THE MUSIC SALON: classical music, popular culture, philosophy and anything else that catches my fancy...
First up an interesting performance of Haydn's Farewell Symphony:
And now the ultra-enigmatic Prelude op. 28 no. 2 by Chopin:
Over at Slipped Disc Alexis Hauser, the artistic director of the McGill Symphony Orchestra weighs in with a fierce rebuttal to the closing of the McGill Conservatory. SSoM stands for "Schulich School of Music" at McGill.
I must express my shock about the foreseen imminent closing of the McGill Conservatory, to say nothing about how it was communicated.
I know many of the 66 Conservatory instructors, all of them immensely dedciated, one of them my wife with 55 (fifty-five!) students, nearly all of them resp. their parents have already indicated their definitive plan to continue their studies with her, with or without a Conservatory.
The motives in the letter are completely false, with no numbers given, no previous talks/warnings ahead, nothing but a fait accompli of the exiting Dean of SSoM. “With heavy heart”…I agree:, heart of stone! Its contents is in total contrast to the facts:
Regarding space:
As professor of the SSoM faculty I was always willing to share my studio with Conservatory professors, and so did several colleagues of mine. Besides, I cannot understand that the classes must take place in the Strathcona Music Building which indeed suffers with space, but everyone familiar with McGill’s total amount of buildings, rooms etc. in different parts of the city, cannot take the space claim seriously, certainly not with instruments which can be brought to the lesson by teacher and student ( = all Instruments except keyboards). With a bit of research, good will and endurance, this “problem” can be solved!!!!
Number of students:
I cannot speak for other instructors than my wife, but as mentioned, supportive letters of nearly all her students/parents have already poured in, protesting the decision, speechless over its short term (!!!) and assuring that they want to continue the lessons.
When some years ago, the existence of some Conservatoires within Quebec was threatened (except for Montréal and Québec City), not by a politician, but by a Conservatoire insider (!), I was one of many who wrote a protest note to the Minister of Culture, arguing that Quebec would seriously harm its position as the distinct province, ruining its exceptional cultural reputation within Canada. Fortunately, the crisis then was eventually solved positively.
Now we experience the same with the McGill Conservatory, a disastrous decision signed by two insiders, an exiting and an incoming Dean (none of them, by the way, with any closeness to performance!) with obviously no concern for the long term negative effects:
– Many Conservatory students moved on to professional music studies, won prizes and even performed in special programs in New York’s Carnegie Hall
– A large part would go into other professions, but because of their early-in-life musical education are/will/would be future enthusiastic concert goers, genuine melomanes.
– SSoM, by far the most important music faculty in Canada and well known internationally, is (has been to the brdt of my knowledge the only one with the inclusion of a Conservatory, an excellent method to secure a rich cultural life on all levels, on stage and in the auditorium (in Asia, Universities start even with music kindergarten!). It is/was again something that made Québec the one distinct province, far above all other provinces, the only one, I for one and several other international colleagues of mine, feel (felt) proud to work here and not anywhere else within Canada.
I dare say that no Dean with a direct background/link to Music Performance would have ever allowed that to happen (this I know as a fact and can elaborate on it). But a slimy letter like this, with false claims, fatal and not thought through in all consequences, tarnishes the good McGill name internationally of our beloved institution, ruins with one stroke what has been built over many years with enormous care and enthusiasm by dedicated teachers who have been made jobless from one day to the next, while their instigators are moving on (one of them simultaneously even receiving an award….!) “Strategic Planning”: eliminating an immensely important pedagogical institution with catastrophic consequences for so many instructors and frustrations/protests from numerous students/parents, all this with vague excuses saying nothing concretely.
In what world are we living??? Nothing can convince me that no other ways would be possible for a solution, acceptable for the teachers and the students/parents alike. Therefore, all facts, numbers, room options (and for Heavens’s sake including outside the Strathcona Music Building, in one or more of McGill’s countless buildings all over the town), should be brought forward and turned upside down for evidence and strategic thinking which deserve the name to secure the good name of McGill. What we have right now is a huge disgrace!
Hoping for a very constructive Townhall Meeting,
Sincerely
Alexis Hauser Artistic Director, McGill Symphony Orchestra Montréal
Here is the maestro conducting the McGill Symphony in the first movement of the Symphony No. 5 by Tchaikovsky:
A profound observation about the contribution of subjectivity to aesthetics:
"the real and express content that the poet puts in his work remains as always finite; the possible content that he allows us to contribute is an infinite quality."
--Friedrich Schiller
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Some statistics about music education: The surprising musical instrument many parents want their kids to learn
More than half — 1,200 — of the parents surveyed said they have played at least one instrument in their lifetime.
The survey revealed one of every four Americans can play an instrument — with 17% picking up old musical habits during the coronavirus pandemic and 37% saying they’d learned an instrument in the past but don’t currently play anything.
A quarter of respondents said they have never learned an instrument and only 9% of parents said their children hadn’t yet expressed any interest in learning an instrument.
In addition, 26% believe that music education should be encouraged in schools, and 29% think it should be required or prioritized at school.
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The headline at Slipped Disc is rather misleading, but the story is that McGill University School of Music has decided that they have to shut down the affiliated Conservatory, largely as a result of the Covid hiatus.
The Conservatory of Music at Montreal’s McGill University is to cease operations next summer, after 118 years of teaching.
The Conservatory, which was run by the university’s Schulich School of Music, was open to the greater Montreal community, giving courses to students of all ages and offering teaching space to instructors, free of charge.
According to the school, the pandemic showed that “the Conservatory is no longer financially viable nor sustainable.” While there were over 550 students before COVID-19 hit, predictions showed that fewer than 100 students would sign up in the coming year.
The Covid crisis is having many long-term unfortunate consequences for classical music.
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Also from Slipped Disc is some important news for John Adams fans:
Around the middle of the last century, the elegant head of Columbia Records Goddard Lieberson told his friend, the composer Igor Stravinsky, that the label would record every work he wrote, juvenile to old-age, under his own supervision.
Lieberson was as good as his word and the result is an incomparable monument of 20th century culture.
No label has sought to emulate it with a living composer.
Until now.
Nonesuch is about to release the complete works of John Adams, the most successful American composer of our time.
It includes, in addition to the familiar operas and Harmonielehre, such esoteric adventures as ‘Guide to Strange Places’, ‘American Berserk’ and ‘Christian Zeal and Activity.’
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Here is an article and clip about the sound of the Vienna Philharmonic: What's the secret behind the Vienna Philharmonic's unique sound?
Explaining the dark quality of the Viennese sound, Ottensamer adds, “What always strikes me is the subtlety in the sound. You try not to play too directly in certain passages. Notes gradually rise and don’t always have a clear beginning." Some of the orchestra’s instruments are quite different from those played elsewhere in the world.
“The [Viennese] clarinet is built with a little bit more wood. It’s a little thicker, more voluminous, and therefore creates a darker sound. This brings us to the Viennese sound itself. This sound blends particularly well with the other instruments in the orchestra,” says Ottensamer.
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Method Singing is an article about the influence of "method acting" on opera:
While stage and screen acting was revolutionized during the 20th century by the thinking of Russian actor-director Constantin Stanislavski and his “System”—later a foundation of Method acting—it sometimes appears as though his innovations passed opera by entirely. But Method acting has a history in opera, and it begins earlier than you might think. Even before his Moscow Art Theatre toured the United States and galvanized famous disciples like Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, Stanislavski was trying out his acting techniques with opera singers.
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There are a limited number of set pieces in music journalism. You know what they are: exciting new songs by someone you have never heard of, world tour by aging rock gods, outrageous production of much-beloved opera where everyone is dressed as a Nazi--or nude, the horrible unlistenable modern music and so on. In the last category we have this from the Wall Street Journal: ‘The War on Music’ Review: Songs Without Listeners. The article refers to:
the near-total inability of post-World War II America and Europe to produce more than a small number of classical works that any normal person would want to hear. That failure is slowly killing classical music. You can’t expect the public to remain engaged with works of the distant past if the present doesn’t produce anything interesting. Today’s concertgoers are not antiquaries; they, too, no less than music lovers in centuries gone by, want to enjoy and rave about the latest thing.
This piece is actually a book review:
The great virtue of John Mauceri’s “The War on Music: Reclaiming the Twentieth Century” is that it acknowledges what many writers on the subject know but can’t say: that something went badly wrong in music in the 20th century, and especially after 1945. The time has come, Mr. Mauceri writes, “to ask why so much contemporary music played by our greatest musical institutions—and supported overwhelmingly by music critics—is music that the vast majority of people do not want to hear—and have never wanted to hear.”
This is a venerable genre--critics were writing books about how modern music had gone all wrong starting in the 1920s when "modern" music had barely arrived. The reviewer doesn't buy the arguments of the book as to why modern music was the way it was, but makes this observation:
The rise of the 12-tone compositional method, invented by Schoenberg and elaborated by his many imitators, produced nothing of greatness and signified a sickness at the heart of Western music. That the book’s survey of 20th-century music begins with Igor Stravinsky’s revolting ballet “Rite of Spring,” which glorified pagan savagery and premiered a year before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, suggests that Mr. Mauceri, too, suspects the war on music began well before the guns started firing in 1914.
This is all just a mélange of clichés and stereotypes, of course. That simple, pleasant music enjoyed by the majority is largely pop music these days is not much of a mystery. That there is also more esoteric music enjoyed by a minority is also quite obvious. There is a marvelously varied spectrum from innocuous pop music like that of Ed Sheeran all the way to the avant-garde experimentation of Captain Beefheart. And that's just in the pop world. There is a similar spectrum in the classical world from Vivaldi to Stravinsky or Philip Glass to Sofia Gubaidulina.
There is music literally for every taste and when you call the Rite of Spring a revolting glorification of pagan savagery you are just saying it is not to your taste and you don't like it. My saying I love the Rite of Spring just means that it is to my taste and I do like it. None of that is interesting, of course. It only gets interesting when you start to talk about why you like or don't like something and how the music creates a certain atmosphere or mood. Of course, you don't find much of that detail in journalism--or even in very many books either!
Whenever I see an orchestra in concert or watch a clip of a particularly engaged orchestra, such as that of musicAeterna I put up the other day, I am again struck with what a wondrous thing a fine orchestra is. The fruit of a thousand years of musical development in terms of notation, theory, orchestration, performance practice, and instrumental training, it is really a metaphor of what a harmonious society could be. I always delight in the sight of so many different kinds of people united in a single project, the performance of a piece of music. Young people, old people, people of various different ethnic groups and, less visibly, of different economic classes in society, of different social groups, often hinted at by wildly different hairstyles. A symphony orchestra is a model of a well-functioning society. Or, conversely, of a society with deep-rooted problems.
In one orchestra I knew very well, the principal French horn and the principal trumpet had a nasty breakup and afterwards the horns and the trumpets refused to tune to one another. I forget how long that lasted, but it was not optimal! You could draw a lot of interesting sociological conclusions from observing orchestras of which the most mundane might be that engaging in working together does tend to unify a group of people. The well-defined lines of responsibility tend to reduce the possibility of intra-group friction, for example. Also, an orchestra is not a simple democracy as it is the conductor's job to direct and mold and train the ensemble. Overall leadership also devolves to the concertmaster who has special responsibilities in the string section and generally. Within each group of instruments there is a principal as well. An orchestra is a kind of corporation, though with a very low hierarchical profile. There is a democratic dimension, however: in many European orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the orchestra votes on who they want to appoint as music director.
This is all inspired by this news story: San Antonio Symphony to Dissolve Amid Labor Dispute.
For almost nine months, the musicians of the San Antonio Symphony were on strike, resisting steep cuts proposed by management that they said would destroy the ensemble. As the dispute dragged on, much of the 2021-22 season was canceled, the players found part-time jobs and mediators tried to negotiate a compromise to save the 83-year-old orchestra.
The impasse came to an end on Thursday with the announcement that the symphony had decided to file for bankruptcy and dissolve. The symphony’s board, which had argued that maintaining a large orchestra had grown too costly, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, said it did not see a path forward.
And that was that. Yes, symphony orchestras are costly, and opera is even more so. But in this, as in everything else, you get what you pay for and if you don't want to pay for something, you don't get it. It seems that San Antonio did not contain sufficient wealthy donors who were willing to support the orchestra.
It is a sad truth that the artistic elite have a tendency to believe that art makes us better people, which is not supported by the evidence. But the arts do have a valuable role in society in terms of inspiration, consolation, the realization and development of personal growth and a bunch of things that are very hard to describe or categorize. Suffice it to say that civic life in San Antonio just got a little less fulfilling, a little less culturally rich and a duller place. A society without art is not a very enjoyable one, even though it might be materially prosperous.
There is not much on YouTube from the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra, but here is the coda to Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov:
This is the Mozart concert from the Salzburg Festival last summer by Theodor Currentzis and musicAeterna. Three arias for soprano and the last two symphonies.
A few years ago I had the chance to spend a few days in Valencia attending some concerts. They have an absolutely magnificent opera house, the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia, part of an enormous complex of contemporary museums and attractions. You can see an aerial shot of the opera house at the end of this clip, announcing their 22/23 season:
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At The New Yorker, Alex Ross offers us A Grand Tour of Germany’s Opera Paradise:
Germany is, on statistical grounds, the most operatic country on earth. The Bundesrepublik has more than eighty permanent opera houses, which in a typical season present seven or eight thousand performances—about a third of the global total, according to the Web site Operabase. By contrast, Italy, the birthplace of the art, manages fewer than two thousand. As opportunities elsewhere dwindle, the German system has become a crucial mechanism by which opera careers are made. Countless younger singers from around the world have undergone the ritual of a Festvertrag—a fixed-term contract to sing a variety of roles at a single German house. With so many productions, directors feel free to try out new ideas, some outlandish and some revelatory. New works surface regularly; forgotten scores are given a second chance. Public funding makes this quasi-utopia possible: before the pandemic, federal, state, and local entities were spending 2.7 billion euros each year on theatre.
Yes, that's where you want to be to make a living as an opera singer. I remember a conversation I had with an agent many years ago. She was saying that she would tell people looking for a career as an opera singer that they would have to invest at least $50,000 just to prepare: lessons, travel, master-classes, competitions and so on. And how long would it take to recoup this investment? One year. Read the rest of Ross' article for a fascinating glimpse at the riches available in the smaller centers in Germany.
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Rhinestones & Nashville Twang, a look at the early music scene in Nashville!
Nashville’s period-instrument musicians can play Bach’s B-minor Mass with the best of them. But these musicians are influenced just as much by their close association with Music City as they are by their familiarity with valveless horns and viola da gambas. Nashville has a music infrastructure that is second to none, with over 180 recording studios, 130 music publishers, 100 live music clubs, and 80 record labels.
The urbanologist Richard Florida once famously described the concentration of musical talent and resources in a city as the “Nashville Effect.” This phenomenon has contributed to a remarkably versatile commercial- and classical-music culture.
It’s not uncommon for Nashville classical musicians to perform Mahler with the Nashville Symphony, record a pop song with Miley Cyrus, premiere a 21st-century piece with one of Nashville’s several contemporary-music ensembles, and give a period-instrument performance of a Bach Brandenburg Concerto—all in a few weeks.
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Fading traditions don't have to be lost forever as we learn from this BBC article: Flamenco and the 1922 Woodstock of Spain
Falla had organised the contest with an express purpose: to elevate cante jondo (deep song) – the raw and expressive strand of flamenco practised by the Roma people – into a serious art form. The classical composer and his assembled friends were concerned that the music was in danger of losing its essence, being contaminated by popular "flamenco" which, by the 1920s had, in their opinion, morphed into a frivolous public spectacle staged in rowdy urban drinking establishments known as cafés cantantes.
Falla's group wanted to reset the clock, opening a dialogue about what flamenco was and how it was perceived. To them, the music in its purist form was a noble art whose structure had been framed by Andalucia's Roma people as far back as the 15th Century.
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A $56 Million Donation Will Help MPR Greatly Expand Its Classical Service.
MPR says it will establish a separate permanent endowment to steward the massive contribution so it can best serve the donor’s designated purpose. It plans to use some of the money to increase national appreciation of classical music and expand audience reach with new programming and technologies. It said it will divvy up the funds between classical programming and new media technologies to fit the organization’s strategic priorities. And how MPR invests in new media technology will serve as a model for digital transformation across APMG, it said.
When I was young the classical programming on the CBC in Canada made a big difference in my exposure to classical music.
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I couldn't find a really good clip of early music in Nashville (maybe I didn't look hard enough!) but here is an example of cante jondo with some interesting harmonies:
Here are some excerpts from a performance of Aida in Chemnitz:
One hobby includes writing haiku fairly regularly, so here are a few recent ones:
One of the finest conductors working today with one of the finest orchestras in possibly the finest concert hall, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg.
You know, to be completely honest, I would rather listen to this and the Unfinished than pretty well any other symphony by any composer. Even Beethoven. Well, maybe an exception for the Symphony 41 by Mozart--no-one has written a better finale.
This is a topic that has never hugely interested me, but Ted Gioia and others have written a lot about it. He just dropped an interesting essay for subscribers only, but it has this provocative excerpt in the teaser. Talking about a number of new ventures he says:
A meaningful number of these startups aim to make musicians irrelevant or obsolete, usually with some kind of artificial intelligence. Record labels seem more interested in these initiatives, while ignoring many of the rest—I’ll let you decide why that might be the case.
The bottom line: Music tech is evolving faster than the music itself, perhaps for the first time in history. So the next revolution might not be televised, but it sure as hell will be funded by venture capital.
Biggle was celebrated in science fiction circles as the author who introduced aesthetics into a literature known for its scientific and technological complications. His stories frequently used musical and artistic themes. Such notables as songwriter Jimmy Webb and novelist Orson Scott Card have written of the tremendous effect that his early story, "The Tunesmith", had on them in their youth.
Tunesmith, written in 1957, has this passage about how music has been commercialized, indeed, the only surviving musical form is the "Com" or commercial. This is a conversation between Erlin Baque, the last true composer in the world, and his agent, Hulsey:
Hulsey reached for his briefcase, dropped it again, leaned forward scowling. “Erlin, I’m worried about you. I have twenty-seven tunesmiths in my agency. You’re the best by far. Hell, you’re the best in the world, and you make the least money of any of them. Your net last year was twenty-two hundred. None of the others netted less than eleven thousand.” “That isn’t news to me,” Baque said. “This may be. You have as many accounts as any of them. Did you know that?” Baque shook his head. “No, I didn’t know that.” “You have as many accounts, but you don’t make any money. Want to know why? Two reasons. You spend too much time on a Com, and you write it too well. Sponsors can use one of your Coms for months—or sometimes even years, like that Tamper Cheese thing. People like to hear them. Now if you just didn’t write so damned well, you could work faster, and the sponsors would have to use more of your Coms, and you could turn out more.” “I’ve thought about that. Even if I didn’t, Val would keep reminding me. But it’s no use. That’s the way I have to work. If there was some way to get the sponsors to pay more for a good Com—” “There isn’t. The guild wouldn’t stand for it, because good Coms mean less work, and most tunesmiths couldn’t write a really good Com.
Masterpieces (p. 58). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
This is, of course, the age-old battle between aesthetics and economics or between quality and quantity. In the short story Erlin Baque quits the composer's union and returns to his career as a performer where, reinventing the genre of instrumental music, he achieves such great success that the world returns to honoring the great cultural creators, instead of those who make the most money.
Obviously pure science fiction!
I haven't written about the Chaconne by Bach for a while, but I have been continuing to work on it, though I did miss over a month due to moving houses. Today I want to talk about what is probably the most salient aspect of the piece: it is a set of variations on a theme eight measures long, though the second four measures are nearly identical to the first four. Call it a theme of 4X2 measures. After this theme there are thirty-one variations the last of which is a slightly varied repeat of the theme. The theme is a version of the old chaconne chord progression that I talked about in this post.
What is so interesting, to both composers and listeners, about a theme and variations? I guess it is because it faces head-on the basic problem of composition, that of unity and variety. Arnold Schoenberg in his text for composers, Fundamentals of Music Composition, devotes a whole chapter to theme and variations. His models in this text are almost all from Beethoven, but, of course, Beethoven looked to Bach for some of his models. Schoenberg says "A simple theme will consist of closely related motive-forms, in preference to distant ones. Structurally, the theme should show definite subdivision and clear phrasing." (op. cit. p.167-8)
In order to make my points as succinctly as possible, I am just going to look at the first four measures of the theme (as I said, the second four are nearly the same). I'm also going to use examples from my edition of the piece to save time. Here is the beginning. As you can see, the phrase begins on the second beat of the measure and ends on the first. (You can click all these images to enlarge.)
It is not so well-known that many of the biggest hits in pop music these days are crafted by a committee of Swedes. But Scandinavia has an even bigger musical superpower in tiny Finland. This nation of only five and a half million people looms very large in the world's concert halls. The latest example, Klaus Mäkelä, 26, Takes Podium at Storied Concertgebouw Orchestra.
Klaus Mäkelä, a 26-year-old Finnish maestro on a rapid rise, will be the next chief conductor of the storied Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, the ensemble announced on Friday, after a several-year search following the dismissal of Daniele Gatti over sexual assault allegations in 2018.
“It means very much,” Mäkelä, who currently leads the Orchestre de Paris and the Oslo Philharmonic, said during a news conference. “It’s wonderful to have found this family of musicians. We really share the same ambition and passion.”
There are Finnish conductors all over the place. One of the most famous is Esa-Pekka Salonen who took over the reins of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1989 at thirty-one years of age. Alex Ross commented in the New Yorker:
The Salonen era in L.A. may mark a turning point in the recent history of classical music in America. It is a story not of an individual magically imprinting his personality on an institution – what Salonen has called the "empty hype" of conductor worship – but of an individual and an institution bringing out unforeseen capabilities in each other, and thereby proving how much life remains in the orchestra itself, at once the most conservative and the most powerful of musical organisms.
In 2018 the San Francisco Symphony appointed him musical director. But there are many other Finnish conductors and Wikipedia has fifty-one pages of them including Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Leif Segerstam, Susanna Mälkki, Osmo Vänskä and a host of others. Keep those umlauts handy!
But the question is why? Yes, Finland has been prominent in classical music for the last hundred years, due in part to the fame of composer Jean Sibelius, but the mystery of how a semi-arctic nation of five and half million is so much more prolific in music than, say, that other semi-arctic nation of Canada with thirty-eight and a half million people has long puzzled me. Perhaps part of the answer lies in the Finnish educational system, reputedly one of the finest in the world. Is it because they are mostly Lutherans? Who knows, but obviously cultural factors are involved. You won't find the answer in this post, obviously, as it would take a major research project. In the meantime we can just contemplate how miraculous it is that the Concertgebouw Orchestra, one of the finest in the world, chose a twenty-six year old Finn as their new musical director.
Here he is conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony in the Symphony No. 7 by Shostakovich:
The best response to a bear attack? Music teacher plays trombone to scare bear away from school
A British Columbia music teacher who saw a bear lurking outside the school where he works managed to drive the animal away by playing the trombone.
Tristan Clausen, a music teacher at St. John's Academy in Shawnigan Lake, said he was alerted to the presence of a bear sniffing around the wooden structure that houses the trash cans outside the school.
Clausen said another teacher attempted to scare the bear away by banging on a door.
"I thought: 'Well I can do better than that,' and reached for my trombone and went out,"
And if that didn't work, he had an accordion for backup!
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And speaking of brass instruments, just because stories of young virtuosos are perennial in classical music doesn't mean they're not true: A Young Horn Player Could Become ‘a Real Legend’
SILBERSCHLAG WAS BORN into what he called a “very, very musical family.” That might be an understatement. There are well over a dozen professional musicians, and plenty of Juilliard School degrees, among his relatives. His grandfather was Sol Greitzer, a violist who played under Toscanini and held the principal seat at the New York Philharmonic for over a decade (appointed by Pierre Boulez). His parents met as members of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. And his older brother, Zachary Silberschlag, is the principal trumpet of the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra.
There are lots of reasons why musicians tend to come from families of musicians. Both nature (genetics) and nurture (culture and connections) are involved. The most striking case is that of Johann Christian Bach, Wilhelm Friedrich Bach and Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach who were, in different places and different ways, the most important composers of the generation immediately after Johann Sebastian Bach--and they were all sons of J. S. Bach!
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Tree Rings Shed Light on a Stradivarius Mystery.
The researchers compared their measurements from the Stradivari harp with other tree ring sequences measured from stringed instruments. Out of more than 600 records, one stood out for being astonishingly similar: a spruce soundboard from a cello made by Nicola Amati in 1679. “All the maximum and minimum values are coincident,” Dr. Bernabei said. “It’s like somebody split a trunk in two different parts.”
The same wood was indeed used to make the Stradivari harp and the Amati cello, Dr. Bernabei and his colleagues suggest. This was consistent with the two craftsmen sharing a workshop, with the elder Amati possibly mentoring the younger Stradivari, the team concluded.
I have been playing a very special guitar for many years now. It was built by Robert Holroyd in Vancouver in 1983. For the spruce soundboard he made a trip into the mountains of British Columbia and selected a particular high-altitude tree which he had sawn to his specifications. High-altitude trees have a particularly tight and even grain which is preferred for its acoustic properties.
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The crash landing of the 'McDermott moonshot' is an article about local musical politics.
McDermott and Pro Musica were already well acquainted. She had performed with the group many times, including a complete cycle of the Beethoven piano concertos in 2017. She accepted the Pro Musica artistic directorship after a multi-year courtship conducted primarily by O’Connor.
But the McDermott moonshot never escaped the gravitational pull of the group’s internal conflicts. In March, she told the Pro Musica board she would end the relationship before the first season she planned in full even began.
Her departure punctuates a tumultuous 10-month period in which Pro Musica not only lost a nationally known and highly qualified artistic director but also hired a new executive director without considering a critically important issue. It also fired its well-regarded director of artistic operations and administration and alienated its most generous donor.
Yes, it's a bit long and complicated, but it illustrates the perennial problems of management that seem to plague arts organizations. I suspect that the fundamental problems are related to a profound clash between aesthetic and economic values and with a lack of candour regarding them.
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How Did Early Music Get So ‘Crispy’?
“Crisp articulation.” “Crisp enunciation.” “Crisp rhythm.” These qualities are often evoked by today’s music critics in performances of music ranging from the Renaissance to the 19th century. This language has been picked up by some performers, too. Curiously, these traits are not noticeable in historical treatises.
The Newberry Consort gave “lively, crisply articulated performances” of Robert Morton’s “L’Homme armé” setting, according to a 2005 review by Allan Kozinn in The New York Times. His Times colleague James Oestreich, in 2016, noted that the conductor Matthew Hall, “who has honed his early-music credentials as artistic director of the Oregon Bach Festival, brought his own ideas of period style into play” with the Mozarteum Orchestra in a program of Mozart and Beethoven, “eliciting smooth yet crisply articulated playing at brisk tempos.”
Anyone familiar with Richard Taruskin's thoughts on the early music movement might have an idea: he speculated that the approach was entirely consistent with the modernist approach to everything: brisk and unsentimental as opposed to misty and romantic.
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Gilbert and Sullivan in the opera house? Where does this leave Verdi, Puccini and Wagner?
Now don’t get me wrong; I love Gilbert and Sullivan as much as I love “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” There is a little John Cleese in all of us.
But what has Canada’s self-described second largest opera company been doing this spring by producing “H.M.S. Pinafore”?
OK, so the Canadian Opera Company once produced — and produced very well — the Broadway musical “Kismet.” So why shouldn’t Vancouver Opera slum a little?
Slum? Well, snob that I am, I happen to believe that opera companies should be producing opera. And the reason? We in Canada are operatically underserved. Our so-called second largest company offers its patrons the grand total of three mainstage productions annually and this season, shockingly, so does our largest company.
So where does this leave Verdi, Puccini and Wagner? Out in the Canadian cold, that’s where.
I rather think that Canada doesn't care much for classical music--not if it costs anything.
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This is pretty much the most interesting thing I read this week: Advice to Musicians from Martin Heidegger
Heidegger would probably say that any technological orientation, at its very roots, has this tendency to dominate. That was always implied, even going back to the invention of the wheel, but it gets worse as the tech advances. The very people who pursue this path of progress, in hopes of liberation and personal growth, get dominated by the Frankenstein monster they create. First, you invent the wheel, and soon you’re caught behind the wheel of your car in the hellish daily commute.
The curse isn’t even the technologies themselves, Heidegger would have cautioned—no, not the robots and algorithms and machines—but the grasping, utilitarian attitude that views everything as mere grist for the mill, as content (oh, how the web bosses love that word) to be put to use.
The answer is in a song. Read the whole thing.
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Let's start with a concerto we don't hear very often, the Concerto No. 1 for Horn by Richard Strauss. The soloist is Marie-Luise Neunecker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sl5Zc3Qrz2I&list=PL6Z7ufPU2ibn5Qnnt-Dcf0r9jGOnr8Xmv
And finally, one of the pieces that inspired the harmonic approach of the whole 19th century, the Unfinished Symphony by Franz Schubert:
Which is just another word for miscellanea. I don't have any sizable topics ready to go, though a big one on the Chaconne is brewing. So here are a few random observations:
Just finished the first chapter of the Oxford History of Western Music volume on the 19th century and Taruskin does a wonderful job of showing how German bias in musicology has led us to consistently undervalue the wonderful opera creations of not only Rossini, but also Bellini and Donizetti. He goes into all the details of how the opera buffa forms and conventions were expanded and later applied to opera seria in order to create the iconic romantic opera that burgeoned throughout the century. Here is a great example by Donizetti from Lucia di Lammermoor sung by the brilliant Anna Netrebko:
“I gather sounds around me and mobilise them with the least force possible. The worst is to move them around like driving an automobile." – Takemitsu
Takemitsu's writing about his own music contains very little technical information. This attitude may be partly explained by his musical education, or lack thereof. He can legitimately claim to be self-taught. While he had some help from older composers, notably Yasuji Kiyose, he had little formal musical training. Two of his most formative influences were Messiaen and Cage, and while he borrowed many things from their music, he followed neither of their rigorous compositional styles. When you think he might be about to develop the music in any traditional or systematic way, he usually then does something else. He had a freer, intuitive style. He had no problem calling his music "Romantic".
Unlike most composers, Takemitsu never held a teaching post. His career was financed by composition for film in particular – and he took cinema very seriously, not merely as a way to earn money. He also wrote a detective novel and even made appearances on television as a celebrity chef! Takemitsu had a wide range of interests, and this was evident in his approach to composition. His music was never narrowly abstract. The titles of nearly everything he wrote refer to something other than music: rain, wind, dreams, trees, gardens etc. For him, music could not be abstracted out from the world. (One sees Cage’s influence here, as well as Takemitsu’s increasing engagement with Japanese traditions.)
During Takemitsu’s most experimental period, from roughly the late 50s to late 70s, Takemitsu followed the examples of his peers in playing around with various novel methods of composition. But he did so without strictness or ideological commitment. He later commented that “if a work depends on technique it will be picked bare by nature, its bleaching bones left to become part of the landscape." He was excited by new systems and methods, but was sceptical about how they are used – concerned that they do not merely become ends in themselves. “Composers have been too steeped in techniques, trying to grasp sounds only through their function within the system.”
For example Takemitsu experimented with musique concrète, but, as Peter Burt writes:
While Schaeffer laboured for hours over his steam-train and casserole sounds in an effort to ‘abstract the sound from its dramatic context and elevate it to the dignity of musical material’, Takemitsu seems to have delighted in offering his listeners sounds drawn more or less recognisably from the natural world.
An example is Water Music (1960), which sounds like a digital reimagination of Japanese percussive instrumentation. If I recall correctly, as part of the composition Takemitsu wanted to record the sounds of stones being dropped into some beautiful Japanese pond or water fountain, say, but this didn't work out, so he ended up using the sound of water dripping inside a lavatory:
He stopped experimenting with electronics after a time, but the experiments helped cultivate his interest in timbre. His skill in using timbre, especially in orchestral writing, would develop greatly, with his later orchestral works being particularly fine examples, as you’ll soon hear.
But back to stones..! Takemitsu was greatly interested in stones from his childhood onwards. This is not an uncommon fascination in Japan; stones which excite such interest and meditation are called suiseki. It was part of Takemitsu’s love of the natural world. (Another peculiar experience of nature that he later wrote about was going mushroom-hunting in a Japanese forest with John Cage – which is quite an image.) The influence of the natural world manifests in various ways in his music. For example one of the most common motifs he uses is the SEA motif (Eb-E-A). In his later works, in which his music was the most unabashedly lyrically, he employs what he called a “sea of tonality”, a rather vague term that probably refers to his use of multiple tonalities at once, or perhaps the rich, wavy textures of the orchestral works in particular.
The structure of his music can resemble a garden: arranged in careful ways as if creating a garden of complementing musical ideas, rather than music that is developed through a narrative and transformed into something else. Music from earlier in the piece may be repeated with little or no alteration. Moments can happen suddenly, without preparation. There is no sense of travelling, of progressing from A to B. Almost all his music is somewhere on the scale of lento to moderato, and usually much closer to the lento side (he once said that “Japanese people have no sense of allegro"). Listen for example to one of Takemitsu’s last works, Spirit Garden for orchestra (1994):
When discussing his 1977 orchestral work A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden, Takemitsu touches upon method and form:
My interest in manipulating numbers is not directed at creating music theory. On the contrary, by using numbers I want to integrate music with the real, changing world. By means of numbers I want to see more clearly those unpredictable, formless images within me that, perhaps prepared over a long time, suddenly emerge in a dream. Through the absolute simplicity of numbers I want to clarify the complexities of the dream. Since I am not a mathematician I react to numbers quite instinctively, and I feel that when they are grasped instinctively, numbers become more cosmological.
…
In my music there is no constant development as in the sonata; instead, imaginary soundscapes appear. A single element is never emphasized with development through contrast. The listener need not understand the different operations discussed here. Actually I have my own theories of structure and systematic procedure, but I wish to avoid overemphasizing these. My music is composed as if fragments were thrown together unstructured, as in dreams. You go to a far place and suddenly find yourself back home without having noticed the return
When thinking of music, I see symbols on flat paper and grasp them as notes. But in the case of my music, unless these notes are performed and take shape in sound they have no significance. If only correct theory exists, then sounds do not have their own being. For me, sounds are the essence, and all theoretical systems exist with these sounds in mind.
This again brings us to Cage’s influence, and Takemitsu's interest in the relationship between sound and silence. For Takemitsu silence was not nothing. The Japanese have a concept of silence called ma, and for Takemitsu this was “a deep, powerful, and rich resonance that can stand up to the sound." Toshio Hosokawa, a composer in the generation after Takemitsu and in many ways a successor to Takemitsu, said that:
Sound and silence are not different for me. I hear the silence in a sound, and sound in a silence. They are connected together. I think that deep sounds contain a deep silence, and also deep silence contains deep sound. Silence and sound are not opposites. Takemitsu thought this also.
It is in Takemitsu’s later works that he realised all these musical ideals best. It’s often said, or assumed, that x composer’s mature works are their most profound – and it’s often rather less than true. But in Takemitsu’s case I think it is true. Takemitsu’s transition into his later phase was not dramatic or radical like Penderecki’s, for example. Rather, it feels more like Takemitsu has done all the experimenting and working out and is now settling into his musical style. In the final two decades he had returned almost entirely to traditional notation and instrumentation; it was during this time that most of his works for orchestra were written. He no longer held back that lyricality that had always been in his works, but was often tempered by, say, Webern-esque pointillism or aleatoric experimentation (enjoy those works though I do). He embraced totally his love of sound for its own sake. Takemitsu had long wanted to “carve away the excess” in his music, and by this point he had in my view succeeded, creating works of profound textural clarity and colour. He achieved an equilibrium between sound and silence. The music became happier, more consistent, more contented – this is in line with some of his suspicions of mere self-expression (“Does one express himself through his own suppression? Or is the reverse true?") Though a self-described Romantic, he had little interest in emoting. His music had in some ways become more traditionally Western again, but perhaps his musical temperament had become more Japanese.
To end with, one of my favourite of his compositions, And Then I Knew 'Twas Wind for flute, viola and harp (1992). If you follow the score you will notice many examples and echoes of the SEA motif (Eb-E-A):
If you enjoyed that, How Slow the Wind is an orchestral work he wrote the year before that belongs alongside And Then…, with the latter using musical ideas from the former. Indeed, Takemitsu often quotes his own music, as well as quoting Debussy, Messiaen, Bach – and even in one instance a Catalan folksong. Anyway, here it is conducted by his friend and fellow composer Oliver Knussen:
From the players’ side, Rebecca Jones, principal viola of BBC National Orchestra of Wales, explains how eye contact helps the performance: ‘If a particular viola part is exposed and the conductor wants you to play more, they look at you to give you confidence. Some eye contact is friendlier than others – some conductors convey warmth with their eyes and that helps you play better; some glare and you feel they’re not happy with you – but generally, it is positive. You feel confident that they are aware of what’s going on in the music and are in the piece with you. If there isn’t any eye contact, it feels like it’s just them with their score.’
Most of the piece is about conductors and orchestras, but the example of chamber music comes to my mind. If you watch a lot of recent chamber music videos you will see, especially among younger musicians, a great deal of glancing at the other musicians combined with an occasional smile or nod. This phenomenon is a bit less common among older musicians. Here, for example, are the Alban Berg Quartet, who are certainly very aware of one another without obvious glancing:
Of course, if there were such a class, Emerson would probably be teaching it! I have played a lot of chamber music and I must confess I almost never look at my colleagues. With singers and wind players I can hear them breath before the first note. With string players I will probably at least have them in my peripheral vision or perhaps look directly. But after that initial glance I don't look directly at them. Why is this? Well, I am reading the music and also sometimes looking at the guitar neck if I am shifting. I don't need to be watching the other player(s) because I am listening to them! I can hear what they are doing and usually, what they are about to do. And this is a far better guide than watching them. Right? I think this whole "let's all be glancing and nodding at one another" stuff is for the audience, not the players. Am I right?
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Alex Ross has a piece on new and newly revived operas at The New Yorker: Malcolm X and Hamlet Seize the Opera Stage
On the same weekend that “X” opened in Detroit, the Met mounted Brett Dean’s “Hamlet,” a deft stab at a play that has long defied operatic adaptation. Dean’s two-act condensation, first seen at Glyndebourne, in 2017, avoids most of the obvious pitfalls of making opera out of Shakespeare. How can a composer set the words “To be or not to be” or “The rest is silence” without sounding faintly ridiculous? Dean and his librettist, Matthew Jocelyn, finesse the problem with a strategy of self-consciousness. When Hamlet enters, he’s muttering bits and pieces of the famous phrases—“. . . or not to be,” “The rest is . . .”—while the orchestra revels in eerie effects. This “Hamlet” is aware of its “Hamlet”-ness, and is also aware that its audience is aware.
Lots of interesting operas on right now. The Met is doing an early summer revival of The Rake's Progress by Stravinsky and Auden and you can hear Wozzeck in Valencia. Who would have guessed that opera would see such a return in the 21st century?
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Music and architecture can have some surprising intersections: India’s ancient temples that ‘sing’ thanks to intricate musical architecture
Within the Vijaya Vittala Temple in Hampi, South India are 56 pillars, each 3.6 metres high, which when gently tapped produce delicate musical notes.
Tourists have been travelling to the UNESCO World Heritage Site for years to hear the over 500-year-old temple’s mesmerising music.
The pillars, named SaReGaMa, are so-called after the first four notes (svaras) of the standard scale in Indian classical music – similar to the Western (solfège).
Together, they hold up the 15th-century ‘Ranga Mantapa’, a main attraction within the temple complex. Resembling an open pavilion, it was most likely used for music and dancing.
Across the hall, primary larger pillars are surrounded by seven smaller pillars that each ‘play’ one of the seven notes in the Indian classical music scale. Made of pieces of huge resonant stone, the cluster of musical pillars vary in height and width, in order to produce the different tones.
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And here is a never-ending debate: ‘Do we want music to be a pursuit only of the wealthy?’ Anger grows at PRS Foundation cuts
One of the UK’s biggest funders of new and emerging music, responsible for fostering the careers of artists including Sam Fender, Little Simz and 2021 Mercury prize winner Arlo Parks, has this week seen its budget slashed by 60%.
The PRS Foundation, which funds hundreds of aspiring artists and music organisations across the country – including a number of artists from groups underrepresented in the music industry – announced on Wednesday that its income would be cut from £2.75m to £1m from 2024 onwards, citing financial necessity. The decision was taken by its parent company and primary funder PRS for Music, which collects royalties for musicians when their music is streamed or played in public.
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Hmm, no obvious choices for envois today. I've just been reading about the Code Rossini in Tarkuskin's Oxford History, so let's have an example. Here is the overture to La Gazza Ladra wherein he demonstrates how to distill sonata form and how to steamroller the audience with the famous Rossini crescendo:
If I recall correctly this is only the third guest poster on The Music Salon. Steven Watson is a fine young musician and frequent commentator here. He has a special interest in the music of Tōru Takemitsu. The post will be in two parts.
Classical music came to Japan when the country opened up to the world during the Meiji Era. Before Takemitsu's generation, Japanese composers would typically study in the West and write in a relatively conservative and bold style, at least compared to what was happening elsewhere. But the music can have a certain power, for example Symphony No. 3 (1943) by Saburo Moroi (1903-1977):
The composer Takemitsu singled out as the best of this generation is Yoritsune Matsudaira (1907-2001). Japanese composers of the time would to varying degrees draw upon national music, but Matsudaira was the first composer to create a compelling synthesis of Western classical music and gagaku. An early example is his Theme and Variations for piano and orchestra (1951):
Takemitsu was born in 1930, a generation after these composers. Although as a child he played the shakuhachi (a bamboo flute) and also for a time lived with his aunt, who was a koto teacher (a koto is a kind of zither), he never developed a strong interest in Japanese music. He was more interested in his father's jazz albums, and jazz would have an audible influence on his music. In 1944 he was conscripted to the army and sent to a military base deep within a mountain; those stationed there had the disagreeable task of preparing for an American invasion. There was no music except for a record player, with a makeshift bamboo needle, that was owned by an officer. One day the officer invited Takemitsu and some soldiers to listen to some illicit Western music. The piece that stayed with Takemitsu was Parlez-moi d’amour, sung by Lucienne Boyer:
I can well understand why Takemitsu never forgot the experience of hearing such a beautiful little song. This was the trigger for his great passion for music. After the war he searched for all the Western music he could find. He would listen to the U.S. Armed Forces Radio and make frequent visits to the library of the Civil Information and Education branch of the U.S. Occupation government, where he discovered modern American classical music in particular, from Aaron Copland to Walter Piston. If he passed a house and heard a piano playing, he would knock and ask to be allowed to play it himself – so strong was his desire to not merely hear the sounds he made, but to touch and feel the piano. Amazingly, most people let him in. But he had little interest in Japanese music, which for him just “recalled the bitter memory of war”. For his first decade as a professional composer he was only interested in the Western tradition: “For me, a Japanese, the West was a single enormous mirror. The strong reflected light of that mirror overwhelmed the light of other cultures."
From hearing Parlez-moi d’amour ownards, he showed a particular affinity for French music, particularly Messiaen and Debussy, whose music would be a source of undiminishing inspiration for the rest of his life. You can hear this in Takemitsu’s earliest surviving composition, Romance (1948) for piano:
Interestingly this piece shows that Takemitsu's was not yet as averse to Japanese music as he later made out – pentatonic scales blend with French impressionism. In this regard he was following the model of other Japanese composers at the time. But by the time of his Op.1, Uninterrupted Rest (1952), he had removed all obvious Japanese characteristics from his music. (Only the first movement was written in 1952; the second and third were written in 1959.)
What is immediately noticeable is how much Takemitsu’s style in both these pieces is consistent with his style to come: the importance of silence, the slowness, the suspension of pulse, his use of melodic expression, Messiaen’s modes, parallel harmonies, the interest in sounds for their own sake, rather than for means of musical development. Much of what was to come was the slow working out of some of these fundamental ideas.
It was during this period of Takemitsu’s life that his work gained international attention. Stravinsky heard his Requiem for orchestra in 1957, a more developed piece than the two previous, and was astounded:
Around this time Takemitsu was entering a period characterised by radical experimentation and a reversal of his position on Japanese music. John Cage was in large part responsible for the latter. It was through Takemitsu’s contact with Cage and his music that, as Takemitsu later wrote, “I came to recognize the value of my own tradition.” Peter Burt, in his excellent book on Takemitsu, writes:
“Superficially, therefore, the operation of Cage’s influence on the younger generation of Japanese composers at this time appears to present another example of that kind of ‘feedback loop’ whereby ‘Eastern’ ideas are reimported from the West to their point of origin, as had happened half a century earlier with Debussy’s music. Once again, too, this export–import manoeuvre had the important consequence of lending the seal of Western endorsement to ideas that were fundamentally ‘Eastern’ in origin, and thereby freeing Japanese composers to explore aspects of their own tradition without fear that they might be lapsing into some kind of pre-war nationalistic ‘Zealotism’."
(Might something like this happen in the West in the future, wherein some of our traditions are reimported from abroad – perhaps, even, from the East?)
Takemitsu would for some time wrestle with how to incorporate his newfound Japaneseness into his music. Although he is well-known for his innovations combining traditional Japanese instruments with Western music, these experiments were actually rather few and, though interesting, are not in my view his best music. The most well-known, November Steps (1967), was a great international success, despite Takemitsu's initial worries about how the work would be received (in rehearsal the orchestra burst into laughter when they heard the traditional instruments). But November Steps was designed not as a complementary meeting of traditions, but as a demonstration of contrasts. In Takemitsu’s writings there are many comparisons of Japanese and Western approaches to music, and one gets the sense that he was struggling to unify the two, looking forward idealistically and vaguely to the hatching of the “universal egg”, as he called it, or more specifically “the geographic and historic unity of all peoples”. There's a tension in much of Takemitsu’s writing between a kind of instinctive conservatism – a love of nature and a suspicion of modernity, a deep connection to traditions, wanting to harmonise new with old – and his desire for “a universal world of new sound", which was doubtless partly a response to his experiences of Japanese nationalism.
Takemitsu’s Japaneseness would become evident not so much in a blending of styles or a use of traditional instrumentation, but in how it informed his philosophy and method of composition, which we’ll discuss in the next post. For now, here’s November Steps for shakuhachi, biwa and orchestra. As you’ll see, the shakuhachi and biwa parts are semi-improvised. In the cadenza-like section, the shakuhachi uses graphic notation and the biwa part uses a kind of tablature of Takemitsu’s invention. How these two parts interact is at the discretion of the performers. The orchestra, however, use standard notation throughout. You have as a result unmeasured, indeterminate music going on at the same time as the fully-notated orchestral parts. It's an Ivesian blend of two independent things that never really work together:
Actually, I can’t leave it at that. November Steps is undoubtedly an interesting work, but for me a more successful and underrated work from this period would be Wind Horse (1966) for unaccompanied mixed chorus. You’ll notice, as you’ll hear further in the next post, how diverse Takemitsu’s output was at this time. This piece also shows how Takemitsu could be both strikingly modernist and popular, beginning with strange modes and sprechgesang, set to Japanese poetry, then gradually introducing South African lullaby from the third movement onwards:
