Today's Recital

Here is something you rarely see--or wait, there is a strong possibility this is something you never see! A whole recital of lieder by C. P. E. Bach? Yeah, I know! Who even knew he wrote lieder. But the folks at Wigmore Hall continue to bring us lots of interesting stuff. This is Dorothee Mields, soprano with Tobias Koch, fortepiano.

 

The Most Bizarre Musical Category: "Classical"

The most embarrassing moment, for some composers at least, is when they have to answer the question: "what kind of music do you write?" It is embarrassing for so many reasons: first, because if you had any public profile at all the question would not need to be asked; it is embarrassing because you don't know how to answer it in fewer than 1,000 words; it is embarrassing because if this were after a concert of your music the question would also be unnecessary; but most of all, it is embarrassing because we really don't have a suitable name for what we do.

It sounds weird saying you write "classical music" because, as Frank Zappa pointed out, that was all written by dead white guys in wigs. I usually default to "contemporary classical" but that just has the wrong resonances and I don't really know what it means. "Classical music" as a genre term is hopelessly vague and general. What comes to mind is either Beethoven V or Mozart Eine Kleine and neither is anything like what I write. A popular term used to be "new music" but I think the juggernaut of commercial pop music has run that one over.

I think the truth is that classical music, especially that being composed today, is either a kind of fringe category of experimental pop music or it is simply an embarrassment to the musical world and probably racist and sexist. This is likely because the only way to really understand the category "classical" is through aesthetics and judgements of quality and we don't do that any more. From the perspective of the music business it is embarrassing that classical music even exists as its earnings are shamefully tiny. It seems like an archaic holdover from another era when it mattered. Ok, yeah, it is still something of a tourist attraction in Europe, like beer fests and dirndls, but as a viable and dynamic musical genre? Probably not.

And contemporary classical? Embarrassingly tiny earnings even compared to classical generally. Really, there is no point in even bothering with any of it. So, it makes perfect sense to start shoehorning in experimental pop and jazz pieces into the "classical category" at the Grammys. It is probably just a matter of time before the category is dropped altogether, after all it has no commercial importance.

Mind you, if you want to understand music from an historical and aesthetic point of view, well that is a whole other story. The truth is that "classical" music just does not fit into the modern commercial music categories.

The True Nature of Classical Music

That whole self-deprecating exercise was to show, I hope, that the usual approaches, trying to describe the qualities of classical music, trying to fit it into contemporary commercial music categories, defining it by the fact of notation and so on, really miss the mark. What classical music is, is a tradition and the only real function of the name is to alert us to the historical continuity of the tradition. We could call it art music or concert music or whatever, as long as we stipulate that whatever term we use it is simply a marker to refer to the music that originated in Western Europe during the dark ages in the form of Gregorian and other forms of chant and was elaborately developed through notation, counterpoint, harmony, voice-leading and many other devices, also mainly in Western Europe from the 12th century especially, and continues to this day.

Each composer creates or invents their own approach to the tradition, taking part of it, rejecting other parts, developing certain aspects and neglecting others. John Cage, for example, rejected just about the entire content of the tradition, and that was his relationship to the tradition. Steve Reich took one dimension of the tradition and developed it almost exclusively. Composers in the tradition can also absorb influences from outside the tradition: Bartók folk music of central and eastern Europe, Stravinsky Russian folk traditions, Haydn Hungarian folk musics, Steve Reich again, African drumming structures, Debussy Asian traditions. Someone like Toru Takemitsu is a fascinating blend of traditions: Japanese traditional music, obviously, but also American jazz and European classical traditions.

There is a great deal of music, probably most music created today, that really does not come from this tradition, essentially ignores this tradition, which is fine. But that music should not be called "classical music" and no disrespect intended. It just owes its allegiance to other traditions. Popular music around the world has taken certain elements from the classical tradition, but it has altered them to the extent that it is safe to say that nothing is owed now to that particular tradition.

The great clanging dissonance comes from trying to fit classical music into modern commercial categories. If classical music has commercial or economic dimensions, and certainly in some places it does, the Salzburg Tourist Bureau, for example, that is really incidental to its actual nature and character.

So please, let's just drop the classical category from the Grammys entirely and if necessary, set up a separate institution just for it.

Here is a performance that is an excellent demonstration of classical music best understood. The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra with Verklärte Nacht by Arnold Schoenberg.

Friday Miscellanea

Last week the New York Times had an article on an upcoming premiere and now appears the review of the performance: At Rothko Chapel, a Composer Is Haunted by a Hero. Rothko Chapel, the piece by Morton Feldman written to be performed in the Chapel occupied by the fourteen paintings of Mark Rothko is a monument of late 20th century music and the last assignment I completed in a 20th Century Theory and Analysis seminar, so I have known it for quite a while. I look forward to hearing the new piece. As the article says, "Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” for the 50th anniversary of the Houston space, closely echoes Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel.” "

“Rothko Chapel” and “Monochromatic Light,” both spacious yet intimate, share a certain ritualistic sobriety, with a choir textlessly hovering over soft, somber beats of percussion. Both feature a solo violist whose phrases — sometimes halting, sometimes expressive — exist in something like a duet of duets. The more immediate pairing is with a punctuating, interrogating keyboardist; more distant, more refracted, more delayed is the viola’s echo in a solo vocalist, who also sings enigmatic phrases without text and is the only other performer permitted lyrical expansion.

Both pieces unfold as single movements without clear pulse or meter; the music pauses only occasionally for momentary rests, and both composers’ emphasis on the natural decay of sound means that even those brief silences seem hazily saturated.

* * *

 The remarkably prolific Ted Gioia has a new post up: Protest Music Hasn't Disappeared—It's Everywhere (Except the Music Business) After a long list of examples, he concludes:

Each of these situations is different, but it’s curious to note how little the music business has done to spur these musical movements. Or even notice them.

If you judged music by radio or TV or promoted playlists, you wouldn’t know about any of this. The explanation is simple. You can’t make much money off these songs—especially if they get censored and prohibited. So there’s no incentive to expose audiences to these songs, or even let you know they exist.

But the protesters certainly know about them. And the authorities fear them.

This is a useful reminder that the dominant commercial model, which views songs as an entertainment product, distorts and constrains our musical culture. We’re fortunate that people still remember the power of song in changing the world, even when it’s been forgotten by the people running the business.

I have made the accusation myself that a great deal of the musical mainstream these days is music as an industrial product.

* * *

The Guardian has a comment on the classical nominations for the Grammys: ‘How is this classical music?’ Composers’ fury at Grammys shortlist

When is a classical music composition not actually classical? This is the conundrum now at the heart of a heated row over the shortlisted songs for the Grammys, the annual awards that will be handed out in a few weeks’ time to recognise outstanding contributions to music.

A number of musicians have collectively expressed their outrage that nominations for the “classical music” awards include recordings they consider anything but classical. Letters of complaint have been sent to the organisers, the Recording Academy, arguing that the tracks in question – by two separate artists, Jon Batiste and Curtis Stewart – have been “mis-categorised”.

Marc Neikrug wrote:

“As a serious, dedicated composer of what has always been considered ‘classical’ music, I am dismayed. I have spent 60 years studying and labouring at this precise craft. It is unfathomable that an organisation which is supposed to have some inherent knowledge of music would choose to re-categorise an entire segment of our inherited culture.”

Read the whole thing as the article contains arguments for both sides of the question.

* * *

Economist Tyler Cowen walks us through an appreciation of the Beach Boys: What is so great about *Pet Sounds*?

It is an album of sadness, loss, and infinite longing.  Melancholy.  Do I know of a sadder album?  Listen to the lyrics.  And yet it is all set amongst the sunshine and girls and southern California.  As for the harmonies, they are continually building up expectation and never satisfying it.  It is necessary for the album to end on the down note of “Caroline, No,” a song which itself just fades away and ends, merging into the “pet sounds” that give the album its name.  I think of the combination of the sadness and the rising and swelling but never satisfied expectations as the key feature of Pet Sounds.

Plus lots more interesting observations.

* * *

And then there is the story of Charles Dibdin, a huge megastar of popular music in the late 18th century:

Think of an era-defining, wildly popular pop star: are you picturing David Bowie? Prince? Elton John? Maybe Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga or Adele? The solo singer-songwriter, whose persona is as well-known as their music and lyrics, is a cornerstone of popular music.

Yet none of those names achieved anything like the domination of arguably Britain's first popular music star: Charles Dibdin. If the name isn't familiar, that's probably because he died in 1814 

...in his own lifetime – and indeed for half a century after his death – Dibdin was no one-hit wonder, but a hugely prolific, extremely famous figure. He performed in operas and then wrote his own, composed more than a thousand songs, toured one-man shows around the country, and opened his own London theatre. He penned several novels and a five-volume history of theatre. His own autobiography also stretched to four volumes – the largest memoir of the period, and a good indication of Dibdin's remarkable facility for self-promotion. 

"He was the most dominant singer-songwriter that Britain has ever had," insists David Chandler, Professor of English Literature at Doshiba University in Kyoto. 

And then… a gradual fade into relative obscurity. A version of The Waterman was performed in Covent Garden in 1911. Another opera, Lionel and Clarissa, was revived at the Lyric Theatre in London in 1925. And people continue to record Tom Bowling to this day… Still, it's a sharp decline from Britain's most prolific and popular singer-songwriter to being remembered for one tune only.

* * * 

 Our first envoi is necessarily going to be Feldman's Rothko Chapel:

And here is one of those controversial Grammy nominees: Jon Batiste, Movement 11:

And finally, the one song by Charles Dibdin that has survived, "Tom Bowling":

Today I'm Listening to Mieczysław Weinberg

 

Not too much to say. Weinberg was a friend of Shostakovich who admired his work.

Friday Miscellanea

Catalina Vicens playing an organetto

This picture is from an article describing the revival of an obscure medieval instrument, the laptop organ called an "organetto."

What experts know today about the organetto comes from its depiction in hundreds of medieval paintings, illuminated manuscripts, and stained-glass windows, and well as the literature of the period. The instrument is mentioned, for example, in the Roman de la Rose, a famous medieval poem written in Old French, and the organetto playing of Francesco Landini, a famed 14th-century Italian composer and organist, is described in a novella by Giovanni da Prato.

* * * 

Those tireless music researchers have another study out: What does your music taste say about you? Nothing actually

Does music taste reflect personality? A study from the University of Cambridge involving 350,000 participants, from 50 countries, across six continents, posits that people with similar traits across the globe are drawn to similar music genres. So, “extroverts” love Ed Sheeran, Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake. The “open” thrill to Daft Punk, Radiohead and Jimi Hendrix. The “agreeable” are into Marvin Gaye, U2 and Taylor Swift. The “neurotic” enjoy, presumably as much they can, the work of David Bowie, Nirvana, and the Killers. And so on.

I think we can safely file this under pointless, academic make-work.

* * *

Why is CBC radio forgetting its classical music lovers?

Growing up in Vancouver decades ago, I remember concerts by its national network of orchestras, offering often challenging music and often intelligent commentary. It was a serious business.

Those days are history now. The orchestras and concerts have disappeared and so has most of the critical commentary associated with them. To be blunt about it, from a musical point of view, CBC English-language radio has dumbed down.

Oh yes, I got a great deal of musical benefit from the CBC decades ago. Some of the first Bach I ever heard was performed by Glenn Gould on a Sunday afternoon television show. On CBC radio you could hear a great deal of new music on Two New Hours, a weekly program. Living in Montreal I got my first radio exposure as an artist on the program Banc d'Essai and later on Jeunes Artistes. As a more mature artist CBC Vancouver recorded my concerts quite often and I was a soloist with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra playing the Villa-Lobos Guitar Concerto. A lot of that has simply vanished--the CBC Vancouver Orchestra no longer exists.

* * *

Ok, this is a little off our beaten path, but interesting nonetheless: Jordan Peterson’s Next Move? Taking Out the Universities

“I want to tell you a story. It’s a crazy story. I hope it’s interesting.”

Those were Jordan Peterson’s first words when he took the stage recently at a theater in Austin, Tex., as part of his “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life” tour. What followed was a description of an encounter with a Canadian politician who believes that vaccination mandates violate that country’s charter of rights and who, not incidentally, helped draft the charter.

The rest is behind a paywall, but you can find a lot of Jordan Peterson at YouTube where he comments on just about everything. He has the kind of passionate, penetrating wisdom that makes you realize how rare these traits are in academia these days where so many seem to have transformed into petty careerists and outright cowards. I feel a certain affinity with Peterson for several reasons: he and I were born in the same part of remote northern Alberta and both graduated from McGill in Montreal. I also like his way of brilliantly striking to the heart of so many issues.

* * *

On an Overgrown Path has a post up titled: New classical audiences need new music

Electronic dance music and related non-classical genres leave the listener's brain free to make its own interactions. Classical music want a new young audience. The starting point for bringing listeners across the classical/non-classical divide is giving the new audience music they can relate to. Once that relationship is established the new audience will move on to Mahler, Shostakovich and Beethoven. Giving the new audience music they can relate to doesn't mean dumbing down or exorcising the standard repertoire. It simply means being far more experimental and adventurous in classical programming. Because, despite the stereotyping of the classical marketeers, audiences - young and old - are not backward children. And new classical audiences don't just need new music: they also need new thinking.

That's the conclusion, but read the whole thing. I can find something to quibble about in nearly every sentence, but I'm probably just an old fuddy.duddy.

* * *

Here is an interesting piece: the Cello Concerto by Friedrich Gulda:

Something else really interesting: the Rite of Spring on two pianos:

 And here is a piece by Francesco Landini, he of the famous Landini cadence, played on the organetto:

What I'm Listening to Today

Back in 2018 Thomas Dunford released a CD of Bach on Baroque lute with the Suite in G minor, the Cello Suite No. 1 and the Chaconne from the D minor violin partita. Here is the Chaconne. For some reason Blogger won't embed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_NA-GA_ehg&list=RDZ_NA-GA_ehg&start_radio=1

A Gathering of Haiku

We are a bit omnivorous here, occasionally straying into philosophy and even literature. I have put up some haiku before, but not for quite a while. I write several every week, so here are a selection of the ones that are the least bad:

Here comes the New Year

How very odd the Old Year:

Plague, politics and loss.

* * *

Sudden heat of Spring

In such a hurry to melt

All trace of winter.

* * *

Green glint: hummingbird

Hovering so precisely

Misses not a bloom!

 * * *

Quiet rain at night

Falling out of its season

Traces of memory.

* * *

Ancient wisdom or

"Latest research." I think I

Know where the truth lies.

* * *

Heavy rains today

Plants are drinking eagerly

World takes a shower.

* * *

Sad to realize

How poor in relationships

I have always been.

* * *

Ghosts of past mistakes

Flow through my dreams, keeping me

Awake, feeding doubt.

* * *

But I don't normally type my haiku into a computer. Instead, I write them with a fountain pen, like this:

English is probably a less suitable language for haiku than Japanese as it needs more syllables to say something. But the discipline of five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables I find to greatly aid in focussing these tiny crystals of thought. The other requirement in the traditional haiku is a word that reveals the season. Sometimes I observe that, sometimes not.

Musing on a Charpentier Chaconne

Marc-Antoine Charpentier (probably)

First let's start with a performance of the piece, a chaconne for voice and continuo by Marc-Antoine Charpentier. This is "Sans frayeur dans ce bois" performed by Lea Desandre and Thomas Dunford and yes, I have posted it before, but stick with me, this might get interesting.

I really liked the accompaniment so I started looking around for the score. Quite nice all those things Dunford is playing, right? Well this is all he had to work with:

Yes, that's correct, every single thing you hear, apart from those simple bass notes, was invented by Dunford. Was it improvised? Certainly the first couple of times, but by the time they got to the recording studio I'm sure he had settled on what he was going to do. Here is the complete score, the rest is the vocal part:

Click to enlarge

Now I am quite familiar with this sort of thing as I have played lots of lute duets written in a similar fashion. Here is a piece by John Johnson for lute duet titled "The Queen's Dump." The accompanying musician (I think she is playing an orpharion) keeps playing the same simple chord progression, but when I played it I only did that a couple of times and then started strumming, changing the rhythm, doing everything I could to change it up. I can't find anything like that on YouTube, and sadly we never recorded it, but trust me, it is the thing to do!

I love that they changed the title to something less suggestive, but I transcribed it from a photostat of the original manuscript, Jane Pickering's Lute Book, and the title is "The Queen's Dump." A dump was a kind of dance in the 16th century.

I think this is the ground to The Queen's Dump, but it is not labeled as such in this manuscript, but whether it is or not, it shows you what the original notation looks like, French lute tablature.

Click to enlarge

And here is my transcription of the ground to The Queen's Dump:

I take a very tiny amount of credit for doing some wild, improvisatory accompaniments in these kinds of pieces (there are lots of other examples) twenty and thirty years ago, but only a very tiny amount because, of course, the musicians of the 16th and 17th centuries were doing it all the time.

Now go back and listen to Desandre and Dunford one more time and groove on the inégale.

Friday Miscellanea

I don't usually do obituaries here, and I won't now, but I do want to mention that George Crumb just passed away at 92 years: How George Crumb became one of America's most surprisingly consequential composers

Crumb may not have been well known outside of new-music circles, but he mattered beyond those perimeters. In 1970 alone, he composed two new pieces that had sweeping implications, continue to resonate and challenge, and sound maybe even more radical and rational now than they did a half-century ago.

One was the string quartet “Black Angels: Thirteen Images From the Dark Land,” written, as Crumb indicated on his graphically arresting score, “in tempore belli (in time of war)” and “Finished Friday the Thirteenth, March 1970.” The Vietnam War raged, and the composer, for the first time in any major string quartet, invoked the horror of modern warfare, exposed the precipitous fall from grace inherent in battle and proposed a path for spiritual redemption. 

The other propitious work from 1970, and Crumb’s most famous, was “Ancient Voices of Children” for soprano, boy soprano, oboe, mandolin, harp, electric piano and percussion. Intoxicated by Federico García Lorca, Crumb devoted much of his music in the 1960s to unusual settings that accentuated the sheer strangeness of the Spanish poet. He said he was drawn to Lorca’s essential concerns, in all their nuances, with primary things: “life, death, love, the smell of the earth, the sounds of the wind and the sea.”

Crumb had a quality of evocation that was lacking in most post-WWII avant-garde composers.

* * *

Thomas Wolf comments: Why Should We Listen to Old Recordings (or Any Recordings for That Matter)?

One of the reasons I listen to old recordings more often than I listen to modern ones is to appreciate the range of performance styles that have existed over the last hundred years.  Today, of course, technical perfection is an overriding concern.  But there are other aspects of performance practice today, some of which are wonderful but others I find distracting after comparing them to recordings of certain of my favorite musicians of the past.  For example, I have a particular interest in string chamber ensembles (string quartets, quintets, sextets, string orchestras, etc.) and find that many musicians active today tend to over-exaggerate accents as well as over-dramatize the swelling on long notes or notes before a cadence. Alex Ross of the New Yorker noted the same trend among today’s orchestra conductors—what he called in a recent article, “the prevailing fashion these days (to) vie with one another to see who can drive ahead most impetuously and jab at accents most aggressively.”

* * *

Researchers travel to the remote Hindu Kush to discover how culture influences how we listen:

When we listen to music, we rely heavily on our memory of the music we’ve heard throughout our lives. People around the world use different types of music for different purposes. And cultures have their own established ways of expressing themes and emotions through music, just as they have developed preferences for certain musical harmonies. Cultural traditions shape which musical harmonies convey happiness and – up to a point – how much harmonic dissonance is appreciated. Think, for example, of the happy mood of The Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun and compare it to the ominous harshness of Bernard Herrmann’s score for the infamous shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho.

There is quite a lot in the article. For example:

To our astonishment, the only thing the western and the non-western responses had in common was the universal aversion to highly dissonant chords. The finding of a lack of preference for consonant harmonies is in line with previous cross-cultural research investigating how consonance and dissonance are perceived among the Tsimané, an indigenous population living in the Amazon rainforest of Bolivia with limited exposure to western culture. Notably, however, the experiment conducted on the Tsimané did not include highly dissonant harmonies in the stimuli. So the study’s conclusion of an indifference to both consonance and dissonance might have been premature in the light of our own findings.

* * *

She Used to Sing Opera:

Now that years have passed since I stopped, I don’t mind telling people that I trained to be an opera singer. I used to be ashamed of it, though I’m not sure what exactly felt shameful – the admission that I’d once wanted to be part of that world or the fact that I’d failed. Even now, I’m careful always to say briefly – I briefly trained to be an opera singer – because I want to make it sound like it was all a very long time ago and didn’t mean much to me anyway, and I often find myself putting on an expression of generic self-deprecation when I say it too, like, yeah, mad I know.

There are some interesting observations:

When you go to watch an opera like Bohème in a big opera house, there’s an unavoidable irony: in so many of these works – from The Marriage of Figaro to Tosca to Wozzeck – money, disempowerment (particularly of woman) and social inequality are repeated themes, and yet the contexts they’re so often seen in – at large opera houses with expensive tickets and dressed-up audiences – are rich and privileged. The rituals surrounding going to operas, its entire reputation as an art form, seem to me now so at odds with the spirit of the stories and the music.

I can remember feelings like this at the disjunction between the texts of some works and the formality of the dress of the performers. But I'm afraid that a lot of the experience recounted, the disappointments, are sadly very usual in music schools.

* * *

The London Review of Books has a fascinating review of two books about a very important group of women that essentially rescued ethics from the dismissive clutch of positivism. Yes, I know this is a tad outside our usual stomping ground, but we do notice philosophy from time to time.

According to Ayer, only two kinds of statement are meaningful: (1) statements about the world that can be confirmed or disconfirmed by experience, and (2) analytic statements that are true simply in virtue of the logic of our language. This excludes all theological and metaphysical statements, and also, importantly, all moral judgments. The statement that stealing is wrong can be neither confirmed nor disconfirmed by experience, nor is it true by definition. It is neither true nor false, and can only be understood as an expression of emotion – in this case, antagonism to stealing. There is in consequence no such subject as ethics, if that means the search for true moral principles.

Whew, that's a pretty nasty position to be in. But luckily some begged to differ:

The content-neutral analysis of moral language fails at the linguistic level, but that is because the disconnect between fact and value on which it is based is false, and our language recognises this. The names of the virtues and vices refer to qualities that contribute to a good or bad life, which is not a subjective matter, but a consequence of what humans need to live well – a consequence of human nature.

The article and the concepts in it are complex, but it is worth noting that one of the women, Elizabeth Anscombe, wrote a paper, "Modern Moral Philosophy," that became the originator of virtue ethics, one of the most important streams of thinking on moral philosophy.

* * *

The astonishingly productive Ted Gioia has a piece on seven albums from seven unlikely places.

 * * *

Over at The New Yorker, Alex Ross weighs in on Spotify: Reasons to Abandon Spotify That Have Nothing to Do with Joe Rogan

It is good to see Spotify suffer, at least in the short term. The Swedish streaming service has fostered a music-distribution model that is singularly hostile to the interests of working musicians. It pays out, on average, an estimated four-tenths of a cent per stream, meaning that a thousand streams nets around four dollars. That arrangement has reaped huge profits for major labels and for superstars while decimating smaller-scale musical incomes—as perfect an embodiment of the winner-takes-all neoliberal economy as has yet been devised.

Read the whole thing. 

* * *

Obviously we need some George Crumb. Here is Black Angels for electric string quartet. One of Crumb's most distinctive qualities as a composer was the remarkable graphic aspect of his scores.

And here is an historic recording of Artur Schnabel playing Beethoven, Piano Sonata op 13:

And while we are on piano music, here is the Opening of Glassworks by Philip Glass:

Today's Wigmore Hall Concert

The first part of this concert is devoted to the Sonata for Solo Violin by Bartók played by Barnabás Kelemen. This is so rarely performed that I didn't even know it existed! Why do composers so rarely compose pieces for solo violin? Because it is so bloody hard, for both composer and performer. This is a wonderful performance and a very interesting piece.

Fascinating Rhythm

But not by George Gershwin! I just discovered an excellent performance of two pieces by Steve Reich on YouTube:

This is a concert from 2016 at Lincoln Center. A particularly nice performance of Music for 18 Musicians that seems to catch just the right tempo. That starts around the 23:40 mark. I've been listening to that piece for some thirty years now and it keeps fascinating me. I used to puzzle over how it could be notated before I finally got a look at the score. You can see it online at the Boosey and Hawkes site. Another thing that fascinates me is how the sections are cued: just watch the glockenspiel player, he signals each one. The marvellous combinations of instruments create so many different timbres. And then there are the rhythms and interlocking combinations of rhythms. It is such an odd piece, viewed from the perspective of traditional composition. But what a successful one!

Classy Music

Blogger has an occasional bug that doesn't let me attach a tag, but if it did the tag would be "music and politics" because that is a recurring issue. My title comes from part of the post yesterday that discussed a book with the title Class, Control, and Classical Music by Anna Bull. Frequent commentator Ethan Hein had a lot to say spread over several comments so I felt it best to start a new post.

The problem with online discussions is that they often become so far-ranging that they wander into irrelevancies. So let me try and put a focus on this. My sense of the book under review and of the review as well is that they both adopt notions of collective justice stemming, I believe, ultimately from Marxian cultural theories. I believe this is the philosophical background to statements like:

 "...we need to disrupt the aesthetics of the music itself rather than continuing to produce perfect versions of the canonic repertoire. The boundary-drawing that I have described, which safeguards classical music’s cultural prestige, needs to be loosened, and the “treasures” guarded by it must be let out for us to play with."

Ethan assures us that both author and reviewer are dedicated classical music educators and I have no problem accepting that, but I do have a concern that a collective notion of justice underlies statements like this:

“how are musical institutions, practices, and aesthetics shaped by wider conditions of economic inequality, and in what ways might music enable and entrench such inequalities or work against them?”

If you have a collective notion of justice then talking in abstract terms about "conditions of economic inequality" shaping musical institution, practices and aesthetics might seem to make sense. But that is precisely what I question. Justice, i.e. moral desert is not collective, but individual because moral agency is individual. Now of course individuals can band together to achieve mutual goals and these may be just or unjust, but that determination is made in the same way that it is with individuals. Collective guilt or innocence is only present when there is some kind of unity of will and action. It emphatically does not apply to entire races or ethnic communities.

The notion of economic inequality is also a very odd one indeed. Economic inequality is present wherever there is an economy and it is only iniquitous when the result of iniquitous actions. In other words, the fact that one individual has more wealth than another is no indication of guilt unless that wealth was obtained in unjust ways. The great error of Karl Marx and his followers is to say that a whole class of people, like the kulaks, are guilty because they have more than the proletariat. Mind you, the practice of blaming whole groups in society for the misery of other groups has proved enormously useful for unscrupulous politicians, which undoubtedly explains its longevity.

Now it seems that I have wandered very far away from music, but I felt that the philosophical and moral context needed to be established.

It is characteristic of this kind of writing quoted above that moral agency is carefully veiled. For example, the assertion that "music" enables and entrenches inequalities conceals that fact that "music" does nothing of the kind. Only moral agents, people in other words, can enable and entrench inequalities. But inequalities are themselves morally neutral only taking on moral qualities when they derive from morally just or unjust actions. These are simple truths, but ones that the language conceals.

You can see how many words it took to address just a couple of brief statements. Alas, to take up all of Ethan's comments would take many, many posts, but let me look at just one:

"Pretending that music is apolitical, as the academy and performing institutions have mainly done in my lifetime, is itself a political stance."

First let me mention a basic division of labor in music scholarship: there are two separate sections in most music departments: theory and musicology. The terminology is a bit awkward because these two divisions are often found in an umbrella section called "music theory." Music theory, the sub-section, deals with the musical structures qua structures, though in recent years this has been extended to things like the psychological reception of music. But generally speaking everything having to do with the political context or implications of music falls in the realm of musicology. Musicology is sometimes defined as all study of music that does not involve composition and performance, but of course that would include music theory as well! But never mind, practically speaking theory and musicology usually occupy different turfs.

So it would be a foundational practice of music theory to ignore the political aspects of music, leaving that to the musicologists who would be concerned with those things. But both of these roles are scholarly ones and that is an important point. A musicologist would properly concern themselves with the political context, meaning, implications and so on of music. But they would not be an activist. The job of a musicologist might be to look at the history of, say, blackface or just racial or ethnic casting in opera generally and that would likely be a fairly complex project as it would also have to delve into a lot of things like the music and libretto, staging, and so forth. The musicologist might even recommend, for example, no more blackface, but that should be the outcome of research which was itself objective.

The activist phase would come from the producers of opera who might, based on research or simple moral grounds decide no more blackface. This is the way it should work. What I have a problem with is motivated reasoning, i.e. activist scholarship that sets out from the beginning to achieve political goals.

Friday Miscellanea

I don't read The Economist very often, but they have a very interesting article on the prevalence of English in popular songs on Spotify: What Spotify data show about the decline of English. It is fairly heavy with statistics, but here are some take-aways:

Three broad clusters emerged: a contingent in which English is dominant; a Spanish-language ecosystem; and a third group that mostly enjoys local songs in various tongues. Across all, one trend emerged: the hegemony of English is in decline. 

The drop over the past five years is mostly concentrated outside the English sphere. Within the Spanish cluster, English quickly lost ground—from 25% of hits to 14%—as native artists like Bad Bunny and Rauw Alejandro became internationally ascendant. Among the local-language cluster, in countries with strong, indigenous music cultures—like Brazil, France and Japan—English declined even more precipitously, dropping from 52% of hit songs to just 30%. Only in the English cluster did the language remain unfazed, dropping only slightly from 92% to 90%.

What would be more interesting, I think, would be to look at how deeply English/American and European musical structures dominate the world. In other words, is the global reach of platforms like Spotify causing popular songs worldwide to resemble more and more those of the US and the UK?

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Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen offers up a Simple Theory of Culture. The link goes to the ample comments, for the post itself, just scroll up.

Popular music was highly emotionally charged because so much of it was connected to ideas you really cared about.

Of course, by attaching an idea to a song you often ensured the idea wasn’t going to be really subtle, at least not along the standard intellectual dimensions.  But it might be correct nonetheless.

Today you can debate ideas directly on social media, without the intermediation of music.  Ideas become less simple and more baroque, while music loses its cultural centrality and becomes more boring.

Lots of interesting thoughts in the comments as well.

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Are we starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel: DENMARK, DISMISSING COVID, OPENS UP FOR MUSIC MENTORING

As of this week, the Danes have abolished all Covid restrictions – no facemasks, no crowd limits, no tests.

Two international music schemes have immediately been announced.

Fabio Luisi at the Malko Conducting Competition in Copenhagen has put out a call for musicians aged 18 to 25 to come and get mentored at his Academy.

And Nikolaj Znaider at the Nielsen Competition in Odense (pictured) has launched Espansiva Academy – ‘a new mentoring programme, specifically designed to offer industry insight through talks, workshops and one-to-one personal conversations for the contestants at appropriate moments during the 11 days of the Competition.’

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Th New York Times has a feature on a conductor who resists the usual career pressures: A Conductor in Demand, and in Control.

“At the moment, I will be much more content to be a simple freelancer,” Gražinytė-Tyla, 35, said in a recent interview at the Bavarian State Opera here, where she was preparing a new production of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen.”

It’s an unusual statement coming from a young conductor in demand, especially one whose current appointment — as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Britain — concludes this spring. Even more unusual since Gražinytė-Tyla, along with the likes of Susanna Mälkki, is often mentioned as a leading contender to fill vacancies on the horizon at top American orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic.

Read the whole thing for an insight into a conductor that is determined to pursue her own artistic path.

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Now I understand why I am single: Music taste has become the latest weapon in our online dating war

...on dating apps, music taste has become one of the primary ways of signalling one’s suitability as a mate – and how, by reducing people to profiles of their likes and dislikes, this taste has been weaponised. 

If we read too much into music taste, it’s probably because it is one of only a handful of data points we’re given to assess potential romantic compatibility. In the past, “Beatles or Stones?” and “Oasis v Blur” were icebreakers that you’d quickly move past if you fancied each other enough; on dating apps, they are the precursor to a conversation occurring at all. 

OkCupid’s survey found that one in three singles believe musical preference to be a good indicator of intelligence.

Ok, new hope for lovers of Anton Webern?

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Taylor Swift v Damon Albarn: why the idea of the lone songwriter is outdated

Damon Albarn, the lead singer of Blur and Gorillaz, has recently been criticised for his “outdated” views of modern songwriting. In an interview with the LA Times, Albarn explained that US singer-songwriter Taylor Swift’s “co-writing” approach was at odds with his “traditionalist” view of writing songs. He went on to say that co-writing “doesn’t count” as songwriting.

Hmm, I seem to recall that the team of Lennon and McCartney were pretty good songwriters...

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Let's have a look at another review in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. This is from a review of Class, Control, and Classical Music, by Anna Bull by Juliet Hess.

In Class, Control, and Classical Music, Anna Bull poses a key question to classical music stakeholders: “how are musical institutions, practices, and aesthetics shaped by wider conditions of economic inequality, and in what ways might music enable and entrench such inequalities or work against them?” (p. 1) Through ethnography and careful historical analysis, she interrogates youth classical music programs and explores how they participate in class reproduction, the formation of middle-class selfhood, and classed boundary-drawing.

Well, of course the basic assumptions here are from Karl Marx and his analysis of society in terms of class and economics, but those assumptions go unquestioned. They might not be the best way to understand the role of music in society, but hey, what do I know? Another big influence is Pierre Bourdieu and I think I have talked about his views before. A quote from the book offers a look at the author's approach:

In order to address inequalities evident in classical music education and its cultural institutions, we need to disrupt the aesthetics of the music itself rather than continuing to produce perfect versions of the canonic repertoire. The boundary-drawing that I have described, which safeguards classical music’s cultural prestige, needs to be loosened, and the “treasures” guarded by it must be let out for us to play with. (p. 192)

This is a subtle approach, but it seems to me to simply valorize whatever progressive music educators choose to do, so it is part of the general wave of progressivism. This is a book about classical music education that has grave doubts about the very value of classical music education because it promotes inequality.

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Here is a lovely piece by Marc-Antoine Charpentier performed by Lea Desandre and Thomas Dunford:

Oddly, there are almost no clips of conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla on YouTube. Apart from a whole Mozart opera and a bunch of interview and trailer clips all I could find was this short Bach movement which hardly requires a conductor.

Here is the first movement of the Brahms Piano Trio No. 1 in B major played by the Merz Trio. I put this up because I just heard them play this piece in a concert last night along with trios by Haydn and Fauré. Yes, chamber music is back!