Let's start with this: Why Success in Canada Means Moving to America. I despair of finding a good summary quote. The subhead is as close as we get:
Canada’s modest institutions have lowered the ceiling on creative professionals. Is leaving the answer?
I am probably too close to this to comment, but my feeling is that Canada prefers its creative talents to move away as they make us uncomfortable. Leonard Cohen is the exception that proves the rule.
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Alex Ross has a new piece up at The New Yorker: How the South Dakota Symphony Became One of America’s Boldest Orchestras.
The S.D.S.O. celebrated its centennial this season, in ambitious style. The roster of composers included not only Beethoven, Grieg, and Tchaikovsky but also Stephen Yarbrough, David M. Gordon, Jessie Montgomery, Anna Clyne, George Walker, Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, and Malek Jandali. One concert was given over to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion; another featured works by student composers from Lakota and Dakota tribes. (The orchestra has a series called the Lakota Music Project.) The season ended with a program that consisted of Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra”; “The Great Gate of Kiev,” from Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”; and “An Atlas of Deep Time,” a sprawling new score by John Luther Adams. I flew in for the occasion, having long admired the group from afar.
Wow, an impressive list. It kind of makes you wonder what is standing in the way of other smaller orchestras being equally creative.
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The great Prokofiev specialist Alexander Toradze has passed away. I have long enjoyed his recording of the Prokofiev piano concertos with Valery Gergiev. Here is the Piano Concerto No. 2:
Gulda (1930-2000), possibly the most original and eccentric pianist ever to emerge from Vienna was shunned in his lifetime by the establishment. He took up jazz, wore funny headgear and sometimes gave recitals naked with a girlfriend. He was a ray of light in a tenebrous society.
I believe he also faked his own death. But my experience of him was through his absolutely extraordinary performances of the Beethoven piano concertos with the Vienna Philharmonic which I owned in a boxed set of vinyl, and the piano sonatas which are sitting on my shelf right now. Not at all wacky.
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Simon Woods offers an essay on Questioning the Canon
As orchestras strive for greater inclusion, it’s time to finally let go of the notion of a classical music “canon”
I must have read dozens of opinion pieces critiquing the canon, with or without scare quotes, so isn't this rather stale news?
Merriam-Webster dictionary defines canon as “a sanctioned or accepted group or body of related works.” But sanctioned by whom? And who accepts it? Language matters, and the concept of canon unhelpfully perpetuates ideas that we are already moving on from.
Again, haven't I read something very like this many times? And if we have already moved on, why are we still talking about it? In order for this to be of any interest, I think the writer should show an understanding of the notion of a canon or repertory that extends a little further than Merriam-Webster.
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More interesting is a New York Times piece on a new opera: With Her First Opera, Rhiannon Giddens Returns to Her Roots
While composing, Giddens recorded tracks, singing and accompanying herself, that she sent to Abels. “She has a wonderful gift for melody, but what people may not know is how great she is at creating character with her voice,” he said. “She would sing Omar or Julie or the auctioneer, and the personality was clear in the music.”
Abels then took those themes and orchestrated them, sometimes making the harmonic language more complex and applying the sense of pacing he’s developed writing for film. The result was a blend of their voices, and, Giddens said, “the genius of Michael is figuring out where the lines blur.”
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Here is Friedrich Gulda in his non-wacky phase, playing the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 with George Szell and Vienna Philharmonic in 1966:
One of the most important influences on the young Mozart was Johann Christian Bach, the youngest of J. S. Bach's composing sons. Mozart met him in London in 1764 and studied composition with him for five months--he was eight at the time. Mozart later turned this piano sonata in D major by J. C. Bach into the Concerto for Keyboard K. 107. J. C. Bach was one of the creators of the classical style in composition.
18 comments:
for US orchestras I've wondered whether they've been more on life support via foundations and education than in Europe. In other words, questioning the orchestral canon by itself may or may not be apt but compared to choral societies and other musical cultures the symphony may never have been as prominent in the life of classical musical cultures in the North American continent as it has been in Europe, even if people WANT it to be as indicative of the state of American classical music.
Thus my skepticism about the idea that classical music stands or falls on the basis of the symphonic, whether defending or critiquing the canons.
"If" orchestras are not doing that great (I've got a book somewhere on the fiscal crises of American orchestras from 2012 ish) then even criticizing the canon may be moot. If advocates of Price and Still want those composers heard chamber music may be the better long-term bet than gambling on symphonies (not that I mind symphonies, I just also haven't gotten to a symphonic concert in a decade whereas I keep tabs on chamber music and guitar music).
The origins of the symphony are interesting. In its most familiar incarnation it developed from high-class party music for the aristocracy, often performed out of doors. Other names were cassation, serenata and divertimento. There were over 16 thousand symphonies composed in the 18th century as it filled an important social need. During the Lenten season, concert series were established, first in Paris and then elsewhere, and the typical kickoff to these concerts was a symphony (sometimes called an overture). The question now is, what social need might the orchestra fill for us? The article about the new opera by Rhiannon Giddens offers a clue. She says:
"It was important to both composers that the opera be composed for a conventional orchestra. One reason was aesthetic, Abels said: “It pulls on so many diverse genres of music” — of the Muslim diaspora, spirituals, bluegrass, Wagner and that other opera set in Charleston, “Porgy.” “The traditional orchestra unifies them.” "
My view is that the symphony orchestra is the most complex and capable musical instrument ever created, which is why it is so useful to composers.
I love how Florence Price is continually trotted out as some woefully underperformed genius, when her work (ersatz Dvorak, really) is so underwhelming. I listened to her 1st symphony all the way through. Meandering, very long-winded, derivative, and totally anachronistic. There's a reason the canon is the canon. And there's a reason that Florence Price has not been in it until quite recently. She's competent, but mediocre (see Fanny and Clara). I'm totally in favor of programming new music, I think that's essential, and I think it interests audiences. But I'm not buying the "genius" marketing around Price. Her music is too slight to bear the burden that marketing departments are putting on her.
Anyone else spot Ted Gioia's interview with Rick Beato? I'll have to get to that one, maybe later this weekend or next.
to make sure I include the link ...
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/i-have-a-frank-and-unfiltered-conversation?s=r
I saw that Wenatchee, but the title put me off: haven't we had our fill of musings on The Future of Music? Anyway, I guess I will have a look at it.
Thanks Jives for some unfiltered comments on Florence Price. Obviously marketing departments have needs!
I watched some of it. Ok, it's pretty good. But it is over an hour long and I just never watch YouTube clips that long. I'm good for five or ten minutes. If it were text I could skim the whole thing in probably ten minutes and get the meat of it. But as a video clip? Sorry, too long!
I wouldn't say Price's music is bad or anything but compared to Scott Joplin, George Walker, William Grant Still, William Levi Dawson or Samuel Coleridge-Taylor I just don't go back and listen to her works as much by comparison. Then there's Leo Brouwer (who some writers have mentioned is Afro-Cuban). Price was at an intersectional disadvantage as a woman writing classical music but one of the reasons comparative study of "pop" and "classical" has interested me is because different biases and intra-industry prejudices play out in different ways. The age of ragtime had a fair amount of music published by people of color and women (May Aufderheide wrote enough music that a dedicated disc or two of her work would seem feasible).
There are composers whose works got snuffed out. Zaderatsky's works were banned from performance and he was dumped in the Gulag in the 1930s but people have revived his 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano (that he wrote while IN the Gulag).
Ferdinand Rebay's music is conservative Brahmsian work but his guitar sonatas and guitar chamber music have been getting presented in this century. There's a sense in which Price Boosterism presents her music as neglected for specifically intersectional reasons and those are surely variables but I've been listening to Zaderatsky and Rebay and sometimes literal political oppression and being a victim of the times consigns the entire catalogues of composers to oblivion for generations across the color lines of contemporary new musicology advocacy. Had Zaderatsky's work not been banned his might have been one of the first cycles of preludes and fugues for piano published. But that didn't happen and his work didn't get published until this century. As it stands I'm glad I imported the score for Zaderatsky's Preludes and Fugues before Putin did his invasion. Importing musical works from Russian and Russian-adjacent composers is probably going to be trickier now. Back when GATT first kicked in I wanted to get the DSCH quartets and the local music shop clerks literally cringed in unison when I said I wanted to order them and told me it would cost them more to import the music than they'd made selling it to me. Geopolitics definitely influences the prices of scores.
Thanks for mentioning Vsevolod Zaderatsky. I had not heard of him before. Yes, being both a White Russian and from Ukraine were not good options in the Soviet Union!
I had great difficulties getting a score by John Duarte, his variations on Dies Irae I think it was. I finally got it, but the European distributor told me I had to deal with their American distributor in future, even though they had refused to get it for me. You might check IMSLP for scores.
A lot of Zaderatsky's work isn't public domain in the US even though they show up on IMSLP.
I've heard of guitarists having trouble finding, of all things, the score for Toru Takemitsu's "All in Twilight" one of the jewels of late 20th century classical guitar literature! It makes me glad I inadvertantly got two copies.
In other realms, I've been enjoying David Starobin's new disc of Matiegka's Op. 31 Progressive Sonatas. Two-thirds of that set are at IMSLP now and that means I can eventually put together a series analyzing those sonatas to give guitarists an idea of how much variety you can have in sonata forms and I can't think of a better guitarist to present them on disc than Starobin. :)
Oh I spent ages searching for All in Twilight. For well over a year its status was "awaiting reprint", and I had to pay a not-inconsiderable amount to a French second-hand bookseller who, after some very difficult correspondence (neither of us spoke eachother's language), I discovered had an old copy lurking in his shop.
That Gioia interview is strange. He alternates between interesting observations about the music business and wild general claims about music history (or more generously, a tendency to overstate things). Particularly his seeming belief that the great development of twentieth century Western music was a liberation from Pythagorean tyranny.
I haven't gotten to the interview on YT yet but I've written at some length on the problems in Ted Gioia's would-be subversive history of music over at Wenatchee The Hatchet. Roger Scruton pointed out that Pythagorean views about music were abandoned as far back as the sixteenth century, a point elaborated in far more detail by Daniel K L Chua and to some extent by Mark Evan Bonds in Bonds' survey of absolute music.
As much as Gioia has written about music and trance being somehow subversive there was hardly anything provably subversive about using music to arouse mantic states in ancient near eastern divinatory practices; it was normative in many cultures and what catalyzed a set of crises regarding the legitimacy of various forms of trance prophecy was not necessarily that men in power didn't want teenage girls giving oracles (men tended to interpret those oracular statements anyway), it was because men of means who made decisions about war got burned by the failures of oracles to the point that they began to preferred technical divination (astrology, for instance) to inspired speech. This was happening across the ancient near east over a centuries long period.
At best the Pythagorean conspiracy theory doesn't square with the materials he cites that I've read for myself. At worst it's a conspiracy theory that pits stereotyped "white science" against "black magic" in a way that precludes the very possibility of the musical convergences he urges his readers to seek out and that, if such convergences can be found I think they are convergences that we can create in our own era provided we don't subscribe to Gioia's conspiracy theory driven conception of music history. :)
Mark Burford and other historians of black popular music and black church music in North America in particular have highlighted the ways that the precedents set by Thomas A DOrsey were that people shouldn't "have" to choose between J S Bach and gospel blues. Gioia's version of music history as I've read his work forces the reader into an either/or that black theologians and pastors rejected across the last 120 years.
The Pythagorean tyranny thing is one of the most implausible things in Gioia's writing. Roger Scruton, Daniel K L Chua and Mark Evan Bonds have all written so extensively on how Pythagorean cosmology hasn't been prevalent in Western thought since the sixteenth century that I wonder whether Gioia has gotten out of his depth on that whole set of topics for years.
A friend of mine studied composition with Takemitsu in Japan and gave me a present of some of his popular song arrangements for guitar. When Manuel Barrueco was staying with me for a few days (he was giving a master class at the conservatory) I showed him the scores and he begged me to send him a copy.
Re Ted Gioia: you can certainly complain about some blind spots in the standard training of musicologists, but I think Ted's fixations and blind spots illustrate how useful are the virtues of musicological training.
Interesting. I recall Barrueco recorded a Beatles album that contained the Takemitsu songs (and also Brouwer's arrangements, which I'm less keen on...) I would have loved to meet Takemitsu - both the music and the man fascinate me. I actually wrote a little Homage to Takemitsu for guitar recently that I then recorded:
https://youtu.be/XF_nB4WRC50
Gioai looks more sound on jazz, yes? I might read one of his books on that, as I'm terribly ignorant of it and would really like to get a better understanding of the music and its history.
Steven, what a lovely piece! I will have to listen to it several more times, of course. I wonder, could I persuade you to write a guest post for the Music Salon on Takemitsu?
Yes, Ted Gioia is a real authority on jazz with a wealth of knowledge. But he tends to wander into realms in which he is much less knowledgeable.
Hm, a very tempting idea! I'll reflect on it and give you an email if I come up with something.
Thanks Bryan for listening to my composition, and for the kind words.
a post, or even a series of posts, on "All in Twilight" would be wonderful. :)
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