Beautiful British Columbia

The title, by the way, comes right off the license plates: that's the motto of BC and it is entirely appropriate. They chose that over "obsessed with health foods" and "socialized medicine no matter how long the waiting list is!" Oh, sorry, that was my acerbic side sneaking out again. No more, I promise!

Today I knocked a couple of items off my bucket list: I visited a Wendy's for the first time in twenty-some years, and did some sightseeing in a nearby park. Wendy's, for those of you joining us from far-flung lands, is the finest fast-food hamburger joint in Canada. It doesn't quite come up to the standard of Five Guys in the US, but still pretty good. The hamburger patties are square and not frozen and they actually taste like freshly cooked hamburger patties. Excellent crispy fries as well. Alas, no Wendy's in Mexico that I know of...

Then I took a trip to the nearest park, Capilano River Regional Park, where the Cleveland Dam is located and a very large reservoir serving the drinking water needs of Vancouver. Here is a panorama:

You always know where north is in Vancouver, because that's where the mountains are. On the north side of the city of Vancouver is Stanley Park, one thousand acres of pretty much untouched forest except around the edges. In most places those trees would be considered large, but here, this is what grows anywhere humans haven't cleared the land:

That's what, twenty, twenty-five meters? Just an ordinary tree you see everywhere. The LARGE trees are found in the old forests and I have seen ones where the trunk is five meters in diameter and the tree is one hundred meters tall!

UPDATE: One of those big trees:

Desultory Observations

 I do have an acerbic, critical side and if I were to let it out for a moment, possibly with this facial expression:

I might make some further comments about my trip to Vancouver.

• I encountered a new kind of cuisine a few times that I will call "bullshit cuisine" defined as the kind that focusses on the presentation and "healthy" aspects to the exclusion of things like good preparation and flavour. I think the exemplar of this was the ridiculously over-priced room-service breakfast I had at the ridiculously over-priced hotel in Victoria. The presentation was impeccable:  large tray with flower vase and flower. elegant cutlery and napkin with a glass of excellent grapefruit juice (no complaint there), a mug of so-so latte, a serving of Belgian waffles that were overcooked, tasteless and dry, but looked great with berries scattered over top and finally, and most hideously, two oversized "breakfast sausages" that never resembled any sausage I have ever had. Extraordinarily firm, if not actually tough, brownish-tan in color and nearly tasteless. I had the feeling that they were concocted from some blend of overcooked chicken breast and tofu. Inedible. The day before I had a similar brunch. This was called an "oatmeal buttermilk pancake" and indeed there was just one, a large very flat pancake resembling a particularly unsuccessful pita with some blueberry compote smeared in the middle and dollops of whipped butter here and there. It didn't taste bad exactly, it just did not resemble any pancake I have ever had due to its stolid, chewy texture. Oh, and this was accompanied by a sausage as well, a greenish cylinder, also very chewy with no discernible flavor, or not one you would wish to taste, at least.
• My theory about these travesties is that this is another instance of the triumph of progressivism over common sense. The traditional tasty dishes all must be replaced with ones we will feel more comfortable eating for "health" reasons. They might still look ok, though a lot greener and more rustic than they used to, but they must not have the fluffy scrumptious textures of the past. No, they must be chewy and resistant so that we can feel virtuous in their consumption. Like so much these days, it is really just another form of bullshit.
• One neat thing about a highly developed nation like Canada is that you have interesting and diverse travel options by which I am referring to the seaplane I took from Vancouver harbour to Victoria harbour saving many hours of travel time I just didn't have. This was a De Havilland Otter, upgraded to a turboprop. It is just slightly disconcerting to realize that the company went defunct in 1963 so all these well-maintained aircraft are rather elderly.

• While in my hotel room I subjected myself to an hour or so of Canadian news broadcasting on the Global, CTV and CBC networks. One might expect a bit of diversity from these three networks, one an upstart, another a venerable private network and the last the government-subsidized one. But no, everything was highly filtered and staged to present a very specific narrative about our world. I won't offer my interpretation of it, but I will say that I then went to the BBC and it was even worse, insufferably so. I guess I would call this "bullshit news narrative." Whether you agree with my point of view or not--which I am not going to share with you--wouldn't you at least be able to agree that all this stuff bears very, very little resemblance to reality?
• My old friend who came over to Vancouver from Victoria specifically to record the last concert was one of the most delightful aspects of the trip. Since retiring from the symphony where he was principle flute, he has taken up the vocation of recording. Due to modern technology, this is a lot easier than it used to be, though it still involves the careful coiling of a lot of cables afterward. High-tech microphones and recording apparatus means he was able to set it up, hit "record" and then just join us in the audience. He has already sent me the edited product which I won't listen to until I get home and can listen to on some good speakers.
• The natural beauty of coastal British Columbia is just stunning and the good citizens are doing their best to preserve it. That is a big plus.
• I am really delighted with how this trip has turned out. The quartet got better and better and the final concert was excellent and I believe we got an excellent recording. Lots of people had good things to say about the music and I was so happy to re-connect with people I hadn't seen for a long time. In my final three days I am going to have a little vacation starting today with a dim sum brunch with some family. Tomorrow I am going to visit a spectacular park and the day after I am heading to the Granville Island Market, a very hip shopping destination. Souvenirs!

A Sunday Free-Ranging Miscellanea

Yesterday afternoon was the last of the three concerts premiering my String Quartet No. 2 "Landscapes." Yes, I've decided to append that nickname officially to the quartet. It was an excellent finale to the series as it was in, by far, the best space acoustically--a large church hall with a glorious high wood ceiling. Also, my old friend Richard Volet was there to capture the performance in a recording that I will undoubtedly share with you in the coming weeks. The Pro Nova Ensemble were very comfortable with the piece by this point and gave a very fine performance and I gave my best impromptu introduction. So a good time was had by all and we retired to a White Spot for lunch afterwards.

For today, let me just share a few photos I have taken in the last few days.

Introducing the piece before the second concert

With the Pro Nova Ensemble at the second concert (in West Vancouver on the water)

Flying over the Gulf Islands on the way to Victoria in the seaplane

One of the BC Ferries that travel to the Island every hour (and hold 500 cars)

Acknowledging applause at the last concert in Burnaby

A successful concert!

Friday Miscellanea

I have to prepare this miscellanea ahead of time as well, as Friday is another travel day for me. Friday morning I fly the little inter-harbour seaplane from Vancouver to Victoria, flight time 35 minutes. Then Saturday morning early I fly back in time to attend the last concert at 2 pm. The usual way to go from Vancouver, the largest city in British Columbia, located on the mainland, to Victoria, the second largest city and capitol located on Vancouver Island, is by car ferry. These travel every hour from harbours located quite a ways from the city centres so not very convenient if you have limited time as the whole trip takes about three and a half hours. The inner city harbour to harbour flights are more expensive, of course, but way more convenient. I'm looking forward to it because I haven't used the service before. Here is a screenshot of one of their planes:

I'll probably be able to get some nice shots during the trip from the air. Lots of charming islands between Vancouver Island and the mainland.

On with the miscellanea! The New York Times reviews a new six-hour opera: Review: ‘Stranger Love’ Reflects the L.A. Philharmonic at Its Finest

“Stranger Love” is a six-hour, durational opera, an earnest exercise in deep feeling that takes sensations and stretches them from the personal to the cosmic, and goes big in a time when contemporary music tends to go small. It requires the kind of pipe-dream planning that many institutions shy away from, but that has been characteristic of the Philharmonic.

Here is an excerpt:

You can't tell too much from that except for the overwhelming influence of Philip Glass and the fact that I was just about to kill myself by the end of the clip...

* * *

 Adam Kirsch talks about opera and sex in The Paris Review: Faust and the Risk of Desire

Like Violetta and Alfredo in La traviata and Don Giovanni and Donna Elvira in Mozart’s opera, Faust and Marguerite helped me begin to understand things about love and sex that were still remote from my experience. In many ways, of course, these works were products of an alien culture: no one in my world associated sex with sin, as Marguerite does. But for that very reason, opera had more to teach me about the riskiness and perversity of desire than did Madonna and George Michael, who sold transgression on the radio. Thirty years later, I’m still perpetually surprised by the boldness of an art often thought of, by people who don’t listen to it, as old-fashioned.

* * *

I once forgot my guitar in a restaurant in Montreal--luckily I noticed just a few meters down the street and rushed back to retrieve it! This violinist was not so lucky: STAR SOLOIST LOSES VIOLIN ON GERMAN TRAIN

The Berliner Zeitung reports that a 17th century violin ‘worth more than 100,000 euros’ was stolen on a Berlin-to-Stuttgart ICE train together with two bows.

The incident happened on Friday. ‘When the 59-year-old got off at Stuttgart Central Station, she forgot her violin case and its contents on the train. The woman only noticed the loss when the ICE was already on its way back to Berlin. The police assume that an unknown perpetrator stole the violin case during this trip.’

* * *

In Classical Crescendo even Maureen Dowd is talking about sex and music:

As we discuss which musical genres are expiring — Is rock ’n’ roll dead, as Jann Wenner told me? Is jazz fading away? — it seems that classical music is getting hotter.

Albert Imperato, a New York music promoter, says the idea is breaking through that classical music is not supposed to be safe and relaxing. It’s supposed to tingle.

I think it was always supposed to tingle. But read the whole thing.

* * *

 Some good news: Audiences Are Coming Back to Orchestras After ‘Scary’ Sales Last Fall

Before the pandemic, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra had been averaging houses just over 70 percent. But in fall, said Melia Tourangeau, its chief executive, “we were happy, we were jumping up and down, if we got above 1,000” — about 37 percent of the 2,700-seat Heinz Hall. “It was very visible, and very scary.”

In Dallas, said Kim Notelmy, that ensemble’s leader: “We remained hopeful because we felt people were interested. But we weren’t seeing it translate into ticket sales.”

But then a turnaround appeared most everywhere, which many leaders ascribed to an easing of lingering health concerns around the pandemic, particularly among older segments of the audience.

“It seemed like a switch flipped right before Thanksgiving,” said Jeff Alexander, of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

* * *

The Wall Street Journal weighs in on the economic aspects of music: Taylor Swift’s Tour Is Wreaking Havoc on Ticket Reselling

Dollar sales for Taylor Swift’s tour this year are seven times that of Bruce Springsteen, eight times Morgan Wallen and Coldplay, nine times Adele and Beyoncé, and 13 times what this year’s Super Bowl did, according to StubHub.

And just for perspective, about 10.5 million times that of box office for my concerts. Just in case you were wondering!

* * * 

Pfitzner’s end is an essay on a musical conservative:

Pfitzner, in other words, shared the Burkean belief that what already exists must exist for a reason and shouldn’t be lightly discarded in favor of an abstract freedom. “That the nature of music has been grossly misunderstood for four hundred years,” he writes, “I will only believe if I am shown just the glimmer of something positive, something more beautiful . . . than music has produced so far.”

* * * 

John McWhorter in Is Musicology Racist? weighs in on the new book by Philip Ewell. Read the whole thing, but here are the concluding paragraphs:

There are surely reasoned debates one could have about Ewell’s various recommendations, but it is disturbing that they so often entail a relaxing of standards without presenting new challenges other than those that decentering whiteness might entail. Getting a musicology master’s or Ph.D. in Ewell’s world would be a lot easier: no need to play piano (or apparently, any instrument), no need to learn foreign languages, no need to take standardized tests or submit to anonymous peer reviews (two additional targets of Ewell’s) and so on. Ewell answers thus: “If someone says that enacting any of my recommendations represents a ‘lowering of standards,’ push back against that language. Usually a lowering of standards is code for becoming less white and less male.” He does not explain why his ideas do not involve a lowering of standards; he merely dismisses such standards as racist “code.”

The assumption, then, is that the “whiteness” or “maleness” of any given proposition must automatically be a mere power play rather than a reasoned aesthetic or logical conclusion. And that elicits a question we’re not supposed to ask: What if, where classical music is concerned, white people, in all of their perfidies otherwise, got something right? And I mean so right that all those trained in the close study of music should be familiar with it? Black people got it right with syncopation as default, with blue notes and, especially in Africa, with complex rhythm. All of these elements deeply season our modern musical experience. But Beethoven’s Seventh is just, in Ewell’s telling, white stuff? In a blog post, Ewell dismissed the composer as merely “above average” and fetishized by the white establishment.

* * *

Let's have a brief excerpt from Gounod's Faust:

 

And some Offenbach by Fatma Said and Marianne Crebassa:

Here is the Prelude to Act 1 of Pfitzner's opera Palestrina:

What I Love About Canada

I like to do some commentary about the place when I go on these music-related junkets. In this case, I am back in British Columbia, Vancouver to be exact, after a long hiatus: the last time I was here was in 2005. After twenty-five years in Mexico, Canada feels a bit like a foreign country, but one I used to know very well. So what do I love about Canada?

Ok, the climate is not as nice as Mexico, but the air is fresh and clean and everything, I mean everything, is green. This is a gardener's paradise. Here is where I am staying, taken from the front. There is a house back there somewhere:

Canadian corner stores like 7/11 have every form of junk food known to man--and I mean the good stuff like Hawkins Cheezies, the finest cheese-flavoured corn snack food. Not to mention Aero bars, especially the peppermint ones. A plethora of Reese's confections, O Henry bars, Creamsicles. I could go on! This was the great failing of Austria in my opinion: no places to buy junk food. Of course, Austrians tend to ride bikes a lot and look to be in shape so these things may be related.

I have had AirBnb rentals in four different countries, Austria, Spain, Germany and Quebec but this is the best appointed of them all. The host stocked the kitchen with everything: bread and jam, milk, mayonnaise, mustard, balsamic vinegar, four kinds of tea, several blends of coffee for the Nespresso machine plus ground coffee for the coffee maker. Lots of towels, shampoo, bath gel, blankets and more blankets, extra garbage bags. In a word, absolutely everything! She even lent me a computer chair to save my back.

Canadians are very polite and there are some really fine restaurants. Chinese food! Seafood! It is a fine and prosperous developed country.

But there are some oddities if you have been away a while. Walking down the street in a quiet residential neighborhood you do not say hello to someone passing by. No. In Mexico you always would. You have to own a car here, no real alternative. Things are really expensive which I attribute to the invisible high rate of taxation built into every price.

I will do a post on the concerts after they are complete, but I just wanted to make a brief comment on where I am.

From Vancouver

I'm in Vancouver and my String Quartet No. 2, which should probably be nicknamed "Landscapes," will be premiered tonight in a concert in North Vancouver. Getting here was a bit of a mess, though. Flying to either Canada or Europe I always fly out of Mexico City because there are direct flights avoiding having to travel via the US. It is just a five hour flight to Vancouver so I anticipated an easy travel day. Alas! or as they say in some Italian madrigals "Ohimè!" Normally it is about a three and a half hour drive from where I live to Mexico City. My flight was at 9am so I arranged for my driver to pick me up at 3am which should have put us at the airport two and a half hours before the flight--plenty of time. This has always worked before, but this time we were very unlucky! Just minutes into the drive we ran into the first obstacle. Our lane was blocked by some transit officials to allow passage of an oversize semitrailer with a huge machine on it. No big deal, it just put us ten minutes behind schedule. But this was just a harbinger. We were taking the main north/south highway and about an hour into our journey we ran into a serious traffic jam. Surrounded by trucks and semis we ground to a halt and did no more than inch along for the next two hours. The end of the tale is that I missed my flight by about 20 minutes. This was the only time in my life I have ever missed a flight except for thirty years ago when I actually got the day wrong!

So I had to go to the Aeromexico office where the worst offenders are handled. The bad news was the next flight was at 1 am Saturday morning, getting into Vancouver about 6am. Ok, I was still going to make the dress rehearsal at the cost of a night's sleep. The worse news was that I had to buy a whole new ticket, not just for this leg, but for the return flight as well. The policy was that if you miss one leg of a return ticket, you lose the whole thing. Airlines are a lot less forgiving than they used to be.

Stuck with having to spend the whole day with nothing to do I got a hotel room and had a nap. The flight was fine and the weather in Vancouver was lovely and sunny when I landed. I got to my AirBnb and had another nap! Speaking of, I have now used AirBnb apartments in four different countries (Spain, Austria, Germany and Canada) and in every case the experience was excellent. Here is the living room and garden of the apartment I am currently staying at:

The apartment has everything you need and the host even stocked the kitchen with essentials. While hotels have many advantages, booking an apartment through Airbnb is definitely the solution for economical longer stays.

In the afternoon I attended the last rehearsal of the quartet for the concert tonight. The ensemble is the Pro Nova Ensemble and here is their website: http://www.pronova.ca. The members are Shin-Jung Nam (cello), Ju Dee Ang (violin), Barbara Irschick (viola), Hyunsil Lucia Roh (violin). In this photo they are, from left to right, Lucia, Barbara, Shin-Jung and Ju Dee.

We will be recording the last concert so I will post that later on. It was immensely enjoyable finally hearing the piece. I think I was able to make some good suggestions. I wrote this using my music software with its playback capabilities and while that is enormously useful, I am convinced that pencil, eraser and paper is the best way to work until the piece is pretty much in its final form. I wrote most of this music three years ago before Covid hit and caused concerts to be cancelled. I completely re-wrote the first movement this year and it is much better as a result. The quartet players seem to be having fun with the piece, especially the last movement, and I will talk more about it when I post the recording.

Friday Miscellanea

I have to write this ahead of time because I will be traveling all day Friday. And it's likely to be skimpy as a result. The bonus is I will be in Vancouver next week attending the premiere of my second string quartet. There might be photos and later on, a recording.

In Escaping Netflix, the On An Overgrown Path blog reviews a documentary about Alma Mahler:

That is Alma Mahler in the photo. In July 1940 she fled from unoccupied Marseille in France across the Pyrenees to neutral Spain in an escape masterminded by American Varian Fry's Emergency Rescue Committee. She escaped with the Czech writer Franz Werfel , and in her luggage were several Mahler manuscripts, among them Das Lied von der Erde and the the score of the first three movements of Bruckner's Third Symphony. 

Netflix docudramas are not my thing. But I watched the first episode of the strangely titled Transatlantic as I am familiar with the story of Varian Fry on which the series is very, very, very loosely based. I will say no more about Transatlantic, except that I won't be watching the other five episodes.

* * *

Yannick Nézet-Séguin Condemns Cell Phone Use in Concerts:

Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin has expressed his frustration with cell phones interrupting orchestral concerts, after ringtones have ruined delicate musical moments twice in as many weeks.

Nézet-Séguin and the orchestra were about one minute into the devotional third movement of Bruckner's Symphony No. 9, when a cell phone rang — breaking the orchestra's focus and the audience's absorption. Nézet-Séguin then began the movement again, only for the same thing to happen at about the same part of the music.

Frustrated, he then turned to address the audience, asking "Can we live without the phone for just one damn hour?"

A few years ago there were a flurry of these kinds of incidents, but then it seemed to go away. In retrospect that was probably due to most concerts also going away during the Covid hiatus.

* * *

And Wenatchee the Hatchet weighs in on the new Philip Ewell book: Don Baton reviewed Phil Ewell's book and this hobbyist composer considers a few things about arguments made and not made about tonal, racial and cognitive hierarchical appeals

It's been hard to shake a sense that Baton's main interest was dismissing Ewell's conflation of hierarchical taxonomies in Schenkerian thought as unproven when a more robust counter-argument would be to point that however Schenker's views may have reflected taxonomies of racial and tonal hierarchies this is not necessarily where the theory and interpretive historical use of the theory has stayed on the one hand and, on the other, that research into cognition and the relationships between the senses and the brain suggest that hierarchical information sifting and interpretive patterns are built in to how humans see and hear. Writing music that keeps these aspects of humanity in mind can respect that memory works in hierarchical ways without being implicitly or explicitly as racist as Heinrich Schenker was.

* * *

Alex Ross comes up with another interesting essay: Yo-Yo Ma Goes Underground with the Louisville Orchestra

In 1948, the Louisville Orchestra, which had been founded eleven years earlier, was in financial crisis. Farnsley, who had audited classes with the émigré Jewish-German musicologist Gerhard Herz, at the University of Louisville, offered a radical suggestion: Why not use some of the money that had been slated for celebrity soloists to instead commission new works? Supporting composers, Farnsley said, would be “a much greater, more lasting service to music.” More practically, he believed that such a policy would attract national press and boost the city’s profile. He even spoke of establishing a record label, which, he thought, would drum up revenue. Robert Whitney, the orchestra’s gifted and furiously hardworking young music director, endorsed the plan, although he wondered whether the audience would be able to keep up with Farnsley’s enthusiasms. The mayor, one associate reported, “doesn’t like any music that was written before 1920.”

Thus began the Louisville revolution, which riveted the classical world in the nineteen-fifties.

My good friend and colleague Paul Kling had a stint as concertmaster in Louisville.

* * *

The (classical) Empire Strikes Back: Turbocharge philanthropy, conga to Beethoven, ditch the ukuleles: 10 ways to save classical music

6. Nurture the grassroots, from choirs to brass bands

Growing up in Cumbria, opportunities to experience live music weren’t ample but I picked up the saxophone at the Barracudas Carnival Arts Centre aged seven and I was hooked. It was a place that embraced anyone who wanted to be part of dance, music or stilt-walking. Music is a living, breathing art form and, often, once experienced never forgotten. Letting young people be the music is often an ideal starting point.As with sport, the ecosystem of our community relies on music being supported at every level – from local choirs and county orchestras to symphony orchestras and brass bands. In a fragmented world, we need these musical spaces to allow communities to come together with a shared mission and so nurture the audiences of tomorrow. Jess Gillam, saxophonist and broadcaster

* * *

Inspired by a review by Richard Taruskin, here are some very different performances of Bach's Sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord. First the early music version with Anner Bylsma and Bob van Asperen.

Next the contrapuntalist analytical version with Glenn Gould and Leonard Rose. The G minor sonata for comparison starts at the 28:29 mark:

 Finally a recording with Misha Maisky and Martha Argerich:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiYMANrp6-s

Tendonitis

I'm tagging this "guitar technique" because I don't have a "music and health" tag. Yesterday I was diagnosed with tendonitis. I have played guitar for over fifty years and never had a problem, but now I do. The irony is that for quite a few years now I have been the guy professional guitarists come to when they have a problem with tension, technique or tendonitis. I have been fairly successful in helping with these kinds of problems. I even wrote a book on guitar technique. So how did I come down with tendonitis at my advanced age, especially since I retired from my performing career a long time ago? I only ever had one student with a tendonitis problem in many years of teaching.

Here is the context: last fall, for the first time in several years, I gave a mini-concert for a private audience. I played a short program of music from Milan to Rodrigo. Preparing for the program I dropped a piece by Moreno Torroba because I found that my bar chord technique was not up to it. I do daily technique just to keep a minimal amount of technique, but my index finger was not strong enough for some bar chords. So I did three things: I replaced the Torroba with a piece by Rodrigo that did not have awkward bar chords, I switched from hard tension to medium tension strings and I instituted a set of bar chord exercises that I practiced every morning. After a few months I had restored my bar chord technique. But I noticed that I had developed some tenderness in my elbow, so I stopped those exercises hoping the tenderness would go away. A couple of weeks later I was making a pan sauce in a heavy cast-iron pan and holding the pan at a steep angle to pour out the sauce when suddenly I got a very sharp pain in my elbow--it almost felt as if something had given way. Agh! Now I have a serious case of tendonitis which is an inflammation of a tendon.

I emailed my doctor and she sent an ultrasound technician to my house to take pictures of my elbow. A couple of days later I visited her in her office where she prescribed an anti-inflammatory, a cream, and a muscle relaxant. While in her office she had an orthopedic surgeon pop in just to have a look at my elbow and confirm the diagnosis. Also, Monday, a physiotherapist is going to come by my house and show me an exercise for my arm. No permanent damage and I should be back to normal in a few weeks.

If this range of services sounds weird or implausible, especially the home visits, I should tell you that this is private medicine in Mexico which is actually very reasonable. My doctor heads up a team that offers emergency and radiological services, home services, x-rays, ultrasound, nursing care, laboratory studies and so on. They even have their own ambulance. The orthopedic surgeon who dropped by is a member of the team.

Anyway, I will keep you posted on my recovery! Here is the piece by Rodrigo I swapped in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvNNaUXkHp4

Friday Miscellanea

Salzburg 1922

City Journal has a review of a new book by Philip Ewell: Ewelldämmerung. The book is On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone, by Philip Ewell (University of Michigan Press, 332 pp., $85). As you might guess, it is not a favorable review.

Some arguments are best suited for t-shirts, not books: any attempt to expand on them weakens them. Rarely is this phenomenon displayed more starkly than in Philip Ewell’s idea of “music theory’s white racial frame,” now stretched to book length in his recently published On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone. Over the past few years, Ewell’s verbal, tweeted, and blogged broadsides against the “whiteness” of classical music have captured some hearts and minds with their missionary zeal and father-knows-best penchant for overstatement. But now, spelled out over 275 pages, Ewell’s thesis has been revealed for what it is: a giant sieve, leaking from nearly every evidentiary and logical orifice.

I suggest reading the whole thing, for the details. Regarding Philip Ewell, it has previously been commented here that he deserves to be treated with respect, and so he does, as all scholars should. However, his arguments and assumptions should be treated with the same degree of criticism and review that any scholar's would.

* * *

Violinist Nicola Benedetti is the new director of the Edinburgh International Festival:

Now the great violinist Nicola Benedetti has added her powerful voice to the defence of an imperilled genre. “There has got to be scope for maintaining a central classical music environment, a space for Beethoven, for music like that, which should still be at the core of what people play and hear,” she said this weekend, acknowledging the onset of “the real battle” to get people to accept the greater challenge of listening to more complex sounds.

Born in West Kilbride, Ayrshire, the astonishing Benedetti led the National Children’s Orchestra of Great Britain at the age of eight. A mere eight years later, she won the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition. As an elite, skilled artist, she continues to believe that everyone can be creative, but that hard work is the only route to excellence.

Speaking to the Observer after announcing the programme for her first Edinburgh international festival as director, the Scottish virtuoso said she had to walk a careful line between keeping classical music at the heart of the event while offering variety and accessibility.

* * *

UK LAW CAN STOP YOU PLAYING ANY INSTRUMENT AT HOME

From a desperate online petition by multi-instrumentalist Fiona Fey:

Last week I was served a noise abatement notice by Lewisham Council that forbids me to play any musical instrument in my home at any time.

I am a musician, it is my job to practise.

If I do, Lewisham Council can force entry, confiscate all my instruments and fine me £5000.

This seems a tad excessive. Mind you, in Mexico, it seems not possible to prevent your neighbor from making pretty much any kind of noise...

* * *

Here is a thread about the costs and logistics of Taylor Swift's concert tour.

https://twitter.com/FreightAlley/status/1654860984714944514

* * *

The San Francisco Conservatory has been buying up music businesses:

 In October 2020, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) acquired the management company Opus 3 Artists. In May 2022, the conservatory bought the boutique Dutch record label Pentatone. And in December 2022, SFCM added the prestigious London agency Askonas Holt to its portfolio, consolidating Opus 3 under Askonas chief executive Donagh Collins. 

These acquisitions were greeted by a mix of curiosity and anxiety. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Joshua Kosman wrote that they had “prompted furious head-scratching and a flurry of questions from many observers.” In the San Francisco Classical Voice, Janos Gereben described the purchases as “a mysterious tear of unprecedented business deals.” Some commenters on SlippedDisc saw a dark conspiracy, with talk of Askonas Holt becoming “the puppet of American paymasters.” (In fairness, SlippedDisc commenters see most anything as a sign of conspiracy.) 

By purchasing the two artist management companies Opus 3 and Askonas Holt, Stull hopes mainly to give SFCM students better access to the prominent artists on these agencies’ rosters. In 2021, the conservatory completed construction of its $200 million Bowes Center, a “vertical campus” which includes performance spaces, student housing, and luxurious apartments for visiting artists. These concert venues and apartments, along with direct access to artist calendars, mean SFCM can easily slot sought-after performers in for masterclasses while they are on tour in the U.S.

* * *

Let's have a little Nicola Benedetti to start. This is the Shostakovich First Violin Concerto:

 I don't think I have ever posted the Romanian Folk Dances by Bartók and I can't think why not:

And I haven't mentioned Arthur Bliss on the blog. Here is a piece he was writing around the time he was in Salzburg.

Today's Listening

In his discussion of the "early music" approach to Beethoven performance ("lighter, less filling!") Richard Taruskin takes time to discuss one of the conductors from the so-called "Bad Old Days" and in the process explodes a few myths. Here is an example, Professor Dr. Willem Mengelberg conducting the Concergebouw in a performance of Symphony No. 1 in 1938:

 

Where is the Bach Chaconne?

At first glance this seems like the kind of nonsensical question only a philosopher would ask. The obvious answer is, well, uh, of course it's... Well, it has to be in the Bach Museum in Leipzig, right? Or the Bach Archive, wherever that is? The philosopher would answer, no, that's actually the score, or one copy of the score--the autograph score that is, (unless it is in the hand of Ana Magdalena Bach who actually wrote a lot of the fair copies we have):

Click to enlarge

So that's it, the Chaconne by Bach, even though the name is spelled "Ciaccona" here, is carefully stored away in an archive somewhere, probably in Leipzig. Now, mind you, if you show up at their door and ask to see it they might get all Teutonic on you and ask for the "correct name" which is actually the Partita No. 2 in D minor for violin solo, BWV 1004 (from the original Bach catalogue number). So when you have it in your hands you will have that special feeling you only get when you have found a particular piece of music. Right? Oh, not right? Because this is just a few scraps of paper, not an actual, you know, piece of music. Music, last I heard, was sound (most of the time). So what we have been going with so far is the theory that a piece of music is the earliest autograph score. But that doesn't quite work, does it?

We need another theory. This one, slightly more subtle, says that the original autograph copy of the score is just a plan or instructions for performance, it is not an actual performance. So what we really need is a performance of the Chaconne. But by whom? By the violinist who may have given the first performance, in Köthen in 1720, Johann Georg Pisendel or someone else? Sadly, no recordings available! Something more modern? By Jascha Heifetz? or on Baroque violin by Rachel Podger? Andrés Segovia on guitar? Maybe a performance of the Brahms or Busoni transcriptions on piano? Jean Rondeau or Gustav Leonhardt on harpsichord? Where is the Chaconne?!

Sadly, that theory, that the actual Chaconne is instantiated in performances might cause some confusion as well. Which performances? Any performances? Even bad ones that miss a lot of notes and are profoundly unmusical as well? Maybe not! Perhaps the work only really exists in whatever the first performance was, in which case, not only will we have no knowledge of the Chaconne, but also of most other music.

The correct answer may be found in a book by a Polish philosopher, Roman Ingarden, who devoted a whole book to the question: The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity. Hat tip to Richard Taruskin who summarized all this in his essay "The New Antiquity" in Text and Act, p. 206.

Rejecting score because of its lack of specificity and performance because of its excessive contingency, he characterizes the musical work ... as a "purely intentional object," using the word intentional in the highly specialized sense adopted by phenomenologists for whom it denotes something that can exist only in thought (for in understanding). Such thinking about a piece of music does depend on the prior existence of score or performance or both, but the piece cannot be wholly identified with either. The score is a plan for the work and the performance an instance of it, but the work as such is a mental construct only.

This harks me back to a performance I heard of one of the Janáček string quartets, which one I forget, by a quartet in a summer festival performance. I was chatting with the first violin afterwards, we both taught at the same conservatory, and he suddenly blurted out, "do you know the piece?" That might seem an odd question as I had just listened to him play it, but less so if you understand that a piece of music is a purely intentional object. I had a recording of the piece at home and, yes, I had just heard it performed, but he was talking about a specific harmony so what he was really asking was, had I studied the score. And the answer was no.

To know a piece actually means to have some understanding of it. To not only have seen and studied the score but also to understand what it means. Even listening to a piece of music with no understanding of harmony or structure means, you probably don't actually know it. Ontology and epistemology have a subtle relationship when it comes to music.

I've been playing, or trying to, the Bach Chaconne for some fifty years, so I have a vague sort-of understanding of it!

I heard Daniil Trifinov play the Brahms version for the left hand in Salzburg a couple of years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljb5MvKv0Hw

You might point out that this problem no longer exists, because now we have perfect first performances in the form of, for example, the Beatles' Abby Road recordings where the songs actually, from the time of Rubber Soul on, were composed and performed in the studio and we have those performances. Well, that argument was looking pretty good, at least for that repertoire, but now the question is going to come up, what is the most authentic? The original vinyl? The CD reissue? But what mastering? The latest? And will there be no more perfect remastering? No, I'm afraid that, even when it comes to a Beatles' song, a piece of music is still a purely intentional object. It's all in your head.

  

Today's Watching

Blogger The New Neo has a special expertise in dance so it is a pleasure to read her thoughts on Petrouchka by Stravinsky, the second of his ballets for the Ballets Russes.

Watching Petrouchka

Michel Fokine’s ballet “Petrouchka,” created in 1911, is one I’ve seen many times. But perhaps I’ll never see it again, because I have a feeling it’s pretty much banned now. I’m virtually certain that one of its puppet characters, the Moor, would be considered irredeemably racist today.

The music is my favorite Stravinsky composition by far. The Fokine choreography is surpassingly strange, and the stage is full of people much of the time, with every character doing something different and creating the impression of a village fair come to life. The costumes are wonderful, with less of an ensemble quality and more like the individual costumes worn by the actors in a play. It’s a ballet, but only three characters wear pointe shoes, and two are street entertainers and one is a puppet. There are three puppets, but they periodically escape from the confines of puppitude and take on a life of their own.

You should read the whole thing. I realize that Petrouchka is by far my favorite ballet as well.

 I stop to marvel, once again, at the astonishing creativity of Stravinsky who wrote the music for three extremely fine but extremely different ballets over the course of just a couple of years: The Firebird (1910), Petrouchka (1911) and The Rite of Spring (1913). I'm not sure he ever matched this level of creativity. Actually, I'm not sure anyone has!

Could someone please invent a time machine so we could go back and see these premieres?

Friday Miscellanea

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

― C. S. Lewis

 And on a brighter note, apparently the collapse of civilization does not have to be final: HMV's flagship Oxford Street store to reopen.

The century-old music shop chain shut its flagship store in 2019 after going into administration. It was then taken over by Sunrise Records.

It said the return to 363 Oxford Street was due to a "dramatic turnaround", with HMV returning to profit in 2022.

The store will have different branding and a new layout.

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An Imperfect Cassandra is a piece about Blair Tindall’s “Mozart in the Jungle”. I tried to watch the Prime series but gave up after fifteen minutes.

For those who had read Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music, these events also confirmed a version of Tindall that many contemporary critics pointed to in their reviews of the divisive memoir. In the New York Times, Anne Midgette noted that “the book’s biggest weakness is that it smacks of sour grapes. By writing it as an autobiography, Ms. Tindall seems to be saying that everything that went wrong in her life is the fault of the classical music world.” An unattributed review for the New Yorker conceded that the book’s critique of the American classical music industry—one that was unable to support the number of musicians it trains—“is difficult to refute,” but added that the facts and statistics Tindall weaves into her narrative are overshadowed by her stories of “sleep[ing] her way to the bottom.”

Which is possibly better than what a lot of people do: sleep their way to the middle.

* * *

 Norman Lebrecht: three cheers for Apple Classical: The apple of my ear

If you happen to need the whole of classical music on tap, this is practically it. Apple delivers 115,000 works by 20,000 composers in any number of interpretations. Search for a performer and a result pops up within a second. If the name is missing, come back next week. The database is being constantly enlarged.

By my estimation, Apple’s app has over 80 per cent of all music ever recorded for public release. It seems to contain all significant sources, from elusive Russian Melodiya to cut-price Naxos, the Primark of classical music. The only absentees are a scattering of lone-owner labels that kept their output offline in the hope the internet would go away.

* * *

 After a report that a woman had a "full-body orgasm" during an LA Philharmonic concert, Slipped Disc steps forward with a list of suggested repertoire: TEN CONCERTOS FOR ORGASM AND ORCHESTRA

* * *

Really slim pickings this week in the news. I guess we have to start our envois with the Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5, the original "orgasm symphony"

Now for something completely different, L'Arpeggiata with Dido and Aeneas by Purcell.

Here is something unusual: a modern Italian musician and composer who writes in a baroque, sort-of, style: Federico Maria Sardelli

Today's Listening

I've got a couple of unusual ones for you today. First up, the Mischa Elman Quartet that Taruskin cites as an example of how late-19th century players actually played:

To our ears the frequent portamenti just sound overdone, too much. Of course, this is why early music specialists are now setting their sights on 19th century music to adapt it as well to our modern taste. Next up an album talked about in today's New York Times: Abdul Wadud’s Cosmic Cello Music Gets Another Moment in the Sun

This leads me to mention one point Taruskin made about the nature of our modern taste: it is text-centered, hence literalistic. I can support this in my own experience. When I was making the transition, which took a couple of years, from a rock and blues guitarist to a classical guitarist there were a couple of elements. One was the shift from an aural environment where you play everything by ear, to a text oriented environment where you, basically, follow the text (though not without interpretation). While I was going through this I remember attending an evening of jazz piano which I found excessively self-indulgent. Why would I want to listen to this overlong, poorly thought-out performance? All it was, mostly, was random noodling. I was developing a love for the texts, those wonderfully mysterious books that contained an unimaginable wealth of musical ideas. So when I listen to Abdul Wadud's album, it sounds to me, mostly, like random noodling.

But lately I have been doing more random noodling of my own in connection with composing a new guitar piece: I'm trying out all sorts of things on the instrument before I write anything down. But, as a transitioned musician (heh) I do in fact write it down. Finally, let's have one of those more solid, traditional, weighty performances of Bach, done before all this music was lightened and brightened according to our latest taste. Otto Klemperer, Matthew Passion, 1961: