Of course I can't find it now, but the other day I ran across an article with quotes from a wide range of pianists all saying how it was really ok with them if the audience clapped between movements. Gyorgy Sokolov was not among those quoted I hasten to mention. Some even averred that it might be ok to clap anytime you felt the need to respond enthusiastically to a particular passage. Against all that I offer the following clip of a Victor Borge performance.
At the 20 second mark he stands up and says: "Don't you like good music? Why do you interrupt me all the time?"
This is the best long think-piece about our cultural malaise I have read in a long time: America’s pop-culture armageddon. Read the whole thing, but this is a good bit:
While the implosion of each of America’s culture industries may look different up close, it is not hard to see the common factors at work. These range from the consolidation of once-thriving industries and the monopolisation of distribution channels to the stamping-out of competition, the ongoing detachment of monopolistic conglomerates from their audiences and the pursuit of lowest-common-denominator blockbusters to pay for the resulting losses. As America’s culture industries have decayed into anti-competitive, risk-averse monopolists, they have imposed layers upon layers of mind-numbing and increasingly politicised bureaucracy on their productions that make real creativity all but impossible. Looming above all these developments is the threat of push-button culture-production driven by AI, whereby studio executives can fulfil their dystopian dreams of licensing the likenesses of dead actors and actresses and feeding them into software owned by tech conglomerates. This would dispense with the need to negotiate for the services of pesky writers, directors and actors, along with Hollywood’s century-old hodge-podge of unionised guilds.
“Period instruments.” We often associate the term with the era in which they were either invented or were in their heyday. The time warp of historical performance thus entails some cartography to recover (or discover) a period instrument’s home turf. We often must take a step back from the instruments, viewing them as foreign objects, philosophically fusing time and space to make good L.P. Bartley’s famous quote, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
But the fields of composition and contemporary performance have offered alternative paths to learning about the expressive potential of period instruments, and, intriguingly, even some historical aspects of how they were used.
“The magic of the instrument is mostly hidden,” Harden says. “I wanted to liberate the piano by more fully expressing its form, function, and usability.” For now, the Ravenchord is just a concept, but the technical drawings are done, and Harden is waiting for an investor—maybe Elton John, he says in jest—to swoop in and turn those drawings into a built prototype.
Harden is far from the first person to attempt to reinvent the instrument. The Schimmel Pegasus, for example, boasts a voluptuous body worthy of Zaha Hadid’s office. The Bogányi piano sports a cantilevered shape reminiscent of a giant Panton chair. Most of these iterations retain the DNA of a grand piano, tweaking it only at the margin. But the Ravenchord is unrecognizable—perhaps because Harden, who doesn’t play the piano, isn’t as attached to the traditional shape of the instrument as I have been since I started playing at age 7. “I don’t think that pianos are very beautiful. I think they’re awkward forms with ugly legs,” he tells me. Touché.
Follow the link for some photos of a really weird and wonderful instrument.
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Truncated? Skimpy? You're darn right it is! This is possibly the most deficient Friday Miscellanea I have ever put up except for that one that didn't even get posted on Friday. The reason is that I have been so busy this week that I didn't have any spare time to dig around for interesting items. So let's just move right on to some envois.
Here is a piece for amplified viol quartet from the second item above:
And now some Llobet played by one of our favorite commentators, Steven Watson.
Music, because of its abstract nature, offers us some interesting perspectives on social matters. For example, at the very beginning of the long series of novels about the friendship of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin there is a scene that recounts their very first meeting. They are attending a concert at the Governor's House in Port Mahon, Menorca, at the time, during the Napoleonic Wars, a possession of the British Empire. The performers, Italians, were playing a quartet by Locatelli and Jack, a passionate music-lover, became so caught up in the music that he began beating the tempo on his knee and at one point even started humming along with the cello. Alas, this was not taken kindly by his neighbor:
"a small, dark, white-faced creature in a rusty black coat – a civilian"
Aubrey was at the time a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. His neighbor, Stephen Maturin, a surgeon and natural philosopher, elbowed him in the ribs and shushed him emphatically. Both men were at a rather low point--Aubrey was awaiting a long-delayed promotion to his own command and Maturin was at the end of his resources, broke and without any employment. In the social context of the early 19th century a gentleman could not suffer a blow like that without asking satisfaction in the form of a duel. Luckily that did not come to pass as Aubrey received notification of his promotion on return to his boarding house and when he next met Maturin he greeted him with apologies for his behavior in the concert which were returned by Maturin's apologizing for his short temper. They shared a love of music and became great friends. But it could have easily gone another way. A gentleman (and all officers are gentlemen by default) must behave in a civilized manner in public and must not suffer public insults as well. These things were usually settled promptly with pistols or swords which at this point in history were not ceremonial.
A shocking video emerged on social media showing an altercation that left a TTC passenger shaken and in tears, all because they asked another rider to turn down their music.
The video shared by Instagram user brampton__wasteman shows an enraged man screaming at a female passenger, asking, "what did you say to me on the bus?," the two having apparently just exited a TTC vehicle at the corner of Sherbourne and Carlton.
“I don't know who you are,” shouts the female passenger in response. The aggressive male passenger continues yelling, repeatedly asking, "what did you say about my music?" while moving toward the retreating female in a threatening manner.
Next, the female explains that she simply asked the man to turn down his music, before the video cuts out. The clip resumes with the pair again angrily exchanging words, and the female passenger being escorted onto a streetcar as bystanders separate the two. Once safely on board the streetcar, the woman can be heard breaking down in tears.
On the one hand we can criticize the barbaric practice of dueling, but on the other hand, this incident is barbaric in an entirely different way and, to my mind, not a whit more civilized--quite the opposite. It is entirely unsafe to offer any criticism of this sort to anyone in public. In many cities you could get shot.
So, you might ask, how civilized is our contemporary society?
In the history of pop, the producer’s place is clearer. A producer serves as a shorthand for the dominant sound of a whole era: George Martin and Eddie Kramer for the “studio as a musical instrument” experiments of the late ’60s; Quincy Jones for the clinically precise grooves of ’70s and ’80s R&B; Glen Ballard for the drum-machine-and-acoustic-guitar mallscapes of ’90s adult alternative; Babyface for the smooth textures of that decade’s R&B; Max Martin for the Eurodance sheen of 2000s teen pop. Each of these sounds is curiously detachable from the music itself, and certainly from the artists who make it.
It could be said that we are living through soundless — which is to say zeitgeistless — times. Our pop stars have a curiously anonymous quality, as if they are singing from behind the disturbing animal masks on The Masked Singer, already alienated from their own music. Streaming platforms have melted down the old genre system, where each style of music could lay claim to a discrete audience segment, into a tepid, A.I.-aggregated soup.
Or, as I think of it, "industrialized music product."
It’s commonplace to note that sociopolitical upheaval and artistic experimentation often flourish side by side. But today — despite an alleged “polycrisis” — new modes of cultural production don’t seem to be emerging. Three years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent George Floyd rebellion, the arts seem stagnant and stubbornly centralized: franchise fare dominates at the box office; literary output is hampered by monopolized publishers; even the obsession with so-called nepo babies suggests a cultural bloodline without disruption. The internet, meanwhile, tends to both homogenize art and silo audiences by algorithm. We’ve begun to wonder if we’re overlooking experimental movements, or if they’re going extinct.
There are several linked articles. I have some ideas, but what do you think?
It’s our second year at the Oregon Old-Time Fiddlers’ Summer Camp, in Pleasant Hills, Oregon. About 200 of us are camped in a flat, hot field abutting a grove of Douglas Firs belonging to the rather down-at-the-heals Emerald Christian Academy. We are fearlessly lead by a motley group of instructors with a median age of somewhere between 75 and 105, judging from the stories of childhoods with no running water, lists of recent health issues combined with forgetting where the double bass is parked.
Students range from 2 years old to 80, coming from a 500 mile radius, in campers, old pickup trucks and SUV’s, carrying banjos, fiddles, basses, ukuleles and guitars. From many walks of life, I have met farmers, retired professionals, and university professors, some wearing home-made clothing, cowboy hats and boots, or cutoffs and Nirvana t-shirts. Green-haired adolescents and mothers with long braids join in ad-hoc circle jams well before and after the sun has gone down. In the evenings, after country dancing in the gym, the kids play outside while parents play their instruments around the campsites, all eventually coming back to sleep when they feel like their day is done.
This is the kind of thing my mother would have been involved with when she was alive. Read the whole thing.
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Here is yet another example of why you should not allow your guitar in checked baggage: ‘RYANAIR CHUCKED MY GUITAR’.
When I moved from Montreal I had a lot of possessions to trim down and one category was musical instruments. My mother had recently passed away so I had her collection as well as my own. I also had several computers to unload. So I put a couple of ads in the paper. The computers (and the car) disappeared in a few days. But the musical instruments, which included an electric piano, several violins, some student guitars, an antique banjo and others, just sat there. No calls. Nobody needed or wanted musical instruments. I still have that antique banjo.
If we need a score of Beethoven piano sonatas or Brahms string quartets, we might spend a while deliberating over which of the various editions to buy – many musicians will choose an ‘Urtext’ edition, which aims to present as faithfully as possible the composer’s markings; others might choose a version with more editorial suggestions, helpful fingerings and other annotations. Fortunately, these days we can generally be fairly confident that, whichever edition we end up with, the notes which Beethoven or Brahms wrote will be accurately represented.
This is not surprising as these works have been studied and performed and re-published many times which has provided numerous occasions to correct the many mistakes that certainly plagued the scores when they were first published.
In the weeks leading up to Kaleidoscope’s recordings of Florence Price’s Piano Quintet and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Nonet (both for Chandos), Tom spent many days trying to correct a vast catalogue of errors in the published editions – some were very obvious (the very first bar of the Coleridge-Taylor Nonet, a resonant F minor chord, contained notes which clearly didn’t belong to the harmony), while others needed more detailed detective work, and only became apparent as we got to know the music more intimately.
Upon realising just how many errors there seemed to be in the Price Quintet score, we contacted the library of University of Arkansas Special Collections Department, where Price’s original manuscript is held. This enabled us to spot and correct a huge number of mistakes – our errata list runs to 150 significant misprints (which we’re always happy to share with other musicians), and we’re quite sure we didn’t catch everything. The editor admitted that the score had been produced in a hurry and apologised for the errors; since then, a ‘revised and corrected’ edition has been produced by the same publisher...
This is also not surprising for the same reasons cited above. After a couple of generations of performances, all these errors (or most of them!) will be hunted down and corrected. Probably. Alas, I know of quite a few guitar editions that have had the same errors reproduced in printing after printing--and they were far from "underrepresented" composers.
An artificial intelligence company in Delaware boasted, in a press release, that it had created 100 million new songs. That’s roughly equivalent to the entire catalog of music available on Spotify.
It took thousands of years of human creativity to make the first 100 million songs. But an AI bot matched that effort in a flash.
While classical music has long been mired in high profile cases of sexual abuse, the psychological and emotional abuse experienced by many young musicians is harder to pin down and often goes under the radar – especially when it happens to impressionable music students at universities and conservatoires who feel unable to speak out against their teachers.
Along with Hollywood, film, theater, dance and other areas. I really hate to read statements like these that seem to portray classical music education as uniquely evil. It's not. Most classical music teachers are caring, hard-working (if sometimes bored) musicians who are simply trying to do the best they can for their students. And for not much pay!
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Ok, no more dreary news items. Time for some joyous envoi! Let's start with some old-time fiddle music:
Next, Segovia playing Bach:
And finally, the Piano Quintet in A minor (with the score!) by Florence Price:
Ted Gioia has succeeded in becoming perhaps the most prominent music blogger and more power to him. He is amazingly prolific, turning out a thousand or more word essay every few days and he comes up with a myriad of topics. I tend to think that when he does music history he goes wildly astray, but hey, that's just my opinion. He certainly puts all his efforts into his work.
But I find two things: one, I almost never find his essays worth reading: tl;dr to use the common abbreviation for "too long; didn't read." Yes, they are too long and what's more, they always overpromise and underdeliver, the ubiquitous failing of these hyper-promotional times. It is the YouTubeization of the world: in every discussion someone "destroys" or "obliterates" or "hammers" their opponent when really it was just a discussion. Everything is in the "top ten" of something and, my favorite, AI just wrote 100 million new songs. Uh-huh.
The other thing is that I am occasionally goaded into doing something to diverge from all this. So here it is, a little parenthetical discussion of things. That's it, no hype!
Here is what I have been reading lately, and why:
A hugely influential collection of essays by Richard Taruskin--the first, in fact. Just as valuable now as they were twenty-some years ago. They delve deeply into our modern obsessions with the sacredness of the text, i.e. the notation, and how we pretend to be historically "authentic" when we probably are not.
I've been reading Chinese poetry, mostly in the little Penguin anthologies, for many years, but have missed doing so recently. So I thought it was time. This is the longest continuous poetic tradition of any culture, extending from the Book of Songs of c. 600 BC (some of which were set for voice and guitar by Benjamin Britten) right up to the poetry of Mao Zedong, who turns out to be a surprisingly good poet. Amazed he found the time... The peak was during the Tang Dynasty (618 AD - 907 AD). One remarkable thing is how, century after century, poets write lyrics to be sung to ancient folk songs--all the music of which has been lost! Here is an example by Sun Daoxuan, an early Song Dynasty woman poet:
To the Tune of "As in a Dream"
Jumbled shadows of green banana leaves,
a moon halfway up the red railing.
Wind arrives from the turquoise sky,
blowing down like a string of singing pearls.
Invisible,
Invisible,
my lover is hidden by an emerald curtain.
Here is a very important book of ethics that I am starting to re-read:
The conventional wisdom about ethics or moral philosophy is that there are two main varieties: utilitarian ethics, based on the theories of English philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, who saw the goal of ethics as the production of the greatest amount of human well-being; and deontological ethics coming from the theories of Immanuel Kant, which based everything on duty and obligation to obey the laws of rationality. But in 1958 along came Elizabeth Anscombe who pointed out that this is all bunk. She claims that there is nothing worth having in life except the exercise of the virtues. This comes, of course, from the writings of Aristotle. Oh, and this also solves the problem of how to live a moral life even if you are not following the commandments of a deity.
Finally, I am about three-quarters through this challenging novel which I first read about forty years ago--with very little comprehension! And just a bit more now. But it is very exciting to be inside the mind of a 19th century Russian murderer.
As for listening, I am still working my way through the big box of 15th century music. Here is disc 10:
The point of all this is that, if you don't challenge yourself with these kinds of cultural artifacts, you end up being the passive recipient of a welter of misinformation, propaganda, hype, "influence," and politicized crap. This turns your brain into a spongy toadstool.
In my day job I visit a lot of people's houses and I always take a moment to look over their bookshelves (if there are any!). It is frankly shocking how few books most people have. They tend to contain popular novels, books on Mexico, the occasional art book, even more occasional book of opinion and so on. What they don't often contain are what I would call "perennial classics," i.e. books that you should read and re-read throughout your life. You could put some CDs and DVDs on that list as well.
Sometimes the Internet feels to me to be a vast conspiracy to prevent us from reading anything of any importance whatsoever in favor of whatever political tidbit is likely to prove advantageous to someone.
With Simon Rattle leading a virtually unimpeachable London Symphony Orchestra in the pit, this “Wozzeck” was one of those operatic miracles: a harmonious meeting of singing, playing and direction at an impressively high level. It is the finest presentation at this year’s edition of the Aix Festival, the 75th.
It’s both understandable, and a touch disappointing, that the festival’s clearest success was also the most traditional production: McBurney’s “Wozzeck” could have come from any major opera house. But this type of show alone is not what makes Aix a summer music destination.
No. Its draw is also in the departures from tradition. Without them, Aix would be another Salzburg instead of the most interesting opera festival in Europe — though at this point in Pierre Audi’s tenure as artistic director, “opera” is too limiting a label, with a slate over the past week of film, music theater, concerts and, yes, opera, including two new works, each of vastly different character.
Ligeti was born in 1923 to Hungarian-speaking intellectual parents in Transylvania, recently under Romanian rule. He was a late starter as a musician, but decided to study composition after his desire to be a scientist was frustrated by tightening Nazi antisemitic laws. As the second world war escalated he found himself conscripted into forced agricultural labour, escaping the terrible fate of his father and brother only by luck. He began his life as a composer under grim artistic restrictions in postwar communist Hungary, finally escaping to the west in 1956. “I did not choose the tumults of my life,” Ligeti later said. “Rather, they were imposed on me by two murderous dictatorships: first by Hitler and the Nazis, and then by Stalin and the Soviet system.”
If all of this led to music that could be unrelenting, there is another side to Ligeti. A piece of old BBC footage shows the famously ice-cool Pierre Boulez getting the giggles while conducting a 1971 performance of Ligeti’s Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures at the Roundhouse. Although the works are impeccably avant garde, you’re allowed to laugh. Ligeti – like Haydn – was a composer who could pull off that rare trick of being laugh-out-loud funny in music.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, 22 musicians and one librarian have retired from the orchestra. Immediately before the pandemic, principal cellist Michael Grebanier died.
Three have left for other reasons. Chorus Director Ragnar Bohlin departed over the orchestra’s vaccination requirement, violinist Helen Kim became associate concertmaster of the Seattle Symphony, and violinist Eliot Lev is now a mental health professional.
The chair held by principal keyboardist Robin Sutherland, who retired in 2018 and died in 2020, remains open. Nadya Tichman stepped down from associate concertmaster and is now a section violinist; auditions were held recently for that position, but the results are not yet publicly known. All of these changes mean a cumulative 28 vacancies.
The orchestra has held auditions for and appointed new members for only a few positions. Rainer Eudeikis is now principal cellist. Matthew Griffith succeeded Luis Baez as associate principal and E-flat clarinet. Katarzyna Bryla-Weiss and Leonid Plashinov-Johnson joined the viola section. Last year’s round of flute auditions did not result in the appointment of a principal flutist. The results of recent auditions for principal flute, principal harp, and second bassoon have not yet been publicly announced.
Beyond the 28 vacancies, principal horn Robert Ward will retire at the end of 2023; again, the outcome of auditions for principal horn is not yet known. The orchestra said in an email that it does intend to hire a chorus director.
What this means is that the orchestra onstage at Davies Symphony Hall includes more than 20 freelance players each week...
Internal tensions aside, I can see a lot of reasons why musicians might not want to live in San Francisco.
Of the 1,100 violins, cellos, violas and other stringed instruments made by Stradivarius, who died in 1737 aged 93, some 650 survive.
The "Lady Blunt" Stradivarius, which sold for $15.89 million in 2011, holds the record for the price fetched by a violin at auction.
French violin maker Benedicte Friedmann, 48, is one of more than 180 luthiers based in Cremona, a city with fewer than 70,000 inhabitants.
Chisels, pairing tools, bandsaws and small planes hang on the wall above her workbench where she carefully finishes a violin neck, and prepares to apply the varnish to the instrument, string it, and add the bridge.
It usually takes Friedmann around six weeks to finish her creations, using the same techniques as 300 years ago.
"The only thing that has changed are the tools, which have been slightly modernised," said the trained violinist, who tests her creations herself.
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Some envois. First an excerpt from Cosi fan tutte from the Aix Festival:
The Kyrie from the Requiem by Ligeti, a distorted version of which was used in Kubrick's 2001:
We only seem to have brief publicity clips of Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the San Francisco Symphony, but here is their youth symphony playing Salonen's Nyx:
Byrd was, for the majority of his working life, a Catholic living under the Protestant rule of Queen Elizabeth I, but the situation was more fluid and complicated than that. Unlike his Catholic contemporaries John Dowland, John Bull and Richard Dering, Byrd didn’t flee the country, opting instead to stay and, in part, abide by the new, state-enforced Protestantism. And support for Byrd’s burgeoning career came from both England’s extant Catholic establishment and the queen herself.
The quote “I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls” is regularly attributed to Elizabeth, during the early moments of her reign. “It was clear,” Johnstone said, “that she was making it possible for the Catholics among her subjects to continue to have this indemnity of conscience when it came to the essential religious matter of making your Communion,” the primary difference between the two religions at the time.
And don't we wish our current rulers might also refrain from "making windows" into our souls!
Carried through all Byrd’s vocal music is economy, lucidity and emotional clarity in his approach to text — at a time when words and their representations were contested so painfully. He, Dawes said, “fits in the same category as Benjamin Britten and Henry Purcell as one of the best setters of text from any composer in England.”
I’m really in awe of Byrd. First, how brave he was being a Catholic in such dangerous times, during the Tudors and Queen Elizabeth’s reign. That’s no joke, and thank God he was a musician, because I think that’s probably what saved him. But I love his harmony. Byrd, Tallis and Bach — I think their harmonic changes are more emotional, and sometimes more radical than a lot of 19th-century composers. He was really a man ahead of his time.
Johnson is a figure many a writer has chased and failed to catch, a journeyman guitarist who became a prodigy after, as legend has it, making a deal with the devil. The truth is that Johnson probably just followed the more traditional route to artistic success: He listened to and learned what audiences like, stole from others, and he practiced, practiced, practiced. As far as his personal life goes, the few people who knew him and the fewer still who were willing to go on record said that Johnson was shy. He liked to drink and was popular with women—single and otherwise, supposedly. He died in 1938.
Other than that, we know almost as little about him as we know about Homer.
In a scene in the 2022 movie Tár, a Juilliard student declares to his professor: “As a BIPOC pan-gender person, I would say Bach’s misogynistic life makes it impossible” to play or conduct the German composer—in part because of the 20 children he obliged his two wives to bear. It is a caricature of woke excess: There has been no serious attempt to cancel Bach for living in the era before birth control. The response from the professor, the film’s protagonist Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), is a caricature of power: She launches into a semi-coherent rant, insulting the student and extolling Bach’s greatness. At one point, the two sit together on a piano bench while Blanchett tries to demonstrate the value of Bach, playing the opening of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and crooning that “there’s a humility in Bach, he’s not pretending he’s certain about anything. Because he knows it’s always the question that involves the listener, and never the answer.” The film is clever, and her arrogance only sharpens the knife. The viewer feels the despair of a closed system—both sides are right on their own terms, and both are loathsome.
Bach served as the director of church music in Leipzig from 1723 until his death, a position from which he composed religious music for the exhortation and edification of parishioners. He was aware of Enlightenment-style thinking that elevated reason, and railed against it in his vocal compositions. Marissen makes a survey of all appearances of the word “reason” in Bach’s texts, and quotes them, including “reason—the blind leader—seduces,” “reason does not help; only God’s spirit can teach us through his word” and the wonderful, “Shut up, just shut up, tottery reason!” Marissen dryly notes “I do not see or hear anything in Bach’s musical settings to suggest that these vocal compositions subvert their anti-Enlightenment messages at the same time as they enunciate them.” There is also, he says, no sign that Bach privately disagreed with the material. One of the primary sources of insight into the composer’s private reflections comes from notations and small corrections he made on his personal study Bible. Marissen analyzes these in some detail to demonstrate the pre-modern, anti-Enlightenment trend of Bach’s thought.
Glance at Manchester Collective's gig diary and you'll see conventional, comfortable concert venues like the Albert Hall for the BBC Proms this summer, the Southbank Centre in London, and the Bridgewater Hall in their home city.
Other dates, meanwhile, are a long way from the traditional classical circuit. Like a nightclub in a former MOT garage in Salford, an indie venue in a former nightclub in Birkenhead, a warehouse in Leeds and a multi-storey car park in Peckham.
Those venues don't always have the luxuries of plush concert halls. Like heating.
"When it's 150 people standing crammed into a small room and you're closer to the musicians than you would ever be at the [Royal] Festival Hall or Bridgewater or whatever, it does feel like it's this tightrope, and it has a sense of jeopardy and danger in the performance," he says. "The best kind of risk."
There is something to be said for exploring unusual performance situations. By taking away the usual relationships and barriers new things might be revealed about the audience, the performers and even the music.
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Here is the Sanctus and Benedictus from the Mass for five voices by William Byrd:
