Fellow blogger Wenatchee has long been recommending the music of Matiegka so I decided to have a look for myself. I have no idea why it has taken so long for him to be better known because he seems to be as fine a composer for guitar as Fernando Sor and Mauro Giuliani. Here is Wenatchee's analysis of one of Matiegka's sonatas. Here is the first movement of the Sonata, op. 17. The guitarist is Giulio Tampalini.
There is also an excellent edition of the guitar sonatas by Stanley Yates, published in 2017 so it isn't exactly new.
This is a very useful edition as it includes some 12 pages of editorial material covering biographical information, notes on the compositions and technique and on expression markings. I haven't spent a lot of time with the music, but I have very much enjoyed these pieces and I think they are a solid addition to our scant repertoire from the period. Think of Matiegka as a somewhat less-talented Joseph Haydn and you would not be far off. The music is well-composed and lies well on the guitar. Let's hope it gets lots of performances!
Here is a zippy performance by Hao Yang of the Sonata, op. 31 no. 6 (just the scherzo and finale, though the beginning of the scherzo is cut off):
I think my last comment on this, some time ago, was that we should wait to see the results of the legal battles. Well, it seems that a decision has been reached, in favor of Prof. Jackson. Here is a discussion at The New Criterion: Canceling the cancelers. Read the article for the whole sequence of events. But here is the latest:
Jackson did not take the assault lying down. He sued the UNT regents as well as those colleagues who had defamed him. The regents argued that they could not be sued personally because they had “sovereign immunity.” A district court disagreed, handing Jackson a preliminary victory. The regents appealed. But just a few weeks ago, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found for Jackson on all counts. The decision will have reverberations throughout academia as regents and board members, administrators, and faculty come to realize that defaming people for expressing an opinion with which they disagree can have legal and probably financial consequences.
I'm somewhat surprised that we haven't heard of this ruling already. Nor whether the Journal of Schenkerian Studies will be restored to life.
It often surprises me, which item in the Friday Miscellanea sparks the most comments. But I suspect that this week, it will be this one: The connections between Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez and fascism. Here is the argument presented by Rafael Andia:
It will help a lot to recall the context of the 1930s, that very unsettled time in European history, with the Spanish Civil War, the spread of communist ideals through many European capitals, especially among artists, and the rise of Fascism in Italy and the Nazi party in Germany. At the time, no-one had any idea of how history would play out with the occupation of France and much of the rest of Europe, the subsequent destruction of Germany, the defeat of Italy, and the entirely new post-war reality with the triumph of Anglo-Saxon democracy and capitalism. None of this was evident in the 1930s. Stravinsky was also an admirer of Fascism in the person of Benito Mussolini, as was Ezra Pound. Rodrigo, it seems, was caught on the horns of a dilemma.
It did not take the Emerson long to set the formidable technical standards that we take for granted among chamber musicians today. “After five minutes of playing,” the critic Bernard Holland wrote of that Bartok concert in 1981, “one began to assume perfection. There were no disappointments.” There are none to be heard, either, in the Emerson’s recorded legacy, which, with all its vitality and its security, Deutsche Grammophon ensured defined the sound of a quartet in the digital age. Hearing them now is to be confronted with persistent excellence, an enduring commitment to quality that any musician would be proud of.
Emerson made their bones with performances of all six Bartók quartets in a single concert. But for me what made them a great quartet was their live recording of the Shostakovich quartets:
From another musician, I learned that my experience was not unique. This trusted colleague speculated I might suffer from musician’s focal dystonia. I was embarrassed that I had never heard of it. I soon discovered that I might have a disorder that has plagued some of the world’s most famous musicians. The 19th-century German composer and pianist Robert Schumann was thought to have dystonia, based on his letters to friends, and used a weighted contraption to strengthen a rogue finger. In his diaries, Glenn Gould, known for contorted body postures at the keyboard, described symptoms in his left hand and arm as if writing the definitive dystonia textbook. And Leon Fleisher, after years of misdiagnosis and a right hand frozen into a claw (he played the piano with one hand), brought worldwide attention to dystonia in musicians as never before.
Thank god I don't have this problem. I'm just lazy and don't practice enough.
The classical guitar world is in mourning for Lily Ashfar, an Iranian student of Andres Segovia at USC who was the first woman to breach a closely guarded macho instrument. Lily was 63 and had been ill for some time.
She received her doctorate from Florida State University in the midst of an international career. Her Hemispheres album has iconic status.
Lily is being buried in northern Iran.
The correct spelling is Lily Afshar.
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Daniel Barenboim: In our orchestra, Israelis and Palestinians found common ground. Our hearts are broken by this conflict. You may have to register to read the article. The project, co-founded by Barenboim and Edward Said, of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra united players from many countries in the Middle East including both Jewish and Arab musicians. The ideals were laudable and if music alone could bridge these kinds of gaps, I'm sure that it would have been successful. But while it has been a genuine success in the musical world, in the wider context, sadly, it has not been.
Car drivers armed with a playlist of Celine Dion songs have been plaguing residents of a small New Zealand city for months on end with loud, late-night "siren battles".
The beloved Canadian singer's melodies lose their charm when blared at high volume as late as 2 am, say the sleepless residents of Porirua, north of Wellington and home to 60,000 people.
"It's a headache," Porirua Mayor Anita Baker told AFP on Thursday.
Siren battles have erupted in parts of New Zealand for at least seven years.
Local media have reported on contestants -- often people with family links to Pacific Island nations -- using large siren-type speakers on cars and even bicycles to drown each other out with their powerful systems.
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The first, obvious choice of envoi is the Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo. Here in a performance by Pepe Romero:
Next, Emerson with the String Quartet No. 8 by Shostakovich:
My favorite Beatle changed over time, and George was the one that I went for first. His dreamy meditations like "Within You Without You" really captured me. Next was John, then Paul, and finally Ringo when I realized what a genius drummer he was. Anyway, it is nice to have a new biography of George Harrison, in many ways the most enigmatic Beatle.
The paradoxes of George Harrison’s career can perplex even the most casual Beatles fans. Taken together the contradictions are as much a part of the band’s legend as John Lennon’s solipsism or Paul McCartney’s eagerness to please. Here, after all, was a global pop star who played lead guitar in the most influential group in history and yet was regarded as its invisible man. He was a paid-up antimaterialist whose first significant Beatles song, “Taxman,” was a scarifying assault on the U.K. tax regime, and a sharp-eyed scourge of selfishness (see his final contribution to the Beatles’ oeuvre, “I Me Mine”) whose emotional life seems to have been a gargantuan exercise in having your cake and eating it. Being in the Fab Four might have given Harrison (1943-2001) fame, wealth and boundless opportunity, but as Philip Norman shows in this absorbing biography, the burden it placed on his far-from-resilient shoulders stayed with him for the rest of his life.
Some of the best Beatles songs came from his imagination such as "Taxman," that kicked off one of their finest albums, Revolver:
No, I don't actually believe Stockhausen served imperialism. That was the title of an essay by Cornelius Cardew and I quote it just as a joke, though the story is that avant-garde music in Europe did receive some funding from the CIA.
“I cannot in all conscience continue to support the board and management’s strategy for the future of the company,” he said in a statement released on Sunday by his management.
“While my feelings on this have been developing for some time, it reached its nadir this week, with the internal announcement of severe cuts to its orchestra and chorus from 2024-25 season.
Perhaps the English National Opera just needs a new name? "The Threepenny Opera"? "Lo-cal Opera Lite"? "The Fat Lady Has Sung"?
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This is a widespread phenomenon: PALTRY PAY FOR PROFESSORS AT SINKING CIM. When people ask why I quit playing concerts, I just tell them how poorly I was paid...
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The Washington Post has a piece on The Economy (Taylor's Version) where they claim that she could go home with as much as $4.1 billion from the current tour. That's with a 'b'! I can't actually read it because of the paywall, but that seems about four times the previous estimates I have seen which were around one billion. I'm just a tad flabbergasted...
Music is universal among humans, typically used for immediate benefits: aesthetic pleasure, accompaniment to ritual, dance or work or even getting a baby to sleep. However, there is a 2.0 kind of music. You may like it fine on first hearing, but only with repeated listenings do you fully take it to heart and feel that magic click.
This music does not follow predictable patterns, the harmonies might be complex, the instrumental arrangement might be agitated with countermelodies and eccentric frills, the piece might not have been designed to summon you to move your body, or maybe the thing is just kind of long. It’s hard to embrace its full essence until you’ve experienced it a few times.
Edward Bland (1926-2013) was a classically trained Black composer who spent decades creating a sui generis idiom he called “urban classical funk.” It combined classical technique with Black American and African elements.
He stumbled into singing in a high range during his time in an amateur choir in his native Poland when they began taking up music from the Renaissance. The collaboration and "musical intelligence" necessary to perform these works was "truly magical and extraordinary," Orliński says.
As a teen, he would listen to the punk rock bank The Offspring. But he also enjoyed pieces by 16th century composers Thomas Tallis or Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.
"I could sense or I could feel something that I could not find in the pieces that I was listening by Britney Spears or Destiny's Child," he explains.
At the same time, Orliński was a skater kid who also did capoeira, freestyle skiing and snowboarding and played tennis. When he started breakdancing in his late teens, it was "an enlightenment," he says. "It combined acrobatics, it combined music and personal expression, so it's an art form."
You have been playing the “Goldbergs” for 25 years. What were your first experiences with them?
It actually goes back to that famous recording from 1955. When I heard Glenn Gould, I realized that Bach is not one thing; he’s everything at the same time. The way Gould plays them, it turns this music from something that was seen as predominantly academic into something that was performance material — the sheer visceral side of the “Goldberg” Variations, the physicality of Bach, the physicality of the writing.
So I think when I was 14, I was just captivated that the piano can sound like this, that someone can actually play this three- or four- or five-part counterpoint and somehow be able to keep four or five different voices absolutely individual in their head. That’s something that took me so many years to try to capture myself.
I partly want to put up this complete performance of Die Winterreise by Franz Schubert for voice and guitar because you so rarely see a guitarist in white tie! The artists are Tilman Lichdi and Klaus Jäckle.
We haven't had a Wigmore Hall concert for a while so here is a lovely one with Théotime Langlois de Swarte, violin and Justin Taylor, harpsichord.
Still reading the book on 20th century French poetry I ran across this brief passage:
Tu es dans ton essence constamment poète, constamment au zénith de ton amour, constamment avide de vérité et de justice. C'est sans doute un mal nécessaire que tu ne puisses l'être assidûment dans ta conscience.
In translation:
In your essence you are always a poet, always at the height of your love, always hungry for truth and justice. It is no doubt a necessary evil that you cannot be one steadily in your conscience.
The author is René Char (1907 - 1988). The name is familiar because he was the author of the poetry used in Le Marteau sans maître, a chamber cantata by Pierre Boulez, composed in 1953/54. So that's two old friends. Another is Thomas Merton who translated much of the poetry of René Char.
If you don't know Thomas Merton, he wrote The Seven Storey Mountain, one of the most compelling accounts of a spiritual journey ever written.
We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press. There is new content, of course, so much content, and there are new themes; there are new methods of production and distribution, more diverse creators and more global audiences; there is more singing in hip-hop and more sampling on pop tracks; there are TV detectives with smartphones and lovers facing rising seas. Twenty-three years in, though, shockingly few works of art in any medium — some albums, a handful of novels and artworks and barely any plays or poems — have been created that are unassimilable to the cultural and critical standards that audiences accepted in 1999. To pay attention to culture in 2023 is to be belted into some glacially slow Ferris wheel, cycling through remakes and pastiches with nowhere to go but around. The suspicion gnaws at me (does it gnaw at you?) that we live in a time and place whose culture seems likely to be forgotten.
This is the kind of wild performance story I love: AUDIENCE MEMBER GETS CALLED UP TO PLAY PROKOFIEV
My wife and I were at the Indianapolis Symphony enjoying the opening of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture when my (on silent) cell phone buzzed me. It was a message from the manager of the ISO asking if I would be willing to play in the second half, which would be Prokofiev’s 5th Symphony.
Clara and I were to be dining with ISO timpanist Jack Brennan and his wife after the concert, so they knew I was in the audience. A percussionist had been involved in a car accident on his way to the concert, and they needed somebody to fill in. I told them that while I play a lot of music, I never played Prokofiev 5, and the last time I played under a conductor was 17 years ago.
Yes, of course he's a percussionist, why do you ask?
The Goldberg Variations are like an encyclopedia of how to think and dream on the piano. When they were written, they were probably almost unplayable for the majority of musicians. One could argue that they remain quite unplayable today. Once those deceptively facile opening notes have been struck, there really is no place to hide – you must carry on to the end, through 75 minutes of the most wildly virtuosic keyboard music ever written. And not just that – you must somehow bring to life some of the most astonishingly brilliant uses of counterpoint in the repertoire as well as countless instances of exalted poetry, abstract contemplation and deep pathos. How could this seem anything but impossible?
Unthinkability. Travel back in time to the early 1970s: you are sitting on a living room couch, and you take out a record, Alice Coltrane’s Universal Consciousness (1971), and put it on the turntable.
It is an aesthetic scenario, like being at a museum and looking at a painting. While listening to Coltrane’s record, you open up its colorful, psychedelic gatefold, and read this about the title track:
UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS literally means Cosmic Consciousness; Self-realization and Illumination. This music tells of some of the various diverse avenues and channels through which the soul must pass before it finally reaches that exalted state of absolute consciousness. Once achieved, the soul becomes reunited with God and basks in the Sun of blissful union. At this point, the Creator bestows on the soul many of his Attributes and names one, a New Name. This experience and this music involve the totality concept which embraces cosmic thought as an emblem of Universal Sound.
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We need some fine and positive music this week. I think we could stand to hear some more Lea Desandre:
Many years ago I used to play this in E minor: the Lute Sonata No. 34 by Weiss.
Every time I move, especially from one country to another, I lose a lot of books. I used to have an excellent book of modern European poetry. This one:
But I lost that about five moves ago! One poem I remember very well is The Invention by Paul Éluard. I ran across it again in this book:
Halfway through and this is the first poem that I can recall reading before. Here is how it ends:
The art of living, liberal art, the art of dying well, the art of thinking, incoherent art, the art of smoking, the art of enjoying, the art of the Middle Ages, decorative art, the art of reasoning, the art of reasoning well, poetic art, mechanic art, erotic art, the art of being a grandfather, the art of the dance, the art of seeing, the art of being accomplished, the art of caressing, Japanese art, the art of playing, the art of eating, the art of torturing.
Yet I have never found what I write in what I love.
Steve Reich, who just turned eighty-seven, is not resting on his laurels, so let's see what he has been up to lately. I first became aware of his music around 1976 when I stumbled across the Deutsche Gramophon recording of Drumming in the McGill School of Music listening library. To say that it stood out radically from the other discs I was exploring (Stockhausen, Takemitsu, Ligeti and others) is an understatement. Almost no serious composers were doing pulse back then. Just Steve Reich and Philip Glass (to a lesser extent). Other works that I became familiar with over the next decade or so were Eight Lines and Music for 18 Musicians. I've put up the latter before, so here is Eight Lines:
A piece I am particularly fond of is Tehillim (the Hebrew word for Psalms) for voices and instruments using the texts of four Hebrew Psalms, written in 1981.
The string quartet Different Trains dates from 1988 and it adds a number of new dimensions, melody based on speech patterns, for example. This clip also includes Electric Counterpoint.
I'm going to skip over a lot of pieces and jump to more recent ones. In 2020 Traveler's Prayer, using texts from the Hebrew Bible, appeared using no pulse but Medieval contrapuntal techniques.
Most recently the new piece Jacob's Ladder, based on the verse from Genesis, returns to a regular pulse. It was premiered two days ago in New York and the New York Times has the review: Review: After Hovering, Steve Reich Brings Back the Pulse.
You may or may not like his music, but it seems clear that Steve Reich is the most important American composer of the last fifty years and one with a world-wide influence.
AI keeps creeping into our daily lives. For example, here is an AI-generated podcast on the music of Sun Ra: https://www.readtrellis.com/bespoke/podcast?id=8bba164a-1f06-4c35-9f95-95ecab35afee The really odd thing about it is the opening and closing are backgrounded with generic synth noodling and no actual music of Sun Ra is heard. What did it cost to produce this podcast? Almost nothing I would guess so we are likely to see a lot more of this sort of thing.
One day in April 1976, his teacher, Peter Gellhorn, took him to see Messiaen. He recalls how they arrived early and were let into the flat by Yvonne Loriod, Messiaen’s pianist wife. Eventually, “I hear a key in the door. I’d read books about him and heard his music – and I imagined someone very serious and intense, philosophical and distant and terrifying. I was probably shaking with fear. And he comes in with a sweet, lovely smile.” Benjamin played a piece he’d written, far too fast, and Messiaen gently told him to try it again, slower. And that was that: Messiaen agreed to teach him. “One of those moments of transfiguration for me.”
There is a sense of ending in the festival industry, with all the major players in a state of nervous transition. Bayreuth, where you once had to wait years in a ballot for a ticket, now has seats to spare. Salzburg is suffering side-shocks of the Russia-Ukraine war. Lucerne is preparing for regime change. Verbier’s future is clouded in its thirtieth year. Edinburgh is in transition. The formula for producing music at high levels through the long vacation is suddenly cracked, if not broken.
Regarding Salzburg:
The most recent trend has been to attract Russian oligarchs with their favourites Anna Netrebko, Valery Gergiev and Teodor Currentzis. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and oligarchs scrambled for their yachts. Now Salzburg tries to face both ways. It still hires the contentious Currentzis and charges $500 for some tickets. Director Markus Hinterhäuser seems to be waiting for inspiration.
I don't think this is a fair appraisal. There is a lot more going on there, plus, the Currentzis concert was the best one I saw at Salzburg.
Country music isn’t known as a good ol’ boys’ club for nothing. Gender issues are “historic to the genre”, says Dr Jada Watson, an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa. “There are women who preceded Maren like Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn who often wrote songs about more progressive ideals of what it means to be a woman.” The problem is that country music’s once broad church seems to be closing its doors to progressive voices.
As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, the only thing that can resist progressivism is tradition and country music has the strongest traditions.
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The Gramophone chamber music award this year goes to Mozart String Quintets – No 3, K515; No 4, K516 played by the Ébène Quartet with Antoine Tamestit viola.
A listener-supported radio station in North Carolina, WCPE, is planning to withhold the broadcast of six contemporary operas this season from New York's Metropolitan Opera, because of the station management's objections to the operas' content. It is a classical music controversy that echoes larger, nationwide culture war debates.
WCPE's protest comes at a time when the Metropolitan Opera is eager to showcase its commitment to recently written operas and works from outside the traditional canon of music written by white men. Three of the operas that WCPE plans to reject in the 2023-24 season were written by Black or Mexican composers. This past April, WCPE also refused to broadcast another Met-produced opera written by a Black composer that included LGBTQ themes.
Located in Italy’s isolated and rugged southern region of Molise, the quiet stone village lies squarely in a mountainous valley, where green hills roll into each other like waves and hay barrels freckle the land like drops of gold. It’s here, teetering at the top of a rocky outcrop, where you’ll find the two brothers working in the Pontifical Marinelli Bell Foundry, which, appropriately, is the oldest family-run business in Italy and among the oldest in the world.
The Marinellis have been handcrafting bronze bells since at least the 11th century, although archaeological findings at nearby Benedictine monasteries suggest the Marinellis’ craft could date as far back as the 9th century.
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Lots of material for envois today. First up At First Light by George Benjamin:
Next L'Ascension by Messiaen:
The Quatuor Ébène with the Quintet No. 4 in G minor, K. 516 by Mozart:
