Let's kick off with an item from the ever-prolific Ted Gioia: Why Musicians Can't Retire. Well, of course musicians can retire and Ted gives lots of examples:
Years ago, I felt cheated when some superstar musicians retired—especially if I hadn’t had a chance to see them in concert. But Stan Getz once took me to task when I told him my disappointment that Benny Goodman, who was still alive at the time, rarely performed on the West Coast in his final years. “He deserves to enjoy a period of retirement,” Stan admonished me. “He has been playing for audiences since the 1920s.”
And, of course, Stan was right.
Except for a few benefit concerts and a couple of special events, I retired from doing concerts quite a while ago. But I tend to tell people that I'm not retired, I'm on a lengthy strike for higher pay and better working conditions!
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One of the most interesting artists I saw in Salzburg the last time I was there was violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja. Wait, did I say violinist? In the concert I saw she was performing the solo sprechstimme part in Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire--and conducting! But most of the time she is playing the violin as in this concert reviewed in The Guardian: Patricia Kopatchinskaja/Joonas Ahonen review – freewheeling explosive expressionism.
Schoenberg’s Phantasy Op 47 began the concert. It’s one of the late pieces, like the String Trio, in which Schoenberg seemed to recapture some of the freewheeling expressionism of his early atonal works, and it’s a musical world that Kopatchinskaja inhabits instinctively. Webern’s Four Pieces Op 7 followed, the briefest of miniatures, each just a wisp of music, and all projected with just as much expressive power as the Phantasy before them.
The performances of the Beethoven sonatas didn’t shrink from emotional extremes either. In the second of the Op 30 set, in C minor, Kopatchinskaja’s playing was full of ferocious effects – fierce staccatos, steepling crescendos, sly portamentos – interspersed with moments of almost ghostly, vibrato-less quietness. There was an edge-of-the-seat danger about it all, with intonation sometimes teetering too, and the Kreutzer Sonata Op 47 (which had been preceded by Morton Feldman’s Webern-esque Piece for violin and piano from 1950) predictably received the same treatment, only if anything even more intensely.
Richard Taruskin began his Oxford History of Western Music seriously proposing the era of literate music in the West was coming to an end, a kind of death-of-classical-music that was more typical of a Norman Lebrecht. By the end of the fifth volume he concluded that classical music wasn't dying, it was changing.
I have more than a handful of times floated the idea that the symphony and the orchestral traditions of the long 19th century constituted an equivalent to the ars perfecta of the late Renaissance mass. When the mass of the earlier era gave way to new styles and forms partisans of the older style complained that the new recitative genre was garbage, that any unmusical hack could do that and simulating the rhythms of human speech in such a dubiously literal way was not really musical or expressive.
Here we are in 2023 and I would venture the proposal that rap has become a kind of recitative in our era, declamatory speech that is organically fused with melodic activity and it's the kind of thing that is denounced as the death of melody by partisans of the older ars perfecta equivalents of our era. The historical irony would be that recitative in Italian opera was viewed by partisans of Palestrina and company as being as much anti-musical junk in the time of Monteverdi as rap is viewed by fans of Italian opera now.
The first couple of paragraphs alone give us a lot to talk about!
Paintings that imitate music exist on a spectrum. On one end, there are abstract artists such as Williams and Paul Klee, for whom music itself sometimes becomes the subject matter. On the other end, there are the likes of James Whistler, Paul Gauguin and Wassily Kandinsky, who paint in a ‘musical manner’, moving away from a concern with representing reality. Whistler, known for his almost abstract ‘nocturne’ pictures, defined painting as ‘the exact correlative of music, as vague, as purely emotional, as released from all functions of representation’. Though not going as far towards pure abstraction, Gauguin saw colours and lines as having the power to evoke emotions and thoughts just like music. When asked why he painted red dogs and pink skies, Gauguin replied: ‘It’s music, if you like!’
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I usually avoid doing obituaries, leaving that to Slipped Disc, but I just learned that the great Spanish film director Carlos Saura passed away this month. In the 1980s he did a wonderful trilogy of films on flamenco including one of Manuel de Falla's ballet El Amor Brujo. The choreographer was Antonio Gades and Christina Hoyos the featured dancer. Here is a scene from that movie:
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While a number of trends seem to be unfortunate, I am always coming across terrific new compositions, organizations and musicians well worth celebrating. I'm not the only one: America’s Culture Is Booming. Really.
But I care about more than just artistry. I also want to foster a healthy cultural ecosystem that lets creative people thrive. Maybe that’s why I’m anxious.
So here’s my report on where we are today. I think the facts might surprise you.
First revelation: It really is boom times. At least, the numbers are huge:
A hundred thousand songs are uploaded daily to streaming platforms.
In the last year, 1.7 million books were self-published.
Every minute, 2,500 videos are uploaded to YouTube.
There are now 3 million podcasts—and 30 million podcast episodes were released last year.
About 86% of youngsters want to grow up to become influencers, and they contribute to these impressive numbers.
A hundred years ago, you folks didn’t even own a radio. Just last year, you thought TikTok was a breath mint. And now look at all those big numbers.
Mind you, there is a downside--follow the link for the problem, which is on the demand side.
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We start our musical clips with the Phantasy op. 47 by Schoenberg:
It has been said that Schoenberg is famous for being able to empty any concert hall, but, surprisingly, he has always been one of my favorite composers. Next we have some pop music that is actually a lot of fun, both musically and visually:
Here is a tricky early piano piece by Thomas Adès:
Sure, two staves is really necessary for piano music, and maybe three for complex textures. But four staves seems a bit excessive.
A commentator responded to my Friday Miscellanea with a complaint that I was ignoring the supposed fact that Oxford's new submission policy:
Oxford University Press is committed to promoting and maintaining a culture of equality, diversity, and inclusion, and acting upon issues of diversity and inclusion is vitally important to fulfilling our mission. We recognize that many groups are currently under-represented in our music catalogue, and we are committed to changing and rapidly improving this through future publishing. As part of this commitment, we are currently accepting submissions from composers who:
• live with a disability; and/or
• are women; and/or
• identify on the broader spectrum of gender; and/or
• are from under-represented ethnic groups; and/or
• are from a lower socio-economic group
We encourage composers from these groups to submit their music for review.
...was still only making a minor change: "Oxford's library of published music has gone from 99% white and male to 97% white and male." Never mind whether these numbers are entirely made up, as I suspect they are, the real point, as I suggested, is that why would anyone who was NOT a member of these groups think they would get a fair shake at Oxford? Another commentator said "Any policy that prioritises satisfying quotas over actual merit is decidedly suspect to me." We could go back and forth on this for days, but what interests me more is why is it that there is such uniformity in the political policies of all of our elite institutions? Whether it is climate change, economic policy, educational methods or, in this instance, cultural policy, there seems to be a monoculture that prevails worldwide.
Our modern ruling class is peculiar. One of its many peculiarities is its penchant for fads, and what can only be called mass hysteria. Repeatedly, we see waves in which something that nobody much cared about suddenly comes to dominate ruling class discourse. Almost in synchrony, a wide range of institutions begin to talk about it, and to be preoccupied by it, even as every leading figure virtue-signals regarding this subject which, only a month or two previously, hardly any of them even knew about, much less cared about.
There are several factors behind this, but one of the most important, I think, is that our ruling class is a monoculture.
He quotes a revealing essay by Angelo Codevilla:
Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.
Personally, I find that I am not part of this whole cultural universe so I remain skeptical about all of the trends and narratives that emerge. Why is this? I think it is because of what I am thinking of as the "threads of influence" that I find most important in my life. I was born in a remote area in the north of Canada, so right away it was unlikely that I was going to be absorbed into the usual channels. Government and other cultural institutions were very thin on the ground! About all I had as an influence or model was a tiny municipal library. I just read whatever looked interesting from cowboy stories to quantum mechanics. I guess my father was a big early influence though I don't recall the details. What I do know is that by the time I attended first grade I was already a perfectly competent reader. No kindergarten up there.
As we moved to Vancouver Island in my middle teens, the public library continued to be my main channel of influence. The public school system was, to be frank, not very stimulating. My interests extended to history, Asian (especially Japanese) art and culture, and ultimately classical music. I found some books on 20th century music in the library. Attending university was a huge influence, of course. My music courses were practical in nature. The professor who taught music history, a somewhat acerbic bassoonist named Christine Mather, was so focussed on early music that we barely made it to Monteverdi by Christmas and had to cover Stravinsky and Bartók in an extra supplementary class at the end of term!
I was unhappy with my options as a guitarist at that university so, on the advice of a Dutch guitarist, I went to Spain for most of a year and studied with José Tomás, a greatly renowned disciple of Segovia. This was an enormous influence because, without even being really aware of it, I absorbed a European cultural stance regarding things like repertoire and expression.
I could go on and on, but it should be clear already that at no point did I ever really become drawn into the overarching narrative of the ruling gentry of North America. While I did work in a government job for a year and a half, I left it as soon as I could. I never received government cultural grants--never even applied for them in most cases. My professors, from that musicologist to an English literature professor to a philosophy professor made no attempts to inculcate what I perceived as an ideology, though you could certainly argue about the details: was the fact that the focus was always on the European cultural heritage a kind of ideological statement? Well, whether it was or not, I compensated for that by making my own study of non-Western music, art and literature.
I tend to take a contrarian approach to just about everything and on the whole I think it has been effective for me. Ironically, in my younger years I tended to regard everything published with the characteristic deep blue cover of Oxford University Press as being particularly authoritative in its balanced, objective approach. Nowadays, it seems, it cannot be trusted.
So that is my apologia for why, from time to time, I critique what I see as extreme or morally questionably cultural policies as they affect the world of music.
Puts’s opera The Hours received an extraordinary lavish production that most composers can only dream of. It featured a huge cast headlined by three top operatic stars–Renée Fleming, Joyce DiDonato, and Kelli O’Hara–plus a gargantuan chorus which frequently takes center stage. When the production was announced it seemed to come out of nowhere, but it was in the works for five years. It grew directly out of Puts’s previous collaboration with Fleming, Letters From Georgia, a five moment song cycle based on letters that the painter Georgia O’Keeffe wrote to her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz. After Fleming announced she was no longer focusing on standard operatic repertoire and wanted to devote her energies to singing new roles, Puts casually asked her if she’d be amenable to singing in an opera if he wrote one for her. Within weeks she suggested an opera based on The Hours, a complex narrative that interweaves stories of women in three different time periods which had been a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel as well as a successful Hollywood film. Puts, who had read the book and saw the movie and loved them both, said that he instantly “could imagine the kinds of things that you could do on the operatic stage that are not possible in a book or in a film.” Soon thereafter she mentioned the idea to Peter Gelb who was immediately excited about a work that could star three major box office draws.
1. The advent of musical recording favored musical forms that allow for the direct communication of personality. Mozart is mediated by sheet music, but the Rolling Stones are on record and the radio and now streaming. You actually get “Mick Jagger,” and most listeners prefer this to a bunch of quarter notes. So a lot of energy left the forms of music that are communicated through more abstract means, such as musical notation, and leapt into personality-specific musics.
1b. Eras have aesthetic centers of gravity. So pushing a lot of talent in one direction does discourage some other directions from developing fully. Dylan didn’t just pull people into folk, he pulled them away from trying to be the next Pat Boone.
2. Electrification favored a variety of musical styles that are not “classical” or even “contemporary classical,” with apologies to Glenn Branca.
3. The two World Wars ripped out the birthplaces of so much wonderful European culture. It is not only classical music that suffered, but also European science, letters, entrepreneurship, and much more.
4. It is tough to top Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc., so eventually creators struck out in new directions. And precisely because of the less abstract, more personality-laden nature of popular music, it is harder to have a very long career and attain the status of a true titan. The Rolling Stones ran out of steam forty (?) years ago, but Bach could have kept on writing fugues, had he lived longer. More recent musical times thus have many creators who are smaller in overall stature, even though the total of wonderful music has stayed very high.
5. Contemporary classical music (NB: not the best term, for one thing much of it is no longer contemporary) is much better than most people realize. Much of it is designed for peers, and intended to be experienced live. In the last decade I saw performances of Glass’s Satyagraha, Golijov’s St. Marc Passion, Boulez’s Le Marteau (at IRCAM), and Stockhausen’s Mantra, and it was all pretty amazing. I doubt if those same pieces are very effective on streaming. It may be unfortunate, but due to incentives emanating from peers, most non-peer listeners do not have the proper dimensionality of listening experience to proper appreciate those compositions. To be clear, for the most part I don’t either, not living down here in northern Virginia, but at times I can overcome this (mostly through travel) and in any case I am aware of the phenomenon. For these same reasons, it is wrong to think those works will have significantly higher reputations 50 or 100 years from now — some of them are already fairly old!
I hope this sparks a few comments. One thing for sure, these speculations are far more interesting than the usual "because contemporary classical music is all unmusical crap!"
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I have mentioned a few times that creativity in the arts is a balance between tradition and innovation and apparently the critic Jed Pearl agrees: Authority & Freedom: A Conversation with Jed Perl
you say that you have written your book “to release art from the stranglehold of relevance,” to challenge the notion that works of art can be “validated (or invalidated) by the extent to which they line up with (or fail to line up with) our current social and political concerns.”
the institutional model of classical music education engineers us to fall in love with burnout from the very beginning. By stepping into a conservatory, we are encouraged to maintain packed-out schedules, work beyond the point of exhaustion, and have pristine social media accounts showcasing our highlight reel of repertoire in order to justify our choice in career. Even though I love what I do immensely, I have been conditioned to feel anxious when my days aren’t jam-packed as a result of what I was taught in school: that learning the notes on the page takes priority over my rest.
I didn't feel this when I was a student, but that was before social media and the unceasing pressure to be your own marketing agent and promoter.
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I was looking for fun and interesting articles about music and musicians, but I really didn't find many this week. Too much heavy thinking! So let's compensate with some listening. Let's start with a little YouTube clip that reminds me of a college seminar I took: Samuel Andreyev walks us through a Bach invention:
That's fun and interesting if you are into counterpoint, big time. Next is Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha from 1968:
Bob Dylan, "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight"? Sure, why not?
Breaking with tradition a bit, I start with a Wigmore Hall recital by Korean pianist Yunchan Lim. I love the unusual programming of Dowland arranged by William Byrd, Bach sinfonias and Beethoven bagatelles and variations:
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Over at Slipped Disc we learn of an affair between Shostakovich and the ballerina Nina Pavlovna Ivanova.
A Russian auction house is putting up for sale a cache of ten love letters between Dmitri Shostakovich and the Bolshoi ballerina Nina Pavlovna Ivanova, a relationship unknown until now. ‘Fate has sent me great happiness in you,’ he tells her.
The letters, dated 1935 to 1939, are passionate and persistent. Shostakovich aimed to marry Nina ‘in 3-4 months’, oblivous of the fact that he was already married to the scientist, Nina Varzar – albeit in an open relationship – and had two small children.
There are many technical similarities between classical music, especially music from the baroque period, and metal, which others more versed in music theory are better qualified than I am to discuss. At a fundamental level, both types of music are interested in exploring complexity. Sometimes this can appear like complexity for the sake of complexity, giving us the negative connotations of the word “baroque” (as in “the baroque language of government documents”). However, both the best baroque music and the best metal put their complexity to work in the service of building a musical architecture, an abstract structure that keeps the brain in motion, trying to work out how the pieces fit together.
I'm not sure how true this is, but I'm always interested in fresh perspectives.
Irving Berlin — who may be most famous for his patriotic hit, “God Bless America” — was born Israel Baline in Russia. Along with his family (including his father, a cantor), he immigrated the U.S. in 1893, where they lived on the the Lower East Side of New York City. The Jewish Standard reports that Berlin’s daughter said that it was her father’s gratitude for America — the country that brought his family out of poverty — that fostered an appreciation for Christmas as an American family holiday. Thus, he wrote “White Christmas” in 1947 as another patriotic homage to this country and its distinctly American Christmas traditions.
Since the Metropolitan Opera announced its plans to change the policy towards the repertory and schedules to remedy a difficult financial situation the institution is facing after the pandemic, the audience simply cannot stop expressing displeasure with General Manager Peter Gelb’s new strategy.
Prioritizing new operas and reducing the number of performances by almost 10 percent is only a part of the bigger plan, which also includes the withdrawal of up to $30 million from Met’s endowment and intensified work with donors.
But are those changes so crucial or are we afraid of losing the Met we got used to?
Going into the unknown is scary, but if we think about it, this actually sounds like a good business development plan. The previous model did not perform well, and the pandemic changed the habits of consumption. Something had to be changed. And, I suppose, management spent long weeks trying to figure out what people want [to pay for], so they would return and fill the hall to the desirable 80 percent.
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Not many interesting items this week, so let's have a few music clips. Oh, and if you want to avoid those annoying ads on YouTube, switch to Opera as your browser. Here is a fascinating clip of interviews with singers from the Netherlands Bach Society about, yep, singing Bach:
And here is one of their latest releases:
Here is a new quartet by Russian composer Andrey Rubtsov with the Julia Fischer Quartet:
These days I think that this is a very practical and compelling philosophical issue. Philosophers call this area "epistemology" --how we come to know what we know. Here is the definition from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
The term “epistemology” comes from the Greek words “episteme” and “logos”. “Episteme” can be translated as “knowledge” or “understanding” or “acquaintance”, while “logos” can be translated as “account” or “argument” or “reason”. Just as each of these different translations captures some facet of the meaning of these Greek terms, so too does each translation capture a different facet of epistemology itself. Although the term “epistemology” is no more than a couple of centuries old, the field of epistemology is at least as old as any in philosophy.[1] In different parts of its extensive history, different facets of epistemology have attracted attention. Plato’s epistemology was an attempt to understand what it was to know, and how knowledge (unlike mere true opinion) is good for the knower.
But the problem in the current world situation is rather different and even more urgent. Little hints of it come through in terms like "fake news," ideology and propaganda. For the ancient Greeks the problem was distinguishing knowledge from mere opinion and from sense perception and appearance. For us, swamped by a tidal wave of data, opinion, "news" and a host of other streams, the problem is rather finding what is not only true, but also useful and appropriate.
Let me illustrate from my own experience, which is always a good place to start. When I was in my teens and wandering, looking for some sort of career and life guidance, the problem was what was the real story of who I was and what I could hope to accomplish? Unfortunately, that knowledge was not only difficult to obtain, I wasn't even aware that it might exist!
Oddly enough, I got a bit of a taste of a solution many years later when I had to take a required seminar in my musicology doctoral program. The course was called "research methods" and frankly, we all need some version of it. The other solution might be a course called "potential and possibilities." That one should probably come first. What I needed to know when I was young, was what possible paths there were for me and I'm not distorting the situation when I say I really had absolutely no idea. I liked music a lot and had played in a band so I ended up pursuing that path. But honestly, I never even considered any others because they seemed not to be feasible--in fact I was pretty much totally ignorant of them! If I had simply asked, what are the potential possibilities in my life, then I might have started doing the research.
Ever since my experience as a graduate student I tend to approach things in a different way. I was asked to give a pre-concert talk on Chopin a few years ago and since I knew almost nothing about him I created a graduate seminar for myself that involved reading a biography and a collection of scholarly papers, The Cambridge Companion to Chopin, as well as listening to a box of his complete works and studying some scores. It took me a couple of months, but I was then prepared to do a little talk on Chopin. This is pretty much what I do whenever I run into a significant gap in my knowledge and understanding.
The main problem for us nowadays is developing a fairly sensitive, what in less enlightened times we would have called a "bullshit meter." This is something that should go off when you read most items in the mainstream media, on television news and, yes, on the Internet, even blogs. Frankly, it is pretty easy to tell when you are being manipulated and propagandized, at least I think so. Here is one of my solutions: decades ago I found that there were a host of articles about health and health dangers so I went to my local bookstore (this was pre-Internet) and started searching the shelves for a skeptical review of the health literature. I did find a suitable book and after reading it, proceeded to discount most of what I read about health issues.
In many cases a simple recourse to cui bono is helpful: who benefits from getting you to believe this information? It is usually perfectly obvious which is why all political statements are particularly suspect. But the solutions, even in our hyper-politicized times, are usually obvious once you get a certain habit of mind. In whatever field the issue arises, look for alternative sources: substack, scholarly treatments (in some areas even this has become corrupted so you may need to seek out older sources), or even simply delving into your own personal experience. The evidence of your own eyes is pretty compelling. Or ears in the case of music. That is usually why I accompany any musical discussion with some clips of the pieces in question. Hey, have a listen for yourself.
Samuel Andreyev is a Canadian composer, resident in Europe, for whom I have a great deal of respect. He has done a lot of very serious analyses of some important modern compositions, such as this:
Plus, to show how hip or post-modern he is, he has also done tributes to Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart:
But the Second String Quartet of Morton Feldman was, apparently, a bridge too far as today he put up a clip of him listening to all six hours of the piece, on headphones. We can see him and hear his comments, but not the piece itself. It is like a bizarre version of one of those strange "reaction" clips where someone who normally doesn't listen to classical music listens to something by Mozart and is visibly amazed.
I've listened to a lot of Feldman--have I listened to all of this? I don't think I have. I have listened to large sections of it, but I'm pretty sure I skipped ahead. A lot. This German quartet zip through it pretty quickly.
At this point a few questions come to mind: what was the point of the piece, especially it's very long duration? And, apart from a simple test of endurance, what was the point of Andreyev's listening to it while videoing himself? Feldman wrote a lot of good and interesting music. Did he wander a bit far off into the mystic in his later years? I dunno, let's wait a hundred years and see what people think. He might be totally forgotten or as widely loved as Mozart... Who knows?
Where I live in Mexico is one of the "colonial silver cities" which means one of the cities in Central Mexico that were established by the Spanish in order to mine the extensive silver deposits. By the way, the sending of enormous amounts of gold and silver from South and Central America during the 16th and 17th centuries was one of the main factors that destroyed the Spanish economy and led to its impoverishment right up until, well, a couple of decades ago. Beware easily gotten wealth.
The small city where I live was not a major site during the Spanish colonial times and it was very much neglected after the Mexican War of Independence of 1810 and nearly abandoned after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Since the 1950s it has seen a rebirth and is now a city of around one hundred thousand and home to around ten thousand American and Canadian expatriates. But the historic center is preserved by law and one still sees historic echoes like this:
That ceramic plaque, which likely dates from the first half of the 19th century, states that this building was one of the sites of the Inquisition when this was part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, an enormous entity stretching from northern South America through Central America to California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Florida and even parts of Wyoming. The buildings in the historic Centro are from two to four hundred years old. My office, which is about twenty yards from that plaque about the Inquisition, is around three hundred years old. We still have nuns and even a nunnery and I saw a procession of Franciscan monks a while back. But don't think we are backward--the whole town was recently connected with fiber optic cable.
Living here it is difficult to be unaware of history. Here is some Baroque guitar music from a 1772 manuscript from New Spain. In 1772 in Europe, of course, Haydn had already been composing in the Classical Style for quite a while.
I often enjoy criticizing Alex Ross, but I never go into the kind of detail we find in this article: Moving on From Alex Ross. The writer deplores the progressive politicization of Ross' criticism.
Ross trained with composers, and his calling card has always been his interest in composers and repertoire, not just performers. It was in this arena that the new woke Alex Ross first caught my attention. In February 2018, Ross penned a column on the work of Florence Price, a then relatively unknown early-twentieth-century black female composer from Arkansas. “The Rediscovery of Florence Price,” Ross’s apologia for Price’s charming but musically undistinguished output, would set the agenda for a Price revival across the American classical music landscape—one that continues to this day.
In the article, Ross test-drove several arguments that music organizations and music media would employ over the ensuing years to keep criticism of Price’s music at bay. There was Price’s political significance. (“She seems to speak from an imaginary past, from an alternative history of an America that lived up to its stated ideals.”) There was the idea that we ought to regard racism and sexism as the exclusive reasons why we don’t all know the name Florence Price. (“The reasons for the shocking neglect of Price’s legacy are not hard to find. In a 1943 letter to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, she introduced herself thus: ‘My dear Dr. Koussevitzky, To begin with I have two handicaps—those of sex and race.’”) And lastly there was the idea that the absence of Price and other minorities from the classical music canon invalidated the canon itself. (“If racism and misogyny had not so profoundly defined European and American culture, would as many white male composers have prospered?”)
I'm sure that will start an argument here, but let me offer one more quote that I want to contest:
taste in American classical music is a signaling cascade, and that the man upstream of everyone else is Alex Ross.
Now sure, there is a grain of truth here, but I really don't think those scattered few music critics still active these days take their marching orders from Alex Ross. Instead, what I think is the case is that Ross' success is partly built on his conformity with the views of enlightened inhabitants of Manhattan regarding race, gender and justice. Which is fair enough--that is his community audience. It underlines how cultural taste in the US tends to flow from just a few few nodes of which New York tends to be predominant, in classical music if not in movies and pop music. Canada has the same problem to an even greater extent. Quebec aside, which has its own independent culture, cultural taste in Canada largely flows from Toronto.
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Review: Kronos Quartet Offers a Creative Snapshot of a Global Pandemic. I doubt that there is another string quartet that have contributed anything near the sheer quantity and quality of commissions and performances of new music for the medium. Sitting on my CD shelves is a hefty box issued by Nonesuch to celebrate their first twenty-five years of recording. Soon we will need another for the second twenty-five years. In the meantime, the New York Times reviews a recent concert of innovative new works:
Many of the works on the Zankel program were brief but transporting. The Benin-born composer and singer Angélique Kidjo’s “YanYanKliYan Senamido #2,” arranged by Jacob Garchik, provided an easefully exuberant start to the evening, with interlocked melodies and rhythms playing call-and-response. The Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi’s “Daughters of Sol” was a profoundly meditative study on shade and color, with each layer unfolding slowly into another. The Armenian-American composer Mary Kouyoumdjian’s “I Haven’t the Words” was a restless, questioning susurration precipitated by the tumults of 2020, including the pandemic lockdowns and George Floyd’s murder.
Kronos are an interesting anomaly as they exemplify that much of the most progressive artistic thinking in the US has, for a long time now, come from the West Coast.
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An excellent piece by Ted Gioia on how critics get things so disastrously wrong: Why Did the Beatles Get So Many Bad Reviews? Here is one reviewer talking about the White Album:
The reviewer admits that the Beatles were once good in the past—an unusual, albeit revealing claim, because this same periodical had ridiculed them in those early days—but not anymore. The Less-Than-Fab Four have been reduced to creating music with an empty cover, and the same emptiness inside. “The blankness extends into the records within,” the reviewer scornfully declares; the music is “uptight” and “dull.” Although these musicians “could have turned out a real fine album” somehow they couldn’t come close in 1968.
I could give numerous other examples. And it’s fun to laugh at such wrong-headed opinions. But I think it’s more valuable to ask how these critics, specialists in their field, not only missed the mark, but in such an absurd way. They literally were handed the greatest recordings of their era to review, and blew them off. Every classic song on these albums was not only attacked, but actually mocked.
It would have been even more interesting to look around and see if any critics of the time did good evaluations and who they were exactly--especially what was their methodology. That might be useful. And here is another datum: I remember hearing the White Album the day it came out in 1968, on the radio, and my seventeen-year-old self thought it was terrific, as I still do. I imagine there was a host of seventeen-year-olds with similar opinions. So, a lot of people at the time got it right. But it seems most music critics got it wrong. What this tells me is that the music critics were using the wrong criteria but the rest of us were using better criteria. Let's talk about that.
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One of the things about the mass media I enjoy is the divergence between headlines and content: rarely does the latter fulfill the promise of the former. The New York Times series "Five Minutes That Will Make You Love X" is one of my contrarian favorites. This week it is the particularly challenging Five Minutes That Will Make You Love 21st-Century Jazz. It is no secret that I don't like jazz, though I certainly respect certain artists, but out of sheer curiosity I devoted five minutes of my life to the exercise. I do admit that there were some interesting textures and there was a certain amount of variety. I even liked the fragment by Immanuel Wilkins. The format here, by the way is to offer up a 29 second bleeding hunk chosen by another jazz artist. This would not favor musical genres with a longer structural reach, but it doesn't seem to help jazz either. I usually think of jazz as aimless noodling and these selections don't change my mind much. It is remarkable how much this 21st century jazz sounds like 20th century jazz: chaotic Bebop free jazz with occasional touches of smooth and a bit of post-modern juxtaposition. I can agree with one quote, this is rather the “the nowhere of utopia.”
Tuesday 19:40. Another phone call. Another tenor can’t jump in tomorrow. The options are dwindling. I mention half-jokingly to the Stage-Manager if technically he thinks I could do it? Venus and Orpheus don’t share much stage time and when they are both on stage together they sing very similar lines in big ensemble, shouldn’t it be possible that one person does both? He starts to seriously think about it and says it depends how fast I am with learning all the text, but with 3 hours of staging rehearsal before the show he thinks it could be doable… I have another look into the score. It really doesn’t look that difficult… sure I’d have to jump between singing some things an octave lower to sound like a tenor and sing some things in my octave to be able to be heard… but… I think… I could actually do it…
During Kanye West’s spectacular plummet last fall, my friends and I would often marvel at the latest outrageous thing he’d said. And we would send around clips of what were, in hindsight, terribly suspect comments he’d previously made. One such example was “I am not a fan of books,” which Ye told an interviewer upon the publication of his own book, Thank You and You’re Welcome. “I am a proud non-reader of books,” he continued. That statement strikes me as one of the more disturbing things he’s ever said. Ye’s patently reprehensible anti-Semitic tirades rightly drew the world’s scorn. But his anti-book stance is disturbing because it says something about not only Ye’s character but the smugly solipsistic tenor of this cultural moment.
I suspect people who avoid books also have little awareness of history, which tends to explain a lot.
In the course of the twentieth century, the abbey’s nuns helped to bring about a surge of interest in Hildegard, preparing editions of her writings and recording her music. She had never been forgotten, but modern Catholicism has embraced her as a symbol of piety and creativity intertwined. In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI announced Hildegard’s canonization and named her a Doctor of the Church—a title that has been bestowed on only thirty-six other figures.
Hildegard’s fame has also crossed over into zones of New Age spirituality, environmental discourse, and feminist thought. In the gift shop at the Hildegard Abbey, you can find self-help texts along the lines of “Strengthen the Immune System with Hildegard of Bingen.” Fiction about Hildegard is a genre unto itself: there have been at least twenty novels in various languages, including two crime stories. The growth of the phenomenon had much to do with the serene allure of Hildegard’s music. In 1982, the British group Gothic Voices released a rapt album titled “A Feather on the Breath of God: Sequences and Hymns by Abbess Hildegard of Bingen,” which became a cult item. The Sequentia ensemble followed with a nine-CD survey of Hildegard’s output. These and other releases have sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
One of Alex Ross' greatest strengths is his energy as a researcher.
In 2006, Haas co-founded the Exilarte Center for Banned Music in Vienna, which locates, preserves and presents music lost during the Holocaust. The impetus began when Haas, a Grammy-winning classical producer for Decca Records, recorded music by Kurt Weill — the German Jewish emigré who wrote "The Threepenny Opera."
"I kept stumbling across names of other composers who were just as famous as Kurt Weill," Haas says. He points to the Jewish composers who fled Hitler's Europe and found success in Hollywood.
After investing in yesterday’s catalogues, the next stop is the future — or rather, a futures index. It would mean that investors could put their money on which songs would become the next streaming stars.
Chicago-based company Clouty — “at the intersection of data, music and finance, re-imagining the value of music by making it a tradable asset” — introduced the world’s first music trading index, MUSIQ™, launched in the summer of 2022.
Because of online streaming, metrics are now readily available to measure and analyze activity in the music sector. It’s led to the next step of the company’s vision, which is the release of the MUSIQ 500 composite index that will track various genres of music and their current market value. The company uses a proprietary method with multiple inputs to calculate the value of the top 500 songs at any given time.
Clouty is currently looking for an exchange-traded fund to make it easy for investors to jump into the game. Futures could be linked to specific genres, artists or even songs.
"Bob, I want you to get me into some call options on Billie Eilish's next three albums."
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And now for some music as, you know, music. We begin, of course, with Hildegard von Bingen:
This is not a canon, which is supposedly a list of books everyone should read. That reminds me of an old Ezra Pound essay where he claimed that the list of books that everyone should read was really short: the Bible, Homer and Dante. No Shakespeare for some reason.
I'm just going to list a few books that I keep coming back to, ones that I have mostly been reading my whole adult life.
Robert A. Heinlein: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress published in 1966 is about the politics of revolution, libertarianism, and has the first major character in a novel who is an artificial intelligence.
Patrick O'Brian: the Aubrey-Maturin series of nautical historical novels written between 1969 and 1999.
Robert Graves: Goodbye to All That, written in 1929, revised in 1957. A poet's biography of his early life culminating in his experience as a captain in a line regiment in the trenches in World War I and his decision to leave England permanently.
William Shakespeare, Complete Works. I currently have the edition of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Plato: Complete Works, Hackett.
Homer: Iliad and Odyssey. I have the Robert Fagles translation.
Frederick Copleston, S. J.: A History of Philosophy. I always have a few volumes of this on my shelves though I have not yet finished reading all of it. It is in nine volumes.
Willi Apel: The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900 - 1600. A friend gave me this volume some forty years ago and I have been using it ever since.
Charles Rosen: The Classical Style. I have had various copies of this for thirty or forty years. First published in 1971, I have the expanded 1997 edition.
Joseph Kerman: The Beethoven Quartets, published 1966. I have had copies of this on my shelves for forty years or so as well.
Wing-Tsit Chan: A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy, published in 1963. This is where we find the delightful story of Chuang Chou, who once dreamed that he was a butterfly, but later was unsure if he was Chou dreaming he was a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming it was Chou... (p. 190).
Paul Johnson: Art: A New History, published 2003. A recent book, but one that I have read a couple of times already.
Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State, and Utopia, published 1974. An interesting philosophical approach to politics.
The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, published 1975. My first year English professor said that Roethke felt he needed to have a nervous breakdown every few years, just to clear away the underbrush.
Stephen Mitchell: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, published 1984.
From the last one:
Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one's sleep under so many
lids.
As I said, not at all a canon, just a few volumes I feel I need to have handy to go back to.
