Friday Miscellanea

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.

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Frequent commentator Wenatchee the Hatchet has been blogging a lot lately: the death or change theme in classical music.

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!

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Is the attunement of abstract art and music more than a metaphor?

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.