Friday Miscellanea

One of the most popular and successful music teaching methods for young children is this one: What the Suzuki Method Really Teaches.

 The Suzuki Method aims to bring elements of fun to otherwise tedious drilling. For instance, students are required to take group lessons in addition to private instruction, with the goal of impressing on youngsters the joy of making music with their peers. Early lessons are full of catchy melodies that appeal to preschoolers. The first of Suzuki’s 10 instructional books for violin starts with his arrangement of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” which has become something of a sacred hymn for his movement. The final two volumes feature demanding but equally hummable Mozart concertos.

The Suzuki method is also available for other instruments including the guitar. While more traditional music teachers have some criticisms, the Suzuki method has undeniably brought music to hosts of children worldwide.

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Another critic weighs in on the new concert hall: The Refreshed David Geffen Hall Hits the Right Notes.

The acoustic challenge is always to reflect sound while avoiding harsh echoes, and the great concert halls of the 19th century did this by means of their richly textured architecture, their columns, cornices and ornamental panels that serve to break up the sound. The architects of Geffen Hall achieve this by abstract means, balancing expanses of plain wood wall with passages that are gathered together in a linenfold pattern, like pleated drapes. The result is a warm enclosure of mellow beechwood that glows like a chalice of honey.

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 Countertenor Iestyn Davies gives us a list: How low can you go? Singer Iestyn Davies’s melancholic playlist.

Music is “a sovereign remedy against despair and melancholy, and will drive away the devil himself”, wrote Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621. Yet music is not simply a cure for sadness or grief; it speaks where words run out, it enables those in mourning to commune with the inexpressible, and possesses the unique ability to access and transfigure our feelings of lack and loss. Are we wallowing when we listen to sad songs or are we hearing a deeper truth behind the plain facts of minor chords and chromatic dissonances?

Today, the term “melancholy” has lost its currency in the psychological lexicon. “Depression” has emphatically replaced it as the diagnosis for our culture’s relationship with loss and suffering. Yet if one word best describes the experience of so many in the past few years of pandemic life, it is melancholy – and it is to music that so many were able to turn during those isolated months for solace and contemplation. As Burton wrote four centuries ago, “Sorrow is both mother and daughter of Melancholy, symptom and chief cause; they tread in a ring, Melancholy can only be overcome with Melancholy”.

The list goes from John Dowland to The Smiths, so worth a look.

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And here is the review of the thematically linked concert with Thomas Dunford: An Anatomy of Melancholy review – vivid musical study of an indefinable condition.

"If there be a hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man’s heart,” wrote Robert Burton, whose 1621 work The Anatomy of Melancholy attempted to pin down this elusive and then-fashionable condition. In the decades before, John Dowland had epitomised melancholy in his lute songs. Up close in the Pit theatre, the director and video artist Netia Jones brings Dowland together with Burton and other writers in a production for the countertenor Iestyn Davies and lutenist Thomas Dunford that is somewhere between a staged recital and a mini-opera. 

Jones punctuated Dowland’s songs with recorded readings from Burton, Freud, the psychoanalyst Darian Leader and others, and these seemed at times to be equating it with depression, which didn’t sit convincingly. Dowland’s music can indeed be bleak in such songs as In Darkness Let Me Dwell – which began and ended the programme here in complete blackout, an effective conceit. Yet elsewhere the music fights this: Dowland pins down so vividly the state of being miserably yet enjoyably in love, even with the occasional innuendo; and the way the lute keeps searching out the harmonies means the music has the opposite of the deadening effect of depression.

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Here is a piece about conductors moonlighting as accompanists: Don’t shoot the pianists, protect them

What harm is done by letting conductors into our chamber music? More than you’d suspect. Collaborative pianists — we only recently stopped calling them “accompanists” — have struggled to acquire a modicum of dignity for their vocation.

When a conductor pushes them off the stool and blags his way through a sonata or song cycle, an essential occupation is diminished and demoralised.

It hasn’t yet reached the point where we need a society for the protection of chamber pianists, but it is about time that soloists stood up more for their other halves. To his great credit, Jonas Kaufmann always insists on equal billing for Helmut Deutsch, who is not only his recital partner but also his former college professor.

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Life is not easy if you play certain instruments: Fury as double bassists barred from French trains

The French national train service SNCF continues to restrict musicians travelling with large instruments, including double basses, causing large public outcry within the musician community.

SNCF currently states the maximum size for an item of luggage is 130cm x 90cm (approximately 4ft 2in x 3ft), while a double bass typically stands at around 190cm in its case. In 2021, an open letter published in Le Monde was signed by 45,000 people, illustrating the struggles faced by those denied access on board trains with large instruments.

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Here is the story of an unlikely defector: The Defection of Mikhail Voskresensky

The idea of fleeing into exile had been stirring in his head for weeks. Now it was becoming more like a conviction.

He couldn’t shake the feeling of his own complicity. “I’m guilty if I live in this society,” he told me, many months later. “I had this feeling that was ethically hard to live with.” Although he was 87 years old, he had a 4-year-old son, and he wanted his youngest child “to grow up free of this feeling.” His wife, who shared his distaste for Moscow’s wartime oppressiveness, agreed.

To put it in the parlance of another time: Voskresensky—a beloved figure who had won many of his nation’s highest honors, including the People’s Artist of Russia—was ready to defect.

The last time Voskresensky engaged in a political act was in 1963.

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Let's start with a little melancholy: this is Iestyn Davies and Thomas Dunford with John Dowland's "In Darkness Let Me Dwell."

 Here is a much more cheerful song with Jonas Kaufman and Helmut Deutsch:

Finally, a concert by Mikhail Voskresensky from the Moscow Conservatory last year:

The Vital and the Geometrical

One element in the scholarship of Richard Taruskin has always troubled me, this relates to his views on performance practice in early music especially, but to performance practice generally. In volume IV of the Oxford History of Western Music he takes up the aesthetic reaction to the horrors of the First World War and describes how artists reacted to them by rejecting the subjectivity and expression of late romanticism in favour of a dehumanization, a turn to the objective, the crystalline, the geometric. (For the denumanization of art see the writings of José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art, 1925, English translation 1968.)

This is a very obvious trend, of course, the musical manifestation was neo-classicism. The Symphonies of Winds (1920) by Stravinsky is a clear example:

Here is Taruskin's comment on the effect on musical performance:

A great change in the performance style of all European classical music, regardless of age or origin, followed the Great War. The ban on pathos was translated directly into a ban on two practices that symbolized pathos in musical performance: tempo rubato (spontaneous, unnotated variations in tempo) and similarly unnotated fluctuations in dynamics. Play with variable tempo and dynamics and you are playing "romantically." That is how all music was played up until the 1920s, as early phonograph recordings testify. No music is played like that any more, not even romantic music. All music is played "as written," within a hierarchical chain of command (composer too editor to performer with an additional step when a conductor is employed) that takes all initiative away from the person actually producing the sounds. [Oxford History of Western Music, Volume 4, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, p. 475]

Two things are obvious here: first, Taruskin is highlighting a real reaction to a major upheaval in European civilization--sometimes referred to as a cultural suicide attempt--and second, that he is very much over-egging the pudding. Sure, there is a remarkable quantity of musical performances in a wide variety of contexts that do indeed come close to eliminating tempo rubato and the shading of dynamics. Sometimes we call this being "in the groove" and sometimes it is just stiff and unmusical, but the truth of the matter is that shaping the rhythms and dynamics to heighten the musical expression not only did not die out after World War I, it was present before romanticism ever came along. Of course I can't dig around and pull up recorded examples from the Baroque era, but anyone familiar with Baroque music will realize that, while great quantities of it are motoric and in the groove, other great quantities of it only make sense if you understand that the performers were making use of phrase and dynamics. I'm not just referring to harpsichord music, whose dynamic possibilities are very limited, though rhythmic expression is not, but more to music for strings and lute. Can you really imagine the lute music of Denis Gaultier played the way Taruskin describes? I cannot.

So while I get his point, my own whole musical experience tells me that performers, especially of solo music, have always continued to use the resources of phrase and dynamics to shape and contour their musical performances. To take just one example, we have a host of recordings by Andrés Segovia that span much of the first half of the century and he never played anything without tempo rubato and dynamic fluctuation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGfFii6Dtkg

But this is not to deny the historical observation that post-World War I, there was a flight from the pretty and the charming in favour of the bare, the crisp and the unadorned. Some of this spilled over into performance practice, but musical expression never came close to being erased.

Basic Aesthetics

One fine book in the field of economics is Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. It is stimulating in its refreshing down to earth common sense. I wonder if we could do something similar in aesthetics?

Aesthetics is that part of philosophy that looks at art and examines questions of taste and quality and what makes an artwork art, that sort of thing. In both music and visual art we have examples of artists who have gone out of their way to create something to challenge even the possibility of asking these sorts of questions. In visual art the locus classicus is "Fountain" (actually a urinal) by Marcel Duchamp using the pseudonym "R. Mutt."

The go-to example in music came much later, in 1952, with John Cage's 4'33 which is for any instruments but usually performed with piano. The work consists solely of rests. In both cases the point is to defy any rational attempt to define "art" or "beauty." Artists like to have complete freedom, or, rather, they like to choose their own challenges. At least the modernist kind of artist, though there are exceptions. Bartók for example believed in crafting a kind of modernism that united with folk or peasant music.

Beauty is, of course, in the eye or ear of the beholder, but what this means is that beauty is something perceived that is consequent or instigated by an art object (at least artistic beauty, leaving aside sunsets and beautiful humans). As something perceived by individuals it is perceived in various ways which is why we can disagree on whether something is beautiful. The art object itself is something real and fixed in itself (leaving aside musical interpretations for the moment), but the way it is perceived is variable, though there can also be considerable agreement.

Theoretical analyses of music offer some interesting examples of how this works. Musical works can be very complex, of course, but that does not mean that they are beyond understanding--at least in most cases. What a theorist discusses or points out in a piece of music is something that we can all see (in the score) and hear, though we might not hear it until it is pointed out. The more we notice in the score, the more we might like the piece--or dislike it, I suppose. The music is what it is, how we feel about it is a different thing, but most certainly related to the music itself.

But I am leaving out all sorts of aspects and some of them exactly what we would want to call "aesthetic." For example, in a masterclass when the maestro stops you and says "play that phrase more poetically," what could that possibly mean? It almost certainly relates to the use of rubato, tone-color, phrasing, that sort of thing. Very crucial to a good performance, but unquantifiable, though we can all hear the application of these things. Tempo and the variation and adjustment of it is another important aspect. Some of this is notated, but most of it is not, but again, we can certainly hear when a passage is played "poetically" and when it is just delivered like cold porridge.

So those are a couple of ideas relating to basic aesthetics.

Bad Music

I'm always on the lookout for bad music because it is often very revealing of aesthetic principles. But it is surprisingly hard to locate bad music. When you search for it you rarely turn up good examples. So I stumbled across this with some anticipation: Turn It Down Please: Here Are The Most Annoying Pop Songs Ever Made:

There’s a fine line between a great song and an unbearably annoying one. Both get stuck in our heads, but the songs that get on our nerves dig in first. It doesn’t make sense. If a song is bad, why does it play on repeat upstairs? It’s counterintuitive.

One sample from the list Cher, "Believe" the big hit from 1999 and the beginnings of Autotune:

There is lots of bad Baroque music as well, but a lot harder to run down. Baroque music was never bad in the sense of badly crafted, but more in the sense of boring and unimaginative. Routine, pedestrian. I'm sure there are lots worse than this, but here is a piece by the fairly dull composer Johann Friedrich Fasch:

But I'm sure he has admirers that will vociferously disagree. Here is another example, from the Classical Era, The Battle of Prague by František Kocžwar:

Anyone have any other suggestions? 

Friday Miscellanea

For those who are interested in this sort of thing: How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports.

Brian Eno’s experiments with tape loops go as far back as 1973’s (No Pussyfooting), a collaborative album with King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp. For the recording of (No Pussyfooting), Eno employed an early experiment in sound-on-sound tape looping, where he would run Robert Fripps’ guitar into two tape machines, that were then fed back into each other. 

Fripp’s guitar melodies were recorded and then bounced back and forth between the two tape machines, creating longs, fading delays that would build up to create a dense soundscape. The length of the delay was controlled by the physical distance between the two machines.

We did similar experiments in a 1976 20th century performance practice seminar at McGill.

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Igor Levit Takes on a Shostakovich Kaleidoscope in a Carnegie Hall concert:

He played just one work: Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87. That music, though — inspired by Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” and written in the early 1950s, during one of Shostakovich’s frequent bouts of official Soviet censure — is a marathon, a two-and-a-half-hour kaleidoscope of melodic and harmonic invention. Until Tuesday, it had never been performed in its entirety at Carnegie.

I have long been a big fan of this work which rarely receives concert performances.

Levit released a recording of the Preludes and Fugues with Sony Classical in 2021, so the evening also provided an opportunity to hear him continue a conversation with Shostakovich. On Tuesday, that dialogue was rich in risk taking, and rewarding. From the first prelude, in C, Levit’s daring tempo — much slower than on his album — made clear that he was not on autopilot, but taking advantage of the Stern Auditorium’s resonance to consider the music anew.

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Some news: Jazz Cellist Tomeka Reid Receives MacArthur "Genius Grant"

Reid, 45, was trained in the Western classical tradition and is fluent in musical modes rooted in the African diaspora and avant-garde minimalism, plus uses many extended techniques in her performance. 

She is the leader of the Tomeka Reid Quartet, alongside Tomas Fujiwara, Jason Roebke, and Mary Halvorson, whose latest album, “Old New,” was released in 2019 and includes original works and standards with a post-bop, free jazz, and minimalist hue.

Reid has also performed and recorded with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Nicole Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, the AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, Mike Reed’s Loose Assembly, and Roscoe Mitchell. Reid also co-leads the string trio HEAR in NOW with violinist Mazz Swift and bassist Silvia Bolognesi.

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A minimalist project: Removing notes from Mendelssohn overture shows plight of humpback whales.

Felix Mendelssohn's The Hebrides was inspired by the composer's 1829 trip to the British Isles. His overture has now inspired collaboration between a Cambridge economist and a composer, using sound to call attention to the loss of biodiversity on Earth. Hebrides Redacted successively removes notes from the 10- to 11-minute overture in proportion to the decline in humpback whale populations over many decades. 

...there are about 30,000 notes in Mendelssohn's original score, which roughly corresponds to the number of humpback whales that populated the oceans in 1829. But a thriving whaling industry reduced their numbers to the brink of extinction. By the 1960s, there were only around 5,000 humpback whales left, and the International Whaling Commission (IWC) banned commercial humpback whaling as a protective measure. 

The species has since rebounded, with a 2018 worldwide population of around 135,000 whales, 13,000 of which call the North Atlantic home.

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When so many confusing things are going on--the resignation of the new UK Prime Minister in just a few weeks, wobbly stock markets, increasing inflation--one starts to realize that perhaps we don't understand the world as much as we thought. We become conscious of our own ignorance. So this is rather apropos: What We Don’t Know.

We need external reminders of our own ignorance (such as piles of unread books, or good teachers, or friends willing to give it to us straight, or supernatural spirits visiting on Christmas Eve) to prod us out of complacency, because recognizing our deficiencies on our own is famously difficult. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a handy concept that explains why some people know so little that they think they know everything, and why you have to know a lot about something before you can truly understand just how little you know.

Amen to that.

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And now for some suitable music. First some Brian Eno. This is his early Music for Airports:

And here is my favorite Shostakovich fugue with a birdsong-like subject, from Igor Levit:

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

Here is Prospective Dwellers by Tomeka Reid:

Finally, an early piano work by Bartók that is a fascinating blend of folk music and modernism, the Bagatelles, op. 6:

 

A Reassuring Return

 Last night I attended the season-opening concert of our local chamber music society, something I haven't done for two years. It was reassuring in its normalcy: back in the usual hall, mask-free, most of the usual faces and with a young Canadian violinist onstage.

A couple of years ago I wrote somewhere that it seemed as if the music world, the classical music world in particular, would never recover from the severe blows it sustained as a result of the Covid pandemic. We seemed uniquely vulnerable with our concert life nearly eliminated. But as I see the small, local concert series revive, seemingly unaffected (my string quartet premiere in Vancouver, our local chamber music series and a host of others), it seems as if those fears were overblown.

What does not seem to be recovering and indeed seems to be worsening day by day, is the fate of the world outside of music.  A new European war supported by US and NATO arms and training, a new UK prime minister with an economic recovery plan similar to those launched by John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan scuppered in a couple of weeks by the negative reaction of economists, central bankers and let's not forget, "markets," meaning more economic "experts." Oh yes, and the price of energy and most other things going through the roof because of really lunatic policies by yet more echelons of experts. There is a long list of other things that seem to be going wrong with shocking frequency.

Quoting from today's Wall Street Journal:

The International Monetary Fund says the world economy is headed for “stormy waters.” Ray Dalio, who founded the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, thinks we’ll see five years of “negative or poor real returns.” JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon says stocks could fall another 20%. Is that negative enough? It’s a start, given that few said these words a year ago.

But let's put all that to one side and enjoy our small return to normalcy. It was a delight to sink into my seat, not wearing a mask, and enjoy a very normal chamber music program. The artist was Jessica Tong, violin, accompanied by Michael Sheppard, piano. The program was works by Franz Schubert, Francis Poulenc, George Gershwin and Richard Strauss

I did not get the opportunity to go backstage to meet the artists, as I often do, so I can't tell you much about them. Jessica Tong is Canadian, but her professional bio, as is typical, refuses to share important information such as what part of Canada she is from, or even where she studied or with whom, citing only a laundry list of collaborations. The biography of Michael Sheppard is a bit more revealing: he studied with Leon Fleisher at Peabody and is a composer as well as a performer.

From the opening notes it was evident that the artists, particularly Jessica Tong, were fine musicians. She captured the charm and intimacy of an early violin sonata by Schubert, written when he was still a teenager (but an accomplished composer already). The Poulenc sonata, the only one he wrote, was full of acerbic gestures and biting humor--with an absolutely lovely middle movement. The first half ended with Jascha Heifetz' arrangement of three preludes by George Gershwin played with dash and elan.

I have to admit I drifted off a bit during the second half, consisting of the early 1887 violin sonata by Richard Strauss (he does tend to go on), but I fully returned to consciousness for the encore. This was something I have never seen in a concert before and I have attended thousands of concerts. The artists played an encore in which the leading performer, played on a different instrument than she did during the concert! Yes, very odd. The encore was a short piece by Schubert for piano four hands in which Jessica Tong played the upper part. And very well indeed.

Here is a sample clip of Jessica Tong playing Sibelius:

Friday Miscellanea

Why do standing ovations now seem obligatory?

Over my lifetime, the cultural norm of standing ovations has gone from rare to common, which makes it hard to acknowledge an actual masterpiece. The now ever-present standing ovation seems to be part of the performance rather than a mark of appreciation for it. Has there been a single “Hamilton” show that did not get an ovation? 

Indeed, it often feels as if the standing ovation is anticipated before the first line is spoken or the first note sung. Maybe it’s steep ticket prices that create a self-fulfilling prophecy; a performance has to be great to justify spending a week’s pay on a night out. Perhaps it just makes for a better selfie if you are standing at the end of a performance. Or it’s done unreflectively because performances can be staged in such a way as to manipulate this response. It’s also possible this phenomenon is an extension of the “everyone gets a trophy” culture. And if today’s audience grew up knowing only standing ovations, then this behavior can seem as appropriate to them as knowing not to clap between movements at the symphony feels to my generation.

I think it also relates to the general decline in critical thinking which is now perceived as negative and hence bad. We don't need any stinkin' criticism! Also, a standing ovation makes the event more special and that fits with our feeling that we are super special. Sometimes though I think that everyone stands up at the end to get a head-start at getting out of the theater or reclaiming their coat at the coat check booth.

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Ted Gioia is off on more gnostic nattering this week: In this section from my new book, I unlock the secret history of the conductor. Even the little stick they hold is much stranger than you think.

Why do some musicians get called conductors? That’s a little odd, no? A conductor is a person who takes you on a journey—you find them on trains and buses. Their job description is a little vague, but they’re supposed to get us to the destination safely and on time.

But we learned something curious back in chapter one, namely that the oldest book in Europe describes extraordinary musicians exactly like that, powerful singers whose songs keep us safe and guide us on dangerous journeys.

Even stranger, this tradition can be found everywhere in the world. The most famous conductor of this sort was Orpheus, who in the well-known myth actually conducts a dead person back to the realm of the living. But there are hundreds of similar stories from various cultures, and they almost always involve music.

Is anyone else uncomfortable with Ted Gioia's claiming to know the secret history of something that he also claims "can be found everywhere in the world"?

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Taking a very different kind of approach is Popular Science with Who invented music?

Scientists will probably never be able to credit one person, or even a group of people, with music’s invention. But as a musicologist–that’s someone who studies the history of music–I’ve seen many artifacts and much evidence that can help us understand how and why the ancients played music. 

Some scholars say singing was the first kind of musical sound. Not that people back then were crooning full-length songs. Instead, they made simpler vocal sounds–perhaps just a few notes put together. If that’s true, perhaps early humans began to speak and sing at about the same time.

Why did they sing? Maybe they had an impulse to imitate something beautiful, like bird sounds. Vocal imitations of other animal sounds, however, may have been used for hunting, like a modern-day duck call.

Yes, this is just an essay introducing the ancient history of music for popular consumption--but the underlying assumptions are interesting. First of all is the idea that scientists should take up the historical problem of the origins of music. Scientists are not historians, after all, with an entirely different set of skills and techniques. Here they are offering archeological data, such as carbon-dating, to a historian. The problem, of course, is that this is not history, which relies on written accounts, but pre-history, which does not. So everything here is 100% pure speculation. No, we really don't know if singing was the first kind of musical sound--it could have been drumming. Nor do we know what early humans sang and for what purpose. We don't have a single, solitary piece of evidence. This is neither history nor science of course, just untethered imaginings.

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From the New York Times: Vaughan Williams: Complicated, but Not Quite Conservative.

Especially in the 1920s and ’30s, Vaughan Williams was amply capable of wielding ferocious, dissonant violence, most sardonically in his Fourth Symphony; Bartok admired his percussive Piano Concerto. His modal vocabulary, flecked with pentatonic and other outré accents, could be profoundly ambiguous — sometimes stark, as in “Job,” a ballet in all but name, and sometimes discomforting, as in the otherworldly Sixth. Even the “Lark,” for all its pastoral popularity, has an indeterminate form and a sense of “sonic freedom,” Saylor writes.

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Here is an interesting video clip:

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 Sometimes it is necessary to state the obvious: Taylor Swift Will Always Be Bigger Than AI

Consider music. If Taylor Swift’s or Beyonce’s songs had been made by a software program, with no star at the microphone, would they be nearly as popular? It is no accident that Taylor Swift has more than 227 million Instagram followers — her fans want more than just the music, and that extra something (at least so far) has to be supplied by a living, breathing human being.

In the world of the visual arts, too, collectors are often buying the story as much as the artist. Even the experts have trouble distinguishing a real Kasimir Malevich painting from a fake (he painted abstract black squares on a white background, with a minimum of detail). The same image and physical item, when connected to the actual hand of the artist, is worth millions — but if shown to be a fake, it counts for zero.

For me agency is important: AI has no human agency so we need to look at the agency of the programmers. At the base of all creativity is some form of human agency. Well, with the exception of God, of course.

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Looks like an investment of $550,000,000 did actually improve the acoustics of the new Geffen Hall: After Decades, the Philharmonic’s Hall Sounds and Feels More Intimate.

On Wednesday, the Philharmonic’s first subscription program in the space, the third movement of John Adams’s “My Father Knew Charles Ives” demonstrated that magical orchestral alchemy in a superb hall: the way dozens of musicians playing softly can feel huge. A low growl in the basses was palpable, not just audible. At quiet dynamics throughout the evening — like the brooding opening of the catacombs section of Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” and the ambiguous haze of Tania León’s “Stride” — the sound was glistening and lucid.

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From the American Scholar: If the American symphony orchestra is to survive, it must rewired and reengineered

But orchestras’ activities are proscribed in union-negotiated contracts that need to be paid whether an orchestra is performing or not. The modern orchestra contract is breathtakingly inflexible in what it will and won’t allow, spelling out in painstaking detail the rules about rehearsing, performing, recording, and working that govern institutional life. In other words, the modern orchestra’s legacy operating system has become so encrusted with lines of code that it is wheezing under the strain of trying to compete in contemporary culture. Alas, what might have been an opportunity to rethink a creaky institutional model was instead largely regarded as accommodation to pandemic disruption until the return of a pre- Covid norm. One that may no longer exist.

Read the whole thing.

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Of course we need to listen to Vaughan Williams' Fourth Symphony. The performance starts at around the 2:50 mark:

 Here is a lovely performance of the Gesualdo Six at Wigmore Hall. The concert starts at the 4:00 mark:

And here is a performance by Pablo Márquez of one of the greatest guitar pieces:

Apology for a String Quartet

Not "apology" in the sense of I'm sorry I wrote it, but in the sense of an explanation of how and why.

I emigrated to Vancouver Island when I was fourteen years old, so it came at a formative moment in my life. I say "emigrated" because that was what it felt like--it seemed as if I were entering an entirely new world. Previously we had lived in quite a few very small towns in northern Alberta and British Columbia--towns of a few hundred people that had virtually nothing in the way of cultural resources. The town we moved to on Vancouver Island was many times larger and had an actual library, if a small one.

The landscape was also utterly different, instead of the rolling birch-clad hills of northern Canada, there were towering forests of Douglas fir, steep mountains, and the vast Pacific ocean. You could stand on the street and, looking to the West, see a looming glacier. Turning around, you could see the waters of Georgia Strait which separates Vancouver Island from the mainland.

After high school I had a couple of jobs that took me to the north end of the island. Vancouver Island is fairly large, 456 km (283 mi) in length, 100 km (62 mi) in width at its widest point, and 32,134 km2 (12,407 sq mi) in area. While there I experienced some moments of, I'm not sure what to call them, epiphany, moments of transcendental astonishment? One was when I was hiking during a long midday break and cleared a ridge to be confronted with the enormous height of the tallest mountain on the island and one I wasn't even aware of being near! It rose up and up, an unclimbable snow-clad peak. Of course, people do climb it, but not me. Another moment was even further north on the island, in a remote area accessible only by a rudimentary logging road. At the end of a narrow valley, logged off and now covered in wild flowers, rose two peaks, each in their symmetry resembling Japan's Mount Fuji, but two of them, facing each other, with a sheet of pure snow-covered glacier arcing between them.

These experiences of my youth are the inspiration for the quartet, my second for this combination of instruments. Like Olivier Messiaen, I find the natural world, or parts of it, to be a spur to try and capture something of the feeling of experiencing it in music. The three movements are titled "Mountain with Birdsong," "Moments in the Forest," and "The Surrounding Ocean." Together they capture the three most salient aspects of the Vancouver Island landscape. There is an element of nostalgia as well, as I left Vancouver Island many years ago to live elsewhere in Canada and then to move to Mexico where I currently live. But those moments experienced in my youth resonate with me still.

I wrote most of the quartet in 2020 on commission from the Pro Nova Ensemble of Vancouver led by violinist Lucia Roh. Due to the pandemic however the ensemble was forced to cancel two seasons of performances and are only now returning to a normal concert schedule. I am very pleased that they are scheduling the premiere of the quartet for May 2023. I had completed the quartet but set it aside as the original premiere was canceled. Taking it up again now, I am unsatisfied with the first movement in particular which I am extensively revising. A lot of that consists in simply editing out passages that I don't like.

How does one compose music? As one composer of my acquaintance answered the question, "I just put down the notes that sound good." As good an answer as any, but not too satisfying! I am a bit wary of discussing how I compose in too much detail as it risks centipedal problems that Glenn Gould described once: a centipede was minding his business one day when someone asked him, when he set out to go somewhere, which leg did he start with? Contemplating this question so confused the creature that he became paralyzed and couldn't move!

I draw techniques and methods from many places, of course, but some important influences are Olivier Messiaen, Dmitri Shostakovich and Asian, especially Japanese, music. But all this is funneled into the idea of capturing, not any kind of depiction or representation of a natural landscape, but rather the feelings that it engenders. As Beethoven said regarding his Symphony No. 6, it is "more the expression of feeling than painting".

How I basically work is to allow my mind to freewheel and when ideas emerge to see where they might fit into my general conception. I might write a movement several times, then excise great chunks of it and try again. Much of what you come up with is junk, after all. One of the most important compositional acts is the removing of unsatisfactory material. As Schoenberg once said, pointing to the eraser end of a pencil, "this end is more important than the other end."

I am going to arrange for the recording of the performances (there will be two or three) and then put them together into an archival version which I will share with you. It might even be possible to do a good video.

Friday Miscellanea

Does this make you sing "I wanna be sedated"? Asset manager takes stake in publisher, commits $1.7 billion to buying copyrights, including Joey Ramone’s

Brookfield Asset Management Inc. BAM -2.08%▼ is joining with independent publisher Primary Wave Music in a $2 billion deal to invest in music copyrights, the companies said. 

The asset manager, which hasn’t previously invested in music catalogs, will take a significant minority interest in Primary Wave, and commit $1.7 billion to fund a permanent capital vehicle focused on acquiring music rights from top acts.

Next thing you know, Warren Buffett will be taking a position in Captain Beefheart, which I think was number seventeen in the Signs of the Apocalypse? 

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An excellent article in the New York Times celebrating Lucas Foss, a composer who is neglected these days: Eight Ways of Looking at a Singular Composer.

The polymathic Foss was a skilled and wide-ranging conductor, but he thought of himself primarily as a composer. His music grazed freely among Copland-esque Americana, thorny serial, wild chance-based, angular Neo-Classical, arch Neo-Baroque and churning Minimalist styles. That eclecticism, however, has worked against his lasting popularity, Falletta believes.

“He was very proud that he did everything,” she said. “He thought the more techniques you used, the richer your vocabulary was as a composer.”

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One of the things that turns me off about Netflix is that nearly every science fiction movie or tv series is described as "dystopian." What's worse is that most of them actually are! It seems the only future we can envision now is one of climate collapse and social anarchy. It didn't used to be this way as this writer explains in Whence, Wherefore, Whither Utopia?

 The last couple decades of the nineteenth century saw the publication of over 400 utopian novels in English, fully half of which were published in just eight years, between 1887 (when Edward Bellamy’s hugely influential novel Looking Backward appeared) and 1895. Bellamy’s novel and William Morris’s response in News from Nowhere (1890) not only sparked a craze for utopia-writing that lasted over a decade; they jump-started a vogue for utopias set in the future.

Of course both dystopias and utopias are equally unlikely.

* * * 

 Weaponizing music: When Music is Torture.

The idea that music can be used to control territory and influence behavior is at the heart of Hirsch’s 2012 book, Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment. She demonstrates how music has been used—by police, prosecutors, and judges as well as by businesses and ordinary people—to shape American notions of what is “right” and who “belongs” where. 

A few years ago, the city of West Palm Beach, FL made headlines for blasting the children’s tune “Baby Shark” to discourage unhoused people from sleeping in parks. In the aftermath, Hirsch received emails from journalists around the country asking about the history of music as a tool for spatial control. People are still surprised that music can be used in negative ways: they think music is supposed to be sublime and uplifting, Hirsch says, but music can just as easily be destructive. That destructiveness is not something to cover up or shy away from. It’s part of the power of music.

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One commentator recently asked why does anyone read Slipped Disc? The answer is because Norman Lebrecht often has those interesting stories no-one else seems to. Here is one example: WHY OBOES COST THE EARTH.

A high-end oboe can cost $14,000, four times as much as top flute.

Why is that? Something to do with scarce African blackwood and rare craftsmanship.

He embeds this clip:

You can get a high-quality concert guitar for between $5,000 and $10,000 but violins and cellos cost a small fortune, roughly like buying a house. And that is for modern instruments, Stradivariuses and Guarneris cost seven figures.

 * * *

I had an LP way back with the John Cage Piano Concerto on one side and Lucas Foss' Baroque Variations on the other. All I remember is the wild recomposition of the Prelude to the E major violin partita which starts at the 13:45 mark on this clip:

We think of Glenn Gould as being primarily a Bach interpreter, but he was also an advocate of the music of Arnold Schoenberg.

And finally, The Ramones:

Today's Listening

Remixed "Revolver" to reveal new layers of the Beatles' extraordinary musical powers 

This week, producer Giles Martin held a listening session at New York City's Republic Studios, where he unveiled his remixed version (prepared with engineer Sam Okell) of the Beatles' legendary "Revolver" album. As the key feature of an upcoming boxed set, slated for release on October 28, the remixed "Revolver" is a revelation made explicitly possible by recent advances in sonic technology.

In some ways Revolver is my favorite Beatles album because they were discovering new ways of composing and working in the studio. Here is Taxman from the new mix:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdTzOUUZ8Vg

What is astonishing, apart from the clarity of the new mix (I think I'm hearing a cowbell I never heard before) is the incredible freshness of the music even fifty-six years later.