I went through three stages of musical involvement when I was younger and it occurred to me the other day that this might be of interest to others. So here goes.
As I have mentioned before, my mother was what in Canada we call an "old time fiddler," which means she played a lot of traditional kinds of fiddle music loosely related to Celtic traditions. For example, this is Andy DeJarlis, a particularly good fiddler:
Hard as it may be to believe, this kind of music didn't interest me when I was young. I had a few piano lessons when I was ten or eleven, but they didn't take. It wasn't until I was well into my teens that I developed an interest in music and it mostly focussed on the rock music of the middle and late 60s. Particular favorites were the Rolling Stones, Eric Burden and the Animals and the Beatles, though I also went through a phase of admiration of Bob Dylan. I even performed "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" a couple of times in local folk venues.
But one day a musician friend played the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto for me:
At first it was just the virtuosity of the violin part that caught my attention. But then I started to notice a lot of other stuff: harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration. Within a year or so I had discovered Bach. I don't recall the first Bach I heard. It might have been Glenn Gould on CBC television playing some preludes and fugues, or it might have been a recording of the Mass in B minor on vinyl. But at some point I heard the Chaconne:
The significance of this is that I soon discovered that this piece was very often played on guitar. This was the recording I had in the early days, by Christopher Parkening:
That pretty much did it. My whole ambition in life was to learn to play this piece. Over a couple of years I switched from steel string and electric guitar to nylon string and taught myself to read music. Without so much as a single lesson from a classical guitarist I set out to learn the Chaconnne! I actually memorized the first page before I realized how much work I had to do on the basics. There followed about ten years of study in various places with various teachers which included an undergraduate degree in performance and a diplôme de concert and, ironically, even though I did learn two other pieces that were a great inspiration for me, the Asturias by Albéniz and the Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo, I never actually got back to the Chaconne even though I played a lot of other music by Bach.
What happened to me to cause this transformation? I was in high school when the great cultural upheaval of the 60 sluiced through society so my devotion to rock music (and psychedelic drugs) was certainly typical. What was less typical was the fairly rapid giving up of the drugs and the rock music. What I really wanted was not freedom and psychedelic hallucinations but discipline and transcendence and I found both in the classical guitar and Bach. The two most transformative years for me were first year university where I must have spent about half my time in the listening library trying to absorb simply everything in classical music. At the same time I was reading Dante and the history of philosophy.
The other big transformative year was spent in Spain studying with a true master of the guitar, José Tomás. The rest really just followed from there. I'm still not sure exactly what happened in my mind. But when I heard Tchaikovsky, and Bach, and then Debussy and Beethoven and Mozart and Dvořák that was the musical path for me. Extensive reading acquainted me with people like Schoenberg and Boulez and many others. This was my path. It was the intensity and rigor of it that attracted me. The 60s I came to feel were a cultural misstep, a descent into things best not descended into.
There have been many musical adjustments in my life. I spent several years training to be a musicologist without finally pursuing it as a career. And now, though I play the guitar nearly every day, I think of myself more as a composer. But the important transformation happened around my 19th year when I was struck, maybe not instantly, perhaps over the course of six months or a year, by classical music and that for me became a kind of truth.
Sometimes I ask myself if I just lack talent. But then I read something like this and think, nope, I just don't work hard enough: The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back. There was so much kerfuffle over the release of the new documentary that I was avoiding all mention of it for a while. But then I ran across this, an excellent long essay on just what the series uncovered. The very best section, for me, was this one:
There’s a truism in sport that what makes a champion is not the level they play at when they’re in top form but how well they play when they’re not in form. When we meet The Beatles in Get Back, they’re clearly in a dip, and that’s what makes their response to it so impressive. Even the best songs they bring in are not necessarily very good to begin with. Don’t Let Me Down is not up to much at Twickenham. George calls it corny, and he isn’t wrong. But John has a vision of a song that eschews irony and sophistication and lunges straight for your heart, and he achieves it, with a little help from his friends. They keep running at the song, shaping it and honing it, and by the time they get to the roof it is majestic.
The already classic scene in which Paul wrenches the song Get Back out of himself shows us, not just a moment of inspiration, but how the group pick up on what is not an obviously promising fragment and begin the process of turning it into a song. In the days to follow, they keep going at it, day after day, run-through after run-through, chipping away, laboriously sculpting the song into something that seems, in its final form, perfectly effortless. As viewers, we get bored of seeing them rehearse it and we see only some of it: on January 23rd alone they ran it through 43 times. The Beatles don’t know, during this long process, what we know - that they’re creating a song that millions of people will sing and move to for decades to come. For all they know, it might be Shit Takes all the way down. But they keep going, changing the lyrics, making small decision after small decision - when the chorus comes in, where to put the guitar solos, when to syncopate the beat, how to play the intro - in the blind faith that somewhere, hundreds of decisions down the line, a Beatles song worthy of the name will emerge.
But I really recommend you read the whole thing.
Forgive me for putting this up: when I was 19 years old it pretty much summarized life for me. Then I discovered Bach...
Many years ago when I was studying with José Tomás in Alicante, Spain, I brought in a new piece I wanted to play. I wasn't quite ready, technically, to launch into one of the lute suites so I had started on the Cello Suite No. 1 by Bach in the arrangement by John Duarte. The original suite is in G major and mostly lies in the baritone range. Duarte had arranged it in D major, up a fifth, and to make up for the higher tessitura had added a bass line. In the same series he had also arranged the Cello Suite No. 3, originally in C major, up a sixth to A major.
I don't recall exactly, but I think I played the prelude for Maestro Tomás. He looked over the music briefly, then dug out a copy of the original cello suites and picking up his guitar read through the prelude in the original key. It sounded very rich and resonant in comparison. Now how could he do that? Tomás is well known for being the main advocate of the 8-string guitar which is the normal 6-string but with two additional bass strings. He adopted it to be able to play the lute suites of S. L. Weiss with the original bass notes, though it is also very useful in playing the later Renaissance lute music such as that by John Dowland as well. His two lower strings were usually tuned to D and C so he could easily play the Cello Suite as the lowest string on the cello is also a C.
When he came to the end of the prelude Tomás suggested that, since I had a 6-string I might try transcribing it in A major and tuning the sixth to D, a common scordatura. Somewhat chastened I went away and learned a different piece, but years later I set out to try the idea and transcribed the whole suite in A. After learning it, I found quite a few passages lay rather awkwardly where they did not in D major. As I had been playing a lot of lute music tuning the third string in F# I tried that and it worked perfectly. What that actually does is move the interval spacing of the strings down a 4th so the left hand fingering is much like it is in D major. But now I had a piece with the rather unusual scordatura of both sixth in D and third in F#, something unique in my experience. But never mind, it works perfectly so that is the key I play the suite in and I even published my transcription in a book of Bach.
When I played it for Oscar Ghiglia in Banff he was at first scornful, mainly I think because Segovia plays it in D major, but came round after a while and offered some excellent suggestions for an improvement to the gigue.
Everyone else is still playing it in D major which, to my ear, sounds feeble compared to the richer resonance of the cello key.
But now, someone is finally playing the Cello Suite No. 1 by Bach in the right key on guitar! This is Waldemar Kerner playing the suite, originally in G major, in A major.
Two things I don't like about this version is the added bass lines (not in the prelude, but in later movements) which seem un-Bachian and arbitrary and the lack of slurs. One of the reasons I went to the F# tuning is that it facilitates slurs in the appropriate places. Here is my transcription of the prelude:
This is a piece I just stumbled across. I've been a big fan of Steve Reich's music for a long time, but I had never heard of this piece. So many interesting composers seem fascinated with the music of the first real polyphonic composers of music history: Léonin and Pérotin from the 12th century. Oh, and sure, lyrics by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
As a guitarist I was not too familiar with Chopin except as an occasional listener until I was asked to give a pre-concert talk on his music. That galvanized me into giving myself a quick graduate seminar on Chopin and I have been an admirer ever since. Opera composers aside, he is possibly the greatest composer not to have spread himself among different forms and genres, focussing almost entirely on one instrument. Mind you, he exhaustively explored that instrument and invented or expanded quite a few sub-genres like the mazurka, ballade and, the subject of a new piece by Alex Ross in The New Yorker, the nocturne: Chopin’s Nocturnes Are Arias for the Piano.
Three recordings of Chopin’s complete Nocturnes have arrived in the past year: one on the Deutsche Grammophon label, with the young Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki; one on Harmonia Mundi, with the veteran French artist Alain Planès, who uses a vintage 1836 Pleyel instrument; and one on Hyperion, with the British polymath Stephen Hough. The notion of listening in a single setting to these leisurely, contemplative pieces—twenty or twenty-one in all, depending on how you count—might have struck Chopin as bizarre. Although he assembled sets of nocturnes, preludes, waltzes, mazurkas, and so on, his legendarily bewitching recitals intermingled selections from various categories, and also incorporated works by other composers. Chopin pianists tend to follow that practice today, in the interest of cultivating contrast; live traversals of the entire set of Nocturnes are rare. In the more intimate sphere of home listening, however, the idea of spending a couple of hours in this realm is by no means strange, and the experience gathers its own dream logic.
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Norman Lebrecht launches a biting criticism of the new AI Beethoven:
The attempt to manufacture a tenth Beethoven symphony by means of Artificial Intelligence has proved about as intelligent as cloning Albert Einstein out of paper from his wastebasket.
The outcome, 21 minutes long, is performed on YouTube by the Beethoven Orchestra of Bonn. It welds fragments of a discarded project onto bits of other symphonies in a manner so uninspiring that it reduces Beethoven to the level of a Hummel. The work’s opening, a student-essay paraphrase of the fifth symphony, is all you need to hear.
The rest just gets worse. What possessed the brains of Bonn to think they could create a Beethoven symphony ab virtually nihilo? Probably the thought that fellow-necrophiles had done such things before.
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Here is a fairly long discussion of recent events at the Seattle Symphony: Seattle Symphony Update: A Cautionary Tale? I really wanted to put up a pithy quote for you, but after reading the whole thing I can't find one! It is a complex situation with the music director resigning making some serious allegations, but the writer seems to have failed to come up with what really went on. Still, worth reading to get a sense of the challenges facing orchestras today.
The Twitterverse has been in an uproar this week after a US-based composer (Spencer Arias) shared a letter he received from an alleged organization called, “Society for the Preservation of Western Music” (SPWM).
I mean, who could possibly want to preserve Western Music? Unless they meant "Country and Western"?
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I don't really do obituaries which is why I haven't mentioned the passing of Terry Teachout, but this is interesting:
The critic and dramatist Terry Teachout had many friends, so news of his death at age 65 on January 13 spread very quickly. I heard about it that afternoon, shortly after listening to the episode of the podcast Know Your Enemy dealing with the recent death of another prominent writer: Joan Didion. The podcast and Teachout’s death became quickly intertwined in my mind not just because of the coincidence of timing. Didion and Teachout were both exemplars of a kind of literate and skeptical cultural conservatism that with their deaths now seems a preciously rare commodity. The United States in 2022 is awash in conservatives trying to ignite a culture war, but now there aren’t many conservatives engaged in genuine cultural conversation and debate.
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I don't often get over to the Journal of the American Musicological Society of which I used to be a member, though I should. But I found this review of a recent collection of essays by Richard Taruskin rather perplexing: Cursed Questions: On Music and Its Social Practices, by Richard Taruskin. Perplexing why? Because it seems to have almost nothing to do with any of the things discussed in the essays. Instead we are treated to a meandering discussion of re-reading. I did my own post on the collection a year and a half ago here: All Kinds of Brows and to my surprise received a comment from Dr. Taruskin himself.
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Here is Stephen Hough with possibly the most famous of the Chopin Nocturnes:
Here is Thomas Dausgaard conducting the Seattle Symphony in the Dvořák: Symphony No. 8, Allegro con brio:
And finally, Anton Webern's orchestration of the six-part ricercare from The Musical Offering by J. S. Bach, discussed in one of the essays from the Taruskin collection. Bach from an unusual perspective.
You see this more and more in high-end homes these days. One popular choice is to combine things like African art objects with African musical instruments like the mbira. Or Mexican artisanal art with mariachi instruments. In the photo above the reminiscence is to American popular music of several decades ago. Maybe 80 years from now a home design might feature autotune somehow.
Here is how one designer describes the technique:
“You don’t have to necessarily hang it all on a wall. Leaning an instrument like a cello in a corner against the wall is a really cool way to display it. Give an instrument like a cello its own moment next to an accent chair, lamp and textured rug. You can even casually place a smaller instrument, like a clarinet on an adjacent coffee table. Use instruments as decor and as a functional piece works, too. You can literally take the guitar right off the wall and play it. There’s a level of functionality that’s also really nice about this. Display books about music or your favorite musicians. You could also fill a coffee table that has a transparent opening with guitar picks, records and sheet music. You don’t want to take it too far where it’s cheesy though. You want it to feel effortless if it’s a home where someone is very into music.”
It all looks a bit weird to me because I actually grew up in a home stuffed with musical instruments. Between when I was eight years old and fifteen years old our very modest home contained an upright piano, a couple of violins, a vintage four-string banjo (that I still have), a steel string guitar, a mandolin, an octophone (a double-strung instrument vaguely like an overgrown ukulele), a slide whistle and probably a few I have forgotten. Later on when I got into music we added another steel string guitar, a nylon string guitar, an electric bass and amplifier and a microphone and mike-stand. And this was in a tiny two-bedroom bungalow of no more than 800 square feet. Here is what is weird to me: all our instruments were always kept in their cases to prevent damage and dust. Musical instruments easily get dusty and because of the strings and all those interstices, they are darn hard to dust. Plus, leaning a cello into a corner? Really?
So I look at these instruments just hanging on the wall and I think, doesn't anyone play them and take care of them? Guitars are like horses, you have to take care of them and, especially in winter and dry climates, keep them humidified so they don't crack.
But yeah, sure, they look cool. But they sound even cooler. This is me playing Asturias by Isaac Albéniz:
If you listen to a lot of different kinds of music you might notice that there are two fundamental elements. This is on an abstract level, not a concrete one. The two elements are syntax and semantics, both words coming from ancient Greek. So do the words melody, harmony and rhythm, by the way!
Syntax is the way things are put together. In language it is the way sentences are constructed and the subject of grammar. Semantics is the meaning of the words and sentences. In music this distinction is often referred to as form vs content, but I want to get away a bit from that historical approach.
I see composers as falling into roughly three groups: the syntax composers, the semantics composers and the ones who manage to balance them both. For example, a composer like Steve Reich, in his earlier works, was a purely syntactical composer. Drumming is about nothing more than rhythm, downbeat, hemiola and phasing which is just the incremental shifting of rhythmic patterns. There is literally NO semantic content. Early Philip Glass is similar, for example his Music in 12 Parts has no extra-musical content but is just about patterns and pitches. But we also have earlier examples. Bach's Art of Fugue is a purely syntactical piece as is his Well-Tempered Clavier and the two and three-part inventions.
The program music of the 19th century starting with Hector Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique was an attempt to focus on the content rather than the form, color rather than contour in visual art terms. French composers, starting in the 17th century, made rather a specialty of making pieces about their extra-musical content. Of course, once you integrate referentiality into a piece of music then that becomes part of the music. There are innumerable examples from the French clavecinistes in which they fill conventional forms like the rondeau with all sorts of referential content. The tombeau, for example, is nothing but an allemande with special reference to the death of someone.
Then there are composers who manage a real synthesis of form and content. Bach is a great example of this as well in his cantatas, passions, masses and so on. Haydn is another good example. In many of his symphonies and string quartets, which are primarily syntactical forms, i.e. "pure" music, he infuses referential content. Some examples: the "Farewell" Symphony, the "Rider" String Quartet and so on. In Beethoven there have been many efforts to uncover or elaborate on referentiality in the symphonies and piano sonatas, some of them encouraged by Beethoven himself. The association of the Symphony No. 3 with Napoleon and the nicknames attached to some piano sonatas like the "Tempest" or "Hammerklavier" are other examples. But in all of these works, the syntax is equally involved, it is not a question of merely dumping content into a conventional form. That is why I refer to these works as syntheses.
Mind you, there are lots of examples of pieces that have such an evocative atmosphere that they have acquired a nickname that is not related to anything the composer did. The "Moonlight" Sonata of Beethoven had no associations with moonlight in Beethoven's mind.
These categories survive in the music of the present day, Caroline Shaw, for example, uses a lot of traditional musical syntax in constructing new pieces with often ambiguous titles: Boris Kerner for cello and percussion, for example, uses a very traditional harmonic and melodic syntax combined with contrasting percussion. Become Ocean by John Luther Adams is the opposite in that the referential atmosphere predominates and it is difficult to discern any traditional syntax.
There is a kind of progression from the mind of the composer to the mind of the ultimate listener. The composer often thinks in terms of syntax because that has a lot to do with how the music is written. The listener however takes the opposite approach and asks themselves "what does this music mean to me?"
Interestingly, jazz also seems to have these two fundamental elements. There are lots of referential pieces that draw on popular song forms like Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" and many other examples, but there are more purely syntactical pieces like "So What" by Miles Davis or "Giant Steps" by John Coltrane. In popular music, however, the purely syntactical seems not to exist outside rare examples like Deep Purple's Concerto for Group and Orchestra.
Here is the Tombeau sur la mort de M. Comte de Logy by Sylvius Leopold Weiss played by lutenist Edin Karamazov.
This is a postscript to my post the other day on music and business. Somewhere I was saying I wish we had some hard data and lo and behold Ted Gioia shared this table on his blog that a reader sent:
You probably have to click on it to see the numbers. But what knocks me over is that classical is up pretty substantially while pop contemporary is way down. Of course I imagine classical is coming up from a pretty low share, but still...
The cover of the liner notes booklet with Lea Desandre showing a bit more flexibility than most classical singers
Speaking of singers, I see that Adele's planned Las Vegas residency has collapsed in a welter of recriminations and emotional sob-fests. So it is refreshing to turn to a very different singer, the young Lea Desandre who is so new on the scene that her Wikipedia page consists of one line of text! Here is a longer article on her from Opéra magazine, but in French. We don't learn her age from that article, just that she studied dance when she was young before switching to voice.
There seems to be a whole new generation of French musicians coming on the scene. Apart from Lea Desandre, they include the superb harpsichordist Jean Rondeau that I have mentioned a lot here, plus the equally superb lutenist Thomas Dunford whom I have also mentioned several times. I just received yesterday Lea Desandre's new CD Amazone, which also features those other two artists as well as the more seasoned performers Cecilia Bartoli, Véronique Gens and William Christie. The album is released by Erato and I observe that I haven't purchased a disc from them for quite some time.
The theme of the album is in the title Amazone and fifteen out of the twenty-five tracks are world premiere recordings serving notice that we are still far from having exhausted the enormous fund of music from the pre-Bach eras.
I rather grew up with the "early music movement" as it used to be called: people like harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt and conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt were influential figures in my musical development. Oddly, their thoughts on music I took as being as profound and insightful as the compositional innovations of people like Steve Reich. Essays by Harnoncourt and Reich both occupied space on my bookshelf. So I do not see it as anything strange that one aspect of a creative musical revival should take the form of a recording of 17th and 18th century music. In a note contained in the album Lea Desandre describes the project as "a hymn to the women who have guided me ... a hymn to Mother Nature ... the poetic, universal and timeless message of a sentimental and emotional journey."
The Amazons were, of course, the mythical race of women warriors and the producers were delighted to discover a substantial repertoire from the 17th to the 19th centuries with Amazon characters and themes. Thomas Dunford's ensemble Jupiter specializes in the Baroque so this disc contains music from the second half of the 17th century and the first quarter of the 18th century.
Now to the music. The CD contains a rich selection of arias and duets from Amazon themed operas by French, Italian and one German composer. More than one opera is named after Mitilene the notional first queen of the Amazons (Marthésie in French). There are also a few sinfonias from operas for the instrumental ensemble as well as a duet with Thomas Dunford and William Christie (theorbo and harpsichord) and an improvisation and a solo by Jean Rondeau (harpsichord), L'Amazône from the 10th Ordre of François Couperin, of course.
Lea Desandre is well up to the challenge of this music. She has the clarity and agility to negotiate the very speedy and complex ornamented passages in the more warlike arias as well as the brilliance of tone in the upper register. I was surprised at how rich and dark her low register could be. A young singer, I'm sure she has room to grow as the voice develops. Cecilia Bartoli and Véronique Gens do an excellent job in the duets. The instrumental group (two violins, viola, cello, two double basses, flute and two percussionists with theorbo, organ and harpsichord) are really excellent under the direction of Thomas Dunford.
The production of the album itself is lovely: it comes in a slim cardboard box with a substantial booklet with photos of the artists, liner notes and all the lyrics in German, Italian, French and English.
Given recent cultural events I was amused to read the opening lyrics of the first aria "Non posso far" by Francesco Provenzale (1624 - 1704). In translation they read:
I cannot help but burst into laughter
to see these women transformed into men
and unable to tear themselves away from battle.
Chosen intentionally?
Excerpts (I suppose we call them "trailers" now) from the album have been up on YouTube for months, so let's listen to one of them. This is the duet with Cecilia Bartoli "Io piango/Io peno" from the opera Mitilene, regina delle amazzoni (1707) by Giuseepe de Bottis (1678 - 1753), so, composed when he was twenty-nine.
The New York Times has an article on a new recording of C. P. E Bach by Marc-André Hamelin:
C.P.E. Bach was a prolific composer and an important pedagogue, a significant influence on Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. (Hamelin’s new album is a welcome companion to the three volumes of solo Haydn that he set down, with ideal panache, a decade and more ago on the Hyperion label.) But if he was more widely appreciated than his father well into the 19th century, that has certainly not been the case more recently.
I have a box of C. P. E. (sometimes called the "Berlin" Bach) that is a delight. His symphonies and concertos are often surprising in their unusual phrasing and harmonies. The path from the late Baroque to the early Classical style took two roads, the southern one with Haydn and the northern one with C. P. E. Bach.
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Slipped Disc has a piece on Angelo Gilardino whose passing was mentioned in a comment here: ITALY’S ‘HEIR TO SEGOVIA’ DIES AT 80. Of course Gilardino, a very fine composer for guitar, was not really Segovia's Italian heir, that honor belongs to Oscar Ghiglia. However, the Slipped Disc item does have three YouTube clips of his music.
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Over at Musicology Now an item titled Music Writing Reconceived seems to imply that they are interested in every kind of music except the classical canon. Hmmm... It seems the American Musicological Society has lost its way.
The people running the music industry have lost confidence in new music. They won’t admit it publicly—that would be like the priests of Jupiter and Apollo in ancient Rome admitting that their gods are dead. Even if they know it’s true, their job titles won’t allow such a humble and abject confession. Yet that is exactly what’s happening in the music business. The moguls have lost their faith in the redemptive and life-changing power of new music—how sad is that? Of course, the decision-makers need to pretend that they still believe in the future of their business, and want to discover the next revolutionary talent—but that’s not what they really think. Their actions speak much louder than their empty words.
A friend of mine once said that music has been in constant decline since 1733 (the death of François Couperin). Well, maybe he was right. The one thing that Ted does not mention is that popular music has been turned into an industry of mass production with less and less creativity and real character. Might that have something to do with it?
It is impossible to talk seriously about the fate of Germany in the twentieth century without reference to Thomas Mann.
In America, however, one can coast through a liberal-arts education without having to deal with Mann. General readers are understandably hesitant to plunge into the Hanseatic decadence of “Buddenbrooks” or the sanatorium symposia of “The Magic Mountain,” never mind the musicological diabolism of “Doctor Faustus” or the Biblical mythography of “Joseph and His Brothers.”
Doctor Faustus is one of the most important novels ever written about music composition and it made a large impact on me when I read it decades ago. A copy sits on my shelf and every year I promise myself that I will re-read it.
In my own life time, I have watched as so-called cornerstones of twentieth century repertoire have been superseded, much to my dismay. When I was a presenter of string quartet concerts in the second half of the 20th century, for example, it was assumed that I would cycle through all six of the string quartets of Béla Bartók over the course of several seasons, only to repeat the cycle when it was completed. These works were considered masterpieces in the tradition of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven string quartets. Today, Dmitri Shostakovich’s quartets have largely replaced Bartók’s as a core component of that period’s string quartet masterpieces. Similarly, today, one is far less likely to find seminal twelve-tone compositions from the twentieth century—so prevalent a generation ago—on concert programs as works by women composers and composers of color have come to be much more common, almost all written in very different styles.
Of course tastes are constantly changing and as they do they offer us two lovely opportunities: to discover new repertoire and to revive older repertoire that has been recently neglected. Hence the interest in C. P. E. Bach.
When the building opened it was mired in controversy. More than six years late, it was many hundreds of millions of euros over budget – costs had risen tenfold, taking the final bill to €866m, of which €789m came from the city. None denied its architectural splendours, but had its long and agonising birth ensured that it was toxic, an eye-wateringly expensive white elephant funded by public money, programming classical music concerts for an elite; or would Hamburgers take it to their hearts and learn to love this modernist marvel perched on the banks of the Elbe?
The answer seems to be a resounding vote for the latter. With “Elphi”, as it is affectionately known, the city has a new centre of gravity. More than three million concert-goers to date have visited; concert audiences in the city have tripled and subscription concert-series subscribers have quadrupled. And, 80% of these audiences are from Hamburg itself. Meanwhile, it’s estimated that by spring of this year, 15 million will have visited the Plaza, the viewing platform 37 metres above ground level.
This tends to confirm my belief that while classical music may be suffering in North America, it is hale and healthy in Europe.
Decolonising Shakespeare, with its historic links to English national identity, language and culture is a particularly knotty challenge. Shakespeare was writing in a country that had begun to trade in slaves just two years before his birth, and the racist attitudes that enabled slavery to flourish can be seen in many of his plays. However, Shakespeare remains central to many national education systems around the world, including nations with historic colonial links to Britain.
The paragraph begins with a grammatical howler: it is not the decolonising of Shakespeare that has historic links, it is Shakespeare himself. Isn't the project one of simply denying or erasing simple historic truth? How ironic that those that complain about how some artists's roles have been concealed or "erased" now are attempting to do the same to Shakespeare.
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We really have to start with C. P. E. Bach, don't we? Here is a little teaser from the Hamelin album:
And here are two of Gilardino's Studi di Virtuosità e di Trascendenza played by Cristiano Porqueddu:
They do make the Villa-Lobos sound a bit rudimentary, don't they? Next, a really fine performance of the String Quartet No. 4 by Bartók from the Quatuor Ebène.
I am including a link to a new essay by Ted Gioia in the Friday Miscellanea tomorrow, but there is one phrase from it, the last one in fact, that I want to just muse on for a bit.
music is too powerful for them to kill
He says this because he sees a grass-roots music revolution turning things upside down the way rock 'n' roll did in the mid-50s. Well, maybe, but back then the music business was a tiny fraction of what it is today so the people running it were proportionally less powerful. Now it is a large industry and more invulnerable to revolution, aesthetic revolution at least!
But let's have a look at the sentiment Ted expresses: music is too powerful for them to kill. The underlying assumptions are interesting. Music has some kind of Platonic Form that has an aesthetic power above the mere instances of it in the world. I might even like to believe that! But I don't think that is the actual question here. It is not music that is being put into a mindless algorithm box: it is rather people's tastes. If you feed people the same thing over and over, they will have no taste for anything different and will even reject it as "bad." In the past there was enough regional variation that music was more of a cottage industry. Every group of producers followed their own methods and formulas like traditional cheesemakers in France. But now we have a globalized homogeneity that is fed to the whole world. That is a pretty powerful creator of musical taste.
But I very much would like to believe that musical revolution is possible. But wait, we had one just fifty years ago. No, I'm not talking about The Beatles, though there is an argument to be made there. I am referring to the so-called minimalist music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass which very much overturned the maximal complexity model of the post-war avant-garde. But this revolution only caused tiny ripples in the music business and hardly affected the commercial models at all.
"Music" --that is, some ideal form of music, may be too powerful for them to kill, but they can certainly keep it locked up in a closet somewhere so it doesn't upset the commercial applecart.
Our local chamber music society is struggling back to offering a normal concert season in the face of considerable difficulties. Mexico is blessed with quite low levels of infection so it is possible to stage concerts indoors though we still have to observe "social distancing" which means that the revenues from ticket sales are half what they should be. Patrons are making up the difference. Yesterday I attended a very fine concert given by New Zealand-born violinist Geneva Lewis who is all of twenty-two years old. She was playing a three-hundred-year-old violin built by Stradivarius. In fact, the very same instrument owned by Joseph Joaquim, the great 19th century virtuoso for whom Brahms wrote his violin concerto--premiered on this very instrument! Lewis was accompanied by the very able Spanish/Dutch pianist Albert Cano Smit.
The whole program was designed as a homage to Joaquim with pieces written for him, by him or by his friends and included works by Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. The exception was the Ciaccona from the 2nd Violin Partita by J. S. Bach, included because it was a concert favorite of Joaquim's. After the concert I chatted with the artists and we talked about how hard it is to program that piece. It is certainly the greatest piece ever written for violin and indeed one of the greatest pieces of all time. It tends to overshadow everything else on the program. Lewis ended the first half with it, a good choice. I told her about a program I shared with a violinist many years ago in which, due to a shortage of material, we decided that we would each play a solo. When I asked my colleague what he was going to play he casually announced "the Chaconne." Agh! So what could I possibly play!!
The sound of the 1714 Stradivarius, nicknamed the "Joachim" Stradivarius in honor of its most famous player, is velvety, but capable of both haunting pianissimos and biting fortes. My colleague played a Guarnerius which has perhaps a bit warmer sound.
The program ended with the 3rd Sonata for violin and piano, op. 108 by Brahms, a very fine piece, but not quite on the same level as the Chaconne. Oh yes, both the French version and the Italian version of the name are used. The chaconne is a dance form based on a chord progression reportedly originating in Mexico and coming to light in Spain in the 16th century as a somewhat lascivious dance. By Bach's time it had become a slow and dignified form. Bach's "ciaccona" dwarfs the other movements in the partita and indeed is often claimed to be the longest (at around fifteen minutes) single movement written in the whole Baroque period. It consists of 354 measures varying an eight-measure harmonic progression. It uses a wide variety of violin techniques including extensive arpeggio passages. There is a sizable section in the middle in D major, but most of the piece is in D minor.
I haven't said much about the performance, have I? It was very fine, both technically and musically. For a young virtuoso Geneva Lewis shows a great deal of musical maturity. We can expect great things from her in the future.
Here is a clip of the 2nd Sonata for Violin and Piano by Brahms with Lewis and pianist Dina Vainshtein.
Europe is being ravaged by the pandemic and in response Salzburg is canceling its Mozart Week, held every year since 1956.
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An economist weighs in on Herbert von Karajan and explains why he was so able to dominate musical life then and why that would not likely be possible now.
1. In that time the central European classical music canon was far more dominant than it is today (later this month the NSO is doing Beethoven with William Grant Still, for instance). That made the dominance of a few figures such as von Karajan and Klemperer, who specialized in that repertoire, far more possible. In America, Germanic culture was more influential as well.
2. There was overall less conducting talent around at the time. Yes, I know the beloved status of your few favorites from back then, and their unique styles, but conductor #30 today, in terms of quality, is far better than before. Today it is harder for anyone to stand out.
3. The authoritarian and possibly abusive management style of von Karajan was far more acceptable back then. Without that style, he could not have honed such a unique sound.
4. Back then conductors actually could sell classical LPs and bring in revenue. This helped enable many of von Karajan’s projects, including costly operas and symphonic cycles. Whether he would have done as well on YouTube, or other more contemporary media, is very much an open question, but probably not. He was very much a “whole package” sort of musical star.
4b. Radio really mattered too. His distant and forbidding but legendary personal style worked well in that medium, and the “always forward impetus whiplash” sonics cut through the poor sound quality.
5. I grew up with von Karajan’s recordings in so many parts of the repertoire, but how many really have held up? His Bruckner’s 8th and Mahler’s 9th are incredible. His Cosi is amazing, though too rigidly controlled for my taste. His Verdi Aida. A big thumbs up to his Mozart #40 and #41. But the Wagner I don’t listen to any more. Never loved his Beethoven cycle. Rarely is he the conductor in my favorite concerti performances, as he tended to blunt the styles of his accompanying soloists. Would I ever prefer him for Haydn, or for French music? No. Definitely some Strauss (the conductor most suited to him?), or perhaps his Tristan? I feel I could get 85% of his value with maybe five recordings? In a way that is quite impressive, but it does put matters in perspective.
6. He was a Nazi, and perhaps that would go over differently today.
A retired professor in Darwin, Australia, claims he has proof that Mozart stole music from his sister Nannerl in two of his violin concertos.
The former conductor of the Darwin Symphony Orchestra told the national broadcaster ABC that the handwriting is quite different on two concertos out of the five.
Less excitable voices suggest that Nannerl might have copied out the scores for her brother.
There is no other surviving evidence that she was capable of composing at this level.
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And I have another link to a post by the music-loving economist Tyler Cowen: Why has classical music declined? Is this a trick question? Actually it is a response to a comment by one of his readers:
In general perception, why are there no achievements in classical music that rival a Mozart, Bach, Beethoven etc. that were created in say the last 50 years?
Is it an exhaustion of what’s possible? Are all great motifs already discovered?
Or will we in another 50 or 100 years admire a 1900’s composer at the same level as a Mozart or Beethoven?
Or was it something unique in that era ( say 1800’s) which was conducive to the discovery of great compositions? Patronage? Lack of distraction?
Before looking at Tyler Cowen's response, here is what I would say: why do you think classical music has declined? As far as I can tell there are lots of composers that are of the first rank, creatively. It is hard to tell who they are in the last couple of decades because we don't have enough distance. But if we go back fifty to a hundred years I have no hesitation in saying that composers like Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Bartok are certainly composers as great as Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. Now for Mr. Cowen's response:
1. The advent of musical recording favored musical forms that allow for the direct communication of personality. Mozart is mediated by sheet music, but the Rolling Stones are on record and the radio and now streaming. You actually get “Mick Jagger,” and most listeners prefer this to a bunch of quarter notes. So a lot of energy left the forms of music that are communicated through more abstract means, such as musical notation, and leapt into personality-specific musics.
1b. Eras have aesthetic centers of gravity. So pushing a lot of talent in one direction does discourage some other directions from developing fully. Dylan didn’t just pull people into folk, he pulled them away from trying to be the next Pat Boone.
2. Electrification favored a variety of musical styles that are not “classical” or even “contemporary classical,” with apologies to Glenn Branca.
3. The two World Wars ripped out the birthplaces of so much wonderful European culture. It is not only classical music that suffered, but also European science, letters, entrepreneurship, and much more.
4. It is tough to top Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc., so eventually creators struck out in new directions. And precisely because of the less abstract, more personality-laden nature of popular music, it is harder to have a very long career and attain the status of a true titan. The Rolling Stones ran out of steam forty (?) years ago, but Bach could have kept on writing fugues, had he lived longer. More recent musical times thus have many creators who are smaller in overall stature, even though the total of wonderful music has stayed very high.
5. Contemporary classical music (NB: not the best term, for one thing much of it is no longer contemporary) is much better than most people realize. Much of it is designed for peers, and intended to be experienced live. In the last decade I saw performances of Glass’s Satyagraha, Golijov’s St. Marc Passion, Boulez’s Le Marteau (at IRCAM), and Stockhausen’s Mantra, and it was all pretty amazing. I doubt if those same pieces are very effective on streaming. It may be unfortunate, but due to incentives emanating from peers, most non-peer listeners do not have the proper dimensionality of listening experience to proper appreciate those compositions. To be clear, for the most part I don’t either, not living down here in northern Virginia, but at times I can overcome this (mostly through travel) and in any case I am aware of the phenomenon. For these same reasons, it is wrong to think those works will have significantly higher reputations 50 or 100 years from now — some of them are already fairly old!
Okaaay, well that was certainly a more complicated answer.
Despite his locally renowned reputation, [my first music teacher's] teaching style didn’t work well for me. I’ll never forget one thing that he said to me incessantly: “If you can imagine yourself doing anything else besides clarinet, do that instead.” He was speaking of how to make a decision about my career path, and I found his perspective deeply disturbing.
Yeah, that can mess you up!
I once attended a summer music institute in high school and befriended a fellow clarinetist who told me on more than one occasion, “I make it as a professional musician or my life is over.” He might sound melodramatic, but I always felt his statement captured exactly how high the stakes felt.
It would have been better if someone had just run the odds for him.
To fellow musicians considering a career change—you are not alone. It’s okay to move on, even if you’re a great musician. Find a friend who will talk this through with you. Trust that the people who love you want you to be happy, no matter what. It’s not easy, and people will question you, but it’s possible to find a happier and more fulfilled version of you on the other side of a career in classical music.
Ok, but I want you all to know that I didn't quit music, I just went on strike as a performing musician. I'm holding out for higher pay and better working conditions.
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Let's find some suitable envois. How about Karajan's Bruckner Symphony No. 8:
And Hilary Hahn playing the Mozart Violin Concerto No. 3:
Finally, Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, a piece that neither Mozart nor Bach nor Beethoven could have written:
When I was quite young I did a very smart thing and went to Spain for a year to study guitar. At the time, there were almost no qualified classical guitar teachers in Canada. I had been studying with one of them in Vancouver and one day he told me I should study with his teacher in Alicante, Spain, José Tomás. While there I met a terrific Japanese guitarist, Masahiro Umemoto, who won the competition that year. There was quite an international community of guitar students around Maestro Tomás including ones from Canada, the US, Japan, the Philippines, Finland, Belgium, the UK, Peru, Mexico and other places. I later realized that I had been lucky enough to be in the very best place on earth to study guitar at that moment in time. I just noticed that Masahiro has a YouTube channel. I encourage you to go have a listen.
I usually avoid movies with the theme of music, classical music in particular--with the exception, of course, of Amadeus. I just can't quite adapt myself to seeing Gary Oldman in the role of Beethoven though I loved him in The Professional and The Fifth Element. Last night, however, I watched a music-themed movie with some enjoyment: Yesterday on Netflix. If you haven't seen it already, without giving too much away, a strange power failure shuts down all civilization for twelve seconds during which a young musician, cycling in the dark, runs into a bus and mashes up his face. Recovering in the hospital, he starts to notice something odd: no-one seems to have heard of The Beatles nor recognizes any of their songs. Coke also seems to have disappeared from the culture as well as a couple of other things.
The big plus for our young musician, a failed folk-singer, is that since he is the only one who remembers the songs (with a couple of exceptions I will not share), he can pretend that they are his songs and achieve great fame. Mind you, he does have some doubts, but the lure of fame is hard to resist.
There are lots of clever twists and a lovely satire of the fame-development machine that make the unfolding of the story quite fun. There is also an excellent plot surprise towards the end that I won't reveal. But while the movie is clever, it is founded on some romantic themes that some might find hackneyed but others might find authentic. Love or career is the fundamental tension and well, yes, this can be a significant element in many musician's lives. I suppose what the movie leaves out is that for many musicians, they don't really have a choice--music rather takes over their lives for better or worse.
I'm struggling to get a new piece off the ground so, not too many postings this week. Let's start off with a new clip from Rick Beato in which he reviews the ten songs nominated for Song of the Year for the Grammies.
Well, yeah, it is nice to hear some informed criticism. I think that, as in recent movies, the overuse of technology is simply destructive to good aesthetic values. Oh, and songs written by committee.
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I have something of an unusual distinction: I may have the YouTube channel with the least subscribers ever: two (2). I actually didn't set this up. It comes from a compilation album released years ago by a Toronto record company (violating my copyright, by the way). Here is one of the three tracks on the channel, all from the album. This is En los Trigales by Joaquin Rodrigo. Of course, Blogger won't embed.
In the past, the great orchestral music composers like Beethoven were titans of culture. Today, individuals with skills at complex orchestral music such as John Williams are still much in demand to score films.
Movies are, more or less, the Total Art dreamt of by Wagner. On the other hand, he would have been surprised that the composer is a servant, typically called in late in the process to augment the existing work.
Composing the music for movies is a really good job. Still, it’s paid work rather than being the boss. In contrast, it’s hard to imagine Mozart, Verdi, or Wagner deferring to their librettists or the directors of their operas.
In opera, the composer is The Man. But in movies he is not.
It seems that the person, director, actor, producer, who brought in the money, is the one who calls the shots. Nowadays we have a number of billionaire musicians so I can see one of them getting involved. We already have an example: Kanye West directed his own 34 minute film of Runaway using tracks from his album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
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Alex Ross is doing a piece on ecological tourism this week, but economist Tyler Cowen had one a few years ago on How to get started with opera:
First I assume we are talking about recorded opera (most opera on DVD bores me, too static, though many swear by it), but of course go live when you can. My core view is that people "do well" with culture when they feel they are in control, and tune out otherwise. So pick one area and master it, or at least get intrigued, rather than trying to survey all of opera. Those "introductory" books are probably counterproductive, if only because they let you know how much ground there is to cover. Who could possibly master five different recordings of Parsifal?
That's actually pretty good advice and corresponds with my experience. I was a late-comer to opera, at least as a fan. It wasn't until I heard a couple of major European productions that I really got into it.
The Ingmar Bergman film of Magic Flute is perhaps the single most inspiring introduction to opera, even if they are singing in Swedish. It is cinematic in conception, rather than a mere film of a performance, thus avoiding the DVD problem.
I first saw this in Montreal in Swedish with French sub-titles, but yes, great film of a great opera.
However, for all of its darkness, the pandemic has allowed us to reimagine what our musical world could look like if we start from scratch. Throughout the crisis, the industry has begun to construct a new narrative shaped to accommodate great artistic expression for everyone. As we rebuild our society and our economy, I’m convinced, more than ever, that participation in music is part of the solution for national recovery. Participating in musical activity sustains us through the most perplexing and difficult moments of our lives.
I also think that, in order to avoid complaints that this is "elitist" we also rethink music as a component of education. Apart from the usual benefits, it would go a long way to developing a larger audience for classical music.
Anyone dedicated to a career in the arts is a risk-taker used to inconsistent income but the damage COVID has done, particularly in the performing arts, is without precedent; this is the fourth time in two years that arts workers have had to shelve their careers. The federal income supports expired at year’s end and there is no word yet whether they will be reinstated; in December, the federal government did announce the $60-million Canada Performing Arts Workers Resilience Fund for 2022-23 but it will not be available until the spring. Many gig and contract workers have simply switched to other jobs, while newcomers are unlikely to join such precarious fields. Shuttered institutions will survive and return – although the federal payroll subsidy that kept many afloat expired in October – but individual artists will abandon the arts, depriving Canada of their creativity.
We may even want to rethink how much liberty we are willing to give up in the face of the growing technological tools available to governments and administrators and whether they possess the understanding to use them wisely.
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I think the kindest thing you can say about this aesthetic train-wreck is that it was mercifully brief:
Because the more you know about Shaw’s work and the trajectory of her career, the more intimidating she seems. She became, at the age of 30, the youngest person to win the Pulitzer prize for music (2013, Partita for Eight Voices). She has filled the decade since winning her Pulitzer by continuing to perform as a violinist and vocalist, all the while composing for orchestras, chamber ensembles, and soloists, often collaborating as a performer with those for whom she composes—in the classical realm but further afield as well, with such artists as Kanye West, Nas, The National, and at least one member of Arcade Fire. And she has written film scores. And won two Grammys. And even appeared, as herself, in season four of the Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle.
I've found myself listening to several pieces for string quartet by Caroline Shaw recently--and enjoying them! So I will probably devote a post to her in the near future.
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For our envois today, let's start with a piece by Caroline Shaw:
And an excerpt from the Bergman Magic Flute:
Here is a new clip from Wigmore Hall. Ning Feng plays the Gavotte en rondeau from the E major violin partita as an encore to his October recital.
