THE MUSIC SALON: classical music, popular culture, philosophy and anything else that catches my fancy...
I just ran across this very nice performance of a unique piece by Bartók, the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. What is so unusual about this performance is that everyone is playing from memory, something you rarely see in chamber music, especially of this sort!
What is interesting about this piece is that he takes the idea of a sonata for piano and expands it to two pianos and then hugely expands the timbral range by using percussion to extend the sounds of the pianos.
The rich traditions of folk and peasant music found in Eastern Europe were a lifelong preoccupation of Bartók. He was greatly aided in this project by the use of the Edison phonograph, which recorded on wax cylinders. Here is a photo of him recording Slovak folksongs. Bartók is fourth from the left:
Bartók's first expedition to collect Hungarian folksongs was in collaboration with Zoltan Kodály and in December 1906 they published a collection of twenty arranged for voice and piano. Here is an excerpt:
Bartók later wrote about the influence of this music in his autobiography:
The outcome of these studies was of decisive influence upon my work, because it freed me from the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys. The greater part of the collected treasure, and the more valuable part, was in old ecclesiastical or old Greek modes, or based on more primitive (pentatonic) scales, and the melodies were full of most free and varied rhythmical phrases and changes of tempi... [quoted in Antokoletz, The Music of Béla Bartók, p. 26]
Another example: six Romanian Folk Dances arranged for violin and piano:
My love and appreciation for specific composers tends to wax and wane, always in a bit of a flux. This is partly because I am constantly renegotiating my relationship with music. Over the years I have been entirely captivated by composers that I am less enthusiastic about now: Steve Reich is an example. A contrary example is Mozart who I used to think was too "precious" but now I simply adore. Some composers I am perennially taken with like, of course, J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Shostakovich and Stravinsky (though the latter has gone up and down a bit in my estimation). I guess that, for me, the story never comes to an end: there are always new strengths and weaknesses to be discovered. Not in Bach, of course, but in most others!
For much of the time that I have been posting this blog I have not been a huge fan of Béla Bartók, finding his music often too gloomy and dark. This probably came from listening to so much Steve Reich who is often, let's admit it, pretty upbeat. But I find myself leaning more and more toward Bartók recently and I recognize that I haven't given him a fair shake on the Music Salon. Years and years ago I did a post titled The Case of Bartók where the praise was rather half-hearted. Let me try and make up for that by doing several posts on Bartók and revealing what is really remarkable about his music.
But first let's have just a taste of his musical style. This is his well-known Allegro barbaro, composed in 1911 when he was thirty years old:
Reader’s Comment of the Day from Bernard Chevilly in Orléans, France:Steinway & Sons pianos are in almost every concert hall in the world because the Allies imposed them after World War II. The most prestigious European concert grand piano was, until then, the C. Bechstein, but the Bechstein family, since the early 1930s, were close to Adolf Hitler (Helene Bechstein wanted to marry Hitler to her daughter) and therefore Nazis. The Soviets and the Americans reduced the Bechstein factory in Berlin to ashes in 1945. The Steinway, an American piano of ancient German origin (Heinrich Steinweg), but genuinely “American”, was then produced in Hamburg. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Steinways gradually took over all concert halls in Europe and, by extension, on other continents. To conclude: the massive presence of the Steinway & Sons, manufactured with the unconditional financial support of the USA in Germany, was a political decision, totally unrelated to music. This is why major brands such as Fazioli, Bösendorfer or Steingraeber & Söhne cannot compete at all in the world market for concert pianos.
How true is this? The last piano recital I viewed in Wigmore Hall was played on a Fazioli and Bösendorfer pianos are quite common--in Europe at least.
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Culture venues can finally reopen to the public in France after months of lockdown. But arts workers who have been occupying theaters in protest against pandemic-related closures say their needs have still not been met—and many won’t leave, preventing some theaters from reopening.
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There seems to be a trend to concerts returning sans intermission: What to do when nature calls — and there’s no intermission?
in the expansive new season at Lyric: all of the fall operas were to be recast as one-act experiences, performed without intermission. To achieve this goal, Lyric said, it even planned to make some artistic compromises and reduce the running times so that no opera would run more than two and a half hours.
That is going to involve some serious cuts in many operas.
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Four in 10 musicians could leave Britain over EU touring fears – poll
More than 40% of musicians polled about their work in the European Union said they would consider relocating to continue accessing jobs, with a fifth contemplating changing career entirely.
As well, it could be years before we even realize how much damage the pandemic did to the performing arts.
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Ok, here is our quirky bit for the day, and it's about guitar lessons.
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William Deresiewicz has just about the best discussion of the arts before and during the catastrophe of COVID: Stages of Grief.
The pandemic will likely extinguish thousands of artistic careers. And the devastation will extend to the businesses and institutions that connect artists to audiences. The big players with deep pockets—Live Nation, the mammoth concert, ticketing, and artist-management company, or Gagosian, which operates galleries in seven countries—will survive. The entities that founder will be the smaller ones—mid-tier galleries, independent music venues—the kind that are crucial for helping emerging artists gain exposure, for sustaining serious creators and performers who won’t or can’t sell out to the commercial mainstream, and for keeping alive the spirit and soul of the arts.
But there have been beneficiaries, oh yes:
But the most frightening prospect is precisely the degree to which this crisis has entrenched and extended the power of the platforms: Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook; YouTube, which is part of Google; and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Because it is that power that is ultimately behind what has been happening to artists. Art hasn’t really been demonetized. For the companies reaping the clicks and streams, free content is a bonanza. Along with Spotify and a few other players, the tech giants are diverting tens of billions of dollars a year away from creators and toward themselves. They have been able to do so only because of their size, which has given them leverage over labels, studios, publishers, publications, and above all, independent artists, and because of the influence it has given them in Congress. And while almost every other sector has been suffering, the pandemic has functioned like a hormone injection for Big Tech. At the start of 2020, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft—the Big Five—had a combined market value of just under $5 trillion. By the end of the year, that already terrifying figure had grown to more than $7.5 trillion.
The whole essay is well-worth reading.
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For our envoi today an interesting and varied program by Mishka Rushdie Momen recorded last month at Wigmore Hall. She is playing on a Steinway, but Angela Hewitt, who also just did a recital at Wigmore, played on a Fazioli.
I'm not sure that David Russell has ever gotten the recognition he deserves. A very fine guitarist with a normally quite conservative repertoire, in this program, just premiered on YouTube last month, he explores some interesting repertoire including a new suite written for David by Stephen Goss. The concert was taped in three different churches on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostella.
If ever a musical occasion mattered more than the music itself, here it was. Social distancing meant the hall could not be completely full on Tuesday afternoon for the London Symphony Orchestra’s post-pandemic return. But the mere public address announcement “Welcome back to the Barbican Hall” drew loud and prolonged cheering from the LSO’s first audience in 14 months, as well as answering applause and waving from the players themselves. For everyone, it was good to be back.
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Both the Elbphilharmonie and the Laeiszhalle will reopen on 31 May in light of falling Covid numbers.
Audience members will have to show proof of vaccination, or a recent negative Covid test, or proof of their recovery from the virus.
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A fascinating article on how musical instruments get made with clips from YouTube:
Some scholars argue that bone and ivory flutes are the very earliest of tonal musical instruments, with examples from as long as 43,000 years ago. The videos in this show the making of a simple end-blown kaval, a Baroque flute, modern flute, clarinet, and bassoon. You’ll note that the process of whittling a few holes in a hollow bone or stick has evolved dramatically over the years. Finally, as every double-reed player knows, reed-making is an essential skill, but few of us have seen the process from start to finish. Here's a glimpse.
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And for the pessimists among us: Stages of Grief: What the pandemic has done to the arts
It doesn’t take a Leonardo-level intellect to figure out that the pandemic has been devastating for the arts economy. Live events were the first things to stop, and they will be the last to return. That means musicians, actors, and dancers, plus all the people who enable them to take the stage—playwrights and choreographers, directors and conductors, lighting designers and makeup artists, roadies, ushers, ticket takers, theater managers—have no way to make a living from their work, and haven’t for more than a year.
Still, I don’t think most of us appreciate just how bad things are. The crisis goes well beyond the performing arts. Surveys published last summer found that 90 percent of independent music venues were in danger of closing for good, but so were a third of museums. In a survey by the Music Workers Alliance, 71 percent of musicians and DJs reported a loss of income of at least 75 percent, and in another, by the Authors Guild, 60 percent of respondents reported losing income, with an average drop of 43 percent. During the third quarter of 2020, unemployment averaged 27 percent among musicians, 52 percent among actors, and 55 percent among dancers. In the first two months of the pandemic, unemployment in the film and sound-recording industries reached 31 percent. Meanwhile, as of September, gallery sales of modern and contemporary art were down by 36 percent. What has been happening across the arts is not a recession. It is not even a depression. It is a catastrophe.
There is a lot more in the article, so I recommend reading the whole thing.
In 1982, the top 1 percent of musicians earned 26 percent of concert revenue. By 2017, the top 1 percent earned 60 percent. And so it is across the arts: the bestseller lists are dominated by a shrinking number of authors and books; the box office, by an endless procession of big-budget, mega-grossing franchises. And in the visual-art world, as of 2018, just twenty individuals accounted for 64 percent of global sales by living artists. Aside from stars and superstars, nearly everyone is making do with less.
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For our envoi, here is Simon Rattle conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in the Symphony No. 9 by Anton Bruckner:
I'm deceiving you a bit with the title. This is not a rondeau by Forqueray, this is La Portugaise by Forqueray performed by Jean Rondeau. I used to have Gustav Leonhardt's album of Forqueray which was lovely. But this is the first time I have heard a performance as good. Great playing. No, it is not a rondeau. It is in binary repeated form with some minuet in its genes.
I'm working on a large post about the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta by Bartók, but it isn't ready yet. Those analytical posts take more time!
There's a new history of Western music in town: The Life of Music review – pushing at the boundaries of the classical canon
Nicholas Kenyon’s The Life of Music, a project long in gestation that he completed during the pandemic of 2020, generously embraces all, reminding us that “western music” began some four centuries before Bach and introducing us to composers, several of them women, born in the 1980s. The transformative power of digital music is central to his story. So, too, is that vital, ever-changing relationship between composer and performer: notes on the page are only the starting point.
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118 Years Later, Japan’s Earliest Sound Recordings Still Resonate:
IT IS FEBRUARY 28, 1903, and 12 musicians from the Imperial Household Orchestra are seated in front of a gramophone horn in a Tokyo hotel room. American recording engineer Fred Gaisberg carefully lowers the needle onto a spinning blank disc and the session begins. The fragile melody of a bamboo flute breaks the silence, followed by the slow beat of the conductor’s drum. As the song unfolds, Gaisberg’s chikuonki, or “sound storing machine,” records the ceremonial sound of gagaku. The oldest continuously performed orchestral music in the world, gagaku had been the reserve of Japan’s imperial court for over a thousand years. This recital is the first ever to be committed to disc. “Weird and fascinating indeed,” Gaisberg noted in his diary later that day.
Here are some samples of these recordings:
https://soundcloud.com/user-258102796/sf115-sampler
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Muti: Pandemic year silenced culture, leaving world stunned
Conductor Riccardo Muti comments on the strange year we have experienced:
Muti called the experience of the past year “an unnatural global experiment” that had “stunned” the world.
“If we truly took into account how we are living, we would all go crazy. We try to maintain the illusion that we are living a normal life. It is the only way to reach the end of this absurd path,’’ he said.
Muti is plunging back into concert life. He is conducting his much-curtailed 50th anniversary tour with the Vienna Philharmonic in Florence on Monday and at Milan’s La Scala on Tuesday, before returning to Ravenna to prepare for festival appearances of his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra and for the debut of a piece of music written for the Dante anniversary based on the Divine Comedy’s Purgatory canticle.
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When Niccolò Paganini, around 1802, needed a powerful new violin, he found (or was given) an instrument by Guarneri del Gesù. It had been made in 1743, near the end of the great luthier’s career. Paganini called his new instrument “Il Cannone” (the Cannon) and used it for the rest of his life. After his death, it was given to the city of Genoa, where it is exhibited in the town hall.
Il Cannone has its original neck (though it was extended and reset into the body at some point in its life), the plates were never re-graduated, and the instrument has never been polished. The Sala Paganiniana, where Il Cannone resides inside the Palazzo Tursi, is monitored by scientists, experts, and bodyguards. The instrument is played monthly by curator Bruce Carlson and each year by the winner of the Premio Paganini contest for young violinists.
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Musicians Say Streaming Doesn’t Pay. Can the Industry Change?
Like musicians everywhere who were stuck off the road, staring into the abyss of their bank accounts, Shah — whose dark alto and eclectic songs have brought her critical acclaim and a niche following — began to examine her livelihood as an artist. Money from the streams of her songs on services like Spotify and Apple Music was practically nonexistent, she said, adding up to “just a few pounds here and there.” So she joined other disillusioned musicians in organizing online to push for change. Last fall, Shah testified before a Parliamentary committee that has been taking a hard look at the economics of streaming, raising the prospect of new regulation.
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Here is a book that looks at a topic we have often touched on here at The Music Salon: The Opportunists
Louis Menand’s big new book on art, literature, music, and thought from 1945 to 1965 instills the conviction that the 20th century is well and truly over.
Menand’s inclination is not really to debunk, nor to make or undo reputations. Yet guided by a fascination with the wayward paths to fame, he half-unwittingly sows doubt about the justice of the American rise to artistic leadership in the postwar era. In his erudite account, artistic success owes little to vision and purpose, more to self-promotion, but most to unanticipated adoption by bigger systems with other aims, principally oriented toward money, political advantage, or commercial churn. For the greatness and inevitability of artistic consecration, Menand substitutes the arbitrary confluences of forces at any given moment.
The paradoxical feature of the book is that its stylish, comprehensive retellings of some of the most famous stories of the most famous individuals, weaving connections between them, made me doubtful and weary of them, and much more interested in minor figures whom we barely glimpse. (Funny that in this book Josef Albers, Ralph Ellison, and Aimé Césaire become such “minor figures”—because the more peripatetic fame seekers like Rauschenberg and Baldwin are pushing their way in front of the camera instead.) As for the construction of art history in “schools” or “groups,” the effect of The Free World’s explain-don’t-judge perspective on canon formation is to leave many of the major art movements looking negligible or meretricious, floated on excesses of cash, power, and mass media.
Obviously a book worth a further look.
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Hmm, deciding on the appropriate envoi today is a bit of a stumper. Here is Riccardo Muti conducting the Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini in symphonies by Schubert and Dvořák. The program was given in March of this year.
Richard Taruskin in his Oxford History of Western Music talks about the move toward compositional complexity in several phases, the last of which, in the last half of the 20th century, he calls the "New Complexity" though the phrase was actually coined by Australian music theorist Richard Toop (Oxford History, volume 5, p. 475). Of course the move from simplicity to complexity is one that has seen a number of manifestations. Take, for example, the movement from the simplicity of stile recitativo monody of around 1600 (replacing the complexities of late Renaissance counterpoint) to the complexities of the High Baroque as exemplified in the Art of Fugue by J. S. Bach.
There is a kind of predisposition in historians and theorists toward the valorization of complexity as a musical good. Indeed, the phases in music history when radical simplification occurs are often sold in terms of their innovation. Discussion of Giulio Caccini's expressive monody stresses the new importance of passionate expression. Alongside this we might cite the radical simplification of Philip Glass and Steve Reich. The radical innovation there was the return of a steady rhythmic pulse, something that had nearly vanished from musical composition in the post-WWII avant-garde.
But the truth is that what Caccini (and Monteverdi) were doing and what Glass and Reich were doing was a radical simplification, one of the consequences of which was a new sort of musical language. In other words, the simplification was a necessary prolegomena to the new style. First you simplify, clearing away the underbrush as it were, then you find places to innovate.
The New Simplicity, if I could coin an alternate phase, is much more than what is often called "minimalism"--mistakenly, I believe. Reich calls what he was doing early on, "process" music, which is more accurate. We could add to the list of composers who pursued various kinds of simplification the names Galina Ustvolskaya, Arvo Pärt, John Adams, Sofia Gubaidulina, Morton Feldman and a host of others. These seem to come from different places, traditions and schools, but they all focussed to some extent, in some pieces, on the idea of simplifying the musical texture.
Ever since Beethoven, the business of composition has often been to develop, to expand, to enrich and a variety of other verbs that more or less add up to "make more complicated." This process, by fits and starts, continued throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. We find Schoenberg taking several years just to orchestrate his mammoth Gurre-Lieder cantata. To illustrate the complexity of the pendulum swing between complexity and simplification, he took time off to compose his first, quite brief, atonal piano pieces.
The neo-classical phase in music history, between the World Wars, was another bid for simplicity and an ideal example is Prokofiev's Classical Symphony, an astonishing simplification after the enormous ones by Mahler:
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We don't often think of 21st century classical music as being especially fun, but here is a pretty good example, Strum for string quartet by Jessie Montgomery played by the Catalyst Quartet:
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Slipped Disc has a horror story about a pianist: HOW YOUTUBE SCREWS SMALL CREATORS
Marina of The Piano Keys keeps getting her videos taken down by Youtube, constantly getting told that Bach and Mozart are in copyright.
She has no recourse to appeal.
It’s a common complaints, and it’s getting worse.
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HOW DO YOU LISTEN TO MUSIC – WITH YOUR HEAD OR WITH YOUR HEART?
...when you listen to music, do you tend to analyze and think critically about what you are hearing (head)? Or is music listening pretty much an emotional experience for you—something that can tingle your spine or make you cry (heart)?
Perhaps it is because I spent many years as a performing flutist and had to work hard to figure out how to play things well that analysis is so close to the surface for me. Imagine the thought process in working through difficult passages and playing them hundreds of times. “Which fingering should I use for that B flat if I want the passage to be smooth [there are three fingerings to choose from]?” “How can I bring down the pitch of that high A natural so it is in tune with the clarinet?” “Should I play the repeat of that passage differently for more variety?” and so on. Without a great leap, such analysis can migrate to my listening.
Lots of interesting thoughts in that piece. I would add another pair of categories: do you listen to music to soothe you or to energize you?
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The Christian Science Monitor has an article on opera subsidy in Germany:
About a third of all opera performances worldwide take place here, and Germany has cultivated a society where children are schooled in music theory and adults commonly budget for opera season tickets.
“Berlin is a city where I’ve gotten into taxis and said, ‘Take me to Deutsche Oper,’ and the driver launches a discussion about ‘Don Giovanni,’” says Mr. Carico, a freelancer who was formerly salaried at Berlin’s premier opera company. “Music is baked into society here in a way I haven’t experienced in America.”
“What we learned in the crisis was that the public purse was very much willing to keep [opera] alive in Germany,” says Dieter Haselbach, a German cultural sociologist and consultant. “But in the long run the state-funded system covers a structural crisis which is an oversupply of theaters and opera houses, with [growing] competition from digital performances.”
Just a reminder that while audiences may be aging and diminishing in North America that is not the case in Europe.
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Alex Ross has a piece about the revival of the New York Philharmonic: The New York Philharmonic Mourns and Rebuilds.
No one was in a celebratory mood when, on April 14th, the New York Philharmonic returned to indoor live performance for the first time in more than a year. Instead, the atmosphere was meditative, wistful, even mournful. This was fitting, given what the city, the country, and the world have endured since the pandemic began. Working musicians are reeling. Most American orchestral players have had to accept considerable pay cuts, and freelancers are in a desperate state, some of them being forced to give up on music entirely. The composer Nico Muhly spoke for many colleagues this past March when he told the Times, “I don’t think there is a return to normal in the performing arts, I’m sorry to say. We have to make a new normal, and build a lot of it from scratch."
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The New York Times tells us When Bernstein Conducted Stravinsky, Modern Music Came Alive.
Stravinsky and Bernstein were linked in my mind: the world’s greatest living composer and his greatest (and certainly most famous) champion. That reputation has lingered: To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Stravinsky’s death, Sony has released a box set pairing these two artists.
Yet Bernstein’s Stravinsky discography is actually frustratingly small; the Sony set contains only six discs. Even in the concert hall, Bernstein did not conduct the range of Stravinsky works he might have — unlike the comprehensive approach he took to, for example, the symphonies of Mahler.
Read the whole thing for a detailed review of the Bernstein recordings and some interesting recollections.
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For our envoi today, here is Leonard Bernstein conducting the Rite of Spring by Stravinsky with the London Symphony in 1972:
Also at the New York Times, a more promising article on new music: In a Dark Time, This Music Will Make You Smile that looks at some offerings from a new British label, NMC Recordings.
Last fall, when the world was being told to expect a long, dark winter after what had already been a brutal year, I decided to search for some new, bracing orchestral music. It had been months since I’d been walloped by symphonic forces in a live setting. And if it was to be grim times ahead, I wanted at least some music that gestured toward that sense of scale.
Thanks to the British label NMC Recordings, I quickly found what I was looking for in the Irish composer Ed Bennett’s “Freefalling,” the opening track from his October release “Psychedelia.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxUTQemhApE
the label has continued to put out a string of winning recordings, including, this month, “Nature,” the first full-length collection of orchestral pieces by the English composer Tansy Davies.
Follow the first link above for the clip embedded in the NYT article. We have an excerpt from another piece, Re-greening, performed at the BBC Proms in 2015:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujdZH2F-T6I&t=1s
All these composers are in their forties. Plainly there is nothing wrong with the UK music scene when it comes to up and coming composers. And what an enlightened record label!
Williams’s radiant sound and adventitious origins have made her a key figure in a diverse dawn for the solo guitar. Long dominated by much-mythologized white men like John Fahey, the form’s demographic is slowly broadening to include those who have often been omitted, including women, nonbinary instrumentalists and people of color. These musicians are paying little mind to the traditional godheads. They are, instead, expanding the fundamental influences within solo guitar, incorporating idioms sometimes deemed verboten in what was once a homogenized scene.
Let me first of all outline what I am not doing here: I have absolutely nothing against this kind of music--like all musical genres it contains more interesting and less interesting examples. I also have nothing against any of the artists talked about. My attitude is more power to them and let a hundred flowers bloom. But what I do find irritating is the little threads of ideology that seem to be required to be woven in--and to actually be the basic stimulus behind the article. Are white men like John Fahey "much-mythologized" or simply fine musicians of an earlier generation? Have musicians of color "been omitted" and if so by whom and with what means? It seems to me that great black guitarists like B. B. King and Jimi Hendrix loom very large in the guitar's recent history. Also, what idioms were "deemed verboten"? I don't even know what that means. Also, again, deemed by whom?
As this music moves beyond the realm of obscure collectors, its audience and attention have grown, prompted by the possibilities of players who sound as different as they look.
This brings us back to what really bothers me: this story is really about how a group of musicians look more than how they sound, because, to my ears, there is a whole lot less of interest here than is promised. I find this over and over in the way popular music is covered in the mass media: articles are written that wildly rave about what is fairly ordinary music.
I keep coming back to that headline: The Face of Solo Guitar. But it is a misnomer. This is all about the face of the performer, not the instrument. As long as that face is non-binary, female or of a person of color, then the music is somehow sacralized by this. If a young white, Jewish male guitarist were to come along, I guess that's just tough luck for him! Too bad dude, you just are not "diverse" in the right way.
Here is a track from the article: "Urban Driftwood" by Yasmin Williams:
