One of my commentators turned up an article on music education with the title Can Music Theory Education Overcome its Whiteness Problem? I don't think it is worthwhile examining the whole of this long article, but I found the assumptions contained in the subhead to be revealing of some fundamental problems, so let's have a look at them. Here is the claim:
White European classical music dominates music education in the U.S. at all levels. Achieving racial justice in the field means diversifying personnel, curricula, and repertoires. Only then will students be able to enjoy and create the rich array of music created by the world’s people.
Three sentences with three different problems. Before I tackle them I want to make a couple of procedural points. One of the most valuable classes I had as an undergraduate was Philosophy 100. I have mentioned this before, as it made a real impression. The professor was a new hire with all the fresh enthusiastic competence that promises. And best of all, the class only contained a few over twenty students. I was lucky with other philosophy classes as well. In the early 70s I was enrolled in second and third year philosophy classes with just a handful of students. Nowadays to get this kind of attention you would need to be in a graduate seminar. Just for your information, the other classes were Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Mind. The basic attitude and skills I took away from these classes were very influential in my understanding of how to argue a case.
To this day I remember the body language of my Philosophy 100 professor who would assign us troubling texts by philosophers like Thomas Aquinas and Bishop Berkeley and then, as we tried to tear down the absurd things they were saying, he would pace back and forth in front of the class until we ran down. Casting a glance our way he would ask, "may I rephrase?" Then he would edit our intemperate remarks into a concise and coherent statement and adroitly counter all of our points. As soon as he said "may I rephrase?" we knew we were lost! Relatedly, my Philosophy of History professor once counseled me to never argue with a Jesuit because they are so well-educated in debate that you will likely lose.
What I took away from all this was not the Sophist view that through tricky rhetoric you can win any debate, but rather a few basic principles:
the basic elements of logic and common sense do not change with every intellectual fashion
it doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong so much as where the most truth is
what does matter is the means by which you arrive at the truth
Keeping this in mind, let's look at those three sentences. The first one is what we would call an empirical claim. The content of most music education comes from the traditions of Western European classical music. The implication is that this is racist because it is white and because it dominates music education. Even though this is obviously true to some extent the content of the claim needs examination. There are empirical facts that must be taken into account. For example, music notation defined as the use of a five-line staff with clefs, key signatures and time signatures was developed by various composers and theorists over centuries in Western Europe. More specifically it was developed by Italian and French composers, theorists and scholars all of whom also happened to be Christians of the Catholic faith. This system of notation is used across the whole globe at this point. Should we condemn it or stop using it because it is not only white, but Christian? The same points could be made about the other key elements of music education such as harmony and counterpoint.
Now for the second sentence. The problem with this is that justice is not a question of statistics though there are certainly trends in modern legal systems that tend to suggest that it is. I will just offer a couple of counter examples. While there has been a great deal of talk about making sure that women and racial minorities are given a proportionate share of good jobs in music like orchestral conductors, there seems to be no effort to eliminate disparities in, for example, orchestral harp positions which are nearly all held by women. More widely, no-one ever seems to mention that the proportion of dangerous jobs in fields such as mining and forestry is hugely biased towards men. Not to mention casualties in war. Justice is not a statistic because mathematics and morality operate under different principles.
The last sentence I already commented on in the Friday Miscellanea thread, I just want to add that it is an astonishing claim to think that music students will only begin to appreciate non-white and non-European music after they are told to by their progressive music professor.
We think of music theorists as being rather remote from actual musical practice, living in their own world of abstractions, but in the early 14th century music theory, at least as it concerned mensuration and notation, was being revolutionized by actual mathematicians--and ones who wrote in Latin no less!
The older Franconian notation used rhythmic modes but this system was not flexible enough for the needs of the newer music, the ars nova. Mathematicians such as Nicole d'Oresme and Levi ben Gershom, author of the treatise De numeris harmonicis, wrote about integral and fractional exponents and, as the title indicates, this was regarded as revealing the truths of how God ordered the cosmos.
On the more prosaic level of musical mensuration, the goal was to tweak the old notation so that it could handle both the perfect, i.e. triple, division of the long notes (ironically named "breves") and the imperfect division, i.e. duple. 14th century theory saw two levels of division: the breve into semibreves and the semibreves into minims. The first was referred to as the tempus and the second, the prolation. With both the triple and duple subdivisions, that allowed for four different metric systems, what we would call "time signatures." Here is a chart from Taruskin's History (p. 254):
Sorry for the blurry image--the original was quite tiny. But I think you can see the modern equivalents, from the top down: 9/8, 3/4, 6/8 and 2/4. The interesting thing is the symbols used as key signatures: the circle with the dot indicating triple tempus and triple prolation: tempus imperfectus, prolation major, the circle without the dot indicating duple on both levels and so on.
All of these symbols are long gone, of course, given that they are six centuries out of date. But wait a minute, what about that bottom one, the half-circle indicating tempus imperfectum, prolatio minor? Could that possibly be the same as the one still in use to indicate 4/4? Yes, you bet! Music teachers (except the ones trained in musicology) tell their students that this is a "C" standing for "common time" but of course it is not, just the last remaining holdover from the ars nova notational system.
To go with this, here is a little motet in the new style by Philippe de Vitry, Tribum / Quoniam secta / Merito hec patimur. One of the new elements is that all the texts are in Latin.
This is from the Roman de Fauvel, one of the most viciously satirical pieces of musical narrative ever composed.
UPDATE: Looking over that chart and my comment, I think there are two errors. First, in the chart, the second item should read tempus perfectum, prolatio minor because the breve is divided into three semibreves, not two. And then I followed the error in my comment: on this one I should have said "the circle without the dot indicating triple tempus and duple prolation." Mea culpa! But the chart is also wrong.
Quiet, sincere and more famous in his lifetime as an organist and teacher than as a composer, Franck celebrates the bicentenary of his birth this year. But it’s unlikely that American orchestras will bring to the celebration the fervor with which they once performed his sole symphony. In one of the stranger stories in the history of the canon, the work — which from the 1920s until the ’60s was such a hit that the New York Philharmonic thought it a solid bet to fill Lewisohn Stadium on a hot summer’s night — is now all but absent from concert halls.
And the conclusion?
And if newer music by the likes of Sibelius and Stravinsky pushed the Franck aside — although not brand-new music, which American orchestras have played less of over time — the past also struck back. The Boston Symphony has performed Dvorak three times as often in the second half of its history as in its first, according to the orchestra; Mozart’s fortunes have risen almost as dramatically.
Facts like that convey the lasting conservatism of much of the orchestra world, and they make it hard to argue too strenuously that the Franck should be resurrected. The righteous call now is to diversify what ensembles play, in all senses of the verb. Inevitably, some works will rise to prominence in the process, and some will drift away.
And if that’s the moral of the tale, it’s all right. The rise and fall of Franck’s symphony shows that the canon can change — that the canon can be changed.
Ah, so that's the answer: canons change!
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Slipped Disc has a somewhat surprising bit of news: AN ENGLISH COMPOSER MAKES HIS VIENNA PHILHARMONIC DEBUT. The composer is Thomas Adès and it turns out that this is not the first time his music has been heard in Vienna, but the first time in a very, very long time--if ever--that an English composer has conducted the Vienna Phillies:
The composer Thomas Adès will break new ground this weekend when he conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in a subscription concert.
Who was the last British composer to earn that honour? Was there ever one.
Adès had experience of the orchestra when conducting his Shakesperean opera The Tempest at the Vienna State Opera in 2015. He says: ‘I admired the sound that the orchestra got out of my music, an understanding of my tonal language was immediately noticeable. Not only were the notes played back exactly. You heard the meaning of the phrases, understood what they were saying…. Because of this understanding, the musicians also asked very good questions.’
This weekend’s programme is Berg, Three Orchestral Pieces, Op. 6; Ravel, La Valse; Adès, Dance of death.
The streaming giant said 52,600 artists earned more than $10,000 (£7,500) from Spotify in 2021.
Of those, 130 were paid more than $5m (£3.8m) over the last 12 months.
Spotify didn't name any of the artists involved, but its most-streamed acts last year were Bad Bunny, Taylor Swift, BTS, Drake and Justin Bieber; while the most streamed-song was Olivia Rodrigo's Drivers License.
It would be interesting to see the numbers for the five highest-paid composers, wouldn't it? Though I can only imagine how depressing it would be. Back when I was a traveling guitar virtuoso I might have been one of the five most active classical guitarists in Canada--and it would be a rare year when I made $30,000. Canadian. At that time there were probably only five really successful classical guitarists in the world including Pepe Romero, Julian Bream, Manuel Barrueco, John Williams and someone else who I have forgotten. And they might have made as much as $500,000 in a year. It's a tough business.
How tough? Here are the other numbers:
Spotify says about eight million people have uploaded tracks to its service, with 60,000 new songs arriving every day. As a result, 99.3% of the artists on Spotify are generating less than $10,000 a year.
The most popular ensemble in North Korea is the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble. It’s hard to describe the keytar-loving electro-band’s work, but try to imagine a mashup between a communist Kraftwerk and an authoritarian Abba. Many of Pochonbo’s songs are developed to prop up the personality cult. (“Longing for the General” and “We Always Live Under His Love.”) Other tunes are more militaristic. (“Peace Is On Our Bayonet” and “When Our Ranks Advance.”) Meanwhile, others are more political. (“Let's Defend Socialism” and “Labor Is a Song.”)
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As one would expect, The New Yorker takes a considered look at the politics of blacklisting: Classical Music’s Iron Curtain
To discuss this issue, and the politics that have always swirled around the world of classical music, I recently spoke by phone with two musicologists. Kira Thurman, an assistant professor of history and German at the University of Michigan, is the author of “Singing like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.” Emily Richmond Pollock is an associate professor of music at M.I.T. and the author of “Opera After the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how classical music was understood in Germany after the Second World War, the different ways that art and politics can mix, and the dangers of associating musical traditions with specific nationalities.
Probably worth reading the whole thing. I wish they had called up Richard Taruskin as I'm sure he would have had something to say.
emily richmond pollock: I think one of the things that Kira and I have noticed, because we’ve been talking about it, is that some of the discussion of these issues has fallen into some old patterns of thinking that we as musicologists are alert to, and want to warn against, which includes reacting to these kinds of bans by insisting that music is apolitical, or that there’s something fundamentally and inherently apolitical about music, which is a really problematic and untrue statement, and a knee-jerk response.
But on the other side of the coin:
But I would also say that the idea of moral complicity that we’re seeing with this and trying to make shades—this conductor supports Putin, so he’s a bad guy; this other kid just plays piano well, so he’s a victim of this—those kinds of distinctions that are being made, in terms of complicity and culpability, are also very familiar to me as a scholar of de-Nazification. So this idea that you can determine, based on some number of factors, exactly how in bed with the government someone is, and how much to hold them responsible for, is not a question without historical precedent. And what we know from de-Nazification is that it was super messy, and it didn’t make any sense. And it came across in different ways.
It's messy all right! But examining the specifics of moral agency does indeed make sense and it is in fact what we do.
Over the last century, classical music has grown increasingly estranged from a mass audience or popular musical forms, retreating into an elitist silo. This is not the fault of individual musicians: the development of their art is inseparable from wider social and political trends. Capitalism first created the space in which such music could flourish, and then took it away, leaving behind a frozen, formalized tradition.
The problem with this and other approaches is that once you have completely reduced classical music to its social context then all you have left is sociology.
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On to the music! I mean, the envois. First up, the once-popular now neglected Franck Symphony in D minor here is the Frankfurt Radio Symphony.
And here is the premiere of the Thomas Adès Totentanz:
And finally, one of my favorite Bach albums on guitar, Pepe Romero playing all of the Violin Partita No. 2, not just the Chaconne, followed by the Cello Suite No. 3.
I haven't talked too systematically about the pre-Bach repertoire, but there's a lot of it. I'm re-reading Taruksin's Oxford History of Western Music so I'm reacquainting myself with some music I have nearly forgotten about. Such as the 13th century motet, for example. The development of mensural notation enabled composers to write more complex rhythmic patterns. The motet started out as just a bit of church music in which the melismas, those long melodic decorations, were fitted with texts. Originally all this came from the Notre Dame repertoire dating back centuries. But the new texts were often secular ones modeled after the trouvère poems. In fact, as the motet developed, they often used two different texts for the upper parts such as in the rondeau-motet J'ai les maus d'amours/que ferai/IN SECULUM from the Montpelier manuscript. That odd way of naming the motet is simply the beginning of all three texts.
A lot of ensembles extend the durations of pieces by first playing them on instruments, then with voices and then with repeats. This is just the basic version. Very brief! But as a matter of fact it is rather a tour de force. There are not only three different texts, two in French and one in Latin, but all three of the melodies are from different sources so the composer has fitted them all into one harmonic texture. Better listen again! Here is the beginning of the score:
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The measure of just how popular or important the 13th century motet was is that Taruskin devotes an entire chapter to it. Also in the Montpelier codex are some pieces attributed to Petrus de Cruce that seems to represent the peak of the style. Here is Aucun/Lonc tans/ANNUNTIANTES. The tenor again comes from a Notre Dame organum. Sorry, Blogger won't embed:
Here is the beginning of the score in the original manuscript:
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We just don't get illuminated capitals in scores these days!
And finally, as promised, those fresh strawberries. This is a motet that might have been sung at a feast or banquet in Paris as indicated by the two upper texts which begin:
Duplum: Morning and night in Paris, there is good bread to be found, good, clear wine, food, meat and fish...
Triplum: The talk is of threshing and winnowing, of digging and ploughing, Such pastimes are not at all to my liking.
Tenor: Fresh strawberries! Ripe blackberries!
In this performance the tenor is sung alone, then with the duplum and finally with all three parts together. Again, Blogger won't embed:
So I guess the first question is, what is a chaconne? As usual, the Wikipedia article is not a bad place to start:
The chaconne has been understood by some nineteenth and early twentieth-century theorists to be a set of variations on a harmonic progression, as opposed to a set of variations on a melodic bass pattern (to which is assigned the term passacaglia),[7] while other theorists of the same period make the distinction the other way around.[8] In actual usage in music history, the term "chaconne" has not been so clearly distinguished from passacaglia as regards the way the given piece of music is constructed, and "modern attempts to arrive at a clear distinction are arbitrary and historically unfounded."[9] In fact, the two genres were sometimes combined in a single composition, as in the Cento partite sopra passacagli, from Toccate d’intavolatura di cimbalo et organo, partite di diverse arie ... (1637), by Girolamo Frescobaldi, and the first suite of Les Nations (1726) as well as in the Pièces de Violes (1728) by François Couperin.[10]
Frescobaldi, who was probably the first composer to treat the chaconne and passacaglia comparatively, usually (but not always) sets the former in major key, with two compound triple-beat groups per variation, giving his chaconne a more propulsive forward motion than his passacaglia, which usually has four simple triple-beat groups per variation.[11] Both are usually in triple meter, begin on the second beat of the bar, and have a theme of four measures (or a close multiple thereof). (In more recent times the chaconne, like the passacaglia, need not be in 3 4 time; see, for instance, Francesco Tristano Schlimé's Chaconne/Ground Bass, where every section is built on seven-beats patterns).
By way of contrast, Richard Taruskin in the Oxford History of Western Music describes the ciaccona in his discussion like this:
The ciaccona was a fast and furious dance in syncopated triple meter, which in the sixteenth century has been imported into Spanish and Italian courtly circles from the New World ... Monteverdi published his setting of Ottavio Rinuccini's imitation of Petrarch's famous sonnet Zefiro torna in the form of a "ciacona." [op. cit. vol. 2, p. 37]
Here is how that looks in score:
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Pretty simple harmonic structure: I V vi I6 V repeat. The C could be either IV or just a passing note. The metric layout is interesting: 6/4 with stresses on 2 and 5 in the second measure. This is from Scherzi musicali of 1632. There is a chaconne by Louis Couperin from a manuscript dated to around 1660:
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This is an eight-measure theme, but the second four measures are the same as the first. Interesting, the syncopation (stress on the second beat) only happens in the third complete measure. This is also a structural downbeat as it is the first appearance of the dominant on a beat. The key is G minor and the harmonies are III (the upbeat is an interesting ambiguity as on the face it is simply a d minor chord, but the downbeat reveals that it should be heard as a III6/5), VI (and up to this point we could be in E flat), iv, V7 (first confirmation of key) i, V (4-3 suspension) i. And the downward scale connecting the cadence with the repeat shows how the d minor/B flat harmony integrates with the rest. Rhythmically this replaces the downbeat beginning of the Monteverdi, with an upbeat.
Here is a "Chaconne Légère" from the Troisieme Concert Royale by François Couperin from 1714:
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Again, an eight-measure theme and the harmonies in a minor are i, iv, III, V (the arrival of V is delayed with a syncopation) i VI, V i V i. The harmonic rhythm accelerates throughout. Here is an example from Telemann:
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For the first time we see the theme beginning on the second beat of a 3/4 measure and the tempo seems slower. The chaconne was not a huge favorite of German composers, but here is another example from Pachelbel:
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Rhythmically rather humdrum as one would expect from Pachelbel. No upbeat, eight-measure theme and the harmonies are i, viiº6, i6, ii6, V, i, ii, i6-iv, V, i.
What started as a fairly zippy dance-like brief harmonic ground has evolved into an eight-measure theme in two halves sometimes with syncopation. It also, at least with German composers, seems to have slowed down. The name "ciacona" was often used and does not seem to have been an indication of whether the composer is following the earlier, syncopated and quicker Italian model or the later French model. In general the genre seems to have slowed down. Here is the Bach theme:
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Eight measures divided into two halves, each ending with a cadence on the tonic. Here are Bach's harmonies: i, ii4/2, V6/5, i, VI, iv, i6/4, V i, ii4/2, V6/5, i, VI, ii6/5, V, i. The only difference between the two halves is the iv chord replaced by the ii6/5. This is a harmonically very rich theme which Bach actually simplifies, harmonically, in some variations. This goes rather against the usual tendency with sets of variations which is to follow a simple theme with more elaborate variations.
Bach also sets up a fundamental harmonic syncopation throughout that stresses the second beat. In the third and fourth complete measures he even creates a hemiola by making the two measures of 3/4 into one measure of 3/2. All this sets the listener up for a substantial piece.
I think that what is actually happening here is that Bach, that great synthesist, is uniting the chaconne genre with the sarabande. If I replaced these harmonies with other ones, but retained the rhythmic structure, I think I could persuade you that you were listening to the first section of a sarabande. For comparison, here is the Sarabande from the same partita:
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The main difference seems to be that while the second beat is stressed in both, the Chaconne begins on the second beat. In any case, the theme to the Chaconne just feels a bit sarabande-like to me!
Here is a performance on violin by Sigiswald Kuijken:
Of course it doesn't feel much like a sarabande at that tempo.
I put up the John Williams recording a while back. When it came out it seemed to me to be a really valid approach to the piece. It trimmed away the excess additions of the Segovia transcription and had a crisper rhythmic approach and even added a few ornaments here and there. But listening to it now I have to admit that about halfway through, when he gets to the restatement of the original harmonies just before the major section (right around the 6:23 mark), I started to chuckle. Yes, it seemed so incongruous to me that after so much of the piece without a shred of a trace of an ornament, suddenly he decides to add quite a few.
John Williams is a very great guitarist and he is the performer whose wonderful recording of all the "lute" music of Bach made it truly part of the repertoire. But frankly, while a technical marvel and a very solid interpreter, when it comes to the Chaconne he is not very creative. If you are going to adopt Baroque performance practice then you should do it in a comprehensive way, not adding it like whipped cream and a cherry on top. That reminds me a bit of the old guitarists' interpretive standby: anytime you have a passage that is repeated you either do it ponticello or tasto for contrast. This is one of the Segovia quirks that has mercifully disappeared from most interpretations. But slapping in ornaments in one tiny section is not very much more profound.
Don't get me wrong, Segovia was a great artist and a great player of Bach, but he was certainly not a model of Baroque performance practice. John Williams represented a considerable advance in the guitar world's understanding of Bach. But listening to a selection of other performances on guitar, about the best that one can expect, it seems, is a technically solid if rather dull delivery. Here are a couple of examples by John Feeley and Ben Verdery.
So even early on I found myself attracted to performances on the Baroque lute instead of the guitar. Here is a fairly early one by Hopkinson Smith and right from the first chord we encounter a different sensibility.
The most recent Baroque lute version is by Thomas Dunford and he takes us a step further with looser rhythms and some interesting arpeggiations.
One of the most interesting things about the Chaconne is how it tends to reveal the musical personality of the performer--it is a kind of test of your character as an artist. Some of the most interesting performances are found on the harpsichord. Here is an early one by Gustav Leonhardt:
What I really like about this version is the free use of ornaments. In the opening theme, for example, he does mordents on the two A melodic notes that begin each half of the theme. I like this because when I was working on the piece the other day and thinking about how to begin it I came up with two ideas: first, to fill in the third in the first chord, adding an E between the D and F. Then adding a mordent on the next A. This was, I hasten to say, before I listened to the Leonhardt!
But for a really zingy performance let's listen to the very recent one by Jean Rondeau. From the video it looks like he recorded it in his garage:
UPDATE: Just to bring it full circle, the most creative interpreter of Baroque music on guitar seems to be Leo Brouwer. Before he injured his index finger, cutting short his performing career he did an interesting version of the Chaconne:
And guess who he studied Baroque performance practice with in Amsterdam back in the late 1960s? Yep, Gustav Leonhardt.
2022 is the 100th anniversary of the opera by Alban Berg, Wozzeck. This is likely the most influential opera of the 20th century and there have been several articles commemorating it. The New York Times has an interesting one on the power of the orchestral score: When the Orchestra Is the Star of the Opera.
“Wozzeck,” particularly in concert, is a study in orchestral sound, and this ensemble did justice to both its crushing density and eerie lightness — sometimes both at once, as in an early interlude layering pale strings and whispering but denser brasses. This wasn’t a shattering performance, but it was a dazzling one.
The Bavarian State Opera was planning a production with Teodor Currentzis and his Putin-bank funded Russian ensemble MusicÆterna.
Suddenly, that does not look like such a good idea.
"It is with great regret that we have decided, in consultation with Romeo Castellucci and Teodor Currentzis as well as our Munich and international co-production partners, to postpone the new production of (Georg Friedrich Haas’s 2016 opera) Koma to the Ja, Mai Festival in 2024 …"
I don't know that Currentzis' ensemble is funded by a Putin bank, but it would not be surprising if it were. It brings us back to the age-old question of the relationship between aesthetic objects, their content and their social context and it prompts me to wonder if we can turn it around? Are we supporting crappy pieces of art simply because they are supportive of (or propaganda for) things that we perceive as socially desirable? Fill in your own examples.
Germany’s culture minister Claudia Roth spoke at last night’s Ukraine fundraising concert in Berlin.
Among other things the Green politician said: ‘Music is the most effective, the most radical contradiction to war…
‘We must contradict this deadly, this unbounded madness, as loudly and as audibly as humanly possible. Precisely because we cannot stop the aggressor, because we cannot stop Putin, because we have no means of ending this criminal war in Ukraine right now, we need these widely audible signs of solidarity with the Ukrainians…
But: ‘We will not stop listening to Tchaikovsky and reading Chekhov. I don’t want to imagine a world without Russian culture, without Ukrainian culture, without our culture and therefore I oppose anyone who tries to instrumentalize or boycott culture. It’s the culture that makes us human.’
The class was the idea of Ms. Spanos, an NYU alum. She pitched a list of musical megastars she could focus on, including Britney Spears, Janet Jackson or Tina Turner. Ms. Swift was at the top, she said.
NYU said students, many of whom want careers in the music industry, were expected to develop their writing, critical thinking and research skills, but also learn about Ms. Swift’s creative process and her business sense.
“Taylor Swift is one of the leading creative music entrepreneurs of the 21st century,” said Jason King, chair of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, NYU’s music program. “I would love for them to walk away from the course with a deeper understanding of who Taylor Swift is and why she matters to the history and study of recorded music.”
Hey, I'm the guy that delivered two papers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer at an academic conference in Huddersfield, Yorkshire a few years ago, so I'm all on board with the study of popular culture.
Yanran from Bristol started to play the piano in 2020, when she was just five-and-half-years old, learning to read music before she could read her storybooks.
Since then she has passed her Grade 1 exams, won a competition, taught herself to compose music and taken up the violin.
Her father, Yuxing, a senior research scientist for an aerospace company, and mother, Huamei, have no musical background and are astonished at her progress.
I think the message here might be that the hustle and bustle of our daily lives might be standing in the way of the focus needed to develop new skills.
An argument can be made that the greatest of Italian opera composers wrote his masterpiece in French. Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” the anomaly in question, is now playing in a new production at the Metropolitan Opera, with the original French text supplanting the Italian translation that had been used in previous stagings at the house. Although there is little point in debating whether “Don Carlos” outclasses “La Traviata” or “Otello,” the work is certainly Verdi’s most formidable political creation, standing alongside Wagner’s “Die Walküre” and Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” as an eternally topical study in the delusion and desolation of worldly power.
I have to admit that I have warmed to Ross' contributions over the last few years. I used to shake my head at the inevitability of his aesthetic judgements--in one place I averred that he would rather drive knitting needles into his eardrums than say something critical about a piece of contemporary music--but either he has gotten better or I have gotten more tolerant.
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And to the envois! Even avoiding the repetitive stories about who was accused of what by whom, there was a fair amount of interesting material this week. First up, Wozzeck of course. This is the 1970 film version with English subtitles:
When I first discovered classical music back around 1970, it seemed like everything was for orchestra, piano, or violin. I was very happy to discover, after a while, that there was actually such a thing as classical guitar and it even had a repertoire. Most of that repertoire was by composers who were, shall we say, "lesser known"? But there was one big exception: J. S. Bach and I delighted in listening to some wonderful performances by Christopher Parkening, Andrés Segovia and, later on, John Williams.
Now of course Bach did not actually write for the classical guitar which did not even exist in his time. Nor did he write for the Baroque guitar, which did. But Bach's music has a universal quality and much of it survives very well when translated to different instruments. Though Bach did know and play on pianos, his keyboard music is for harpsichord, clavichord and organ, though that has not stopped generations of pianists from playing it, and playing it superbly well.
The one guitar piece that made a huge impact on me was the Chaconne in D minor, the last movement of the Partita in D minor for solo violin. It was this piece in particular that inspired me to devoting much of my life to learning the classical guitar. Two other pieces were also influential: Leyenda by Albéniz and the Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo. These two, plus a host of other repertoire, I did, in time, learn and perform on numerous occasions. But something about the Chaconne stymied me.
It was one of the first pieces I tried to learn as I got a photocopy of Segovia's brilliant transcription for guitar. In fact, very early on I memorized the first page. But I realized that I was years away from having the necessary technique so I shelved it. I did learn a lot of other music by Bach, the First Lute Suite, the Fourth Lute Suite, the First Cello Suite and so on, but not the Chaconne. I took it up to deliver a presentation on it in a performance practices class in university, but I never got around to learning it.
Why not? At the time it just felt like I did not have something new and original to say about the piece. I tended to avoid pieces that seemed to me to be over-performed unless I had something to say. But in retrospect I realize that it was that very Segovia transcription that was standing in my way. It was too beefy and too romantic and added too much to the piece. The great strength of the Chaconne is its enormous aesthetic power delivered through such slender means. Then I heard John Williams masterful recording of it where he trimmed down the Segovia transcription to its pure essentials and I thought, ok, good, Williams has the final word, no need for me to learn the piece.
Well, that was truly wrong-headed of me! The truth is that of the great masterpieces of the classical music world, the list that includes the Brandenburg Concertos and Mass in B minor of Bach, the symphonies of Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn, the string quartets and piano sonatas of Beethoven, and so on, the only piece that is undeniably on that list and that you can credibly play on guitar is, yes, the Chaconne.
So I am finally learning it--not to perform as I am retired from public concerts, but purely because it is there: 256 measures in D (minor and major) for violin unaccompanied, very playable on guitar. A set of variations on an eight measure theme. If we set aside Bach's own Goldberg Variations, the greatest set of variations ever written in the Baroque era--or any era, arguably. And delivered with such modest means: four strings and a bow.
I am going to do some other posts on the piece. I am already planning one on the genius of the variation technique. In the meantime here is the John Williams performance:
The New York Times gins up some journalistic excitement: Unsuk Chin on the Violin Concerto She Swore She’d Never Write. I really cannot imagine a composer saying to themselves "I swear I will never write another violin concerto!" But never mind, it is an interesting article on an interesting premiere:
After having its premiere delayed by the pandemic, the work was unveiled by the London Symphony Orchestra in January. It arrived in the United States last week for performances with another of its commissioners, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which joins Kavakos to perform the work under Andris Nelsons at Carnegie Hall on Monday, alongside Ives’s “The Unanswered Question” and Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.”
That's the kind of program I would love to hear! Included in the article is a couple of pages from the violin part heavily annotated by the performer, Leonidas Kavakos:
Click to enlarge
AGH! That is the kind of score that makes me glad I'm not doing contemporary premieres any more. A lot of the added notes in color are showing where a harmonic will actually sound. Just imagine how many hours (months!) of work goes into sorting out exactly how to play a score like this. The London premiere is available on YouTube:
And we can also listen to her Violin Concerto from 2001 which won the Grawemeyer Award in 2004.
If you have written a lot of program notes and gone to a lot of concerts you may have noticed a certain sameness to programs: something 18th century followed by something modern, intermission, big 19th century work in the second half. But some manage to find a creative way to organize a recital: Tamara Stefanovich: 20 Sonatas review – a remarkable feat of sustained pianism.
In 2019 Tamara Stefanovich treated London to a thrilling survey of the piano étude in the last century, from Scriabin to the present day, which was one of the highlights of the musical year in the capital. Now she has turned her attention to sonatas, and devised a three-part recital – over two and a half hours of music, taking in 20 works – that mixes the baroque and the modern, and carefully avoids what many would see as the heyday of the piano sonata, from Haydn and Mozart to Brahms and Liszt.
Aesthetic experience seems both regular and idiosyncratic. On one hand, there are powerful regularities in what we tend to find attractive versus unattractive (e.g., beaches versus mud puddles). On the other hand, our tastes also vary dramatically from person to person: what one of us finds beautiful, another might find distasteful. What is the nature of such differences? They may in part be arbitrary—e.g., reflecting specific past judgments (such as liking red towels over blue ones because they were once cheaper). However, they may also in part be systematic—reflecting deeper differences in perception and/or cognition. We assessed the systematicity of aesthetic taste by exploring its typicality for the first time across seeing and hearing.
This study looks at reactions to ordinary aesthetic phenomena, not high art, and compares them to typical reactions, not those of experts, so it offers a somewhat different approach. Nothing too earth-shaking, though it is interesting that people who have unusual tastes in visual areas also have them in audible areas.
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We mentioned the new piece by Tyshawn Sorey written for the Rothko Chapel, now Alex Ross has a review of the performance: Music Fills the Rothko Chapel.
Two formidable artistic creations bear the name “Rothko Chapel.” The first is an ecumenical spiritual space, in Houston, built to display huge, dark paintings by Mark Rothko. The second is a half-hour composition by Morton Feldman, which had its première in the chapel in 1972, a year after the site opened. Each work possesses a legendary aura. The chapel, the brainchild of the art patrons Dominique and John de Menil, projects an abyssal stillness that mesmerizes more than a hundred thousand visitors every year. Feldman’s composition, a sparse soundscape for viola, chorus, celesta, and percussion, long ago became a classic of modern music; according to the Feldman archivist Chris Villars, in the past two decades it has received more than a hundred and thirty performances, in twenty-seven countries. Together, the music and the art constitute a monument of twentieth-century modernism—a locus of its dreams and sorrows. Fifty years on, a third voice has joined this interdisciplinary conversation: that of the composer Tyshawn Sorey, whose “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” had its première in the chapel last month.
A very large part of the review is actually about the Morton Feldman piece and about the personal relationship between Feldman and Rothko.
The building blocks of “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” are essentially the same as those of “Rothko Chapel”: sustained choral chords, questing viola lines, rumblings and chimings of percussion. Yet significant differences soon appear. The viola is broader, more restless, more impassioned. One phrase is marked “legato, molto espressivo”—editorializing that is absent from “Rothko Chapel.” In the Feldman, members of the ensemble seem independent of one another, coinciding like parts of a mobile; the chorus is indifferent, otherworldly. Sorey plots subtle connections among the disparate parts.
Apart from innumerable articles about whose performances got cancelled because of the Russia-Ukraine war, the pickings were slim this week. One of the lesser-heard sonatas in Tamara Stefanovich's program was Hanns Eisler's First:
Here is Everything Changes, Nothing Changes by Tyshawn Sorey:
And finally, a piece by Takemitsu for traditional gagaku orchestra:
I just saw this headline: Cardiff Philharmonic removes Tchaikovsky from programme in light of Russian invasion of Ukraine and my initial thought was, no, that's a bridge too far. Tchaikovsky didn't invade anyone so why should he get cancelled? They felt that while Russia was invading Ukraine was an "inappropriate" time to be doing an all-Tchaikovsky program. While it makes sense to punish the current regime in Russia for its cruel adventurism through economic sanctions, shutting down internet services, boycotting Russian oil and gas and a host of other measures, I really fail to see how eliminating Tchaikovsky from a symphony program serves any practical end. Do we hate Russian culture? Certainly not, so maybe it would be a good idea to perform more Russian and Ukrainian music to show that. Cancelling Tchaikovsky is just a particularly pointless example of virtue-signalling. But yes, do everything feasible to discourage the current leadership in Russian from continuing on this very dangerous path.
If you wander around the shelves of a music research library you will run into great stretches devoted to multivolume editions with titles like Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich. Or sometimes the title will be all in Cyrillic if it is the Soviet edition of the complete works of Shostakovich, for example. The first title translates as "Monuments of Austrian Music". This series was begun in 1894 and volumes are still being published. The first volume was devoted to masses by Johann Josef Fux and we are currently up to volume 160. There are a bunch of series, mostly worked on by German musicologists though collected editions from many different places tend to be edited by musicologists from that area. The basic principle is that before you can perform, consider or discuss the music you have to have an accessible edition. Of course as we are now moving into post-literate times musically all this might change.
So, as exemplified in these series, the greatest monument of Western music is, of course, the music itself. But next to that I think we should place another monument, perhaps the greatest apart from the music itself, and this is the five volume Oxford History of Western Music heroically written single-handedly (though with the indirect assistance of many, many scholars) by Richard Taruskin and completed just fourteen years ago. Indeed, because of its monumentality it is only now, perhaps, that we can begin to appreciate the achievement. Four thousand or so pages of brilliant and sober insight into the history of Western music.
I'm pointing this out because I am re-reading this work and appreciating once again what a marvel it is. In future weeks I will share little bits of wisdom from it. Right now I am reading chapter one, "The Curtain Goes Up: "Gregorian" Chant, the First Literate Repertory and How It Got That Way." The title itself is mordantly humorous. It is deliciously ironic that the written repertory of Western music came to be out of a bureaucratic and administrative need: to centralize and codify the liturgy of Christianity according to the Roman rite because of the 9th century alliance between Pepin the Short and Pope Stephen the Second. The texts could be written down, of course, but in the absence of a musical notation how on earth could you codify and teach the Roman rite to clerics and lay people across the whole Frankish empire? Only with a musical notation. And so the story begins!
I had to search around to find a good example of Gregorian chant that was not accompanied by bells or organ. In its earliest form, it was monophonic.
As a bit of a footnote to our recent discussion: I decided to re-read Taruskin's Oxford History and the introduction, titled "The History of What?" is a brilliant discussion of the methodology. In fact, he comes down in favor of Maury's recent point about the basic division in music being between formal and informal though he describes it as literate and either pre-literate or post-literate--where we are going currently. But he is speaking as a historian and I have a slightly different perspective. He is good at teasing out the left over elements of German Romanticism and rejecting them, but he also takes a run at the pretensions of Adorno and does an excellent job of unveiling the cop-out that comes with avoiding agency. It is always composers, musicians and audiences that cause things to happen, not vague Hegelian forces. What I found most fascinating was his mention of Howard Becker whose book Art Worlds takes an approach close to mine:
An "art world" as Becker conceives it, is the ensemble of agents and social relations that it takes to produce works of art (or maintain artistic activity) in various media. To study art worlds is to study processes of collective action and mediation, the very things that are most often missing in conventional musical historiography. [op. cit. p. xx]
For an absolutely stunning example of that you could not do better than to read Taruskin's discussion of how Stravinsky's Rite of Spring came to be.
The one thing that I find crucially important that Taruskin carefully avoids, is mention of aesthetic quality, though he does talk a lot about the related concept of taste. Aesthetics has been the weird cousin of philosophy for a long time now, but it is pretty important. I was a performer and am now, sort of, a composer, and in those two roles, what you are aiming for is aesthetic quality. So your perspective is very different from that of a historian.
Of course, what I should be doing is composing and not talking about it!
For an unusual envoi, here is a mixed concert of chamber music played by Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski and friends streamed from Wigmore Hall this morning:
On February 23rd, Gergiev led the first performance in a run of Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades” at La Scala, in Milan. (Yes, he was supposed to be leading an American orchestral tour and an Italian opera production simultaneously.) The following day, as the invasion began, Beppe Sala, the mayor of Milan, declared that Gergiev’s engagement would be cut short unless he denounced the assault on Ukraine. That decisive action changed the conversation. Rotterdam and Munich issued similar ultimatums, and, one day before the first Vienna concert, Carnegie announced that Yannick Nézet-Séguin would take Gergiev’s place on the tour. Not surprisingly, Putin’s court conductor condemned nothing. His posts in Munich and Rotterdam were rescinded, and other engagements in Europe and America were cancelled. Gergiev’s career outside Russia was effectively over.
Not just Gergiev, of course, but other musicians as well, such as Anna Netrebko whose career is certainly not over, but currently on pause.
The melee around Putin’s musicians is following a familiar pattern: first, ignore the issue for as long as possible; then, join a moralizing stampede. Many Russian musical figures have spoken out against the war, and their courage is bracing. Yet the notion that every Russian should have to repudiate Putin before being allowed to perform in America or Europe is grim. There is no way of knowing what constraints musicians labor under, what consequences they face.
Yes, and the example of Shostakovich and other Soviet-era musicians is sobering. For years he kept a suitcase packed by the door in case the KGB came for him in the middle of the night as happened to a number of associates. For much of Russia's history its musicians and artists had little choice about supporting the regime and we should not forget that. Ross writes:
I’ve also turned to Shostakovich, the angel of dread. His Symphony No. 13 is subtitled “Babi Yar,” in honor of the one of the most horrific massacres of the Holocaust.
I think Ross hits the right note and the conclusion with reference to the Shostakovich Symphony 13 is excellent. I would have added that the finest performances of Shostakovich symphonies I have heard have been with the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre conducted by ------ Valery Gergiev.
Valery Gergiev, the star Russian maestro and prominent supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, was removed Tuesday from his post as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic after he refused to denounce Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Dieter Reiter, the mayor of Munich, announced his decision in a news release saying termination of Mr. Gergiev’s contract was the only option available.
Mr. Gergiev is a prominent supporter of Mr. Putin, endorsing his re-election and appearing at concerts in Russia and abroad to promote his policies. The two have known each other since the early 1990s, when Mr. Putin was an official in St. Petersburg and Mr. Gergiev was beginning his tenure as the leader of the Mariinsky, then called the Kirov.
Mr. Putin has played an important role in Mr. Gergiev’s success, providing funding to the Mariinsky Theater, where Mr. Gergiev serves as general and artistic director.
Which illustrates the danger of relying on the support of a powerful political leader for a musician. His enemies become your enemies--in this case, just about everyone.
Anna Netrebko, the superstar Russian soprano, will no longer appear at the Metropolitan Opera this season or next after failing to comply with the company’s demand that she distance herself from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as he wages war on Ukraine.
The end of Ms. Netrebko’s engagements, which the Met announced on Thursday, came after the opera company, citing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, said it would no longer hire artists who support Mr. Putin. While Ms. Netrebko has in recent days issued statements critical of the war, she has remained silent on the Russian president, whose re-election she has in the past endorsed.
This should be a warning to every artist: keep a distance between yourself and any and all political figures, because while they might help you now, depending on future events, you may come to regret it. Anna Netrebko and Valery Gergiev are artists of the highest rank and it seems likely their careers are over--for the foreseeable future.
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We don't often hear about Shostakovich's sense of humor, but he indeed had one. In Dolmatovskiy's brief memoir he mentions a couple of instances. Shostakovich was very reluctant to criticize even bad works of music, but he was known to have said "It didn't turn out completely successfully" and, my favorite, "One can't say that what you've composed is original or good, but I can see you worked on it for a long time." [Shostakovich Studies 2, p. 260]
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Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowan links to a report that the Ukrainian Library Association announced cancellation of their upcoming conference by saying "We will reschedule just as soon as we have finished vanquishing our invaders".
At the heart of our traditional music is the notion of returning to the well: that source of infinite riches where melodies and songs abound. Whether it’s one singer borrowing a song from another or a musician stumbling across a tune in a dusty manuscript, there’s a constant process of renewal at play. Fittingly, this spring sees the publication of two seminal collections by the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA), one dating back 170 years and the other a relative newcomer at just 70 years of age.
Speaking of musical traditions...
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Last year the composer focus at the Salzburg Festival was on Morton Feldman, this coming summer it will be on Bartók with seven concerts devoted to his music. There will be four performances of Bluebeard's Castle, piano and chamber concerts as well as the Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Vienna Philharmonic and Yefim Bronfman.
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Let's start with that Bartók concerto. This is Yefim Bronfman with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the LA Philharmonic:
And this is Anna Netrebko singing "Casta Diva" from Bellini's Norma:
And here is an example of a traditional Irish song collected by Alan Lomax in 1951.
