On Movies

I used to love going to the movies. One place I used to live, the owner of one downtown cinema was a Shakespeare fan so every winter he would show a different Shakespeare film every Sunday matinee. Classics, of course: Polanski's Macbeth, Zefirelli's Romeo and Juliet, Olivier's Othello, Peter Brook's King Lear and probably a couple of others I have forgotten. There was also a small film festival where I saw a lot of European films like Devil in the Flesh and Fellini's Satyricon. In the 1980s there was a wonderful efflorescence of Australian film with Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, Walkabout and others. But it was when I moved to Montreal that I really got to see a lot of films: because of the bilingual culture, there are first-run French cinemas, first-run English cinemas as well as repertory houses where I saw things like Last Tango in Paris, Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute, Luc Besson's Le Grand Bleu and La Belle Noiseuse. I don't translate that last title because, like Les Misérables, there is simply no possible English version.

I saw La Belle Noiseuse, directed by Jacques Rivette, as a first-run film in Montreal in 1991 or 92. And I just realized that that was probably the last really great film I saw! Every few years I wander up to our local cinema, with very poor selection, to see the latest, but I don't even remember them. I saw 300 a few years ago... But while entertaining, that's not a great film. I watched the new Dune on streaming a few weeks ago and not only is that not a great film, it is as bad as the novel it is based on. I'm obviously not a Frank Herbert fan, though Hellstrom's Hive is interesting.

But back to La Belle Noiseuse. I just got the DVDs because I really wanted to see all of it again, this time with sub-titles because I can't follow the French anymore. This is a four-hour film that seems to swoop by in half the time. Some films, I am exhausted by the crappiness in the first five minutes and, honestly, most films I give up on three-quarters of the way through. The feel of La Belle Noiseuse is so different from movies today that it is shocking--at the beginning, shockingly normal. What happens in the first 53 minutes? Let me summarize: Nicolas and Marianne, a young French couple (he is a painter and she a writer) go to visit a famous, though retired painter, Édouard Frenhofer and his wife Liz (who does taxidermy). They are introduced by the art dealer Porbus. They have dinner and afterwards Nicolas and Frenhofer talk about reviving a long-standing but never realized project of painting "La Belle Noiseuse" but this time with Marianne (played by Emmanuelle Béart) as the model. And that's it.

What is shocking? No spandex costumes or special effects where characters are thrown hundreds of feet with no injuries. No quipping. In fact, this could be any dinner with perfectly ordinary, though artistic, people. This could even be any dinner in any century almost because, except for one scene a minute long when Nicolas talks on the phone--an old-fashioned handset--there is nothing that is not age-old. The fact that this ordinary dinner is shot in a leisurely, ordinary way is actually shocking since we are so used to movies that are mannered and artificial to an extreme. Then comes the first drawing scene which you can watch for yourself, it starts around 53:30:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEiZvDY1uPw&t=6s

It's incomplete, but watching to the end of the clip will give you an idea. It says that this is "part 1" but it is really just the first half of part one. This is the only film that actually gives an accurate representation of the act of creation: the scratchy pens, the elusive washes, rubbing with the fingers, the almost random strokes and then, magically, out of nothing, suddenly we see a face... Sure, we see Mozart composing in Amadeus, but frankly, it's a put-up job with no resemblance to the real thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b2pyEvp8ls

All movies about classical music, without exception, are romanticized bunk, including Amadeus, though that is the best of a bad bunch. I don't know films about painting very well, but it is probably a similar situation. La Belle Noiseuse is a great film and watching it we realize just how rare great films are these days...

Ted Gioia's Reading Plan

I often say critical things about Ted Gioia's musicology, but sometimes he hits the nail on the head. This post is an example: My Lifetime Reading Plan. The eerie thing is that some of it sounds a lot like how I approach reading:

Some people will tell you that this is elitist. But I have the exact opposite opinion. For a working class kid like me, this was my way of overcoming elitism. Some elites even tried to steer me away from this project—as not appropriate for somebody from my neighborhood and background.

I felt that this was patronizing in the extreme. In any event, I was determined to pursue this path of wisdom even if others tried to stop it.

I felt that my best way to do all this was through books.

In fact, that was the only way. Now that may surprise you, because most people think that learning of this sort takes place at school. This leads me to my first tip or technique:

WHAT YOU LEARN IN CLASSROOMS IS IRRELEVANT, AND SOMETIMES EVEN WORTHLESS—YOU MUST TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR OWN EDUCATION

 Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. The most important learning you will ever have will come from your own efforts. It may be adjacent to the classroom, but it will rarely be in the classroom. You are responsible for your own education. It is deeply dispiriting to observe what is happening with educational institutions lately because they seem to be going in exactly the wrong direction. You should go and read the rest of Ted's essay. I'm going to muse a bit about my reading experience.

I think my father taught me to read--I don't really recall because I can't remember a time when I couldn't read. When I got to Grade 1 I was already an accomplished reader. From the time I was eleven I have been a fairly heavy reader. I estimate that I have read about four books a week since then, exhausting a couple of small municipal libraries in the process. When I was studying guitar in Spain for ten months or so, literally all I did was practice guitar five hours a day and read Russian novels (ok, and go for lunch with my Finnish friend). While there I read pretty much all of Dostoyevsky except the second volume of The Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy (War and Peace and Anna Karenina), Turgenev (Fathers and Sons, I think), Gogol (Dead Souls) and Sholokov (And Quiet Flows the Don). I've read Trollope, Balzac, Flaubert, Sterne, Proust, Joyce and hoards that I don't remember. In first year university, apart from the classroom reading I also read the first few volumes (up to Kant) of Copleston's History of Philosophy as well as Dante, the Divine Comedy (all three volumes, not just the Inferno) and other stuff I don't remember, mostly philosophy. I also did a prodigious amount of listening as I had access to a serious listening library for the first time. In later years I spent one summer listening to gamelan music and another listening to Haydn string quartets.

Recently I have upgraded my reading to adopt the practice of doing pencil annotations on every paragraph of the original on the advice of a professor of philosophy. You have to take notes!

Anyway, that's all I will belabor you with today. For our listening, how about the String Quartet, op. 20 #5 by Joseph Haydn:

Invidious Antonyms!

One thing I particularly enjoy about Richard Taruskin's prose is his ability to slip in the stiletto, almost without the victim noticing. This particular phrase comes from an essay on historic performance practice, or what pretends to be so. Referring to "authenticity" in performance practice he says:

There it is at last in all its purloined majesty, this word that simply cannot be rid of its moral and and ethical overtones (and which always carries its invidious antonym in tow) being used to priviledge one philosophy of performance over all others.

Of course that "invidious antonym" that he cleverly avoids stating is "inauthenticity," with which no self-respecting musician would wish to be cursed!

How does one build a career as a superstar musicologist? Susan McClary did so by metaphorically accusing Beethoven of being a rapist, Philip Ewell by also accusing Beethoven, but of being merely "above average." Ouch! And Richard Taruskin did so, rather more elegantly, by choosing to examine the ideology lurking behind the Early Music, authentic performance practice and historically-informed performance movements. Yes, in later years it was his astounding Stravinsky monograph and the weighty Oxford History that spread his renown, but in the early days, in the 1980s, it was his papers on performance practice, later collected in the first book of his essays, Text and Act, that really kicked up the dust. The first time I ever encountered his writing was the essay "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past" in this volume, assigned reading in a doctoral seminar.

I can recall, upon reading that paper, not being very impressed by the argument which seemed to me unconvincing. At the time I was a performer, just beginning to transition into being a musicologist and frankly, I just didn't have the intellectual context to really grasp his argument. Since I am now re-reading Text and Act, I think it might be a good time to do an overview of the argument which spreads over quite a few papers and approaches the issue from a number of different angles. I think at the end of the day, we can get a pretty good handle on the issue which might reveal quite a bit about us, and early music and the act of performing.

Let's start by taking a look at Taruskin's first paper on the topic, first published in 1982, "On Letting the Music Speak for Itself." That's one of those deceptively tricky clichés that, after reading Taruskin, you learn to be wary of. Let's anatomize the argument:

• Historical performance practice is now a recognized subdiscipline
• Let's examine the assumptions that underlie current thinking
• One is "let the music speak for itself" --i.e. don't gussy it up
• This implies a mistrust of performers and interpretation (cf Stravinsky, Babbitt and even Brahms)
• Oddly, in the case of Stravinsky especially, the performances vary wildly from the score
• Music cannot, in fact, speak for itself so what this has to really mean is "let the composer speak for himself." That opens up an epistemological can of worms.
• Composers' intentions may be unknowable, not exist, or not be relevant
• the idea seems to be to try and re-create the external conditions of the original performance but would this actually recreate the composer's inner experience?
• The purpose of all this is to make our performance "authentic"
• Musicological ideals of performance style actually owe a lot to the modernist aesthetic associated with Stravinsky after the First World War
• He connects this also with the "dehumanization" described by Ortega y Gasset in 1925 and the depersonalization discussed by T. S. Eliot in1917
• Music has to be imaginatively re-created in order to be performed
• Lost performing traditions have to be re-invented
• An historical reconstruction would be merely antiquarian
• Authoritative and compelling performances of old music demand a vividly imagined and coherent performance style
• Authenticity stems from conviction of the individual performer who is only interested in the individual cases, pieces with unique meaning
• Scholarship, on the other hand, is always about generalization; scholarly methods don't deal with uniqueness
• So the performer must use intuition as the guide
• Historical reconstruction performances are actually modernist: the artwork is an autonomous object
• The modernist artist is in communion with Art whereas for artists in the past it was about the process or activity
• One indicator is that, with few exceptions, performers of early music today are not great improvisers which was the norm historically (this is probably less true today than in 1982)
• Ironically, in early music performance, the suspension of personality is an indicator of the modern sensibility
• A musicologist is someone capable of playing 14th century music with 17th century ornaments (my joke, but it fits with what he is saying)

You really need to read the whole thing, which is not very long, to get the flavor of the argument, but this will give you the bare bones. In the early 80s was precisely when I was discovering the early music movement for myself and I was loading up Bach lute suites with piles of ornaments and agonizing over tempo relationships. The short essay I am summarizing above is just a brief assay into the question and discussion will expand a lot in later papers.

For an envoi, here is an historical historical performance, meaning one from the fairly early days: Concentus Musicus Wein, Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, 1964.

Friday Miscellanea

The Wall Street Journal has a review of a new book by Norman Lebrecht: ‘Why Beethoven’ Review: Can a Genius Survive?

“Johann Sebastian Bach’s oratorios lay untouched for a hundred years,” Mr. Lebrecht writes. “The operas of Handel were hardly seen for two centuries. Mozart, popular as his operas may have been, had his symphonies and concertos used as kindling. . . . Schubert’s piano sonatas gathered dust for generations. Schumann’s symphonies were discarded, as were several Verdi operas. Beethoven, alone among classical and romantic composers, was embraced first to last, his time to ours. Why is that?” 

It is a sad fact in the 2020s that anyone writing a book praising the achievements of an artist on the order of Ludwig van Beethoven situates himself on the dangerous side of a political question. To sum up the pervasive critical attitude: Beethoven was white, his music is enjoyed by white people with money, and his “greatness” is a construction of a racist society.

Follow the link to read the rest. 

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This is a surprisingly intelligent discussion of musical elitism:

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

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The New Yorker tells us about The Origins of Creativity. The sub-head reads:

The concept was devised in postwar America, in response to the cultural and commercial demands of the era. Now we’re stuck with it.

Are they serious? Isn't this just like the Soviets' tendency to claim that they invented everything? Or the Chinese--but they had a bit better evidence. But wait, actually the claim is a bit narrower:

The term “creative nonfiction” is actually a fairly recent coinage, postdating the advent of the New Journalism by about twenty years. The man credited with it is the writer Lee Gutkind. He seems to have first used “creative nonfiction,” in print, anyway, thirty years ago, though he thought that the term originated in the fellowship application form used by the National Endowment for the Arts. The word “creative,” he explained, refers to “the unique and subjective focus, concept, context and point of view in which the information is presented and defined, which may be partially obtained through the writer’s own voice, as in a personal essay.”

So only "creative nonfiction" then.

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On an Overgrown Path has an interesting discussion of sound quality: Sibelius remastered or reimagined?

Classical music has a schizophrenic relationship with sound quality. On the one hand there is an obsessive preocuppation with hideously expensive 'acoustically perfect' concert halls. On the other hand recorded classical music has been chased down the rabbit hole of lo-fi by MP3s, streaming, ear buds, and mobile listening, and rarely - if ever - is sound quality mentioned in reviews of CDs. So it is not surprising but still disappointing that a major initiative by one of the largest classical labels to open the debate about recorded sound quality has passed unremarked, while classical's great and good continue their demands for yet another 'acoustically perfect' concert hall.

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Re the UK crisis: ‘A long-term fight for existence’ – full text of Simon Rattle speech on the crisis facing UK classical music

The last few months have been devastating for our sector. After the Arts Council’s swingeing cuts in November, which have affected all of us and left some extraordinary groups fighting for their lives, we were all stopped in our tracks by the proposed vandalism by the BBC, of which the closure of the BBC singers was only the tip of the iceberg.

There’s a kind of dishonesty at the heart of many of the decisions. George Orwell will recognise the language: ‘Refresh the administration’ and ‘reimagine the art form’

When the two largest supporters of classical music in this country cut away at the flesh of our culture in this way, it means that the direction of travel has become deeply alarming. It’s clear we are facing a long-term fight for existence and we cannot just quietly acquiesce to the dismantling or dismembering of so many important companies.

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Fashion and the Classical Musician. This is a topic I have loved to kick around, contrasting Grigory Sokolov with Yuja Wang. But this article manages to discuss a number of other artists as well.

Miuccia Prada, head designer of her eponymous company, once stated, “What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language.”

Classical music can also be considered “instant language,” especially when performed by the French piano duo Katia and Marielle Labèque, who have been dazzling audiences throughout the world with their musicianship — and couture wardrobe — for more than five decades. Included in their custom-made fashion dossier? Feathered frocks by Prada, which the siblings donned while playing Camille Saint-Saëns’ The Carnival of the Animals for a 2005 televised concert at the Waldbühne with conductor Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic.

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 If you can get past the paywall, this might be interesting: How the Streaming Era Turned Music Into Sludge. I get similar feelings from YouTube these days which always seems to be wanting to nudge me into watching the most trivial clips no matter how I try to eliminate those channels.

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Very slim pickings this week, so let's make up for it with some stunning envois! First up a performance of the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto by Bach from the 1950 Salzburg Festival. On piano and conducting, Wilhelm Fürtwangler:

I was led to this performance by a very hefty paper by Richard Taruskin. He avers that this performance, led by someone who reached maturity before the First World War, provides us with an example of "pre-modern" performance practice, what he describes as "vitalistic" as opposed to the rhythmically and dynamically uniform performances from modern performers which he terms "geometric." I'll be talking about this in a future post. But for now, let's have one of the "historically-informed" performances that Taruskin claims really stem from a modernist sensibility. This is Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music with the same piece.

 And finally, the Barbirolli recording of the Symphony No. 5 by Sibelius.

If I could only hear one...

 One concert, that is, by artists on various instruments. If I could just hear one concert on each instrument or ensemble, who would I want to hear:

• piano: Grigory Sokolov
• lute: Thomas Dunford
• harpsichord: Jean Rondeau
• guitar: Marcin Dylla
• chamber orchestra: Norwegian Chamber Orchestra
• full orchestra: musicAeterna
• violin: uh-oh, here I have a conflict. Either Hilary Hahn or Patricia Kopatchinskaja
• early music singer: Lea Desandre
• other music singer: Marianne Crebassa

Who would you pick?

UPDATE: A commentator adds a link to an encore by L'Arpeggiata reminding us that people who play early music in concerts today are still very much people of today. Doesn't this make Taylor Swift concerts seem, well, a bit dull in comparison?

Let us turn to the past

Torniamo all'antico e sarà un progresso

--Giuseppe Verdi

That phrase translates as "let us turn to the past and that will be progress." Interesting thought. In my case, today, that means noticing that my guitar is forty years old this year. I bought it in 1983 from Robert Holroyd in Vancouver. I've told this story before, but I'll add some details this time. But first, here is the instrument in question:

Click to enlarge

I just took that photo. As you can see if you look closely, I'm just in the middle of putting new strings on. They are all on, but I haven't cut off the excess at the pegbox. No, you don't need to spend half your life winding all that excess length on.

How did I come to buy the guitar? At the time I was playing a Masaru Kohno guitar that I quite liked. That was my second concert guitar, the first being a José Ramirez I bought in Madrid. One day a good friend of mine called me and said that a builder he knew had just finished a guitar and it was going to be sitting in his shop for a few days before the buyer picked it up. "You have to try it!" he said. So I did. After five minutes I knew I wanted it. It was fantastically in tune everywhere on the fingerboard. Very clear and open sound and the basses were terrific and defined. If you look at the photo you can see that the bridge is very unusual. It is a wide, but slim, piece of ebony with no actual "bridge" (usually a strip of ivory or plastic over which the strings pass). Instead, the strings are fed through narrow holes drilled in the ebony and then pass over six individual tool steel posts. You have to make a knot in the end so they don't slip. This is a "Neil Hiebert" bridge, named after the Montreal guitar builder who came up with it. He and Robert Holroyd spent a lot of time on the phone in the early 80s talking about guitar design and this is one of the things they came up with. The internal strutting is also very different.

As soon as I played it I asked Bob for his next guitar which he finished three months later. He only built about four guitars a year. I didn't have any money so I had to get a loan from my credit union to buy it: $3,000 Canadian dollars which, back then, were pretty much even with US dollars. The collateral to support the loan? A photocopy of my bachelor's degree from McGill University. Mind you, it was hand written in Latin on parchment.

With apologies to my ex-wife, I guess this guitar is the true love of my life. I have been married once, had many girlfriends, lived in three and a half countries and had three important teaching jobs. But always the same guitar which has undergone one major repair and one complete restoration and is due for another.

It's a great guitar. Pepe Romero tried it out when I was in his master-class in Salzburg and later bought one for himself. I have tried out a lot of guitars: Manuel Barrueco's Ruck included, plus a number of Ramirez guitars, a lovely Daniel Friedrich, lots by Canadian builders and lots I can't even remember. I haven't played a Greg Smallman, but that aside, I suspect that this is pretty much as good as guitars get.

Let's hear it. This is a Venezuelan waltz by Antonio Lauro: Carora.

Friday Miscellanea

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Here's an interesting item about a violin collector: The collector.

Alongside his career as a computer science professor and database software company founder, Fulton spent two decades amassing what was regarded by many as the world’s greatest collection of stringed instruments. In total he has owned 18 violins, six violas, and four cellos by makers including Antonio Stradivari; Andrea Guarneri; Guarneri’s grandson Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri, known as del Gesù; and Giovanni Battista Guadagnini. These 17th- and 18th-century Italians are regarded as history’s finest luthiers, and their wares sell for millions, whether at auction or in private transactions facilitated by violin dealers.

* * *

A review of a new recording: Glenn Gould’s musical laboratory. This is Glenn Gould the composer, not the pianist and the piece is his String Quartet, op. 1. Norman Lebrecht opines:

So what are we to make of this revival by the Minguet Quartet on the eclectic German label CPO? Frankly, it’s a mess – but not an unattractive one. Gould opens with a growl of medieval groundbass, meanders into late Beethoven, swipes an indecent chunk of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht before lolloping around Bruckner’s little-known F-major quartet to no obvious conclusion. He might have empathised with Bruckner, a thoughtful loner with ideas larger than the trends of his time.

After twenty minutes, Gould reverts to the 1920s sound world of Alban Berg and Richard Strauss and stays there until he is done. The quartet, by no means uninteresting, will make a lively dinner-party game of spot the composer.

Reading that, I wonder what Lebrecht would make of my string quartet? If you stripped away the identifying bits, Gould might not even recognize that his piece is being discussed. This citing of inventory seems knowledgeable and clever, but, honestly, it is vague and generic.

* * *

Alex Ross has a new piece at The New Yorker: The Doleful Minimalism of Max Richter

The film scores of John Williams are beloved by untold millions. Philip Glass’s name is known to a good fraction of the population. Arvo Pärt’s sonic visions entrance audiences around the world. But, if cultural relevance is measured in sheer saturating ubiquity, the composer of our moment is the fifty-seven-year-old British minimalist Max Richter, who, according to his record label, Deutsche Grammophon, has produced the “most streamed classical record of all time.” That album, released in 2015, is titled “Sleep.” It lasts eight and a half hours and is designed to facilitate a full night’s slumber. Richter has also produced an extended compositional remix of “The Four Seasons,” transforming Vivaldi’s kinetic concertos into something spacey and amorphous. His customary mode, as in his soundtrack for the dystopian HBO series “The Leftovers,” is slowly unspooling, painstakingly repetitive melancholia.

Later on he mentions "the world première of Cassandra Miller’s “I cannot love without trembling,” a desolate, radiant concerto for viola and orchestra" which we linked to here a few weeks ago. We also talked about Max Richter, but that was years ago.

* * *

In a variation of the old saw "you have to be crazy to be a musician" we have: Are Music Engagement and Mental Illness Related? Lots of technical stuff there, but this quote is interesting:

Right now you are doing a study on the concept of flow while making music. What is that about?

This is actually mostly the work of Miriam Mosing. Flow is a state of ultimate concentration, and it has been associated with good mental health. We look at flow in general: both in work and in any leisure activity, not only in music making. We found that flow has a protective effect on mental health. We saw this in the sample with the monozygotic twins: the one who experiences more flow actually experiences less depression. That indicates that the reason is not overlapping genes, but that flow can be protective against mental health problems. So right now we are looking at whether therapy could tap into that: If you increase the prevalence of flow somebody experiences, might that help [fight] against depressive symptoms?

* * *

English National Opera to receive up to £24 million to support new base outside London. You know it is really hard not to equate this with paying a particularly annoying busker just to go away.

* * *

Ted Gioia takes on another jaunt into his Gnostic version of music history: How Musicians Were the First Heroes—And Their Songs a Kind of Superpower

We will encounter magical and musical chariots again in the next chapter. There we try to understand a fantastic journey described in the fragments of Parmenides, who is sometimes considered the founder of metaphysics and ontology in Western philosophy. But his sole surviving work is (as we shall see) a song about a mystical trip by chariot.

The curious thing here is that Parmenides and the other Greek pre-Socratics are not considered religious or mystical figures, but rather as the inventors of secular and scientific thinking. Yet even there, at the origin of our own logical conceptual framework—literally the birth of Western rational thought—we encounter the rhythmic propulsion of a flying chariot.

But the most useful Ted Gioia this week was this one: Spotify Gives 49 Different Names to the Same Song. Read the article and then explain to me why any serious music lover would ever use a streaming service.

* * *

So you can decide for yourself, here is an older recording of the Glenn Gould String Quartet, op. 1

Here is Max Richter's most well-known piece, On the Nature of Daylight:

Here is a piece I always wished I had taken the time to learn the Fantasia-Sonata by Joan Manén:

The Refuge of Music

I mentioned that Richard Taruskin's main battlegrounds were ones that, in some cases, are no longer critically important. One of them was insisting on the social and cultural context of music against those who, like Schopenhauer, believe that music exists in its own separate world:

The inexpressible depth of all music, by virtue of which it floats past us as a paradise quite familiar and yet eternally remote, and is so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain.

Taruskin spent much of his career railing against those who would want to insulate music from the world because he believed that in so doing, they simply made music irrelevant. There is a great deal of truth in this, of course, and we can be gratified that he largely won that battle.

But.

But.

When I sit down to compose, I do go off into another world, one without the distractions of this one. I close my ears to the sounds of construction next door, the barking of a neighborhood dog, the distant strains of a car radio and so on. I close my ears to these and other distractions because they are not relevant to my task which is to open myself to musical ideas that may float past (where do these come from?) and try to follow where they lead. It is as if I am, intentionally, insulating myself from the everyday world. This is pretty much how every composer works. Now this is while I am acting as a creator, a producer, where Taruskin is talking more about music as it is received by the listener who may be much more engaged with it in a social and cultural context. But even for a lot of listeners, while they may be aware and inspired by the context of the music as much as its abstract content, they may also choose to listen to music as a refuge from, yes, exactly that everyday world of politics and confusion.

Taruskin mentions that in the Symphony No. 5 of Beethoven he chooses instruments, kettledrums, piccolo, trombones, that have military associations. This is nothing new, Haydn also has military references in some symphonies, but it is an undeniable bit of referentiality. But if we choose to listen to a string quartet or a piano sonata, there is not necessarily the same kind of contextualism. Well, you could argue for it, I suppose, but I'm pretty sure that most listeners are immersed in the music qua music and not in terms of whatever external things might be referenced.

 

Today's Listening

One of the finest lutenists on record is Hopkinson Smith. Here he is playing a chaconne by Vieux Gaultier from a whole album of his music.

Performances like these make me a bit doubtful about Taruskin's claims that the early music performance practice movement was entirely or mostly driven by our modern taste for brisk tempos and crisp rhythms. This might be true in some areas of the repertoire, but it seems a big stretch when it comes to 17th century French music.

Two Antiquarian Modernists

And I'm willing to bet that you would never guess which ones I have in mind. The first is possibly easier as he has been remarked on previously: Ezra Pound a famous figure in early 20th century modernist poetry. Here is the most famous example. the first instance of what became known as Imagist poetry:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

That's the modernist side, on the antiquarian side we might cite his study of the Provençal dialect and attraction to Dante, Homer and Anglo-Saxon poetry. He also translated Confucius and Chinese poetry and spent a lot of time in the Royal Library in Madrid. Some might say that what I claim is antiquarian, which I define as a deep interest in things that are old, of our or of other cultures, is simply one aspect of modernism.

Now for my second example that I'm sure you would never guess: guitarist/composer Leo Brouwer. In the early 1970s he was awarded a scholarship to study in Berlin where he worked with Hans Werner Henze and studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Something not as well known (it is not mentioned in the Wikipedia biography) is that he also studied performance practice with harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt and the fruits of this relationship can be found in his second set of studies where he notates many ornaments suitable for Baroque music and in his recording of Scarlatti sonatas (and published guitar arrangements) where he exhibits a marvelous creative brilliance in ornamentation. Here is an example:

By mere happenstance, I have connections to both of these figures. As an undergraduate at the University of Victoria in the early 1970s I met Basil Bunting, a poet and friend of Ezra Pound. I was delighted to have had a number of conversations with him about the relation between poetry and music. He shared with me his love for the playing of Andrés Segovia. Like Pound he was also an antiquarian and once said that at his age he was starting to lose his Persian. I also took two master classes with Leo Brouwer as a guitarist and in Salzburg in 1988 I met Karlheinz Stockhausen and had some interesting discussions with him about live performance versus recordings.

I have always had antiquarian leanings as well, so perhaps it is a component of contemporaneity. In my early days as a classical guitarist I took a summer course in lute-playing and later on, as part of my work as a concert guitar performer I had a lot of interest in performance practice of early (and 20th century) music. As part of that project, I put a lot of research into how to play the music of the Spanish vihuelistas and as a guide to that I studied the treatise of Tomás de Santa María titled Arte de tañer fantasía published in Valladolid in 1556. Luis de Narváez' book of compositions was published in the same city in 1538. I chose, however, a fantasia by Luys Milan to apply Tomás de Santa María's ornamental suggestions to. Here is the second page of the Milan Fantasía 10 in the edition of Emilio Pujol with my ornaments pencilled in:

Click to enlarge

Was this a component of my approach as a modernist? Or was this an antiquarian impulse? How can we tell the difference? Is someone who spends their entire life studying and performing 16th century music still a closet modernist? Obviously there are lots of modernists that have no interest in things antiquarian. Looking into my own heart, I really don't know how to answer these questions.

Richard Taruskin's Envoi

This morning I finished reading Taruskin's last collection of essays. It ends in a rather personal way with his address on the occasion of winning the Kyoto Prize, the first musicologist to do so as previously they have only been given to composers and performers. The address is a wonderful way to end, not only the volume, but a blessed career in music. He recounts his life, outlining how choices and "affordances" (what we used to call opportunities or just chance) led him to the career that he had. How your life goes depends on ability, ambition and luck and stumbling across some Russian cousins in his early teens led Taruskin to become fluent in Russian. Later on, as a graduate student in musicology, this uniquely qualified him to do research into Russian music and we all know how that turned out! That gigantic Stravinsky monograph that no-one else could have written and that has to be the model for future composer studies.

Lots of other instances of providence aided him in developing writing skills, in dropping composition for musicology and dropping the cello for the viola da gamba. All these things led to his scholarship in areas that might otherwise have been neglected.

Let me just take a moment to rejoice a bit. Quite a while back I put up a post here that connected the "Private Language Argument" of Wittgenstein with the problems of hyper-abstract musical compositions such as those by Pierre Boulez. I was delighted to run across the same comparison being made in one of the essays here discussing contextualism.

It is a sorrowful shock to turn to the very last item in the book, the acknowledgements where we read just how devastatingly sudden his illness was. He was diagnosed with stage four esophageal cancer on May 25, 2022 and died thirty-eight days later on July 1.

Now I want to re-read a few things: Text and Act, his first collection of essays which I have on Kindle, but now I am getting in hard copy because I am convinced that the only way to read anything at all serious is by writing notes in the margins in pencil, something awkward to do with Kindle. After that I am going to re-read some of the other collections, then the final volume of the Oxford History (I recently re-read the first four) and then, oh yes, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, this time with pencil in hand...

I want to end with one of my envoi, a musical moment. The first time I saw the name of Richard Taruskin was on an LP of the music of Josquin des Prez recorded by a New York early music ensemble. He was playing viola da gamba. I lost that LP decades ago and it doesn't seem to be on YouTube, so this will have to do:

Richard Taruskin's Big Issues

These are questions or problems that he has wrestled with for decades and we find them taken up in various places in the Oxford History of Western Music as well as many published essays. These are the kinds of problems that he welcomes debating because

it is important that they go on, lest music--and when I say music, I always mean classical music--lapse into utter cultural irrelevance, as it seems to be doing in today's world. [Musical Lives and Times Examined, p. 2]

What are these questions? They are expressed in different ways in different places, but one big one is the social or political context of music which he always wanted to deal with, especially in the face of the romantic and modernist desire to wall music off from any contaminating elements for the sake of aesthetic autonomy. Music without context is essentially arid.

Another issue has to do with ethics and aesthetics. Both are important values, but independent of one another: "Good art can do evil. And of course bad art can do good." [op. cit. p. 9] He mentions preparing a list of compositions that are "musically excruciating but politically attractive" and it is all I can do to resist naming a composer or two myself. But I won't! In any case, he makes the point that it is important to allow, perhaps even arrange, collisions between our ethical and aesthetic sensibilities. In doing so, perhaps we can come to some dim comprehension of how you can listen to Schubert in the evening and go back to torturing prisoners in the morning.

Another one has to do with exoticism and authenticity and why it is that, for example, some singers adopted an untrained, vibratoless sound to sing early music on the grounds that if it sounds strange, it must be authentic. At around the same time, the early 60s, the lutenist Thomas Binkley was developing a performance practice for medieval monophonies based on North African vocal and instrumental techniques. This was very influential and why, to this day, a lot of recordings of the troubadour repertoire sound like Arab music. Again, if it sounds strange, it must be authentic. This discussion is part of Tariskin's long campaign against the marketing of early music as "historically authentic." He was of the opinion that we play Bach with crisp rhythms and articulations because it is to our modern taste and not necessarily because that is what Bach actually wanted or sounded like. I'm still wrestling with that one, but he makes some solid arguments.

Since these issues and debates were sustained over a few decades, they are starting to look like yesterday's problems. Taruskin never quite addressed current issues such as is classical music, heck, civilization itself, inherently racist? Similarly, is meritocracy racist? Can we think of some other recent questions that might come up? I think that he would advocate debating these kinds of questions, whatever they might be.

I want to put up a YouTube clip that I discovered through a Taruskin essay. This is a truly apocalyptic performance: Wilhelm Furtwangler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in their last concert before the end of World War II in January 1945. The piece is the last movement of Brahms' Symphony No. 1.

This is available because magnetic recording tape had been recently invented, in Germany. About the only concert that might be more apocalyptic would be if there was a performance of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony in that city while it was besieged by six Panzer Divisions for 900 days. There would be the sound of artillery bombardment in the background.

My McCartney Moment

The story goes that Paul McCartney fell out of bed one morning with the whole melody of "Yesterday" in his head. He was sure he had heard it somewhere and kept asking people if they knew the tune, but no-one did. Of course, the story might have been embroidered a bit: maybe he only had a piece of it and the rest came to him over a few days.

I'm writing a guitar piece right now, improvising and sketching in pencil every morning and one day I just had this little fragment of a melody pop into my head. It seems obviously Latin-American and I seemed to recall it from somewhere. But I looked around in some obvious places: Venezuelan waltzes, an anthology of Latin-American folk tunes, Barrios, but I didn't see it anywhere. So I put it to the readership: do you know this tune?

Friday Miscellanea

“I have yet to find a genre of music I enjoy; it’s basically audible physics, waves and energized particles, and, like most sane people, I have no interest in physics.” 

― Gail Honeyman

Which is better, to my mind, than someone saying, "oh, I like all kinds of music."

* * *

For aficionados of The Simpsons: Cypress Hill to finally make ‘The Simpsons’ orchestra joke “a reality”

In the 1996 Simpsons episode Homerpalooza, Homer took his family on a road trip to an alternative rock festival Hullabalooza in a bid to prove to his children, Bart and Lisa, that he was still the cool and in touch with popular culture. However, he soon embarrassed them when he became a sideshow who had cannonballs aimed at his stomach – before proving a hit with bands and festival-goers. 

Among the likes of Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth, Cypress Hill made a cameo in the show, during which they joked about performing with a classical orchestra.

There's even a clip, proving that sooner or later, reality does copy art.

* * * 

I've said a few times that the canon, however you define it as the repertoire advocated by academics, by performers or by public taste, is always in constant flux as the influence of each group waxes and wanes. Therefore, I tend to see pronouncements, by academics in particular, as being potentially just attempts to sway the dispute in their favor. Lately there seems to be an attempt to re-evaluate the most famous 20th century artist, Picasso: How good, really, was Pablo Picasso? First of all, trigger warning, is this "good" a suggestion that there are objective standards in aesthetics?

Blue Picasso, pink Picasso, cubist Picasso, society Picasso, surreal Picasso, ceramist Picasso, late Picasso. Picasso in his underwear, Picasso in a bow tie. Harlequin Picasso, bullfight Picasso, the poets’ Picasso, the GIs’ Picasso. Anti-fascist Picasso, communist Picasso, peace dove Picasso. Prankster Picasso, heartsick Picasso, lecherous Picasso.

Yes, Pablo Picasso was all over the place. He died 50 years ago this month at 91, and we’re still trying to clean up his mess.

Adam Gopnik wrote a critical essay twenty-five years ago:

One of Gopnik’s most contentious claims was that Picasso’s best work was confined to the “fifteen-year period centered on cubism, the First World War, and its immediate aftermath.” Surrounding this high period, he wrote, “was a vast sea of kitsch, an almost bottomless vulgarity of imagination, an ugliness that was not the honest Medusa’s-head ugliness of modernism but the glaring ugliness of falseness and sentimentality.” “What made cubism great,” he declared, “is not that it gave Picasso a means of self-expression, but that it acted as a barrier to self-expression — pretty much the only one he ever met.”

We might, after Philip Ewell, just say that Picasso was an above-average painter and leave it at that. But one starts to wonder, how soon will we start to ask how good, really, was Igor Stravinsky?

* * *

Headlines and titles so often over-promise: Quartet review: did four women really change the world of classical music?

The subtitle of Quartet, historian Leah Broad’s book about four UK women composers, reads boldly: How Four Women Changed the Musical World.

But I am unsure that the musical world – for Broad, classical music – was changed in any meaningful way by composers Ethel Smyth (b.1858) Rebecca Clarke (b.1886), Dorothy Howell (b.1898) and Doreen Carwithen (b.1922), however fascinating their lives and careers, and however much their music deserves to be more widely heard.

Although Broad is a passionate advocate for these women’s music, convincingly arguing that it should be heard far more, she never really explains how her chosen women might have changed their or our musical worlds – or even what changing the musical world might mean. Given the book’s title, this is a fundamental flaw.

The reviewer mentions some significant omissions, including my favorite UK woman composer Elizabeth Maconchy.

* * *

The Nation tells us about The End of the Music Business. The article gives a fairly comprehensive history of recorded sound. Favorite quote, the ever-popular one from Hunter S. Thompson: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” The conclusion:

No one outside of the inner corporate circles really knows how the economics of the streaming world works. It pays, but what does it pay, and to whom? Reasonably high-profile artists in many genres have not been shy about posting their meager Spotify royalty checks to social media. Many of those artists then encourage listeners to buy their music on Bandcamp as a moral choice. That’s when you know the old model is truly dead: “Buy my music as a moral choice.” The music business as we knew it lasted about a century, from 1903 to 2003.

The biggest check I ever got in my career was from my record company for copyright infringement. They settled.

* * *

We need to be grateful to Rick Beato who listens to pop music so we don't have to. In the process of listening to the top ten, he shows what a great ear he has (and how weak the songs are).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD_DoKo5Dg8

Out of the top ten songs in the world, he finds that only three of them are actual, you know, songs. He and I agree on Miley Cyrus: she is a good singer and "Flowers" is an actual song. But wow, most of this stuff isn't even bad, it's just ... nothing.

* * *

Reviewing a couple of books on lives well lived, Psyche comes to sound rather Aristotelian: A life of splendid uselessness is a life well lived

The good human life demands meaning and purpose, which cannot be won in any stable sense from things – like wealth or pleasure – that can only ever be means. Mere living might be possible under the solitary law of instrumentality; living well, however, is not. ‘The freedom from small utilities and large ones,’ Hitz observes, ‘from colourless surroundings, from the human diminishment offered in given social roles – this freedom grounds a vast variety of human possibilities.’ The Homo faber hypothesis of the early modern anthropologists and the US pragmatists was always an insufficient account of the human being: chimpanzees and orangutans use tools and weapons; ants and termites build elaborate supercities. No ape or insect, however, has been observed writing poems, philosophising or singing the blues.

Much as I appreciate Taruskin's long battle to restore music's social context, it is good to hear, now and then, about some individuals' lonely pursuit of something out of the ordinary.

* * *

An article on modernism and politics: Modernists can be monarchists. The subhead summarizes it nicely: There’s an assumption that atonalists must be anarchists, but musical radicals often have conservative politics.

To Craft — and you can almost see him shaking his bespectacled, all-American head — Stravinsky’s enduring respect for Russian royalty was literally beyond belief.

Great modernists aren’t supposed to think like that, are they? They’re meant to be radicals, revolutionaries — and in fairness, few composers have worked more diligently to present themselves in that light than Stravinsky, or found a more willing enabler than Craft. Meanwhile a profoundly conservative spirit was hiding in plain sight. I still remember my surprise when I first read that Stravinsky dedicated his Symphony in C — that brisk, brilliant deconstruction of art and emotion — “to the glory of God”. Craft witnessed him lying prostrated before the altar of a Los Angeles Russian Orthodox church for a full hour on the morning of his 68th birthday. The great musical iconoclast actually carried an ikon of Saint Gerasimus with him wherever he travelled.

 * * *

For our first envoi, the Symphony in C by Stravinsky:

Next the Suffolk Suite by Dorothy Carwithen:

And while we are in a mellow mode, here is some Brahms played by Grigory Sokolov:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb8QPgQHsag

An Unlikely Pairing

One of the joys of reading Taruskin is that often one stumbles across really intriguing perspectives and bits of information. One such is this photo, from p. 400 of Musical Lives and Times Examined:

Edgar Varèse and Heitor Villa-Lobos together in Paris in 1929

That this photo seems so odd to us is a reminder of the ideological trends that have shaped our understanding of musical modernism. Varèse is an acknowledged master within the modernist canon while Villa-Lobos emphatically is not. But in Paris in the 1920s they were both lauded and indeed were featured on the same concert program: May 30, 1929 saw the premiere of Amazonas by Villa-Lobos and Amériques by Varèse conducted by Marius-François Gaillard at the Salle Gaveau. Let's have a listen:

Put side-by-side one can see that they are not incompatible. They both have neo-primitivist roots that Varèse was able to surmount through his connection with new instruments, technology and electronic resources. Villa-Lobos was cursed with both enormous productivity and modest popularity. Taruskin mentions his Bach-inspired pieces and the preludes for guitar. He doesn't mention Villa-Lobos' connection with folklore, but, pace Bartók, that might count as well. Another element might be what we might call "manifesto promotion" or marketing through manifesto. Wikipedia gives us a taste of how Varèse described his aesthetic:

Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm; he coined the term "organized sound" in reference to his own musical aesthetic. Varèse's conception of music reflected his vision of "sound as living matter" and of "musical space as open rather than bounded". He conceived the elements of his music in terms of "sound-masses", likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization. Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise", and he posed the question, "what is music but organized noises?"

Nowadays we might see this as a collection of convenient metaphors to create a modernist image. Given the more conventional way Villa-Lobos described his music, inevitably they ended up in very different boxes.

Prizes and Competition

Shostakovich (center) with the Beethoven Quartet

I'm well past the halfway mark in the new Taruskin collection: Musical Lives and Times Examined. There is a lot to be learned in terms of music history and historiography, but also in areas of social and moral context, and even in personal experience. I just finished "How to Win a Stalin Prize" that deals with the Piano Quintet which received a Stalin Prize, first class, and Taruskin sorts out the truths from the myths surrounding it. Chamber music in Russia does not have a long history and he starts by filling in the background for us with composers like Alyabiev, of whom you have likely not heard, and Chaikovsky and Borodin, of whom you most certainly have. Borodin's second quartet is quite famous and it was paired with Shostakovich's eighth on an LP I picked up around 1971.

The Piano Quintet, op. 57, was composed and premiered in 1940 and Taruskin does an excellent job of filling in the social and political context. Part of this is yet another attempt to correct the distortions thrown up by Solomon Volkov in his two books on Shostakovich, the second of which, in 2004, specifically dealt with the relationship between Stalin and Shostakovich. Taruskin sorts out a lot of detail, which I will pass over, but suffice it to say that Volkov misrepresents the reasons why the Quintet won the Stalin prize and it had nothing to do with Stalin's "obsession" with Shostakovich--the truth is that he wasn't much interested in music and the main critical evaluation came from the Ukrainian-born musicologist Daniel Zhitomirsky who was present at the premiere and wrote:

...it is asked whether this lyrical composition is typical of our music, whether it is connected with its basic tasks. Such doubts call forth a protest from me. Could it be that the embodiment of high ethical qualities, the creation of an image of a full-grown human being with strong, finely-honed, noble yet uncomplicated feelings--could it be that all this is not one of the chief tasks of socialist art? [op. cit. p. 351]

It is important to recall that 1940-41 was a window of relative openness in Soviet aesthetic control. The Cold War was not yet and in fact, neither the USA nor the Soviet Union was yet in the Second World War--the Soviets were still allies of Nazi Germany! The denunciation of Shostakovich in 1936 was past and he had executed a change of course to return to the favor of the authorities. The second denunciation of 1948 was in the future and at this moment in time, Shostakovich took the opportunity to reinvent the role of chamber music in the Soviet Union--all of his string quartets except the first, slight, example, will follow the Quintet. Shostakovich judged the moment well and Taruskin points out the case of Prokofiev who did just the opposite (though he did make some interesting critical comments on the Quintet).

Taruskin observes that

Shostakovich was a better chooser than Prokofieff; his life achieved a better synthesis of personal integrity and necessary adaptation. The Quintet is a beautiful example of such adaptation--adaptation to the demands of Socialist Realism, grand style, life-affirmation, and all, and an adaptation to new affordances vouchsafed by a particularly "German" moment in Soviet Culture.

This makes me reconsider my own choices and adaptation--or rather, lack of it--to a career in music over the last fifty years. Like Prokofiev, my choices were often poor. I tended to avoid adaptation and competition. This was partly because of poor socialization and lack of confidence. I think you need a deep well of confidence to sustain any career in music! If I had it to do over, I think I would try to take the bull by the horns and dive into competition instead of avoiding it.

Let's end by listening to a recording of Shostakovich with the Beethoven Quartet playing the Piano Quintet:

Tradition as Foundation

I live in a small city in central Mexico that has a large expat population which makes for an interesting blend. They are re-doing the high street just around the corner from where I live. Here is a photo of the incomplete construction:

Yes, that's a cobblestone street. In fact, most roads in the countryside are also made with cobblestones. There is some use of concrete to embed the stones in, but this is mostly the same method of road construction used by the Roman legions. The advantage for modern Mexican workers is that you can do a street or a road without heavy equipment. Two guys and a wheelbarrow pretty much does it.

Now mind you, that surface conceals a modern sewage system and fibre-optic internet connections, but still the basic structure is thousands of years old. When I was a student in Spain I watched them re-do a cobblestone street in a similar way, though they used different stones.

Mexico has cultural traditions that are also very old--sadly, I don't know as much about them as I might.

What's my point here? As a composer I am always looking for a new kind of expression or a new way of expressing something, but the truth is that there is a relation between innovation and tradition and that relation is akin to that of foundation and superstructure. Stuff needs to be founded on other stuff, preferably solid and long-standing. But, you know, I don't think of this when I am composing. But after I have written something I often notice that it has roots--perhaps not very evident, but they are there. I think that Schoenberg was experiencing a similar process when he would go back and attempt to analyze something he had newly written in an attempt to "justify" it. I don't think that way at all, but I do think that creations that have aesthetic substance often have roots--sometimes very deep ones.

The Rite of Spring is a good example, but so is a lot of Stravinsky. Of course, he went to some pains to conceal the roots.

Fiction and History

One of the shorter essays in the new Taruskin collection is "Was Shostakovich a Martyr, or Is That Just Fiction?" which is a review of the novel The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes. Taruskin was a suitable reviewer because the novel is a fictionalization of the life of Dmitri Shostakovich. This has long been highly-contested ground "between those who believe that Shostakovich was a blameless martyr, opposed to and victimized by the Soviet regime, and those of us who believe he made pragmatic compromises to survive and prosper..." [op. cit. p 329] Taruskin labels the novel a "beautifully written botch" and "hagiography."

Taruskin offers the example of Tolstoy in War and Peace who "knew that the difference between real and fictional worlds is that a fictional world is wholly known." But for historians "the whole documentary truth can never be known" as there are always other documents to be discovered, not to mention ones that have been destroyed.

Which brings me to my main point: as industrious activists busily scrub our history of its indiscretions, what is coming into view is not any kind of truth--historical truth will always be messy--but a kind of sanitized lie. As Taruskin mentions later on "No one makes a successful career anywhere without learning and executing a complicated social dance." [op. cit. p. 333] Well, that's a relief as it explains why my career fell short of success! I never really learned the complicated social dance.

History itself will always be complicated, contradictory and only partially known. Only through the adroit application of ideological cleansers can it be made pure. We used to accept that even Homer nods, but now all our cultural icons, from Kanye West to Anna Netrebko, must be ideologically sound, or be banished into the outer darkness.

This is turning history into fiction!

Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8, mentioned in the essay, might be a suitable envoi.

Friday Miscellanea

It's Holy Week down here in Mexico, so I have a little more time to put together a Friday Miscellanea.

In every department of human endeavour, inspired talent is an intolerable insult to mediocrity.

--Simon Leys

Musicology Now asks Is Country Music Quintessentially American? Or White?

The sense of country music as one’s own culture is shared by members of every group discussed here. Thus, to speak of country as white music today is not just a continuation of long-standing erasures; it erases anew. Country music is quintessentially American music, bearing audible traces of exchange among diverse groups in U.S. society. In our divided moment it’s music that speaks to a stereotype-shatteringly broad audience through themes of love of family, friends, community, and country; freedom and fun; and what Steve Goodson called “hillbilly humanism,” an ethos insisting that each person is worthy and none of us can judge another. At this pivotal point in our history, the music industry must recognize the rich diversity of country music’s past and present and embrace its potential for a more equitable and inclusive future.

Oddly, the paragraph just prior to this one talks about the influence of Mexico which rather suggests that country music is not quintessentially American:

Mexican influences and engagements in country music are the focus of my current research—which includes variously gendered vaqueros. In my fieldwork, Mexican American country fans spoke of the music’s crucial connections to the Mexican figure of the cowboy, working-class rancho culture, the former Mexican territories that constitute the American Southwest, and—in country’s patriotic songs—their love for both their American and Mexican cultures and identities.

While the roughly equivalent genre in Mexico might be called by a different name, "ranchero" for example, a similar populist form of music certainly exists. Canada is also mentioned, mainly for its indigenous contributions, but the existence of several kinds of equivalent musics in Canada isn't really acknowledged. These include, yes, "country music" but also "old-time" music and various regional forms. So I guess the obvious answers to the title questions are "no" and "no."

* * *

This is a question we have pondered here: ‘Anything is possible’: why Iceland has become a classical music powerhouse.

Student musicians in Iceland often find themselves crossing genre boundaries by necessity. There’s only one institution in the capital where you can study music to degree level, thrusting students of varied outlooks together. This eroding of musical silos has produced countless indefinable artists, including Hildur Guðnadóttir who became the first female composer to win an Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe in the same season. It was for her score to the film Joker – a cello concerto in disguise. A cellist, singer, producer and composer, Guðnadóttir works across metal, electronica, classical and film music.

What really boggles me is that Iceland has a population about the same as the capital city of British Columbia, Victoria, where I lived and taught for over a decade. No energetic aesthetic ferment there, I can tell you! And then there is Finland...

* * *

Does this worry anyone: It’s Their Content, You’re Just Licensing it

Amid recent debates over several publishers’ removal of potentially offensive material from the work of popular 20th-century authors — including Roald Dahl, R.L. Stine and Agatha Christie — is a less discussed but no less thorny question about the method of the revisions. For some e-book owners, the changes appeared as if made by a book thief in the night: quietly and with no clear evidence of a disturbance.

For those who use a music streaming service, isn't this much like a different arrangement of a song being substituted? Say, a version of Across the Universe without all the Phil Specter strings? Or a performance of Bach on modern instead of original instruments. Or even an arrangement of a piano piece by Prokofiev with some of the dissonances removed? Sound ridiculous? Well, a few years ago the idea of Agatha Christie being surreptitiously censored would also have seemed ridiculous.

* * *

On an Overgrown Path talks about Bach: Bach to basics.

One of the many downsides of our clickbait obsessed culture is the neglect of not very clickbait-able J S Bach. To compensate for that in a very small way this post highlights some old and new, straight and not so straight, recordings of Bach's music that have given me particular pleasure recently.

Check it out.

* * *

Here is a beautiful example of how to mess up by asking the wrong question: In the architecture of the mind, where lies human imagination?

Though there are many theories about the place of imagination in cognitive architecture, two are worth mentioning here, not least because all others can be traced to them. On the one hand, in their book Mindreading (2003), Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich argue that some components of our cognitive architecture are dedicated to imagination. For them, imagination is a distinct mental ability like belief and desire, and since those each have cognitive equipment dedicated to them in cognitive architecture, so too does imagination. With such dedicated equipment, we can explain how imagination is used for different ends. For instance, we can explain how imagination can be a source of knowledge, even though it is typically taken to be fantastical in nature. We can say that the imagination-equipment is connected to the belief-equipment such that, by leveraging that connection, imagination can be constrained, thereby leading us to knowledge. After all, being constrained is what distinguishes knowledge from fantasy. While you can fantasise about wildly improbable things, you can’t know wildly improbable things. Put simply, we can explain the epistemic uses of imagination.

Or being too quick to make an assumption. I've recently been watching this video:

Which deals with the interesting question, is everything that exists physical? And the answer is, most likely not. On the list of things that are not physical are consciousness, belief, imagination and so on. So, nope, you're not going to find the "structure" of imagination in the brain. I await your cards and letters!

* * *

Steve Reich Looks Back on the Musical Revolution He Helped Ignite

Steve Reich isn’t crazy about the term “minimalism.” But he’s made his peace with it.

“In the early days, there was the possibility it would be called ‘trance music,’” he said. “So the name could have been worse.”

Whatever you want to call it, Reich, along with his friends and fellow composers Philip Glass and Terry Riley, created a new style of classical music in the 1960s and ’70s, one that emphasized repetition and shifting rhythmic patterns. It was a radical break from the thorny art music of the time, and it took decades for critics and scholars to accept its best works, including Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, into the canon.

 Follow the link to read the whole thing.

* * *

Once more with Gustavo where Norman Lebrecht explains how New York has such difficulty picking a conductor:

It has been 65 years since the New York Philharmonic last appointed the right conductor, so long ago that hardly anyone alive remembers it except as legend. The ensuing vacancy of imagination has meant that every well-intentioned baton since then has been held up against Leonard Bernstein’s and found wanting in every department — music, human and media. 

Bernstein was music director for a record 11 years. His successors were doomed by comparison. Pierre Boulez was too ascetic, Zubin Mehta superficial, Kurt Masur heavy weather, Lorin Maazel boring, Alan Gilbert half-baked and Jaap Van Zweden an accounting error. 

All that can be asserted right now is that New York has, for once in a lifetime, not picked the wrong baton.

Wow, talk about praising with faint damns!

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How Cold War Politics Destroyed One of the Most Popular Bands in America

 Last year, Rolling Stone compiled a list of “The 50 Worst Decisions in Music History.” Near the top, alongside very high-profile errors in judgment like Decca Records’ rejection of the Beatles, there was a much less familiar episode: the time Blood, Sweat & Tears embarked on an Eastern European concert tour, underwritten by the State Department while the Vietnam War was raging. The reputation of the U.S. government was in tatters for young people, meaning the band looked, as the magazine put it, like “propaganda pawns — which is, more or less, what they were.”

An interesting read.

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Here's a different envoi to start: Muddy Waters back before there were any billionaire musicians.

And of course, the Bach Easter Oratorio with the Netherlands Bach Society:

And since we haven't put up any Steve Reich for a while here is Music for 18 Musicians, still one of his most influential pieces. Performance by a French ensemble:

Taruskin on Van Cliburn

I'm still working my way through the new Taruskin collection Musical Lives and Times Examined, now over halfway. I just finished a short piece, a review of Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story--How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War by Nigel Cliff. Just looking at that title you can guess that Taruskin is going to have a lot to say about that "Cold War." But he usually delivers much more than one expects and does so here. He provides a well-founded estimate of both Cliburn's strengths (by training he was as close as an American could get to being a Russian pianist) and weaknesses (the pressures of his unique career turned him into a "flesh and blood juke box"). But even better than that, in a couple of paragraphs he discerns the landscape of classical music in society since the 60s:

The strongest reaction I felt while reading this book was a pang of recognition that classical music is no longer seen, even fatuously, as an arena for national policy. It no longer represents nations, only (often rapacious) elites. That, rather than the end of superpower competition, is the big change that Cliburn's decline symbolizes. He was indeed a significant figure, and worthy of a book that says so, but Cliff puts him in the wrong context. He was the protagonist--or perhaps, more accurately, the figurehead--of the moment when classical music enjoyed a pinnacle of popularity and prestige from which it would plummet almost immediately. The sixties were the decade in which, as sociologists have shown and sought to explain, big changes in musical taste and consumption patterns, reflecting changes in demography and social attitudes, caused classical music to return to its tiny social niche after a couple of decades of pumped-up status vouchsafed by the New Deal and the touting of middlebrow culture.

Educated people, who until the 1960s habitually "graduated" from popular music to genres with higher social status--classical, jazz, coffeehouse "folk"--upon entering college, began retaining their popular music allegiances into adulthood, as they still do. Since then, no classical musician who was not already popular in the 1950s (perhaps only Leonard Bernstein besides Cliburn) has figured as a mass cultural or political icon, and such icons as still existed were worshiped nostalgically, by aging fans. [Taruskin, op. cit. p. 317]

Which rather makes me realize how out of step I have been, my entire career. In the 1960s I was a big fan of The Beatles and other popular music, but around 1969 I stumbled across classical music--not for any sociological or demographic reasons, but simply because the music affected me more intensely and in many more different ways than popular music. And I have basically stayed the course on that for my whole life. Yes, I guess I do feel I occupy a tiny social niche, but it is certainly not one with any elite status whatsoever let alone a "rapacious" one. I retain the tiny social hope that some of my compositions might reach others trapped in their tiny social niche!

Just a personal note: this week I had a video conference call with the string quartet in Vancouver who will be premiering my new quartet in May. They had a lot of questions about the second movement. Here is part of the score so you can see the problem:

Click to enlarge

This is in moment form, but there are a lot of different ways of skinning that cat. Interestingly, moment form dates from a piece by Stockhausen called Momente that was composed between 1962 and 1969. I probably read about it in a history of 20th century music sometime in the early 70s and I certainly heard some student composer versions between 1971 and 1973. I encountered moment form as a performer around 1980 in a piece for flute and guitar by Anthony Genge. Here is that piece:

The score consists of three pages, each of which is a "movement." The top half of each page has a number of "moments" for the flute and the bottom half the same for the guitar. You play the moments in any order. Some consist of rests. Around that time I wrote my first piece in moment form, organized more as a flow-chart. The moments were arranged in a stream, connected by lines and the conductor signaled which performers were to play which level. The piece was for guitar orchestra. Here is a performance of that work:

My piece Dark Dream for violin and guitar has a brief section in moment form which is structured like Night Rain. In the string quartet, the players start, either in the center or at the periphery and follow the spiral to the other end. Then you can go back, if you wish. There is considerable room for improvisation as each moment is like a kernel or seed that can be expanded on. As I said to the quartet the other day, the cool thing about this piece is that, as of this moment, there is absolutely no performance practice tradition, so we get to invent one.

They looked at me a bit wide-eyed after that...