I had the opportunity to participate in two master-classes with Pepe Romero in my younger years. One was a brief one in Canada and the other a month-long session in Salzburg at the Mozarteum. What set Pepe's approach apart from other classes was the focus on technique. Each class began by playing some basic technical exercises together and the result was that by the end of the class everyone had acquired more technical confidence. This was valuable because most guitarists are still a bit weak, technically, compared to violinists and pianists.
I picked up these two exercises from the master-class and I still use them as a warm-up to this day. The first one is a scale exercise. Most guitarists use the Segovia scales which are certainly useful, but this approach is a bit different. Instead of diatonic major or minor scales, the exercise uses chromatic scales. Very simply it goes from the lowest to the highest note so it also keeps your extension to the highest frets in shape. I'm not going to write out the whole gamut as it is obvious how it is to be fingered. Once you get to the first string, just keep the pattern, shifting up. Once your first finger shifts to the fingerboard past the body, the problem is where do you put your thumb. You have to practice very slowly sliding your thumb from behind the neck to resting along the edge of the fingerboard. With practice this will become quite easy. The right hand fingering is simply to work all the possibilities. These days I am using pm, im, ia and ma.
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The other exercise is for the right hand. This is a rasgueado exercise which classical guitarists normally don't do but it is perfect for both warming up and strengthening the weak side of the hand. On the open strings use this pattern: c ("chico" standing for the little finger), a, m, i (all downstrokes) and i coming back as an upstroke. The trick is to stack the fingers so, for example, the c is stacked behind the a, the a behind the m, the m behind the i and the i held with the thumb. This is so you can put pressure on each finger in turn, releasing it with a sudden burst of energy. As the greatest accent is on the c, this allows you to strengthen the weak side of the hand. You can rest the thumb on the sixth string for stability. Try to make the five-stroke pattern as even as possible.
And for listening, a little piece by Turina, the Fantasia Sevillana which uses a lot of rasgueado:
Here is what music-loving economist Tyler Cowan listened to in 2022:
I am listing only new releases:
Bach, Johann Sebastian, complete Sonatas and Partitas for violin, Fabio Biondi. Perhaps the only recording I like as much as the older (stereo) Milstein performance?
Bach, Johann Sebastian, The Art of Life, Daniil Trifonov, The Art of the Fugue (favorite of Thomas Schelling!) is the main work here. Schelling, by the way, was especially fond of the Grigory Sokolov recording of this work.
van Baerle Trio, Beethoven complete piano trios
Beethoven, Kreuzer sonata for violin and piano, Clara-Jumi Kang and Sunwook Kim
William Byrd, John Bull, The Visionaries of Piano Music, played by Kit Armstrong
Handel, George Frideric, Eight Great Suites and Overtures, by Francesco Corti on harpischord
Matthias Kirschnereit plays Mozart, the complete piano concerti, and two Rondos
Mozart, La flûte enchantée (yes in French), conducted by Hervé Niquet
Shostakovich/Stevenson, mostly Op.87, piano music, by Igor Levit
Szymanowski, Karol, Piano Works, by Krystian Zimerman
By far my biggest discovery was Benjamin Alard playing the complete keyboard works of Bach, mostly on organ and clavichord. These are some of the best recordings of the best music I have heard, ever.
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The Guardian's listening list for January for the 26th is this piece (more interesting than today's piece) but the selections seem largely random:
This might be Arts Council England’s lowest moment.
Last night, in response to protests from every major opera company at its lack of an opera policy, ACE issued this statement:
At the Arts Council we have a single 10-year strategy, Let’s Create, which shapes all our investment and development decisions. We will not therefore develop separate artform or sub artform strategies. But as the national development agency for creativity and culture, for the past few months we have been planning to commission an independent piece of analysis, designed to focus on consideration of opera and music theatre in relation to Let’s Create. This analysis will help us shape our future investment in opera and music theatre and to develop a shared understanding with the sector of the challenges and opportunities currently faced by it. We will share further details of this work later in the Spring.
I think the problem here, and one that comes with every "national strategy," one that Friedrich Hayek pointed out many years ago, is an epistemological one. Incidentally, it is the same problem that dogs most socialist policies. The problem is that a central authority, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or the Arts Council of Great Britain, develops a national policy (Stalin's Five Year Plans or opera in the UK) that will somehow lead to future progress. This policy is developed by a small group of administrators but applied at the local level. The knowledge problem is quite simple: no matter how much data they gather, the central authority lacks knowledge of what is needed at the local level. In the Soviet Union, exactly how many what what kind of tractors are needed in a specific district in Ukraine; in the UK, exactly what kind of opera and production will appeal to the audiences in Manchester or Glasgow. Central planning is notoriously bad.
because it is atypical: "The Sixth, however, is sheer escapism, a springtime day evoked in deep midwinter and telling a story, which Beethoven never normally does."
because he hated hiking in the countryside
because he hated Bruno Walter (the conductor of a famous recording)
because Theodor Adorno: "Adorno, for me, cracks the Pastoral enigma. If we accept his proposition that Beethoven delivers both text and subtext, narrative and analysis, we can make of the symphony whatever we like – whether a benign Sunday jaunt or a thunderous sermon against a world bent on self-destruction. We can both love the melodies and loathe the context."
There, now you don't have to read it.
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Let's have some music. First, Bach, the Prelude and Fugue in C minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Bk I played by Benjamin Alard:
And, of course, the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven conducted by Bruno Walter:
Finally from one of the very few people to have recorded all the Bach cantatas, Maasaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan with the Cantata BWV 30:
Way back when I was a student I worried about phrasing: it seemed important, but did I understand it or even know what it was? So I picked up a book on phrasing but after reading it I seemed to know little more than before I read it. Let me try and explain why this happened.
Phrasing, as I understand it today, is simply how a musically aware performer responds to the musical text. What notes are grouped with which and in what way, what is joined and what is separated, basically, how is the meaning of the music articulated in performance? I don't mean the socio-political subtext, I simply mean the musical meaning.
So a proper book on musical phrasing would first explain all the possible musical structures and meanings and how to respond to them in your interpretation. Ah, yes, well that is why there aren't any good books on musical phrasing. Looking at Amazon there are a whack of books on phrasing for jazz and blues players, but only this one for classical: Hermann Keller, Phrasing and Articulation, which is probably the one I read. Actually, since I read it so long ago when I was not very educated, it might be excellent. I would have to re-read it to offer a proper criticism.
But the general problem is still there: an understanding of how to phrase depends on a general musical understanding of things like theory, structure and history. Or you could simply phrase things the way your teacher shows you, which is what a lot of musicians do. But I think it is better to figure things out for yourself.
As this is just a humble blog, I won't explain all about music structure and history, but I will give you two examples that might be illuminating. The first is a YouTube clip from The Independent Pianist discussing an interesting interpretive choice by Sviatoslav Richter and comparing it to a more conventional choice by Alfred Brendel. The choices involve what is essentially rubato. Here, have a listen:
My second example is from the Sonatina meridional by Manuel Ponce that I am re-learning right now. I won't put up any YouTube clips because I can't find any that illustrate my point so I will just give you a written musical example:
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This is from very near the beginning of the movement and this passage is the second theme of the exposition. I input the notes into Finale and the black notes are the theme while the red notes are an accompanying figure that is in the form of a descending sequence. Most players just play it pretty much as written with perhaps some oomph put into the sixteenth notes in the interest of virtuoso expression. But the more interesting interpretive phrasing would be to separate the descending harmonic line, which is quite interesting in its alternating 2nds and 3rds. How do you do this? A couple of ways: just give those notes a tiny bit of rhythmic extension, hold them a very tiny bit longer than their actual value, and second, give them a different timbre, perhaps a bit warmer than the sixteenth notes. I suppose if I had lots of time this morning, I would record myself illustrating this, but why don't you try it for yourself? I think you will see what I mean.
What this does is add another dimension to the passage. Instead of there being basically one idea punctuated by some chords, there are actually two ideas that contrast with one another. So this is an example of how phrasing is suggested by the musical structure. The best way to sort this out is to play just the lower voice(s) by themselves so you hear how they connect with one another, then put it together. Actually, as Oscar Ghiglia often emphasized in his master classes, you should always play through the harmonies of every piece you are learning, listening carefully so you are sure you hear and understand them.
I finished that book on technical analysis of stocks, thank god. Useful, sure, but oh so dreary. I discovered poetry sometime in my late teens after we moved to Vancouver Island and a slightly better municipal library. The poets I read then included T. S. Eliot because everyone said he was wonderful, Ezra Pound, because Eliot said he was wonderful (he dedicated The Waste Land to him) and Shakespeare because we read him in school. My first year English professor introduced me to Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Theodore Roethke. I discovered Rainer Maria Rilke on my own.
Alas, moving to Mexico meant that most of my library had to stay behind so I haven't actually owned any Eliot for a long time now. But I just got his Collected Poems and re-reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was a deeply moving and eerie experience. I first read it fifty years ago but I haven't read it in at least twenty-five years. The lines still echo in my memory.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table
And:
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo
I am so glad I read this when I was young as it resonates so much more now when I read it many years later. It reminds me of the very odd sensation in the two-part finale to season three of Battlestar Galactica when some members of the crew begin hearing (hallucinating) strange musical fragments that elude identification. Finally, at the very end a dead crewmember is resurrected and we hear the song in its entirety: it is All Along the Watchtower written by Bob Dylan with a very famous cover by Jimi Hendrix. The moment when you realize what song it is, and if you are old enough to have heard it when it was released, is very like the sensation of re-encountering a very great poem like Prufrock.
And I have The Waste Land, The Hollow Men and Four Quartets to look forward to!
My commentariat are a polite bunch, never asking prying personal questions--or maybe they are just not interested! But I have the urge to talk a bit about living in Mexico and why I moved. It was February in 1998 and Montreal had experienced a genuine climate crisis: a five-day ice storm. An ice storm occurs when the temperature of the air is just above zero and the temperature of the ground is just below zero, so when it rains the water turns to ice when it hits the ground. Driving and even walking is nearly impossible as everything is coated with a layer of ice. Oh, and those big electric transmission towers? Covered with tons of ice, they tend to collapse:
A typical ice storm lasts maybe a day, but in early January 1998 it went on and on, for five days. At which point those really big transmission towers had maybe 300 tons of ice and, as you can see in the photo, every twig and branch had a cocoon of ice. Montreal is on an island in the St. Lawrence river and there are five main electric lines to the island. Four of them were down and a lot of local neighborhoods had no power because fallen trees had taken out power lines. The city engineer told the mayor and premier of the province that there was no power for the downtown office towers so nobody would be going to work for a while and there would be enough power to either run the Metro, the Montreal subway, OR to have water pressure. Not both. So they shut down the subway.
We left on a Friday afternoon after a couple of days with no power. We took the subway to the bus station and as we arrived they were shutting it down. The office towers were already dark. Eerie sight! We took the bus to the nearest town in Ontario that was out of the swath of the storm and stayed there until power was restored. In our neighborhood that took eight days. We started to think that there must be a better place to live, weather-wise.
A month or so later we had a friend over for dinner who used to be a vocal coach for the Mexico City opera. He was raving about San Miguel de Allende, where they loved to go on the weekends. San Miguel is one of the colonial silver cities, meaning cities founded by the Spanish in central Mexico during the era when immense quantities of silver were being mined and sent back to Spain. San Miguel was just a stopping place on the route from Zacatecas and Guanajuato to Mexico City and it became nearly a ghost town after the Mexican revolution of 1910. But in the late 40s and 50s it was discovered by a generation of arts-oriented Americans who found they could study art here under the GI bill as the Instituto Allende offered a master's degree. The expat community has been growing ever since and now is about 10% of the population.
No ice storms here. This photo could have been taken at any time of the year:
There are lots of other things I love about the place, health care in particular. A visit to your doctor costs $75 US, I can get an MRI the next day, I can see a specialist within a week and the costs for everything are very reasonable. I paid $150 for that MRI. There are three private hospitals in San Miguel and if necessary a doctor or a nurse will come to your home. In Canada, things are very different. A referral for treatment will take anywhere from six months to over a year.
There is a downside, of course. I miss the rich collegiality of the university community I was part of for over twenty years and it is pretty much impossible for me to get a piece premiered here. My String Quartet No. 2 will be premiered in three concerts in May. In Vancouver!
But, you know, I don't miss that winter weather.
Sibelius said that his Symphony No. 6 "always reminds me of the scent of the first snow."
American popular music, however—if one excludes jazz—has arguably produced just one transcendent genius. Bob Dylan is now in his 82nd year, and over the course of 60 of those years, he has changed his medium as utterly and completely as Orson Welles changed cinema or Cervantes changed world literature. Dylan has effectively divided American popular music into the era before his emergence and the era that followed, in which everyone—willing or unwilling, consciously or unconsciously—trod in his footsteps.
You might as well read the rest.
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That nexus of arts coverage, the Wall Street Journal, has a review of Stephen Walsh’s The Beloved Vision: A History of Nineteenth Century Music.
Historians speak of the long 19th century, from the French Revolution to the Great War, and that is more or less how Mr. Walsh uses the denomination. It was, he writes, an era “of stylistic diversity, a time when a composer asserted his or her existential being through a recognisable, even idiosyncratic musical language, after centuries during which composers”—think of Handel or J.S. Bach—“were generally less concerned with self than with craftsmanship.”
Hmm, that sounds interesting.
The 19th century was a time when the aristocracies that sponsored gifted musicians and composers died out and were replaced by public and private institutions—large professional orchestras, concert halls and conservatories. The conservatories dramatically improved the technical skill of musicians and offered a place for gifted composers to learn the newest techniques; orchestras and opera houses largely took over the job of commissioning new works. Many decades would pass before these institutions, grown sclerotic by government funding and no longer responsive to public tastes, would enforce banal orthodoxies on young ambitious composers.
European music, in other words, had not yet become overinstitutionalized and overcredentialed, as ours has been since the middle of the last century. In Vienna, we are reminded by Mr. Walsh, Mozart worked from 1781 as a freelance musician. Beethoven, too, survived on publishers’ commissions and charitable sponsorship. If they had been born two centuries later, both would have been appointed to endowed professorships, paid handsome salaries, feted by arts organizations, further subsidized with prestige prizes, and never heard from again.
My emphases. Now there is certainly a grain of truth there, especially the first passage that I have bolded. But while the second is certainly true of many composers who teach composition from comfortable tenured posts in universities and conservatories, there are many others who roam the musical universe, living on commissions and the sweat of their brow. Some names: Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Thomas Adès, Sofia Gubaidulina, Caroline Shaw and others. So, I find I have to strongly disagree that Mozart and Beethoven would have disappeared into the halls of academe, never to be heard from again.
Jagat Patel, who owns a 7-Eleven in the Riverside neighborhood of Austin, told Fox 7: 'Studies have shown that the classical music is annoying. Opera is annoying, and I'm assuming they are correct because it's working'.
Ah, that other perennial theme: "studies have shown"! What we need are some studies showing how really annoying EDM is.
And now Todd Field’s film Tár about a female conductor is the toast of Hollywood, anchored by Cate Blanchett’s firebrand performance. The film is a glinting prism in which everyone will see different things. For me it asks timely questions about the abuse, fragility and illusion of power. Chatting to Cate and Todd at my book launch, it’s no surprise to me, having spent 30 years in this profession, how enrapt they both remain by this most beguiling of art forms.
If asked to guess what under 25-year-olds are listening to, it's unlikely that many of us would land upon orchestral music. And yet a survey published in December 2022 by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) found that 74% of UK residents aged under 25 were likely to be tuning into just that at Christmas-time, compared with a mere 46% of people aged 55 or more. These figures reflect not only the RPO's broader finding that under 35-year-olds are more likely to listen to orchestral music than their parents, but also the widespread surge in popularity of classical music in general, particularly among younger generations.
That is rather unexpected, given the constant complaints in North America about the aging classical audience. But I have been saying for a long time that things are different in Europe. Part of the story is the rise of young artists:
British concert pianist Harriet Stubbs is another avid proponent of classical music for modern audiences who has been finding her own ways of drawing in new listeners. During lockdown, the musician, who usually splits her time between London and New York, performed multiple 20-minute concerts from her ground-floor flat in West Kensington, opening the windows and using an amplifier to reach listeners outside. "I gave 250 concerts," Stubbs, who was awarded a British Empire Medal by the Queen for this mood-boosting act of service, tells BBC Culture. "I did a range of repertoire from my upcoming album, and also things like All By Myself, which I chose ironically for that audience. And the thing is, people who thought they didn't care for classical music came back every day because of the power of that music."
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We have to start with Bob, don't we. Here is "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" from Blonde on Blonde:
And here is Harriet Stubbs playing the Scherzo #2 by Chopin:
Lastly, Dmitri Shostakovich playing his own Prelude and Fugue in E minor:
I realize that my post the other day was too short to really address this. The basic principle relates to the idea of balancing two different elements, in this case energy and control. A lot of the technical problems guitarists have stem from inadequate control of what the fingers are doing. If you don't have good control, then you can't build a solid technical foundation. One of the things that always impressed me about John Williams was that once he learned a piece, he was pretty much rock-solid every time he played it. This shows how great his control was.
So how do you get this kind of controlled technique? Well, you do have to start young, past a certain age it is doubtful that you can achieve a really great technique. But the daily issue is that you have to balance your energy and your ability to control this energy. The problem students typically have is that they have enthusiasm and energy, but lack control so when they practice they are, essentially, practicing sloppiness.
The solution is to reduce the energy to an amount that you can control. Then, as your control develops, you can increase the amount of energy, being careful not to put in more than you can easily control. This is pretty much the secret of good practicing. Well-controlled movements repeated until they become automatic. Every time you allow an uncontrolled movement, it sets you back and you will have to practice to remove that muscle memory.
A violinist once told me that he couldn't teach a concerto he was about to perform because he might recall the mistake a student made!
So this was why I talked about "soft" practicing: the idea is to soften the movements and energy in your hands down to levels that you can easily control. Most guitarists probably know this instinctively, but it doesn't hurt to be consciously aware of the principle.
One of the tv shows I quite enjoyed was Angel, a spin-off from Buffy the Vampire-Slayer. Wesley was a character in both series. He first appears as a comically inept watcher on Buffy and then as a "rogue demon hunter" on Angel. But his character undergoes an interesting transformation into a much more serious, darker one. Why? As he says because "my throat was cut and all my friends deserted me." Yep, that'll do it. As an expert on demon lore he expresses the principle that the first and most important rule is to distinguish truth from illusion. Now that's a pretty good thing to keep in mind these days as we are inundated with waves of very questionable information and ideas.
Is your gas stove dangerous? Will we all be driving electric cars by 2030? Is democracy in danger? Are developed societies over-regulated? Are there any problems with public school systems? How much do big political donors like George Soros and Sam Bankman-Fried affect government policy? How much influence does China have over North American government policies?
I hesitate to get too specific as I don't want to start an argument, oops, I mean "discussion," I just want to recommend that everyone do their own research instead of just absorbing the interpretation fed to them by the media. But let's take one example. Here was the initial story from a couple of years ago: Grief, sorrow after discovery of 215 bodies, unmarked graves at former B.C. residential school site.
Sorrowful reaction is pouring in following the discovery of more than 200 children in unmarked graves at a former residential school in B.C.’s Interior.
On Thursday, the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation in Kamloops announced that ground-penetrating radar uncovered the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
That sounds really awful! And in Canada, no less. The residential school program for indigenous children was in place for a number of decades and you might look up the details. In any case, the story prompted an hysterical reaction, but just how true was it? Not very as this followup reveals: New archeological evidence contradicts unmarked graves narrative.
Aerial photography and historical documents show that the site where the graves were alleged to have been discovered has been subject to decades of archeological digs and other excavation activity which did not turn up any human remains.
The most significant of these digs took place in 1958 when a plot of over 100,000 square feet or 30% of an apple orchard just outside of the residential school was excavated for a sewage retention pond.
“Not one body has been found,” Jacques Rouillard, who is a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal, told The Post. “After …months of recrimination and denunciation, where are the remains of the children buried at the Kamloops Indian Residential School?”
Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc spokesman Larry Read confirmed to The Post this week that no bodies have yet been exhumed from the Kamloops school and no dates have been set to start excavations.
This is one example out of thousands of an instance where illusion has triumphed over truth, at least in the general perceptions of the public.
So how do you do your own research? The first thing I recommend is switching your default search engine from Google to duckduckgo. Why? Google buries results that are inconvenient. To pick a very pertinent example, if you search for The Music Salon on your iPhone with Google, it will not appear in the first several pages. If you use duckduckgo, it is the third result. You might have some fun by comparing results of other searches. Interestingly, in many browsers it is almost impossible to get rid of Google and make duckduckgo your default search engine.
Other random advice: whoever you are, you should think about becoming an investor. Save 10% of your income and when you have a significant amount saved up, open a brokerage account. Here are some caveats: the vast majority of the articles and advice you read in the media, the financial press in particular, is directed toward trading. Unless you are very savvy or very dedicated I recommend that you NOT be a trader, but instead an investor. A trader tries to identify specific stocks or strategies that will deliver good returns. Oftentimes he or she guesses wrong or is stymied by market conditions, unusual events, trading costs and a host of other things. Every time you make a trade you should remind yourself that the person on the other end of the trade is probably smarter and better informed than you are. So don't be a trader. Instead of buying a stock, buy a business. This is good advice from the long-time investor Warren Buffet who has made a lot of people a lot of money over a lot of years. The very best thing you can do is simply buy the index of the 500 biggest and best companies in the US, the S&P 500, and just hang on to it. The symbol for this is SPY. That's it. Oh, as you get older, sell some of it and buy a bond fund. That's it. You might do your own research as to why this is a good strategy.
Explore alternatives to the mainstream media. Instead of getting all your news from the New York Times and the New Yorker and the Globe and Mail, have a look at the National Post or the Wall Street Journal or City Journal. You might be shocked at how different the narratives are.
And while we are on alternatives, let's take a look at an alternative to YouTube. Here is the Shostakovich String Quartet #8 on Rumble:
During his long career, the ginger-haired Catholic from Manchester with a combative streak became one of the most prominent leftist intellectuals who drifted to the right during the 1960s, moving from editor of the leftist New Statesman magazine to a regular columnist for the Spectator and eventually the right-wing Daily Mail tabloid.
Along the way, he wrote more than 50 books on topics ranging from Socrates to Queen Elizabeth I, as well as dozens of tomes on religious history, art and architecture, novels, memoirs and travel. His histories of the modern world, Jews, and Christianity were among the most prominent.
I usually avoid items on who died, who was fired and who got what orchestra job, but Paul Johnson was a particularly important thinker and he wrote a quite good book on Mozart that I have mentioned here. He also wrote an excellent history of art that I have also mentioned. But his wider influence came in the form of books on the history of the 20th century, history of the Jews, history of Christianity and of the United States.
Many decades ago I read a seminal book on historiography by R. G. Collingwood in which he made the comment that there are two fundamental ways of looking at history: one of them emphasizes the dislocations of wars, revolutions and cultural innovations while the other emphasizes the continuity of history, how events are shaped by customs and traditions and how innovation is always in relation to tradition. Taruskin wrestled with this idea in all five volumes of his Oxford History of Western Music.
The crucial value of Paul Johnson was that he was also very aware of it and did not let the doctrines of modernism affect how he viewed history. This is particularly evident in his Art: A New History in which he does not overvalue, for example, 20th century painters like Pablo Picasso, but instead sees how much their innovations were a kind of artistic fashion. In music this is sometimes called "patent office" innovation.
I just watched a clip on YouTube about the Rite of Spring in which the commentator shows just how much the structure of the work relates to certain traditional styles like folksong and hymn. Of course, the title of Taruskin's masterful work on Stravinsky is Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions. All art is in a tension between tradition and innovation.
So you might have a look at some of Paul Johnson's books. For a fresh look at recent history I recommend Modern Times.
“The real leverage point for AI is cost savings. That’s because the music itself isn’t very good. Sure, there’s a certain novelty factor here—but that will wear off very soon. The real hook is that AI works for cheap, it’s almost like slave labor in the band.”
AI doesn’t ask to share publishing rights or composer credits. You don’t even need to buy it a drink or take it out for lunch. Even more important, AI doesn’t even know what the words union scale mean.
I have been taken to task in the past for calling a lot of pop music nothing more than an industrial product.
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Staying with Ted for a moment, he reports on the top ten most performed classical composers.
This is from Bachtrack and there really aren't any surprises, right? I have a long-standing complaint about Bachtrack: their list of the top ten pianists does not include Gyorgy Sokolov who every year plays a large number of concerts on the European continent in all the leading concert venues--many more concerts than other artists on the list. But he is never mentioned. When I was in Salzburg in 2020 he played the Grossefestspielhaus which was full and gave six encores. Evgeny Kissin played the same hall and gave three encores and Igor Levit played the much smaller Haus für Mozart and played one encore.
Marin Alsop, the world’s foremost woman conductor, is no fan of “TÁR,” the acclaimed film about an unscrupulous woman conductor.
“I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian,” Alsop said of the movie, which stars Cate Blanchett as Berlin Philharmonic leader Lydia Tár.
“There are so many men — actual, documented men — this film could have been based on but, instead, it puts a woman in the role but gives her all the attributes of those men. That feels anti-woman. To assume that women will either behave identically to men or become hysterical, crazy, insane is to perpetuate something we’ve already seen on film so many times before.”
So according to Marin Alsop, it is offensive for a woman conductor to be a villain in a fictional narrative? Or maybe it is just impossible? To tell the truth, I find this attitude, that only male conductors can behave badly, offensive.
Counterfactual history is tricky, but it feels safe to say that Voxtrot found a bigger audience––or found its audience faster––than it would have otherwise thanks to the Internet phenomenon referred to as “blog rock.” By the mid-aughts, starting a blog was easier than ever. Streaming hadn’t yet taken over our listening habits, but Web connections were speedy enough that, if a blog posted an MP3, a reader could be hearing the song a few minutes later. It was exciting, hopping from blog to blog as though you were reading a large, collectively authored, and constantly updated zine, with samples of the gushed-over music just a click away. And it was free! Optimistic thinking about the disruptive, democratizing potential of the Internet was everywhere, and it seemed like blogs had become––at least for fans of certain faddish strains of indie rock––the new A. & R. departments, the new radio, the new Seattle, a tool for wriggling free of the bias and influence of stodgy old gatekeepers.
Well, it didn't take long for Big Tech to step in and fix all that!
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It has been a long time since we have had an envoi from Ravel, so here is Ivo Pogorelich with a fine performance of Gaspard de la nuit:
Marin Alsop conducting the Symphony No. 7 by Shostakovich:
And here are Ten Cello Preludes by Sofia Gubaidulina:
I'm not sure where I got this idea from--I have the vague recollection that Oscar Ghiglia might have said something similar in a master class--but it is a very useful concept. When you are learning new music or re-learning old music you should make use of "soft" practicing. I mean by this a particular approach to how you use your hands, especially the left hand. You should practice slowly, of course, but you should also practice with soft hands. That is, without any tension in the hand to speak of. Approach the notes not only very deliberately, but also very softly, focussing on touch and feeling. Don't slap your fingers down quickly and inaccurately, do the opposite, place them gently and carefully. If you do this many times, then you will have the passage programmed accurately into your muscle memory. The more speed, inaccuracy and tension, the harder this is to do. Don't play loud! Play quietly as well.
Perhaps the greatest failing of guitar students is that they practice too quickly and are very sloppy. The more you do this, the more you inculcate bad habits that will be hard to eradicate later on. I think it was in an interview that Isaac Stern said it is all in how you practice: it might take two hours of careful practice to make up for one hour of bad practice. This kind of practicing does take a lot of focus and concentration and when you feel your concentration going, you should take a break. But I am quite sure that soft practicing will improve your playing!
I offer the following article not because I necessarily agree with all of it, but because it might spark a useful debate: Strategic Charitable Giving.
Many years ago, I decided to focus my donations exclusively on classical music, since it is the most important thing in my life and is struggling to survive. My primary criterion for donation is whether an organization programs music outside the stupefyingly repeated canonical repertoire, a repertoire that probably comprises at most 100 works, out of a tantalizing musical universe of hundreds of thousands of unknown gems. I attend only those concerts now that expand my musical knowledge, absent a strong countervailing reason to the contrary. The canonical works are being played to death, and I am not afraid to admit that my 33rd experience of Don Giovanni does not produce in me anything like the astounded ravishment and obsession that followed my first or even tenth exposure to the work.
A couple of posts back I expressed a similar view and mentioned that the place you are going to find interesting opera programming out of the usual canon is in Europe these days.
Contemporary works may draw me to a concert—I will attend a few New York Philharmonic concerts this year to try, inter alia, to figure out the Thomas Adès cult, having been repelled by the literally dog-whistle writing in his Tempest. But the new music I usually seek is either lesser-known works by canonical composers—instead of The Four Seasons, Vivaldi’s operas; instead of the Rhenish Symphony, Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri; instead of Orfeo ed Euridice, Gluck’s ballet music Don Juan—or works by lesser-known composers: Christoph Graupner, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Charles-Valentin Alkan, Nikolai Medtner, Andrea Zani, to name a few. Program C. P. E. Bach, and you have guaranteed my attendance at your concert (logistics permitting) and put yourself in the running for a donation.
Again, while making different choices (except maybe for C. P. E. Bach), I agree with the general sentiment.
After that initial new-repertoire cut, my giving to classical music organizations is inversely proportional to those organizations’ embrace of racial-justice rhetoric. I am all for racial justice, as it once was defined. But classical music does not at present have a racism problem. It is colorblind in its pursuit of musical excellence, or was until the post-George Floyd meltdown. No black or Hispanic musician is being denied opportunities today because of his skin color. To the contrary. (The same can no longer be said with confidence regarding white male performers.)
Now that paragraph is likely to lead to some vehement disagreement. Certainly if you read the New York Times you will be convinced that classical music is still heavily biased against, for example, black composers and performers. But how true is that? Does anyone have any relevant data? Bear in mind that just citing the percentages of black musicians employed by symphony orchestras is not necessarily probative any more than citing the percentages of white athletes in the NBA indicates a prejudice against white athletes or, for that matter, the relatively few white hip-hop artists. There are overarching cultural forces at work here.
A couple of years ago I decided that I was spending too much time online reading very ephemeral stuff like newspapers and blogs (heh!), so I decided to put a little more fiber in my diet. I started with Shakespeare plays and read a few. Then I read the Odyssey, which went surprisingly quickly--one book a day. Oh, and I do my serious reading first thing in the morning, with a cup of coffee. Next I took on a really big challenge: re-reading the Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin. I just finished volume four, Music in the Early Twentieth Century. Then I decided to take a pause before finishing with volume five, Music in the Late Twentieth Century. I'm about to rebuild my stock portfolio so I read a real investing classic, Stocks for the Long Run by Jeremy Siegel, one of the clearest distillations of decades of investing wisdom, supported by a lot of data. I had put the Michael Kurtz monograph on Sofia Gubaidulina on the shelf so I took a few days to finish it. That will lead to a summation post on her fairly soon.
Another book that I never finished is Getting Started in Technical Analysis by Jack Schwager, so I am finishing that one now. Technical analysis of what, you ask: the movement of stock prices. I used to think that technical analysis was voodoo, but it does have its uses though I suspect the discipline is still in its infancy. The major work in the field is Technical Analysis of Stock Trends by Robert Edwards and John Magee, originally published in 1948. I guess that will get back on my reading list in the near future though it is a dauntingly hefty volume. Once I finish the Schwager I will go back to Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations which I have tried to finish before on a couple of occasions.
Speaking of long-term reading projects, the big one I had planned when I moved to Mexico was Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, well over three thousand pages, making Tolstoy's War and Peace seem like a short story. I only got around to it last year and after slogging through half of it, I decided it wasn't quite worth the effort. Your mileage may vary.
So what's on the agenda for this year? I might re-read A Guide to Musical Analysis by Nicholas Cook and perhaps the Iliad. Maybe something by Aristotle, either the Nichomachean Ethics or the Politics. I downloaded the first volume of The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, so I may give it a shot. Plus there are some books on Stravinsky and Bartók by van den Toorn and Antokoletz that have been sitting on my shelf for a while that I should really get to. Plus, for variety, The Oxford Book of English Verse, the new edition from 1939 of the original first published in 1900. I got a well-preserved second-hand copy through Amazon. 1141 pages of wonderful poetry and the very first one is a famous song: "Sumer is icumen in."
I don't really care for jazz for reasons I have discussed before, but at the same time, there are jazz musicians I have a great deal of respect for. Miles Davis, of course. But the one jazz musician that always impresses me with his sheer creative spirit and imagination is Sun Ra. The New York Times has this guide to his work: 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Sun Ra.
Now we’re putting the spotlight on Sun Ra, the experimental pianist, organist and bandleader whose idiosyncratic blend of jazz imagined life on other planets. Born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Ala., he wore ornate robes and Egyptian headgear, and composed progressive music meant to commune with Saturn, a place he said he felt a connection with after an out-of-body experience in college. “My whole body was changed into something else,” Sun Ra once said. “I could see through myself.” He said aliens spoke to him: “They would teach me some things that when it looked like the world was going into complete chaos, when there was no hope for nothing, then I could speak, but not until then. I would speak, and the world would listen.” In turn, Sun Ra’s music centered on space travel as a form of Black liberation. He believed Black people would never find freedom on Earth, and that real emancipation resided in the cosmos. Over the course of his career, Sun Ra recorded more than 200 albums with his band — called the Arkestra — before his death in 1993 at 79.
Choices have been shaped, in part, by the cold, dank days and long nights of January. A summer regime would have been altogether more airy. Away from live encounters in the concert hall, my preference tends to be contemplative and often quiet: a measure of what level of noise I want coming in through my headphones and invading rather than enhancing my day’s activities. You may have a different appetite for musical jolts and thumps and pulsating rhythms. All the composers here can provide that option too, easy to find with a bit of YouTube-ing or Googling. The boundaries of classical music are ever more porous and open, spilling into other forms and all to the good. Give up prejudice or fear or indifference. Open your ears. Get listening.
For today she recommends "Clair de lune" by Gabriel Fauré:
For some, it’s a pinnacle of cultural achievement. For others it perpetuates class inequality and upholds “white middle class social domination”.
To controversy, we can add contradiction! We love to hear the instruments and idioms of classical music in film and television (think of the theme from The Crown or the music from the Harry Potter films), but experience has shown classical music is most effective at repelling loiterers from public spaces.
But this is mostly a guide for beginning concert attendees.
Lusitano was an African-Portuguese composer and music theorist who was most likely born between 1520 and 1522, and who died sometime after 1562. Probably the child of an enslaved African woman and a Portuguese noble, Lusitano traversed Europe in a career that saw him depart the Iberian Peninsula for Rome as a Catholic priest in 1550 and, around a decade later, relocate from Italy to Germany as a married Protestant.
He wrote sacred and secular vocal music, taught extensively and produced scholarship that includes a unique manuscript treatise on improvised vocal counterpoint. But until recently, Lusitano has been mostly overlooked by music histories. He has been omitted altogether in some instances, and his appearances in centuries of academic literature have consistently minimized his biography.
BandLab CEO Meng Ru Kuok says that having tools to spark song creation makes a huge difference for young music-makers, who, so far, seem to be the biggest adopters of this technology. Meng claims his AI-powered SongStarter tool, which generates a simple musical loop over which creators can fashion a song, makes new BandLab users “80% more likely to actually share their music as opposed to writing from zero.” (Billboard and BandLab collaborated on Bringing BandLab to Billboard, a portal that highlights emerging artists.)
Other applications for generative AI include creating “entirely new formats for listening,” as Endel co-founder/CEO Oleg Stavitsky says. This includes personalized music for gaming, wellness and soundtracks.
Can I remain skeptical? My enjoyment of popular music plummeted when drum machines and autotune became ubiquitous. I guess it could plunge even further!
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How about some music? Let's start with a little Sun Ra. This is "Satellites are Spinning" with vocalist June Tyson.
Here is a mid-16th century motet by Vicente Lusitano:
Finally, here is a song by the Incredible String Band from the days before pop music came to rely on technology:
For a bonus, frequent commentator Steven Watson just posted one of his compositions today. Here is the Prelude and Fantasy:
I played a brief concert in November and I'm planning to do another in the near future. This was after a few years of no public performances. So now I find myself thinking about programming. This is a fairly important subject, but I don't think people talk about it too much. I recall the head of the performance department at McGill saying to me once "put your best piece at the beginning of the second half." Ok, makes sense I guess. But I honestly can't recall anyone else ever saying a thing about programming except maybe a few isolated remarks on encores and what one should and shouldn't play as an encore.
So, it might be worth while to talk about programming. In the past, especially when I was at McGill, I did some hefty programs. For my third year performance exam I did the Bach 4th Lute Suite, the Ponce Sonata romantica and the Tedesco Concerto in D. Whew! Later concert programs played as a performance requirement might start with some vihuela music, continue with the Hungarian lute composer Bakfark, some Scarlatti sonatas, Villa-Lobos etudes and maybe a concerto with piano accompaniment.
I used to play a lot of Latin American music by composers other than Villa-Lobos like Manuel Ponce, Agustin Barrios, Antonio Lauro and Leo Brouwer (though he is more modernist than Latin American). Apart from Ponce, I have pretty much let that repertoire go. Especially Astor Piazzolla. I went through a brief, though intense, bout of playing his music but now I avoid it like the plague. Not entirely sure why, but there seem to be two and only two moods/atmospheres and I don't like either of them! And, with the exception of Ponce, most Latin American composers seem pretty shallow, though not, I guess, Ginastera.
I used to play quite a bit of Fernando Sor and considerably less of Mauro Giuliani. While I still find Sor to be both charming and agreeable, I don't have much desire to play his music and even less to play Giuliani. Tarrega? Apart from the Capricho Arabe, what is there? Mertz and Regondi leave me a bit cold. The problem is that their music is embarrassingly slight compared to their contemporaries who wrote for piano.
The repertoire took a great leap forward with the arrival of Segovia who inspired Moreno Torroba, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and a host of others like Turina and Mompou to write for guitar. And there are some fine pieces there. In recent years I have especially found Torroba to be an outstanding composer for guitar with lots of tuneful character pieces that are very enjoyable. The Four Short Pieces by Frank Martin are very fine.
The next generation of players, Julian Bream and John Williams, inspired a new generation of composers and music by Benjamin Britten, Lennox Berkeley, Hans Werner Henze and others is well worth your time.
Joaquin Rodrigo is in a category of his own as the composer of a really terrific concerto and quite a few remarkable solo pieces.
But the truth is that there is only one truly great composer that we can successfully play on guitar and that is J. S. Bach, of course. He never wrote a note for guitar, but his lute music (and music only purportedly for the lute), and his solo cello and violin music adapts excellently for guitar.
Now sure, there are innumerable transcriptions from Beethoven, Mozart, Grieg, Chopin and others for guitar, but, with the exception of the piano music of Albeniz and Granados, they really just illustrate why they don't actually work on guitar.
So what will my next brief program consist of? Just two pieces, the Sonatina meridional of Manuel Ponce and the Chaconne of Bach. The Bach is one of the greatest pieces ever written, of course, and the Ponce is a delightful piece rich in melodic and harmonic interest. The problem is, which order to play them in...
