Friday Miscellanea

Josquin des Prez

The New York Times offers an article on a composer who died 500 years ago this coming August: Josquin des Prez: The Renaissance’s Most Influential Composer, 500 Years Later.

Josquin indeed wedded the logic of math to the magic of melody, and his compositions feel like they unfold with both perfect clarity and atmospheric strangeness. Shining and austere, with the gentle radiance of a shaft of sunlight beaming through a window, Josquin’s music weeded out extraneous, extravagant ornamentation; he created textures of polyphonic complexity that are still smooth and free.

His works feel unified because they are organized around small melodic fragments that gradually develop as they are passed from voice to voice. This might seem like a description of, well, all music. But the notion of carrying a melodic “cell” through a whole work was unknown before Josquin’s time, and he was one of the most gifted experimenters with the concept.

Much of the article is in the form of an interview with Peter Phillips, director of the Tallis Scholars and composer Nico Muhly.

* * *

The Whitsun Festival is going ahead in Salzburg and Slipped Disc has the stringent requirements:

TRAVEL REGULATIONS for ENTRIES FROM ABROAD

As of 19 May, the current restrictions on entries from abroad, including quarantine rules, will terminate. Persons who are tested, vaccinated or recovered from Covid-19 will be able to travel to Austria without quarantine (the exception being travellers entering from high-risk countries with a 7-day average infection rate of over 250 per 100,000).

This gives me some hope I might be able to attend the summer festival.

* * *

 The archives of music of colonial Latin America are beginning to be explored: El Mundo/Richard Savino: Archivo de Guatemala review – perfect balance of sacred and profane

The huge cathedral that dominates the central square in the Guatemalan capital was built in stages at the end of the 18th century, after the capital was moved from the city that is now known as Antigua, and quickly became the centre of the lively musical culture that is documented in its archives. Those records contain music by both Spanish and Guatemalan composers. El Mundo’s selection includes some of the imported music, including a beautiful little cantata, Sosiega Tu Quebranto, by José de Torres, but they concentrate on locally produced works, especially those by two successive maestri di cappella at the cathedral, Manuel José de Quirós and Rafael Antonio Castellanos, whose sacred compositions combined the techniques of 16th-century polyphony with the rhythms and harmonies of local dance music, especially a dance called the xácara.

Be sure to listen to the brief musical examples.

* * *

What Makes Music Universal. Yes, this is one of those headlines that promises far more than it delivers. But there are some interesting thoughts:

In the past two years, the debate over whether music is universal, or even whether that debate has merit, has raged like a battle of the bands among scientists. The stage has expanded from musicology to evolutionary biology to cultural anthropology. This summer, in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, more than 100 scholars sound off on evolution and universality of music. I love the din. The academic discord gives way to a symphony of insights into the meaning of music in our lives. It may be a cliché to say music is the sound of our shared humanity. But it feels transcendent to be in tune with a person from another culture. There’s something alchemical about knowing we share the same biology. Originate from the same place. Share the same desires. But there’s more to the story. My recent adventures in the fields of music research have instilled in me, deeper than ever before, the feeling that music is what makes us human. I also have a new appreciation of what universality in music really means.

The most interesting is a performance by the Ukrainian musical group DakhaBrakha:

 * * *

Ted Gioia, who has commented here, talks about new paths to publishing: Arts Coverage Commentary: A Conversation with Ted Gioia About New Approaches to Publishing

Gioia: Substack is the most supportive platform for writers I’ve ever seen. And this support is evident in many ways. They let the writer control all the intellectual property rights. They allow writers to keep 90 percent of the subscription revenues. They let writers maintain complete control over their email list. They allow writers to decide what to charge — or what to give away for free. They provide writers with comprehensive metrics, to a degree that no periodical has ever done in my entire writing career.

Here’s the sad part of this story. Newspapers could imitate all of this today — in fact, they could have done it years ago — and maybe enjoy some of the extraordinary growth that Substack is now demonstrating. But newspapers won’t do it. They will never do it. And for a simple reason: Their business model won’t allow them to operate with that degree of support, generosity, and transparency. Just imagine a newspaper that gave 90 percent of revenues to the writers. It will never happen.

* * *

When Paid Applauders Ruled the Paris Opera House

Imagine you are in the Paris Opera House, circa 1831. Take a look at the crowd. They look like regular opera-goers, just like you, but some of them are not as they appear. See that row of men clapping wildly in the front row, and crying “Encore, encore?” They’re actually employees of the theater, just like the musicians. That woman dabbing tears from her eyes? By day, she’s a professional mourner; by night she brings her talents to the opera house, in order to increase the impact of the melodramatic scenes.

The directors of the Paris Opera saw no reason to leave the success of their performances up to the whims of an unpredictable audience. To guarantee acclaim, they employed the services of an organized body of professional applauders, commonly known as the “claque.” These claqueurs were tucked away throughout the audience, disguised as members of the public.

You know, I think something very similar is going on with the mass media today.

* * *

Classical Music Podcasts Begin to Flourish, at Last

Classical music has been surprisingly slow to embrace podcasting, a medium ideally suited to illuminate its sounds and stories.

But something changed in the last year, with live performances on hold because of the pandemic and the music industry belatedly exploring new platforms: Classical and opera podcasts have begun to flourish.

Established ones have evolved; “Aria Code,” hosted by the cross-genre luminary Rhiannon Giddens, has found new depths of poetry and resonance, and the conductor Joshua Weilerstein’s “Sticky Notes” is experimenting with approaches to score analysis. Others have joined the field, like the Cleveland Orchestra’s “On a Personal Note,” which debuted last April with Franz Welser-Möst wistfully reflecting on the ensemble’s final gathering before the pandemic closed its hall.

* * *

Stravinsky the shapeshifter

Igor Stravinsky was a chronic self-reinventor. A stylistic and cultural shapeshifter, he was declared both the “most modern of modern” and a neoclassicist (he hated the word). He shook the earth with savage pagan dances and went in for intense serialism and religious orthodoxy, all while declaring that music wasn’t capable of expressing anything at all. What to believe? Are we allowed to love all these works that so intoxicatingly and possibly insincerely contradict each other? Because I do.

Stravinsky was born in 1882 in a wooden dacha on the Gulf of Finland. His childhood home in St Petersburg was across the street from the Mariinsky Theatre, where his father Fyodor was a singer in the Imperial Opera. Young Igor was fixated on the Russian operas of Mussorgsky, of his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov and his hero Tchaikovsky. His own early works follow in their footsteps; his breakthrough Paris ballets stand on their shoulders. He would eventually flee Europe and settle in Hollywood just as the Second World War broke out, reinventing himself once again in the New World.

* * *

Let's end with some Stravinsky: the Symphonies of Wind Instruments is one of his most enigmatic works:

 

Queen Mab

One of the most remarkable speeches in one of Shakespeare's most remarkable plays, Romeo and Juliet, comes from a secondary character, Romeo's friend Mercutio. This is the famous speech about Queen Mab, the "fairies' midwife" who rides in a chariot made from an empty hazel-nut and "gallops night by night/Through lovers' brains and then they dream of love..." This is one of Shakespeare's finest flights of fancy and a largely gratuitous one as it has little to do directly with the story but merely creates an atmosphere as it fleshes out the persona of Mercutio, who will later die in a swordfight. Here is the whole, remarkable, speech:

O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you. 

She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes 

In shape no bigger than an agate-stone 

On the fore-finger of an alderman, 

Drawn with a team of little atomies 

Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep; 

Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs, 

The cover of the wings of grasshoppers, 

The traces of the smallest spider’s web, 

The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams, 

Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film, 

Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat, 

Not so big as a round little worm 

Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid; 

Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut 

Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub, 

Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers. 

And in this state she gallops night by night 

Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love; 

O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on court’sies straight, 

O’er lawyers’ fingers, who straight dream on fees, 

O’er ladies ‘ lips, who straight on kisses dream, 

Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues, 

Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are: 

Sometime she gallops o’er a courtier’s nose, 

And then dreams he of smelling out a suit; 

And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig’s tail 

Tickling a parson’s nose as a’ lies asleep, 

Then dreams, he of another benefice: 

Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck, 

And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats, 

Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades, 

Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon 

Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,

And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two 

And sleeps again. This is that very Mab 

That plats the manes of horses in the night, 

And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs, 

Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes: 

This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs, 

That presses them and learns them first to bear, 

Making them women of good carriage.

Why am I bringing this up? For two reasons, really. As part of my project to "de-digitize" my life to some extent I decided a while back to read a physical book every morning. Apart from some musical texts such as Erno Lendvai's book on Bartók and some others, I also made of a point of reading classics like The Odyssey and Thucydides' Peloponnesian War. I might at some point re-read Dante's Inferno. But the biggest classic of all, at least for English readers, is Shakespeare who sits in English literary history like a great boulder athwart the stream--impossible to ignore. I have read many plays, starting with Macbeth in high school and Othello in university and many other plays on my own. I have also watched quite a few films of Shakespeare. A very enlightened movie theatre owner in Canada where I used to live, would put on a mini-Shakespeare film festival every winter. He only had a few films, but they were some of the best: Laurence Olivier as Othello, the Zeffirelli production of Romeo and Juliet, Peter Brook's King Lear and so on. He would put on one film as a matinee each Sunday.

So I have started re-reading some Shakespeare plays and decided to start with some comedies as they are least familiar to me. Much Ado About Nothing (there is a wonderful recent film by Kenneth Branagh with a dream cast of him, Michael Keaton, Robert Sean Leonard, Keanu Reeves, Emma Thompson, Denzel Washington, and Kate Beckinsale. Michael Keaton as Dogberry has to be seen to be believed!), The Tempest and Two Gentlemen of Verona. Shakespeare's comedies are difficult for modern readers because we tend to miss all the puns and Elizabethan bawdy slang. So after that I decided to turn to some tragedies and I am re-reading Romeo and Juliet. Mercutio's Queen Mab speech sticks out as something really remarkable. As Mercutio says a moment later:

I talk of dreams,

Which are the children of an idle brain,

Begot of nothing but vain fantasy...

I rather like it when a great talent like Shakespeare goes off the rails for a bit and takes us into a pure, creative fantasy. Someone else who was impressed with this speech was Hector Berlioz who wrote a lovely scherzo based on it which provides my second reason. Here is the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique conducted by John Eliot Gardiner.

Friday Miscellanea

I have been challenged in the comments when I have made the claim that there is such a thing as "cancel culture" that seeks to replace classics with more contemporary and "diverse" offerings. I offer this essay from The Washington Post to be taken into consideration: Howard University’s removal of classics is a spiritual catastrophe.

Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.

Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.

There is a lot more so I encourage you to read the whole thing. One comment to the article mentions that because of declining enrollment the university really had no choice. You can't offer courses if no-one signs up for them. This fails to take into account a longstanding campaign against the classics, both of the ancient world and in literature generally. The reasons are subtle and complex, but I think we can see the cancellation of classics departments as the final stage in a successful campaign to, frankly, dumb down education.

* * *

LONDON CONCERTMASTER IS DRIVING AN UBER

The violinist Raffaele Pagano, concertmaster of the London Arte Chamber Orchestra, is keeping up his practice in the car while driving a 70-hour week on Uber hires.

Raffaele, 34, from Naples, moved to London for its musical life, but Covid has thwarted his hopes.

* * *

UK QUARTET SPENDS 1/3 OF ITS FEES ON VISAS

Sara Wolstenholme is a violinist in the Heath Quartet, which normally tours Europe year-round. The quartet has an invitation to appear at a concert in Spain in May 2022, but with four work visas costing £232 ($320) apiece (over 30% of their fee), it is a significant pay cut.

But that's not even the main story: if $320 US is 30% of their fee then the fee for the quartet only amounts to a little over $1,000 US. That sounds more like a fee for a wedding or funeral gig than an actual concert fee.

* * *

Do We Deprive Music Of Its Mystery By Writing About It?

Assessing how musicians play a score, classical-music-speaking, is the only question of live performance. Such as well compels the critic who’s hoping to capture the next day’s readers. How spirited, how dull, how spryly, how sluggishly—how I, the evening’s soothsayer, at least, in writing, must exemplify those how’s. In that moment, it struck me, like a man seeing a dog fighting for its life in a swollen river. No assessing its weakness, no praying for its strength. I had to leap in and save the animal from the churning water, dead set on taking the performance under. Perhaps my authorial attentiveness might throw a life preserver to the sinking canine.

This is the oddest sort of essay, one that scarcely even glances at its topic until the very end. The sample of the writer's prose quoted above is, I'm afraid, typical: overwrought metaphor, awkward phrases, excessive adjectives and finally the metaphor collapsing in confusion. This is not only bad writing about music, it is just bad writing period. I don't think you deprive music of anything if you write about it well.

* * *

Does Spotify pay artists a fair rate? Here’s what musicians, managers and Apple Music have to say

As of the first quarter of 2020, about 400 million people worldwide subscribed to one or more music streaming services. With an estimated 32% share of the market, Spotify is the dominant service; its closest competitor, Apple Music, has an 18% share, as tallied by media tracking firm Midia Research.

Mark Mulligan, managing director and streaming analyst at Midia, has followed the Justice at Spotify protests and Ek’s response to them, and he’s got bad news for the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers. “There is nothing you can do about streaming royalty payments that will make it look like record sales again.

“Streaming works for record labels,” says Mulligan. “It works for publishers. It works if you’ve got thousands or millions of songs — it all adds up,” Mulligan says. “But if you’ve only got 20 or 30 or 100 songs then it doesn’t. You need scale of catalog to benefit.”

* * *

One of the things that The New Yorker's classical music critic Alex Ross does well is report on leading edge music festivals: The Sonic Extremes of the MaerzMusik Festival

On the stage of an empty concert hall, the Austrian-born composer Peter Ablinger sits in a chair and begins to tell the time. “At the third stroke, it will be twenty o’clock precisely,” he says, adhering to the hallowed formula of the BBC’s Speaking Clock. He accompanies himself with a simple C-minor sequence on a keyboard. After continuing in this vein for twenty minutes, Ablinger cedes the floor to the young German actress Salome Manyak, who speaks over an atmospherically bleeping soundtrack by the Finnish experimental musician Olli Aarni. The ritual goes on for nearly twenty-seven hours, with an ever-changing team of artists, curators, composers, singers, and d.j.s announcing the time in German, English, Italian, French, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Farsi, Oromo, Mandarin, and twelve other languages. A rotating assortment of prerecorded tracks, usually electronic, provide accompaniment. Most of the reciters maintain a crisp, cool demeanor, even when their Web sites lead one to expect something more uproarious. The Swedish dancer and costume designer Björn Ivan Ekemark, for example, gives no sign that he also performs under the name Ivanka Tramp and leads a “sticky and visceral cake-sitting performance group,” called analkollaps.

You do almost feel that you are there, in Ross's clear and detailed prose.

* * *

The Strange Undeath of Middlebrow: Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.

But what happens if you ask the director of one of those local theater companies, or the percussionist of one of those regional orchestras, whether tragedy or classical music is an “inherently” worthier form than, say, comic strips? Whatever their feelings, they will remember that scrap of Pierre Bourdieu that someone forced them to read in college—for he, too, is canonical—and say “No.” (We will leave aside, as this conversation generally does, the vexing questions of what inherent and great mean or could possibly mean in this context.) If pressed, they will say that the works that embody these traditions remain important because, due to a once common but mistaken belief in their inherent worth, they have influenced the culture. In other words, these works’ value comes from the fact that misguided people once valued them. Not a ringing defense.

Well said: is the fact that misguided people (like myself) once valued them the only thing worth noting about the great works of music and literature? It is like the inverse of Bertrand Russell's famous comment on moral relativity that "I refuse to believe that the only thing wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don't like it!" There is a lot more interesting stuff in that essay if you care to follow the link.

* * *

That absurd metaphor about a dog fighting for its life in a swollen river was, believe it or not, used to describe a faulty performance of an early Mozart symphony. So let's have as our envoi one of those early symphonies. This is the Symphony No.9 in C major, K.73/75a, written when Mozart was twelve years old:

Bach: WTC 1, Prelude and Fugue in B minor

As this is the last prelude and fugue pair in Book One, you might expect Bach to give us something special, and so he does. The prelude is in the form of a trio sonata movement with two contrapuntal voices over a running bass. There are two halves, each repeated. The prelude alone takes five or six minutes depending on the tempo. The upper voices are constantly imitating one another at fairly brief intervals but the counterpoint is rather free as the imitation is changing, not strict. For example, at the very beginning a canon at the half note is suggested, but it mutates after a couple of measures only to suggest a new canon a few measures later. This goes on for the whole prelude in various ways. Here are the beginnings of each half so you can see how it works:

Click to enlarge

As you can see, the imitation disappears after a couple of measures. Same in the second half:

Click to enlarge

But the most interesting things happen in the fugue which spans seventy-six measures and about ten minutes in duration--by far the longest fugue in the set. Here is the subject:

Click to enlarge

This is a very notorious subject, of course, because it contains all twelve chromatic pitches making it famous for having anticipated the twelve-tone system of Arnold Schoenberg. Of course, the basic concept of serial music is that no pitches are repeated until all twelve have been heard and here, some notes, B and F# for example, are heard more than once. But if you spend much time examining the music of Schoenberg, such as the Violin Concerto, you will notice that he often does not follow that rule. This is certainly the most chromatic fugue subject that Bach ever wrote. Structurally, it is not so unusual, once you get used to how this very chromatic subject influences the harmony. The most unusual element is the false entry: several times Bach states just the first seven or eight notes of the subject and then drops it. The same curtailed entry often then appears in another voice before we hear the full subject. We hear more false entries in this fugue than I think we have previously. The other really interesting element is a lovely imitative sequence Bach uses in more than one episode:

Click to enlarge

Every time that comes back it is more haunting.

Now let's hear two performances. First, Bob Van Asperen:

And second, Sviatoslav Richter (unfortunately, without the score):

Bach: WTC 1, Prelude and Fugue in B major

First let's hear this short and sweet pair on the harpsichord with Diego Ares:

 

Unfortunately there does not seem to be a good performance of this piece on piano with the score. We do have a Richter recording, however:

The prelude is a miniature masterpiece based almost entirely on this tiny turn figure:

That's pretty much the whole prelude except for a couple of sequences.

The fugue subject is fairly typical: its most distinctive feature is the trill at the end:

You might also notice that the first four notes of the prelude motif and the first four notes of the fugue subject are the same pitches. This is a fairly typical fugue with quite a few entries and short episodes. A couple of the entries alter the ending of the subject by dropping the trill and shortening that note. As the rest of the subject remains the same I don't think we need call them false entries, however. About halfway through the fugue the subject appears in inversion:

This changes the harmonic context so that this and the subsequent answer, also in inversion, omit the trill. No strettos in this fugue. The prelude and fugue together are barely over three minutes. As I said, short and sweet.

Bach: WTC 1, Prelude and Fugue in B flat minor

Since there are only three left, I want to wrap up this project of surveying all the preludes and fugues in Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier. At five flats, this key is far out on edge of possible keys in the 18th century. Indeed, the next generation would rarely go beyond three or four accidentals. Possibly because of the remote key, I notice a significant expressive difference in the harpsichord version of the prelude in particular. Here is Kris Verhelst in a performance for the Netherlands Bach Society:

As you can hear in the first couple of measures of the prelude, even seconds and augmented seconds sound rather "crunchy" in this temperament. (I'm not good enough to tell which one she is using, but likely Werckmeister III or something similar which is usable in all the keys, but some are crunchier than others.)

Now here is Sviatoslav Richter and the poster has kindly included not only the score, but marked the entries of the subject in red and answers in blue.

The prelude sounds so much more smoothly consonant on the piano. That is a lovely prelude, in its measured stride reminding me of some of the choruses from the St. Matthew Passion. But let's take a close look at the fugue. Here is the extremely simple subject:

And the answer:

And that's it. As far as material goes you can't get much simpler. The only distinctive thing about this subject, and something that we have not seen before, is the gigantic leap of a ninth to the third note. Bach subjects typically tend to be rhythmically active, but generally move by step. This is the largest leap we have seen in one of his subjects, I believe. There also isn't a very distinctive countersubject.

The fugue unfolds pretty much as you would expect. It is in five rather than three or four voices and the entries are interspersed with free counterpoint. No inverted subjects and no strettos until the end. One of the nicest effects is an entry on the relative major, D flat major, in m. 25 followed by an answer on E flat minor. But just when it seems we will continue in E flat minor, Bach gives us another entry on D flat major in m. 37 that is given a harmonically haunting context. Things are fairly normal from then on until m. 67 when Bach gives us a very tight stretto at the half note (i.e. one note delayed) of all five voices from the soprano on down. Given the nature of the theme that means that the first note of the second entry is identical with the second note of the first entry and so on through all five voices. I don't think I have ever seen another stretto so brilliantly executed.

Well, twenty-four preludes and fugues in all the keys and no two alike. Bach really outdid himself. Just the B major and minor ones to go and I will get to them quite soon.

Friday Miscellanea

I'm sorry for not posting more this week. I have been very busy with other things and just didn't have the free time available. I think that I will manage to get my Bach Well-Tempered Clavier series finished this weekend as there are only a couple to do. After that I have some posts on Bartók I want to do. I also have one on composing that I'm mulling over right now. So, there will be some things worth reading up soon.

* * *

I have been reading a history of China and I strongly recommend it. A couple of interesting takeaways: the Chinese authorities have been struggling to dominate and assimilate the Uighur people of Xinjiang province for, oh, about the last two thousand years. And the Chinese have always thought of themselves as inherently superior to all other peoples. So recent news stories are really not "news." Just a little public service announcement.

* * *

Here is a lovely Wigmore Hall recital by Benjamin Appl, baritone and James Baillieu, piano with settings of poems by Heinrich Heine ending with a lovely performance of Dichterliebe by Robert Schumann but also with settings by Mauricio Kagel, Felix Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann and others.

* * *

WHAT DO OPERA SINGERS TALK ABOUT? WHERE TO EAT…

The truth about opera singers is that food and drinks are pretty much the only topic we discuss. When they know you’ve been hired to sing in a new opera house, your musician friends will give you their list. Where to get the best täffelspitz with cream spinach if you’re in Vienna. The address of Pavarotti’s cook in Genova. The best wine bar in Madrid. Believe me, nobody knows food and drinks like an opera singer.

This is so, so true!

* * *

Can Beethoven temper the political tensions between U.S. and China?

 In the case of classical music, as Beethoven in Beijing illustrates, the ties that bind our two countries are historically driven and deeply emotional. They will be tested, but hopefully, they will survive.

The documentary revolves around the Philadelphia Orchestra’s historic 1973 visit to China, the first by a U.S. orchestra. It followed President Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking trip to Beijing that established diplomatic ties with the country. Classical music had been banned as “decadent” during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, but the orchestra’s visit, with Eugene Ormandy conducting Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, became a milestone in U.S.-Chinese relations.

And as a footnote to that we could mention Sviatoslav Richter's first US tour in 1960 at the height of the Cold War,

* * *

Two Years Later: An Update on the Organs at Notre-Dame de Paris

In December 2020, the nearly 8,000 pipes of the grand orgue at Notre-Dame were taken to be cleaned, so the lead dust that had settled on them could be removed. What does this entail?

It wasn't only the pipes, but nearly everything has been removed and taken down: the console, the windchests, the wind trunks, actions, pipe conveyances, etc. This took the organbuilders almost five months. The treatment of each component will be different according to the element and material to be restored: cleaning and decontamination of the metal pieces (pipes, conveyances, wind trunks), application of a layer of paint to the wooden parts, and replacement of all leather parts, even those that are new. Leather cannot be cleaned except through the simple application of water, which is obviously not ideal for the material. The plan is that the organ will be completely reinstalled for the reopening of the Cathedral in April 2024.

* * *

DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND FUNDING NEW MUSIC IN THE ’90S

The music that became subject to Culture Wars controversy––such as the rock and hip-hop targeted by the PMRC and Christian fundamentalist organizations––seemed far from the world of contemporary composition. Indeed, in an October 1989 article, the young composer David Lang expounded on the apparent lack of significance of the so-called “Helms amendment”––an attempt by the right-wing senator Jesse Helms to restrict federal funding to art that was deemed obscene or indecent––for the world of new music. “Artists like to feel that their work is challenging enough to be controversial,” he wrote. “Photographers, painters, filmmakers and the like can imagine victimization at the hands of Congress as a badge of honor. They are Art-martyrs to the First Amendment.”

“With all of the excitement,” Lang fretted, “it is disturbing that so little of this controversy is aimed at composers. Are we not controversial? Why isn’t Congress rushing to censor the subversive power of modern music? It is possible that we are doing something wrong.”

That is just a brief excerpt and it is worth looking at the whole essay. There are all sorts of interesting questions that surround government subsidy of the arts. Some subsidies are likely to be challenged by conservative politicians on behalf of their constituents who might not be comfortable with art that could be seen as obscene or sacrilegious. But this is just one facet of a larger problem that is most keen in non-European western nations: Canada and the US simply do not have the deep cultural traditions that would support heavy subsidies of art by government, while in Europe this is fairly uncontroversial, at the present, at least. The very notion that art, in order to be taken seriously, has to be subversive pretty much excludes it from government subsidy, does it not? In Canada the problem is addressed by making arts subsidies through an organization, the Canada Council, that is at arm's length from government. In that case what has happened is that arts funding is determined by an insider group that essentially funds one another and their friends. Funding of the arts is always pretty problematic and I frequently long for the days when eccentric, but educated members of the nobility funded whatever art they liked...

* * *

Science now says you can judge people by their taste in music after all

In 2016, University of Cambridge music psychologist David Greenberg performed a study with his colleagues called “The Song Is You,” aimed at evaluating how the main three dimensions of music, “arousal” (the energy level of music), “valence” (the spectrum from sad to happy emotions in music) and “depth” (the amount of sophistication and emotional depth in music), are linked to the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

Their results are what one might generally expect — self-assured people were more likely to enjoy positive music, while those who seek excitement prefer high arousal music. Greenberg says that those who were defined as open minded had not only a more general preference for music overall, but were also more open to music that spanned genres or might be defined as “genre-fluid.”

The article is quite a lengthy summary of a lot of recent research on music from a psychological standpoint.

* * *

 Here is a performance of the Appassionata Sonata by Beethoven by Sviatoslav Richter at Carnegie Hall in 1960. Over the course of a month, interspersed by recitals and concerto performances elsewhere, he gave eight different solo recitals at Carnegie Hall.

An Argument for Music Education

This article is from American Scientist:

 Musicians dedicate their lives to focused, disciplined, and repeated practice. Moreover, playing music offers an unlimited capacity for improvement: Musicians constantly strive for nuance, defter technique, and better synchrony with their ensembles. Articles implying a link between musicianship and brain plasticity started to appear: Violinists had enlarged motor brain areas dedicated to the hand; expert musicians made finer judgments about sounds that differed subtly in timing or pitch.

We suspected something more might be going on with music. Playing music could affect more than our ability to process melodies and rhythms; it might trigger much broader cognitive and sensory changes. With our colleagues Gabriella Musacchia, Erika Skoe, Patrick Wong, and Mikko Sams, our lab decided to investigate. We recruited a cohort of college students, half of whom had been avid musicians for several years and the other half were musically naive. We then measured electrophysiological responses to speech and music—brain waves that tell us the integrity of sound processing in the brain.

In a pair of papers published in 2007, we reported that the musicians had heightened responses to the subtle acoustic details of speech, suggesting that music training generalizes to language. Indeed, the musicians’ brains could encode acoustic details of Mandarin speech too subtle for most English speakers to detect, suggesting that music training might enable a listener to be a more precocious language learner.

There is a lot more there, so read the whole thing.

We quickly discovered that music training forges a remarkably similar brain signature across all ages. Musicians’ brains more quickly and accurately encode certain ingredients of speech sounds than do those of nonmusicians. Music training improves the brain’s ability to process speech sounds against a noisy background, such as the din of a busy restaurant. This neural resilience made sense, because musicians also had a superior ability to understand speech in a noisy environment. Moreover, they had stronger memory and attentional skills than did nonmusicians. Although there were developmental variations, with certain aspects of brain function being fine-tuned later in life than others, music training seemed to have a strikingly consistent effect across the lifespan.

Some of the most surprising results came from musicians in their sixties and seventies, who showed stronger memory, attention, and hearing abilities than did contemporaries who had never participated in music training. We also found direct evidence for differences in brain function between older musicians and nonmusicians. Neural responses to speech generally slow as we age. Not so in lifelong musicians: A 65-year-old musician’s neural responses are indistinguishable from those of a 25-year-old nonmusician. The responses of a 65-year-old who played music as a child but hadn’t touched an instrument in decades fell in the middle: faster than those of a peer who had never played music but slower than those of a lifelong musician. Musical experience early in life imparts lifelong neuroplasticity.

And I suspect that there are lot of other, not easily measurable, benefits. Take for example, the learning of the disciplines of practice, of delayed gratification through slow practice, of developing the skills to communicate mood and atmosphere to listeners and a whole bunch of other things that are hard to find words for. 

Classical and Class

Though I have been a professional musician since my teens and a classical musician for nearly all of that time, and always interested in composition, I never took my own composing seriously until a few years after I moved to Mexico. Musing over this recently I'm wondering if there were not some class issues I was not consciously aware of.

My parents both left school at the Grade 8 level and I was the first in my extended family to attend university--in the 1970s. I think we would be lower-middle-class at best. Of course, as soon as I started considering myself a musician, i.e. artist, I declared myself to be outside the class system. And besides, there are no classes in modern Western democracies, right? Oh how silly of me. Of course there are and I, in all respects other than my expertise as a classical guitarist, was still lower-middle-class. And not just because I was poor (as a classical musician I typically made between $20,000 and $25,000 CDN a year in earnings)--I also had some basic cultural attitudes associated with the lower-middle-class. Both I and my English professor might wear a t-shirt and jeans to class but for him it was inverted snobbery and for me it was just the costume of my class.

All of this got very confused because of the 60s, of course, when the costume and attitudes of the lower-middle-class became universalized. But over the years I succeeded in expunging much of the 60s madness from my mind. And, as I became more thoroughly ensconced in the classical music world, taking positions as chair of the guitar department at the conservatory and sessional lecturer at the university, I became more harmonized with the culture of the international classical music fraternity. Greatly accomplished musicians regarded me as a peer, for example.

But there still was a corner of my consciousness that thought as a member of the lower-middle-class and members of that class might be popular musicians or traditional musicians (like my mother), but they were not composers. Every member of the composing class in Canada that I am aware of comes from an upper-middle-class or higher background. This is possibly true in the US as well, though I haven't done any research.

So, while I composed in small increments throughout my career, I did not regard it as a serious artistic activity. Moving to Mexico seems to have changed my basic attitudes. Here I am a member of the expatriate class and hence truly out of the Mexican class system. This particular enclave is one heavily weighted towards the arts. So these factors together with my inherent interest in composition led me to start composing in a serious way some fifteen years ago. Now I have a substantial body of work and while I am unsure of its real quality I am sure of one thing: I am actually a composer! And, I suspect for the first time in my life, really not in the class system.

Here are some pieces:

Friday Miscellanea

The Remodern Review is an interesting place to visit for an oblique perspective on modernism in the arts: April 10 is Slow Art Day. Establishment Art Can’t Stand Up to Such Scrutiny.

It’s an often quoted statistic that the average museum goer only spends 30 seconds looking at each artwork they encounter. 

The sad truth is, regarding much of modern and contemporary art, that’s about 27 seconds longer than needed.

The visual arts are in a crisis of relevance, largely due to dire mismanagement by our cultural institutions. Instead of being encouraged as a communion for all, for over a century many art administrators have favored art as a divider, an opportunity to flaunt elitist attitudes. Officially sanctioned art often emphasizes theoretical formal matters and sociological notions designed to exclude, rather than engage, the general public.

* * *

 In Big Giant Wave, a film about the all-encompassing power of music, it all comes back to Montreal

Director Marie-Julie Dallaire’s new film has arrived at just the right time. After a year and change of being worn down by a pandemic that distances us from one another, Big Giant Wave (Comme une vague in French) explores how we are affected and connected by music.

“It feels strange to see people in concerts, collected; we’ve taken that for granted all our lives,” Dallaire says when looking back on the film’s footage of packed concert halls and busy streets. “The purpose of the film was to make people aware of all the music that surrounds them… to take an hour and half just to think about it. We always listen to or play music, but rarely do we stop and ask ourselves ‘why is music so powerful?'” 

In theatres since April 2, Big Giant Wave is a film that has the trappings of a documentary in how it explores how music is experienced by a variety of points of view, ranging from its anthropological and religious roots to its quantifiable, scientific effects on the brain and the simplicity of when music plays out in nature through birdsong or the rhythm of waves.

Now that sounds interesting!

* * *

From Slipped Disc an anonymous blogger suggests: IS MUSIC SCHOOL NOW IRRELEVANT?

The highest caliber of artistic education would give us clear and usable tools to help us navigate the paperwork-strewn networking maze that is the life of a freelance artist.  The highest caliber of artistic education would teach us why we should matter.  Instead, we are lectured on Gregorian chant, scrutinized for our knowledge of scale degrees and soprano clef, and applauded for our performance of complex polyrhythms.

Sounds like this kind of music school is indistinguishable from Harvard Business. The 21st century is turning out differently than I expected...

* * *

'We Will Never Break': In Iraq, A Yazidi Women's Choir Keeps Ancient Music Alive

DOHUK, Iraq — With rows of white tents filling a windswept hillside, the Khanke camp in northern Iraq shelters about 14,000 men, women and children from the Yazidi religious minority. They have been stuck here since ISIS invaded their home villages in 2014.

With its dirt roads and drab dwellings, the camp can be a bleak place. But the beat of a daf, a drum sacred to Yazidis, throbs underneath loud, energetic singing, rising over shouts of children in a trash-strewn playground.

Inside a small building, a dozen young Yazidi women are rehearsing folk songs. They sing about the dawn, the harvest and the Sinjar mountain the Yazidis consider holy. Sometimes their voices harmonize gently, sometimes they rise almost to a shout as the women chant.

* * *

Writing songs in lockdown: 'It was an escape'

"I'd never written a song before," he said. "But I came home from work and said: 'I need to write this down.' I sat down, wrote some lyrics and put together a melody on my guitar. Putting it down on paper… I definitely found that helped."

His song is one of several lockdown-themed tunes to feature in a BBC project. Now That's What I Call Lockdown is a collection of songs and music written by BBC Radio 5 Live listeners.

* * *

Reviews of some new books on music: Symphony of a Thousand Millennia

The first note known to have sounded on earth was an E natural. It was produced some 165 million years ago by a katydid (a kind of cricket) rubbing its wings together, a fact deduced by scientists from the remains of one of these insects, preserved in amber. Consider, too, the love life of the mosquito. When a male mosquito wishes to attract a mate, his wings buzz at a frequency of 600Hz, which is the equivalent of D natural. The normal pitch of the female’s wings is 400Hz, or G natural. Just prior to sex, however, male and female harmonise at 1200Hz, which is, as Michael Spitzer notes in his extraordinary new book, The Musical Human, ‘an ecstatic octave above the male’s D’. ‘Everything we sing’, Spitzer adds, ‘is just a footnote to that.’

Don't you love the astonishing arrogance of scientists when talking about art?

Nicholas Kenyon’s The Life of Music, which is primarily a survey of the classical repertoire from the 12th century to the present day. Kenyon presents the classical tradition in part as a centuries-long musical conversation, through which composers far distant in time speak to each other. Kenyon cites by way of example the manner in which the 15th-century Franco-Flemish composer Johannes Ockeghem looks forward to the serialism of the 20th century and how the contemporary composer Thomas Adès has found inspiration in the French Baroque composer François Couperin.

* * *

I think today's envoi calls for some Ockeghem, who is a much-neglected composer. Here is his Missa Prolationum with the score:

 

 

Composers Have Huts

Troldhaugen is the name of the former residence of Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg and it has, apart from living quarters, Grieg's "composing hut" overlooking Nordås Lake. Here is a photo of the hut:

The interior of the hut

As you can see, a "hut" is exactly what it is, just big enough for a piano, a chair and a little desk

. Stravinsky composed the Rite of Spring in a similar environment:

In October he left Ustilug for Clarens in Switzerland, where in a tiny and sparsely-furnished room—an 8-by-8-foot (2.4 by 2.4 m) closet, with only a muted upright piano, a table and two chairs—he worked throughout the 1911–12 winter on the score. [Wikipedia]

Indeed, it is not unusual for composers to retreat to a tiny, isolated environment to compose. Mahler composed in a similar tiny hut overlooking Lake Attersee in Upper Austria. The hut even has its own Wikipedia page:

And here is the interior:

Mahler had a second composing hut near Maiernigg:

While I suspect that lots of other composers had similar huts, I can't find photos of them online. When I attended The Banff Centre many years ago, the extensive grounds were dotted with isolated little practice huts for musicians, writers and composers to work in. Here is a photo of the simplest ones:

But there are also much more elaborate ones:

This is the dream of many composers, writers and musicians, of course. The key elements are complete separation from other people and their noises (and the noises of their pets). You cannot imagine the sheer frustration when you are just working out some sound-combination in your mind or on the piano when next door Fido unleashes a furious round of barking or your neighbor decides he really needs to hear some Grateful Dead at high volume. The delicate, only half-comprehended idea vanishes like mist in the morning.

What do composers need even more than commissions and premieres? Solitude.

Here is the Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 by Edvard Grieg:

UPDATE: A commentator reminds me of composer Peter Maxwell Davies' croft in the Orkney Islands:

Bach: WTC I, Prelude and Fugue in B flat major

We are getting close to the end of our project, just a few to go and perhaps Bach was feeling the same because this pair of pieces are quite brief. The prelude is right in the improvisatory/fantasia tradition and has perhaps the most impressive fireworks of any prelude we have heard. Let's start by having a listen to both pieces on harpsichord. This is the Belgian harpsichordist Bart Naessens:

It is amazing how many different ways Bach finds to arpeggiate chords and that is about all we have here, apart from scales and, in the second half of the prelude, the dotted chords of French overture style. The prelude is all about fireworks and harmony.

The fugue has a very long, but rhythmically conventional subject unlike the one from the A major fugue, so it is fairly easy to follow it every time it appears. The first half of the brief fugue is basically just a few statements of the subject and answer and a sequential episode. Then we have a couple more harmonically interesting entries of the subject, one in G minor and another in C minor. Following that we have another sequential episode and that's it. In the harpsichord version, together they take less than four minutes.

Now let's hear Sviatoslav Richter where we can follow the score. He manages to play both prelude and fugue in just a hair over two and a half minutes! He does this mainly by playing the prelude at a terrifying tempo--and one that seems just right. Fireworks indeed.

Friday Miscellanea

Here is an entirely laudable project: The rich world of African classical music

It has not been an easy journey for Omordia. Entirely self-funded until this year (when she secured a £15,000 grant from Arts Council England) she has battled scepticism, indifference and – most challenging of all – faced nearly insuperable difficulties tracking down the music itself, which remains mostly unpublished. Yet the 2020 African Concert Series has proved to be an outstanding success, which has sparked widespread interest in this hitherto virtually unknown genre. Launched the previous year with a mission to introduce music by African art composers to the mainstream, the series has already been promised a day of concerts in the 2021-22 season at one of London’s most enlightened concert venues, the October Gallery in Holborn.

Be sure to follow the link to hear some examples. 

* * *

Despite high levels of COVID, Europe is struggling to revive concert life: Dudamel conducts for an audience of 1,000 indoors. What reopening looks like in Spain

BARCELONA, Spain —  Try to imagine Gustavo Dudamel conducting 50 musicians huddled in an orchestra pit, with 75 singers packed on the stage above and 1,000 people on hand just to watch, all indoors.

That’s exactly what maestro Dudamel pulled off on Saturday night — albeit 6,000 miles away from a still-closed Walt Disney Concert Hall — when the Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor premiered a starry Bavarian State Opera production of Verdi’s “Otello” at the Gran Teatre del Liceu.

It was all perfectly legal and earned a healthy round of applause (and, to be fair, a few boos). Dudamel made his Spanish opera debut in an uncut, fully-staged production that many hoped would mark the beginning of the post-COVID-19 era.

* * *

 Colorado Public Radio helps us Discover The Music Jane Austen Loved.

Playing piano was an integral part of Austen’s life. She practiced every morning and acquired music from friends by copying pieces note for note, in addition to purchasing her own sheet music. But scholars like Ray believe that music was more than just a passion, it might have been a linchpin to her writing creativity.

When Austen was 21 years old, she and her family moved to Bath, England. “In Bath, we don’t think she had an instrument to play and she does very little, if any, writing in Bath,” Ray told CPR Classical. “Music scholars of the period who also read Jane Austen like to propose that unless Jane Austen had music in her life, her writing didn’t proceed the way it should.”

* * *

Long Beach Opera Refuses to Play It Safe:

 Long Beach Opera defies the odds in several ways. Founded in 1979, it’s the oldest producing opera company in Los Angeles and Orange County, a region that has not always been fertile ground for the unwieldy art form. (O.C.’s opera fans still get emotional when talking about the messy demise of Opera Pacific in 2008.) But unlike many regional companies that exist to dutifully produce the same dozen or so warhorses, LBO has made its reputation as a risk-taking and iconoclastic organization, exploring new and obscure work with innovative productions and championing up-and-coming talent, all on a budget that would make a shoestring look overfed.

The company’s vision is succinctly summed up in the self-description on its website: “Our artistic vision is to present unconventional works — repertoire which is neglected by other, more mainstream opera companies — ranging from the very beginnings of opera to modern, avant-garde works, emphasizing their theatrical and musical relevance to our time.”

* * *

Music’s Most Treacherous Assignment: Finishing Mozart

The new Mozart-Jones recording is unusual, though, in its choose-your-own-adventure approach. Jones, testing different aspects of Mozartian style, made multiple completions of each fragment, and the album includes some of that variety, giving a heady sense of how open-ended creative production is — how differently symphonies (or paintings or novels) we know and love might have ended up.

* * *

The problem of obtaining a traditional education in the humanities is being satisfied in unusual ways these days as we learn at Law & Liberty:

 Fortunately, the free marketplace of ideas is not yet dead. The unmet demand for a traditional humanities education in elite universities is increasingly being supplied by offshore institutions that set up shop near universities but are not officially part of them. Indeed, the last decade has seen an extraordinary blossoming of private humanities institutes that offer what progressive academe no longer offers:  a space to escape the suffocating taboos of contemporary university life, a place to explore the deep questions of human existence and form friendships in the pursuit of meaningful lives and (dare one say it) truth.

There are now many such foundations across the country, including the Morningside Institute near Columbia, the Elm Institute at Yale, the Abigail Adams Institute at Harvard, the Berkeley Institute at UC Berkeley, and the Zephryr Institute at Stanford. These institutes present themselves as non-political and non-religious but welcome students with religious convictions or unorthodox political views. The Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education currently provides support for 21 entities of this type. Others offshore institutes, like the Collegium Institute at the University of Pennsylvania or Lumen Christi at Chicago, were set up to foster the Catholic intellectual tradition but have become places that support the liberal tradition of humane studies generally. Many of their events are oriented to students with no religious commitments but who value the chance to discuss the great landmarks of the Western intellectual tradition in an atmosphere that treats those works with the respect they deserve.

I really don't see how these institutions are "offshore" though. Off-campus maybe.

* * *

A couple of envois for you. First, if you want to explore some of the African Concert series:

And the Sonata for violin and piano, K. 301, completely composed by Mozart:

Composer's Composers

As someone who became a composer late in life (though I have always done a bit of composing throughout my career), I am always discovering new things about this activity. One of them is noticing how some composers are particularly interesting to other composers. I don't necessarily mean influential, though this may be the case, instead I refer to certain qualities that some composers have that tend to attract the interest of other composers.

Here are some examples: Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach and Joseph Haydn. What these three composers did that is of particular interest to other composers was to take up a particular style or genre and explore in great depth, all the possibilities it offered. This is a kind of pure creativity that is quite rare. Instead of the idea that creativity consists in exploring all the areas, materials and genres, this concept of creativity suggests that you define particular boundaries and work within them.

The 1960s were a time when the idea was popular that a composer might be best advised to throw everything including the kitchen sink into a piece. It was the era of "happenings" and "multi-media" and long, self-indulgent pieces that often are unlistenable today. The idea of focussing on one particular medium or style is to go in the opposite direction.

As an extreme example, Domenico Scarlatti wrote sonatas for the harpsichord in two repeating sections and kept doing it until he had written five hundred and fifty-five of them. To a composer this is an astonishing feat because not one of these pieces is boring! The pieces are fairly short, ranging between two and six minutes long, but while they all have a similar structure, every single one is different. This is an astonishing compositional feat.

The symphonies of Joseph Haydn are another example. There are one hundred and six and again, while they share a certain structural similarity he solves the problems of variety and unity differently in every one.

And, of course, Bach. I started out doing a post on each of the preludes and fugues from book one of the Well-Tempered Clavier on the supposition that looking at them as a whole would reveal just how remarkably different they all are, even though they all stay within the boundaries of the style and genre. The idea of taking up the same basic problem and doing it in every different major and minor key is the kind of thing that is fascinating to a composer.

Another remarkable thing is that, over time, all this music has become very popular with general audiences. I think this is simply because, in the long run, quality will out.

The only way to really realize just how remarkable these compositional projects are is to go through them, having a close look at each piece in turn. I did that with a lot of the Haydn symphonies a few years ago and now am doing it with Bach. But I don't think I will do it with the Scarlatti sonatas! Just too darn many of them...

Here is Scott Ross playing a hundred of the Scarlatti sonatas: