I don't do a lot of concert reviews, partly because, apart from the Salzburg Festival, I don't attend a lot of concerts. But I saw one on Friday so this is an opportune time to check in on string quartet concerts as they are done nowadays. Some context: this concert was part of our local chamber series here in Mexico, though the audience is largely expatriates. The quartet were Americans from San Francisco and the program was one quartet each by Fanny Mendelssohn, Benjamin Britten and Beethoven.
First reactions: the Fanny Mendelssohn was a bit dull, but the Allegretto was dynamic and fun. The Britten was surprisingly good with lots of atmospheric textures and effects. And the Beethoven was Beethoven, that is, by far the best piece of the evening. I'm all for hearing unfamiliar works, by the way, and in the fullness of time we will discover what composers are really worth hearing often enough that they will find a place in the canon. In other words, audiences and performers will make these aesthetic decisions based on the aesthetic worth and audience enjoyment as they should and not on gender, race or any other collective membership.
What I really disliked was the first violinist and spokesperson for the group standing up before and rehearsing the standard narrative for us about how oppressed women composers were in past ages and how now we are enlightened and can congratulate ourselves on overcoming this bias. He didn't offer a similar narrative before the Britten based on how oppressed homosexuals were, etc, so thanks for that.
What I really enjoy about attending concerts in Europe is that never, out of dozens and dozens of concerts in various countries, have I ever had to listen to a speech before a concert retailing the social justice narrative. No, not once.
If I had attended the Sunday concert I would have been lectured on how oppressed black composers were as the opening composition was by George Walker. Those are the two oppressed groups we must always defer to, which means that, of course, everyone is being steadily reduced to their identity as a member of a collective. A very inappropriate approach for a field as dependent on individuality as composition. But there it is.
I’ve always believed that the divisions between high art and low art, between high culture, which really ought to be called sanctified culture, and what’s sometimes called popular culture, but ought to be called everyday culture—the culture of anyone’s everyday life, the music that we listen to, the movies that we see, the museum objects we pass by or are fixed by, the advertisements that infuriate us and that sometimes we find so moving—are false. Nearly everything I’ve written is based on that conviction, and on the learned belief that there are depths and satisfactions, shocks and revelations, in blues, rock ’n’ roll, detective stories, movies, and television as rich and profound as those that can be found anywhere else.
I think I believe this too, but it cries out for a balancing. There are indeed depths and satisfactions and revelations in popular culture, music, movies and television that can be truly profound. Just as there is fraudulent crap and pompous pretension in high culture. But you know, if you are a critic worth your salt, then you have to point out the dreary, mechanical, pseudo posturing in a lot of popular culture. Because, you know, it is easier to do that and make a buck than to transcend it and do something great.
Levit does brooding well, his sombre frame drooping over the coffin-black piano in a self-effacing act of concentrated communion. He also does variety. His commanding technique, muscular yet flexible, suited the mood swings of the E-flat Rhapsody that concludes the Four Klavierstücke Op 119, or the hurly-burly of the capriccios that flank the Seven Fantasien Op 116. Mostly though, this was a supremely poetic performance, Levit moving body and soul to convey the spirit of these deeply personal utterances.
You might have recently heard that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—via SoftBank Kabushiki Gaisha, via its wholly-owned subsidiary Gannett, which owns USA Today alongside a sad little clutch of failing syndicated local newspapers—has hired the world’s first full-time Taylor Swift reporter. His name is Bryan, and I’m deeply upset. Not because I don’t think Taylor Swift is worth writing about. Taylor Swift is, by any sensible measure, the most famous person in the world. The actual leaders of actual countries beg her to visit their dying lands, put on a show, make their miserable people spend some of their miserable money, maybe nudge the whole economy just a few points out of recession. When a war breaks out in Asia, both sides immediately try to argue that they’re fighting on the side of Taylor Swift. She is bigger than Elvis, bigger than the Beatles, bigger than God. She has blasted herself on a jet of pure sugary Americana into every quiet crevice of global culture. She provides the texture of daily life for thirteen year old Indonesian girls with hijabs and hard scraping eyes. There are swathes of rebel bushland in central Africa where children tear the guts out the earth at gunpoint and the central government has no power at all—but Taylor Swift does. In my travels across China, the only Western music you’d ever hear playing anywhere belonged to Taylor Swift. She’s not a solitary human being; she’s Coca-Cola. She has fundamentally changed the inner workings of the record industry, show ticketing, intellectual property—why not? Let’s say music theory too. She invented tone. She invented pitch. Taylor Swift seems destined to be remembered by our drooling, mud-eating descendants as a kind of culture hero, the mythical source of everything left for them to inherit. First was she who plucked strings and made pleasant sounds. Who taught man to spin thread and mark the hours of the sun. She who scattered the stars in the sky. She’s kind of a big deal.
Very little of that has any relationship with truth, but it is fun to read.
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On an Overgrown Path tells us There is no mass market for classical music. I'm pretty sure of two things regarding that: first, I have known this ever since I got into classical music, so it ain't news and two, that is a big part of the appeal. Not everyone climbs mountains and not everyone listens to classical music.
Classical industry executives should make it their New Year's resolution to finally understand that there is no mass market for classical music. For two decades classical music has been chasing a non-existent mass market. The latest manifestation of this misguided thinking is the reinvention in the UK of BBC Radio 3 as a clone of Classic FM by the network's new Controller Sam Jackson, who worked for Classic FM for five years culminating in the post of 'Senior Managing Editor, Classic FM, Smooth and Gold'. Forget whether you love the new BBC Radio Classic 3 FM, or like me you loathe it with a vengeance. Let's instead look at the facts.
Can't we just ignore the facts and listen to some Bach instead?
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The phrase "the Commodification of Passive Listening" is one that fills me with a kind of bored distress akin to that of any number of science fiction dystopias. Follow the link for the story.
Endel, a German company founded in 2018, has been described as “the first-ever algorithm to sign a deal with a major label.” Unlike music companies that use generative AI to write new songs, Endel is a standalone subscription service (currently 14.99 USD/month) that uses AI to create ever-shifting “wellness soundscapes” that dynamically adapt to information such as the weather, time of day, and listener’s heart rate.
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Now for some music. Here is Igor Levit at Royal Albert Hall:
Yuja Wang with the Ravel Piano Concerto for the Left Hand written for Ludwig Wittgenstein's brother Paul who lost his right arm in the First World War.
Now let's have a paean to active listening! A Kyrie by Jacob Obrecht:
I'm still doing research for my next Music, War, and Philosophy post and I keep running across interesting quotes:
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.” ― Francis Bacon, The Essays
"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." --attributed, possibly incorrectly, to Dorothy Parker
“With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.” ― William Lloyd Garrison
“The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.” ― Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Let's apply that first one to some music: Some pieces are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. Here is one from each category:
For more than a half century, through live performances seemingly born of the marriage of Mozart, the Marx Brothers and Rube Goldberg; prizewinning recordings; and even a book-length biography, P.D.Q. Bach (“the only dead composer from whom one can commission,” Mr. Schickele liked to say) remained enduringly, fiendishly alive.
Leaping from Mr. Schickele’s pen in P.D.Q.’s name were compositions like the “No-No Nonette,” the cantata “Iphigenia in Brooklyn,” the “Unbegun” Symphony and “Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons.”
Read the whole thing! Now on with our regularly-scheduled program.
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"A gramophone record, the musical thought, the musical notation,
the sound waves, all stand to one another in that internal relation of depicting
In the National Philharmonic Hall in Warsaw, violinist Joshua Bell and conductor Dalia Stasevska are on an intensely focused mission to get the opening bars of a concerto just right. The work begins with a series of exposed chords from the woodwind, from which rises a declamatory flourish on the violin that fades into a lyrical phrase so intimate and hushed that it steals the breath. The musicians are recording the piece, so the passage is repeated over and over, then critiqued, with the finest of adjustments made.
The violin concerto is by the virtually forgotten Ukrainian-born composer Thomas de Hartmann. The musicians of the International Symphony Orchestra Lviv (INSO-Lviv) are giving it its first commercial recording since the work’s premiere in 1943. They will then perform it in a concert of Ukrainian and Polish music in Warsaw. The timing of this wartime resurrection has its own irony, since De Hartmann’s klezmer-inflected score was deeply influenced by his distress at the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and especially by the fate of its Jewish citizens.
Let’s look at how haute cuisine emerged from the hushed and totally utopian space of the 1970s and 1980s. Elitist, terribly hermetic in its codes and vocabulary, the cuisine of the happy few has become incredibly open and popular without renouncing quality, creative demand and invention, but by abandoning the purity of the space in which it was deployed, by completely rethinking the discourse and the codes which accompanied it and by embracing, this is the essential, a real economic, social and referential diversity…
Creative quality is something that can be nurtured in hermetic spaces and then used to infuse more popular offerings, is the message here.
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I tried to watch the Bernstein movie Maestro on Netflix, but found it uncongenial (as I do with most movies about classical music) and turned it off after five minutes. I did enjoy this review, though: Leonard Bernstein Deserved Better Than ‘Maestro’
Was it any good? The fact that the first extended scene about music didn’t come till about 90 minutes into the two-hour film should be enough to supply you with your answer. By confining the plot to a small part of Bernstein’s personal life, Cooper somehow managed to turn the most talented, flamboyant, beloved, successful, and complex American musician in history into a two-dimensional domestic villain.
A Universal rep said in a statement: “We continue to position UMG to accelerate its leadership in music’s most promising growth areas and drive its transformation to capitalize on them. Over the past several years, we have been investing in future growth—building our ecommerce and D2C operations, expanding geographically, and leveraging new technologies. While we maintain our industry-leading investments in A&R and artist development, we are creating efficiencies in other areas of the business so we can remain nimble and responsive to the dynamic market, while realizing the benefits of our scale.”
Doesn't sound like there is any room there for creative freedom.
Songs are getting shorter, because it only takes 30 seconds to rack up a listen on Spotify. Poetry has enjoyed an unexpected revival on Instagram, but mostly when it is universal, aphoristic, and neatly formatted to work as image as well as text. There’s the phenomenon of the “fake movie” on streaming services like Netflix; these cultural artifacts have actors, plots, settings—all the makings of a real film, but still seem slickly artificial, crowd-sourced and focus-grouped down to nothing.
In other words, what you like is being erased by what suits an algorithm.
Despite their backgrounds, both men were stymied by the vast and arcane world of music streaming fraud, a realm where anonymous pirates are constantly devising new ways to steal from the $17 billion a year pool of royalty money intended for artists.
That’s a giant, tempting pot of gold for scammers around the world. Beatdapp, a Vancouver company that detects fraud for industry clients, estimates that a little more than 10 percent of that pot, about $2 billion, is swiped annually.
“Bad actors are getting creative,” said Andreea Gleeson of the Music Fights Fraud Alliance, a collection of labels, distributors and streaming platforms. “It’s a constantly moving target.”
Spotify and its rivals were supposed to end the era of music piracy. In the late 1990s and early aughts, millions of fans routinely downloaded songs from online peer-to-peer file services without paying a penny, a fiasco that cost the industry a fortune. When monthly subscription services (like Spotify) and pay-per-song offerings (the early version of Apple Music) came along, musicians and labels finally had a lucrative way to harness the convenience of online music.
But the streaming ecosystem, say critics, is easily gamed. For $20, artists can buy an annual subscription to a music distributor, a company that can instantly post songs to dozens of streaming platforms. Unfortunately, bad actors have the same opportunity.
It will be no secret to anyone who’s attended a live concert that the experience can bring people together, and that it can happen on what feels like a visceral level. The implications point to questions and theories.
Has music evolved as a way to create and build social bonds? Was that its main driving force in early humans?
Traditional and modern societies tend to mark most public occasions with music, which helps to establish trust within groups.
Spontaneous synchronization to the rhythm of music has an effect on specific areas of the brain, as well as on feelings of positive connectedness.
Several studies show that the feeling of affiliation with the group persists after the musical experience, and resulted in increased cooperation and cohesion within working groups.
That effect has been observed in children as young as 14-months of age.
One notable finding over the past ten years has been the steady rise in programming of music by living composers. Worldwide, since 2013, contemporary music has risen from around 6% to 14% in our listings. This is a trend reflected in many individual locations: in the UK rising from 6% to 15%, and in the US rising from 7.5% to 20%. In some locations, such as Japan, Austria and France, there are comparatively fewer performances of contemporary music, but even in each of these locations, there is an observed rise.
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Here is the Thomas de Hartmann Violin Concerto in a live performance:
Here is Nucleus (2003) for orchestra by Jean-Louis Agobet:
Let's have a little Leonard Bernstein. This is his Serenade for violin and orchestra after Plato's Symposium.
And for something less modern, here is the Takeuchi String Quartet with the String Quartet in G major Hob.III:81 Op.77-1 by Joseph Haydn:
I'm doing research for a follow-up post on Music, War, and Philosophy and I stumbled across something quite remarkable. In 1919, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War Bertrand Russell, one of the most prominent English philosophers of the first half of the 20th century, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, probably the most important philosopher of the 20th century, exchanged some correspondence. Russell had sent to Wittgenstein a copy of his newly-published Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy and Wittgenstein had sent his newly-completed and corrected text of the Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus to Russell asking him to contribute an introduction and help him to find a publisher.
Now what is worth noting here is that the work of Russell and Wittgenstein on logic and the foundations of mathematics (along with the earlier work of Gottlob Frege) was the first advance on the logical treatises of Aristotle, written 2,300 years before. Another important fact is that Russell was a pacifist while Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austrian Army as soon as the war broke out. In fact, he wrote much of his book while serving as a lieutenant in an artillery regiment. Despite being on opposite sides of a global conflict they were not only close friends but Russell had chosen Wittgenstein to carry on his work of fixing the misunderstandings of philosophy.
But what is really mind-boggling is that they had both written their foundational works while in prison! Russell wrote the Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy while in Brixton Prison for publicly lecturing against the war and Wittgenstein sent him the Tractatus while in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp.
Incidentally, the Tractatus, one of the most bizarre books of philosophy ever written, consists of seven numbered propositions starting with 1 The world is everything that is the case. It ends with 7 Of what one cannot speak, about that one must be silent. Except for a note on page one about the numbering system, there are no footnotes. There is also no other editorial matter apart from a brief preface. No bibliography. Each proposition has numbered sub-propositions:
2.012 In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in a state-of-things then the possibility of the state-of-things must already be prefigured in the thing.
When it was first published no-one, not Frege, not even Russell, really understood it, but after a few years, in June 1929, Cambridge awarded him a PhD, based on the Tractatus as his dissertation.
Times have certainly changed...
For anyone interested, there is an excellent new translation out last year.
We live in very unsettled times and one indicator of this is that I struggle to find any items to share that are NOT contaminated by politics. The long-standing policy of this blog has been to avoid politics with the exception of political policies and events that directly impact the music world. But the context is constantly changing and over the last few years the whole social environment has been politicized to the extent that governments everywhere are intervening in private lives to an extent rarely seen. I won't go on a rant about how is it that government bureaucrats feel empowered to dictate what sort of home appliances you are allowed to purchase or how other government policies make agriculture more and more difficult--farmers in Germany are on strike for this reason--instead I will append comments to items that have an inordinate amount of political content.
Sharrock’s vocal exclamations have become deeper and more guttural moans than the high-pitched shrieks of her early work with her then-husband, the musician Sonny Sharrock. In the late 1960s, Sonny revolutionized jazz guitar through volume, distortion and feedback while playing with Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry, Wayne Shorter and Miles Davis. Linda’s approach was no less radical: On three albums of collaborations with Sonny, beginning with their remarkable 1969 debut “Black Woman,” her wordless exhortations included psychedelic sighs, orgasmic yodels and blood-chilling screams, all delivered with an intensity that made “Plastic Ono Band”-era Yoko Ono sound like Anne Murray in comparison.
While I would occasionally listen to this sort of thing when I was a young person, I never found much musical sustenance there. Even less these days. You might investigate for yourself on YouTube. The difference between this and primal scream therapy is what exactly?
In “Angel Island,” a staged oratorio about the anguish and isolation of Chinese detainees at Angel Island Immigration Station in California, a choir recites a poem about tyranny and misfortune.
“Like a stray dog forced into confinement, like a pig trapped in a bamboo cage, our spirits are lost in this wintry prison,” they sing in Chinese. “We are worse than horses and cattle. Our tears shed on an icy day.”
The poem is one of more than 200 inscribed on barrack walls at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, where hundreds of thousands of people, mostly from China and Japan, were questioned and held — sometimes for months or even years — as they sought entry to the United States in the first part of the 20th century. Their harrowing accounts form the emotional core of “Angel Island,” by the Chinese-born composer Huang Ruo, which has its New York premiere this month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in a staging that is part of the opera and theater festival Prototype.
Which leads one to ask, does everything have to be about the emotional core of an oppressed person or group? And can we have a name for this new era in art? Despairism maybe?
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I am chagrined to discover that I, a retired sessional lecturer, private scholar and blogger, have higher ethical standards than the president of Harvard.
Ms. Gay’s resignation on Jan. 2 was a result of her maladministration as well as of convincing accusations of plagiarism in her academic writings. (In a New York Times op-ed after resigning, Ms. Gay acknowledged “errors” of attribution and wrote that she had never “claimed credit for the research of others.”) Mr. Ackman underscores that plagiarism wasn’t the main reason he gunned for her: “Had Claudine Gay had a perfect academic record, she’d still be a failed leader at Harvard.” He lists the reasons why he wanted her out: “how she led the institution, how she let antisemitism erupt on campus; how she responded to the 34 student groups; the lack of free speech on campus, the campus culture, the speech codes . . . the DEI department.”
As in the phrase “running the gauntlet,” the process involves a series of hurdles, challenges, and setbacks you must overcome to reach your goal. In the Conformity Gauntlet, however, these trials have nothing to do with your level of skill, intelligence, or competence, but rather your rigidness in adhering to the ideas and behaviors of the academic ruling class. The idea is to keep dissenters out or at least make them extremely hesitant to dissent, and it works very well.
Not having an academic job, I feel perfectly comfortable dissenting.
Capable of playing any type of guitar, on the evidence so far, in any style he chooses, Sean Shibe has returned to the classical tradition for his latest album, Profesión (Pentatone). The title is taken from Profesión de Fe (“profession of faith”), a poem by Agustín Barrios (1885-1944), the Paraguayan composer-guitarist whose singular story is alluded to in the CD notes. His La Catedral is one of the highlights here, along with works by two other South Americans: the Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos (12 Etudes) and the Argentinian Alberto Ginastera (Sonata). All were written originally for guitar. Sensuous, virtuosic, beguiling, Profesión draws the listener in, through the range of music as well as the irresistible quality of the playing. Shibe plays a Hauser copy that belonged to the late, great guitarist Julian Bream, a predecessor pioneer in expanding the instrument’s repertoire.
If classical music were truly dead, as Pleasants already contended 70 years ago, people desperate today to signal their “anti-racist” bona fides or grovel over their wrongthink would probably choose some other cultural target, while those fearful of drowning in a rising sea of barbarism would find a different islet on which to haul themselves ashore. Classical-music critics at The New Yorker and The New York Times, not to mention various opera and orchestra managers and executives from Peter Gelb at the Met to Simon Woods of the League of American Orchestras, have recently indulged in an orgy of self-flagellation for their devotion to this “blindingly white” art form, to quote New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. Yet the very fact of these self-abasing pronouncements from the critical establishment attests to the enduring power of classical music—a power that neoliberal monoculture finds deeply intolerable.
Ah yes, "blindingly white" just like physics, engineering, philosophy, and a bunch of other disciplines. Read the whole thing as the discussion takes in a lot of interesting territory:
This is a recurring story in cultural history, whether it is the theater of Elizabethan England, the ink painting of the Song dynasty, the sculpture of Renaissance Florence, the woodblock prints of Edo, or the jazz that came out of New Orleans and Kansas City. A school of great artists—and an enduring body of work—emerges out of a fortuitous combination of factors that we don’t fully understand; individual artistic genius is only one of those.
And finally:
Mozart’s and Gluck’s place in the culture won’t be replaced by Joseph Bologne and Florence Price. Nor, for that matter, do Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, or Billy Strayhorn risk having their central position in the history of great music shoved aside by some minor contemporary of theirs decreed by the commissars of our cultural life to be, for patently non-musical reasons, someone we must listen to. The threat is elsewhere, menacing the music of Bologne and Price as well as that of Mozart, Gluck—and the jazz greats. It lies in the implicit warning of films such as Chevalier or articles such as Ewell’s: that to allow any great art to make, channeling Kierkegaard, a “fool” of one—or even to acknowledge that such a thing as great art exists—risks putting oneself beyond the pale of the politically and socially acceptable. The soundtrack our elites are preparing for us will be ear candy with room only for the thump-thump-thump of algorithm-driven pap—neither dangerous nor subversive.
George Lewis is one of the most formidable figures in modern music: a composer of international renown, a legendary improvising trombonist, a computer-music pioneer, a professor at Columbia, a stalwart of the Black avant-garde collective known as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Yet a routine encomium to Lewis’s achievements and influence would ignore the import of his scholarly writings, which resist the usual narratives of individual genius. His 2008 book, “A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music,” is a riveting portrait of communal originality, with the author assuming a background role. Let’s simply say, then, that this genially authoritative figure deserves an extended round of applause. At the age of seventy-one, he is at the height of his productivity; he had seven premières in 2023, in New York, Vienna, and points in between. In a December concert at the Park Avenue Armory, the International Contemporary Ensemble, of which Lewis is the artistic director, played his music on a double bill with a performance by the composer-pianist Amina Claudine Myers, another A.A.C.M. veteran. The ensemble has also recorded “Afterword,” Lewis’s first opera. His second, “Comet/Poppea,” arrives in June, in Los Angeles.
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Let's kick off our envois for today with some Villa-Lobos. This is Sean Shibe playing the Etude #11 from his new album:
Finally something from that "blindingly white" composer (wearing a pink wig in the movie Amadeus) W. A. Mozart. The String Quartet K. 465 "Dissonance":
The reference is, of course, to Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. As a lifelong student I was musing the other day that if I had the opportunity to spend some time on a university campus what I would like to do most of all is attend a graduate seminar on Wittgenstein. But then I realized that you don't have to do that any more--you just have to go to YouTube. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of clips on Wittgenstein including audiobooks of the Tractatus, explanations and introductions to Wittgenstein, taped university lectures, clips on individual topics and so on. In other words, for free (or at most the cost of ordering a couple of books from Amazon) you can give yourself as thorough a course in Wittgenstein as you wish. The only thing you won't have is a credential. The ramification of this is that pretty much the only thing that universities offer these days for their exorbitant fees are credentials, frills like gyms and lounges, and cafeteria food.
Just for fun, here is a very new clip by a commentator rather different from most:
Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.
(possibly by Jean de La Bruyère but often attributed to Horace Walpole)
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21 foot tall statue of Shakira unveiled in her hometown in Columbia
Kicking off with that photo because, well, it's fun and I always rather liked Shakira.
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New Year's Resolutions:
Figure out figured bass for Schoenberg quartets
Write a symphony for ukeleles
Learn to appreciate Taylor Swift
New strings on my guitar
That should do it.
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A thoughtful article about the new Beatles single: Studio Trickery
The Beatles achieved something close to perfection from 1963 to 1969, gradually expanding out of entertainingly scrappy R&B into grand psychedelic vistas, then into strange, personal and oblique miniatures. They achieved this while maintaining a level of global popularity that is hard to imagine today. In a ridiculous American TV series from 1965 and a wonderful film, Yellow Submarine (1968), they appeared as cartoon characters, as instantly recognisable as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. But in 1970, the year they split up, they spoiled the picture. Their final album, Let It Be, consisted mostly of bad songs, recorded for a ‘back to basics’ project which they had abandoned a year earlier, releasing the far superior Abbey Road (1969) instead.
Money can’t buy you love, but in 2023, what it can buy you is AI-assisted time travel. Now in his eighties, Paul McCartney increasingly resembles one of those lost characters in a 1960s Alain Resnais or Chris Marker film, repeatedly thrown back into the past to re-experience a traumatic event; or perhaps the protagonist of J.G. Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, constantly re-enacting the assassinations of famous people so that they might ‘make sense’. As a piece of music, the ‘new’ ‘last’ ‘Beatles’ single, ‘Now and Then’, is of very little interest, but as a phenomenon, it is highly symptomatic. McCartney’s project of going back in time to the 1960s and 1970s and using advanced software to scrub the historical fact of the Beatles’ shabby, acrimonious end and replace it with a series of warm, friendly fakes is proof of another of Ballard’s claims – that the science-fictional future, when it arrives, will turn out to be boring.
And here is a delightful critical summary:
As a song, ‘Now and Then’ is generic late Lennon, one of many ponderous piano ballads. Its weary verses do have a certain poignancy, but the chorus was evidently an afterthought, now bloated into overemphasis by a pompous string arrangement. The result, despite a lovely, subtle backbeat from Starr, sounds a little like Coldplay, a terrible end for a group who once had the daring to try and emulate Little Richard, Ravi Shankar and Stockhausen all at once.
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Is the only reason Slipped Disc runs a lot of pieces on Yuja Wang to show off photos of her concert attire? YUJA WANG PLAYS BOULEZ IN CHINA
You won't see him on stage unless it's before or after a concert, or during the interval, but many concerts couldn’t happen without him. If you don’t know him yet, meet Andrew Wooderson, maker and supplier of fine harpsichords! Relied upon by a wide array of period-instrument ensembles for their performances of baroque and classical repertoires, we see Andrew and his wife Naomi, a recorder player and teacher, at concerts everywhere. His keyboard instruments are individually hand built to order from carefully selected materials, based closely on surviving original examples. Andrew comments: “my instruments are an expression of my love for harpsichords and passion for fine craftsmanship.”
I'm always fascinated by fine musical instruments and the folks who make them. I recently started thinking about acquiring a vihuela and have contacted a builder.
There are fewer than 20 homes in the U.S. designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando, and entertainment power couple Beyoncé and Jay-Z now own one of them. (Rapper and designer Kanye West also owns one that he’s now trying to sell.) The pair shelled out $190 million in 2023 for an Ando-designed mansion in Malibu, Calif., solidifying the architect’s cultlike status among celebrities. Neither Beyoncé nor Jay-Z responded to requests for comment.
I guess we should be happy for their success? It's nice that musicians can afford to purchase homes just under $200 million? So why am I uncomfortable? I suppose it depends on how you view, not success, but rather creativity? What are the sources of creativity? I think I have always suspected that hardship, at least the right amount of hardship, was an important engine and motivation of both the energy to be creative and also part of the content of the work as well. But many of the most prominent musicians of today seem to have goals other than the creation of something artistic. Which is fine, by the way. But working it in reverse, if you end up a billionaire with a house worth $200 million, maybe that was your goal? I don't quite see how you set out to be musically creative and end up a billionaire (as always, Paul McCartney excepted)? Wasn't it rather that you actually set out to be a billionaire and just found a productive avenue for that, which happened to be music? It could have been bitcoin or inventing a new video game. Just some thoughts...
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Now this is something I never suspected would occur: US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken singing some Muddy Waters while playing a left-handed Strat:
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And this leads us into our envois for today. I guess we should have a piano piece from Boulez. Here are his 12 Notationspour piano of 1945:
Jean Rondeau playing some Frescobaldi on harpsichord:
Mozart's piano concertos are really without equal, but when it comes to piano sonatas I rather prefer Haydn's to Mozart's. For example:
Finally, three fantasias by Luys Milán on vihuela (with some nice ornaments):
Pop concerts have become such over-weening extravaganzas that the artists themselves are overshadowed by the production with enormous stages and lighting set-ups, pyrotechnics and echelons of dancers. And then you go home, at least Taylor Swift does, with billions of dollars. Can you believe that when I was a rock guitarist there were NO billionaire musicians? Not even Paul McCartney.
So if we want to get a sense of what this generation of pop stars are actually like, it is better to see them in a smaller, more personal setting. For this the Tiny Desk concerts at NPR are ideal.
Let's start with Olivia Rodrigo's set:
Well, that was carefully played, though more rambunctious towards the end. Wasn't interested in hearing the second song because, frankly, Olivia Rodrigo has all the heaven-storming passion of someone baking muffins. Time for music's next mega-mogul, Taylor Swift:
Taylor Swift claims her membership in today's victim culture by pretending to be a sufferer from the "double standard" that always values men higher than women. Honey, there is no musician on earth, or in history, that has a net worth anywhere near what yours will be at the end of your tour. Y'all ain't no victim!
Billie Eilish did an NPR Tiny Desk concert during the COVID lockdown and it was, as you might expect, an exercise in depressive lethargy:
I'm pretty sure popular music used to be better than this...
These are going to be heterodox and rambly posts as they just notice some interesting relationships. I'm looking at Europe in the first half of the 20th century. There was a huge ferment that forever altered many aspects of culture. Two crucial figures were Ludwig Wittgenstein and Olivier Messiaen. Both were intellectually and creatively brilliant and both were deeply affected by war. There are facts about their lives that strain belief. The Wittgensteins were of Jewish descent though practicing Catholics. Ludwig's father, Karl, was one of the wealthiest men in Europe, head of the Austrian steel cartel. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire only the Rothschilds were richer. Karl and his wife Poldi had nine children, four girls and five boys. Of the five boys three committed suicide and of the remaining two, Paul was a concert pianist who lost his right arm in WWI but continued his career by commissioning concertos for the left hand alone by Ravel, Prokofiev and others. The remaining son was Ludwig who wrote a very short book that revolutionized (and is still revolutionizing) philosophy while a front-line officer in a regiment of Austrian artillery (for which he received several decorations) during the First World War.
Ludwig was a student of Bertrand Russell's at Cambridge from 1911 to 1913. Out of depression and frustration he moved to a tiny village in Norway. In January of 1913 his father died and Ludwig inherited enough money to become one of the wealthiest men in Europe. He used some of it to support art and culture and in 1919 he gave away the rest of it to his surviving siblings. At the outbreak of war in 1914 he immediately volunteered for the Austrian army. He completed his book of philosophy, known in English as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in August 1918. The two people who were most likely to understand it were Gottlob Frege, a philosopher of logic who was an important influence on Wittgenstein, and Russell. Frege said it was incomprehensible and Russell misunderstood much of it. It rather boggles the mind that a book that has been called the most important work in philosophy of the 20th century could be written that, at first, simply no-one could understand.
The book is highly unusual, only 80 pages long and with only one footnote to the very first sentence. It is laid out as a series of numbered propositions consisting of seven basic claims with sub-propositions elaborating on them. Here is the first of these:
1 The world is everything that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.
1.12 For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2 The world divides into facts.
1.21 Any fact can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same.
[The translation is by C. K. Ogden except for the second word in 1.21 where I have replaced "one" with "fact" from a different translation for the sake of clarity.]
Now all that would seem both trivial and perplexing--what could he possibly mean? The best guide to this I have so far found to be a 38 minute YouTube clip by Dutch philosopher Victor Gijsbers:
I'm going to stop right there for today. The next post will bring in Olivier Messiaen and musical aspects of the story.
