Friday Miscellanea

Remember Musicology Now, the blog associated with the American Musicological Society? For several reasons it died an unlamented death a few years ago. It's back! I missed it, but as of March it has returned with a renewed mandate: Welcome to (the New) Musicology Now

The curatorial team hopes that, along with a revitalized web design, this fresh beginning will animate a renewed and capacious spirit of conversation about music. We invite readers and audiences alike to revel in the joy of sharing ideas, research, and sound, just as we ask them to turn to this online platform as a place to reflect upon music’s (and music scholars’) roles in engendering precarity, racism and racial inequality, ableism, and exclusion—in the past as in the present.

So, it's all about institutionalized wokeness? The old Musicology Now was a graduate student project, the new one will be curated by a professional team.

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Slipped Disc has an item on the woes of the Vienna State Opera:

The Vienna State Opera is caught between a rock and a hard place.

It wants to stay open but the audience is staying away.

This is Tosca yesterday – the safest of tickets in the safest of productions – and hardly anyone turned up.

A thicket of new Covid rules and rising Covid numbers have conspired to keep locals at home.

Tourists are kept away by lack of flights and strict entry controls.

An empty house is demoralising for performers. How long can Vienna stay open?

The photo at the link shows a half-empty house.

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At The New Yorker, Alex Ross has a piece on the flute: Claire Chase Taps the Primal Power of the Flute

Over the millennia, the flute has come to be seen as delicate, decorous, ethereal. Claire Chase, perhaps the instrument’s most imaginative living advocate, is bent on tapping its primal power. Since 2013, she has been commissioning scores for a monumental project called “Density 2036”; when it comes to completion, in the designated year, it will have added as many as a hundred pieces to the flute repertory. In the latest installment of the series, which had three performances at the Kitchen, in December, Chase was a solitary figure in an audiovisual storm, holding her own against roiling electronic textures and a barrage of video images. She made heavy use of her contrabass flute, which she has nicknamed Big Bertha; more than six feet tall, it emits tones of unearthly, breathy depth, suitable for an audience of whales.

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The Wall Street Journal has an item on listening:

We live with constant racket, but we have forgotten how to listen. And yet the part of our brain that is given over to sound—what Ms. Kraus calls the“hearing brain” or “sound mind”—is far bigger and more complex than any of our other sensory equipment. Hearing influences how we feel, how we see, how we move, how we think. It makes us who we are. 

The way by which we convert sound waves into electrical brain signals is indeed unusual: Within the inner ear are tiny hairs in a fluid; when external vibrations enter the ear canal, they agitate the fluid and cause the hair cells to bob up and down. Microscopic projections that perch on top bump and bend, causing porelike channels to open. Chemicals rush into the cells, creating electrical signals that the auditory nerve carry to the brain. Ms. Kraus’s descriptions of the process are rich in metaphorical imagery, giving us the sense that an ear is a cathedral with walls, roof and floor, with fountains of living (electrical) water. But while the science is clear, there remains a magical, awe-inspiring sense of wonder that somehow timing, timbre and pitch can become conversation, lyric and song.

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When it comes to the act of composition I tend to be old school--in fact, in the last year or so I have even reverted back to pencil sketches instead of using music software. Though once I have the basic ideas I do go back to the software. But I should probably have a look at where music technology is at these days and a good place to start might be a book co-written by Ethan Hein: Electronic Music School. The link goes to the syllabus for his current course.

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One belated discovery for me this year was conductor Herbert Blomstedt, 94 years old! Slipped Disc has an anecdote about why he no longer uses a baton:

‘I once had a concert with the Vienna Philharmonic in Salzburg. And after a break from rehearsals I forgot my baton in the conductor’s room. Then you stand in front of a Bruckner symphony and think to yourself: run back quickly? Or ask someone to do it? So I went on. Such orchestras do not need a beat or a metronome, but a musician. And since then I have done without the baton.’

Asked what he will do on his 95th birthday, next July 11:

‘The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic have competed for it. The request from the Gewandhausorchester came a little earlier, so the Viennese are on my 100th. As you can see, I am optimistic here too. On July 11th, that is a Monday, there will be a special thanksgiving service in the Thomaskirche. No sermon, the music will speak.’

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Our first envoi is a piece written for flautist Claire Chase by Dai Fujikura:

Here is the Frankfurt Radio Symphony conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada with Bartók's Miraculous Mandarin Suite. The original pantomime was banned due to obscenity!

Here is the orchestral suite from the ballet Zéphire (1745) by J. Ph. Rameau with Les Arts Florissants conducted by William Christie.

What I'm Listening to Today

This is not a new piece, but I missed it when it came out. The piece is titled "Boris Kerner" who was a theorist of modern traffic flow theory.

If one were unkind, one might say that this is Bach with a little flower-pot percussion, but it is a bit more than that. And a very nice piece, to boot.

And later on I ran across this one:

Popular and Unpopular

Time was when composers, John Cage for example, luxuriated in their unpopularity, thinking that if they were liked they must be doing something wrong. That seems to have entirely gone away. Everyone wants to be popular now. How do you do that? It seems by largely feeding people what they expect and are used to with just enough novelty to seem fresh (while not exactly being fresh).

So what I want to talk about is how to be unpopular. Now there is a right way and a wrong way, obviously. The wrong way is to simply be bad: clumsy, incoherent, meaningless drivel. This is wrong because, judging from recent films, you can still see some mainstream success even if you are quite bad. No, in order to be unpopular in the right way, you have to be truly original. You have to be doing something that is either new, or something old refreshed. New wine in old bottles or old wine in new bottles. Or, heck, maybe new wine in new bottles. I don't think old wine in old bottles would work because we have lots of that lying around already.

The best way to be unpopular, I think, is to follow your own instincts and intuitions and if it results in some fame or even notoriety, then keep trying until that goes away. Yes, there will always be a few aficionados that will figure out what you are up to, but as long as they remain few in number, you are safe.

So is your main goal simply to be unpopular? No, not really, you strive for unpopularity in order to avoid the perils of commercial success which is the surest way to destroy any actual quality in your work,

Does this seem cynical? Well, I am certainly trying for that, but I worry that I am not nearly cynical enough!

I offer as an envoi, a piece by a composer who really did a achieve a considerable unpopularity in his career. This is the String Quartet No. 4 by Arnold Schoenberg, composed in 1936.

UPDATE: I ran into an interesting coda to this on another blog. A tech writer points out that:

The world largely runs on open source software, but not only is 99.9% of the revenue swallowed up by huge corporations, those corporations work tirelessly to make sure that the people that made that revenue possible will never see a penny of it.

This echoes what I see in the music world. I have a vague feeling that a lot of the real creativity that goes on is completely unrewarded while, again, huge corporations work tirelessly to make sure that the revenue goes almost exclusively to them. There seems something very wrong with this! 

Friday Miscellanea

Alex Ross has long been a fan of Radiohead and Jonny Greenwood in particular: How Jonny Greenwood Wrote the Year’s Best Film Score.

When, in the nineteen-nineties, the grand and strange rock band known as Radiohead rose to fame, word began spreading excitedly among younger classical-music nerds: we now had someone on the inside. If an arena-filling band was inserting multi-octave octatonic scales into guitar anthems or derailing string arrangements with cluster string chords, the likelihood was strong that a modern-classical mole had penetrated the inner sanctum of pop power. The agent was soon unmasked as Jonny Greenwood, the band’s lead guitarist, who, in the past two decades, has established himself as a concert composer and as a creator of film scores. Once a lanky youth barely visible behind a mop of black hair, Greenwood is now a seasoned fifty-year-old who, in recent weeks, has cemented his status as a leading film composer with the release of three projects: Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza,” Pablo Larraín’s “Spencer,” and—Oscar voters, this is your cue—Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog.”

Follow the link for an interview with the composer.

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While we are at the New Yorker, there is an article by Louis Menand reviewing two new books by humanities professors arguing for the "Great Books", what I often call a "classical education."

Both men teach what are called—unfortunately but inescapably—“great books” courses. Since Weinstein works at a college that has no requirements outside the major, his courses are departmental offerings, but the syllabi seem to be composed largely of books by well-known Western writers, from Sophocles to Toni Morrison. At Columbia, undergraduates must complete two years of non-departmental great-books courses: Masterpieces of Western Literature and Philosophy, for first-year students, and Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West, for sophomores. These courses, among others, known as “the Core,” originated around the time of the First World War and have been required since 1947. Montás not only teaches in the Core; he served for ten years as the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum.

Although Montás and Weinstein are highly successful academics at two leading universities, where they are, no doubt, popular teachers, they feel alienated from and, to some extent, disrespected by the higher-education system. As they see it, they are doing God’s work. Their humanities colleagues are careerists who have lost sight of what education is about, and their institutions are in service to Mammon and Big Tech.

Menand ends his very thoughtful commentary by pointing out:

The humanities do not have a monopoly on moral insight. Reading Weinstein and Montás, you might conclude that English professors, having spent their entire lives reading and discussing works of literature, must be the wisest and most humane people on earth. Take my word for it, we are not. We are not better or worse than anyone else. I have read and taught hundreds of books, including most of the books in the Columbia Core. I teach a great-books course now. I like my job, and I think I understand many things that are important to me much better than I did when I was seventeen. But I don’t think I’m a better person.

Nope, you can read the great books and listen to Bach and still be a sonofabitch. Mind you, you can also be a professional careerist in service to Mammon and Big Tech! What you don't want to be, I think, is someone who is simply unaware of Shakespeare, Dante, Homer and the others.

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 This year is the 300th anniversary of the composition of the Brandenburg Concertos by J. S. Bach: 

 This year celebrates the 300th anniversary of Bach having presented the concertos as a gift to the Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg on March 24, 1721. The composer's stated intention was to give His Royal Highness pleasure (not that Bach didn't imply that a little employment wouldn’t hurt). Musicologists are not so sure about the margrave's penchant for pleasure (Bach didn't get the job), but the concertos have continued to cheer music lovers for three centuries.

The piece reviews a number of new recordings:

But one set turns out to be the knockout of the "Brandenburg" year. In 1997, the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin made a dutiful recording of the concertos, careful not to violate norms of what we now call historically informed performance (or HIP). Over nearly a quarter-century of "Brandenburg"-ing, the period instrument Berliners have loosened up and, during lockdown, made a buoyant new recording. It features violinist Isabelle Faust and violist Antoine Tamestit, two especially dynamic soloists who bring with them exceptional contemporary music chops.

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Back when I was a practicing popular (well, not that popular!) musician I could never have imagined the story behind this headline: A $550 Million Springsteen Deal? It’s Glory Days for Catalog Sales.

In 1972, a struggling New Jersey musician hustled into Manhattan for an audition at Columbia Records, using an acoustic guitar borrowed from his former drummer.

“I had to haul it ‘Midnight Cowboy’-style over my shoulder on the bus and through the streets of the city,” the rocker, Bruce Springsteen, later recalled in his memoirs.

Half a century later, he can afford plenty of guitars. Last week Sony, which now owns Columbia, announced that it acquired Springsteen’s entire body of work — his recordings and his songwriting catalog — for what two people briefed on the deal said was about $550 million.

Is it just me, or does there seem to be some sort of cognitive dissonance between the down home, just folks, personal statement of most popular music artists and the billions of dollars that popular music earns these days?

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Here is the Guardian's list of the best classical recordings of the year:

As usual there was no shortage of high-quality chamber music and solo-piano releases. The Takács Quartet in Mendelssohn, both Fanny and Felix, Les Vents Français surveying the Hindemith wind sonatas and Nicholas Daniel and the Doric Quartet in a selection of early 20th-century British oboe quintets were all in their very different ways outstanding. The exceptional piano releases were headed by Igor Levit’s pairing of Ronald Stevenson’s Passacaglia on DSCH and Shostakovich preludes and fugues, and Piotr Anderszewski’s selection from the second book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. But there was also elegant Liszt from Kenneth Hamilton, brilliant Ligeti Études from Danny Driver, and the start of a series devoted to the piano works of the disgracefully neglected Elisabeth Lutyens from Martin Jones, as well as a delectable selection of French music for two pianos from Paul Lewis and Steven Osborne.

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First up in our envois today is a taste of the new Brandenburg Concertos recording. This is the first movement of the 5th Concerto:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQkqPyIbBWQ

And here is the soundtrack album of Jonny Greenwood's score for The Power of the Dog. It starts with his imitation of banjo music on a cello pizzicato:

And here is the Prelude and Fugue in F minor from the second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach in the new recording by Piotr Anderszewski:

Best Recordings of the Year?

I guess you could call me a conservative investor in that I have limited time. I think of listening to a recording as being an investment of time so I try to use my time wisely. I look at a recent post by Ted Gioia where he mentions listening to a thousand new recordings this year so he could pick out the top 100 and just the thought of it leaves me breathless. Mind you, I listen to a lot of clips on YouTube, but they are often of old recordings and I don't necessarily listen to all of the clip. I only purchased three CDs this year that I can recall: Igor Levit ON DSCH, Daniil Trifonov, Silver Age and Lea Desandre, Thomas Dunford and others, Amazone and the latter hasn't even arrived yet. Early in the New Year, I would expect. I did reviews of the first two soon after receiving them and they were as fine as I expected. I listened to excerpts before hand as I have done with the Lea Desandre recording. So, those are my candidates for best of the year. I just don't have time to listen to a thousand others and, just between you and me, the odds are that most of those would be, uh, mediocre. Somehow, though this is rather obviously necessarily the case, it seems boorish to mention it. In fact, apparently one has to gin up an enormous amount of enthusiasm for just about everything under the sun.

I do notice one thing: there seem to be two basic kinds of new music in the US these days that I will call "Brooklyn hammering" and "California Dreaming" for obvious reasons. I might do a post on that!

Here's Andy Akiho, excerpt from Seven Pillars

Bartók: Bluebeard's Castle

If you were like me a couple of weeks ago, you might have had a look at/listen to Bluebeard's Castle by Bartók and said, what is this about? This is, after all, a pretty weird piece. I listened to it a couple of times while working through a whole box of Bartók and honestly, I couldn't make any sense of the music. So I decided to have another look at it and found a couple of filmed versions with subtitles so I could actually, you know, know what was going on. Listening to it sung in German or Hungarian without translated subtitles is not going to get you very far.

Bluebeard's Castle is a kind of expressionist fairy tale with the typical structure of a fixed number of stages or challenges. There are only two singing roles: Duke Bluebeard and Judith his new wife. He brings her to his dark castle. Bluebeard's castle has seven locked doors, behind them are:

1. Torture chamber with bloody walls
2. Armory with blood-stained weapons
3. Treasury with gold and gemstones
4. Garden with beautiful flowers
5. A rocky abyss, view of the domain
6. Pool of white still water of tears
7. Bluebeard's three previous wives, as living effigies

The work, composed in 1911, has been called "one of the great early twentieth century operas" (Abbate, Carolyn; Parker, Roger. A History of Opera (p. 447). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition) and it might be compared to Schoenberg's Erwartung, composed just two years earlier, in 1909, as another example of psychological expressionism. The Bartók work is carefully structured, beginning in F#, moving to C in the middle when the castle is bathed in light and returning to F# and darkness at the end. Each door unveils its own unique orchestration, brass fanfares for the armory, harp arpeggios and flute trills for the garden and so on.

A lot of, to my mind, odd interpretations have grown up around the work. Some have even thought that Judith is the villain, invading the private world of Bluebeard and forcing him to give up his secrets. In a recent staging, Judith is a police detective who frees the three previous wives and kills the perpetrator. A more balanced view might see this as a primarily symbolic work that delves into the problems and challenges of man/woman relationships. Or maybe it is just a critique of serial divorce!

The most unique feature of the opera is the seven doors with their seven varying contents. These are obviously aspects of Duke Bluebeard's personality that are step by step revealed to his new bride. The torture chamber might be seen as the cruel facet, the armory the assertive, the treasury the acquisitive, the garden the aesthetic and so on. A thorough examination of the work would look at the details of how Bartók characterizes each aspect. The final door shows the previous wives as the dawn, midday and evening of what, one's relationships? Then Judith is installed as the night and darkness falls. I see this as a rich field for interpretive investigation.

However you see it, it is certainly a powerful work and the unique structure makes the narrative work. Here is a 1988 performance with English subtitles that was broadcast on the BBC. For some reason Blogger doesn't want to embed, so just follow the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9Aq2WWds8k&t=1196s

Friday Miscellanea

The New York Times has a list of the best recordings of 2021 that is worth a look. I've been thinking of exploring Bartók's music theatre lately and they feature a new recording of Bluebeard's Castle with Szilvia Voros, mezzo-soprano; Mika Kares, bass; Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and Susanna Malkki, conductor. The very inclusive list includes recordings from C. P. E. Bach to Tyshawn Sorey. They include clips so I am going to spend some time browsing among them.

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The Goldberg Variations by Bach continue to get a lot of attention from nearly every pianist and harpsichordist on the planet. The Guardian reviews a recent Lang Lang concert:

Too often, though, Lang seemed intent on smothering the music with love, in little details as well as the big picture. When he plays fast, he is very fast; when he is slow, he is funereal. The opening aria was pulled about with such elongated exaggeration that its role as the heartbeat of the 30 variations that follow was lost. The celebrated 25th variation, whose stillness and chromaticism are the emotional crux of the work, was stretched beyond belief and almost came to a halt.

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I haven't visited the music blog On An Overgrown Path recently but I discovered he has been writing about one of my favorite musicians Scott Ross:

After seven years my post 'Scott Ross and the paradox of genius' is still one of the most widely read Overgrown Path articles. This popularity at first sight seems pardoxical, as Scott Ross lacks any click bait or celebrity appeal. But his flame is kept alive by thoughtful articles such as the one in today's FranceSoir by Moufid Azmaïesh which links to my 2004 post.

Follow the link for more.

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Over at the New Yorker Alex Ross gives us his notable performances and recordings of the year:

 The thousand-year-old, thousand-sided art form known as classical music hinges almost entirely on live performance. Catastrophically, the pandemic made a musical livelihood all but impossible. Organizations and individuals learned some new tricks with streaming, but no one could feed a family or care for a pet by posting videos. Those early indoor performances caught the heart all the more because they were the sound of work resuming. Statistics from recent years suggest that, before the pandemic, American orchestras and opera companies were together employing more than ninety thousand people. This is not a small cohort, and it excludes the thousands of freelancers who had no organizational reserves to fall back on when everything shut down. That evanescent shimmer is the labor of throats, lungs, arms, and hands.

Again, follow the link for a lot of interesting observations.

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Opera composer Matthew Aucoin has a book out:

Matthew Aucoin happily wrestles with multiple impossibilities in this highly personal book. In vivid, granular detail, he explores composers and operas he loves, from Claudio Monteverdi in 17th-century Italy to contemporary British composers Harrison Birtwistle and Thomas Adès. He also highlights the process of writing two of his own three operas: Crossing, a work about Walt Whitman dating from 2015, and Eurydice, which premiered in February 2020 at the Los Angeles Opera and made its Metropolitan Opera debut this fall. Now 31, Aucoin is one of classical music’s brightest stars—winner of a MacArthur Fellowship, cofounder of the innovative American Modern Opera Company, and a former Solti Conducting Apprentice at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He was 23 when the Met asked him to write an opera, starting him on the path to Eurydice.

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I didn't know that "Doom Metal" was a thing, but apparently it is: ‘Doom metal’ organist’s Paris show cancelled amid Catholic protests

Von Hausswolff’s primary instrument is the pipe organ, largely found in places of worship. British music publication the Quietus described the Swedish Grammy nominee’s output as exploring “unmapped territory where post-rock, prog, doom metal, modern classical and high church music all coexist in uneasy alliance”. Her lyrics have touched on gothic themes.

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Anthony Tommasini is bidding farewell as the principal classical music critic for the New York Times and his final column is a summing up:

after 18 perilous months when this art form seemed in danger of disappearing altogether, I love it more than ever. I want to protect it, as well as shake it up.

So what things about classical music shouldn’t change? I’ve been pondering this as I approach my departure after 21 years as the chief classical music critic of The New York Times.

It’s not inconsistent to fret over the fixation on a roster of familiar works while also extolling the repertory that’s been created over centuries. The staples are often staples for good reasons.

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We don't seem to have a clip of Susanna Mälkki conducting Bluebeard's Castle on YouTube, but here she is with Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta:

Here is Scott Ross playing the Gavotte with six doubles by Rameau:

And here is The Orphic Moment, a dramatic cantata by Matthew Aucoin:

Polish Guitarists

Is there something in the water in Poland? Because recently there seem to be some spectacular guitarists coming from there. A while back I discovered Marcin Dylla who is a terrific guitarist with impeccable technique and very good taste in repertoire, but now there is a new guy named Mateusz Kowalski who is also a remarkable guitarist. Here is his Prelude to the 4th Lute Suite by Bach, a real test of both technique and musicality:

But listen to this, the Etude No. 2 by Heitor Villa-Lobos. To anyone who has struggled to master this piece, this performance is, well, terrifying:

The Cultural Context of Music

Uh-oh, this might be one of those doctoral dissertation topics that I whimsically toss out from time to time! Caveat lector. While the music world of today seems to be all about streaming, album sales and Adele's personal issues, the less-obvious reality is that all musical expression takes place within a cultural context. I think I learned this from my mother. She was what in Canada we call an "old-time fiddler." There is no real equivalent in the US. She played jigs, reels, schottisches and other violin-related music which included some tunes from bluegrass and Appalachian genres. Her whole life she played for dances on Friday nights which were a local community affair. When I was fairly young we were at a dance in a nearby community of German immigrants from Sudetenland and out of some obscure memory of something I had read once, I inscribed a swastika on the condensation of the window next to our table. In a couple of moments a fellow came over and diplomatically rubbed it out. No need for a reminder of that particular historical context!

But all music resonates with its historical and cultural context. I think the tendency today is to either suppress the context or to only acknowledge it in a very selective way. But the threads of the fabric are very complexly interwoven. A few days ago I put up a spectacular performance of Arnold Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. Let's dig a bit into its cultural context. First of all, the musical idiom is that of post-Wagnerian chromaticism. Schoenberg is coming at the very end of the long century of Romanticism--the piece was composed in 1899--and the influence of Wagner was pervasive. Wagner was a vehement anti-Semite, which might not have too much relevance, except that Schoenberg was Jewish and perhaps, as he became more connected to his Jewish roots in later life (his only opera is Moses und Aron), this may have been one of the things that drove him away from the Wagner-related musical idiom into his atonal style. In 1921 he experienced a crisis of "Jewish identity" as a result of growing German anti-Semitism and around the same time he was developing his 12-tone method of composition as an alternative to tonality.

Now let's talk about the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. They are a wonderfully professional and deeply committed ensemble and as I said the other day, this is some of the finest music-making I have ever heard from an ensemble. And they are heavily supported by the Norwegian government:

The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra is a project orchestra where musicians of the orchestra varies from project to project. The orchestra aims to bring together the best musicians in Norway to each project, capturing musicians from several of the Norwegian orchestras focusing on musicians from Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as extensive use of freelance musicians. The orchestra also tries to bring home the Norwegian musicians who work abroad for several of its projects. However, it is always a core of members who are helping to keep the continuity of the orchestra.

The orchestra produces 30-40 concerts annually and has a separate series in Oslo. In addition, the orchestra travels on separate tours in Norway, as well as visiting a number of festivals throughout the country. The orchestra has no permanent concert venue, but playing their concerts in Oslo in both Den Norske Opera, Oslo Concert Hall, Gamle Logen and a number of churches. The orchestra had for many years the University Hall in Oslo as the main arena, and when this will again open in 2011, will continue to play several of their concerts there.

The orchestra is funded through grants from the Norwegian government, and Oslo. Public support is ca. 50% of the funding. Other revenue comes from ticket sales, sales of concerts and sponsorship revenue.

Norway had a somewhat ambiguous status during the Second World War:

King Haakon and the Norwegian government escaped to Rotherhithe in London. Throughout the war they sent inspirational radio speeches and supported clandestine military actions in Norway against the Germans. On the day of the invasion, the leader of the small National-Socialist party Nasjonal Samling, Vidkun Quisling, tried to seize power, but was forced by the German occupiers to step aside. Real power was wielded by the leader of the German occupation authority, Reichskommissar Josef Terboven. Quisling, as minister president, later formed a collaborationist government under German control. Up to 15,000 Norwegians volunteered to fight in German units, including the Waffen-SS.

The fraction of the Norwegian population that supported Germany was traditionally smaller than in Sweden, but greater than is generally appreciated today. It included a number of prominent personalities such as the Nobel-prize winning novelist Knut Hamsun. The concept of a "Germanic Union" of member states fit well into their thoroughly nationalist-patriotic ideology.

Nowadays Norway is a very wealthy nation from North Sea oil revenues which it deploys to not only guarantee a strong economic future post-fossil fuels, but also to provide a high quality social fabric for its citizens. And part of that goes to support artistic projects like that of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra.

As we listen to music, we are not only hearing half and quarter notes and melodies and harmonies, we are also hearing echoes and resonances of historical and cultural contexts. Mind you, it takes some work to dig them out, but as one professor said to me once, "as musicologists we are interested in the details."

Let's listen to the Violin Concerto by Arnold Schoenberg written immediately after his move to the United States due to the Nazi policies against Jews. The artists are Hilary Hahn, violin with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Swedish Radio Orchestra.

Friday Miscellanea

The Spectator reveals Why the mid-1960s was the golden age of pop music

On a Monday evening in May 1966, Paul McCartney and John Lennon visited a nightclub called Dolly’s in Jermyn Street. The two Beatles were accompanied by two Rolling Stones, Brian Jones and Keith Richards. Already at the club was Bob Dylan, stopping off in London on his European tour.

Dylan had first met Lennon and McCartney nearly two years earlier at the Delmonico Hotel in New York. All four Beatles, then in the first flush of American success, had gone to meet him after playing to thousands of screaming teenagers at a tennis stadium in Queen’s. Their fascination with his lyrical and emotional maturity was already showing in their songs. Although Dylan was less likely to admit it, the influence went both ways. Intrigued by the group’s musical sophistication (‘She Loves You’ uses nine chords, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ three), he was edging towards a poppier, band-based sound. That night, he introduced the Beatles to marijuana, which bent them further out of shape — or rather into a new one.

I don't want to quote any more, so go read the whole thing. These guys hung out a lot together, shared ongoing projects and influenced one another. Interesting scene. Of course nowadays most pop songs are written by a committee in Sweden...

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 Here is the New York Times' take on the Best Classical Music of 2021. Almost the only item that was not New York centric was this one:

It always feels frivolous to speak in superlatives, but this year it’s fitting — necessary, even — to name a best composer.

Kaija Saariaho, who has long conjured otherworldly sounds with the spirit of an explorer returning to share her discoveries, reached new heights of mastery with two of 2021’s most memorable premieres: the opera “Innocence” and the symphonic “Vista.”

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Over at the Marginal Revolution blog there is a post on How to read canonical Western literature. I just think it is heartening that we can still talk about canonical Western literature without, you know, scare quotes.

Assume from the beginning that you will need to read the work more than once, or at least read significant portions of the work more than once.  Furthermore, these multiple readings should be done back-to-back (and also over many years, btw, after all this is the canonical).  So your first reading should not in every way be super-careful, as you don’t yet know what to look for.  Treat the first reading as a warm-up for the second reading to follow.

I might do a similar post on canonical Western music if only because the whole notion that there is such a thing is pooh-poohed so often. In my own mind there is an interesting tension between the idea that there is a canon of Great Works that remains fairly stable over a long period of time and the idea that the canon is always undergoing a revision and renewal. Some works, pretty much anything by Bach, for example, seem to be absolutely central, but other composers wax and wane over the decades and centuries.

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Also from the same blog, a reference to a Times of London article that I can't access:

A leading music teacher has said the popularity of the ukulele is threatening classical guitar playing.

More than one in ten musical schoolchildren now play the ukulele, the largest proportion ever, a study by the music exam board ABRSM found. It said the instrument’s popularity grew from 1 per cent of school music students in 1997 to 15 per cent last year.

The ukulele was cited as a cause of the decline of the recorder in schools but in a letter to The Times, Graham Wade, former head of guitar teaching at Leeds College of Music, said the popularity of the four-stringed ukulele was threatening its six-stringed uncle.

“The ukulele is more likely to oust the guitar (whether classical or otherwise) from early instrumental tuition than the recorder,” he said. “I have been a classical guitar teacher in schools and colleges for 50 years, and the subtext of your headline is the demise of a worthy musical tradition.”

Any time I encounter real excellence or genuine knowledge I find it stimulating. I recall a conversation I had with a new friend in my first year at university. He was a recorder player and spent several minutes discussing conical vs straight recorder bores, simply assuming that I was both interested and could follow the discussion. I found that very stimulating. On the other hand, all those situations where the assumption is that everyone is pretty much an idiot leave me distraught. 

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The Left Should Defend Classical Education. Well, sure. But why?

...the perspective of Roosevelt Montás, author of Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation, is so badly needed. Montás is as passionate about the great books as Allan Bloom and his present-day intellectual descendants, but there’s an important difference: For Montás, the classical curriculum isn’t part of a proxy war against egalitarian politics. In this part memoir, part call to action, Montás argues that reading great literature and philosophy can make working-class people’s lives more meaningful and that everyone should have the opportunity to read great books. Instead of ceding this issue to the Right, as we often do, the Left should heed his arguments.

My view is that a good education, which should certainly include what is known as the "classical curriculum", is essential to one's full realization of one's character and potential. It's how you become what you truly are. Otherwise you are just a slave to someone's ideology.

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We start with Vista by Kaija Saariaho:

And some Bach:

Finally, a song by George Harrison:

One of the most unromantic love songs ever written. Influenced by the Byrds' use of the jangly 12-string guitar sound, which itself was influenced by George Harrison's use of the instrument in the film A Hard Day's Night.

Some Cultural Musings

It seems you can't turn around these days without running into yet another trailer for Peter Jackson's documentary on the Beatles, or a piece in the New York Times, or a review on a blog. IT'S EVERYWHERE! Which makes me think that this is the end of the Beatles as an interesting cultural phenomenon. I do have a beef with Peter Jackson: I disliked The Lord of the Rings and I really hated what he did to The Hobbit. I grew up with those books and I think that the movies, while visually appealing, were a severe diminishment of the books. For one thing, they fix in the mind certain images that replace the ones the imagination creates when you read. That is a big deal, in my opinion. And the soundtrack tends to trivialize the mood and, again, prevents you from having your own emotional reaction.

I have the same thoughts regarding the Harry Potter movies. The generic, derivative orchestral scores from John Williams, again, trivialize the narrative and the same caveats apply to the visual imagery. I know this just sounds grouchy, and it certainly doesn't diminish my enjoyment as I just go back to the books. But I worry that lots of people think they have experienced the Tolkien and Rowling books by seeing the movies, when they really have not. It seems that any popular literature stands the risk of being Disneyfied.

What I think underlies this is a general cultural phenomenon where excellence and challenging literature is discounted in favor of trivial and maudlin displays. I guess to a narcissistic generation this is appropriate. If all you want is to be reinforced, told how wonderful you are and reassured as to your being the best and deserving the best, then hey wow. I think a whole raft of so-called "self-help" books were really mislabeled. They should be called "self-harm" books. As it says in the Odyssey somewhere, "sufferings are teachings." And the contrary: if you are insulated from all suffering and challenges, then your learning experience is impoverished.

Of course, reality has a tendency to break through our little delusions like a splash of ice water. In this wonderful modern world we live in, twelve major cities in the US are experiencing record levels of homicides. But we are going to be carbon-free by 2050!

Still, despite all the fearsome rumblings in the world, I'm having a lot of fun and have no complaints. Really! Mind you, I am going to put off all travel plans for the foreseeable future. But I seem to be living in a place that has not entirely lost its mind, for whatever reason, and I can live, not only a relatively normal life, but a fulfilling one. Well, yeah, I can't seem to get any pieces premiered, but you can't have everything.

The upside of the current situation is that with resources like YouTube, you can hear just about any piece of music you want. I was just listening to a 2019 piece by Kaija Saariaho titled Vista and a lovely piece it is. Back in the good old days you could not hear music like that unless you lived where it was premiered or unless CBC broadcast it (unlikely) and if it had not yet been commercially recorded, your only other option was to buy the score at some horrendous price. Now, just go to YouTube and there it is. And the sound quality is not too bad. Just that alone is really amazing. Another upside, I can video chat with my ex-wife in Germany over Facetime and usually the picture is clear and the audio is pretty good. These are real treasures and were not available until recent years.

So I suppose we should just be grateful for the good stuff!

Why I Dropped Out of Grad School

Back in the 90s I retired from my career as a concert guitarist because it became clear that I just could not break through to the next level (at least not in the Canadian concert scene) and I went back to school as a doctoral candidate in musicology. This was a very positive and enjoyable time for me because it got me back in touch with a lot of intellectual skills that I had been neglecting. Working as a concert soloist means that you spend a remarkable amount of time every day in fairly repetitive technical exercises.

Applying for the program I dug out an old paper I had done on the lute fantasia and brushed up on some theory and history. I was accepted into the program, but, as I had not done an honours undergraduate degree, with the proviso that I do two seminars in music theory. It turned out that these two courses, one on fugue and the other on form-functional analysis of non-classical theme types, were two of the most enjoyable and meaty of all the ones I took. There was one on Shostakovich symphonies that enriches my life to this day and other interesting ones on 20th century theory and analysis, research methods, opera comedy, Dufay, American experimental music and so on. For me it was an enormously productive time.

But.

Ironically, the program was also beneficial economically! As my concert career wound down, with fewer lucrative engagements, I filled in the gap by teaching privately as well as at a two-year college and university. I didn't have a lot of students, but it kept my head above water. Once I started the doctoral program I kept most of that teaching and added on teaching jobs that came with the doctoral program. I taught basic music theory to non-music majors and music appreciation to a huge class. Great fun. And it meant that my income actually increased! Now, compare this to the incredibly sad story of this woman:

Meet a single mom and adjunct professor with $430,000 in student debt: ‘I’m in a hole that I’m never going to get out of’

While Maria's undergraduate education, which she completed in 2001, was funded through scholarships and Pell grants, she knew more advanced degrees would give her a leg up in university teaching — especially as a woman in the industry. So she pursued a master's degree and a PhD, the latter of which took seven years to complete.

It was not a decision she took lightly, and at the time she believed the commitment would be worth it. Maria, who requested her last name be withheld for privacy reasons, extensively researched the program, and its statistics for employment post-graduation looked promising. However, she was unable to land a full-time university job after graduation in 2014 and found herself unable to afford her student-loan payments.

Now, at 48 years old, Maria's student-loan balance is $430,000 — all from her advanced degrees, per documents reviewed by Insider.

In the whole article there are no indications of what field she did her doctorate in, but could it have been less commercially feasible than one in musicology?

After completing all my seminars for the degree, there remained the comprehensive exams and the dissertation. These could take a few more years. A few big changes happened around then. I got married and my mother passed away, both of which caused me to re-evaluate my life path. I decided to drop the PhD program and I moved to Mexico, where I still live.

The doctoral program I was in was a very humane one: if you were accepted they automatically defrayed your tuition and gave you teaching jobs, so it was quite reasonable to put yourself through grad school without assistance. I neither applied for nor received any student aid.

So what is happening now in higher education, especially in the US? It seems to me to be an enormous scam that is ruining many people's lives, like this young woman's. Sure, you could criticize her for choosing a field unlikely to lead to lucrative employment. But even so, the costs of her education, and the relentless addition of interest when she could not make payments are horrific! This isn't higher education, this is a confidence game. And notice how I have made no criticism of any of the content of programs at university these days, though one certainly could.

So why did I drop out of grad school? I realized that I really was not too sure I wanted to spend the next twenty years of my life on campus. After all, I had spent the last twenty years teaching guitar at university and conservatory and it might be time to try something else. In retrospect, I think it was a good decision. While I miss the collegiality of university life, there are some trends these days that I am glad to be away from. And I recall an envious glint in the eye of the chair of the theory department when I told him I was moving to Mexico...

Here is some music by the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas:

Listening to Jazz

Even since a commentator remarked that some argue that the greatest composer of the 20th century was Duke Ellington I've been listening to more jazz than I usually do. I'm asking myself, could this possibly be true? Really? So I listened to Mood Indigo a few times:

 Well, ok. But then I listened to Thelonius Monk:

Uh-huh. Then I listened to Miles Davis:

And what about Sun Ra?

And I remember reading something Duke Ellington said about jazz and freedom:

Put it this way: Jazz is a good barometer of freedom... In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.

I like that.

You have to understand, I have always had a difficult relationship with jazz. When I was still a teen, the only serious music magazine I could find in my local store was Downbeat, so I subscribed to it for a year or so. I didn't actually have access to jazz performances or recordings so I was mostly reading about music I hadn't heard. Later on, I did get a chance to hear some jazz recordings, but my most intense encounter was when I was hired to play rhythm guitar in a 27-piece big band for a few months. Oh, man, I was the worst jazz rhythm guitarist ever. All I knew how to play was blues and rock and suddenly I had to find an E flat, flat 5th, flat 9th chord? And they only played in horrible keys. And what the hell is a 13th chord anyway? So that was pretty intimidating. Anyway, my path led to classical music from then so I didn't have anything to do with jazz for a long time. The basic aesthetic principles just didn't make any sense to me, even though I liked a few pieces. Some Dave Brubeck, some Miles Davis. And like I said, if the music is about freedom, then it starts to make sense to me.

Plus, these are obviously very serious musicians.

But look, if I have to give an honest comment on the clips above, here is what I am going to say.

• Duke Ellington, "Mood Indigo". It seems arbitrary or sketchy to me, both in concept and execution but this is probably inherent in the style. 
• Thelonious Monk, "Lulu's Back in Town". A stiff touch on the piano, so it must be a stylistic thing. But a bit painful to watch if you are used to classical pianists. And the sax is badly out of tune with the piano.
• Miles Davis, "So What". I liked this quite a lot, but I had the feeling all the way through that the real title should be "F**k You."
• Sun Ra, "Take the A Train". This guy is way out there, and I liked that insane piano introduction. Freedom, yeah.

Stravinsky's comment on jazz the first time he heard it was that the way it was played was more interesting than the music itself. Still, I think I am starting to get the point, a bit anyway. The thing is that every one of these guys are really who they are, they are strong musical personalities.

But Duke Ellington as the greatest composer of the 20th  century? I dunno, I think I might vote for Sun Ra instead in the jazz field. But I think the ones really in the running are the usual suspects: Stravinsky, Bartók, Shostakovich, maybe Messiaen. Your milage may vary.

More of the Norwegians

I was wondering if the Schoenberg performance I put up yesterday was just a fluke, something done on a special occasion, so I looked around for more of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. Here they are with Rudolph Barshai's arrangement (approved by the composer) of the String Quartet No. 8 by Shostakovich. Same committed performance also without conductor and again without the score! Chamber orchestras, like the larger ones, nearly always perform from instrumental parts and with a conductor. I would give a great deal to hear these folks in concert--that is, if we ever return to unrestricted concerts.

Transfigured Night

Arnold Schoenberg, by Egon Schiele, 1917

Several posts back I rather arbitrarily put up a performance of Arnold Schoenberg's chamber piece for strings (originally for sextet, but also in a version for string orchestra) Verklärte Nacht, composed in 1899. I've known this piece for a long time as I had a vinyl recording of the string orchestra version decades ago. But the performance I posted,  by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, was so compelling that I keep coming back to it. I sent it to a friend of mind with five decades of experience as an orchestral musician and she was bowled over, saying she had never heard anything like it. Indeed, this is one of the finest classical music performances I have ever heard. Here it is:

Let's talk a little bit about why this is so extraordinary. First, the staging: with one exception, every performer is dressed in the plainest of black garb. For most of the performance there is absolutely minimal lighting. They play without music and without a conductor. Instead, all the musicians are deeply tuned into what one another are doing. This is a chamber orchestra that truly plays as a chamber ensemble. Then the performance: deeply committed to simply delivering the music in the finest and most expressive way they can. No egos here, either. It is the music that is on display, not the performers.

Arnold Schoenberg has long been notorious for inventing or discovering atonal music (which he preferred to call "pan-tonal") and is sometimes accused of being able to empty any concert hall. He was the teacher of two other great modernist masters, Alban Berg and Anton Webern who have achieved their own notoriety. But alongside the side of Schoenberg that is known for being an iconoclast is a deeply traditional facet. His textbooks on composition, for example, restrict themselves almost exclusively to examples from Beethoven. And in his earlier years he composed some superlative examples of late romanticism such as this piece and his large-scale cantata Gurre-Lieder.

The present piece, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) is a real oddity: a piece of chamber music, traditionally the most abstract musical genre, turned into program music, as it is based on a poem by Richard Dehmel. Here is the beginning of the poem. See the Wikipedia link to the piece for the rest.

Two people are walking through a bare, cold wood;

the moon keeps pace with them and draws their gaze.

The moon moves along above tall oak trees,

there is no wisp of cloud to obscure the radiance

to which the black, jagged tips reach up.

 The piece was premiered in 1902 and attracted controversy not only for the program, but also for its use of a ninth chord in last inversion. This last I have never understood for two reasons: the chord is merely passing harmony connecting two other chords and besides, Beethoven already used this inversion in one of his string quartets. But I suppose critics at the time were looking for any old stick to beat Schoenberg with.

I have always really liked this piece, but hearing this performance, it occurs to me that this is a truly great piece of music. It both summarizes the 19th century and gazes into the future, hinting at the turmoil of the 20th century.

Just one thing puzzles me: why is one of the violists wearing a red jacket?

Friday MIscellanea

This is the centenary of the birth of English composer Malcolm Arnold who wrote a rather nice guitar concerto for Julian Bream. The New York Times has a tribute: The Hilarious, Heartbreaking Life and Music of Malcolm Arnold.

Arnold’s music isn’t out of favor everywhere. His compositions for amateur and youth ensembles appear with deserved regularity. Pieces like the dance sets (Cornish, Scottish, English); the Little Suites for Orchestra; and the Fantasy for Brass Band blend lush orchestrations with lilting themes, balancing accessibility with challenge while never pandering to nonprofessional players. Conservatory students in trombone, recorder, guitar and tuba, lacking a rich standard repertoire, are also blessed with a collection of works by Arnold that include smaller fantasies, concertos (written for performers as varied as Benny Goodman, Julian Bream and Larry Adler) and other occasional works for instruments he felt deserved their moment in the sun.

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 From The Guardian, Singer Jamie Barton: ‘Can we do a queer Don Carlo? Or a lesbian Orfeo?’

“I’ve been saying for so long: ‘Can I please do an Orfeo where it’s a lesbian love story? Can we do a Don Carlo where Eboli or Rodrigo are queer? Can we open up the doors of representation so that the vast majority of our Black artists aren’t just doing Porgy and Bess? Can we open the doors of storytelling and make it as inclusive as is possible?’ And I do see that as something going forward out of this. I think the world has changed in such a way that we can’t go back – and thank God, because we are better off on the path we’re on now.”

Well, sure, why not? As long as it makes some kind of musical and aesthetic sense. Personally I would find a lesbian Doña Giovanna rather interesting.

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I used to live with a harpsichordist so I daily heard the instrument at close quarters. It turns out that that may be why I enjoy the harpsichord so much. THE JOYS OF THE HARPSICHORD:

The grand piano was built for the stage, and owes its reverberation to the concert hall in which it is placed (or, in modern classical music recordings, to digital plug-ins through which its sound is processed). The harpsichord's reverberation, on the other hand, comes from within its own wooden walls. As a result, a real harpsichord simply isn't very loud. 

I find this intimate music compelling. The sound swims; every note touched lingers long after your finger is gone. It is a warm and rich sound, the musical equivalent of enjoying a fire on an icy day.

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Here is an interesting and unusual item about a Korean composer: The Moveable Musical Feast Of Jung Jaeil.

A soft-spoken, self-effacing young man from Seoul may be the most listened-to living composer on the planet right now, with two blockbuster works of cinema and TV on his resumé. Not only did Jung Jaeil compose the score for the Oscar-winning Parasite, but his subsequent gig, Squid Game, has just stormed into the record books: Seen and heard by hundreds of millions by now, it has become a global phenomenon, another sign of South Korea’s approaching and encroaching hegemony over all things cultural.

And here is something I was not aware of:

The music business in South Korea has been booming for much longer than we in the West have been aware. The country accounts for 20 percent of worldwide classical music sales, with a much younger audience base than in the West.

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 Thanks to Slipped Disc, here is a bit of sad news: L'Ensemble contemporain de Montréal To Cease Operations In 2022.

Véronique Lacroix, the Artistic Director and Founder of L’Ensemble contemporain de Montréal (ECM+), has announced they will be shutting down operations.

The sad news was announced to a stunned audience in Montréal during what was to be their second final concert this past Tuesday.

Ludwig Van’s Caroline Rodgers spoke to Lacroix by phone to better understand the reasons behind the decision.

When asked what the motivation was, Lacroix said she felt that the organization had reached its limits. Even before the pandemic, there was some talk of wrapping it up.

“We have been here for 35 years,” said Lacroix. “We have made 300 creations, several international tours, 11 Canadian tours, and 70 concerts across the country just for Generation. The list of our accomplishments is very long and covers all aspects of the discipline.”

I attended quite a few of their concerts which were often held at the McGill School of Music's concert hall when I was an undergraduate there. In fact, one of the most memorable concert experiences I can recall was at one of their concerts. It may have been a piece by Quebec composer Serge Garant. In any case, it was for piano and six percussionists. In addition to other instruments, each percussionist had six large gongs on a large frame--probably every one in town! At one point, the pianist was playing the concert Steinway with such force that the open lid was bouncing up and down a couple of inches. I could see this because I was sitting in the second row. But I couldn't hear a single note of the piano because all 36 gongs were being played, also with great force. This was pretty much a unique acoustic experience and no, it would not be possible to record it!

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 For our first envoi, Circuit (1971) by Serge Garant for percussion ensemble, played by the McGill Percussion Ensemble:

The Guitar Concerto by Malcolm Arnold played by Julian Bream with the BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Barry Wordsworth:

And here is some music from the film Parasite by Jung Jaeil: