Friday Miscellanea

The New Criterion has an extensive (but not nearly extensive enough) review of this year's Salzburg Festival. Jay Nordlinger has been attending this festival for a long time and it shows:

The resident band at the Salzburg Festival is the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. The vpo plays steadily throughout the festival, in concert and in operas—especially the latter. The orchestra has no music director, but rather an unending stream of guests. This summer, five conductors conducted the orchestra in concert: Christian Thielemann, Andris Nelsons, Riccardo Muti, Daniel Barenboim, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. 

A few years ago, I podcasted with Bronfman, and asked him about the Bartók No. 2: Is it the most difficult piano concerto? No, said Bronfman. He regards the Brahms No. 2 as harder, and also the Prokofiev No. 2. But he had a subsequent thought: he learned the Bartók No. 2 as a teenager, and the others later (as I recall). That makes a difference. It’s harder to learn a concerto later in life. 

Later in the week, there was an all-Bartók concert in the House for Mozart. This was a chamber concert, involving six musicians. The evening began with the Contrasts, that piece for violin, clarinet, and piano, which Benny Goodman commissioned in the late 1930s. Does it have some jazz in it? Yes, but so does other Bartók, not commissioned by jazz legends.

Our violinist for the evening was Isabelle Faust, a German. She is a smart, tasteful musician. That is the kiss of death: it sounds like I’m calling her boring. I am not. She is highly musical, and plenty soulful. But she is also smart and tasteful—which is good. Our clarinetist was Daniel Ottensamer, who belongs to a royal family. His late father, Ernst, was a principal clarinetist in the Vienna Philharmonic. So is Daniel. Daniel’s brother, Andreas, is a principal clarinetist in the Berlin Philharmonic. In the Contrasts, Daniel was smooth and adept. He moved, he bent, gracefully on the stage. He is athletic, even dancer-like.

Just a few tidbits--you should read the whole thing. The review just covers a tiny fraction of the concerts--which run about four a day for six weeks. I wept to see how much Bartók was on this year, because I particularly love Bartók and have not heard nearly enough in concert. Wept because I missed this year's festival.

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And while we are on music festivals: Venice Biennale Musica review – things old, new, borrowed and bleurgh.

It may not attract headlines the way that its visual art and cinema siblings regularly do, but the International Festival of Contemporary Music has been part of the Venice Biennale family of cultural events since 1930. It now takes place every year across a fortnight in early autumn, and the composer Lucia Ronchetti is its current artistic director.

Music theatre features prominently in Ronchetti’s own list of works, and it was no surprise that she made it the theme of this year’s programme. It was an appropriate theme for a festival in Venice too, for if the city was not actually the birthplace of opera, it played a huge part in the early development of the form.

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Here's a perennial topic: Shushed at the symphony: Is it time to clap back at no-clapping rules?

The typical classical music concert can seem full of arcane rituals that set it apart from everyday life. Many of these traditions might spark the curiosity of the uninitiated. But as another concert season begins and many institutions dream of attracting new listeners, it’s worth revisiting one chapter in the concert-going etiquette book that routinely brings the most anxiety for newcomers: those rules of applause.

When to do it. When not to do it. How to avoid being that person who gets peremptorily shushed and imagines a hall of 2,000 people glaring at them.

A colleague who recently began attending concerts after a long break and has been seeing them through fresh eyes recently asked me a simple question: Why do these applause rules exist? Why is a cathedral silence the expected norm? And in particular: Why is there such a fierce injunction against applauding between movements?

I'll skip over the article's straw man defence to present a different take. I am also going to skip over the historiographical analysis that attributes the "arcane rituals" to the evolution of concert etiquette in the 19th century as an aspect of the sacralization of art, music in particular. No, let me suggest a simpler response: these "arcane rituals" are neither arcane nor ritual. They instead just show respect to the performer and the composer. With the exception of opera, where different conditions apply, most multi-movement classical works do not really benefit from applause between movements. For one thing, the length of the silence between movements is one of the interpretive choices the performer makes. For another, composers usually work with connections and contrasts between movements, which can be seriously attenuated by applause. Applause is just one kind of sound that can interfere with the enjoyment of the music. Other ones include whispered comments to one's companion, coughing, unwrapping candies or cough drops and so on. Not to mention the horror of ringing cellphones. It should not be too hard to understand that non-musical sounds should not interfere with the musical performance--that is if you want to show respect for the performer.

I have attended a lot of performances in Europe in recent years and not once did I hear anyone applaud between movements. Even with a crowded large concert hall with audience members of all ages. And with concerts of Grigory Sokolov, no-one applauds even between pieces until he stands up. A concert with two Mozart sonatas framing a fantasia had no applause until the end of the first half--at which point the artist had to return three times to the stage at intermission to acknowledge applause. It is really just respect.

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Loosely related: Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It).

I used to be able to understand 99% of the dialogue in Hollywood films. But over the past 10 years or so, I've noticed that percentage has dropped significantly — and it's not due to hearing loss on my end. It's gotten to the point where I find myself occasionally not being able to parse entire lines of dialogue when I see a movie in a theater, and when I watch things at home, I've defaulted to turning the subtitles on to make sure I don't miss anything crucial to the plot. 

There are a lot of reasons why this is so, but they are difficult to summarize so go have a look at the whole article. 

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I've noticed that I've been listening less to CDs lately and I'm not alone: ‘There’s endless choice, but you’re not listening’: fans quitting Spotify to save their love of music.

It wasn’t just passive listening, but a utilitarian approach to music that felt like a creation of the streaming environment. “I decided that having music be this tool to [create] an experience instead of an experience itself was not something I was into,” she reflects. So she cut off her Spotify service, and later, Apple Music too, to focus on making her listening more “home-based” and less of a background experience.

You don't necessarily get more from a listening experience by having a huge choice. Sure, I've got a lot of CDs on my shelves, but I'm pretty sure that if I listened to one or two a few times with real concentration I would get a lot more than if I just picked several at random.

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I confess to an interest in the economic factors relating to culture so this was interesting: Sydney festival to suspend foreign government funding after mass boycott.

In December 2021, artists and producers engaged for the January 2022 festival began withdrawing after it was revealed the festival had accepted a $20,000 sponsorship from the Israeli embassy, to co-fund a Sydney Dance Company production featuring the work of Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin.

An online protest and petition was led by a coalition of Arab and pro-Palestinian organisations, and artists and academics from diverse backgrounds.

I suspect that there is a great deal of behind the scenes funding by various nations that we usually are not aware of.

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Now for some music. I confess that I don't know the Contrasts for violin, clarinet and piano by Bartók! Here is a performance at the Verbier Festival by Yuja Wang, piano, Leonidas Kavakos,violin and Martin Fröst, clarinet.

Here is a piece by Lucia Ronchetti for soprano, baritone and orchestra: Une leçon des Ténèbres.

And finally Deux Mélodies hébraïques by Ravel:

Composition and Influence

The discussion about the Canadian Indigenous Advisory Council that we are having in the comments section to the Friday Miscellanea raises all sorts of interesting questions and issues. It got me thinking about my own musical identity. By the way, if you follow the link that Ethan provided:

https://cmccanada.org/indigenous-advisory-council/

I don't think it will make you any more comfortable with the work of the council:

“The history of Canadian classical composition is a colonial history. Since Confederation, composers have resourced the songs, stories, and cultural wealth of Indigenous Peoples as part of an expansive nationalist impulse to define an authentic Canadian music” (from the background section o the IAC Terms of Reference). From 1885-1950, the Potlach Ban made it illegal for Indigenous communities to perform songs and hold ceremony. Shortly after this, composers were encouraged to look for a “so called authentic Canadian sound”. Fostered by the government, people were pushed to do assimilation and theft of the material. There was misappropriation, but there was also annihilation of language and culture.

The Canadian Music Centre was founded in 1959. It was established in the context of violent state policies targeting Indigenous communities including the Potlatch ban, the 60s scoop, and residential schools. These policies were not part of some dark chapter that has ended and is in the past, as injustice and violence against Indigenous people are ongoing: missing and murdered Indigenous women, the (disproportionate) incarceration of Indigenous people, the defunding of Indigenous-led education curriculum, and many more well documented forms of systemic violence.

The CMC is committed to equity, diversity, inclusion and decolonization in its governing structure and activities. The Accountability for Change Council was established in 2020 to support these goals. For more information about the CMC’s work for change, please visit Accountability for Change.

This seems to me to signal a political struggle between the First Nations and the Government of Canada with the government trying to provide symbolic relief of indigenous concerns without actually decolonizing Canada. What would that actually involve? Given that the history of French and British colonization of the Canadian part of North America is not actually going to be undone in any real way, the only thing left is symbolic gestures, of which the Indigenous Advisory Council project is one.

But back to my musical identity. I am descended, not from "settlers" exactly, but from lower-class English people forcibly deported to Canada in the mid-18th century for poaching. Yes, not all the criminals went to Australia. My family were poor prairie farmers and slowly moved westward until my branch ended up on Vancouver Island, as far west as you can go. I was the first member of my family to attend university. There I encountered the full force of the history of Western civilization in terms of art, music, philosophy and literature. In addition to my courses in music history and theory I also took German, linguistics and English. But I read extensively as well: Dante, The Divine Comedy and Copleston, History of Philosophy were high points. I also listened to a prodigious amount of music as for the first time I had access to a real listening library. I may have listened to some indigenous music, but it was drowned in a sea of music from Western Europe going back a thousand years as well as music from Japan, Indonesia, India, Africa and other places.

Looking back, the music of my actual ancestors, the jigs and reels that my mother played on the fiddle, were among the least influential on my musical development. My musical identity was constructed out of things that influenced me, music that I liked, in other words. Ravi Shankar and Javanese gamelan music were at least if not more important than English music. This process has continued throughout my life. Discovering the music of Stravinsky and Steve Reich were big milestones as well. Every musician in a sense, chooses their ancestors and influences. If you fall in love with the music of an obscure Saxon organist (Bach) there is not much you can do about it. Similarly, if I had fallen in love with the music of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, there would not be much I could do about that either and its influence would inevitably appear in my compositions.

This is why this whole project, and especially the underlying assumptions, just seems completely wrong-headed to me. It is a kind of symbolic genuflection and hence fake.

Friday Miscellanea

Via Marginal Revolution we learn that Art Garfunkle has been keeping a record of what he has been reading since 1968. Looking at the list for recent years I am abashed. And I thought I was a reader!

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From Slipped Disc, this item: CANADA WILL CENSOR USE OF INDIGENOUS MUSIC.

The Canadian Music Centre (CMC) has authorised an indigenous panel to permit or ban use of indigenous material in new compositions.

Composers have contacted us in alarm.

Read the new censorship rule:

The Indigenous Advisory Council (IAC) serves at arm’s length from the CMC on matters related to cultural appropriation and misuse of Indigenous songs, story, and culture. The IAC is a group of Indigenous folks from across Canada with a broad range of expertise in music, curation, museology, performance, and repatriation. Its mandate is to provide recommendations to CMC for appropriately redressing instances of misuse in compositions on an ongoing, case-by-case basis.

This work is made possible with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and Canadian Heritage to support thinking about these issues in a large-scale policy basis. It is a major priority for the CMC to work with Indigenous leaders “to examine and search for resolutions to the use of Indigenous Song and Story in the works of Canadian Composition past, present and future; [to establish] protocols for composers and performers when composing and performing works influenced or based on Indigenous materials” (Goal #1, current 2019-2024 Strategic Plan). Having been part of the cause of injury, CMC has to be part of the healing and the solution and take leadership in the healing.

I believe that my Four Pieces for Violin and Guitar are now archived at the CMC. One of them uses an Irish folk tune. Which is not a censorable item. YET! The idea that the Canadian government, through some sort of advisory council, has the right or mandate to tell composers what materials they are and are not allowed to use is just one small instance of appalling governmental overreach. The others are much worse, but we notice this one because it affects musical creativity. The question arises does this policy just affect things like what is available in the CMC and what is funded by the Canada Council? But as classical music is more and more funded by government, that would still result in a blanket ban on the use of indigenous music by composers. Reading this, wouldn't any composer worth their salt immediately start writing a piece satirizing policies like this in the most blatant way?

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Ludwigvan has something to say about Music and the Quest for Innovation.

Composers and new music groups make innovation their raison d’être. Their marketing paraphernalia is replete with language suggesting excellence and innovation. The publicity material of the well-known Sydney-based Ensemble Offspring informs us the ensemble is “dedicated to the performance of innovative new music” and “pursues an agenda of directly shaping the music of our future”. 

These groups may indeed be performing the most innovative composers. But what is also emerging is a much more heightened gravitational pull of music to money. This has meant that for composers to survive they’ve become much more fiercely competitive.

They woo contemporary performing ensembles, hoping for commissions. And they spend excessive amounts of time filling out funding applications and writing up reports at the conclusion of projects, no doubt explaining they were successful in the innovative stakes. 

But it seems that even the composer who does not care what the masses think has exhausted the repertoire of possibility for the new. This is due, in part, to the heightened relationship of music with money and to the intensified competition this sets up among individuals. It seems that nowadays so-called “innovative” composers are searching for ways to out-innovate their competition.

These are just a few quotes from an interesting essay by Sally Macarthur that raises a lot of different questions and issues. 

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Wenatchee the Hatchet commemorates guitar composer Angelo Gilardino on his blog by posting a clip devoted to his Sonata Mediterranea:

I am only familiar with a tiny part of this prolific composer's output, a lot of which was written after I retired as a concert artist. But I have played his etudes with pleasure for years. His writing for guitar is always utterly idiomatic, something less common than you would think.

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Over at the Violin Channel, Maxim Vengerov talks about the value of storytelling in teaching music:

Instrumental music is without words, and usually, there is not a specific image or association suggested by the composer. However, this does not mean the music is abstract or remote; it is up to us as performers to discover and communicate the story behind it.

The beauty is that there can be different stories, different interpretations. This is what keeps the music alive. As performers, we try to faithfully follow the composer's wishes, but we also bring our own heart and soul to every performance. We can think of ourselves as a window illuminating the painting of an old master - every window will refract light slightly differently, bringing into relief different subtleties in the work.

The only guitar maestro that used this method that I know of was Oscar Ghiglia--and each time he worked on a particular piece with a different student he would tell a different story. But the purpose was always to activate the student's engagement with the music, to get beyond the notes to the expression.

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Now let's have some envois! First up, just for the heck of it, a young Hélène Grimaud playing the Piano Concerto No. 4 by Beethoven:

Arthur Rubinstein playing the Nocturne Op. 55, No. 1 by Chopin:

We seem to be developing a French theme here (Chopin lived most of his life in Paris) so let's end with harpist Héloïse de Jenlis playing the Two Arabesques by Debussy:

I Cried for Madder Music...

The title is a quote from a poem by Ernest Dowson--the next phrase is "and stronger wine" but that doesn't fit my theme as well.

What I'm concerned about is the dull seriousness music seems to be slumping into. I look to music for delight, transcendence, euphoria, even perhaps a mad delirium sometimes. But lately music has become dutiful and dull. Whimsy and humor, which open the door to delight and joy, seem suspect. I am reminded of an old French joke about living in difficult times. One says, "situation desperate, but not serious" meaning it is always appropriate to make a joke.

When Stravinsky was composing the Rite of Spring he played parts of it for various listeners. One of these was conductor Pierre Monteux who conducted the premiere. Describing the experience of hearing a performance for himself and Diaghilev in April 1912 he later wrote:

The room was small and the music was large, the sound of it completely dwarfing the poor piano on which the composer was pounding, completely dwarfing Diaghilev and his poor conductor, listening in utter amazement... The old upright piano quivered and shook as Stravinsky tried to give us an idea of his new work... I remember vividly his dynamism and his sort of ruthless impetuosity as he attacked the score. By the time he had reached the second tableau, his face was so completely covered with sweat that I thought, "He will surely burst, or have a syncope." My own head ached badly, and I must admit I did not understand one note of Le Sacre du Printemps. My one desire was to flee that room... [from It's All in the Music: The Life and Works of Pierre Monteux by Doris Monteux, p. 91]

 Here is the first recording of the Rite, in 1929, conducted by Pierre Monteux:

 

Die Kunst der Fuge

I've enjoyed quite a few performances by the Netherlands Bach Society and just the other day they posted a really interesting one. We all know that the Art of Fugue by Bach was written for, uh, harpsichord? Clavichord? Organ? Actually, not! There is no instrumentation specified! From the notes to the new recording:

Bach’s Kunst der Fuge is shrouded in mystery. We don’t know which instrument it was written for and whether Bach intended the music as material for practice or performance. The order of the 18 sections is unclear as well and we don’t know whether the piece was ever completed.

As it is not clear which instrument Bach had in mind, Shunske Sato made his own instrumentation for the Netherlands Bach Society. “I wanted to bring out the many colours of the work and of my ensemble. Every fugue has its own character. On the basis of the rhythm, time and chromatic lines, etc., you can determine which instrument is most suitable. I’ve studied each part very carefully, in order to decide which instruments are best to use. I wanted the whole Netherlands Bach Society to be heard, so the singers are taking part as well. They sing without words, to vowel sounds.”

I'm just listening to it for the first time now. The first fugue is performed by solo voices, the second by viols, the third by winds and I look forward to seeing how the rest have been instrumented.

 

Rethinking the Canon

I've said many times here that I think that the canon, whether we are referring to those pieces that are generally recognized as being "classic" or "core" or "mainstream" are those of the general public or of scholars and musicians, is always in a process of flux as some works and composers seem to diminish over times, while others become more widely recognized.

Over at The New Neo, she has a post up on Greatest Books in which she questions a lot of the choices made on another website. This is how it works on the individual level, so let me take a stab at it. Taking as a model, here is The 50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music according to Wikipedia. Just looking at the first few, it is obvious that this is the list corresponding to the tastes of the general public. I'm not sure where to find the scholarly equivalent as it is probably more spread around in various places. Who has the most coverage in the Oxford History would be a place to start. But let's just stick with the Wikipedia list for now.

Beethoven Symphony No. 5, certainly on everyone's list, though I don't listen to it much these days. Honestly, I would skip the next four: I don't listen much to Wagner or Grieg and I would listen to something else by Vivaldi. Barber Adagio, probably not. Chopin Nocturne? Sure, along with the Ballades and Scherzi. No to Pachelbel and Orff. Yes, to Bach of course, but the orchestral suites are not the most interesting works by him. The Mass in B Minor, the Passions and the Cantatas as well as the Well-Tempered Clavier is what I would put on my list. Holst is an interesting choice, and Debussy, of course, but La Mer and the Nocturnes as well as the Preludes for piano over the Suite bergamasque. Verdi? I'm moving in that direction, but I'm not there yet. Mozart, god yes, all the piano concertos, big thumbs up. More Bach, for sure. Massenet, Dvorak, Strauss, no. But I'm growing more and more fond of Brahms, but I prefer the symphonies, the Variations on a Theme by Haydn and the Ballades. Tchaikovsky and Satie, sure, but I don't listen to them very much. That takes us through the first twenty.

So now you guys want to weigh in?

For your listening enjoyment while you contemplate, here is Grigory Sokolov playing the Brahms Ballades, op. 10:

How I Teach Music

This comes out of the article on AI and the arts. Reading the bit about how students copy their teachers I realized that this may be a common understanding--in the article they mention nothing else--but it is 180° away from how I always taught. Let me give some context first: I taught at the conservatory and university level for twenty years in four different institutions. My primary area was private instrumental instruction in classical guitar though I also, from time to time, taught music theory, chamber music and music appreciation.

For more context, my teachers, in order of importance*, were José Tomás, Oscar Ghiglia, Pepe Romero and, briefly in master classes, Manuel Barrueco and Leo Brouwer. They come from different traditions, of course. Tomás was a student of Segovia as was Ghiglia, Pepe Romero comes from the Tarrega school descending through Daniel Ortega and Pepe's father Caledonio. And Barrueco and Brouwer are really their own schools.

When I taught private students I never tried to instill the details of how I played, instead I taught the basic principles of technique and tried to encourage the development of musicality--not my musicality, but musicality in general. My goal was for each student to develop their own approach and competencies. I always recall the words of a wonderful voice teacher I had: she interrupted my singing of a Schubert lieder to say "now do something with it," i.e. shape the phrase in some way. That is always what I said to my students. Not "do this with the phrase" i.e. play it the way I would play it, but rather "find how you want to play the phrase."

Sometimes I would take an unusual approach. I had a student once, technically gifted but a bit stolid musically. He was playing the A minor Fugue by Bach. After he finished I just said: "play it again." And then again, a few more times. I could see he was puzzled and a bit frustrated by this as I wasn't saying anything. I was waiting for him to discover something in the music other than just the notes. And, after a while, it started to come. I didn't tell him how to play it and he certainly wasn't copying me as I didn't even play it for him. But he was learning--or rather, teaching himself. I was just providing the occasion.

Of course, one takes a different approach with each student. I once had a student ask me what I was going to teach him and I said "I have no idea!" I don't know what I should teach any particular student until I hear them play. I have to hear where they are technically and musically. What are their technical strengths and weaknesses? Where are they musically? And so on.

I don't think any of my students ended up sounding like me. I hope they sounded like themselves.

Here is a previous post on my book on guitar technique that includes a clip of my playing Recuerdos de la Alhambra:

https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2017/08/my-book-on-guitar-technique.html

*UPDATE: I should hasten to add that I meant just their importance in my development, not their artistic importance, or importance in the guitar world!! 

Friday Miscellanea

Here is another in a steadily lengthening series of attempts to understand how the Internet is changing the nature of culture in society: The Book That Explains Our Cultural Stagnation.

“There was a virtuous cycle for Cage: His originality, mystery and influence provided him artist status; this encouraged serious institutions to explore his work; the frequent engagement with his work imbued Cage with cachet among the public, who then received a status boost for taking his work seriously,” writes Marx. For Marx, this isn’t a matter of pretension. Cachet, he writes, “opens minds to radical propositions of what art can be and how we should perceive it.”

The internet, Marx writes in his book’s closing section, changes this dynamic. With so much content out there, the chance that others will recognize the meaning of any obscure cultural signal declines. Challenging art loses its prestige. Besides, in the age of the internet, taste tells you less about a person. You don’t need to make your way into any social world to develop a familiarity with Cage — or, for that matter, with underground hip-hop, weird performance art, or rare sneakers.

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Salzburg isn't the only major European music festival and The Guardian has a piece on this year's iteration of the Lucerne Festival: Lucerne festival 2022 review – strength through diversity.

 The Lucerne festival – which already has an exemplary sustainability programme – was back to full strength, welcoming the world’s top ensembles and soloists to its many-layered season. Its important contemporary strand featured the British composer Thomas Adès, with the premiere of his festival commission, Air, for violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. (Further performances for those of us who missed it are scheduled next year for the US, but none as yet for the UK.)

The year’s overriding theme was diversity, symbolised by multicoloured chess pieces in the publicity material: bitonal knights, a zebra-striped bishop. A bold move was to invite Chineke!, the British majority black and minority ethnic orchestra, thus giving this seven-year-old newcomer a platform alongside the world’s most venerable: the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra among others. Chi-chi Nwanoku, Chineke!’s founder, gave the keynote speech. Chineke! will close the festival today, with the cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason as soloist.

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Here is a discussion of a growing issue in the arts: AI and Art. The article makes a long and fairly involved argument so you should read the whole thing. I'm not going to critique the whole thing here, but I will take up one paragraph:

Before 1986, all musicians who learned to play musical instruments did so by trying to copy (as exactly as possible) the way their music teachers played. That’s right — they listened to a note and did everything in their power to copy it exactly. Intonation, quality, volume, attack, decay, sustain and release — every aspect of every note played was to be copied as exactly as possible. If you could put some notes together in a sequence, you could play a song. If not, you went out for a sports team.

This doesn't ring true for me. Yes, of course one copies, emulates, as one learns to play an instrument, but that is far from the simple act described. For example, one may copy one's music teacher, but listening to the students of a particular teacher will quickly reveal that every student does so in a different way and some don't seem to be copying their teacher at all. Students make choices, both technical and aesthetic, and they do so from a wide variety of influences. At the heart of it are the individual strengths and taste of the student, which develop over time into a unique musical personality--at least one hopes! This is an important brick in the foundation of the argument and it leads to this conclusion:

From copying my music teacher to copying the great composers to mashing-up great recorded content to learning to ask AI to create – it’s all the same process. We are copying what already exists and trying our best to do it so others will consider it art – not craft. Today, the lines between original and blatantly copied or computer assisted or computer generated works are so blurry, the concept of an original work may need some adjusting.

Well, yes, copying is copying, but this seems to completely deny the existence of anything we might call "creativity." Weren't thought leaders in education recently claiming that all young people were inherently creative? The argument here seems to be that since there is no such thing as creativity, it is all just copying, then AI is up to the job. Talk about moving the goalposts. We have to watch out for arguments that instead of explaining something, just explain it away.

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I love exploring those niches in the music world that are lesser known, like the best bow-rehairer in the world who is found hidden away in Paris, if I recall correctly--I did that item a long time ago. Today let's look at the obscure world of the opera prompter: The hidden world of an opera prompter.

The prompter is invisible to the audience, and he may be only one person among the roughly 250-strong cast and crew, but he plays a major role in keeping everything from flying off the rails.

Inside his box, it's bare bones. There's a wooden stand to hold a musical score, monitors to view the conductor, a fan to deal with the heat, a phone to call stage management in case the audio or video feed goes out, and a small electronic keyboard, conveniently Velcroed to the side of the box, to help the prompter give pitches — though Piatt said this is rarely needed, as most people who do this job have perfect pitch.

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There is a real shortage of interesting items this week, so let's move right into some envois. First up, a very early piece by Claude Debussy in which he sabotages Wagner's harmonic methods by eliminating cadences and leading tones:

When they were both young and struggling, Debussy and Erik Satie both lived in Montmartre and were friends. Satie's Gymnopedies were an influence on Debussy. We always hear the original piano versions which have become quite popular. Here are Debussy's orchestrations of the1st and 3rd:

And for something completely different, here is PJ Harvey from a while back. That is some serious drumming:

The Autonomy of Music

In the preface to volume 4 of the Oxford History of Western Music Richard Taruskin outlines the way his treatment is going to be different from those of the past:

In common with its companions in this series, this volume resolutely rejects the romantic viewpoint that asserts a fundamental divide between art history and world history. In particular, the fundamental tenet of neo-Hegelian art history--that the arts steadily progress toward a state of ever more perfect autonomy--is discarded as impeding by design the investigation of the actual causes of esthetic and stylistic evolution, which are to be sought within rather than outside the histories of social and political affairs. The narrative thus offers an uncompromising challenge to the viewpoint adhered to by a majority of practicing musicians and composers, even down to the present.

Well, fair enough. But I am an Aristotelian and as such I am wary of extremes. Taruskin's history was published in 2010 and the genesis was undoubtedly over the preceding decade. In a sense I feel he is like a World War I general fighting the last war and not the current one. Searching today's music schools, I doubt if you could find an example today of someone with the viewpoint of Pieter van den Toorn whom Taruskin quotes for his adamant view of the autonomy of modern music. I recall a heated debate at one of the American Musicological Society meetings between him and a few others back in the late 90s. But that controversy is long past, I think. And those arguing for the autonomy of music pretty much lost the debate. And perhaps they should have because the claim that music is an art form that is so remote from ordinary life that it is unaffected by social and political affairs is obviously wrong.

But does that mean that the opposite is true? That everything in art music is the mere byproduct of social and political affairs? It seems that this view is becoming predominant when conductors and singers seem to have to be chosen on the basis of race and gender alone. Taruskin is right in pointing out that music history has focussed on the production of music and almost totally ignored the reception of music. But we seem perilously close to a time in which the only lively discussions about music center around how many sales an artist has made to the exclusion of any examination of the music. In pop music we are already there, of course.

I think it is easily possible to swing from one extreme to another, from a myopic examination of pitch series to an equally myopic focus on the economics or sociology of music.

I welcome your cards, letters, and comments.

Friday Miscellanea

The important news of the week: DAVID GARRETT SELLS NEW YORK APT TO BUY A GUARNERIUS.

The German violinist just spent 3.5 mllion Euros at auction on a Guarneri del Gesù.

To afford it, he tells Bild, he had to sell a New York apartment.

It was a 42nd birthday present to himself, he adds.

I did quite a few concerts with my friend Paul Kling who played a Guarnerius--oh, yes absolutely lovely sound.

* * *

Those pesky earworms are back: Playback Mode.

WHILE A SONG PLAYS ON A LOOP IN MY MIND, I’m free from the infinity of anxious thoughts that would otherwise spiral there. My waking hours become distinguished by one song or a few—the playlist depends on my mood or, maybe, determines my mood; every morning, I hear, inwardly, a lyric that speaks to me, a melody that soothes me, and I bring it along through the day—marking time, marking time by its repetition. I recite it in silence. I hum or whistle it. I belt it out of tune.

But the condition of having a lyric or melody repeating in the mind to an excessive extent has been pathologized as stuck song syndrome. Neuroscientists call the song in question involuntary musical imagery, or an earworm, inspired by the German use of ohrwurm (an earwig) to name the phenomenon. Oliver Sacks called it a brainworm. Theodor Reik, Freud’s protégé, called it the haunting melody.

There is an ice cream truck that passes through my neighborhood that has the most annoying music ever and it frequently gets stuck in my head. But the other day for some unknown reason it was the Habanera from Carmen. Over the years I have come up with a solution that works for me: I start humming a Bach fugue theme to myself. It is a more pleasant alternative to most earworms and since it is a bit more complicated, it fades away in a few minutes leaving the mind free.

* * *

Music-loving economist Tyler Cowen makes some recommendations: How to discover Indian classical music.

Twice I heard L. Subramaniam play Indian classical violin.  Wow!  My head was spinning, and from there on out I was determined to hear as many Indian classical concerts as possible.  Maybe his melodic lines are not the very deepest, but he was a remarkably exciting performer.  A whole new world was opened up to me.  I also heard Shakti, with Zakir Hussein and John McLaughlin, play at GWU.  That was fusion yes, but it owed more to Indian classical traditions than anything else.  To this day it remains one of the three or four best concerts I’ve ever seen.

I was lucky enough to hear Ravi Shankar play a concert in Vancouver in 1967 or 8. I even got his autograph, but lost it long ago!

* * *

Roger Norrington on a quest: ‘I’ve been trying to play Mozart for 60 years. On this, my last recording, I think I’ve finally cracked it’

Listening to Mozart’s music makes it seem quite easy. Some of it indeed does have a childlike simplicity. But in fact it’s incredibly difficult to play well. The short span of only 50 years that the classical period lasted (the romantic by contrast lasted 100, and the baroque 150 years) seems to demand the strictest stylistic niceties in the entire repertoire. There’s a self-consciousness about the music that results from a heady set of conflicts: late aristocratic society versus the Enlightenment; a brand new popular music versus its late baroque parent; the composer as servant (Haydn wore a light blue uniform for 30 years) versus the self-employed genius (Mozart in Vienna in the late years).

Read the whole thing! 

As a guitarist I don't have that problem as we don't have any Mozart repertoire. But I remember feeling this way about Bach. A couple of decades ago I even said to a violinist friend of mine that I never quite knew how to play Bach. As a seasoned orchestral musician she just looked at me as if I had suddenly started speaking Klingon. Well, sure, I knew how to play Bach in any of the usual senses of the words, but I never really felt I got inside the music. I'm preparing a program right now with some Bach in it and, oddly, for the first time I really do feel comfortably inside the music. Funny...

* * *

These are not happy times in Russia: The Last String of Russian Greatness Is About to Snap.

Russia may be on its last gasp when it comes to classical music and other fine arts, too. Even during the Cold War, Soviet musicians dazzled the West during their guest appearances. To be sure, there were the odd, embarrassing defections, like those of the dancers Mikhail Baryshnikov and Rudolf Nureyev, and the forced exile of husband-and-wife team Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya. But Soviet state backing of the traditional fine arts helped maintain excellence, even as censorship and disdain for modern art and music cost the chance to develop new scenes. But even after the Soviet Union crumbled, Russia was able to keep up its classical strengths—and attract artists from all around the world.

But most times are not happy times in Russia, it seems.

* * *

For anyonw who missed it, here is a summary of the controversy over the music theorist Heinrich Schenker that is still wending its way slowly through the courts: Music in the Background.

In all this, the Journal of Schenkerian Studies has been forgotten, its activities on hold until a new editor is found. UNT says that while it would like the publication’s activities to continue, it simply has received no applications. For his part, Jackson says that the university has structured the job announcement to discourage applications, with the intended outcome of shuttering the journal completely. 

Either way, it’s not hard to understand why scholars would be reluctant to apply for the JSS editorship. A music theorist with a healthy skepticism of Schenker’s personality and methods would reasonably worry about being portrayed as an outsider intent on destroying the journal from within. A passionate Schenkerian would have grounds to suspect being dismissed as a racist just for taking the post. A nuanced and scholarly debate both about Schenker’s racism and methods would be best for the field of music theory, leading as it could to a genuine reexamination of music education in the United States. That seems highly unlikely now.

* * *

Some weeks I am puzzled as to what to pick for some envois. Not so this week! Let's start with the fugue from the Violin Sonata No. 1 by Bach. This is the theme I hum to myself to get rid of earworms. The player is Iris Kengen:

And here are Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha from around the time when I heard them in concert:

Here is Francesca Dego with the first movement of Mozart's 3rd Violin Concerto:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_rUD_JhrrI

And all that should make you a little happier!

Netherlands Bach

The Netherlands Bach Society seems to have an inexhaustible stable of fine musicians for their ongoing Bach project. Here is Christine Schornsheim with the Prelude and Fugue in C major from Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier. It was just posted today and apparently they are going to have her record all of the second book. Various artists recorded Book I.

 

Ted Gioia on the Origins of Musicology

Ted Gioia, while undeniably a cultural treasure, sometimes leaves me very puzzled--and no more than with his latest effort: Why is the Oldest Book in Europe a Work of Music Criticism? (Part 1 of 2).

I’ve been researching the myth of Orpheus for almost 25 years now, and I’m not so sure he is merely a myth. Certainly the author of the Derveni papyrus was absolutely convinced of his reality. As far as I can tell, everybody back then believed that both Orpheus and his music were incontestably real, and capable of doing things that, today, would fall under the domain of medicine, or science, or philosophy, or even magic.

We would love to hear music of that sort, wouldn’t we? And the Derveni papyrus actually shares parts of a hymn, praised not for its beauty or artistic merits, but because of its extraordinary powers. In other words, the Derveni author was offering to teach the secrets of a kind of music much like that famous Orphic song that had brought a dead soul back to life. You can now understand why someone would want to bring this music to the next life—it was simply too good, too powerful to leave behind.

Ted goes on, jumping from topic to topic:

Inventors and innovators in math, science, and technology are remembered by posterity, but for some reason the opposite is true in music. If you are a great visionary in music, your life is actually at danger (as we shall see below). But, at a minimum, your achievement is removed from the history books. If you think I’m exaggerating, convene a group of music historians and ask them to name the inventor of the fugue, the sonata, the symphony, or any other towering achievement of musical culture, and note the looks of consternation that ensue, even before the arguments begin.

This last is rather hilarious, actually. If you got some musicologists together and asked them to name the inventors of fugue, sonata and symphony, you would certainly get a lively discussion, but not because the names of the people involved in the development of these genres have been "removed from history books" by some shadowy figures or forces, but because the development was incremental and distributed among different musicians. Though certainly Haydn was pretty central to the invention of the sonata. Ted has a bizarre perspective on music history, but one, I suspect, that will win him a lot of readers:

In other words, the history of musical innovation overlaps closely with the history of dissidents and their rebellions. Mull over the implications of that connection. 

But why do we destroy music? In the pages ahead, I will suggest that songs have always played a special role in defining the counterculture and serving as a pathway to experiences outside accepted norms. They are not mere entertainment, as many will have you believe, but exist as an entry point to an alternative universe immune to conventional views and acceptable notions. As such, songs still possess magical power as a gateway on a life-changing quest. And though we may have stopped burning witches at the stake, we still fear their sorcery, and consign to the flames those devilish songs that contain it.

This is deeply flattering to us music lovers, of course, we are like initiates in a secret mystic cult! But charming as this gnosticism is, it is quite a few logical connections short of, well, truth. 

Gandelsman, part 4

Rhea Fowler and Micaela Tobin contribute a piece titled A City Upon a Hill? The composers describe the piece as follows:

"A City Upon a Hill?" is our reaction to the events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The main theme is based on the infamous slogan, 'Make America Great Again,' in which each variation of the Americana-inspired theme becomes increasingly dissonant on the arrival of the word 'again.' ... The sonic dissonance is meant to echo the cognitive dissonance of the far right movement itself, as the piece chronicles the gradual radicalization of an individual who holds an idealized, nostalgic memory of a freedom and equality that has never truly existed in America; someone who believes themselves to be a true patriot while simultaneously undermining basic democratic values and American institutions.

The piece is for solo violin with some solo voice and electronic samples of chanting, protest, etc. This is, so far, the most obviously political piece on the album and as it deals with events in 2021 and not related to the pandemic, it would seem to be a bit outside the parameters of the project, though as Gandelsman asked for pieces reflecting on "the time we were all living through" I suppose this fits.

Here is a clip of the piece from the album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZfpc92JYCo

Here are the composers discussing the piece:

 Rhiannon Giddens piece is titled New to the Session. Her background is rooted in traditional fiddle music and she is often inspired by dance as in this piece. We don't seem to have a clip of her talking about the piece, but here is Johnny Gandelsman with a live performance:

And that brings us to the end of the first CD.

Friday Miscellanea

The New York Times does a good job on a major composer: John Adams, an American Master at 75.

There is an easy argument to be made that Adams is the greatest living American composer. He is an artist for whom Americanness truly matters, as much as the tradition of Western classical music — both heritages treated not with nostalgia, but with awareness and affection. Whose DNA carries traces of Beethoven and Ellington, Claude Debussy and Cole Porter. Whom younger composers regard with a mixture of awe and fondness, and who, in turn, is quick to give advice and life lessons. And who has made opera, as the singer Gerald Finley said, “a force for social commentary.”

Some composers die young, but, luckily, some do not!

* * *

And a new piece by Alex Ross in The New Yorker: How Radical Was Rachmaninoff?

Sergei Rachmaninoff, the focus of this summer’s Bard Music Festival, at Bard College, in upstate New York, was almost universally considered a throwback during his lifetime. Progressives scorned him as a purveyor of late-Romantic schlock. Conservatives cherished him as a bulwark against atonal chaos. Neither side saw him as innovative. In 1939, four years before his death, Rachmaninoff wrote, “I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien.” Nonetheless, he enjoyed immense popularity, which he retains today.

This is a venerable meme in discussions of composers: you can look for innovative elements in supposedly reactionary composers or conservative elements in avant-garde composers. Both approaches can be fruitful because creative people usually have complexities that resist being shoehorned into a particular category. Just think of Schoenberg's essay "Brahms the Progressive."

* * *

Here is a piece by Jay Nordlinger On the preservation of classical music. While interviewing Marilyn Horne they discuss the ups and downs of recorded classical music:

...singers today have many fewer opportunities to record than their predecessors did—fewer opportunities than their teachers, and their teachers’ teachers, did. The recording industry is transformed. Who will pay for an album of, say, Schubert songs? A person can go to YouTube and hear Hans Hotter, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Fritz Wunderlich, Janet Baker, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau . . . Marilyn Horne.

Artists from a few decades ago were able to record vast repertoires while artists today struggle to get a relative handful out.

 * * *

Norman Lebrecht admits that even with his criticisms, SALZBURG HITS 96% ATTENDANCE.

The festival has turned in a dazzling result for this summer – a near-record attendance and 31.1 million euros at the box-office.

The alltime record attendance is 97%.

Even last year, as the pandemic lingered, nearly every concert I attended was close to being sold out. When I get over my current aversion to air travel, I'm sure I will be back in Salzburg.

* * *

I'm often skeptical of "studies" but this one is plausible: Playing music in childhood linked to a sharper mind in old age, study suggests.

Researchers have found a link between learning a musical instrument in youth and improved thinking skills in old age. People with more experience of playing a musical instrument showed greater lifetime improvement on a test of cognitive ability than those with less or no experience, a paper from the University of Edinburgh has said.

Researchers found that this was the case even when accounting for their socio-economic status, years of education, childhood cognitive ability, and their health in older age.

* * *

We start with some John Adams, of course. He had an early success with his Shaker Loops for string orchestra:

 And some Rachmaninoff. This is his Piano Concerto No. 2 with Evgeny Kissin:

And finally, Marilyn Horne with a Rossini aria, "Cruda sorte" from L'italiana in Algeri.