If you want to know more about neglected composer Julius Eastman, the New York Times has an excellent survey of his works focussing on a new recording of his piece Femenine: From a Composer’s Resurgence, a Masterpiece Rises:
Black and gay when few experimental composers were either, Eastman was an impish, provocative fixture on the New York scene into the 1980s, but drifted into mental illness and homelessness, and died in 1990 in obscurity, just 49. What little was left of his work then was a shambles, and his music went almost entirely unplayed and unheard for years.
“Femenine” is notated, but sketchily so; the score consists of smallish cells of material that are repeated, and evolve. The timings of major transitions are set in the music, though there is also room for improvisation and flexibility, not least in the instrumentation, which has a core of winds, piano, bass and bells — and the vibraphone that provides the indelibly summoning central statement — but can expand in size and variety. While the basic contours are constant, the mood can be surprisingly different from version to version.
Follow the link for excerpts from the new recording. Here is a different performance from YouTube:
Mr. Rzewski’s anti-establishment thinking stood at the center of his music-making throughout his life. It was evident in the experimental, agitprop improvisations he created in the 1960s with the ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva; in “Coming Together,” the Minimalist classic inspired by the Attica prison uprising; and a vast catalog of solo piano works, several of which have become cornerstones of the modern repertoire.
His approach was epitomized in his best-known piece, “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!,” an expansive and virtuosic set of 36 variations on a Chilean protest song.
Richards argues that cultural appropriation is wrong and should be avoided when it feels like “taking” instead of “making.” “When Justin Timberlake beatboxes, or Taylor Swift raps, or Miley Cyrus twerks to a trap beat,” he observes, “it feels like taking. Nothing is being invented other than superficial juxtaposition. On the flip side, when the Talking Heads echo African pop rhythms, or the Wu-Tang Clan channels the spiritually of Kung-Fu cinema, or Beyonce writes a country song, it feels more like making. The borrowed elements become an essential, integrated part of a new, previously unheard thing.”
That sounds like it would need a fairly lengthy dissertation to make that distinction clear.
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Mozart can help with epilepsy, but Haydn not, researchers say.
The study was designed to compare the effects on EDs of listening to either Mozart’s K448, or Haydn’s Symphony No. 94 (No94: Surprise Symphony). “We chose Haydn’s music as it represents a similar musical style from the same period,” the investigators wrote. “Works composed by Mozart and Haydn may have similar emotional effects.” In fact, the team noted, when comparing music in terms of the repetition of harmonies, Mozart’s music scored much higher than works by composers including Bach, Wagner, Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt. “It was shown that K448 differs from music composed by other composers in terms of its higher repetition rate,” the team commented. Haydn’s music values were those that were scored second to Mozart’s.
Yes, that's one of those rhetorical questions that somehow seems more courteous than just saying "we play Bach too fast." But I think we do. Let me first offer a caveat: I am a performer of Bach, though I no longer give public concerts, and therefore have a dog in the fight. Not only that, but I also started to study classical guitar seriously at an age where it was unlikely that I could achieve technical perfection. So there are technical difficulties for me in playing Bach at fast tempos. Bear that in mind as you read my arguments. Though actually, I think having some technical limitations has actually been an aid to me, musically.
Let me hone down what I mean to the specifics. I don't mean that we play Bach slow movements too fast. What I want to focus on is those movements that either are traditionally fairly quick, like gigues, or have tempo indications like allegro or presto. We are coming at the end of nearly two hundred years of performers pursuing virtuosity and the cult of higher, faster, louder. This started with Paganini and Liszt in the first half of the19th century, so, long after Bach's death.
It is therefore notionally quite reasonable to make the claim that we might have a tendency to play Bach fast movements too fast simply because we can. Time for a couple of examples. I am a guitarist, so let me choose some guitar examples. Here is a performance just premiered a few days ago of David Russell playing the 1st Lute Suite. Lovely production. The performance starts just after the 2 minute mark. What I want to focus on is the gigue which is just before the fourteen minute mark. This is a fiendishly difficult piece and Russell has done a fantastic job of mastering the challenges.
But it's too fast, in my view. There are not a lot of guitarists who can bring this off at this tempo, and Russell is certainly one of them. Technically, it is a tour de force. But it is not musically comfortable for either the performer or the audience. There are tiny details that tend to go by in a flash that should be noticed more by both performer and listener. Now a lot of the time Bach fast movements are simply rushed, resulting in sloppiness and a lack of clarity. That is not the case here. We can hear the notes and it is rhythmically stable. But the information flows over us too fast. It is hard to luxuriate in the layered counterpoint when it is moving so quickly. Again, this is just my opinion. But I hear a lot of performances, particularly on guitar, that are inappropriately virtuosic.
Here is another example, from Ana Vidovic. Go to the 24:25 mark and listen to the Presto.
Again, this is not fast and sloppy or rushed, it is very virtuoso and very controlled, but still, I think, too fast. This is an exuberant movement, which does not mean that it needs to strain the bounds of virtuosity. But that is what people are paying for these days I guess.
I think I could find examples on other instruments, but I am less comfortable making judgements about performances on instruments I know less well.
I've been watching quite a few YouTube videos by Samuel Andreyev recently. He is a composer, Canadian, but long-resident in France, and he specializes in talking about the more advanced or challenging contemporary music. He also talks about avant-garde pop music by people like Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa and Velvet Underground. There is only one of the so-called "canonic" composers he has ever bothered doing videos about.
Beethoven greatly admired the music of Mozart with whom he hoped to study when he moved to Vienna, but sadly Mozart had just died. There is one composer he mentions by name that he really thought was impressive.
Canadian pianist Glenn Gould based virtually his whole career on performance of music by only one composer.
Probably the greatest setting of the Catholic mass was by a composer who wasn't even Catholic.
Brahms rarely transcribed the music of other composers--with one exception.
Anton Webern, the most advanced of the composers of the Second Viennese School was greatly influenced by this composer.
The first classical guitarist I ever met only played music by a single composer.
And so on.
The composer is J. S. Bach, of course and he is the one composer that you could think of as the "Universal Composer." Universally respected and loved by other composers, performers and audiences. Mind you, there is the story that Leonard Bernstein once said "Bach, that pregnant syllable that terrifies performers, causes composers to fall to their knees and bores everyone else to tears!"
Bach is extraordinary for so many reasons. When he died he was an obscure Saxon organist and church musician who was little known outside his immediate surroundings. But over the decades more and more musicians fell under his spell. When Beethoven first moved to Vienna he made a reputation playing Bach preludes and fugues in the salons. Soon after Bach's death his son C. P. E. Bach collected over three hundred of his chorales and published them for the harmonic education of composers. That book is still in print over two hundred and fifty years later and a copy is sitting on my shelf.
Bach was master of every musical form of his day except opera and in place of that he wrote similarly scaled oratorios that fulfill a similar role. He also was master of forms that only exist today because of him such as the cantata, a part of the Lutheran service that is no longer used. He was the greatest contrapuntalist of all time to the extent that he succeeded in areas that other composers don't even attempt. He was the greatest synthesist in music history taking the dance forms of the French Baroque, the crisp harmonies and concerto forms of the Italian Baroque and the contrapuntal complexities of the German Baroque and fusing them into a musical unity greater than the component parts. He was enormously productive, turning out as much music in a week as most composers do in a year.
Composers as varied as Alban Berg and Toru Takemitsu quote Bach chorales in their works.
It is curious that Bach should be so greatly admired in our day: he approaches music via counterpoint which is virtually forgotten in our day; he was very religious which, again, is very uncommon in our day; and he makes no concessions to the listener, which is almost unheard of in our day!
I have a little story about Bach that I have told before. Late in the 1920s pianist Rudolph Serkin (father of pianist Peter Serkin) gave a recital in Berlin. It went very well and he was called back for an encore. He chose to play the Goldberg Variations with all the repeats which easily takes an hour. After each variation some members of the audience trickled out so at the end when he finished there were only two listeners still in the hall: the great pianist Artur Schnabel and Albert Einstein.
Let's listen to some Bach. First up, possibly the greatest setting of the Catholic mass, the Mass in B minor with John Eliot Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists:
Next the Cello Suite No. 3, the first solo music (and for two hundred years the only) ever written for cello:
Next, the Art of Fugue, probably the greatest piece of counterpoint ever composed.
Next, the Concerto in D minor for harpsichord:
Finally, the longest single movement ever written in the Baroque, the Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 for solo violin:
Posting was hit with a double-whammy this week: I was under the weather and had other responsibilities to take care of. But I will always get out the Friday Miscellanea! First up, the latest from Ted Gioia who tells us about The Worst Day in Jazz History:
when I started digging into the early history of jazz, learning about the masterworks of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and other revered artists, more often than not I found their best work on the Columbia label.
How did a label with such an extraordinary reputation and lineage fall so low? Usually these kinds of shifts take place gradually, and it’s hard to pinpoint the tipping point when a successful leader loses the way. But in the case of Columbia, the legend tells of the collapse happening on a single day. If you run into jazz old-timers, you might even hear them talk about the “Great Columbia Jazz Purge”—that ominous moment when the most powerful record label in jazz decided that it didn’t really like jazz all that much.
While searching for a new way for tourists to exit, Dal Poggetto and his colleagues discovered a trapdoor hidden beneath a wardrobe near the New Sacristy, a chamber designed to house the ornate tombs of Medici rulers. Below the trapdoor, stone steps led to an oblong room filled with coal that at first appeared to be little more than storage space.
But on the walls, Dal Poggetto and his colleagues found what they believe are charcoal and chalk drawings from the hand of famed artist Michelangelo.
Hard to believe, but on 5 June Martha Argerich turned 80. Her birthday has been celebrated by several of the labels for which she has recorded over seven decades, with lavish reissues of her classic discs, many of them dazzling performances that rank among the greatest of the piano repertoire ever recorded. Even though it’s well over 30 years since she was lured into a studio to make a solo recording, and almost as long since she gave a solo recital in public, saying that she feels “lonely” on stage without a recital partner or an orchestra, she is still generally regarded as the greatest pianist alive today.
Interesting. Grigory Sokolov doesn't do studio recordings, nor concerto performances, but instead an annual feast of solo recitals.
Royal Holloway University of London has just specified that it intends to reduce staff numbers in its music department, ‘where student numbers no longer support the staffing levels.’
Here’s the statement:
Following detailed discussions with Heads of School and Heads of Department, a paper will go to Academic Board on Tuesday 29 June, which sets out a proposal to make a small reduction in the number of academic posts in six disciplines where student numbers no longer support the staffing levels, in order to enable increases in academic posts in disciplines where there are currently high levels of student interest.
Or they could check and see if they might improve their offerings, just in case that is the problem.
South African opera star Pretty Yende said she was detained by French authorities, strip searched and held in a dark room at Paris’ main airport after arriving this week for a starring role at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees.
“Police brutality is real for someone who looks like me,” Yende, who is Black, said in a social media post Tuesday, a day after the encounter at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport.
Yende, an acclaimed soprano, is starring in “La Sonnambula” at the Paris theatre and flew into the city on Monday where she said she was subjected to “ill-treatment and outrageous racial discrimination and psychological torture and very offensive racial comments.”
On Sunday, the provincial Culture Ministry announced that elevator and telephone hold music used by government services, including at liquor stores and casinos, will have to feature 100 per cent Quebec artists.
"The time for royalty-free elevator music is over," said Culture Minister Nathalie Roy at a news conference on Sunday.
"I was waiting on hold with the Culture Ministry and I was stunned to hear an American singing me a little song in English," said Roy.
I haven't checked, but I suspect that most Canadian provinces don't even have a Culture Ministry.
Researchers in the misty mountains of the Ecuadorian Andes have discovered a new species of terrestrial frog and named it after the pioneering British rock band Led Zeppelin.
Pristimantis ledzeppelin, known in English as Led Zeppelin’s Rain Frog, was found by the scientists David Brito-Zapata and Carolina Reyes-Puig in the Cordillera del Cóndor, which straddles south-east Ecuador and north-east Peru.
The small frog, which has coppery-red eyes and a mottled, yellow, brown, black and orange skin, is a member of the huge and rapidly expanding Pristimantis genus. The genus comprises 569 species – 28 of which have been described in Ecuador in the past two years alone.
Wow, Ecuador sure has a lot of frogs. Should we expect more new species to be named after other golden age rock groups like the BeeGees or the Eurhythmics?
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The self-esteem movement has likely resulted in the devaluing of the educational method based on severe criticism. So it is refreshing to read about this musician/teacher: Ferenc Rados: And Now for Something Completely Different…
One thing that struck me early on, as it strikes—with some force—everybody who listens to a Rados lesson, is that laughter is, as a rule, not a good sign. Whoever came up with the famous maxim, “Laughter is always a form of criticism,” must have had Rados in mind. His laughter is ordered in shades of madness, ranging from an only mildly manic chuckle to a positively lunatic guffaw, depending on the degree of perceived flaw in the student’s playing. A friend of mine once went to a Rados lesson to play with a violist who had decided to swap around the order of the last two of Schumann’s “Märchenbilder,” in order to end with the fast movement, a “more effective ending.” My friend—who already knew Rados well—said that he’d never seen or heard a laugh like that in his life!
Rados is not one to pay idle compliments. He himself told me that he has three degrees of criticism. The first, very bad: “Zis I do not understand.” Second, a little better: “I understand, but I don’t believe.” This, veering perilously close to praise: “I believe—but I don’t like it!”
Or, as a seasoned Czech violist once told me: "there is talent--and there is anti-talent!"
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Our envoi for today is a couple of clips by singer Pretty Yende. First some tricky vocal gymnastics from Mozart:
Next an aria by Puccini:
I'll bet you really hate those French immigration officers now...
I want to kick this off with this video from composer David Bruce:
I think he makes some fair points, but I'm not really in agreement. My course as a composer has been wildly unconventional--and not in the usual way where you start off as a punk rock guitarist and then move to New York and compose avant-garde music from Brooklyn. My main career was as a performer and sometimes I specialized in contemporary music and sometimes I avoided it, but I didn't compose very much. Then, after I retired as a performer I took up composing seriously.
I also moved to Mexico and I have to say the odds of me starting a musical conversation with audiences here are vanishingly small. Same for Canada, if I still lived there. I'm pretty sure Canadians have almost no interest in contemporary music of any variety (except perhaps in Quebec). My misfortune is to have received the bulk of my musical education in Spain, Austria and Quebec. So I really have a European sensibility. If I lived in Europe, perhaps I could have a musical conversation with audiences there. But, honestly, that's really not my aim. If someone wants to listen to my music, I am gratified, but I don't write it for that end.
The only terms on which I can be musically creative are if there really is no commercial aspect to it.
From Lisbon to St. Petersburg, Russia, the Bibienas dominated every major court theater in Baroque Europe. Their innovations in perspective opened new dramatic possibilities, and their lavish projects cost vast sums, with single spectacles running budgets of up to $10 million in today’s dollars. Writing to Alexander Pope of an opera performed outdoors in Vienna to consecrate the Austrian crown prince’s birth in 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu described a massive stage constructed over a canal. Gilded flotillas sailed beneath it — a spectacle, she wrote, “so large that it is hard to carry the eye to the end of it.”
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One of the most important roles in a symphony orchestra is that of the concertmaster. His or her job is to lead the orchestra from within the orchestra which includes leading the pre-concert tuning as well as marking the bowings in the string parts and other jobs that I likely am unfamiliar with, not being an orchestral player. Given the importance of the job, it pays pretty well. In the leading orchestras in the US that is around half a million a year in salary. Here is a piece on the details: WHAT CONCERTMASTERS EARN.
An important US industry insider mentioned to me that he might never get to hear Madama Buttefly again – an opera that is very much a target of the “racially-correct” crowd, and that an Asian mezzo-soprano he knows and who has sung Suzuki for many companies is now seeing her many future jobs singing the role being pulled away. I know that this a very sensitive topic right now, but hope that opera companies (especially in the US and UK), while working towards diversity and inclusivity, do their part to defend the art form. I also hope that some of the activists, sometimes in their zeal to increase racial justice and inclusivity in the business, realise that some of their demands might decimate the entire industry – in other words, everything will be just and politically correct, but there might not be so much of it left.
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Alex Ross has a long string of excellent pieces over at The New Yorker showing his range as a researcher as well as a writer. The latest is The Musical Mysteries of Josquin:
The murkiness of his existence notwithstanding, Josquin attained an enduring renown of a kind that no previous composer had enjoyed. In 1502, the Venetian printer Ottaviano Petrucci, the chief pioneer of movable-type music publishing, issued a volume of sacred motets, with Josquin’s four-voice setting of “Ave Maria . . . virgo serena” (“Hail Mary . . . serene virgin”) at its head. The piece must have cast a spell, and the beginning shows why. The highest voice, the superius, sings a graceful rising-and-falling phrase: G C C D E C. Each of the lower voices presents the motif in turn. After it arrives in the bass, the superius enters again on a high C, forming an octave pillar. A second phrase unfurls in similar fashion, then a third, with the voices staggered so that only two move together at a time. Eventually, the scheme changes, the texture thickens, and the descending order of vocal entries is reversed. About a minute in, all four voices coalesce to form a gleaming C-major sonority. The entire opening gives the illusion of breadth and depth, as though lamps have been lit in a vaulted room. Music becomes a space in which you walk around in wonder.
Tania León has been awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her orchestra work Stride which received its world premiere in a performance by The New York Philharmonic conducted by Jaap van Zweden in David Geffen Hall in New York City on February 13, 2020. According to the Pulitzer Prize guidelines, the annually awarded $15,000 prize is for “a distinguished musical composition by an American that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the previous year.” The Pulitzer citation describes Stride as “a musical journey full of surprise, with powerful brass and rhythmic motifs that incorporate Black music traditions from the US and the Caribbean into a Western orchestral fabric.”
I’m still trying to wrap my head around Bitches Brew beer which presents “a mix of traditional African mead and English stout… chock full of aromas of vanilla, licorice and chocolate.”
My considered judgment is that nothing associated Miles Davis ought to be described as vanilla.
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Beauty and the Blob is a really interesting piece over at Tablet. Here is a sample:
Not only will beauty not save us, Oppenheimer warns, but it will be a struggle to save beauty from “the blob of curators, academics, review boards, arts organizations, governmental agencies, museum boards, and funding institutions that [have] claimed for themselves almost total control” of the meaning and value of art. The blob, as Oppenheimer describes it, is the network of powers that includes not only the enforcers of an ever-narrower vision of “woke” political correctness on the arts, but also those who contend with that vision either by calling on art to defend supposedly traditional values, or themselves defend art by speaking only of its formal, technical qualities. The blob is all the institutions and discourses that divert our attention away from beauty—the essence of art.
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The obvious choice for an envoi for today is something by the wonderful Josquin des Prez. This is his Ave Maria Virgo Serena:
I was very disappointed last summer that the Salzburg Festival was cancelled as I found it such a valuable experience the year before. I posted every day on my experiences there. I have been on pins and needles for months now as to whether this year was going to go forward or not. And there were some commentators that assured me that there was no real chance it would! I can now say that it is definitely a go and I was allotted all but two of the tickets I requested. The ones I didn't get were for the Chicago Symphony who cancelled their performances and for Berlioz The Damnation of Faust (don't know the reason for that). I do have twelve tickets that I just downloaded from the website: Salzburg Festival.
The process, for me at least, was to request all the tickets back when the program was announced in December of 2020. At that point in time, everything was rather up in the air due to the pandemic, but they were working very hard to put everything together. In early May I was informed that I was going to receive twelve tickets (out of the fourteen I requested), which is a pretty good result. If you want tickets, especially to the most popular concerts, it is best to request them early. Online ticket sales of unallotted seats just went on sale early this month so you can probably still purchase them.
Here are the concerts I have tickets for:
Morton Feldman: four pieces for chorus and instrumental ensemble including Rothko Chapel
Pianist Arcadi Volodos in recital with music by Brahms and Schubert
Arnold Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire plus works by Johann Strauss in arrangements by Schoenberg and Webern
Morton Feldman: his opera Neither, text by Samuel Beckett.
Teodor Currenzis conducting his musicAeterna chorus and orchestra in music by Rameau
Benjamin Bernheim and Carrie-Ann Matheson in a recital of Dichterliebe by Robert Schumann and a song cycle by Ernest Chausson.
Riccardo Muti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic with chorus and soloists in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis
Richard Strauss: Elektra with Franz Welser-Möst and the Vienna Philharmonic
Luigi Nono, Intolleranza 1960 with dancers from the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance and the Vienna Philharmonic
Mozarteum Orchestra conducted by Jörg Widman in music by Mozart
Daniil Trifonov, pianist, in music by Bach: the D minor Chaconne arranged by Brahms, followed by the Art of Fugue.
Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester conducted by Manfred Honeck: music by Wagner and Shostakovich (Symphony No. 10)
And that's it! I had to miss a long list of fantastic concerts because they were outside my dates or because they conflicted with other concerts. Every day there are three or four concerts of superb quality plus plays, movies and workshops. There is no Summer Academy this year, so there won't be masterclasses or student concerts.
I am seeing three operas, two of them avant-garde, also two concerts of Morton Feldman. Every year they do a focus on a particular neglected composer. This year it is Feldman whose music is being rediscovered these days. I am taking the opportunity to hear works that I never usually have the opportunity to like the Missa Solemnis, Dichterliebe and Pierrot Lunaire. These are pieces very widely recognized as being of superb quality but you rarely get to hear them: even in major urban centers.
Two years ago, in a single week, I heard three of the finest pianists performing today: Igor Levit, Yevgeny Kissin and Grigory Sokolov. This year I get to hear two more: Arcadi Volodos and Daniil Trifonov.
As before, I will do daily posts with comments on the performances and the other pleasures of Salzburg. I might get a chance to take an excursion out of Salzburg as well.
Every few years I make a, for me at least, musical discovery and share it here under the title "Discovering Musicians." There aren't very many of them, but in each case I think it is someone you ought to get to know if you don't already. Today it is Samuel Andreyev who I stumbled across in rather an odd way. Doing research for a post on Bartók's String Quartet No. 4, I ran across a clip by Mr. Andreyev analyzing the work--and a darn good one. Then I discovered a number of other clips talking about other pieces. Always interesting clips about interesting pieces, by the way. Here is a discussion of an early Bach cantata, for example:
Then I ran across a clip of an interview with him and Jordan Peterson and from that I learned that Mr. Andreyev is Canadian, though he has lived much of his life in France, which is why I hadn't heard of him. Here is that interview:
Dr. Peterson, by the way, uses Mr. Andreyev to walk us through the whole history of Western music, explaining as he goes. Turning it around, here is Mr. Andreyev interviewing composer Brian Ferneyhough.
And now, let's listen to a composition by Samuel Andreyev. This is his Piano Piece No. 4 which I think is quite recent as he posted it on YouTube in April of this year.
I can't resist trying to give a very brief description of the music: it sounds to me a bit like Stockhausen if he were Japanese! That means, I quite like it. Here is a concerto for violin and chamber orchestra that was posted in 2019 titled "Trois pierres à ne pas jeter," which means "Three stones not to be thrown."
And that reminds me, just a bit, of Henri Dutilleux. Samuel Andreyev is a very interesting composer and one who is able to talk about music very articulately.
Censors, and would-be censors, are part of the larger class of utilitarians who today are widely ensconced in the academy, the media, and arts and culture venues. You will know utilitarians by their mistaking of art for political activity, for community-building, for therapy. Art should produce results in the present, they contend—results for society and for the self. An ascendent belief among utilitarians, expressed by some and held more or less consciously by others, is that righteous art can stamp its righteousness on audiences, who will leave the museum or finish the poem with their priorities realigned, their commitments affirmed. For believers, herein lies art’s purpose: to sway hearts and minds. This fatuous idea undergirds activist art, which supposes its content can be conveyed directly into the psyche of the reader or audience, as though art were a delivery system in service to some more important thing, namely its “message.”
Back in the day, around the turn of the century, the US-Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov was the hottest thing around, with major orchestras competing for his next work.
Then, around 2011, Golijov hit the biggest composer’s block of all time. Deadlines came and deadlines went and Golijov never delivered. Orchestras asked for their commission money back. The Met cancelled an opera. Silence ensued.
Now, it appears, Golijov has broken his hex for an upcoming Carnegie Hall premiere.
I was a big fan of Golijov back then as he seemed to have found a wonderful blend of an advanced music idiom combined with a rich vein of referentiality. Glad to see him return to productivity.
Follow the link for the details. I honestly don't see why a music education should be so expensive. Mind you, I have no direct experience with Juilliard myself, but I was able to obtain a pretty good musical education for very modest amounts. I came from a poor family so there was no question of coming up with a lot for tuition anywhere. I studied at two Canadian universities and the fees were very low. In fact, when I went to graduate school my income actually went up because they defrayed the tuition and gave me teaching jobs. My private studies were also not expensive.
All students at the Curtis Institute receive a full scholarship, I believe. I think that the Conservatoire system in Québec has a similar policy.
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How one symphony is shaking up the business to grow their audience:
If you work in the classical music world, you’ve likely heard of audience growth wunderkind Aubrey Bergauer. Joining the California Symphony in 2014 as Executive Director, Aubrey brought the struggling orchestra from the brink of financial ruin to vibrant health with jaw-dropping speed. By 2019, Aubrey had not only increased the California Symphony’s audiences by nearly 100% but had also quadrupled the size of their donor base, paid off longstanding debt, and established an endowment of one million dollars—outstripping national trends on every front...
What was the driving factor behind this astounding coup? From the perspective of the Jobs to Be Done theory, three facets of Aubrey’s work predestined her success: a self-professed obsession with the customer; a willingness to ask nonconsumers what they hate about the customer experience (and to make radical changes based on this feedback); and a new model for audience development. We’ll examine each of these through the lens of Jobs to Be Done theory.
Might be worth while reading the whole thing. Would this work in larger, more established markets?
Over the past few months, Bob Dylan sold his song catalog to Universal Music Publishing for between $300-400 million, Neil Young sold half of his to fast-rising upstart Hipgnosis Songs for $100 million, and Stevie Nicks sold hers (along with other intellectual property) to Primary Wave for $100 million as well, sources say. Dozens of artists, songwriters and producers have piled on, commanding dozens of millions for some or all of their music assets, slicing and dicing the pies in a head-spinning variety of manners, many of them selling to investors rather than music companies.
“We really believe in the long-term value of creative content, whether generating new content or enhancing the value of the existing IP, and we’ve done this extremely effectively over the past 15 years in film and TV,” he says. “Our focus on film allows us to tap into those relationships and elevate these music catalogs toward symbiotic opportunities beyond music — film, TV, videogames, sports, book publishing — and this gives us a wide perspective of how content can be repurposed, and synergistic opportunities.” And while he says the company has just “a couple” of full-time staffers focusing on music opportunities, he points to the company’s wide network of portfolio companies and its currently small catalog of just a few dozen music copyrights.
You know, I really don't know what to think of this or how it might affect music as an art form over the long term.
We may not know when Homer was born, but we can say for certain that he ceased to exist in the early nineteen-thirties, when a young Harvard professor named Milman Parry published two papers, in the journal Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, with the seemingly innocuous title “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making.” Parry’s thesis was simple but momentous: “It is my own view, as those who have read my studies on Homeric style know, that the nature of Homeric poetry can be grasped only when one has seen that it is composed in a diction which is oral, and so formulaic, and so traditional.” In other words, the Iliad and the Odyssey weren’t written by Homer, because they weren’t written at all. They were products of an oral tradition, performed by generations of anonymous Greek bards who gradually shaped them into the epics we know today. Earlier scholars had advanced this as a hypothesis, but it was Parry who demonstrated it beyond a reasonable doubt.
The whole article is an entertaining introduction to an age-old controversy, but for a more sober discussion see the introduction to the Robert Fagles translation by Bernard Knox.
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We really need to hear some Golijov. Here is his Tenebrae for string quartet performed by the Odeon Quartet in Moscow in 2013. The piece was inspired by some of François Couperin's vocal music.
It has been almost an unalloyed pleasure the whole time. In the beginning I did a lot more posts than I do now as I got much of what I had to say out of my system. Now I am discovering that I do still have things to say and I am continually discovering new ones. From the beginning and more so over time, I have been blessed with kind and intelligent commentators who have made great contributions. These have included not only music lovers and musical amateurs but also private scholars, musicians and composers, music critics and even professors of music. One high point that I felt very humbled by was a comment from Richard Taruskin, the dean of musicologists. I have learned a great deal from the experience and have found it very fulfilling.
Thanks to you all.
This is a song I wrote a bit before I started this blog. It is from a set of twelve songs, all setting well-known poems. This is "Nuits de Juin" by Victor Hugo, in the original French.
When I was taking the graduate seminar 20th Century Theory and Analysis we spent some time with Bartók and I recall the professor recoiling in horror when I suggested that the first movement of Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (composed in 1936) was a fugue. Now of course he was right in that it is not a traditional or conventional fugue, but rather a piece written following Bartók's own unique system of melody and harmony (not to mention rhythm). But I was also right in that it presents all the traditional gestures of a fugue and the listener is meant to hear it in that sense, but with Bartók's re-envisioning and revitalizing of the conventional form. So what I am going to do is show how this movement is a fugue, with all the characteristic elements of a fugue including subjects, inversions of subjects, stretto, episodes and so on. And I am going to show how this all fits into Bartók's harmonic and melodic system.
Incidentally, the introductory note in the score on the structure of the first movement states quite clearly that it is a "fairly strictly executed form of a fugue." What the theory professor was demonstrating was his adherence to the modernist narrative of 20th century music and its avant-garde rejection of musical tradition. Bartók, being one of the founders of 20th century modernism in music, should not be tied to musical traditions such as the fugue in his view. Bartók was certainly a musical progressive, but his musical language has deep roots both in folk musics and past musical traditions.
Fugue from Another Planet
I choose this subtitle because what Bartók has done is give us what is identifiable, in whole and in parts, as a fugue in the Bachian sense, but at the same time he has managed to make it sound utterly unlike the sound of a Bach fugue. Let's look at how he accomplishes this. Here is the subject as first presented and it begins on A:
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And here is the answer beginning on E (I'm not showing the entire answer so as to save space) which appears at the fifth, just as it should in a fugue:
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Then there is an entry in the cellos on D (bass clef and again, I am not showing all the subject):
There follows an entry in the violins on B, an episode and then another entry in the violins on F# (treble clef):
I mentioned inversion and stretto as two other traditional fugal devices that Bartók uses. Here is an example. The first segment of the subject is inverted and layered on top of itself through all the strings from top to bottom:
Stated like that, this seems rather like a traditional fugue. But let's take a look at that subject. Apart from that C# it looks a lot like A Phrygian. But notice that the subject spans the space between A and E-flat in its first two segments. One of the main characteristics of Bartók's approach to pitch, both melodic and harmonic, is to create symmetries where traditional harmony uses asymmetries. The overall layout of this first movement displays different kinds of symmetries. First, this A to E-flat movement is the main structural feature of the movement: it begins on A and the climax is on E flat:
Of course, the main structural pitches in traditional harmony are the tonic, subdominant and dominant, which asymmetrically divide the octave. Using the tritone above A, the E-flat, symmetrically divides the octave in half. At the very end is a little coda that is a kind of summary of the overall structure (treble clef):
Antokoletz' fascinating book on Bartók includes this example that shows two other kinds of symmetries in this movement:
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Here he shows two other ways Bartók structures the movement. Beginning on the initial A, the upper staff shows how he creates entries of the subject each a perfect fifth higher than the last: A, E, B, F#, C#, G# and finally E flat (enharmonic of D#). Interwoven with that is a movement down by perfect fifths: A, D, G, C, F, B-flat and finally E-flat. Two interlocking symmetries both arriving at E-flat!
Summary
The Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is a major classic of 20th century music. To my knowledge it was the first piece written using the "Music for ..." type of title that has been used by innumerable composers ever since. The composition owes its genealogy to both the sonata da chiesa of the Baroque in its slow-fast-slow-fast movement structure and to the 18th century Viennese symphony in its purely instrumental four movement layout ending with a quick dance-like movement. It is as close as Bartók got to writing a symphony, but he wanted to underline his status as a musical innovator so he chose a neutral title (and one that many other composers have found useful). Another major innovation is the division of the orchestra into two "choirs" or groups separated in space in order to make use of the very old 17th techniques of the Gabrielis in San Marco in Venice where the different instrumental groups answered and echoed one another--a technique that had fallen completely into disuse by the early 20th century.
Now let's have a listen to one of the greatest pieces of 20th century music. First the RIAS Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ferenc Fricsay with the score.
Next a performance by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada:
The theory and practice of music criticism is a topic we kick around from time to time here and today a recurring feature at the New York Times provides some grist for our mill: 5 Classical Albums to Hear Right Now. This is a monthly feature and perhaps another time we can look over a few articles, but today I just want to glance at the June repertoire. New York journalism always seems to have a special flavour, a sense of place and a sense of time. It's music to hear right now! Here are the five albums:
American music recorded by the Lucerne Symphony. A reasonable selection of music by Leonard Bernstein, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Samuel Barber and Charles Ives. The musical examples are the usual 30 second bleeding chunks from Spotify. Say, has anyone ever looked into what the financial arrangements are between Spotify and the NYT and the WSJ? The only glaringly weird bit is the first paragraph: "How bold to title an album “Americans.” And what a lot to deliver on: a theme of near-infinite programming possibilities, and a concept under intense scrutiny these days, as classical musicians grapple with the United States’ history of exclusion in the concert hall." Bold? No bolder than Hilary Hahn titling her latest album "Paris" because it is all music composed there. Ah, but it all comes clear as we learn that "classical musicians grapple with the US' history of exclusion." It's as if no music or no composers were ever excluded from any concert hall anywhere, except in the US. One gets the impression that certain genuflections have to be made if one is a New Yorker.
The next album is by the Jihye Lee Orchestra and it is a fine example, but of jazz, not classical music. Isn't this rather the wrong place for it?
Next pianist Samantha Ege offers an album of music by Florence Price and we are told that "The Florence Price revival continues apace. In just the last few weeks, the Philadelphia Orchestra announced that it would record Price’s symphonies under Yannick Nézet-Séguin; the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective released a gorgeous premiere recording of her Piano Quintet in A minor on Chandos; and the musicologists Douglas W. Shadle and Samantha Ege gave notice that they are writing a biography of this long-overlooked composer." Fair enough, though I believe that musicology departments have been looking at her music for decades now.
I have put up a number of posts on French harpsichordist Jean Rondeau and this new release, "Melancholy Grace" is another example of his outstanding musicianship. A terrific new talent on the scene.
Finally pianist Leif Ove Andsnes presents an album of music from a particularly prolific year in the life of Mozart including three piano concertos with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra plus some solo and chamber music. Great idea. 1785 was a really spectacular year for Mozart especially if you consider that he also published his six Haydn quartets in the same year. Mind you, Mozart wrote something truly spectacular every few months.
Instead of engaging my own critical faculties here, I will just mention that this is the kind of closet music criticism that our day seems to specialize in. Speaking of exclusion, if you pick out just five albums to promote every month, then you have already gone through an extremely rigorous selection process of eliminating the vast majority of releases. All this is unnoticed because it is behind the scenes. But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. The five albums selected are all promoted with uncritical enthusiasm of course, because we seem to believe that actually stating criticism is impolite or biased or something.
Exhibit 1 in the "headlines that fail to deliver what they promise" category is a recent New York Times article titled What Makes a Musical Genius? in which we fail to discover a single clue as to what makes a musical genius. Instead we get humdrum reviews of recent books about Tupac Shakur, Sinead O’Connor, Rickie Lee Jones and others.
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I'm sure we all from time to time have to deal with the challenge of friends and relatives offering literary recommendations? As a public service announcement, let me offer the following strategy. A relative recently strongly recommended a book by Kristen Hannah titled The Nightingale. This might be a good book, I don't know, but I do know, from decades of experience, that I am usually better off following my own instincts when it comes to books. But I had the perfect riposte handy, which I offer to you: "I'm reading Shakespeare right now and I guarantee that he is better." Yes, a wee bit arrogant and condescending, but hey. Worked like a charm.
The Wigmore is emerging from its most recent crisis with aplomb. As an early adopter of livestreamed concerts at the beginning of the pandemic, it won large dividends of good will and public donations. Whereas many small performing venues in Britain are reopening nervously after six months of forced closure, the Wigmore Hall is confidently poised to celebrate its 120th anniversary with an ambitious program, starting Sunday.
The hall has occupied a special place in music lovers’ hearts since 1901, when it was opened as a recital hall by the German piano manufacturer Bechstein, which had a showroom next door. The discreet wooden doors under an art nouveau canopy that lead into the 540-seat hall, with its red plush seats, marble, gilt and dark wood panels, are a portal to another era.
Probably the most important chamber-music venue in Britain, the Wigmore has an intensely loyal London audience that filled the hall for most of the 500-plus concerts a year it was staging before last March.
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This is rather touching: Rick Beato is a big fanboy of Martha Argerich:
Well, and why not? Just wait until he discovers Mitsuko Uchida and Grigory Sokolov!
Gandelsman isn’t the only violinist to have tackled these classic works; Rachel Podger recorded them in 2019, a year before he released his own set. But his approach is singular: feather-light and rooted in dance and folk music. He treats the suites as six enclosed spaces, tracing long arcs through each one, the sections blurring as he plays them through without pausing.
Read the whole thing--it contains little clips from this performance set alongside excerpts from performances on cello, which is something that can really add concrete illustrations to a review. Unfortunately, perhaps due to copyright reasons, the excerpts are all bleeding chunks, beginning and ending randomly. If you want to get a better impression of the performance you should look for it on YouTube. I'm not very fond of the sound, but light and airy it certainly is, and yes, rather dancey as well.
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Here's my off-topic bit for today: Jordan Peterson talking about Price's Law, which has all sorts of interesting ramifications--even for classical music as he mentions around the middle of the clip.
Initially, theaters are staging concerts or smaller operas with limited casts. For the next season, which starts in the fall, some operas have reduced the number of performances. Gone for now are fully fledged performances of spectacles that involve scores of performers packed onto the stage.
“In a Wagner opera, how can you have an 80 people chorus with two meters between them?” said French opera director Christophe Gayral. “You’d need a football field.”
Directors are adapting plots and scenography to social distancing rules. Stagehands are moving curtains to make room for socially distanced cast members, while designers are integrating masks into the costumes.
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The Critic magazine opines as how conductors are not nearly as important as we think (which makes us wonder about critics as well...): And the band played on…
It never fails to amaze me how little the appointment of a chief conductor affects the general performance and perception of an orchestra.
Take, as a case history, the New York Philharmonic. America’s premier gateway for musical talent, founded in 1842, the Philharmonic has not picked the right conductor since Leonard Bernstein threw himself under its wheels in 1957 and came up with enough razzle-dazzle to magnetise a new generation. People are going into care homes these days still singing the themes from his Young People’s Concerts. Lenny welded an orchestra to a city and its rising teens.
The Philharmonic plays on. It sounds more or less the same and its patrons continue to cough up the dough
After he left in 1973, the bond frayed. Pierre Boulez brought six years of modernist chic, followed by decades of torpor with Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur, Lorin Maazel, Alan Gilbert and the incumbent Dutchman Jaap van Zweden (yes, who?). None of these baton wagglers grabbed the city by the love-handles the way Bernstein did, or tuned into its rhythms.
You can read the whole thing and not be much wiser, I'm afraid. This is an excellent example of journalism unhindered by musical understanding.
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Which brings us to our envoi and I can think of nothing more appropriate than Martha Argerich playing the Piano Concerto No. 3 by Prokofiev at the Singapore Piano Festival in 2018:
A while back I linked to an opinion piece in the Washington Post about the classics curriculum at Howard University. I don't want to return to the debate we had then, but instead take up one particular paragraph in the piece that makes an interesting point:
The Western canon is an extended dialogue among the crème de la crème of our civilization about the most fundamental questions. It is about asking “What kind of creatures are we?” no matter what context we find ourselves in. It is about living more intensely, more critically, more compassionately. It is about learning to attend to the things that matter and turning our attention away from what is superficial.
This is very much true of the musical canon in particular. Some obvious examples are how the Mozart string quartets are a response to the Haydn string quartets, so much so that the set of six quartets Mozart published in 1785 are simply known as the "Haydn Quartets" as they are not only inspired by him, but also dedicated to him. In turn, some of Beethoven's string quartets can be seen as emulating ones by Mozart. Indeed, the whole genre of the string quartet is like an extended dialogue over generations of composers right up to those by Bartók and Shostakovich.
Another very ethereal dialogue involves the variation form. J. S. Bach really threw out a challenge to the ages with his Goldberg Variations of 1741 consisting of an aria and thirty variations that have taken on an almost legendary status in the classical music world. Glenn Gould based his whole career on them and there is a notorious anecdote about them. Late in the 1920s pianist Rudolph Serkin (father of pianist Peter Serkin) gave a recital in Berlin. It went very well and he was called back for an encore. He chose to play the Goldberg Variations with all the repeats which easily takes an hour. After each variation some members of the audience trickled out so at the end when he finished there were only two listeners still in the hall: the great pianist Artur Schnabel and Albert Einstein.
Perhaps the most famous response to the Goldberg Variations are the Diabelli Variations by Beethoven in which he too attempts to simply exhaust the possibilities of not only the theme, but the form itself. I did a rather overgrown post on them here. Beethoven ups the ante a bit by writing thirty-three variations.
The variation form has not had the same extended genealogy that the string quartet has, but one interesting 20th century example that may continue the dialogue is the thirty-six variations on "The People United Will Never Be Defeated" by Frederic Rzewski (pronounced "Chefsky"). Igor Levit released a three CD box with the Bach, the Beethoven and the Rzewski all together so we can hear the resonances. Perhaps some young composer will write forty variations in response.
The idea that some art is a direct response to much older art, and is enriched by it, is a long-standing truth. One more example? James Joyce's Ulysses is a response to Homer's Odysseus.
In the world of science the latest research may trump all older knowledge (but does it really?), but this is emphatically not true in the world of art.
Here are the three sets of variations. First the Goldberg Variations recorded by Trevor Pinnock (not in one clip, but it should continue if you have autoplay on):
Next, the Diabelli Variations performed by Grigory Sokolov.
Finally, The People United Will Never Be Defeated played by the composer:
