketches. Those ideas wound up in the String Quartet, Opus 132, which inhabits an entirely different realm. Kinderman maps out the hidden relationship between the oratorical symphony and the introspective quartet, suggesting that Beethoven “showed himself capable of regarding Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ with distancing irony.”
This is one of Ross' better pieces with a really good and balanced survey of recent writings. Plus, extra points for proper use of the word "aperçu."
The crux is that streaming — like all business — has winners and losers. And with the collapse of live revenues, the issues in how streaming pays (or doesn’t) is being discussed. Ingham calculates that 1% of all artists receive 90% of the revenue from streaming. That’s about 43,000 artists (and remember, many of these artists are subject to agreements where their share of this is far less than required). Of that 1%, many have been significantly impacted by COVID, as their streaming income has not replaced their live income. The other 99%, around 3 million artists, earn the other 10%. And remember, the race to being the 1% can only be won by 1%. This isn’t fair, but it is business.
It is worth having a look at the rest of the article.
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A piece on Franz Schubert, a lovely composer who is finally getting some of the appreciation he deserves: A lost paradise of purity
Of all the premature deaths among the ranks of the creative, none is more painful to contemplate than Franz Schubert’s. His cutting off in November 1828 at the age of 31 was not as brutal in strictly chronological terms as Keats’s at the age of 25 in 1821, but there is with Schubert a yearning to know the music which he never composed that is even greater than the regret for Keats’s unwritten poems. All Schubert’s works are in a sense early works, and it is striking to think that by the time Haydn reached the age at which Schubert died, he had written none of the music for which we now revere him.
Schubert’s last three piano sonatas (D958-960) were completed in September 1828. Perhaps the most obvious allusion to death in general, if not to his own mortality, is the macabre Totentanz which is the unremitting tarantella finale of D958. Likewise, the bass trill that is never far below the surface in the seemingly unruffled first movement of D960 announces that “Even in Arcadia, I am present”. However, the andantino of D959 is on a different plane of alienation. It is all the more aberrant in a work which is generally so warm-hearted and affirmatory. Alfred Brendel writes of its “desolate grace behind which madness lies”.
And that has to lead us to our envoi, the Andantino from the Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959 played by Mitsuko Uchida:
Several months ago, after nearly thirty years of living digitally (that was when I got my first computer, a second-hand Mac Plus with 2.5 megabytes of RAM, and yes, I said megabytes), I decided to cut back a bit on my digital life, on the Internet with this blog, email, business generally and reading three or four newspapers and a dozen blogs every day. I wanted to recapture what living analogue felt like!
So I started reading actual hard-copy books like Proust (the ebooks version is littered with misprints) and Homer. I just finished The Odyssey in the Fagles translation and really enjoyed it. I've also been keeping a journal written with a fountain pen (which is a much nicer experience than a ballpoint) and I have been learning to sketch. I put up some of my abstract sketches the other day. I have also been composing with a pencil rather than a computer.
What am I reading next? Well, The Iliad would be the obvious choice, but I noticed on my shelf The Landmark Thucydides and realized that it has been on my shelf for years, but I haven't opened it. So, that's what I am currently reading:
It's a nice hefty book loaded with maps and appendices on things like Athenian and Spartan institutions and allies, land and sea warfare, dialects and ethnic groups, religious festivals, currency and calendars--all those things that Thucydides doesn't bother explaining but that a modern reader needs.
Oh, I think we need some Greek music! Bear in mind that this is probably 70% speculative as the Greeks did not have a useful system of music notation:
Yesterday I ended my post The Rôle of Tradition (and notice that here I snuck in a very old diacritical mark over the "o" as a bow to tradition) with Palais de Mari, a piano piece by Morton Feldman. Here I want to talk a little bit about that piece and the rôle of intuition. A while ago I put up a post titled Chance and Creation and I think that when I was talking about "chance," what I was really referring to might better be described as "intuition."
Much to the disappointment of the analytical mind, a piece like Palais de Mari defies explanation. To be negative about it, therefore, would be tempting, especially after hours of investigation leading nowhere; however, it is more fruitful to take this as the triumph of a composer who allowed the irrational to penetrate a precisely notated score.
"Defies explanation" is quite an admission from a music theorist whose very bread and butter is nothing but explanation!
That Feldman took an almost improvisational approach to his compositions, akin to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, must be kept in mind at all times: it is an irrational approach, where pitch notation serves as mere editing, where sound-shapes are pictorial and serve no tonal precept or structure. If anything, the use of pitch in late pieces like Palais de Mari may have been influenced by the colour variations observed by Feldman in the weft-and-warp of the Anatolian rugs he collected.
Perhaps Feldman was inspired by the patterns in Anatolian carpets as Sani mentions. But the really interesting point here is that Feldman is following primarily his intuitions whether they are deep or fleeting. What Sani ends up doing, instead of uncovering a plan or structure for the composition, which seems not to exist, is offer some catalogues of what he calls "group classes" or clusters of pitches which recur:
So, not terribly illuminating. Going back to the piece, what we hear are a lot of subtle pitch and rhythmic variations (Sani doesn't deal with the rhythmic or metric aspects of the score) along with some interesting voice-leading. For example, movement by step, especially by semitone, is always a strong voice-leading gesture and we find a lot of them here: the F to E at the beginning, repeated, the E to D# immediately after, also repeated. Later on (mm 36 et. seq.) we find high grace note Gs followed by high grace note F#s, also repeated. The repetition underlines and emphasizes the voice-leading.
But I don't want to get into offering my own theoretical analysis of a piece which Sani correctly identifies as "refractory to analysis." Instead I want to commit the even greater sin of speculating about Feldman's thought processes! Hey, I was trained as a musicologist, not a theorist.
I suspect that this piece, along with most of Feldman's work, was composed primarily through intuition. That is, you sit down and either pick out notes or hear notes or imagine a skein of notes and rhythms and then try and put them down on paper. It is a kind of mental improvisation. Incidentally, precisely this method was the one pursued by the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi who improvised on a piano or ondiola. Many of these were recorded and later transcribed by musicians who worked with him. This is music that comes from the intuition or subconscious or trance state or transcendent plane.
In my previous post it was this sort of thing that I, rather inaccurately, described as "chance" because that is sometimes how I think of it. Something just comes to you: a note, a rhythm, perhaps just a timbre, and then you sit down and try and work with it. People like Feldman and Scelsi want to just let whatever it is flow to wherever it wants to flow to. But that language seems to assume the existence of something metaphysical, the "it," which puzzles me.
Here is a piece by Scelsi, Natura Renovatur for 11 strings:
I'm afraid I just missed, by a couple of years, the centenary of an important literary essay: "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by T. S. Eliot (first published in 1919). Here is a summary of Eliot's thinking from Wikipedia:
For Eliot, the term "tradition" is imbued with a special and complex character. It represents a "simultaneous order," by which Eliot means a historical timelessness – a fusion of past and present – and, at the same time, a sense of present temporality. A poet must embody "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer," while, simultaneously, expressing their contemporary environment. Eliot challenges the common perception that a poet's greatness and individuality lie in their departure from their predecessors; he argues that "the most individual parts of his [the poet's] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously." Eliot claims that this "historical sense" is not only a resemblance to traditional works but an awareness and understanding of their relation to his poetry.
This fidelity to tradition, however, does not require the great poet to forfeit novelty in an act of surrender to repetition. Rather, Eliot has a much more dynamic and progressive conception of the poetic process: novelty is possible only through tapping into tradition.
I seem to wander back and forth between honoring, respecting and being influenced by tradition and seeking to strike out into fresh territory, assuming I can find some! I think Eliot is capturing an important truth though--one can only innovate in relation to tradition. The "fresh territory" is only known as such if you know the familiar territory, i.e. tradition. One does not, if one is a real composer, set out to copy the "Moonlight" Sonata of Beethoven, but it is resonating in the back of one's consciousness.
This view was disdained by the composers of high modernism and even by someone like Steve Reich in his early years when he thought of music by people like Brahms as being like those old paintings covered in brown varnish (and dust). But later on we find Reich setting the Hebrew psalms, so he was really looking for a much older tradition. It has been pointed out that every great artist, in some sense, actually creates his predecessors. When we listen to Bach, we also have resonating in the back of our mind, all the ways Bach has influenced later composers. Composers like Stravinsky tend to make us hear people like Bach or Gesualdo differently.
Stravinsky, by the way, pursued a policy throughout his life, of denying the role tradition played in his composition. It took an 1,800 page book by Richard Taruskin to uncover all the ways that the Russian traditions influenced Stravinsky.
So, tradition. In the wider world of society in general I think of traditions as being like the keel of a sailboat. They function to lend stability and prevent the vessel from overturning. We seem to be in a real battle between traditions and progressivism right now, but they both have a role, each to correct the other.
I am working on a new piece for piano right now and have to find creative ways to acknowledge tradition. This is in some ways hard for me as, being a guitarist, I did not grow up playing the piano repertoire. On the other hand, for the very same reason, I can approach tradition with a fresh perspective.
Here are a couple of piano pieces. First, the "Moonlight" Sonata of Beethoven:
And next, Palais de Mari (1986) by Morton Feldman:
Like many of you I've been watching some of the streaming concerts from Europe and North America and I've started to wonder what the classical music world will look like after this pandemic crisis is over. And when will it be over? These are questions that are difficult if not impossible to answer at present, but we can do a little speculating.
I have read in a few places that perhaps 30% of professional musicians have simply left the business as there was no work for them. If the current crisis lasts another year or a good part of the year as it seems it might, then wouldn't it be likely that another 30% or more might leave the business?
We might also ask ourselves which musicians in particular are least likely to survive the crisis? It seems obvious that it would be the ones that are most vulnerable: the part-time musicians, the players in the smaller regional orchestras, the musicians that were already struggling to start or sustain a solo career, and most of all, the local musicians.
I ran across an interesting essay recently about some of the ways that technology has transformed society and it might offer some clues about what the music performance world is facing. The article is Everything is Broken:
For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.
But, beginning in the 1970s, the economic ground underneath this landscape began to come apart.
This is something like what is happening now with the music world: the pandemic has shut down most of the cultural institutions that support performing musicians. The article takes a while to get going and you need to read the whole thing to get the details of the argument, but here is the crux of it:
The internet tycoons used the ideology of flatness to hoover up the value from local businesses, national retailers, the whole newspaper industry, etc.—and no one seemed to care. This heist—by which a small group of people, using the wiring of flatness, could transfer to themselves enormous assets without any political, legal or social pushback—enabled progressive activists and their oligarchic funders to pull off a heist of their own, using the same wiring. They seized on the fact that the entire world was already adapting to a life of practical flatness in order to push their ideology of political flatness—what they call social justice, but which has historically meant the transfer of enormous amounts of power and wealth to a select few.
I think we see the "hoovering up" illustrated clearly in the music world: well-established pop musicians are selling rights to their back catalogues for hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time, the vast majority of orchestral musicians are simply out of work. In some places in Europe they are being supported and finding some work in streaming concerts, but the musicians of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, for example, are simply out of work and receiving no payments.
At the end of the day, I think we will find that the "renaissance" or rebirth of classical music-making will mean that the most-established musicians will find employment again, but the majority will not. Much local music-making will have simply disappeared and the music world will contract to a few major centers, most of them in Europe. Every concert will be an "all-star" performance and local musicians will simply not exist.
The consequences of this are likely to be very unfortunate and long-lasting.
I want to hear what my readers think. Please let me know in the comments.
For an envoi, one of those streamed concerts from Europe from a couple of days ago:
Canada is a lovely country in many, many ways. Years ago, when I was living on the West Coast, I had a Mexican girlfriend and we were hurrying to catch the ferry to Vancouver on a rainy Friday evening. This is a very normal thing to do as the two largest cities in British Columbia, Victoria, the capital and Vancouver the largest by population, are separated by ocean, Victoria being confusingly located on Vancouver Island while Vancouver, the city, is on the mainland. Every hour a very large ferry carrying hundreds of cars, leaves the ferry terminal. In any case, I was just speeding a bit so as not to miss the ferry when a police car appeared in the neighboring lane and flashed its lights briefly. I pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. The officer left his car, came up to my open window and simply said, "slow down a bit" before returning to his vehicle and driving off. My girlfriend was staring at me with utter astonishment, saying, "you didn't have to give him a bribe" (in Mexico, a "mordida")? I told her that no, one did not bribe RCMP officers (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) as that could lead to spending the night in jail!
So, lovely country Canada. Mind you, on the West Coast it can rain for months on end. But Back East, as we say, in metropolises like Montreal, a lovely city with a terrible climate, this time of year it is going to snow instead. I was just reading the Montreal Gazette for its sagacious wine columnist Bill Zacharkiw and I noticed a little note saying that delivery of paper would be delayed this morning "due to weather." Yes, that's all they said. But they did provide a photo. This is a pedestrian crossing one of Montreal's main streets:
Why is it, if an amateur musician moves in next door/across the street/across the hall, they are always noodlers? You know: every day or so they pick up the instrument and noodle for half an hour or so. Noodling is when you just play random groups of notes, resembling no known melody or meter.
* * *
The Oracle of Delphi said that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens and Socrates, sure that this could not be so, searched high and low for a wiser one finally concluding that if he were the wisest man it was simply because he knew he didn't know. Many are sure that they know something, but ones that are sure they do not know are far rarer. Am I sure this is true?
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And for a palate cleanser, some Scarlatti with anti-aircraft fire (around the 2 minute mark). Why? Because it was recorded in Paris by Wanda Landowska just before the Germans arrived in 1941.
Horace Walpole once wrote in a letter that "Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel."
* * *
And while we are on quotes, here is my favorite from Edward Gibbon: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.”
Now ask yourself, what are the prevailing modes of worship in our time?
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Let's end with some non-satirical Bach. This is the so-called Third Lute Suite by J. S. Bach, an arrangement of the Cello Suite No. 5 for Baroque lute. The lutenist is Klaudyna Żołnierek. I particularly love the two gavottes, found at the 15:24 mark, which I just learned myself this year.
There are so many great concerts being streamed for us that we could have a whole Friday Miscellanea of nothing but envois. And we might be the better for it. So...
Great impromptu music making by Thomas and Léa outdoors under a tree:
And some really fine Haydn from Les Arts Florissants conducted by William Christie:
Thanks to commentator Marc for tipping me to the mini-festival of chamber music by Morton Feldman from Wigmore Hall. Here is the first of three programs:
Also from Wigmore Hall is the Doric Quartet playing Mozart K. 575. They are obviously called the "Doric" quartet because they have simple, circular capitals as opposed to the elaborate headdresses of the Corinthian Quartet.
I don't think we have heard enough Brahms lately so here, also from Wigmore Hall, are Stephen Hough and the Castalian String Quartet with quintets by Brahms and Carl Frühling. (I don't know where the Castalian Quartet got their name from...)
And that should keep you busy listening over the weekend!
Paul McCartney: Once I’ve finished with my song and I release it then I don’t mind who makes what interpretation of it. At least, for me, they’re thinking about it. They’re free to think it means this, that or the other. If they ask me what it means I’ll say, “OK, well this is what I think it means but you’re free, feel free to think of it as anything you wish.”
Peter Kivy, author of several books on the philosophy of music, has identified three theories of musical expression: the arousal theory in which music arouses in the listener garden-variety emotions such as sadness, happiness, anger, depression and so on. He notes that this theory was pretty much universal since the seventeenth century until recently. The dissenters from this theory fall into two camps, the formalists like Eduard Hanslick who deny that it makes sense to talk about music in emotive terms, and the other camp of thinkers like Susanne Langer who approached music through various semantic and analytic methods trying to discover the emotions in the music itself. [cf. Peter Kivy, New Essays on Musical Understanding, "The Arousal Theory of Musical Expression: Rethinking the Unthinkable," pp 119 et. seq.]
Kivy was, among others, to critique the arousal theory successfully and instead of seeing music as disposed to inspire ordinary emotions, placed the expressive properties in the music itself. Incidentally, one of the key elements of the critique was that garden-variety emotions, such as love, hate, happiness, sadness and so on, have objects. They are not free-floating moods, but directed somewhere. One loves something or is sad about something. These emotions have objects. But instrumental music, at least, lacking concrete referentiality, does not have objects. What we perceive in music is atmosphere, mood, expression--that we can feel in varying ways.
I don't recall the source, but one of the most succinct comments on music and meaning was this one: "if music is a language what are the words and where is the dictionary we can look them up in?" Of course, while music has language-like properties, it is not a language and there are no words nor dictionaries.
In writing my set of songs I looked to the words for inspiration in the sense that I tried to find a musical "language" (by which I mean a collection of expressive devices) that would reflect and amplify the poem. In the setting of the poem by Li Po that mentions a Chinese bell, for example, I used a paper clip on the sixth string to give a cluster of bell-like tones. In an excerpt from a satirical play by Aristophanes, I imitated the gestures of a Rossini opera. Some of the choices were made instinctively and I doubt I could give a rational defense of them!
And in instrumental music, I have been turning away from this kind of referentiality and using each piece to explore the musical materials. This is a fairly common practice in contemporary composers. So the "meaning" of the piece while I am writing it relates to the materials of its construction and the way they are related in time. Later on I may discover interesting atmospheric or mood effects that I might amplify or expand. Finally, after the piece leaves the studio and comes alive in the concert hall the listeners may derive various kinds of enjoyment from it. They may describe it as "relaxing" or "energetic," "soothing" or "dynamic." They may hate it or like it. They may change their minds on further hearing.
But with a few exceptions, for the most part, I am not trying to craft or inject "meaning" into the piece in any kind of sense that can be put into words.
I know I have put this up before, but for those who have not heard it or who want to hear it again, here is my piece Dark Dream:
If you listen to much Morton Feldman you will develop a whole new sense of the word "minimal." Take this piece for example, De Kooning from 1963:
Next to that anything by Philip Glass or Steve Reich is going to sound horribly cluttered and "busy." But austere, spare music like this has its unique appeal.
Amongst fellow musicians I am known for being succinct as a composer and yes, I do tend to prefer to use fewer notes where others might use more. But compared to Morton Feldman I feel positively prolix. Some music, like some sauces, is greatly improved by reduction. We are so often tempted by more: more notes, faster tempos, higher notes and louder notes. But given that those have been the trends for a couple of hundred years now, surely there is more to discover on the other end of the spectrum, among the quiet, few, scattered notes. At least, that seems to be the message from Morton Feldman.
Listening to the music of Feldman is like a new kind of ear-training. You find yourself straining to remember exactly what the pitch of that previous note was. And is the new note really a fourth higher?
Apart from reading your interesting comments I didn't do any blogging on the weekend. I was very busy Saturday and today I devoted to music: guitar and composition. Made good headway with both. But now I am back and wanted to expand a bit on my remark about composers today being "largely forbidden the use of traditional formulae." That sparked a lot of comment!
Now, of course, it is an exaggeration. It is certainly not audiences, or some audiences at least, that forbid composers from using traditional formulae--just look at how they love Alma Deutscher! So who is it that issues this edict? Perhaps some music critics, thinkers like Theodor Adorno as Wenatchee mentioned, but also, granting and commissioning bodies. The Grawemeyer Award or Pulitzer prizes are not going to go to a composer who is not writing in a contemporary idiom. Others who might not want to program contemporary music using traditional formulae are conductors and performers generally. They might say something like, "If it sounds like Mendelssohn, we are better off just playing Mendelssohn."
So yes, it's complicated. I don't want to issue any edicts myself; I have neither the desire nor the right! I think every composer--and audience member--should decide for themselves what formulae they want to use and/or listen to. But I don't feel right using traditional formulae myself unless they are well hidden. It feels to me like taking a drink from a bottle of champagne that has been open too long: all the fizz is gone. When I compose I am really, above all, looking for something fresh.
When you look at Frank Martin or Arvo Pärt, yes, their music can sound rather traditional, but on closer examination, they have found a fresh way of using what was a traditional formula. I have tried that myself and I don't find it entirely congenial.
At the end of the day, of course, it is practical considerations that are important: is whatever we are doing working, expressing something? And does anyone want to hear it?
Here is a piece by Morton Feldman: Durations 1 - 5:
Probably most artists don't like to talk about it, but chance plays an important role in creativity. I've had this come to my attention recently from doing my little abstract sketches. While they often start with some little idea or image, a lot of how they unfold is somewhat random. The trick is somehow tying it all together at the end. Of all contemporary composers, the one who most fully and publicly acknowledged this was, of course, John Cage, many of whose compositions were written using chance procedures.
Historically, this was less the case than it is now. For a long time, music creation was based on the use of sacred or secular texts and composers still like writing songs because the words provide lots of inspiration. Then, later on, instrumental composers relied heavily on a few basic harmonic progressions such as the passamezzo moderno that had such a long history that it finally evolved into the American 12-bar blues. Composers were taught the basic harmonic/melodic formulas right up until Rimsky-Korsakov, who had Stravinsky as a pupil.
These basic materials and structures, along with various kinds of variation techniques, provided composers with enormous resources. But there was still that moment when Mozart, quill pen in hand, paused before a blank sheet of manuscript paper and pondered. Where do you start? In that moment, it might be pure chance that a particular note or interval or chord or progression, or even timbre, comes to mind. Perhaps the composer imagines hearing a distant horn or a leaping interval on a violin. And from that all else follows.
Alas, for a contemporary composer, largely forbidden the use of traditional formulae, that moment of pondering before the blank page is perennial! We are always floating in infinite space. So chance becomes more and more important. As Cage demonstrated, you can simply give all to chance and, oddly enough, his chance music still sounds like John Cage. Or you can, like Morton Feldman or Steve Reich (in very different ways, mind you) try and have as few compositional decisions as possible. Let chance or happenstance get you started and then simply try and follow its logic. But no composer nowadays can create something with the absolute certain inevitability of a piece by Bach, whose creative decisions rested on centuries of inherited tradition. For us, an ancient tradition might be Anton Webern!
Every time I sit down to do an abstract sketch I let random chance have its place and try and see what follows from that. This I find strangely reassuring because I am likely to let ideas flow more freely when I sit down to compose music.
Here is a Bach fugue where everything comes from those first four notes which were actually an age-old melodic formula:
Singer-songwriter Neil Young has sold a half share of the rights to his entire catalogue of 1,180 songs to London-listed specialist investment firm Hipgnosis Songs Fund, the company said on Wednesday. The rise of streaming services means artists such as Dylan and Young are able to reach an ever-expanding audience of fans from a younger generation.
Well, that is the point, I suppose. It is partly about making a lot of money--in another article it was estimated that the deal puts $150 million in Neil Young's pocket--but equally important is that the catalogue be marketed through the new streaming media.
Classical music thrives on collective encounters, but even concerts experienced in large crowds — remember those? — are particularly meaningful when they simultaneously address the more private precincts of the self. Yes, musical organizations will talk about learning pragmatic lessons from this pandemic. But as the industry begins the long march back toward some semblance of normalcy, let’s hope the lessons internalized also include keeping sight of the art form’s unique modes of immediacy, of intimacy, of direct expression, and of vulnerability. These qualities carried classical music through 2020 — and many of the rest of us too.
The Met Orchestra Musicians have issued a statement in response to the Metropolitan Opera’s decision to utilize European musicians for its upcoming gala showcase.
In the statement, the musicians noted that they have been unpaid for 10 months and that the Met’s actions have been an “outlier” in the industry.
“Every other major orchestra has been compensated since the very beginning of the pandemic. Met management is using the pandemic opportunistically. They are not seeking a short-term crisis-plan to balance out pandemic circumstances. They are seeking permanent cuts. The cuts they seek are so deep that the orchestra would need unrealistic salary gains over the next quarter-century just to get back to current salaries,” says the statement.
Art workers are but a slice of the art world, which itself is a portion of the wider culture industry that is verging on collapse. Many creative people today are swimming barely above the poverty line. The walls are caving in everywhere: Book publishing is contracting and consolidating; the music industry is taking huge blows in the transition to streaming; and journalism, as The Observer reported recently, shed 260,000 jobs between 2000 and 2018 (far outstripping the losses in coal mining, it adds).
Contemporary critics often attribute this downward spiral to the rise of exploitative tech platforms: Musicians can release an album on Bandcamp, but they’re still broke; documentarians can distribute their film online, but people can easily watch for free; journalists can blog until their fingers fall off, and never see a cent.
The article poses some possible solutions based on collective bargaining and investment in infrastructure and education, but the problem is larger than that. The basic truth, as Jordan Peterson has pointed out, is that it is very hard to monetize creativity. At least, until you have achieved the heights of pop stardom, in which case you can sell your back catalogue for hundreds of millions.
Maybe the problem lies in seeing creativity as being only a component of something we call the "cultural industry" instead of thinking of it as one component of being human. Creativity is an essential in solving all the problems of life, not just ones involved in putting paint on canvas or notes on paper.
* * *
James Wood in the London Review of Books takes a look at the current batch of books on Beethoven: A Great Deaf Bear.
It wasn’t till my early twenties that I started listening to the piano sonatas as they demand to be heard: evenly, carefully. Later, I worked through a few on the piano, cold-fingered after years of keyboard hibernation. The Beethoven who emerged turned out to be closer in spirit and practice to Tallis and Byrd than I had imagined. This was a Beethoven not of overwhelming symphonic force but of delicate counterpoint and relentless chromatic logic, a composer who explores the subtlest harmonic developments, who delights in exploring fugues, dissonance, form. I was struck above all by Beethoven’s contradictions – he was a conventional master of the unexpected, an explosive student of tradition. The strictest complexity is placed alongside the fiercest simplicity: a flaying double fugue will suddenly give way to a clear and lovely melody, flowing like water.
I didn't start listening carefully to the Beethoven piano sonatas until after I had moved to Mexico--not that many years ago in fact. They are so central to the whole sweep of Western European music that it is astonishing to me that we never studied them in my university years. Many professors take them for granted and think of them as "old hat," music that everyone knows. But if you are making a New Year's resolution to spend more time listening to music, I can only suggest buying the very inexpensive Dover edition of the piano sonatas and picking up an integral recording. I would recommend Friedrich Gulda or the new one by Igor Levit. You really can't have a more fulfilling musical experience.
* * *
Which brings us to our envoi and, of course, a Beethoven piano sonata. Here is Friedrich Gulda with op. 111 recorded in 1967:
That was a little haiku I wrote a couple of days ago. This is the time of year we do a bit of reflecting, at least I do. I think about how last year went and what I could do to make the coming year better. Tempered, of course, by the realization that, as always, we are in the hands of the gods (or God) and who knows what is in store for us. So, we just do the best we can to be prepared.
For the first time in my life (!) I started doing a budget a few months ago. So far all I do is record my daily expenses, but that was always the missing data point, so I should be able to do a bit better financial planning in future. I was talking to my very elderly half-sister the other day and she told me that she has owned Tesla stock for seven years. Good grief! My two thoughts are: first, very humbling for me as an investor and second, she can never sell this stock as the capital gains tax will be other-worldly! She was also telling me she wanted to strangle her financial advisor who was wanting to sell Apple (she has owned Apple for a long, long time) in order to "rebalance" the portfolio. Yeah, well, maybe in normal times, but these days? What could you possibly buy with the proceeds from selling Apple? And don't tell me "value" stocks because they have been moribund for years.
But enough of this off-topic stuff! I want to talk a bit about what I might post in the blog in the New Year. I was thinking of getting back to the roots of the blog. In June of this year it will be the 10th anniversary of The Music Salon. In the earlier days I did a lot of educational posts, which have disappeared in recent years. Back then I got put on Cambridge University's list of music education blogs and later on I even won an award. So there is a lot of room to do more posts about understanding the basics of music. I might even do some of my satirical posts on pop music, always fun. And, who knows, I might do an occasional serious post on pop music.
If I can find a good long term project, like my survey of the concerto repertoire, or the Haydn symphonies, I might do that and I really should finish my series of posts on Sofia Gubaidulina and Luigi Nono. Plus, hanging my head in embarrassment, I did the first half of an analysis of the first movement of the Symphony No. 5 by Shostakovich, and never did part 2. I will, I promise!
And if any of my readers have any suggestions I am always happy to consider them.
Philosophically, the blog will continue to celebrate the virtues and triumphs of Western European Classical Music as it is practiced not only in Western Europe, but also in North and South America, Asia and the rest of the world. We will do so not only because it is worth doing, but because we believe in the long-lasting quality of this music. We will continue to resist the claims that anything written by Dead White Men is offensive because it is racist and misogynist and think that the people making those claims likely have a perverse relationship with reality and the truth.
Finally, my heartfelt thanks to my many, many commentators who bring so much to this blog and without whom there really would be no point.
A very Happy New Year to you all! To celebrate, here is a joyous and expansive performance of the Bach Magnificat that we have not posted before:
This will be the official Music Salon "Good Riddance to 2020, the Year the Music Died" post. Thanks to all of you for reading and commenting and let's look forward to a much better year for music!
Brace yourself, hyperpop is here. This is 100 Gecs, a song from their Christmas album:
Every time I think pop has hit a new low of repetitive inanity, a new group comes along to confound me. At least it is mercifully brief. And the Wall Street Journal even has an article on the genre: Hyperpop’s Joyful Too-Muchness. On the one hand, artists are always going to exploit new technical possibilities to their utmost. On the other hand, the results aren't always easy to listen to:
The organizers of an indoor music festival in Barcelona to test the effectiveness of same-day coronavirus screening said Wednesday that preliminary results indicate there was zero transmission inside the venue.
The results were released over two weeks since 1,000 music fans volunteered to take part in the experiment. After passing an antigen test on site, around 500 people were randomly selected to enter the concert hall. The other 500 were sent home and used as a control group.
All participants were called back to take a second test eight days later. The results showed zero infections among the 463 concertgoers who complied with the second round of testing, while the control group of 496 people who did not get into the concert had two positive cases.
And that’s what has captured me, the layers and complexity of classical music. It’s the amazing combination of disparate instruments brought together to tell us a story in music. Each composer is so different, each has their own signature, both the old and the new composers, they bring us music that engages mind and heart together.
In the midst of the noise of loss that we are all experiencing, I have found a place to go that actually helps to ground me so I can thrive in a challenging environment.
Classical music surrounds me now, all during the day and before I sleep. No matter the news of the latest catastrophe, this music helps me through it so I am never overwhelmed by grief or anxiety.
If there is a group of people who have paid a price during this pandemic, it is musicians, but especially the ones who play for ensembles and orchestras and, of course, the classical singers. They have watched their livelihoods disappear overnight and have had to adapt on the fly to a very different world. While we have obsessed about the millionaires and billionaires in professional sports, these creative artists get nary a mention. I would argue that the value they give for the modest livings they make, are of equal, if not more value to our society than most professional sports.
* * *
Here is a very brief clip of Ravi Shankar giving George Harrison a lesson on sitar:
The latest issue of VAN magazine has a survey of the Beethoven year with combative statements by the feminist musicologist Susan McClary and the BLM music theorist Philip Ewell (pictured), who says: ‘”Beethoven” is like a metonym for the toxic combination that often happens when whiteness combines with maleness in the history of the United States.. At times, especially in terms of power and impact, whiteness plus maleness has more or less always equated with power. And, when that power gets challenged, it really can lash out in horrible ways—up to and including violence, rape, and murder.’
Got it? Beethoven is a poster boy for every evil ascribed by anyone to men with white skin.
As always, the comment section has lots of entertaining bits. Also, there are lots of musicologist who continue to do traditional musicology--probably most fall into that category.
Isolation surely had something to do with my listening. Music was no longer just music, but a reflection of what seemed to be going on. Piece after piece sounded like it had been written to reflect the last six tumultuous months. I chose Machaut’s luminous “Messe Notre Dame,” for instance, because it helped to show where our music came from. It hadn’t occurred to me that it was written not six months ago but six centuries ago, in the wake of the Black Death pandemic.
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I really think that something by the much-maligned Beethoven is called for. Here is Grigory Sokolov playing the Piano Sonata, op 28 'Pastoral', one of the most gentle and charming of the sonatas:
