Friday Miscellanea

From the New York Times: The Complex History Behind a Vienna Philharmonic Tradition.

If the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s Concert is a global success, its legacy and reach rest on five pillars: a marvelous orchestra; internationally renowned conductors; a timeless repertoire, by the Strauss family and other composers of the 19th century; a splendid location, the gilded Musikverein; and TV broadcasts watched most recently by some 1.2 million people in 92 countries on five continents.

The event, which returns this weekend with Franz Welser-Möst leading the Philharmonic, is by now a familiar one, and a multiday affair with three concerts. Between the preview performance, the New Year’s Eve Concert and the New Year’s Concert, conductors and the orchestra are faced with the extreme demands of an emotionally and physically challenging marathon. Just days after the series of concerts, CDs and DVDs of the Jan. 1 concert are released for sale worldwide.

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One of the more unfashionable principles held to be true around here is that the crucial element in all aesthetics is quality, which is traditionally exhibited in the idea of a "masterpiece." This is often attacked from various angles: the relativity of taste, equity, social justice and even things like decolonization. Obviously masterpieces produced by dead white men are intrinsically suspect! But despite this, those pesky masterpieces keep hanging around, the real benchmarks and touchstones of their genres. The Wall Street Journal has an ongoing series titled "Masterpiece" and they collect the most popular ones of the year here: The Most Popular ‘Masterpiece’ Columns of 2022. One of the most interesting:

“The Waste Land,” the most influential poem of the 20th century, was published 100 years ago in T.S. Eliot’s highbrow journal The Criterion. This wildly original and difficult long poem portrays with imaginative authority the modern world as a spiritual desert. Wretched people devoid of religious belief lead a meaningless existence. By describing the bitter mood, after World War I had destroyed a belief in European civilization, the poem touched raw nerves.

The poem is written in disconnected pieces (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”) and has sudden transitions.

Feel free to set this beside The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky, arguably the greatest composition of the 20th century. Another essay in the series is on Dante and begins with this quote:

T.S. Eliot said: “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.”

But he is wrong, of course: there is Homer. 

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Here is something interesting: Pandemic Woes Lead Met Opera to Tap Endowment and Embrace New Work

Facing tepid ticket sales, the company will withdraw up to $30 million from its endowment and stage more operas by living composers, which have been outselling the classics.

Art does often respond to necessity, going back to the Renaissance. And it does not necessarily result in bad art.

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Here's an interesting little statistic: https://twitter.com/byHeatherLong/status/1607808853462089728. Americans are far more likely to move to Mexico than Canada. Well, yeah, just compare the weather!

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From the Guardian: Tears, cheers and whirlytubes: our critics pick their classical highlights of 2022. Picking out one example almost at random:

No artist touched the soul more deeply and more often than the German baritone Christian Gerhaher. I heard him five times in 2022, all at the Wigmore Hall. Three recitals were devoted to Hugo Wolf, bringing peerless vocal illumination to this highly varied repertoire. The most recent, reunited with his regular accompanist Gerold Huber, was a hair-raising account of Schubert’s Schwanengesang cycle. But the most extraordinary was Gerhaher’s appearance at a private memorial concert for Bernard Haitink, at which his singing of Mahler’s Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen touched levels of vocal artistry that are exceptionally rare.

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Slipped Disc weighs in on: ALL-NEW 2023 POWER COUPLES OF CLASSICAL MUSIC. Or it might just be an excuse to post a photo of Yuja Wang's legs.

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'Second chair' musicians are just as trained as principals and paid lower. Here's why.

There are generally three roles in any section, and each is a tenured position that takes an audition to win.

First, there’s the principal player, the section leader.

Next is associate principal, who plays first part on some pieces during a concert if the principal wants to focus on a particular work. For concertgoers, this is why the wind section often looks different in the first and second halves of a symphony performance.

“The idea is that the demands of principal positions are such that to play entire programs isn’t conducive to peak performance,” said Ron Samuels, Pittsburgh’s second clarinetist, who played principal in a smaller orchestra in Toledo, Ohio, for 15 years before moving to Pittsburgh.

More information at the link, but it is actually a fairly complex situation that goes well beyond how much training the musicians have.

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 Here is baritone Christian Gerhaher and pianist Gerold Huber with a Schubert lied.

Here is Hommage à T. S. Eliot by Sofia Gubaidulina, one example of her close aesthetic connections with other art genres:

And finally, the Vienna Philharmonic New Year's concert from last year:

New Jordan Peterson Video

I doubt that there is a more important thinker in the English-speaking world today, which is reason enough to have a look at his latest talk. But there are more reasons than that. This talk, just posted yesterday, is given in connection with his new role as Chancellor of Ralston College and takes place in the ancient site of Ephesus in what is now Turkey. He untangles so many of the profound problems underlying not only our aesthetic conflicts, but also ones of a broader social nature dealing with justice, science, value and so on. I recommend you have a listen. YouTube these days is polluted with so many Peterson clips, many of them of questionable value as they are ripped from their original context, but this one is a well-organized and well-delivered presentation of some very important ideas and principles.

Creativity and Personal Expression

 A recent comment got me thinking because I realized that I didn't agree with the underlying assumption which was that creativity was closely tied to personal expression. This struck me because I am just starting a new composition and it is at times like these that I find myself confronting the basic problem which is, what am I trying to do? It seems odd to say, but I am not trying to express anything personal at all. In my earlier life, I was pretty convinced that this was the job: express yourself. Of course, this immediately leads to the very frustrating question of why would anyone want to hear it? This is the fundamental issue I have with jazz and most pop music which really is about expressing yourself.

I was talking with an old friend yesterday and I described in a few words what is hard about music composition: you have to start by just sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper, staring at it, until something occurs to you. This might take minutes, hours, days, weeks or in extreme cases, years. I've been staring at a particular page in my notebook for nearly a year now and only in the last couple of weeks have started to get somewhere. 

I started to think about a new piece for guitar in January, but got nowhere until this month. Slowly some ideas started to emerge and they led to other ideas and so on. Right now I am just considering some basic structural outlines, some pitch materials and relating this to the Greek myth of Hecate. I find that finding a way of relating these three things is a way of generating a musical fabric.

What does this have to do with my personal life and feelings? Nothing, really. This is an act of exploration in an aesthetic universe. It doesn't have anything to do with my personal life as the goal is to go somewhere I have never been.

This immediately brings up the question of why would anyone else want to listen to the resulting music? Well, if it is dull, boring, painful for no reason, or just weird, then, no, I can't think of a single reason. But the goal is actually to come up with something dynamic, stimulating and fresh, so that would be the reason to listen.

I described how Stravinsky composed the Rite of Spring, in a tiny village in Switzerland over the course of around eight months, spending every day in a tiny 8' X 8' room with nothing more than a chair and an upright piano (and the notebook and pencil, of course!). Speaking of notebooks, the one shown above is my favorite: a Moleskine A5 Music Notebook. I'm not a fan of Moleskine in general as their paper quality seems to have gone downhill, but for my purposes this is perfect. The left hand page is blank and the right hand page has blank music staves so you can jot down both general ideas and diagrams and specific musical ideas.  The pencil is also a favorite, a Graphgear 1000 in .5 HB.

Yes, you do have to have some creative spark, which really consists in being able to let your mind freewheel and open to whatever may drift by. But the big challenge is the determination to sit there until something does drift by and the understanding and craft of how to work this idea out and come up with a finished composition. That's really all there is to the "creative process" which is why it is so impossible to teach (though, mind you, nearly every music department has at least one staff member with that job description: professor of music composition. I'm just not sure what they do exactly. Chat about it, I guess. But the important thing is really to provide composers with some sort of regular paycheck!

Let's listen to the fruit of Stravinsky's stay in that little village in Switzerland. This is a recreation of the original costumes and choreography with Valery Gergiev conducting the Orchestra and Ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre:

And of course...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4Anu6qvhrM&t=1622s

Some of the most joyful music ever.

UPDATE:  A suggestion, the only way I know to avoid the irritating ads on YouTube is to download the Opera browser and select the ad-blocker in preferences. Other browsers, even Brave, don't seem effective.|

Today's Listening

Here is something unusual: the Villa-Lobos Guitar Concerto played on three guitars.

 This turns it into an interesting piece of chamber music with a much different, tighter, kind of ensemble. I learned this piece in three months for a live broadcast with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra. It is heard a good deal less than it should be! This arrangement really seems to work.

Friday Miscellanea

Our Municipal Christmas Tree

Mexico is a lot better at things like Day of the Dead and Holy Week than Christmas which is really a Northern European festival. Still, lots of parties are had and gifts exchanged and the municipality puts up an artificial Christmas tree in the central plaza. So Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all readers of The Music Salon. I am grateful for your interest and will do my best to put up at least one weekly post and hopefully more in the coming year. I have business responsibilities that take time and I am also spending a lot more time on the guitar, plus I am back composing. I am revising my String Quartet No. 2 which will finally have its much-postponed premiere in Vancouver next May. I hope you are all well and happy and looking forward to a better 2023 than 2022. Let's hope this year was not "average" in the Russian meaning: average year, worse than last year, better than next year! So, on with the regular Friday miscellanea.

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First up, the Salzburg Festival just announced their program for next summer which can be found here https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/cms/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/programmbuch_2023_72dpi.pdf

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This looks like a very interesting book and it goes on my list to read next year: The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture.

Andrew Mellor journeys to the heart of the Nordic cultural psyche. From Reykjavik to Rovaniemi, he examines the success of Nordic music’s performers, the attitude of its audiences, and the sound of its composers past and present—celebrating some of the most remarkable music ever written along the way. Mellor peers into the dark side of the Scandinavian utopia, from xenophobia and alcoholism to parochialism and the twilight of the social democratic dream. Drawing on a range of genres and firsthand encounters, he reveals that our fascination with Nordic societies and our love for Nordic music might be more intertwined than first thought.

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From an economics blog: My Conversation with John Adams

COWEN: How do you avoid what Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence?

ADAMS: Harold Bloom was a very great literary critic, sometimes a little bit of a windbag, but his writings on Coleridge and Shelley, and especially on Shakespeare, were very important to me. He had a phrase that he coined, the anxiety of influence, which is interesting because he himself was not a creator. He was a critic, but he intuited that we creators, whether we’re painters or novelists or filmmakers or composers — that we live, so to speak, under the shadow of the greats that preceded us.

If you’re a poet, you’ve got all this great literature behind you, whether it’s Shakespeare or Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. And likewise for me, I’ve got really heavyweight predecessors in Beethoven, in Bach, in Mahler, in Stravinsky. Maybe that’s what he meant, just the anxiety of, is what I do even comparable with this great art? Another thing is, if I have an idea, has somebody already thought of it before? Those are the neurotic aspects of my life, but I’m no different than anybody else. We just have to deal with those concerns.

COWEN: Are you more afraid of Mozart or of Charles Ives?

ADAMS: [laughs] I’m not afraid of either of them. I love them. I obviously love Mozart more than Charles Ives. Charles Ives is a very, very unusual figure. He was almost completely unknown in most of the 20th century until Leonard Bernstein, who was very glamorous and very well known — Bernstein brought him to the public notice, and he coined this idea that Charles Ives was the Abraham Lincoln of music. Of course, Americans love something they can grasp onto like, “Oh, yes, I can relate to that. He’s the Abraham Lincoln of music.”

Charles Ives was a hermit. He worked during the day in an insurance firm, at which he was very successful, but spent his weekends and his summer vacations composing. His work is very sentimental, also very avant-garde for its time. I’ve conducted quite a few of his pieces. They are not, I have to admit, 100 percent satisfying, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that Ives never heard these pieces, or hardly ever heard them.

When you’re composing, you have to hear something and then realize, “Oh, that works and that doesn’t.” I think the fact that Ives — maybe he was just born before his time. He was born in Connecticut in the 1870s, and America at that time just was still a very raw country and not ready for a classical experimental composer.

COWEN: You seem to understand everything in music, from Indian ragas to popular songs, classical music, jazz. Do you ever worry that you have too many influences?

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Bach’s accidental masterpiece: The keyboard works of The Well-Tempered Clavier sound more novel and luminous 300 years later than in their composer’s day.

Unfortunately behind a paywall. But it provides me the opportunity to make an observation about Bach: his major works during his lifetime were overwhelmingly for the church and include hundreds of cantatas (composed on an almost weekly basis), plus the massive passions, oratorios and other works for soloists, chorus and orchestra. But while we certainly listen to these works today, we seem to derive the greatest enjoyment from his more mundane compositions such as the Well-Tempered Clavier, written to demonstrate a new tuning system, the inventions, written to educate his children, the Goldberg variations, written as a diversion to while away the hours and the solo music for cello and violin, written to demonstrate the potential of these relatively newish instruments. For the longest time these were regarded as little more than technical studies. But now, all of these works seem to represent to us the essence of Bach's craft, unlinked to any religious message.

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Alex Ross in the New Yorker: Looking Past the Celebrity Conductor

Some years ago, when I was interviewing the pianist Mitsuko Uchida, she poked fun at the idea of a youthful star conductor: “Do you want yourself to be operated on by a genius twenty-year-old heart surgeon? Do you want to go to the theatre and see a teen-ager play King Lear?” Uchida’s point was that practitioners of the arm-waving profession tend to grow better and wiser with age. Orchestras register not only the gestures a conductor makes in front of them but also the history of music-making that those gestures reflect. Herbert Blomstedt, who is ninety-five, can mesmerize a jaded first-tier ensemble with a gentle wave of his hands. It’s more than a question of personal mystique: it’s trust in a cumulative record of collective work.

That's an intriguing start to an excellent discussion of young conductors--especially their shortcomings.

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New research finds UK public ‘can’t live without music’, while musicians face brutal conditions

This data follows on from a survey released by the charity last month which showed that close to half of professional musicians think they will be forced to leave the industry, due to the ‘brutal’ impact of the cost of living crisis, alongside the ongoing impact of the pandemic and Brexit. 

At a time when music is more important to Brits than ever, six in ten professional musicians (60 per cent) say they are worse off financially now compared to the same time last year. Nine out of ten (90 per cent) are worried about affording food over the next six months, with 84 per cent concerned about paying their mortgage or rent.

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 The Cello Suite No 6 by Bach is probably the least well-known of the set. Here it is performed on a five-string cello for which it was originally written.

Here is the Symphony No. 5 by Sibelius with Jukka-Pekka Saraste & Lahti Symphony Orchestra:

And here is John Adams' Shaker Loops:

Friday Miscellanea

Finland, music's superpower: The Rising Star of Conducting Arrives in New York. As a Canadian, once again I am astonished at how many great musicians Finland produces, at a fraction of the population of Canada.

The hype, that is, around the 26-year-old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä. He’s the fastest-rising maestro of his generation, a darling of fellow musicians and orchestra administrators alike. It seems that every time I meet with someone in the industry lately, there comes a moment in the conversation when I’m asked, “Have you heard Klaus Mäkelä?”

Outside New York, it’s been hard not to. He has collected podium appointments so quickly, an ensemble as prestigious as the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam was willing to create a title, artistic partner, to keep him in reserve until he officially becomes its chief conductor in 2027. That’s when his contracts will be up at the Orchestre de Paris and the Oslo Philharmonic; already, there are whispers about where he could go next.

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From The New Criterion, a tribute to the Orlando Consort: A farewell to voices

Anchored by Robert Macdonald’s bass and propelled upward by Matthew Venner’s lofty countertenor, the Consort had no issue filling the church’s massive nave with sound. From behind their unadorned music stands and without pomp, the small chorus cast barreling waves of voice into every corner of the space with quintet pieces such as De profundis clamavi (Desprez) and maintained the same vigor in more restrained pieces, including Brumel’s (1460–1513) Mater patris et filia, arranged for a trio.

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Has Spotify really wrapped up the mystery of musical taste? Well, I strongly suspect no, but let's have a look:

But for anthropologists, taste is less of a romance than a science. “People often think about taste as being really individual,” Seaver laughs apologetically. “But in the social sciences we say: ‘Ah, that’s not really true.’ Your tastes are part of a broader social patterning that extends beyond you.” He suggests that our typical understanding of taste is shaped by the illusion of choice, akin to going to the record shop: “Among a set of available selections, what record are you going to pick?” Seaver asks me to carry out a thought experiment. “Imagine, what would it mean to have taste in music before there was audio recording?”

It’s flattering to think of taste as a personal choice because it encourages us to believe in our own individuality. Music technologies have long capitalised on this, all while leveraging the emotional connection between a listener and a song.

Nope. In my book, taste is a cultivated collection of aesthetic judgements.

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A Seattle Business Blasts Classical Music To Harass Homeless Encampment Aha! It's not to their taste!

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Melodies unheard, a review of a new book on Music of Ancient Greece.

 However distant the practice of Greek music may be from our experience, the ideal persists. The continued presence of Greek words in musical terminology testifies to ancient music’s cultural authority. (The Greek kithara or concert lyre is the source, via Spanish, for our word guitar, though the two instruments bear little resemblance.) Ambition to revive the music of Greek drama motivated the Italian Renaissance invention of opera and inspired Wagner’s romantic syntheses of myth and spectacle. Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy—the full title is The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music—identified in music the generative force behind the supposed Hellenic Dionysian spirit. Above all, Greek theories about music’s nature and effects—from Plato, Aristotle, and the Pythagoreans, among others—continue to shape our attitudes toward music, even if the sounds that provoked such reflections have long since faded to silence.

The whole review is well worth reading.

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 As an alumnus of McGill University in Montreal, Québec, Canada, I like to keep tabs on the state of affairs in the School of Music. Here is an ex-roommate of mine, Hank Knox, now head of early music performance, conducting the McGill Baroque Orchestra and opera studio in a performance of Handel's opera Rodelinda.

(McGill has three orchestras: the McGill Symphony, who have often played Carnegie Hall, the McGill Chamber Orchestra and the McGill Baroque Orchestra--that's two more than a lot of cities!)

And here is Klaus Mäkelä conducting the Concertgebouw at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg in two symphonies by Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky: the #6 of each. I particularly love the Shostakovich.

A final delight: the Orlando Consort with De profundis clamavi by Josquin:

Is Classical Over?

It used to be the case the the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the CBC, had some sort of mandate to expose and educate the populace with a bit of classical music. I remember watching Glenn Gould do a half-hour show on Sunday afternoons on CBC television. But now it looks like the CBC, the public school system and even the Victoria Conservatory of Music, have thrown in the towel and decided that there is only one kind of music: popular music. Here is an article: Five music classes from Island finalists in CBC's Canadian Music Class Challenge. Here is the Victoria Conservatory entry:

So why this song?

The eighth annual contest is run by CBC Music in partnership with the charitable organization, MusiCounts. In order to qualify, music teachers at the elementary, middle, and high school level were asked to to submit videos of their students performing selections from a list of 24 pre-approved songs, including hits by Neil Young, Blue Rodeo, Trooper and Tegan and Sara, among others.

Ah, so a classical music conservatory was actually not allowed to submit a classical piece. But if they had I'm sure it would have been far more professional.

Weird times. I have the feeling that in a thousand little ways classical music is simply being pushed to the curb and not even allowed to win over new audiences.

UPDATE: And the Victoria Conservatory group won the contest in their category, Community/Independent/Private School. The prize? $1,000 in new musical instruments and a plaque.

Friday Miscellanea

The Grawemeyer Award is one of the most prestigious prizes for composition: Music Inspired by Notre-Dame Fire Wins a Top Prize.

When a fire broke out at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in 2019, the British composer Julian Anderson was devastated.

“Seeing a precise and beautiful and precious structure like that dissolving almost into the fire was very, very traumatizing,” he said in an interview.

Anderson soon began channeling some of his despondence into “Litanies,” a 25-minute meditation for cello and orchestra. In the second movement, a series of chords emerges then melts away, echoing the disaster.

The only clip available on YouTube is this one, an excerpt from the end of the work:

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A Path to Freedom is one of the best things I have read recently about the nature and function of art. Hard to excerpt so you should read it all. But here are some quotes:

Apart from the aesthetic pleasure it gives, what’s the relevance of Starry Night? Can we read it as a record of mental illness (Van Gogh loosely depicts his view from an asylum window), and thus as an indictment of a society that refuses to accommodate people who think differently? Or rather as an idealizing, idyllic picture of a lost harmony between humans and nature, a bond soon to be severed irrevocably by climate change?

In the opinion of Jed Perl, longtime art critic at the New Republic and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, that all misses the point. “I want us to release art from the stranglehold of relevance,” Perl writes in Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts (Knopf, $20, 176 pp.), the sharpest, most inspiring book of criticism I read this year. True, art can shed light on social problems and may indeed inspire us to work for change. But art’s primary task, Perl asserts, is not to “promote a particular idea of ideology, or perform some clearly defined civic or community service.” Art is meaningful, valuable, and exciting precisely because of its irrelevance to our most immediate, surface-level concerns.

At the center of Perl’s analysis is the notion that all art is the result of a tension between the authority of tradition on the one hand and the freedom of creativity and invention on the other.

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One blogger takes on the issue of nationalism in music during wartime.

Unless the music somehow expresses the enemy country's commitment to its war, the music — and other art — created by human beings from that country heightens the awareness of what is lost in war. But, yes, it may move us to love Russian people, and Ukraine may be intentionally demanding that we hate the enemy — not merely its government, but its people.

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A couple of years ago I decided to de-digitize parts of my life. I took up sketching with pens and pencils on actual paper (sadly, that didn't last); I switched from doing preliminary sketches for compositions using my music software to doing them with pencil on paper and I started writing a journal and a sequence of haiku using fountain pens instead of, you know, a word processor. It has been a fulfilling and I think inspiring choice. Here is someone musing on one aspect: On the Gift of Longhand.

I’m a longtime longhand writer. I’m old enough to remember writing by hand when it was the only choice. Then I fell to the seductions of these newfangled things called laptops, like so many others. I was delighted by the convenience and by the final-draft look of even the messiest prose. But I switched back to longhand several years ago, and now it’s the only way I write my drafts. When I returned to pen and paper, I did so with the zeal of a convert. Not content to have just one or two good pens, I’ve amassed a small collection of mostly fountain pens. I’m catholic in my tastes, and cherish my Paper Mate Ink Joy, Pilot G-1, and Pilot Varsity, along with two ‘40s-era Parker 51s, one of which belonged to my father. But it’s the fountain pens I really prefer to use when writing first drafts.

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More data on the problems of music and economics: Flutist Mary Barto on the Mannes School of Music strike.

Our base salary is some $70 per hour, as opposed to other parts of the university, where the average is about $130 an hour. Somebody might say, “$130, that’s incredible!” But this includes hundreds of hours of preparation, grading, and writing recommendations. I stopped counting up how many hours I spent prepping my chamber music class when I got to 53. Some of the faculty who teach classes that meet three times a week stopped when they got to 150. This is not an accurate hourly wage; it includes a huge amount of outside time.

The whole interview is worth having a look at. Private music teachers are perhaps the most critical element in music education and they are usually not well-compensated.

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And you might want to have a look at this: Climate Activists Threaten to Start Slashing Paintings as They ‘Escalate’ Their Campaign to Model the Suffragist Movement

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I was also struck by the Notre Dame fire and I took a piece by François Couperin for harpsichord and recomposed it for violin and guitar. Here is the original:

And here is the first page of my recomposition. When I get a chance I will try to do a recording.

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Now for some music clips. Here is Toward the Sea by Toru Takemitsu for alto flute and guitar:

And here is Le rossignol-en-amour by Couperin:

And finally, a really unusual cover of The Rolling Stones Satisfaction:

Sofia Gubaidulina, part 18!

After being reminded of my series of posts on this composer by a commentator, I decided to try and finish the series. Looking back, I was astonished to see that the last one in the series was posted in February 2019! Now that's a hiatus. Here is that post: Sofia Gubaidulina, part 17 and there is also a link to the first one if you want to go back and pick them up from the beginning. I started this series because I feel that Gubaidulina is one of the most important composers working today.

Sofia Gubaidulina

To write this series of posts I am mostly working my way through the biography by Michael Kurtz (English edition 2007) from Indiana University Press.

Picking up where I left off, we are in 1987 and after her successful concerts in Germany and the US, her next appearance was at the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival in Finland. This festival, founded by the cellist Seppo Kimanen, commissioned Gubaidulina's String Quartet No. 2 for the summer of 1987. The piece uses timbral contrasts and the Fibonacci series as structural elements. This was followed by the premiere of the String Quartet No. 3 at the Edinburgh Festival in August. Let's have a listen to these two pieces.

No-one could accuse this piece of being atonal--at least not in the beginning where it is very firmly focussed on G!

The String Quartet No. 3 was given its US premiere in September by the Muir Quartet at a festival organized by the Louisville Orchestra.

This was a rich time for chamber music as after a visit to Paris in November 1987 she was commissioned  to write a string trio by Radiodiffusion Française which was premiered by members of the Moscow String Quartet in the Salle Gaveau in March 1989.

Friday Miscellanea

If anyone is in the market, you can actually buy five adjoining stall seats in Royal Albert Hall. Price is listed at £825,000. I didn't even know this was a thing.

Seatholders are entitled access to their seats for all Ordinary lettings, which amount to approximately to two thirds of the performances in the Hall in any twelve month period. For those events for which seatholders do not use their tickets, the Hall operates a sucessful Ticket Return Scheme.

I guess the last sentence means you can rent your seats out when you are not using them. I'm still sorry I missed the Cream reunion concerts there in 2005.

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 Via Slipped Disc: IS BUDAPEST THE NEW WORLD CAPITAL OF ORCHESTRAL MUSIC?

Since I moved to Budapest in 2015, the constant question from Hungarians is: “Why on earth would you move here?” My answer is “the music life is like no other city in the world” — an answer that usually elicits confused stares from the questioner. My response to them is: “How many professional symphony orchestras does Budapest have?”

Here is the list of 12 professional orchestras (in no particular order):

MÁV Symphony Orchestra

Budapest Festival Orchestra

Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra

Concerto Budapest

Budafok Dohnányi Orchestra

Zugló Symphony Orchestra

Óbuda Symphony Orchestra

Liszt Chamber Orchestra

Pannon Philharmonic

Orfeo Orchestra/Purcell Choir

Hungarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra

Hungarian National Opera Orchestra

I then pose the question to the questioner(s): How many orchestras do you think New York City has? The answer is: one! That answer is the same for Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Boston. And none of them are supported by state or federal governments…

I think I just put Budapest on my must-visit list. But I think that other large cities have more than one orchestra. Montreal has two, the Orchestra Symphonique de Montréal and the Orchestra Metropolitaine--perhaps three if I Musici de Montréal is still going and even four if you count the McGill Orchestra. I suspect New York has a few as well. But I sure don't know of any cities that have twelve!

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Norman Lebrecht does an Inquest into the death of ENO

When the company’s funding line was finally cut this month, there was little uproar. ENO was a much-loved maiden aunt being laid gently to rest.

Did it have to die? The cause of death, in this coroner’s verdict, is a prolonged failure to address reality. Take opera in English, a founding act of faith. In the vast Coliseum the words were hard to hear, so subtitles were screened above the stage. We faced a Brobdingnagian drama of a Lithuanian tenor mangling Verdi in a foreign tongue while a trendy translation flashed above our eyelines.

This was comic opera on a boardroom scale with a lamentably unEnglish lack of irony. The decline and fall of England’s national opera is a lesson to all working in the arts that you cannot kick problems down the road. ENO died not for lack of cash or love but for want of definition.

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As you may recall, I am an occasional attendee at the Salzburg Festival. But I am thinking of checking out some other European fests. The one in Aix-En-Provence looks interesting as this review in the New York Times attests: At This Summer’s Aix Festival, the Only Laughter Is Bitter.

The characters who feel the freshest at this year’s Aix Festival are populating Ted Huffman’s vivid staging of Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.” Almost 400 years old, “Poppea” is startlingly contemporary in the gray zone of morality it occupies. Almost no one is entirely likable or unlikable; lust and ambition are simultaneously reveled in and condemned.

At the jewel-box Théatre du Jeu de Paume — which seats fewer than 500, an ideal intimacy for Baroque opera — there is barely a set. Pretty much the only element is a huge pipe, half painted white, half black, hanging over the action, perhaps a symbol of the fate that never quite falls on the adulterous, power-hungry leads.

* * * 

The Culture Workers Go On Strike:

This season culture workers are organizing against their own exploitation. Professors of art, workers at museums, and assistants at a publishing house have all gone on strike or staged public protests during contract negotiations. Call this a black-turtleneck-worker uprising rather than a white-collar one. “Wages are stagnant and we earn far lower salaries than our peers elsewhere,” the union representing employees at the Brooklyn Museum recently tweeted. They’ve been busy protesting outside their work site. During one action, workers held up signs decrying the vacuity of the VIP opening for the museum’s haute couture fashion exhibit: One read, “You can’t eat prestige.” (The union is calling for a 7 percent salary increase this year and raises of 4 percent per year for each of the two years following.) Unions are currently on strike at the publisher HarperCollins and at the University of California system, where 48,000 academic workers are sitting out their underpaid teaching gigs.

* * *

Climate activists target Elbphilharmonie:

Just as the Sächsische Staatskapelle was about to begin its concert, two climate activists from Germany's "Letzte Generation" (Last Generation) movement walked onto the stage and glued themselves to the conductor's podium. They began calling for resistance to what they saw as the German government's indecisive climate policy.

You know, I would like to stage a protest of my own, if I could just figure out how and where!

* * *

Let's hear some of those Budapest orchestras. This is the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra with the Beethoven Symphony No. 4:

This is the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra with the Kol Nidre of Max Bruch:

And here is a whole program from Concerto Budapest:

Well, I'm impressed.

Today's Listening

The Suite Compostelana by Federico Mompou is one of the most interesting pieces in the Segovia repertoire, because it has a different character than most of the Spanish compositions. Unlike Federico Moreno Torroba, a Madrileño, Joaquin Rodrigo, born in Valencia, or Joaquin Turina, born in Seville, Mompou was Catalan, born in Barcelona, and his music has more of a French influence--elegance rather than rustic vigor.

20th Century Eccentrics

I'm really stumped to put a tag on this one--not even my catch-all "aesthetics" one will fit! What I want to talk about are those rare unique individuals who set off on their own, exploring musical realms that no-one else has. These figures rarely make any kind of impression on the musical mainstream, or even classical music institutions and are often discovered only decades later, sometimes after they have died.

The one interesting exception to the usual profile is John Cage who was most certainly a musical eccentric following a unique path of his own, but also who managed to achieve a remarkable amount of career success despite this. He is one eccentric who everyone knows by name. I think the main reasons for this were that he always managed to move in closely-knit avant-garde circles and he also had a gift for promotion. He came up with a number of ideas that became so notorious that they were newsworthy. The most prominent of these is probably his silent piece, 4'33, but we should also include his pieces based on the I Ching and a few other ones. He was also a gifted writer and published a number of books, such as Silence, that effectively communicated his aesthetic vision. None of our other eccentrics had much success in self-promotion and most didn't even try. Before we move on, here is a sample of Cage's promotional skills, a 1960 appearance on the popular TV show "I've Got a Secret."

The next eccentric I want to discuss is the very reclusive Conlon Nancarrow who spent much of his life living in obscurity in Mexico. His path was to discover the potential of the manual excising of player piano rolls in order to explore possibilities that no living pianist could execute. You might say he discovered electronic music through mechanical means. Here is his Study No. 40:

Oddly enough, both Cage and Nancarrow were born in 1912.

Pauline Oliveros, born in 1932, is from one generation later and she was a very early explorer of the possibilities of electronic music. She spent most of her life teaching and working in California where she was associated with various colleges and universities. She is particularly known for the concept of "deep listening:" 

an aesthetic based upon principles of improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation. This aesthetic is designed to inspire both trained and untrained performers to practice the art of listening and responding to environmental conditions in solo and ensemble situations

Here is Bye bye butterfly, a 1967 piece by Oliveros:

 Our final eccentric is another Californian, Harry Partch, born in 1901, the oldest of the group. He focussed on the idea of microtuning and as a result had to invent all his own instruments, which he did with great ingenuity. I think my favorite is the Boo-Bam, a kind of sub-bass marimba which I had the great pleasure of playing when I was a graduate student. Here is a performance of Castor and Pollux, composed in 1952.

Update on Tár

The film Tár fascinates me because it seems to deal with a lot of important issues and questions. Unfortunately, because of where I am, I'm not sure I will be able to see the film anytime soon. There is a lengthy review in The New Yorker that is frustrating because after reading it (or most of it) I still have no idea of the truth of the film, whether it is moral crap or not, whether it captures any reality or not. The writer seems to go to great lengths to prevent any such evaluations.

Is the movie saying that if we cancel the greats, we’ll be left only with mass, technology-driven culture? That there is only a superficial difference between a cosplaying fan and a self-mythologizing artist? That Lydia is already in Hell, playing to an audience of demons? That she possesses true artistic purity, because she loves conducting enough to do it at such a debased level? That she has no financial choice? That in being forced to really sublimate her ego, she might find renewal in music, instead of in power? These questions came to me later. In the moment, I registered only an enormous gulf. Lydia is still engaging in the act of making art. But the artist—that is, the person who knows she is connected to others—has separated herself with great success. She’s never been so untouchable.

Uh-huh, well I imagine watching the film might answer a few of those questions! The New Yorker is so attuned to the cultural moment that their writers regard with horror the idea of any kind of plausible evaluation of artistic quality. Waaayy too many other considerations to interpolate. A long while back I commented that Alex Ross would probably rather stab himself in the ears with knitting needles than actually criticize a piece of contemporary music. That principle still seems operative at The New Yorker. Or, heck, in most media and popular culture.

Have any of my readers seen the film and would like to comment?

Public Service Announcements

In retrospect one of the most influential professors in my years at university was not even in the music department--he was a newly-hired philosophy professor teaching Philosophy 100, a first year introduction. I actually spoke to him a few months ago on the phone and thanked him for his inspiration. He was impressed that I am a composer (I didn't tell him how insignificant a composer!).

One of the things he liked to do from time to time was what he called "public service announcements" at the beginning of class before we got into the nitty-gritty. I had a theory professor who did something similar--what he called "ear training" that usually consisted of playing us a particularly unusual piece of music, like a player-piano study by Conlon Nancarrow. The only instance I can recall at this late date from my philosophy professor was when he warned us against hard contact lenses one day.

But I would like to take up the tradition and offer some thoughts on things that lie outside the usual boundaries of the Music Salon. Maybe they will even be useful to some readers.

There is a massive transfer of wealth going on right now from the Boomer generation to their children as many people in their 40s inherit fairly sizable sums of money. I experienced this myself quite a few years ago and can offer some advice. First of all, whatever your current level of understanding is, you will now have to enter the world of investment and finance. The alternative is to hand over your assets to financial advisors or flip-flam operators--and sometimes it is hard to tell the difference. Just look at FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried. The standard path for many is to walk into your bank and purchase whatever mutual funds they recommend. You could do worse, but you could certainly do better. The problem with mutual funds is that there are management expenses that over time can seriously reduce your gains. Another problem is that statistics show that over 90% of active managers do not beat the market. The obvious solution is simply to buy the market, an option offered by what are called "index funds" that simply track a stock index. I think an even better solution is to buy an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that tracks the index. The three biggest ones are SPY which tracks the S&P 500 list of the biggest and best US companies, DIA which tracks the Dow Jones Industrial Average and QQQ which tracks the NASDAQ. A conservative plan is to put 60% into equities (stocks) which make up these indices and 40% into bonds. But this should shift over time. When you are younger you should put more into stocks and less into bonds and vice-versa as you grow older. As no-one really knows where the markets are going over the short-term there is no point in paying experts for their financial advice.

Ethics: this should be a central concern for everyone, but it is surprising how little thought is put into it. There are three main ethical theories: deontology, which emphasizes duties or rules (such as do unto others as you would have them do unto you), consequentialism (which used to be referred to as utilitarianism) which strives to achieve the best result for the greatest number and virtue ethics, which actually goes back to Aristotle. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

What distinguishes virtue ethics from consequentialism or deontology is the centrality of virtue within the theory. Whereas consequentialists will define virtues as traits that yield good consequences and deontologists will define them as traits possessed by those who reliably fulfil their duties, virtue ethicists will resist the attempt to define virtues in terms of some other concept that is taken to be more fundamental. Rather, virtues and vices will be foundational for virtue ethical theories and other normative notions will be grounded in them.

I'm a virtue ethicist as I have long been of the opinion that a lot of the other ethical theories tend to obscure our basic intuitions about virtue and vice. We tend to know virtue and vice when we see them! Interestingly, moral philosophy shares similar methods and problems with aesthetics.

I will make no comments on political issues as there is no surer way to create outrage and dissention! But I will say that I think a modicum of individual liberty is fairly important.

So let's end with one of those pieces for player-piano by Conlon Nancarrow.

UPDATE: If you want to do your own research on investing, I recommend Stocks for the Long Run by Jeremy J. Siegel.

Friday Miscellanea

 I'm always pretty much in favor of creative originality: BARBARA HANNIGAN AIMS TO CHANGE CONCERTGEBOUW VIBE

The concert on Thursday, 1 December is a compact, intimate Late Night programme without interval, in which the audience will be seated on cushions on the floor of the Concertgebouw’s Main Hall. The orchestra will perform Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen and Claude Vivier’s Lonely Child featuring Aphrodite Patoulidou. The Greek soprano will also be performing a Greek lullaby, accompanying herself on the nyckelharpa, a traditional Swedish string instrument.

On Friday 2 and Sunday 4 December Strauss and Vivier will be part of a more regular concert with interval, which will also feature Samuel Barber’s Mutations from Bach and Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto with soloist Vilde Frang. The programme is a musical voyage of ‘memory, loss, solitude, youthful innocence and coming of age’, in Hannigan’s words.

* * *

Here is a brief comment on a new book on James Bond and the Beatles: *Love and Let Die*. Remarkably, the Beatles first single, "Love Me Do" and the first Bond film, Dr. No were released on the same day in 1962. Personally, I think the early Beatles endure a lot better than the Bond films, but that's just me. This is a fascinating excerpt from the book:

In 1978, George married Olivia Arias and in the same year they had a son, Dhani.  Dhani only discovered his father’s past when he was at school.  ‘I came home one day from school after being chased by kids singing “Yellow Submarine”, and I didn’t understand why,’ he has said.  ‘It just seemed surreal: why are they singing that song to me?  I came home and freaked out to my dad: “Why didn’t you tell me you were in the Beatles?”  And he said: “Oh, sorry. Probably should have told you that.”  It’s impossible to imagine, John, Paul or Ringo neglecting to mention they were in the Beatles to their children.

* * *

From the annals of "who pays the piper calls the tune":  English National Opera will close before it accepts move to Manchester, says chair

It’s do or die time for the English National Opera. Earlier this month Arts Council England, a Government body, said it would stop funding the ENO unless it agreed to move from London to Manchester. Now ENO chairman Harry Brunjes says the company will close rather than move up north.

“There is no relocation,” he told MPs on Wednesday. “This is closing ENO down. This is losing 600 jobs from London.” The forced move is part of the levelling up agenda, but there are mixed signals.

* * *

‘Well of Souls’ Review: The Banjo’s Backstory

The banjo gets a bum rap. A staple of American country music, its bright tone and rhythmic clangor threaten to overwhelm musical gatherings of other, milder string-band instruments, such as guitar, mandolin, bass and fiddle. This piercing, metallic quality has made it the butt of a host of musicians’ jokes (“What’s the difference between a banjo and a chainsaw?” “A chainsaw has a dynamic range”). In her compelling, thoroughly researched history, Kristina R. Gaddy reveals a different instrument entirely, one intimately rooted in the African diaspora and capable of expressing flights of sorrow and joy.

Popular culture has tended to obscure the banjo’s roots as a warm, wooden instrument built by enslaved Africans in the Americas for use in dancing and on holy days.

* * *

What Was the Music Critic?

In September 2022, a music critic named Anthony Fantano received a string of angry Instagram D.M.s from Drake. Fantano reviews new albums in short YouTube posts, in which he monologues directly at the camera, standing in front of stacked, cherry-red record shelves. In a recent post, he had likened Drake’s latest release, Honestly, Nevermind, to “a sad solo dance party.” “Your existence is a light 1,” the Canadian rapper clapped back, a reference to Fantano’s practice of rating records on a 1–10 scale. Uncharitable, perhaps. But the fact that Drake—a global superstar who is generally cagey toward journalists—bothered to inveigh against a critic at all spoke to Fantano’s status: He may be one of the few working music critics who can, in this day and age, be conceivably called a tastemaker. It was the sort of ego-first collision of artist and critic that’s in increasingly short supply.

* * *

On the history of ballet: Pirouette power

History books will inform you that ballet properly begins in the late sixteenth century, with the elaborate marriage and birthday celebrations at the French court, drawing their imagery from the cabalistic and astrological geometry of Neoplatonic humanism. This may be true in terms of aesthetic theory, but in executive practice ballet also reflected more immediately the discipline of the military parade ground, with its insistence on straight lines, regular steps, and peremptory commands emanating from a central figure. For Louis XIV, courtly ballet at Versailles was, in the words of the historian and critic Jennifer Homans, “a matter of state” and yet “more than a blunt instrument with which to display royal opulence and power, a symbol and requirement of aristocratic identity.” And even when courtiers weren’t dancing, every move and gesture, every bow and curtsey in the royal presence was choreographed according to a strictly elegant etiquette.

* * * 

In case you don't know the work of Barbara Hannigan, here she is performing a Ligeti excerpt with Simon Rattle and the London Symphony:

And, what the heck, here is the Prelude to the Cello Suite No. 1 by Bach on banjo:

 And, of course, "Love Me Do"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pGOFX1D_jg

The Death of the Key Change

I started noticing this a decade ago. 

https://tedium.co/2022/11/09/the-death-of-the-key-change

Here is the story in a single graphic:

I usually think it’s lazy songwriting when a song injects energy by shifting up a half step or a whole step right around the last chorus.

This used to be called a "truck-driver modulation." 

We could probably do some charts on the narrowing of tempi, dynamics, melody and so on as well.

Tarring Bach

 I guess we have to talk about this scene from the movie Tár:

https://twitter.com/JoelWBerry/status/1593279643045564416?s=20&t=YEJ_LFkAo5ZK8k1YdWtnRA

The line that really stands out is this:

“If Bach’s talent can be reduced to his gender, birth country, religion, sexuality and so on, then so can yours”

I haven't seen the film, but perhaps we can discuss just this scene? I have the idea that Cate Blanchett's character might be a villain, but again maybe we can just take this scene for itself.

Comments?

 

Friday Miscellanea

"Guitar on a Table" painted by Pablo Picasso in 1919, just sold for $37.1 million

 Oh how I wish actual classical guitarists could get well-paid too!

* * *

I’ve booed at the opera before. But what happened to a young soprano this week was plain cruel

There is nothing wrong in principle with protesting at the opera. I’ve very occasionally booed shows I hated, and I want to be free to do so again if I choose. Not everything on the opera, or any other stage, has always got to be cheered politely or given the reflexive standing ovations that seem ever more common. Booing and whistling at the opera or theatre can sometimes be healthy and necessary protest. It is actually a lot more common than you may think, especially on first nights, especially in continental Europe. I once even heard Luciano Pavarotti, no less, booed at La Scala in Milan.

What happened at Covent Garden on Tuesday evening, however, wasn’t booing but heckling. It was repeated and mean-spirited barracking during a touching and plaintive aria about the loss of a father. Most disturbingly of all, it was the heckling of a child. It took place during act one of Handel’s opera Alcina, to a boy character, Oberto. Covent Garden’s production gives Oberto a poignant prominence. The target was Malakai M Bayoh, a 12-year-old boy soprano who is alternating the role with another young singer during the six performances scheduled by the Royal Opera this month.

You really have to read the whole thing which is yet another example of the decline of civilized courtesy in society.

* * *

And speaking of concerts, the Washington Post discusses encores: Has the encore left the building?

“It’s kind of wild to me that [encores] lasted through the ’90s with bands who were sort of cynical of showbiz tactics, because it’s such an old showbiz idea. Of course there’s going to be smoke and mirrors no matter what, but the encore is a pretty overt lie to the audience,” says Max Collins, the frontman of Eve 6 and BuzzFeed’s newest advice columnist, though he added that in the right circumstances, an encore can be an exchange of generosity between artists and fans.

The article is all about encores in popular music performances. It's a bit different in the classical world.

* * *

On the acoustics of violins: Phantom notes played by violins turn out to be a real sound

Giovanni Cecchi at the University of Florence in Italy and his colleagues decided to investigate how different violins produce combination tones.

They analysed recordings of a professional violinist playing selected pairs of notes on five violins of different age and quality using a computer. Motivated by the ideas of 19th-century physicist Hermann von Helmholtz who showed that some musical instruments may be able to produce combination tones on their own, they decomposed the sound waves made by the violins into parts with different frequencies. The team found that all violins produced combination tones, but the oldest instruments produced the strongest ones. The magnitude of the most prominent combination tone for the oldest violin, made in Bologna in 1700, was about 75 per cent larger than the one from a modern mass-produced instrument.

* * * 

Music has influences in lots of interesting places: STILL HOT: Maurice Sendak’s ageless imagination

Music was an essential ingredient in Sendak’s creative process. “The work can’t happen without music,” he said in 1994. “I think everything I’ve done is a collaboration with a composer.” The catalogue contains a selection of Sendak’s “fantasy sketches,” each page a mini-drama with four to six rows of small black-pen line drawings moving from left to right—a wordless comic strip whose silent progression on the page has the feel of experimental musical notation. In fact, Sendak composed these pages while listening to music (such as Strauss’s “Death and Transfiguration” and Deems Taylor’s “Through the Looking Glass”)—the “catalyst,” he said, “that brought them to life [and] kept my pen moving across the paper.”

* * *

I've been a fan of the fortepiano for a long time so it is nice to see this article from Alex Ross: Kristian Bezuidenhout Unleashes the Subtle Power of the Fortepiano

“These older instruments, and even the modern copies, function so differently in rehearsal and in concert,” Bezuidenhout told me. “Sometimes you have this feeling in rehearsal: ‘Oh, yes, this is really making sense, the piano is really helping me.’ Then, in concert, they kind of turn on you. The five-octave pianos, especially, can betray you, leave you in the dust. You say to yourself, ‘Where is that sound I heard four hours ago?’ It may have to do with a change of humidity, or a way of reacting to the room. But it’s as if they can sense your level of stress, your preoccupation, and then they seize up—like some kind of really mean cat.”

Yes, fortepianos can smell your fear! Not to mention guitars.

Some didacts of the early-music world would maintain that certain composers must be performed on so-called original instruments. Bezuidenhout, in remarks from the stage at Hertz, distanced himself from the charged word “authentic,” describing his work as “historically inspired.” For me, the experience of hearing a broad range of repertory filtered through instruments of various eras had the effect of freeing the composers from the tyranny of norms. This recital captured, above all, a sense of music as an evolutionary art, reacting to technology in flux and history in motion.

* * *

Let's listen to some fortepiano. This is Kristian Bezuidenhout playing a Mozart sonata:

I don't think we have had much Richard Strauss lately, so here is his Death and Transfiguration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM0Y-Yly8jY

And let's have the earlier generation of fortepiano players: Malcolm Bilson playing a Mozart concerto:

Masterclasses

I ran into a rather clumsy interview on YouTube the other day that attempted to address the question "are masterclasses worth doing." I stopped watching after a couple of minutes, but I got the impression that the conclusion was going to be yes, they are. That would be my opinion as well, but with this proviso: it really depends on who is giving the class. Some guitarists are so taken with their own egos that they are not terribly helpful to students. Other guitarists are enormously helpful. I took masterclasses with José Tomás, Leo Brouwer, Dik Visser (Dutch guitarist), Manuel Barrueco, John Duarte, Oscar Ghiglia and Pepe Romero and I audited masterclasses by Abel Carlevaro and David Russell. Of all these, the most helpful were José Tomás and Pepe Romero. Everyone came out of those classes more relaxed and more confident.

Some maestros have the tendency to abuse their students which, in a public forum, is very unethical. John Williams hinted that Segovia had this propensity, but he was certainly not alone. One of the best things about masterclasses is what you can learn from other students and the wide variety of repertoire you would, one hopes, be exposed to. You also get to hear an interesting collection of guitars. In one masterclass we came up with a particularly challenging game. Sitting around in a dorm room with ten or so guitarists and one lonely guitar the rule was, whoever had the guitar had to play the first four bars of whatever piece anyone named, or give up the guitar. One fellow, from Cornell, was the champion. It was almost impossible to stump him: Ponce, Prelude 12? Santorsola, some obscure piece? Bach, Minuet 1 from the Cello Suite 1? He knew them all.

You should take masterclasses when you are a young guitarist and you should seek out different kinds of players. Some maestros are just going to try to impress their interpretive ideas on you, which might be interesting, but might not be! As you develop as an artist the really important interpretive ideas are yours and no-one else's. But a lot of the value in master classes comes from the learning of technical solutions. Pepe Romero and Abel Carlevaro were particularly good at this. After every student Carlevaro would say the same thing: "hay dos problems: la mano derecha y la mano izquierda!" And then he would explain the problems. It was quite fascinating. Abel Carlevaro was probably the best guitar pedagogue of the 20th century. Mind you, after a few days of this we were all thinking, his upcoming concert better be perfect! And, as a matter of fact, it was: technical perfection.

Here is an interesting clip: Abel Carlevaro playing three pieces on Spanish television in 1989.

"An art national in form and socialist in content"

We usually think of Russia and its predecessor the Soviet Union as being on the opposite side from the USA of not only international power politics but also economic and social questions, but that was not always the case. For a period in the 1930s and early 40s, there was considerable harmony of aesthetic ideology between the two nations--at least in some circles. The quote standing as title for this post comes from Joseph Stalin and it expressed the new approach in the Soviet Union in 1932 when the RAPM (Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians), the politically radical side, and the Association for Contemporary Music, the more professional association, were replaced by the Union of Soviet Composers. The idea was a compromise: "a professional contemporary art music that would remain accessible to workers and peasants because it would draw on familiar folk and popular idioms." [Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music, volume 4, p. 656]

In the US, leftist politics were having a significant influence on compositional practice. One figure was Marc Blitzstein who studied in Europe and heard the Three Penny Opera of Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht.

Encouraged by the exiled Brecht, whom he met in New York in 1935, Blitzstein composed The Cradle Will Rock, a "play in music" (to his own libretto) in ten scenes embodying what the composer called "an allegory about people I hate" that would through a combination of entertainment and political harangue persuade its intended middle-class audience to join the class struggle on the side of the proletariat... [Taruskin, op. cit. p 649]

I think we have heard something like that before! After the premiere in New York in 1937, itself surrounded by scandal, the cast party was at the Downtown Music School administered by the Workers Music League, an adjunct of the American Communist Party, itself under the discipline of Third International of the Soviet Union. The League also sponsored the Composers Collective of New York, loosely based on the Russian Union of Soviet Composers. The membership included Charles Seeger and Elie Siegmeister as well as Blitzstein. One concert in March 1934 sponsored by the organization was devoted to the music of Aaron Copland and was reviewed by Seeger in the Daily Worker, the Communist Party newspaper. An excerpt:

For one of the finest definitions of revolutionary musical content yet made, we hail Aaron Copland's "Up Against!" And with vigor, too -- that is the essence of the Piano Variations. Their chief shortcomings seem to be that they are almost too much "against" -- against pretty nearly everything. So some day Aaron, write us something "for." You know what for! [quoted in Taruskin, op. cit. p.653]

Let's have a listen to those Piano Variations.

Of course that is more in the aggressively avant-garde mode, but through the 1930s in works like the ballet Hear Ye! Hear Ye! and the mass song "Into the Streets, May First" Copland began to move towards a style more appropriate to a proletarian art. One good example is Prairie Journal, originally commissioned in 1936 under the title Saga of the Prairie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEm6bVD2Wxw

Copland, like other composers of the day, including Virgil Thomson, was searching for a new musical style that would be comprehensible to ordinary people, the proletariat. In the words of Charles Seeger, a music that was "national in form, proletarian in content."

I was planning to look at how Dmitri Shostakovich responded to similar ideological requirements in the Soviet Union, but that will have to wait for a follow-up post.

Friday Miscellanea

 I guess one of the big stories in music this week is Bob Dylan's new book: ‘The Philosophy of Modern Song’ Review: Bob Dylan Plays DJ

“The Philosophy of Modern Song” is an annotated playlist of other people’s songs, an idiosyncratic jukebox of 66 A-sides. The imposing title is perhaps tongue-in-cheek, for the book doesn’t offer—as Bobcats worth their salt might have predicted—anything close to what its title promises. What it does offer is perhaps even more valuable: It’s a generous book—as forthright as anything Dylan has ever laid before his audience—that manages to stick its landing somewhere between the perfect bathroom read (short sections, handsomely illustrated, coincidentally just in time for Christmas) and “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” Robert Burton’s epic, eccentric and encyclopedic compendium of 1621.

* * *

Here is a piece on the nature and function of art: On Not Drinking the Kool-Aid

I recently spoke at a gathering of artists and arts administrators. During the discussion, one of the administrators said, “Art enables us to have difficult conversations with each other.” That struck me as perfectly capturing the going understanding of the role of art these days. Art is now viewed as a pretext for collective discourse, raising “issues” that provide the raw material for op-eds, Twitter threads, college seminars, and conference panels, not to mention (dreaded word) post-performance “talkbacks.”

  But not just any kind of collective discourse. For we all know what “difficult conversations” means: what they are about, and on what terms they are meant to proceed. A “difficult conversation” is not a conversation about the tragic nature of choice or the inevitability of death. Nor is it one in which participants debate whether trans women are women or affirmative action is a good idea. When I hear the phrase “difficult conversations,” I think of something David Mamet said: “When people say, ‘we need to have a conversation about race,’ what they really mean is, ‘shut the fuck up.’”

  In the age of wokeness, aka political correctness, art must be political and art must be correct. The point is familiar, but a few examples might revivify it...

* * *

This is interesting: What the Suzuki Method Really Taught

Apparently, the emotional content of Western concert or “classical” music—its ability to summon up feelings that literally surpass words, and give us that uniquely musical experience of being overwhelmed—could be as immediately manifest to non-Westerners as it was to those raised in the tradition. The Japanese appetite for the emotional intensity of much so-called classical music coincided with a Western appetite for Eastern art, the japonisme that, through the prints of Hiroshige in particular, swept European painting in the second half of the nineteenth century, wresting it from a blind faith in Renaissance one-point perspective. Van Gogh and Manet, Whistler and Degas—they were as much enthralled by Japanese art as Suzuki’s generation was by European music. And, generally speaking, both sides “got it” just about as well, in each case mastering and repurposing the beautiful surface of the form without necessarily grasping all the local purposes beneath. Suzuki knew Bach but not, it seems, his religious points or passions, in the same way that Whistler knew Hiroshige but not his religious points or passions.

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State sponsorship of music, while seemingly essential, is also hazardous: Contemporary music sliced by Arts Council England’s knife

Delayed for over a week, the release of Arts Council England’s latest funding round landed with a thud on Friday – with the headline announcement of the total reduction in National Portfolio funding to English National Opera.

But a series of serious reductions were also visited on contemporary music organisations, with some losing all of their portfolio funding.

This included a total reduction in funding to the Cambridge-based Britten Sinfonia. The group, founded in 1992, is Associate Ensemble at the Barbican.

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Odanak First Nation's Mali Obomsawin tells Indigenous stories through music

When Mali Obomsawin graduated from Dartmouth College in 2018, she quickly found success as one-third of the acclaimed folk rock band Lula Wiles. But Mali grew frustrated by the limitations of that success. She says fans in the Americana folk scene expected a white folk aesthetic. Mali is a citizen of the Odanak First Nation in Quebec, and she didn't fit that box, so she left. She's now released her first album as a solo artist, "Sweet Tooth." It represents a different kind of folk music. Wabanaki hand drums and jazz arrangements replace banjo twang. Mali calls it the first authentic statement in her creative journey.

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Here are some insights into why the English National Opera was defunded: Defunding ENO is devastating – but the writing was on the wall

When the leadership of an arts organisation gives the impression that it has no faith in the importance of the work it produces, it is hardly surprising that people come to negative conclusions about its identity and value. Thousands of opera lovers had the foresight at the time to recognise the longer-term consequences of the changes and signed a petition to save ENO. Those who took that stand are unlikely to be surprised by the decisions that Arts Council England published last week that meant ENO will lose its £12.6m core annual funding.

The fact that this outcome was predicted doesn’t make the reality of it any less heartbreaking, nor less dangerous for the cultural landscape of the country.

Opera is squeezed by those on the left who think it is elitist and those on the right who do not believe it should be supported by government at all. The notion that it is a glamorous and frivolous entertainment for the social and cultural elite may be a convenient stereotype, but for those who have experienced it, nothing could be further from the truth.

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I suppose this was inevitable: Extinction Rebellion activists halt Verdi Requiem at Concertgebouw, comparing to ‘sinking Titanic’

A performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem came to a halt on Wednesday evening at The Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam when a climate protester interrupted the performance.

In a video shared by the global environmental movement, ‘Extinction Rebellion’, a protester seated in the midst of the auditorium level of the concert hall stood up to shout across the venue, “We are in the middle of a climate crisis and we are like the orchestra on the Titanic that keeps playing quietly while the ship is already sinking.”

The protester, named by the protest group as Sebastian, was one of three who interrupted the performance at 8.30pm on 2 November and used their hijacked platform to call on the Dutch government to do everything they could to reach carbon-neutrality by 2025.

All three of the protesters were dragged out by booing audience members

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Let's listen to some music from the Mali Obomsawin album:

 I was listening to some music by American composer Roy Harris this week. Here is his Symphony No. 3 from 1941: