Friday Miscellanea

I think I have mentioned before that most pop songs are written by a mysterious committee of Swedes. Well, that is not quite true. But Max Martin has written between ten and twenty percent of the top ten pop songs over the last decade!

If you rank songwriters by the number of Billboard no 1 hits they have penned, Paul McCarthy and John Lennon have been leagues ahead of the competition for more than fifty years. This is not true anymore. If Max Martin keeps up the streak he has had for the last 25 years, he will overtake Lennon this year and McCarthy in a handful more.

And as incredible as this achievement is, Max Martin is just a part of a larger phenomenon: the so called Swedish music miracle. 

No country comes close to exporting as much music in relation to the size of its economy.

The main drivers of revenue are the big pop acts, ABBA and Roxette, and a stable of songwriters who write for The Weeknd, Taylor Swift, Coldplay, Nicky Minaj, Ed Sheeran, and a large share of other acts that have been on the top of the charts over the last three decades.

The reason is that Sweden has been successful in creating a creative music scene in the same sense as Elizabethan England had a creative theater scene and Florence in the renaissance was a creative scene for writers, painters and other artists. These places had a significant number of creative people who were basically inspired by and creating works directed at one another.

Almost invariably, when you notice someone doing bold original work, there is a scene behind them. Renaissance Florence was a scene for scholars and painters, flowering in Leonardo DaVinci. The coffeehouses of Elizabethan London were a scene for playwrights, flowering in Shakespeare.

For an idea of why this came about in Sweden, follow the link. And then there was Athens in the 4th century BC and Vienna in the 18th century.

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Something new for streaming music: Apple Wants to Solve One of Music’s Biggest Problems.

“We always had a problem,” said Jonathan Gruber, the head of Apple Music’s classical programming. “A big, big problem.” 

The problem was the way that classical music is categorized. The structure of classical music is completely different from pop music’s, which makes it extremely difficult for it to function in the streaming era.

As regular readers know, it's not a problem for me as I don't use a streaming service for music relying instead on my CD collection and frequent reference to YouTube.

Even the most sophisticated algorithms from the most technologically advanced companies are too clumsy to handle composers like Mozart and Brahms. That’s because they were made for individual artists like Bad Bunny and Madonna. If you want to hear a Bad Bunny song, it will be in your ears within seconds. If you want to hear a Brahms piano concerto, good luck. Try sifting through hundreds of recordings without a standardized format to track down one movement from a particular soloist who has performed it several times. You could listen to an entire Madonna album in the time it takes to find the right Mozart.

So it's really a discographic problem not solvable by tech guys but only by some musicians.

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The New Yorker devotes one of its trademark long pieces to David Sulzer, professor of psychiatry, neurology, and pharmacology at Columbia University who has a double identity as musician and composer Dave Soldier: The Wild World of Music. It's a fun piece of journalism, but my favorite bit is this very egregious quote from Allan Kozinn:

“Like the more famous Kronos Quartet, the Soldier navigates waters outside the chamber music mainstream,” the Times critic Allan Kozinn wrote in 1989. “But the Kronos’s unpolished performances leave one suspecting that it adopted its repertory to avoid comparison with better quartets. The Soldier seems to be the real thing—a virtuosic band given to iconoclastic experimentation.”

I suspect he might disavow that aesthetic judgement these days.

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Alex Ross alerts us to a new work by Cassandra Miller: I cannot love without trembling. The piece starts at around the 1:01 mark. While currently based in London, she hails from my neck of the woods, the  southern end of Vancouver Island.

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And speaking of Canada: Regina Symphony Orchestra cancels shows as ticket sales drop

The orchestra returned with a full season of shows last September, something the program hasn’t offered since before the pandemic.

But the ensemble has seen an almost 50 per cent decline in attendance in both season subscriptions and single ticket purchases.

For Gerrard, the big question is: why?

“I think from what I can tell is people largely just got out of the habit of going out. There was a large time that we couldn’t go out and we had to stay home,” Gerrard said

A long time ago I said something like we would not know the full impact of the pandemic lockdowns on the music world for a long time and some might be permanent.

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The Cello Suites by Bach have a perennial appeal: A Cellist Breaks Music Into ‘Fragments,’ Then Connects Them

AT FIRST GLANCE, “Fragments” might appear to be another of Weilerstein’s explorations of Bach, a successor to her all-in-one-night performances of the six suites, her emotive recording of them on the Pentatone label and her pandemic streaming series. But Weilerstein thinks of it not as “a new approach to Bach,” she said, rather “a celebration of the really disparate voices in contemporary classical music,” with Bach as a common reference point.

Read the whole thing for the context.

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BBC suspends proposed closure of the BBC Singers

The BBC has paused its decision to close the BBC Singers, after "a number of organisations" came forward to offer alternative funding.

The group, which is the UK's only full-time professional chamber choir, was targeted by budget cuts shortly before celebrating its 100th anniversary.

The proposal sparked a backlash, with 140,000 people signing a petition urging the BBC to reverse its decision.

A temporary reprieve has been granted, as new funding models are explored.

"I am confident that this does secure their future," said Simon Webb, the BBC's head of orchestras and choirs.

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However: Los Angeles’s Metro Is Using Classical Music as a Weapon

The relentless rain and near-freezing temperatures over the last two months have driven people to seek shelter in the system’s underground stations, and the classical music was an effort to drive them back out. Cheung described the move as making the “system more enjoyable and comfortable for the people who use it as a transit system.” The music — described to me as “earplugs-at-a-concert loud” by one frequent commuter — is the audio version of hostile architecture, where bumpy benches and spiky surfaces are employed to keep those who have nowhere else to go out of sight.

I was thinking Xenakis maybe, or Stockhausen, but the video at the clip sounds more like a drunken performance of Vivaldi.

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And finally, the most entertaining writer on music, Ted Gioia: Where Did Musicology Come From?

Musicology originated as the study of magical incantations. You probably haven’t heard that before. And for a good reason: They don’t teach this stuff in music schools.

It’s too embarrassing. Too shameful. Too unsettling.

Well, the real reason is actually that this bears no resemblance whatsoever to the history of musicology, the study of music from a historical and theoretical standpoint omitting the practices of composition and performance, that was largely the invention of German scholars in the 19th century. Only in the fevered mind of Ted Gioia is it the study of magical incantations. Great opening sentence, though. I think Taruskin had an even better one in the first essay of his new collection: "I thought I'd begin by telling you how I know that God exists and watches over me." Of course the difference is that while Ted proceeds to dance around the mulberry bush for a while, Prof. Taruskin goes on to point out a number of difficult intersections between ethics and aesthetics.

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I know you wanted to hear this, so here is David Soldier's orchestra of Thai elephants with a tune called "Rain"

As you can see each elephant has a human assistant, so they are not on their own. Next is the Arditti Quartet playing Tetras by Iannis Xenakis (couldn't find a performance by Kronos):

And here is Canadian folksinger Jeffrey Straker accompanied by the Regina Symphony:

Finally, the BBC Singers with a Stabat Mater by Sulpitia Lodovica Cesis:

Sergei Taneyev: Today's Listening

Working my way through the new collection of Taruskin essays I run across the late 19th century Bachian-inspired composer Sergei Taneyev who wrote a quite lovely cantata on St. John of Damascus.

Today's Listening

One disc in the big Vivarte box is Italia Mia: Musical Imagination of the Renaissance with the Huelgas Ensemble. This is Italia mia by Philippe Verdelot:

 

The Danger of Taruskin

The last time a new collection of Taruskin essays appeared was about three years ago and I put up a post in April 2020: All Kinds of Brows. One essay in that collection troubled me deeply as you can see if you follow the link. I was astonished, the next time I opened up The Music Salon, to discover that Dr. Taruskin had left a comment. I think of all the comments left here from well-known figures in the music world, this one I treasure the most.

I'm reading the new, and sadly, last, collection and the very first essay, "The Many Dangers of Music" has both challenged me yet again and at the same time resolved an old thorn in my side. Dr. Taruskin's point of view is that yes, music does have the power to be dangerous and this is exactly why it is important. The formalist aesthetic that placed music outside of history and society insulates it both from moral criticism and from actually being powerful. Some of those arguing for this point of view (though not one of the best-known, Stravinsky) are actually tone-deaf with no real sensitivity to the invasive powers of music.

One of the best ways of talking about the power of music is through metaphor and one very famous metaphor has troubled me for decades. It concerns a passage in the recapitulation of the first movement of the Symphony No. 9 by Beethoven, a passage that had an enormous impact on me with its grinding chromatic intensity. The great English musicologist Donald Francis Tovey referred to that passage as "the heavens on fire." The metaphor that troubled me came from feminist musicologist Susan McClary when she described it as: "one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music" evoking "the murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release." This bothered me because the passage seemed to me to be enormously powerful aesthetically and hence "good" and, somehow missing the fact that this is a metaphor, I thought it seemed extremely unfair to Beethoven to characterize him as a rapist. "Assumes facts not in evidence" a lawyer might say. Also, the fact that this is in the recapitulation which proceeds to an harmonic resolution, it also seems unfair to say that it is "incapable of attaining release." I found the metaphor horrifying even though it is really just a testament to the power of Beethoven's music. Incidentally, there are other passages in Beethoven with similarly violent expression: the Grosse Fuge, for example.

But I went ahead and wrote a post, years ago, attacking Susan McClary for this metaphor. Now, with the aid of Dr. Taruskin, I think I understand it much better and I want to recant. I honestly welcome things that challenge my positions. The metaphor was a bit extreme as I think McClary recognized as she toned it down to "constant violent self-assertion" when the paper was reprinted. But it sure did make her famous in musicology! I don't think that it can be denied that even scholars exhibit a touch of career ambition occasionally. Incidentally, I met Prof. McClary at a conference in Rochester years and years ago and we had a nice chat about old blues guitarists.

What I really want to do here is offer heartfelt thanks to Richard Taruskin and Susan McClary and many others who work to understand the great power of music and while it may transcendentally elevate us, it does not grant us any moral superiority. And music is always in the world and having an effect on the world for which we should be grateful. Otherwise, why would we bother?

The new collection is a very fat volume, so you will see more posts inspired by it. In the meantime, let's listen to that Beethoven movement. This is Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen.

Extra Listening

I've been neglecting my shelves of CDs lately in favor of YouTube, so I'm going to be pulling stuff off the shelves for a while. I have a great box of Kronos Quartet discs that was issued to commemorate their first 25 years. Ten CDs of pretty remarkable music. Disc one has John Adams and Arvo Pärt. This is Fratres.

Friday Miscellanea

I think this counts as weird item of the week: DNA From Beethoven’s Hair Unlocks Family Secret

They used eight locks attributed to Beethoven for the study. DNA testing combined with detailed records of how and when the locks were obtained led the group of biologists, geneticists, genealogists and immunologists to conclude that five locks were authentic, said Mr. Begg, the paper’s lead author. The other three locks lacked sufficient DNA for testing or yielded DNA results that led the researchers to conclude they couldn’t have been from Beethoven. 

The Hiller lock, the most famous of the bunch, was determined to be the hair of a woman, the scientists reported.

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Here's something that might kick off some discussion: Met Opera Ordered to Pay Anna Netrebko $200,000 for Canceled Performances

The Metropolitan Opera has been ordered by an arbitrator to pay the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko more than $200,000 for performances it canceled last year after she declined to denounce President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.

The arbitrator, in a decision issued last month that has not been previously reported, ruled that the Met should compensate Netrebko for 13 canceled performances — including appearances in “Don Carlo” this season and “La Forza del Destino” and “Andrea Chénier” next season — because of a contractual agreement known as “pay or play,” which requires institutions to pay performers even if they later decide not to engage them.

The Met had argued that Netrebko, one of opera’s biggest stars, was not entitled to payment because of her refusal to comply with the company’s demand after the invasion of Ukraine that she denounce Putin, which it said had violated the company’s conduct clause. Netrebko had endorsed Putin for president in 2012 and had spoken glowingly of him before the invasion.

The arbitrator, Howard C. Edelman, found that “there is no doubt she was a Putin supporter, as she had a right to be.” But he added that aligning with Putin was “certainly not moral turpitude or worthy, in and of itself, of actionable misconduct.”

I think that gives us the basic facts, though you can follow the link for more detail. Do you think this is a fair arbitration? Or do you side with the Met on this? What are the basic principles involved? And how widely do these principles apply?

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And here is a somewhat related article: As the Met reclassifies Russian art as Ukrainian, not everyone is convinced

Questions of attribution are constantly under review by art scholars, but rarely are they so topical or heated as institutional efforts under way in the US and in Europe to reclassify art once described as Russian as Ukrainian.

In New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has quietly changed the name of an 1899 painting by the French impressionist Edgar Degas from Russian Dancer to Dancer in Ukrainian Dress.

The Met also holds works by Arkhyp Kuindzhi and Ilya Repin, a 19th-century painter who was born in what is now Ukraine. The artists were previously listed as Russian and are now categorized as Ukrainian.

This could get really complicated, not only with painters, but even more so with writers. Consider the case of Joseph Conrad, born in the Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire), grew up speaking Polish and became famous as a novelist writing in English. Nikolai Gogol, also born in that part of the Russian empire now the country of Ukraine, grew up speaking Ukrainian and Russian but wrote novels in Russian. And musicians, of course, perform wherever they are booked...

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If I can possibly find any, I like to put up some cheerful and positive items about classical music and this week there is something from Ted Gioia: Six Recent Studies Show an Unexpected Increase in Classical Music Listening.

The RPO shared more demographic data in its annual report, published a few days ago—including the fact that “more people are listening to orchestral music today as part of their daily lives than was the case before the pandemic (59% up from 55% pre-pandemic)” and the trend is “strongest among younger people.” A previous post-pandemic research project by the same organization indicated that “78% of under 25s were interested in experiencing an orchestral concert this year.” 

And according to the BBC, still another survey reveals that “under 35-year-olds are more likely to listen to orchestral music than their parents.” The article also notes that the hashtag #classictok on TikTok has generated 53.8 million views.

Could something similar happen in opera?

Maybe it’s already starting. The Met has more than its share of problems, but paid ticket sales are up and the audience is surprisingly young. “Single ticket buyers represent 75% of our sales and the average age of a single ticket buyer is now 45 years old, which is remarkably younger than it was,” Peter Gelb remarked a few days ago.

When I attend concerts in Europe I notice that there are lots of young people in the audience. Follow the link for some amazing charts. And frankly, why wouldn't lots of people like to listen to classical music?

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Over at the BBC they seem to have a different view: What does the BBC have against classical music?

Another week, another hammer blow for British classical music. Following the devastating, much criticised funding cuts announced by Arts Council England in the autumn, the BBC has now declared that it is to scrap the BBC Singers and cut salaried posts in the BBC Symphony, Concert and Philharmonic Orchestras by 20 per cent.

It is tempting to rail at the government, and many have. But the government is not stipulating precisely how savings must be made. Someone in W1A is deciding where to wield the axe and has evidently decided that classical music (always an easy target as a supposed “minority interest”) is expendable. We are always being told that the excessive salaries paid to BBC “stars”, whether radio DJs, chat-show hosts or newsreaders (never mind sports presenters), are essential because these people are indispensable. But the UK’s only full-time professional chamber choir, with almost a century of history can, it would appear, simply be casually thrown away.

That's the situation. Here is part of the critique:

What the early BBC was doing, then, was providing “access”, though it would never have expressed it in those terms. Now we hear the word all the time, but it becomes hollow and meaningless when opportunities for listeners to encounter the arts are simultaneously being removed. Some may now baulk at the Reithian BBC’s paternalistic attitude, but what was actually wrong with taking the so-called “high arts” and making them freely available to everyone? Oh, to return to a world where arts organisations, broadcasters and educational institutions weren’t hamstrung by constantly having to fret about “elitism” or “relatability”.

Read the whole thing.

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Shostakovich makes a splash down under: The ‘perverse love letter to Melbourne’ that’s blowing the cobwebs off opera

Moscow, Cheryomushki, the only operetta written by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, explored housing problems in the Soviet Union through a group of friends living in a residential complex. Sydney-based director Constantine Costi sensed an opportunity to bring it into the modern day, where similar issues are not only still playing out, but worsening.

“What could be more pressing than an operetta about the housing crisis? This is something that everybody in Australia is grappling with at the moment,” he says. “What was funny in adapting it from corrupt Soviet bureaucrats to greedy Melbourne landlords was that it was hilariously, disturbingly easy … The subject matter is aggressively contemporary.”

We just don't think of Shostakovich in terms of musical comedy, but perhaps we should!

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Here's something that you may not have heard before: atypical Portuguese Music:

And something else unusual: ancient Chinese music:

Ted mentions in his piece that:

With just a quick search, I found many young classical musicians with 100,000 or more followers on Instagram.

Consider the case of French violinist Esther Abrami—who boasts 275,000 YouTube subscribers, 255,000 Instagram followers, and 380,000 fans on TikTok. Her video performance of Libertango has gotten more than one million views. Okay, maybe that won’t put Taylor Swift out of business, but it proves that Astor Piazzolla’s music can speak to a mass audience.

So let's have a listen:

 

Today's Listening

Looking over my CD shelves I have a great box of mainly earlier music from Sony titled "Vivarte." One of the discs contains two divertimenti by Mozart performed by L'Archibudelli ( a string quartet with Anner Bylsma on cello and two natural horns).

All I can find on YouTube is the second movement of K 334, a theme and variations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqz7yp2FYbA

So let's not give up on actual physical media! If I hadn't gotten rid of all my vinyl decades ago I would still have a fantastic album of lute duos that contained a fantastic quick sarabande--the only one I have ever heard. It never made it to CD, let alone to YouTube.

Here is a different track from that lute duet album, and, ironically, YouTube won't embed it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6WeYHlQh7s

Music and Biography

Music and biography is kind of a recurring theme here. I think it started with some comments on Maynard Solomon's biography of Mozart where I felt he stressed the psychological element far too much. I was reminded of this by a piece in the Wall Street Journal: How Gossip Helped Propel Miley Cyrus to the Top of the Charts.

To the casual listener, Miley Cyrus’s January hit single “Flowers” is a sultry pop song with a feminist bent, an anthem celebrating self-love and independence. But to superfans like Joshua Molina, “Flowers” is a series of clues about Ms. Cyrus’s divorce from Liam Hemsworth.

Among the Easter eggs, according to fans: The song inverts the rhythm and lyrics of Bruno Mars’s “When I Was Your Man,” which supposedly has special meaning for Mr. Hemsworth and Ms. Cyrus. But while Mr. Mars sings, “I should’ve bought you flowers,” Ms. Cyrus’s version retorts, “I can buy myself flowers.” The song was also released on Jan. 13, Mr. Hemsworth’s birthday.

Now of course Miley Cyrus isn't the only pop artist to make use of her personal life in marketing:

Taylor Swift has been baiting Swifties for years with Easter egg-filled albums. Beyoncé made headlines for months after singing about relationship struggles on “Lemonade.” In 2021, fans alleged that then-newcomer Olivia Rodrigo was actually dissecting her breakup with Disney Channel counterpart Joshua Bassett on her debut LP, “Sour,” leading to a gossip cycle that helped drive the single to No. 1 for eight consecutive weeks and turned Ms. Rodrigo into a mainstream star.

This year, emerging country star Kelsea Ballerini dropped a surprise EP detailing her divorce from fellow country musician Morgan Evans, who also released a song about their split.

There has always been gossip and scandal swirling around the pop music world, but while it used to be fairly peripheral, now it seems to be the main thing. Is the tail wagging the dog?

Musicologists used to love to try and examine elements from composers' personal lives in order to uncover truths about the music. The hidden narrative coded into the notes of Alban Berg's Lyric Suite  composed in 1926, was not uncovered until the late 1970s by George Perle when he stumbled across a copy of the score annotated by the composer:

Perle discovered a complete copy of the first edition annotated by Berg for his dedicatee, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (Franz Werfel's sister, with whom Berg had an affair in the 1920s), later that year. Berg used the signature motif, A-B-H-F (in German notation, B means B♭, while H means B♮), to combine Alban Berg (A. B.) and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (H. F.). This is most prominent in the third movement. Berg also quotes a melody from Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony in movement four which originally set the words "You are mine own". In the last movement, according to Berg's self-analysis, the "entire material, the tonal element too... as well as the Tristan motif" is developed "by strict adherence to the 12-note series".

For Berg, the musical encoding was meant to be a private communication with his lover. Similarly, the third movement of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 encodes both his name and that of his lover, Elmira, in musical notes.

The third movement is a moderate dance-like suite of Mahlerian Nachtmusik – or nocturne, which is what Shostakovich called it. It is built around two musical codes: the DSCH theme representing Shostakovich, and the Elmira theme.

At concert pitch one fifth lower, the notes spell out "E La Mi Re A" in a combination of French and German notation. This motif, called out twelve times on the horn, represents Elmira Nazirova, a student of the composer with whom he fell in love. The motif is of ambiguous tonality, giving it an air of uncertainty or hollowness.

Follow the link to the Wikipedia article for the music notation and sound clips. Though the DSCH motif was known to be used by Shostakovich since the 1960s, the other motif, representing Elmira, was only discovered recently (I think in 2000, though I don't have a reference for that). The Symphony No. 10 was premiered in 1953.

I remember a musicologist giving a talk once who described the odd feeling she had when she realized she was an actual fan of the artist she was discussing (don't recall who, but I think it was a pop musician). She said that she had to work to untangle the two different roles of fan and musicologist. I'm wondering if we can even make that distinction any more?

Also, it is worthwhile to have a look at the motivations for these hidden narratives (not so hidden in the case of Miley Cyrus and her peers). Where Berg and Shostakovich were paying tribute to a lover and likely a muse or inspiration as well, the intent of the popular song encodings are more in the realm of, as the newspaper item notes, gossip, getting even, or maybe just the purely practical motive of stirring up publicity.

Ok, let's do some listening: first Miley Cyrus, "Flowers," then Berg, Lyric Suite, then Shostakovich, Symphony No. 10:

Friday Miscellanea

I'm sure that we have all had the thought that if only we could watch someone practicing we could pick up the Secret Tricks That Guarantee Greatness! Yes, if only I could have watched John Williams practicing during my student days, I could have stolen his methods and become a Second John Williams myself.  Hilary Hahn is providing us with some evidence: she is posting numerous videos of herself practicing. Let's see if it might help. The New York Times: Hilary Hahn Practices in Public, Wherever and However She Is. Here, have a look:   https://www.instagram.com/reel/CpTGA0wAUE_/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=e0484d4f-b8f8-490f-94af-fa0b878fcfba

Maybe this is a big help, but I'm not so sure. The thing is that there are important differences between different players. Watching someone else work out their problems might be irrelevant to you working out your problems. The real secret is the internal mental discipline that knows exactly what kind of thought, tension, stance, attitude, tempo, dynamic or whatever is needed to handle, control, resolve whatever technical problem is happening. Watching someone else you can hear the problem, perhaps, and the solution once it is arrived at, but you can't see or hear how it was done.

My teacher in Spain would often play through a piece I had just played and after a while I realized that this was a big part of his teaching method. He didn't say "do this," rather, he showed me. And maybe he emphasized certain aspects to point them out.

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Comment from a former BBC director:

For 23 years as director of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, and latterly the BBC Singers, I was custodian of three great ensembles that have shaped the musical landscape of this country for almost a century. They are celebrated worldwide for unparalleled versatility, flexibility and ability to respond to an ever-changing landscape and the demands of (in my time) six director generals, each keen to leave their mark. Delivering quality first and value for money was the mantra, and meeting the challenge of reaching new and diverse audiences was the reward. Or so we thought.

The BBC announced last week that its great cultural assets are to be savaged so violently that they may never recover; that is the reward. The corporation runs one full-time professional chamber choir, three full-time orchestras in England, and one each in Wales and Scotland. The plan is to axe the BBC Singers before the Proms, on the eve of their centenary, to reduce the headcount by 20% of the three English orchestras, while Simon Webb, the newly appointed fall guy is working with the nations’ orchestras “to consider whether there could be any lessons” for them. A dark warning indeed.

This is a battle over values: as has been mentioned, the idea of public service previously was to elevate public taste by providing high-quality music. Now the idea is more to provide the popular, what people want. Now sure how that qualifies as a public service needing tax revenues?

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Speaking of culture wars: Man 'driven mad' by noisy neighbours put speakers against wall playing non-stop music and went away for the weekend

A Swansea man who was being driven mad by noisy student neighbours put speakers up against the wall and went away for the weekend, leaving music playing. But instead of having heavy metal or gangster rap on a loop, he went for something a little more sophisticated. And when he came back, said a councillor, the noise issue was resolved.

Cllr Allan Jeffery recounted the story at a meeting of a council panel which is carrying out an anti-social behaviour inquiry. The Uplands ward member said the resident's choice of music was Gustav Holst's The Planets - a sweeping, seven-movement orchestral suite.

I tried something similar once with Stravinsky against a barking dog, but the neighbors apparently were out, and the dog didn't care.

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Here is one reason we like English journalism: Why does everyone hate Max Reger? I'm pretty sure this would never appear in the New York Times.

The German composer Max Reger, born 150 years ago next week, is mostly remembered today for countless elephantine fugues and one piece of lavatory humour. When he was savaged by the Munich critic Rudolf Louis, he wrote back to him: ‘Sir, I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.’ The quip was probably borrowed from Voltaire, but since no one can find it in his writings the credit has gone to Reger.

But let’s not dwell on the image of the morbidly obese composer taking his revenge. What’s interesting is that Reger was hated by so many critics. Then, as now, it was a thought crime for a young man (he died of a heart attack at 43) to make a point of embracing tradition.

Uh-oh, I guess I might be in danger. Or partly, as I only partly embrace tradition. From the sound of it, he seems a bit like Brahms, only more so.

* * *

While over at the Times Literary Supplement there is a review of a new choreography of the Rite of Spring:

Over the past twelve months the Sadler’s Wells theatre in north London has presented more than its fair share of versions of The Rite of Spring, from the Swedish choreographer Mats Ek’s new creation for English National Ballet to a restaging of Pina Bausch’s 1975 choreography, performed by a cast of dancers from fourteen African countries. The most recent to be presented is Dada Masilo’s The Sacrifice (2021), which received its London premiere at the end of February before embarking on its current nationwide tour.

Masilo is no stranger to reimagining well-known dance works: the South African choreographer has developed innovative interpretations of classical ballets such as Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake and Giselle, which have gained her international recognition for her fusion of European and southern African dance styles.

* * * 

Let's have a little Hilary Hahn playing Bach. This is the Partita no. 1 in B minor, the Double to the Courante:

And how about the BBC Symphony Orchestra playing the Mars movement from Holst's The Planets:

And we have to have some Max Reger. This is his Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Hiller:

Music Causality

I'm currently reading the Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, largely because Aristotle himself is a really difficult read and I just wanted to refresh my memory. Also this week I received an email from Ted Gioia advertising Eleven New Albums he is recommending. What's the connection? First, let's listen to the first album recommendation, by Jonathan Bockelmann:

Here is what Ted says about this music:

Bockelmann has been playing classical guitar for two decades, and now—finally—releases a debut solo album.

He plays fresh, unfettered music with total authority in a lick-free zone. Although his claimed influences include such disparate voices as Ryuichi Sakamoto, Leo Brouwer, and J.S. Bach, there’s nothing derivative in these guitar vignettes.

I'm not sure what he means by "fresh, unfettered music with total authority in a lick-free zone" but what I hear is basically what is often called "smooth jazz," that is, jazz without an edge, jazz that floats along with no particular direction in a pleasing manner. It is a bit like a cake with a lot of different things on top: here is some fruit (harmonics), then a bit of chocolate sauce (internal pedal), then some icing (wandering harmonies) then a little passage-work and so on. What the music lacks is consistency and direction, it is just a collection of moods--too much topping, not enough cake.

Musical form, like so much else, exists on a spectrum between total unity and total diversity and this pleasant music is well out on the diversity end. For something on the other end we could cite some of the two-part inventions of J. S. Bach or the Art of Fugue which is a huge set of fugues all based on variations of a single theme. Of course, there are jazz examples that are well towards the unity end of the spectrum as well, "So What" from Kind of Blue by Miles Davis is a good example.

Now let's drag Aristotle into this. He was very interested in answering "why" questions which leads him to a theory of causality known as the Four Causes. The idea of a cause is that of an explanation for something.

In Physics II 3 and Metaphysics V 2, Aristotle offers his general account of the four causes. This account is general in the sense that it applies to everything that requires an explanation, including artistic production and human action. Here Aristotle recognizes four different explanatory roles that a thing can play. As a result, there are four different (kinds of) causes :

• The material cause or that which is given in reply to the question “What is it made out of?” What is singled out in the answer need not be material objects such as bricks, stones, or planks. By Aristotle’s lights, A and B are the material cause of the syllable BA.
• The formal cause or that which is given in reply to the question “"What is it?”. What is singled out in the answer is the essence or the what-it-is-to-be something.
• The efficient cause or that which is given in reply to the question: “Where does change (or motion) come from?”. What is singled out in the answer is the whence of change (or motion).
• The final cause is that which is given in reply to the question: “What is its good?”. What is singled out in the answer is that for the sake of which something is done or takes place.

That last cause is not only the most important from Aristotle's point of view, it might also seem the most unusual for a modern mind. Let's take the example of a guitar to make this clear. The material cause of a guitar is the wood, metal and plastic or ivory that it is made out of: Canadian mountain spruce, ebony, Indian rosewood, Honduras mahogany, tool steel and so on. The strings are made from nylon and copper plated with silver. These things are needed to construct a concert guitar. Next is the formal cause, that is, the design, the way these materials and shaped and processed in order to result in a guitar. The efficient cause is the guitar builder or luthier, he or she makes the changes in the materials in order to create the form of the guitar. The final cause, "what is its good?" in Aristotle's phrasing, is "music." The final explanation for why a guitar comes to be is the playing of music.

Now let's move the discussion into the causes of a piece of music. We need materials, of course, pitches, timbres, rhythms, harmonies and so on. They are the bricks and planks that we are going to make the piece from. The formal cause could be seen understood as the structure of the piece: what comes first, second and so on. We talk about "sonata form" which has certain structural commonalities (let's ignore for the moment the wide variations in this form!). The efficient cause is the composer, the person who puts the materials into a certain form. And the final cause, again, is music, or perhaps musical enjoyment.

Good old Aristotle only gets us so far so I want to postulate another element that relates to both the formal and final causes: directionality. Some music has a quality that could be described in different ways: it is gripping, dramatic, directional, it has velocity and so on. The music points in some way towards a conclusion. In some musical genres, like the classical symphony, this element dominates and the locus classicus is without a doubt the Symphony No. 5 of Beethoven:

From the first note we have intensely pointed direction: there are a small number of simple motifs that are developed in a way that points in a direction to a conclusion. Everything that might distract is eliminated. This is one kind of musical ideal: that of unified finality. A more modern example is the first movement of the String Quartet No. 15 of Shostakovich that obsessively focusses on one theme:

Now of course, there are an enormous number of pieces that are not nearly so focussed and instead manage to offer considerably variety on their journey. But in most music there is still a journey with a direction--the form implies a kind of "final cause" in a sense.

Of course, you can have  pleasant listening without any, or very little of this. But I am rather sensitive to the directionality of music and I get very frustrated when a piece of music seems to have no, or no plausible, direction.

The Deep Roots of Aesthetics

I got a new pen the other day, a Visconti, designed and made in Florence. It is quite beautiful and the body is fluted, meaning it has shallow channels along the length:

Now the idea of fluting goes way, way back. As the Wikipedia article shows, it was common for Greek columns to be fluted:

But the idea didn't originate with them. They borrowed ideas about column design from the Egyptians who had quite a variety of designs:

They borrowed ideas from nature, specifically bundles of papyrus stalks, lotus buds and palms. Originally there were probably columns made from actual papyrus bound together in bundles and a fluted column just echoes that. The Greeks didn't have these plants, so they just copied the Egyptian columns, making them more simple and, to our eyes, classic. This idea has never really gone away even four or more thousand years later. Here is the facade of the US Supreme Court:

So, architecture has some very, very deep roots! What about music? Unfortunately, we don't have records in stone going back millennia as there are in architecture. The few examples of Greek notation, carved in stone, give us mere hints as to the melodic content and less of the rhythmic and harmonic content. That doesn't stop people from re-creating versions of ancient Greek music, but we can't be sure how authentic they are. Still, the idea of an open fifth drone must be ancient. Whether or not you believe Pythagoras actually existed, the school associated with him was very aware of the basic musical intervals and the idea that they would have been combined for an accompaniment to melody is likely.

I'm not sure if there is much research on this, but I have a feeling that there are a lot of musical ideas that are really ancient. Here is some of the oldest European polyphony, from the St. Martial manuscript:

UPDATE: I thought of another deep root of aesthetics with some musical connection: the poetic "foot" that comes down to us from ancient times. A related concept is that of arsis and thesis or upbeat and downbeat. Just how old these patterns are is suggested by the names: dactyl, anapest, bacchius and cretic. And being basic rhythmic patterns they are still in use today. In fact, in my analyses of Shostakovich string quartets I found a number of occasions where he uses a pattern like the dactyl to unify a whole movement.

An important early source is Aristoxenus of Tarentum, a pupil of Aristotle, who wrote many volumes on harmony, rhythm and music.

Bourrées

The most well-known bourrée is the one in E minor from the so-called "Lute Suite No. 1." I say so-called because despite a few recordings, the suite is nearly unplayable on the lute (or the guitar, for that matter) though this movement works very well. I say this because there are some passages in the gigue that no-one even attempts. Nearly every classical guitar student takes on the bourrée at some point, though. It is a charming dance with good examples of counterpoint in contrary motion. It is in two sections, a binary dance form, and the first section is pretty easy. In the second half the student will run into a nasty sequence near the end that will be hard to master.

Here is a perfectly decent performance on guitar:

The piece, with its simple, but distinctive character, has been surprisingly popular among non-classical musicians ranging from Paul McCartney to Jethro Tull.

But the dance was used by many Baroque composers. It is one of a group of dances called "galanterie" that were optional members of the suite and often came in pairs. Here are the pair of bourrées from the Cello Suite No. 3 by Bach:

As you can hear the first bourrée is repeated after the second, giving a ternary form. Here is a bourrée by François Couperin. It is followed by its double or variation.

And here is another bourrée by Bach, this time from an orchestral suite:

Bourrées are also dance steps in ballet, those tiny steps en pointe that seem to glide across the stage. There are examples here at 0:56 and 1:35:

So there you go! Now you know a bit more about the bourrée than you did before. Possibly!

Middle-Period Leo Brouwer

I think we can fairly easily discern three different stages in the compositions of Leo Brouwer:

• an early one including the first ten Estudios sencillos, three Piezas sin titulo, Fuga no. 1, Danza del Altiplano, and some Aires populares. There is also an early concerto for guitar and strings and some music for guitar duo
• the middle period begins with Elogio de la Danza of 1964 that is a homage to the early ballets of Stravinsky and continues with more experimental works such as the Canticum of 1968, La Espiral eterna of 1971, Parabola of 1975 and Tarantos of 1977, the latter a piece in moment form. These works show the influence of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono.
• the later period, up until the present, begins with El Decameron negro of 1981 and continues with the Preludios epigramaticos of 1984, several guitar concertos, the series of ensemble pieces titled Cuban Landscape with... and pieces like El arpa y la sombra and many others.

While there are many charming pieces in the early period and others in the later period (El Decameron negro has been particularly well-received), the small group of pieces from the 60s and 70s seem to have the most long-lasting power. Elogio de la Danza is probably Brouwer's best-known and most-performed piece and, to my mind, La Espiral eterna is the most original.

Here is the last movement of El Decameron negro in my recording (which was the premiere recording):

Friday Miscellanea

Stravinsky on period instruments? It had to happen sooner or later: Stravinsky: Violin Concerto review – period instruments bring clarity and gutsy depth.

In an interview included with the sleeve notes, Faust says that it was performing Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale on original instruments that encouraged her to go on to explore the violin concerto in the same way, using the range of tone colour that the gut strings and early 20th-century wind instruments opens up. The gains are obvious in the first few minutes of the concerto, not only in the clarity and gutsy depth that are combined with the technical brilliance of Faust’s playing, but also in the kaleidoscope of colours that the orchestra creates around her – whether it’s the chattering flutes or the chuntering bassoons. It’s a real ear-opener, bringing the concerto into a sharper focus than I’ve ever encountered before.

Can Boulez and Stockhausen be far behind?

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The blog On an Overgrown Path discusses the BBC cuts in some depth: BBC classical cuts - beware of the knee jerk reaction:

The first crucial factor is the seismic cultural shift that has occurred over the last twenty years. The BBC's performing ensembles were created when the arts agenda was set by a top down process. The administrators set an aspirational agenda which the audience stepped up to. Today new technology in the form of the internet has demolished that top down aspirational agenda. Now the online empowered audience sets a populist agenda for the arts which the administrators - the BBC - have to step down to. They have to step down because the priority, for the classical music industry and everyone else, is now audience size. The hard truth is that today the BBC is in the business of giving their audience what they want, and, sadly, they don't want much classical music. 

Whether we like it or not, cultural tastes - which means audience tastes - have changed  dramatically in recent years. And this means the appetite for classical music has declined as cultural tastes have shifted. The result is that the supply of classical music now exceeds demand. This reduction in demand in today's commercially-driven BBC means reducing - aka cutting - budgets. The problem is compounded by the advent of free and cheap classical music via streaming services, a development which has devalued the perceived value of classical music, but which the classical industry has enthusiastically endorsed.

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The question came up in the comments the other day, what composers lived and worked in East Germany before the reunification? Here is the answer: List of classical composers in the German Democratic Republic. The only ones on the list that I recognize were associated with Bertolt Brecht.

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Over at the New Yorker Alex Ross does one of his deep dives into new opera productions: Medieval Romances by Kate Soper and Richard Wagner

No one has ever been able to explain exactly why Richard Wagner had such a shuddering impact on nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, to the point where he became the subject of a somewhat unhinged international cult. Perhaps the most plausible reason has to do with the cascading power triggered by his command of music and words alike. The value of his literary output remains a matter of debate; nonetheless, his dramatic texts, which include the librettos of all thirteen of his operas, have a style indisputably their own, combining extravagant rhetoric with fail-safe narrative structures. Many composers after Wagner wrote their own librettos; few could match his furious double focus. Stephen Sondheim is the most conspicuous modern example, though he almost certainly would have hated the comparison.

The great thing about reading anything by Alex Ross is that, whether you agree with him or not, he has really done his homework.

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Molly Johnson on arts success in Canada: a French knighthood, a Governor General’s honour ‘but I still can’t really pay my bills’

The singer, songwriter and ex-radio host known for her powerful jazz vocals and her philanthropy received news of two formal accolades almost simultaneously: a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for lifetime artistic achievement and also one of France’s highest honours, the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.

“I must be old, eh?” Johnson cracked from her Toronto home near the beginning of a wide-ranging Zoom interview.

And while she fully embraced the French knighthood, which she’ll receive on International Women’s Day Wednesday in a ceremony in Toronto — ironically eight days before departing on a minitour of France and Luxembourg — the Governor General’s honour caused her a great deal of consternation.

“It took me almost a month to call them back,” Johnson revealed. “I gotta say I was depressed. It saddened me, initially, deeply, that here I am in this stage of my career and I still can’t really pay my bills.

I know whereof she speaks! One of the reasons I left Canada was my feeling that it really does not respect its artists in any concrete way.

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I did a post on historic tuning standards years ago: Are regional differences in orchestral tuning really necessary?

It’s 1987. The London Philharmonic Orchestra is on tour in Germany and about to start a three-hour rehearsal. Before beginning the piano concerto, the soloist plays the A to the principal oboe, who in turn gives it to the orchestra. The woodwind section emits a collective groan: they’re wondering how they will cope with the much higher pitch of 444Hz – back in London, the orchestra is used to a lower pitch of 440Hz. Some of the older members make comments about how the pitch is much higher ‘on the continent’. Luckily the string sections, especially the violins, seem to take the so-called sharpness in their stride. Fortunately, half an hour later, everyone has accustomed themselves to the new pitch.

A few months later the orchestra is in a freezing church. It’s the height of CD mania, and everyone is recording another Symphonie fantastique. Unfortunately, the heating has broken down. The oboe’s A emerges witheringly flat, and 30 violins are forced to screw their pegs the wrong way, as they tune to what must be surely no more than 437Hz.

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I try not to have too many gloomy items, but we need to read this one: The death of a music shop

The closure of Banks is part of a larger problem, of course. The high street itself is in peril, with even national chains such as Paperchase failing to weather the financial storm. Independent businesses of all sorts are now struggling, as Covid losses, the cost-of-living crisis and the rise and rise of internet shopping conspire against them. All of this creates a bleak, vicious circle of decline, which is apparent even in historic tourist centres where you would expect to find charming one-off shops and restaurants on every corner. Bath still appears to be thriving, but Oxford, where I live now, is far less commercially vibrant. Numerous independent businesses have closed, the result of a toxic combination of high rents, the opening of an uninspiring, chain-driven shopping mall, and punitive council measures to limit cars and parking that send shoppers to Reading or Milton Keynes instead.

I think this is one of those sad inevitabilities that we have to live with. I used to love spending time in bookstores, especially music bookstores. On my first visit to London in 1974 I made a beeline for Foyles on Charing Cross Road. They have an entire floor of books on art and music. I spent six hours there looking at every guitar score they had (and a few other things). As I look over at my bookshelf I see lots of Dover scores of Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, Chopin and others. But these days, if I want to refer to a particular score I go online to IMSLP/Petrucci. I buy regular books from Amazon in either Kindle or hard copy versions. I haven't set foot in a bookstore in years and years. If I had the chance I would delight in spending a few hours in a second-hand bookshop though...

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Let's start with that Stravinsky Violin Concerto:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9L9VDxZQ2M

Next the Prelude to Lohengrin:

Here is the London Symphony accompanying Deep Purple (many orchestras do these pop gigs these days):

Finally, here is East German composer Hans Eisler's last work, Ernste Gesänge:

Constructing Form

I think I mentioned that a few years back I decided to "de-digitize" my life, partially anyway. To that end I started a hand-written journal (with fountain pens, no less). I also started sketching in charcoal and pencil though that didn't last too long--I do create an illuminated capital each day in my journal, though. And I determined to go back to sketching in pencil when composing. This latter is really paying off.

I'm working on a new guitar piece and I have found composing for guitar to be particularly tricky. I'm handling that by starting on the instrument, exploring chords and motifs on the instrument so I will end up with something truly idiomatic. This is what I really like about the music of Angelo Gilardino and Leo Brouwer--it is always very guitaristic.

And in designing the form and structure of the piece, it is the pencil sketches that are really productive. I had fallen into the lazy practice of going directly to the music software (I use Finale, and have for a long time). The problem with this is that it forces you into the final stage, which really cripples the creative process. I find that sitting, messing around on the guitar, followed by staring hard at the blank staff paper, pencil in hand, is the best way to work. It gets everything in the right balance: idiomatic ideas from the instrument, loosely sketched out formal ideas, a few motifs, some chords and an overall plan. All this comes from a pencil on paper. And, as Schoenberg said, the eraser end of the pencil is more important than the lead end!

Here is an interesting early piece by Leo Brouwer that you rarely hear. I think my favorite idea is the lowering of the sixth string to E flat for the last section:

Just a Smidgeon of Monasticism

I sometimes claim to be an Aristotelian even though I have only read a fraction of his works and understood considerably less. But a few things I do hang on to, such as the doctrine of the mean: every virtue lies in the middle between two associated vices, one in the direction of too much emotion, the other in the direction of too little emotion. For example, bravery is a moral virtue lying between the two vices of recklessness and cowardice. A coward has too much fear and a reckless person has too little. So, apparently, Spock was an Aristotelian. Sort of.

The doctrine of the mean is not a bad thing to keep in mind these days when the political environment is so extremely polarized that it gives me a headache. In order to pursue a bit of moral virtue I subscribe to both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times which I see as occupying different political poles. Mind you, there are those that think that they are both not extreme enough! In any case, I was reading the New York Times this morning and stumbled across an opinion piece by Ross Douthat who is supposedly a conservative voice at the paper. The piece is titled I’m What’s Wrong With the Humanities and I enjoyed both the humility and the humor (both moral virtues, I believe). Quoting the last part:

“The humanities sealed their own fate,” the Temple University professor Jacob Shell tweeted in response to the Heller article, “when they refused to adjust to playing the needed role of intellectual ‘rightist’ critique of soc science, technocracy.” As a rightist myself I’m inclined to see this take and raise it, and suggest that if you care about transmission of the humanities through the digital age you should be looking to classical Christian academies more than to the Harvard faculty.

But a more modest version of Shell’s argument would be just that the humanities need to be proudly reactionary in some way, to push consciously against the digital order in some fashion, to self-consciously separate and make a virtue of that separation.

I think I and some of my commentators have made similar arguments here--going back years. The irony is that we are making those arguments in, yep, a digital format. Being able to share one's thoughts with a wide universe of other people is a profound benefit in my mind. What perplexes me is how horribly it has turned out for so many. I very much doubt there is any kind of political solution to what is really a moral problem. Aristotle tried to answer the question "what is the best way to live?" One simple answer is to avoid extremes of too much emotion and too little emotion. This pretty much applies in all aspects of life, even in aesthetics.

Let's have some Bartók! The Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is always a favorite:

A Little Music by Stephen Dodgson and Gilbert Biberian

I mentioned both these British composers the other day. They have both passed away, Biberian just this January, and they both happened to be at one of the big Toronto Guitar Festivals in the 70s and 80s--one in which I presented an early piece for solo guitar in a Stephen Dodgson workshop. Alas, that piece is long since lost!

These are both interesting composers. I particularly got a lot out of working on Dodgson's studies, written in collaboration with Hector Quine. Here is number one:

and number 5, a passacaglia:

He is better known for his Partita No. 1, recorded by John Williams:

Biberian is not nearly as well-represented on YouTube, but here is his Sonata No. 3:

These are just two of a host of British composers writing for guitar that include Benjamin Britten, Lennox Berkeley, William Walton and many others. The inspiration, or perhaps goad, for this came first from Julian Bream and later John Williams.

Current Compositions

Yesterday I sent off the score and parts to my String Quartet No. 2 to the ensemble in Vancouver. They will be giving the premiere in three concerts in the third week of May. Gives me an opportunity to visit Vancouver which I haven't done in a long time. Last week when I was booking my airbnb the host messaged me that the weather would be nice then. I thought that was an odd comment out of the blue. Then I checked the weather and saw that at that very moment it was snowing in Vancouver!

After quite a few struggles with the first movement, which I rewrote a couple of times, I am reasonably happy with the piece. Or less displeased than I was before? With new music, you kind of put it out there and see what happens. The piece might be nicknamed "Landscapes" as the three movements each are inspired by my experiences growing up on Vancouver Island. The first movement is "Mountain with Birdsong," the second "Moments in the Forest" and the third "The Surrounding Ocean." I should be able to post a recording of it in early June and I will look forward to your comments then!

So I decided to start a new piece that has been on my mind for a while. The piece will be called "Hecate" as that was the inspiration. Hecate was a Greek goddess, a minor one I suppose, though quite popular in some regions. This is a sketch of how she was often depicted:

She has three bodies and this statuary would typically be placed at a junction of three roads where she would face in three directions. She was the deity of crossroads, of the underworld, of the passage to the afterlife but also of light, night, the moon, keys and, oddly, dogs. She is a liminal being, the goddess of boundaries, thresholds and borders. She mediates between different realms and therefore suggests disorientation and ambiguity.

This is going to be a piece for solo guitar, which I haven't written for in quite some time. I don't find the guitar an easy instrument to write for, but that challenge is itself a kind of inspiration.

Years ago, when I was a student, I workshopped an early guitar piece called Tesserae for the English composer Stephen Dodgson. He hated the very idea of the classical allusion of the title and I think he pretty much disliked the piece as well! He probably wouldn't have liked "Hecate" either. But who knows, it hasn't been written yet. I'm still at the rudimentary pencil sketch phase... Incidentally, Gilbert Biberian, who just passed away, was also at that workshop and I think he rather liked Tesserae.

Music History Backwards

Music history is always taught the same way: we start with the beginnings of music notation around the year 1000 AD and work up to today. If you are really enlightened, you spend the first ten minutes talking about a Neanderthal flute made from a cave bear femur. Unless you are very disciplined, you might end up, like my first music history professor, by running out of time at the end of the course and having to do the entire 21st century in a supplemental class. But I just heard about a history professor who teaches US history backwards, starting with the Vietnam War and the upheavals of the 60s and working back to the American Revolution and the earliest colonies. There is something to be said for that. So here we go, music history backwards: the abbreviated version.

The scene today is dominated, like the economy itself, by a few billionaire musical behemoths: Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Taylor Swift (is she a billionaire yet? If not, she soon will be), and that old-timer, Paul McCartney. On a slightly lower level we have a landscape with everything from kids with a drum machine to K-Pop to Bob Dylan, still on the never-ending tour. Oh, and off in a little niche somewhere there are still a few shards of "classical" music, whatever that is. And Philip Glass!

Going back seventy or so years, in the post-WWII era, there was a lot of middle-brow consumption of classical music that was chronicled in popular culture in places like Disney's Fantasia with Bugs Bunny playing the part of conducting superstar Leopold Stokowski.

And alongside this was the emergence of the first really big pop stars: Elvis Presley and The Beatles. Going back even further, the big economic phenomenon of a hundred years ago was the growth of the sales of recorded music. Enrico Caruso, the big star back then, could only perform a hundred or so concerts a year, but he could sell hundreds of thousands of records. At the same time, composers were recoiling from the horrors of WWI by thinning out their musical textures and incorporating march rhythms and acerbic harmonies. A good example is Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat:

The late 19th century was dominated by Big Orchestral Music, mostly by Big German Composers like Richard Wagner, Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler. Gustav was the first composer/conductor to have a really cool photo:

A photo of Bruckner would be too scary to include, so here is one of his very long symphonies:

A lot of the 19th century was really footnotes to the music of Ludwig van Beethoven who wrote a bunch of really cool symphonies, quartets and piano sonatas. They range from the soothingly beautiful:

to the driving and dramatic:

Now Beethoven did not exactly invent this glorious music, though he certainly upgraded it. No, the two dead white men in wigs who laid down the foundations were Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Mozart and they hung out in Vienna. Mozart is famous for having written the most dangerous soprano aria ever:

They were working in the last half of the 18th century. In the first half, the dude to watch was Johann Sebastian Bach, an obscure Saxon organist who, after he died, became a huge success despite being a Lutheran. Yes, from here back, religious music is a thing. Here is Bach going off the reservation and writing a Catholic mass. It was kind of a job application, but he didn't get the job.

Bach was famous for writing Baroque music, still popular today in some circles. But the foundations for that were really put together by some French and Italian guys. Here is a little tune by François Couperin on the harpsichord, a jangly predecessor to the piano:

While down in Venice, Antonio Vivaldi was ripping off a whole bunch of concertos:

Before the Baroque there was the Renaissance with a lot of cool lute music and choral music. Here is a little Francesco da Milano:

And some Tomás Luis de Victoria who worked for a nunnery in Madrid:

That puts us way back in the Middle Ages when they first invented writing down music in many parts. Here is some music by Guillaume de Machaut:

And finally, what the monks were up to in those long, boring nights in the monastery:

Now I know what you are thinking, hey, music is more fun and groovy the further back you go and yes, that is totally true--well, not in the case of the cave bear flute.