This CD arrived quite quickly considering it had to come from England via the Royal Mail. Russian music, recorded by Russian musicians in the USA and Russia for a German label, but shipped from a warehouse in England.
The Silver Age in Russian music, at least as defined by Diaghilev, lasted only a decade: from 1907, when his concerts began in Paris, to 1917 when the Russian Revolution ended the party and exiled so many of the artists. This two-disc set amply captures the range of music with works by Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Scriabin. Two piano concertos, the 2nd, by Prokofiev and the other by Scriabin, are accompanied by the Mariinsky Orchestra conducted by Gergiev. The rest of the repertoire is solo piano with transcriptions from two Stravinsky ballets and the 8th Piano Sonata by Prokofiev.
Daniil Trifonov is a pianist with seemingly unlimited technical skills, not to mention deep musical sensitivities. His Prokofiev Sonata No. 8 is brilliant both musically and technically, as is his Sarcasms, op. 17. His ballet transcriptions of The Firebird and Petrushka are truly orchestral in their timbral resources. Indeed, I don't think I have ever heard the "Russian Dance" so well played. Trifonov never seems to lose the thread of the rhythmic drive despite Stravinsky's montage-like transitions.
The Piano Concerto No. 2 of Prokofiev is one of my very favorite concertos, especially the first movement and this is close to being a definitive rendering. Again, it is an exercise in color and shading. I'm sorry to say that I didn't know the Scriabin Concerto in F# minor before hearing this recording. I've never been quite sure what to make of Scriabin. I suppose you could describe his music as a kind of mystical post-Wagnerian journey. In any case, I was pleased to discover this concerto. The second movement, unusually, is a serene set of variations that grows in intensity leading up to a hyper-romantic finale.
Here is the first movement of the Scriabin Concerto in F# minor:
The idea that it’s hard to sing and play drums at the same time – harder than to sing and play another instrument – isn’t something I just came up with on my own. In fact, being neither a musician nor a singer, I don’t feel personally qualified to say. I find it all rather difficult.
But it’s something I’ve read about quite a bit. There’s a lot of discussion about it among people who play music, a kind of accepted wisdom, although that “wisdom” is also often challenged (as it was in our own discussion).
So, is it really so very hard? And what exactly is meant by “at the same time”?
Obviously, one can’t play a wind instrument while singing, although someone like Louis Armstrong would alternate the two and did a great job of it. The main instruments we’re talking about would be the piano (or other keyboards), the guitar, and the drums, and it’s rock and pop music in particular that we’ve been talking about.
I started my musical career as a bass player who also sang and I progressed to a rhythm guitar player who sang as well. So I have some familiarity with the topic. But I want to mention a related kind of challenge involving singing and playing.
First, some background. In the classical music world, reading music at sight, i.e. performing music while reading it from the score, is a highly-developed skill. If you have been to a film recently with an orchestral score, you might not be aware that it was likely recorded in less than two and a half hours, which is the standard duration of a musical "service" as defined by the musician's union. In other words, in most cases, the soundtrack to the film was recorded in one take! This is some high-level sight-reading. The studio musicians who specialize in this can read and play at sight virtually anything.
Second point, the classical music world has one main type of notation, often called "vocal notation" because it indicates the pitch you should sing. Of course instrumentalists use the same notation as they learn where the notes are on their instruments. But there are some exceptions. Apart from purely historical notation systems that are no longer used, we still find tablature, a system that does not show the pitch, but only where to put your fingers. This was used on the lute and guitar and related instruments up into the 18th century when it was superseded by vocal notation for those instruments as well. There were three main types of tablature, French tab, that used letters to indicate the frets, Italian tab that used numbers and German tab, a very peculiar version that used both in a very confusing way!
In the 16th and 17th centuries a great number of books of songs with lute accompaniment were published. Here is an example of the notation for one of the most famous of these, "Flow My Tears" by John Dowland:
Click to enlarge
The upper staff is the voice part in vocal notation (the C clef is on the bottom line). The lower staff is French lute tablature with the lowest string (or course) on the bottom and the highest string on top. The frets are indicated by a, b, c, d, etc. standing for the open string and first second and third frets respectively. Some lutenists and guitarists still use this notation today for various reasons. Just as a singer can become very skilled at singing from notation at sight, so can lutenists and guitarists.
But imagine that you are a guitarist or lutenist who also sings? Might it be possible to sight sing the voice part and sight read the lute or guitar part simultaneously? Two entirely different notations systems? Well, you can. I have even tried a few times, just for fun. But I had an excellent student that studied guitar with me for several years and then took up the voice. He made a specialty of singing lute songs and accompanying himself. And, of course, every time he learned a new song, he was simultaneously sight reading tablature and vocal notation.
And if you can believe it, I once knew a musicologist who swore she could sight sing from German lute tab! But I wouldn't believe that unless I saw it.
Just for comparison, no-one graduates from McGill University in music without passing a test where they are given an atonal melody, are allowed a couple of minutes to look at it--without the aid of a piano or other instrument--and then have to sing it at sight for the examiners.
Onto a stage bounds a young woman in a backless gown slit up to the hip, or a micro-dress cut an inch below the butt. That’s right, I’ve turned into a fashion critic. And the moment these words appear I shall come under a social-media onslaught for committing the unforgivable male offence of reporting what a female artist wears, instead of how she plays.
My defence is that Yuja Wang does everything possible to draw attention to her appearance. She habitually changes costume in a concert interval to show more leg and she feeds the internet with a stream of selfies in halter tops and skimpy shorts.
For the first time in months, members of Afghanistan's all-female Zohra orchestra have reassembled in Doha, their music once again filling the air as they face an uncertain future.
While grateful to be safe in Qatar, their escape from Taliban rule is bittersweet, as the girls leave behind friends from the orchestra and their "old companions" -- their instruments.
Last week marked the first time in three months that Marzia Anwari, along with other members of the Afghan music community who escaped to Qatar, played live for an audience.
This reminds me of the Hungarian Philharmonic who reassembled in Vienna after fleeing Hungary during the Soviet repression in 1957.
I respect operas like these, am elated that they exist and am always up for sampling others. But the two pieces I have just seen leave me with a guilty feeling I suspect many share: a desire that they appropriated from white music a little less!
In Black music that’s fused with white music, I am more excited when the musical language is more viscerally embraceable beyond sheer beauty of texture. Give me quirky melody and dense harmony, yes, but with beginnings and endings that can be gleaned and appreciated in real time, not just after close study, and jazz and blues language (as well as, perhaps, composition from other Black musical traditions) not necessarily foregrounded, but not elusive either. A workout, yes, but one that leaves me with exercise-bike euphoria.
The combination of Billie Eilish and Mozart is predictably weird, but not for any “musical” reason. There is not such a wide disconnect between Billie Eilish’s melody and classical music. The weirdness is due to the fact that Billie Eilish is a microphone singer, not a concert hall singer. It’s strange to hear microphone singing over classical-style accompaniment!
Classical voice comes from the time before microphones. Singers had to be heard and understood in every seat of a large auditorium, over all the instruments. This requires good strong breath support and control of tone, as well as exaggerated articulation. The typical way to record classical singing is to recreate the experience of being in the concert hall. You place the mics at a distance from the performer, so you are mainly capturing the sound of their voice bouncing off the walls and ceiling of the hall rather than the sound coming directly out of their mouth.
On a similar note, Rick Beato was waxing enthusiastic recently about the new Adele single "Easy On Me" because it starts with just voice and piano--real concert grand piano! Just wait until he discovers Schubert lieder.
At Carnegie, the tenor rode waves of applause through no fewer than six encores, alternating lyrical purring with displays of heroic swagger. He ended with Strauss’s “Cäcilie,” though he stopped momentarily to berate an audience member who was recording a video. “I do everything for you,” he barked. “But please respect the rules and don’t film.” If Kaufmann were the kind of singer who really did give everything he had—a go-for-broke artist like Patti LuPone, who issues similar reprimands on Broadway—I would have admired the sentiment. In this case, though, it had more the flavor of a celebrity pout. And it is that scrim of celebrity which seems to have sealed off Kaufmann’s enormous talent and limited its expressive potential.
The great challenge for all performers these days is that they are constantly in competition with their studio-constructed selves who never make mistakes, who are never less than perfect because they are edited to be so. The raw spontaneity of live performance is to be avoided.
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This article on Music and sex is less interesting than you might think as it just rehashes all that stuff about dopamine levels that neuroscientists have been talking about for ages:
Why does music give us a sensation analogous to sexual climax? Neuroscience calls these physiological effects ‘frisson’ or ‘skin orgasm’. The brain’s motor and reward systems are united in the striatum, deep within the subcortical basal ganglia of the forebrain. The upper, dorsal part of the striatum is responsible for action and prediction. The lower, ventral striatum is connected to the oldest and most emotional part of the brain called the limbic system. A team of neuroscientists at McGill University in Montreal, led by Robert Zatorre, discovered a direct link between these brain regions and musical ‘chills’, based on the release of dopamine.
One wonders why neuroscientists don't seem to spend any time investigating why some music makes us want to run and hide while other music gives us feelings of nausea? Oh, right, those investigations are less "sexy."
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We live in very strange times indeed if iTunes is the metric.
The #1 song on iTunes is an anti-vax anthem with lines like “the pandemic ain’t real they planned it” and shout outs to Nicki Minaj & Kyrie Irving.
In fact 4 out of 10 of the top ten songs are remixes of the same “F**k Joe Biden”, anti-vax anthem. America is now Trump country.
Adele's new single has been pushed down to third place!
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Now for some suitable envois for a very patchy miscellanea. First, a collection of waltzes for classical guitar:
Two seasoned professionals play a Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos:
You may recall that I live in Mexico, which can be a very interesting place. The language of the Aztecs, still spoken by 1.7 million people in Mexico, appears all over the place in, for example, street names. Here is one for you: Huitzilopochtli, god of war. Nahuatl is an agglutinative language and today I ran across the name of a musical instrument: matlaxkalolistlatikwinaltlatzotzonwan which means "musical instruments that are made to thump by being slapped with the hand." Tambourines, in other words, or maybe just drums. This is from a video by Julie on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnQwfvP-QJE.
Traveler’s Prayer was composed last year, begun before and completed during the pandemic. It’s a setting not of the Hebrew Traveller’s Prayer itself, but of three short Old Testament passages that are often added to it, and Reich sets them for four voices in long sinuous vocal lines, often doubled and coloured by the instrumental ensemble, and making extensive use of intertwining canons and their inversions and retrogrades. Reich has said that the music is “closer to Josquin des Prez than Stravinsky”, though the opening section for two tenors (which takes up half of the 16-minute work) does seem to hark back to late Stravinsky, especially to Threni. It’s a muted, rather contained piece, low on rhythmic energy, rooted in the same tonality throughout, and very different from anything Reich has composed before.
Sounds like that was a terrific concert. Remind me to try and spend some time in London. Lots of great music happening there.
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In the New York Times John McWhorter weighs in on the controversy at the University of Michigan over a music professor showing a 1965 film of Laurence Olivier playing Othello in blackface.
Is blackface being shown as part of a collegiate-level discussion, as in the Michigan case? College students shouldn’t need protection from an old film used to help them think about and debate the conversion of a classic over time. Sheng was using the film to stir and inform artistic consciousness. To read that situation otherwise is deeply anti-intellectual.
Very much worth reading the whole thing. The latest is that the university is not going to pursue an investigation.
The research said there were 69,000 fewer jobs in music in 2020 than in 2019 - a drop of 35% - due to the "devastating impact" of coronavirus.
UK Music said the industry had been hit "especially hard" by the virus.
Musicians themselves as well as people working in venues and recording studios were particularly affected, it said.
Live music revenues collapsed by around 90% in 2020, according to the UK Music report, titled This Is Music 2021, which was published on Tuesday.
"The music creators and live music sectors experienced the greatest decline - the majority of those working in the industry are self-employed, and they have been hit especially hard by Covid-19," it said.
...music — at least for some of us — is an engaged and engaging activity that involves your ear, your intellect, your memory, your imagination and more. And that if those resources aren’t available, there’s no shame in preferring the more serene and restful option of silence.
The group of eight Collaborative Partners that Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen has enlisted to help him and the San Francisco Symphony rethink the future of the orchestral world is a notably diverse bunch. They come from various musical domains spanning the unclassifiable divisions of classical, rock, jazz and other. Yet they all share a dedication to new ideas and new approaches — a combination of traits that makes them suitable participants in Salonen’s quest to transform the future of the Symphony.
Read the whole thing for an introduction to the people involved.
Today, the only major charitable foundation funding artistic innovation in the symphonic field is Mellon.
Orchestras are mainly to blame for these troubles. By and large, they have failed to rethink the concert experience, failed to explore native repertoire, failed to revisit issues of purpose and scope. But foundations are not blameless. Knight’s “The Magic of Music” failed to engage informed consultants. Susan Feder, Mellon’s long-time arts and culture program officer, is an exception; when she arrived in 2007, she shrewdly discriminated between recipients who were coasting and those with something on the ball. In sum, orchestras have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment, with its changing audience demographics and shifting political, social, and arts mores. It will not be enough to simply engage more Black instrumentalists, soloists, and composers.
Read the whole thing for an interesting and unusual take on the subject.
Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the Metropolitan Opera season, tells of a young Black man growing up in a rural Louisiana town, his exuberant childhood shadowed by family discord and sexual abuse. Such a story would be nothing too newsworthy in an Off Broadway theatre or in an indie movie house, but it’s a radical novelty for the mainstream opera world, which dwells largely in the European past. This is, in fact, the first time that a Black composer and a Black librettist have found their way to the Met: until now, Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” has been the principal, problematic vehicle for capturing African American experiences. The libretto is by the screenwriter, director, and actor Kasi Lemmons, who adapted it from the eponymous memoir by the Times columnist Charles M. Blow.
Looking over my shelves, I have two previous recordings of the 24 Preludes and Fugues, op. 87 by Dmitri Shostakovich. These were written after Shostakovich was sent to Leipzig in 1950 to serve on the jury of a competition connected with the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the death of J. S. Bach. First prize was won by Tatyana Nikolayeva who was prepared to play any of the Bach Well-Tempered Clavier preludes and fugues on request. Shostakovich was quite impressed. Between October of that year and February of 1951 he composed a set of preludes and fugues in all the keys. My reference for this is Laurel Fay, Shostakovich: A Life, pp. 177 et seq.
Sometimes I think of myself as a "critical traditionalist" or someone who appreciates the enormous contribution the resonance of tradition makes to cultural activities like music. The "critical" part comes in recognizing the possible defects in tradition and the possible benefits deriving from genuinely new creative efforts. So I find the way that Shostakovich approaches harmony and counterpoint under the influence of Bach absolutely fascinating.
The oldest recording I have of these pieces is Vladimir Ashkenazy on Decca dating from 1999. There are much earlier clips by Tatyana Nikolayeva and Shostakovich himself of selected individual pieces on YouTube, of course. I have to say that Ashkenazy does not really knock me out. I also have his complete Chopin and my impression of both recordings is that he is a fine technician, but rather a humdrum interpreter. No poetry.
The other recording that I picked up later is by Konstantin Scherbakov on Naxos. It was recorded in 1999 as well. Technically it is both clear and brilliant but it shows a lot of poetic grace as well. Very nice recording.
Igor Levit's recording history is very impressive. His debut two-disc set (he only seems to release recordings in double sets) was of the Beethoven late sonatas, something most pianists reserve for their later years. He followed this with the six Partitas of Bach (another double set) and then a monster set of variations: the Goldbergs by Bach, the Diabelli by Beethoven and The People United Will Never Be Defeated by Rzewski. What next, you might ask? There were a couple of CD releases that I missed somehow and then this: On DSCH, the Shostakovich 24 Preludes and Fugues with a third disc devoted to an homage written by the Scottish composer Ronald Stevenson in 1960-61 on Shostakovich's musical motto: DSCH. In notes:
The D is Dmitri, of course. In German E flat is called "es." The C is C and, also in German, B natural is referred to as "h." So DSCH spells Dmitri Shostakovich or as close as you can get in musical notes. Sadly there seems to be no good way of transliterating Bryan into notes! Bach however had the very obvious motif which is remarkably similar to DSCH:
The Stevenson piece is titled Passacaglia on DSCH and it is such a mammoth work, nearly an hour and a half long, that I will likely do a separate post on it. Suffice it to say that finding that piece and placing it next to the Shostakovich is the kind of creative programming we expect from Levit.
Now to the Shostakovich. These preludes and fugues demonstrate an astonishing range of creative invention from the calm sarabande of the first prelude in C major, to the Mussorgskian rumblings of the G major prelude, to the cheerful D major fugue, to the French overture style of the B minor prelude, to the A major fugue that sounds like Ravel, to the Hungarian dance-like F# minor prelude, to the very Bachian subject of the E major fugue. And then there are all the pieces that really only sound like Shostakovich: driving fugues, deeply resonant preludes and his trademark grotesquerie.
Now let's look at some examples. Here is the opening of the first prelude in C major:
Click to enlarge
Characteristic sarabande rhythm but the Shostakovich twist is the sudden switch to the tonic minor with a secondary dominant. What is unusual about Shostakovich's harmony is not that it does unprecedented things, but his practice is unexpected, takes unusual turns and is angular rather than smooth. He is always surprising you, which, actually, is only possible in a context where you have conventional harmonic expectations. In the C major fugue, he surprises by not having a single accidental in the entire piece! The entries wander about modally, but without leaving the diatonic scale. The rising fifth interval of the opening of the subject at one point becomes a tritone when it enters on B to F. The scintillating arpeggios of the A minor prelude immediately recall the Bach C major prelude from Bk I of the WTC:
But Shostakovich skews unexpectedly to F# major halfway through which Bach would have done quite differently. Shostakovich preserves some of the basic conventions of the Baroque fugue style: he always answers the subject on the fifth as in the A minor fugue:
Later on he has entries on C and G and a stretto on F# minor followed by one on B flat minor. Nearly every fugue uses stretto to some extent. The prelude in E minor uses Corelli 2nds to expressive effect:
I could go on and on, but this post is already a bit of a monster. But I have to mention a couple of the later pieces. The fugue in D flat major is in Shostakovich's semi-psychotic grotesque manner, starting with the subject:
This is followed by perhaps the most hauntingly expressive fugue of all, in B flat minor:
You need a whole page of that to get the idea. What a marvelous and complex subject. And when these richly riotous ornaments are piled up on top of one another all I can think is that it is as if Messiaen and Bach met up high in the alps and wrote a piece together.
Speaking of Messiaen, his piano music, especially the Catalogue d'oiseaux, is one of the great masterworks of 20th century piano music even though its great length and difficulty make it rarely heard. I think I would put these 24 Preludes and Fugues by Shostakovich on a similar plane. In a century rich with great piano music by Ravel, Debussy, Prokofiev, and Messiaen, I think that this music by Shostakovich, who did not write a great deal of piano music, deserves a place.
And here I am, at the end of this post, and I have not done a trace of what I promised: review Levit's recording of the piece! Well, it is very fine: accurate, expressive and brilliantly executed.
Here is a recording of Shostakovich playing the Prelude and Fugue in B flat minor. The fugue begins around the 3 minute mark.
I was reading Ann Althouse this morning, who often has interesting takes on the issues of the day and found this post: Thrusting for faith. She identified the word "thrusting" as a misreading of the original which was "thirsting" making rather more sense! But what I found interesting as the rest of the quote:
Why are so many, especially so many young people, drawn to this ideology? It’s not because they are dumb. Or because they are snowflakes....All of this has taken place against the backdrop of major changes in American life—the tearing apart of our social fabric; the loss of religion and the decline of civic organizations; the opioid crisis; the collapse of American industries; the rise of big tech; successive financial crises; a toxic public discourse; crushing student debt. An epidemic of loneliness. A crisis of meaning....
“I became converted because I was ripe for it and lived in a disintegrating society thrusting for faith.” That was Arthur Koestler writing in 1949 about his love affair with Communism. The same might be said of this new revolutionary faith. And like other religions at their inception, this one has lit on fire the souls of true believers, eager to burn down anything or anyone that stands in its way....
Back in 1970 I was something of a lost soul. I grew up without religion. My parents were basically atheists though out of a sense of parental duty they sent me--briefly--to Sunday School until I rebelled and occasionally I went to church with my grandmother who was religious. None of that took! With the exception of one teacher I found school uninspiring. My mother was an old-time fiddler, but that didn't fire me up. I did get captivated by rock and blues music and played in a band for my high school years. But that also proved insufficient. Politics? For those of us who grew to maturity in the 60s politics was a pretty weak reed. My father's suggestion that I go to work in a bank I regarded with sheer horror. So I was wandering from one bad job to another: waiter, tree-planter, clam-digger, salal-gatherer and in between sleeping in until noon. Then I discovered classical music and Bach in particular. A friend took a picture of me I wish I still had. I am leaning out of the living room window cradling in my arm a box containing three vinyl records of the Bach Mass in B minor--sort of my version of Moses coming down from the mount with the tablet of the 10 commandments. I lost that copy years ago, but the same performance with the same cover (roughly) is in a DGG Bach Masterworks box on my shelf:
Now classical music wasn't the only thing that rescued me from the Slough of Despond, a chance remark by a friend helped. He had gone off to university, something I had not even considered, and was back for the holidays. We spent a nice evening chatting which included some discussion of ukiyo-e, the Japanese art of woodcut prints which I had recently discovered. As he left at the end of the evening he casually remarked "you really are university material." And next year I did indeed go to university which was the other important turning point in my life. I think the two things that rescued me from an aimless life were first of all Bach and classical music and second of all a decent university library in which I reveled in reading things like Copleston's History of Philosophy and Dante's Divine Comedy.
I think Bach rescued Dmitri Shostakovich as well when he was judge at a Bach competition in Leipzig in 1950, the dark days of the end of Stalin's reign and the 200th anniversary of Bach's death. Shostakovich wrote his own set of preludes and fugues after Bach on his return to the Soviet Union. I am about to put up a post reviewing Igor Levit's new recording.
In any case, I think that art, music in particular and Bach most especially, makes a better than most substitute for religion. At least, it worked out well for me. Here is the Kyrie from the Bach B minor Mass in the Karl Richter recording:
David Russell has been working his way through the Bach lute music (at least some of which is not actually lute music) and is now up to the 3rd Lute Suite, probably the most likely to be actually for lute even though it is a re-working of the Cello Suite No. 5 and that it was done by Bach has been challenged. Be that as it may, this suite and the Suite No. 4, a re-working of the Partita No. 3 for solo violin, are the most suitable for the guitar. Here is the new clip, just streamed last night:
David Russell is a fantastic guitarist, of course, commanding the whole repertoire with technical ease. I just listened to the gavottes, as I have been playing them a lot lately, and what really puzzles me is why he takes everything at a breakneck clip? In addition, is there a book on Baroque music that says that phrasing is not allowed in dance music (the gavotte being a dance form)? In that same book, is there another rule that says that the two gavottes have to be at the same tempo? True, just about every guitarist plays Bach in just this way, but so much the worse for them. No composer sounds his best when strapped to the Procrustean bed of rigid tempi and no allowance for expression. For example, I find that there are several places in the first gavotte where a little inégale works very well. Thomas Dunford inégales all the way through in his performance of the gavottes, but I prefer to mix it up a bit. The point is that this is music, not a race. Let the music ebb and flow a bit.
Music performance practice is a far wider field than just where to use inégale in French Baroque music or how to handle cadential trills. It should actually include the whole theatre of performance as we find in opera: lighting, movement on stage, entrances and exits and a host of other details. I am moved to these thoughts by two recent orchestral performances. First, the gala opening night of the San Francisco Symphony with its new music director Esa-Pekka Salonen. I just mentioned this in yesterday's Miscellanea:
The programming for the evening, dubbed “Re-Opening Night,” was fierce and dynamic, without a note of music from the standard repertoire. At the heart of the evening was an expansive stylistic hybrid by Wayne Shorter, melding jazz and orchestral strains and featuring the inimitable Grammy-winning bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding. There were dancers from Alonzo King Lines Ballet, performing on a large thrust stage.
I wish I had been there for that! Read the whole thing. The other concert was in Salzburg in August and I wrote about it here: Currentzis Rocks Rameau.
But what was really remarkable last night was the basic conception of the music, what I have characterized as Currentzis rocks Rameau. Currentzis is of the wiggly-finger school of conducting (à la Gergiev) and one of the delights was watching him wiggle his fingers as he conducted his soprano in extended trills. He leaps in the air, stamps his feet and occasionally wanders among the orchestra, sometimes with a drum. Oh, and so does the orchestra: leap in the air, stamp their feet and occasionally wander around. Everything is done to de-formalize and re-energize the approach to the music and while I am usually skeptical of this kind of thing, last night it was done superbly well.
A lot of the performance was done in semi-darkness with just stand lights and the first half ended with the whole orchestra trooping offstage in darkness as they continued to play the last refrain of a contredanse from Les Boréades.
I think that both Salonen and Currentzis have a handle on what is going to really work for contemporary audiences as witnessed by the audience responses. The standard orchestral performance with the formality and the restraint and the hushed silence is really a response to the 19th century mode of music expression where what was sought was the "romantic trance" in which both the players and the audience go deep inside in a kind of meditative transformation. But there are other modes of performance! Currentzis is harkening back to a more 18th century style in which there is a kind of boisterous theatricality. Salzburg has a slightly conservative reputation, but one could imagine, during the blacked out parts of the performance, some of the audience members, in the private boxes at least, might have engaged in the kind of erotic encounters that were typical in the 18th century!
Salonen, on the other hand, appears to be channeling the "happening" kind of event that came about in the 1960s, but with better musical substance. A wild, multimedia event that is, when well done, irresistable. Looking back on my own career, I think the most memorable concert I can recall participating in was the Canadian premiere of El Cimarrón by Hans Werner Henze, a chamber opera for baritone, flute, guitar and percussion in which all the performers play a lot of percussion instruments in addition to their usual one. We also used lighting to enhance the performance and there was a wild concatenation of musical styles from aleatory to declamatory recitative to Cuban folk idioms.
What I find most interesting here is that a really good solution to the problem of audience apathy is not pandering to their tastes or filleting in pop music, but by making creative musical decisions with real substance behind them.
Love to hear your thoughts...
For an envoi here is a tiny taste of Correntzis' Rameau without any theatre:
And here is the first half of El Cimarrón, sung in English:
Let's start with a story of reunited lovers: Randy Bachman's guitar was stolen 45 years ago in Toronto. He just found it in Tokyo. It is hard to explain to non-guitarists just how deep the relationship between musician and instrument can be. I'm sure the same applies to violinists, cellists and other instrumentalists as well! But as a guitarist, I am more familiar with my instrument. I purchased my guitar in Vancouver in 1983 and have played it ever since--that is through one major repair and one complete restoration of cracks, fret and tuner replacement and complete revarnishing. Oh, and during this time I also had quite a few girlfriends and one marriage! But my guitar is a constant in my life.
Most of Randy Bachman’s guitars – over 400 at last count – are today safe inside the climate-controlled rooms of museums and memorabilia collections. But the guitar he really loves? The one he so cherishes that he would chain it to the toilet of his hotel room at night? Well, that one disappeared 45 years ago from a Toronto-area Holiday Inn, never to resurface again.
That is, until now.
Read the whole thing to learn how he finally managed to recover that special guitar.
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Here is another useful project from The Guardian: The best classical music works of the 21st century. One sterling example that I have heard in a few soundtracks is by Max Richter: "On the Nature of Daylight" from The Blue Notebooks (2004).
It is very reassuring that there is so much good music being written now.
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Jan Swafford weighs in with a really interesting essay on when AI tries to do Beethoven:
Artificial intelligence can mimic art, but it can’t be expressive at it because, other than the definition of the word, it doesn’t know what expressive is. It also doesn’t know what excitement is, because there’s a reason people call excitement “pulse-pounding,” and computers don’t have pulses. When computers set out to do art, they don’t fashion it in a whirl of creative trance inflected by a deadline; they can’t account for the heat or alarming lack of it in the room, sensations in the groin, the failure or success of drawing a foot that looks planted on the ground, the failure or success of creating rhythmic momentum on the page, the bit that’s bullshit and needs to be fixed and the bit that’s really good and you see where it wants to go, the woman or man you just met who excites you and whom you hope to excite, the thought of the idiots who think they can write as well as you, also the bastards who write better than you, what you’re having for dinner or what you had for dinner that’s not agreeing with you, the hairs falling out of your head onto the page, the expense of ink or paint or the rehearsal costs of a symphony orchestra, and so forth and so on, while in your trance you’re trying to conjure out of the air a portrait in words or tones or images of, say, that man or woman who maybe will appreciate you for the effort. Along with all that and maybe above all that, the gnawing and relentless drive to do something really good, this time, for all the above reasons and more, whether it’s trying to convince the woman to love you, or the public or God to love you, and/or to pay the rent, and to show yourself that you can damned well do something at least in the direction of really good in this possibly cursed endeavor that you believe you’ve been born to do, and without which your life is something in the direction of meaningless.
None of that can be programmed into a computer in any way that means anything. To repeat: The only true, meaningful intelligence is in a body, and likewise the only true and meaningful creativity.
Dead musicians will start by giving tours in concert halls, but as the cost of the technology goes down, they will begin performing everywhere. Holograms of Elvis may make their debut at a pricey Las Vegas casino, but will soon show up at your neighborhood bar. James Brown will sing at the Apollo once more, but eventually take wedding reception and bar mitzvah gigs.
Ok, time to move to a little cabin in the mountains with no Internet.
To say that a new era at the San Francisco Symphony has begun at Davies Symphony Hall is true as far as it goes. But that doesn’t begin to convey just how transformative an event this was, or how thoroughly Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen has reconceived the strained old traditions of the season opening gala.
In a belated inaugural event on Friday, Oct. 1, delayed for a long painful year by the COVID-19 pandemic, Salonen finally got a chance to show Symphony patrons what his leadership is going to look like. The short version is: like nothing we’ve experienced to date.
The programming for the evening, dubbed “Re-Opening Night,” was fierce and dynamic, without a note of music from the standard repertoire. At the heart of the evening was an expansive stylistic hybrid by Wayne Shorter, melding jazz and orchestral strains and featuring the inimitable Grammy-winning bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding. There were dancers from Alonzo King Lines Ballet, performing on a large thrust stage.
To get a sense of what sounds like an amazing concert, read the whole thing!
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Here is another take on the recent Nigel Kennedy controversy:
Mocking Kennedy thirty years ago for performing the Berg Violin Concerto wearing vampire make-up and a cloak, the Radio Three controller John Drummond described him as a ‘Liberace for the nineties’. Paganini may be a better comparison: a restless figure of astonishing ability, despised by many critics as a circus performer and accused by others of selling his soul to the devil. Kennedy – who named his son Sark Yves Amadeus Kennedy – seems similarly trapped, a kind of clown maudit with a virtuoso gift for embarrassing nearly everyone nearly all the time. An honest history of this entire reach of stunt music would have to include informed critical appraisal both of Kennedy’s sonic reworkings (shrewd or too obvious?) and of the quality of his improvisation (haunting or merely corny?). But for all his evidently bankable willingness to pick certain fights, such creative decisions are rarely discussed, because all traces of the arcanely musical arguments for them end up smoothly effaced.
For Hitler, Furtwängler was the supreme exponent of holy German art; it was to the Nazis’ satisfaction that he served — in effect if not in title — as the chief conductor of the Third Reich.
The complications are many. Furtwängler never joined the Nazi party, and after his initial protests over the expulsions of Jewish musicians and the erosion of his artistic control were resolved in the Nazis’ favor in 1935, he found ways to distance himself from the regime, not least over its racial policies. His performances with the Berlin Philharmonic and at the Bayreuth Festival at once served the Reich and gave succor to those who sought to survive it, even oppose it.
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I guess we should have Kennedy's Four Seasons as our first envoi:
Ok, what the f**k is he wearing? I guess some Salonen would be nice about now. Here is his tone poem Nyx, the Greek goddess of night:
This string quartet concert from Wigmore Hall was just streamed yesterday. Very interesting program avoiding the usual clichés. I have not heard of the quartet before. They are based in Frankfurt am Main.
Babi Yar, a ravine near Kyiv in the Ukraine, was the site of one of the most horrific events of the Holocaust in World War II. Over the course of two days, September 29-30, 1941 nearly 34,000 Jews were murdered en masse and buried in a common grave. Later on Soviet POWs, communists, Ukrainian nationalists and Roma were also murdered at the same site. There were a total of between 100,000 and 150,000 killed at the site during the German occupation. It is useful to recall exactly why the Nazi regime was so horrific, especially these days when a politician might be accused of being a Nazi for having a different fiscal, monetary or social welfare policy from the mainstream.
For many years Babi Yar was mostly unknown as the Soviet authorities did not publicize it. In 1961 the Soviet Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko published a poem commemorating the event. Wikipedia discusses it as follows:
In 1961, Yevgeny Yevtushenko published his poem Babiyy Yar in a leading Russian periodical, in part to protest the Soviet Union's refusal to recognize Babi Yar as a Holocaust site. The poem's first line is "Nad Babim Yarom pamyatnikov nyet" ("There are no monuments over Babi Yar.") The anniversary of the massacre was still observed in the context of the "Great Patriotic War" throughout the 1950s and 60s; the code of silence about what it meant for the Jews was broken only in 1961, with the publication of Yevtushenko's Babiyy Yar, in Literaturnaya Gazeta. The poet denounced both Soviet historical revisionism and still-common anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union of 1961. "[I]t spoke not only of the Nazi atrocities, but also of the Soviet government's own persecution of Jewish people." Babiyy Yar first circulated as samizdat (unofficial publications without state sanction.)
I'm thrown back by a boot, I have no strength left,
In vain I beg the rabble of pogrom,
To jeers of "Kill the Jews, and save our Russia!"
My mother's being beaten by a clerk.
O, Russia of my heart, I know that you
Are international, by inner nature.
But often those whose hands are steeped in filth
Abused your purest name, in name of hatred.
I know the kindness of my native land.
How vile, that without the slightest quiver
The antisemites have proclaimed themselves
The "Union of the Russian People!"
It seems to me that I am Anna Frank,
Transparent, as the thinnest branch in April,
And I'm in love, and have no need of phrases,
But only that we gaze into each other's eyes.
How little one can see, or even sense!
Leaves are forbidden, so is sky,
But much is still allowed - very gently
In darkened rooms each other to embrace.
-"They come!"
-"No, fear not - those are sounds
Of spring itself. She's coming soon.
Quickly, your lips!"
-"They break the door!"
-"No, river ice is breaking..."
Wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar,
The trees look sternly, as if passing judgement.
Here, silently, all screams, and, hat in hand,
I feel my hair changing shade to gray.
And I myself, like one long soundless scream
Above the thousands of thousands interred,
I'm every old man executed here,
As I am every child murdered here.
No fiber of my body will forget this.
May "Internationale" thunder and ring
When, for all time, is buried and forgotten
The last of antisemites on this earth.
There is no Jewish blood that's blood of mine,
But, hated with a passion that's corrosive
Am I by antisemites like a Jew.
And that is why I call myself a Russian!
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In an equally courageous act the composer Dmitri Shostakovich one year later, in 1962, composed his Symphony No. 13 using texts from the Yevtushenko poem and other poems by him critical of life in the Soviet Union. For this reason it is nicknamed "Babi Yar." Shostakovich grew more and more interested in Jewish subjects and we can find many other instances in his later work. An example is his song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry composed in 1948. Here is Riccardo Muti conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with soloist Alexey Tikhomirov in a 2018 performance.
On the occasion of a major exhibit of her work at the Hirschhorn Museum, the New York Times has a lengthy article on Laurie Anderson: Laurie Anderson Has a Message for Us Humans.
Over the course of her incessant career, Anderson has done just about everything a creative person can do. She has helped design an Olympics opening ceremony, served as the official artist in residence for NASA, made an opera out of “Moby-Dick” and played a concert for dogs at the Sydney Opera House. She has danced the tango with William S. Burroughs and flown to a tropical island with John Cage. And she is still going. As Anderson once put it to me, during a brief pause between trips to Paris and New Zealand, just before a Carnegie Hall performance with Iggy Pop: “Lately, I’m doing a stupid amount of things.”
If you are not familiar with her work, this is a good place to start.
Much of Bach’s music was forgotten after his death in 1750. A few works – mainly for keyboard – had been published during his lifetime, mostly at his own expense; and a few unpublished works somehow became known, too. His first biographer, Forkel, tells us that “for a long series of years the violin solos were universally considered by the greatest performers on the violin to be the best means to make an ambitious student a perfect master of his instrument”. Meanwhile, in late 18th-century Vienna, Mozart was introduced to several of Bach’s works by Baron van Swieten, a fanatic for baroque music, to whom Forkel’s Bach biography is dedicated (as is Beethoven’s first symphony). Later, Mozart got the chance to hear more of Bach’s choral works in Leipzig. An eyewitness reported: “As soon as the choir had sung a few bars, Mozart started; after a few more he exclaimed: ‘What is that?’ And now his whole soul seemed to be centred in his ears. When the song was ended, he cried out with delight: ‘Now, here is something from which one can learn!’” Just a few years earlier, the first-ever review of Beethoven, when he was 11 years old, tells us that: “He plays chiefly The Well-Tempered Clavier of Sebastian Bach, which Herr Neefe [Beethoven’s teacher] put into his hands.”
So Bach was not completely forgotten – but his cello suites were. There is no record of a performance for at least 100 years after they came into being.
I first heard Steven Isserlis playing the Shostakovich Piano Trio No. 2 at the Vancouver Chamber Music Festival many years ago. A wonderful and haunting performance that is still in my ears.
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Over at Slipped Disc, students at the University of Michigan want a composer fired for showing a Laurence Olivier video. Here is a follow-up. I have a copy of this 1965 video on my DVD shelf: it is one of the finest films of Othello ever made with Olivier in the leading role--a really remarkable representation of a black character by a white actor.
Like the nasheed songs favored by Islamic State in the Middle East, the taranas typically have a refrain and several verses, with no instrumental accompaniment. In some, rhythmic sounds by vocalists give an impression of beats.
Taranas have long existed in Afghan culture. They have, however, been used for propaganda purposes by the Taliban ever since the Islamic fundamentalist group was formed in the 1990s, with lyrics exalting jihad.
You’ve been working with classical players and ensembles for a while. Do you feel like they’re very different from jazz musicians in terms of how they approach playing music?
SOREY
Oh, definitely. I’ve done “Autoschediasms” with a lot of jazz-like players or free improvisers. Those are really rewarding experiences. When I work with classical ensembles, though, it tends to vary. I know with any ensemble with whom I’ve had a very strong rapport, they usually end up being the most successful ones to do it. So, the International Contemporary Ensemble is one. Alarm Will Sound, of course, is another. I’ve done “Autoschediasms” with other classical ensembles—one, for example, that had never improvised. There were some moments that were good, but there were a lot of inconsistencies and a lot of missed opportunities. I guess it’s because the players felt afraid of making mistakes, an attitude that is kind of conditioned in symphony orchestra musicians. It really felt like they were just doing what the conductor told them to do because that’s their conditioning. They don’t understand that it’s a democratic process of music-making that’s involved. I always say that this is a duet between orchestra and conductor. They have to challenge me, and I have to challenge them. Because if you make a mistake, then that challenges me to make it work.
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The Chronicle of Higher Education: In Defense of Disinterested Knowledge. And first we need to recall the meaning of the word "disinterested." It does not mean "uninterested," rather it is the opposite of "motivated reasoning," that is, reasoning crafted to reach a specific conclusion in advance. This used to be called "begging the question" but that usage has fallen out of favor.
A new consensus unites college administrators with many of their faculty members, especially in the humanities: Scholarship today must be socially engaged. This demand, and the morally charged language that comes with it, might seem to meet the urgency of our political moment. But it has a deforming effect — on our teaching, on hiring and funding, and on our understanding of scholarship and the university itself.
You bet it does. I think I absorbed the value of disinterested reasoning when I was reading Frederick Copleston's History of Philosophy as an undergraduate many years ago. Copleston was a Jesuit priest and as such certainly had his own views but it was utterly illuminating reading his discussion of Karl Marx where he bent over backwards to present Marx' thought in the fairest way possible.
Through the 1930s, he notes, Sibelius was committed to working on his Eighth Symphony. Writing to his wife from Berlin in May 1931, he reported: “The symphony makes excellent progress. I can and must get it done.” A few months later he wrote in his diary that he had “worked on the Eighth Symphony and am young once more.” In 1933, he sent the first movement to a copyist, noting that it was to flow seamlessly into a largo and that “the whole piece will be roughly eight times as long as this.” It seems inconceivable, Mr. Grimley concludes, that Sibelius “would have sent the materials, or indicated the scale of the remainder, without having completed at least a preliminary full draft of the score.”
But Mr. Grimley comes to the same sad conclusion as others who have looked into the matter. “That Sibelius had gathered together all the manuscript sources and copies at some point in the early 1940s and burnt them,” he writes, “still seems the most likely explanation.”
One of the saddest losses in music history and still a bit of a mystery.
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Some envois: first, Sibelius. This is the Swedish Radio Symphony conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen playing the Symphony No. 4 by Sibelius.
And this is O Superman by Laurie Anderson:
And here is an excerpt from Autoschediasms by Tyshawn Sorey with Alarm Will Sound:
There have been a flurry of very appealing new recordings released in recent months and I am going to have a listen to some of them and review them in this space. Yes, I know, in the past I have disdained doing reviews of new releases, but frankly, that was mostly because they didn't seem that interesting. These new releases are a whole 'nother thing. The first one I am going to get into is from Daniil Trifonov. It is not his latest, which is a Bach program that probably recapitulates the program he gave in Salzburg in August that I attended. This is an older release: Silver Age, which contains Russian music from the first half of the 20th century, a particularly rich era. Here is the program:
A dream program with dream artists, so I am looking forward to that one. But before that, another two disc set is likely to arrive (yes, I prefer to own CDs) and that is this one:
I already have two recordings of the Shostakovich preludes and fugues so I might be able to do some interesting comparisons. Another recording I would love to review is by up and coming mezzo Lea Desandre:
But alas, that is out of stock already. I already posted a video of one selection from the album, a duet with Cecilia Bartoli. There are other samples at YouTube, but it seems the only one I can embed here is the one I already did. So here it is again:
UPDATE: Amazon just informed me that my order of the Trifonov album is coming from the UK via Royal Mail and will arrive sometime in November. Probably. Isn't that a bit weird?
In 1993 the German composer Hans Zender did a brilliant arrangement of Schubert's Winterreise song cycle for chamber orchestra (including guitar). The arrangement uses a wide variety of contemporary orchestral techniques to create an alluring palette for the work. And now there is an equally brilliant realization by conductor Teodor Currentzis whose Rameau so impressed me in Salzburg:
Just released today is this lovely performance of a piece by Massenet--newly transcribed I assume. From a new album that I hope will include some original music for voice and guitar.
In early 2019, Dr. Matthias Röder, the director of the Karajan Institute, an organization in Salzburg, Austria, that promotes music technology, contacted me. He explained that he was putting together a team to complete Beethoven’s 10th Symphony in celebration of the composer’s 250th birthday. Aware of my work on AI-generated art, he wanted to know if AI would be able to help fill in the blanks left by Beethoven.
The challenge seemed daunting. To pull it off, AI would need to do something it had never done before. But I said I would give it a shot.
Röder then compiled a team that included Austrian composer Walter Werzowa. Famous for writing Intel’s signature bong jingle, Werzowa was tasked with putting together a new kind of composition that would integrate what Beethoven left behind with what the AI would generate. Mark Gotham, a computational music expert, led the effort to transcribe Beethoven’s sketches and process his entire body of work so the AI could be properly trained.
The team also included Robert Levin, a musicologist at Harvard University who also happens to be an incredible pianist. Levin had previously finished a number of incomplete 18th-century works by Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach.
So, a committee of musicologists and computer experts sat down and composed an entirely new piece of music based on a few brief fragmentary sketches by Beethoven. There is no possible sense in which this could be regarded as "completing" an imaginary symphony by Beethoven which could only have come into existence in the usual way, through Beethoven's own torturous compositional process. So if and when there is a performance the program should read:
A Symphony in the Style of Beethoven based on Sketches for a 10th Symphony -- composed by Matthias Röder, Walter Werzowa, Mark Gotham and Robert Levin.
Because we haven't had enough whimsy in the Friday Miscellanea recently.
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A long time ago on this blog I said something like every Rihanna music video reminds me of a brassiere commercial. I meant that as a criticism, but boy, was I out to lunch. Have a look at this: Rihanna on Her Latest Lingerie Collection and Becoming a Billionaire. Yes, Rihanna is now a billionaire!
Like many of us, Rihanna has been stuck at home for much of the last year, but her net worth has skyrocketed to $1.7 billion, according to an estimate by Forbes. Outside of the Savage x Fenty lingerie line, her empire also includes her skin care line, and her makeup line, Fenty Beauty.
But before any Rihanna fans ask: Yes, she says she is working on new music and, no, she doesn’t know when she will be ready to drop it.
Back in the day, I pursued my career avoiding material temptations in order to achieve aesthetic goals. That was all wrong, apparently. This item, by the way, was in the Style section of the Times, not the Music section.
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As regular readers know, the role of aesthetics in the modern world is a frequent topic here. In that area I ran into an interesting essay over at substack: Whither Tartaria? What is that about?
Some people don’t like modern architecture. How many? I sometimes see claims like “nobody really likes it”, and certainly it feels intuitively incontrovertible to me that the older stuff is more beautiful. But I know some people who claim to genuinely like the modern style. Are the modern-is-obviously-worse folks just over-updating on their own preferences?
The best source I can find for this is a National Civic Art Society survey, which finds Americans prefer traditional/classical buildings to modern ones by about 70% to 30% (regardless of political affiliation!). In a poll of America’s favorite architecture, 76% of buildings selected were traditional/classical (establishment architects said the poll was invalid, because you can’t judge buildings by pictures). A study of courthouse architecture determined that “[our] findings agree with consistent findings that architects misjudge public likely public impressions of a design, and that most non-architects dislike “modern” design and have done so for almost a century.”
I offer this as having a different perspective on a debate about contemporary music that has been going on for a while. There is a lot of stuff in that piece, including some photo illustrations, so go have a look.
But so, let’s stipulate that minor keys do tend to be sadder in general than major ones. It is simply untrue that any particular minor key is sadder than any other. In twelve-tone equal temperament (12-TET), all the minor keys feel the same (as do all the major keys, and all the modal keys, and all the blues keys.) The keys are all at different absolute pitch heights, but absolute pitch doesn’t make a difference in musical meaning. The important thing in music is the ratios between the frequencies, and in 12-TET, those are all identical across keys, by definition.
This is absolutely true for any electronic musical instrument. But it is variably less so with acoustic instruments. For example, D minor, the key of the Bach Chaconne, is a dark and resonant key on guitar (especially with a low-D scordatura). D flat minor, on the other hand, would be written as C# minor and would have a quite different brighter resonance. On the piano remote keys like B flat minor or G# major are very accessible, but much less so on other instruments. There is a reason so many violin concertos are in G or D major.
At the Hanover concert, each of the 500 attendees will be asked to provide a sweat sample on a cotton pad. The dogs will then inspect all the samples for any traces of COVID-19. However, since this is a trial, concertgoers will also be expected to provide a negative COVID-19 test.
In October 2020, a Finnish study found that dogs could be trained to sniff out COVID-19 in only seven minutes, and for a time, sniffer dogs were employed as a method of COVID detection at Helsinki airport.
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Ok, "I'll be Bach!" in a thick Austrian accent inspires a little Bach envoi. Here is the Bach A minor violin concerto with Shunske Sato violin and the Netherlands Bach Society:
Here is another concert from this year's Salzburg Festival: Andris Nelsons conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Mahler, Symphony No. 3:
