I'm introducing this post with a famous example from Wittgenstein of the difference between seeing and seeing-as that has some interesting applications in music. When you look at the above picture you see a simple line-drawing. But you can see it as two different animals, a rabbit or a duck. There is a difference between seeing and seeing-as.
There are musical applications because we can both hear and hear as. Take theory class for example: the professor might play two chords and ask "which one do you hear as the tonic?" And what about this progression? Composers can, with context, make it obvious what chord is the tonic and what the dominant. But they can also make it ambiguous and in the case of a modulation from one key to another, we may only hear something as a tonic in retrospect.
Music adds the interesting element of temporal context to the hearing-as aspect. Wittgenstein uses that term "aspect" to describe, say, the two different interpretations of the drawing. In one aspect it is a duck and the other a rabbit. In popular music sometimes there is an ambiguity between tonic and dominant--or is it sub-dominant? If your usual context is Classical style, then a pop song might sound like it is ending on the wrong chord.
But the hearing-as issue extends far beyond simple harmonic function. For example, a passage may be played and heard as introductory when near the beginning of a piece, like this from the Bach Chaconne.
But might have a quite different expressive effect when heard several minutes later in the piece where its function now is to recall the opening and prepare for a modulation to the parallel major:
This example is close to the duck/rabbit one as the two passages are, at first, identical. But we can expand the concept quite a bit. The Chaconne is a splendid example of organic unity in music. The whole piece, roughly fifteen minutes in length, is based almost entirely on this eight measure theme:
Click to enlarge
A chaconne, at this point in music history, usually consists of a set of variations over a short harmonic progression, often in the form of a repeating bass line. Due to the length of this piece, while there are many instances of the same bass line, Bach often departs from it. The basic harmonic progression persists, however. But each variation brings out difference nuances or aspects of the theme. For example, the example above is the whole of the eight measure theme. Notice that it starts on the second beat and ends on the first. The progression is i, iv, V6/5, I, VI, iv, i6/4, V6, i with a slightly different and more conclusive cadence in the second half.
When we hear it at the beginning it has an introductory feel but with two what we might call sub-texts: there is just a hint of the French overture (especially if you add some ornaments as I do) and a hint of the sarabande, which emphasizes the second beat, as this theme does. That French overture feel continues with a couple of variations emphasizing a dotted-note figure:
But there are lots of sub-texts or aspects in play. For example, a bit later Bach alludes to a typical element in fugue texture by inserting a multi-voice stretto, most unusual in a piece for solo violin:
I am using examples from my transcription for guitar, but apart from some added bass notes it is identical with the violin original. Later on there are allusions to dance:
And in this passage I hear an extreme expression that has the feeling of a lament, communicated through chromaticism and texture:
Then, modulating to D major, this passage sounds to me like a deeply meditative chorale:
Bach uses variation form and technique to reveal different possible aspects of the basic harmonic progression, ones referencing different musical styles and genres as well as different kinds of emotional expression. I'll stop here, because I am still learning the piece and haven't thought about later sections.
What I do when I play the piece is look beyond the notes to see the different aspects that they reveal. In that sense I am interpreting the piece according to different aspects. Of course, someone else could see entirely different aspects.
Here is a performance of the piece by Jean Rondeau on harpsichord:
We are coming up on three big milestones in The Music Salon: any day now we are going to hit 13,000 comments, a little later, 3 million page views and a bit after that, 3,000 posts. The blog has been much more successful and fulfilling than I imagined it would be. But it has certainly been a group effort. On a few occasions I have called on frequent commentators to help out with posts on people like Takemitsu and Messiaen and the comments have always been an engine of knowledge and judgement. In the early days the blog was more basic and educational, nowadays it leans more towards culture, aesthetics and philosophy, but even Russian web spiders aside, it has a solid, regular readership.
Here is a little reward for your frequenting the blog: Prokofiev, Violin Concerto no. 1 with Hilary Hahn.
Categorizing music is usually a futile and annoying pursuit so I am going to talk about some music without naming a style or genre. Last night I got the urge to listen to some music I haven't heard for quite a while--this is one of the good things about YouTube, you can indulge almost any urge. Here is what I listened to:
What these clips all have in common is that they are live performances with no lip-syncing, no backup dancers, no fancy pyrotechnics and, most importantly, they blend music traditions with creativity. One of the roots of Cream was the blues of Robert Johnson and the second and third clips also reflect that. PJ Harvey is a different kettle of fish, but her unique creativity also uses some traditional elements such as the driving energy of rock and roll. Jimi Hendrix also has some obvious roots, though he developed the electric guitar in new directions. I like this music because it is what I think of as the "real thing." These days one gets the distinct impression that the whole point of music is to attract listeners, sell tickets, influence fashion and most of all, make money. All that is ok, but it is not what I think of as the "real thing." And oh boy, do I ever want to avoid using the word "authentic!" But to me, the difference between this kind of music, which is just straight from the shoulder and damn the torpedoes, and the other kind of music, which is contrived, self-conscious, aimed at manipulating certain effects, insincere, phony and substanceless is perfectly obvious. And I don't think it is just a matter of taste, or is it?
On this special Friday, why not have two miscellanea? I have noticed a lot of gloom lately so in order to counteract it, let's recall that lovely quote from Horace Walpole: "Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel." So here are some things that I found particularly joyful this week:
Sam Bankman-Fried, financial fraudster, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison (marked down from a possible 110). He is likely to find himself in a low-security prison where he will be able to pursue things like ceramics and playing the harmonica (really!). One should be aware that he was very influenced by utilitarian moral philosophy growing up--an excellent example of how badly that usually works out.
From the unintended consequences file: when Twitter banned Donald Trump from its site he founded a new social media site called Truth Social. This week it went public resulting in a windfall for Mr. Trump of approximately $5 billion.
Some especially good news for those worried about climate change: it happens that, not only are we not in a particularly warm period in Earth's climatic history, we are actually still coming out of a recent ice age, the Late Cenozoic.
Beyoncé does country: I find this image particularly enjoyable for its sheer artificiality. That's not a possible configuration of a horse's legs while running, you can't possibly sit on a horse that way, especially while it is running and good grief:
And finally I discovered something interesting about humour. Sometimes my sense of humour gets a bit out of hand and I apologize for it by saying it is just "Canadian humour." I was teasing a couple of businessmen about selling their company this week and they said, "That's not Canadian humour, that's Irish humour!" I never knew!
Interesting article: The Six Cello Suites (BWV 1007-1012); Mstislav Rostropovich, cello. As a guitarist, I don't play the originals, but I am very familiar with these pieces, both on cello and because they are often played on guitar--especially the prelude to the Cello Suite No. 1. I have not heard the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich play them, so should be interesting. This blogger, Evan Goldfine, intends to listen to every piece by Bach and blog about them. Let's see if he makes it through all three hundred cantatas!
The existence of fake artists on the platform is now a well-known fact: Music released by musicians under pseudonyms, who have no real online presence other than their Spotify accounts and plays, and whose music can be found on many of Spotify’s key playlists dedicated to ‘mood music’.
This is the musical equivalent of Cheez Whiz. Useful, I suppose, but not something you would want to actually listen to.
On Tuesday (March 19), DN published yet another expose on Spotify’s fake artist problem, and reports to have identified the musician “behind the world’s most listened to network of fake artists on Spotify”.
DN reports that this individual is a composer from Sweden named Johan Röhr, whose music, it says, has been released on Spotify under “50 composer aliases and at least 656 invented artist names”.
I know you want to hear something. This is Adelmar Borrego's Go the Distance:
Reading on we discover that he makes over $3 million a year from royalties. I honestly don't know what to say about this. But it confirms me in my blanket rejection of anything that resembles background music--lint for the brain.
All five finalists at the last Leeds piano competition were male – a far from unique competition scenario. Now, the event’s CEO explains how they are dismantling barriers for female musicians
Now of course I am very much against the harassment of women (or anyone) and especially the use of non-disclosure agreements to protect powerful people, but to be brutally honest, the truth here is overpoweringly likely to be that the only "barrier" to female entrants to the competition were that they did not play as well as those who did become finalists. And yes, I did read the article, but it had the odor of special pleading all the way through. Just how much pushback am I going to get for stating this uncomfortable truth? The writer describes many ways in which they are going to try and adjust the "imbalance" but I suspect that nothing less than a 50% quota will be satisfactory.
If there were even the slightest attempt to be fair, there should have been a debate between the last judges in 2021 and the new CEO. This new policy is after all claiming that the male finalists did not earn their places but only achieved them because of mysterious "barriers" to female entrants. That sounds like slander to me.
No equine units were needed outside Alice Tully Hall the other day when the Escher Quartet—Adam Barnett-Hart, Brendan Speltz, Pierre Lapointe, and Brook Speltz—played the Bartók quartets in a single, three-and-a-half-hour concert, under the aegis of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Still, it felt like a significant occasion. The Eschers, who have been playing together since 2005, when they met at the Manhattan School of Music, were nodding to another august group, the Emerson Quartet, which disbanded last fall after a remarkable forty-seven-year run. No one seems to have attempted a Bartók-quartet marathon until the Emersons undertook one, at Tully, in 1981; they repeated the feat seven times in the course of the following two decades. The Eschers were mentored by the Emersons and often emulate their elders. The emphasis is on technical perfection, formal cogency, and unity of interpretive approach. Underscoring the continuity is the fact that David Finckel, the Emersons’ longtime cellist, is a co-artistic director of the Chamber Music Society.
Three days before the Eschers occupied Tully, a no less striking marathon took place at Carnegie Hall. The thirty-seven-year-old German pianist Igor Levit has pulled off many memorable exploits in his career—performances of Beethoven’s final sonatas and of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues in single sittings; a rendition of the Goldberg Variations in the midst of a Marina Abramović installation; a twenty-hour-long immersion in Satie’s endlessly repeating “Vexations.” But the program he brought to Carnegie may have been his most audacious to date. It consisted of Hindemith’s Suite “1922”; the first movement of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, transcribed for piano by Ronald Stevenson; and Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, transcribed for piano by Liszt.
I have a ticket to hear Igor Levit in concert in Salzburg in August.
A trio of neuroscientists at Aix Marseille Université in France, working with a psychologist colleague from the University of Connecticut in the U.S., has discovered what they believe to be the mechanism in the brain that controls the desire to dance prompted by music. In their study, published in Science Advances, the group conducted three separate types of studies to explore the brain's reaction to music and a subsequent desire to dance.
The researchers suggest their work cumulatively shows that the sudden desire to dance prompted by music with a medium amount of syncopation is the brain's attempt to anticipate beats among the syncopation—it causes the body to literally lean forward repeatedly.
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Now for some listening. First up a brisk interpretation of the Cello Suite no. 1 of Bach by Mstislav Rostropovich:
Here is the winner of the 2021 Leeds Competition, Alim Beisembayev from Kazakhstan in the competition finale:
Here are the Escher Quartet with the first movement of Bartók's String Quartet no. 2:
And finally Igor Levit with the Piano Sonata no. 30 by Beethoven:
Bear in mind that I am not a professional philosopher, though I have done a lot of reading, and these are my personal opinions. If you want a large, even-handed history of philosophy I recommend the History of Philosophy by Frederick Copleston S.J. in eleven volumes!
One of the things that David Hume is famous for is waking German philosopher Immanuel Kant from his "dogmatic slumbers." Kant is credited by many as the father of modern philosophy because of his work on ethics and metaphysics. He is a very difficult philosopher to read even if you understand what the "synthetic a priori" is! The two main modern schools of moral philosophy are utilitarianism and deontological ethics. Kant is the locus classicus of the latter which is pretty much the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) updated. A good book to read is the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.
Utilitarianism or consequentialism, the other main school of moral philosophy was founded by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill and has probably done more damage to public policy than any other philosophy, with the exception of Marxism, of course. Utilitarianism seems very plausible, inevitable even, as it judges actions solely by their consequences and aims for the greatest good for the greatest number. Strangely, it usually ends up with rather unfortunate consequences. There have been many criticisms of the various forms of utilitarianism, one of the most intriguing is from Derek Parfit: "According to Derek Parfit, using total happiness falls victim to the repugnant conclusion, whereby large numbers of people with very low but non-negative utility values can be seen as a better goal than a population of a less extreme size living in comfort. In other words, according to the theory, it is a moral good to breed more people on the world for as long as total happiness rises."
The Germans came a bit late to the philosophical debate, but once they got started they really got their teeth into it. One of the most important is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who wrote a stack of rather large volumes on just about everything: philosophy of history, metaphysics, epistemology, ontology and so on. He was born in the same year as Beethoven and in terms of the breadth and range of his influence the two are certainly comparable. Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics as mentioned by our commentator the other day, might be worth a look.
There are great swaths of philosophy that I don't find personally very interesting so I am just going to skip over a lot of the 19th century. I encourage you to consult the volumes by Copleston. One I can't entirely skip is:
Friedrich Nietzsche who had a real problem trimming his mustache. He is another difficult German philosopher, but a very influential one. His On the Genealogy of Morality is a very important book that discusses the evolution of moral concepts.
I find the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein to be of immense interest because of the way he sidesteps most of the traditional obsessions of philosophy by examining our language and how we use language to describe the world. This is more important than it might seem. There is an immense amount of commentary on him as well as published books, notes and manuscripts. The best discussion I have found is The Routledge Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations by Marie McGinn which is remarkably clearer than most.
One of Wittgenstein's closest associates was G. E. M. Anscombe who herself published a very important paper that shook moral philosophy out of its dogmatic slumbers: "Modern Moral Philosophy" reprinted in Virtue Ethics, edited by Roger Crisp and Michael Slote. Virtue ethics is a revival of the basic approach to ethics that Aristotle outlined in the Nicomachean Ethics and it resolves a lot of modern difficulties.
Finally, a contemporary figure, Peter Singer whose Famine, Affluence, and Morality has sparked a great deal of pious gnashing of teeth in the elevated ranks of society. I think of him as the Professor of Virtue-Signaling at Princeton University.
UPDATE: I forgot to put a philosophy video clip in this post, so let me add one now. Here is another one by Jeffrey Kaplan about the problem of consciousness:
One of the greatest ballets ever composed, Romeo and Juliet by Prokofiev:
One wonders why Russia is so very good at music (three of the greatest composers of the 20th century, and many of the greatest pianists, not to mention a few violinists and cellists), dance, chess, mathematics and literature and so very, very bad at government.
Philosophy is one of the items listed on the Music Salon masthead and, though we often approach it via aesthetics, a shared concern, as in this post: Aesthetic Facts and Opinions, we also talk about philosophy tout simple. I was going to put up some links, but really there are so many philosophy posts that I could spend half the morning picking and choosing and I really need to get to practicing Bach!
So what I would like to do instead is offer brief comments on different philosophers and what you might gain from reading their works. And at the end I will link to a couple of philosophers on YouTube that might be worth your time. But first, why bother with philosophy? The popular opinion is that it is largely a waste of time--your time would be better spent with self-help books or in the gym. True, a lot of philosophy is of only marginal value to everyday life, but as soon as you stumble across that word "value" you might find yourself asking, what is of value in life? And that is a philosophical question. Sure, you could just go with Conan:
But the ability to examine ideas critically might prove quite useful. For example, in that post I link to above I quote an article in the New York Times by a philosophy professor who points out a problem with the public school curriculum:
The inconsistency in this curriculum is obvious. For example, at the outset of the school year, my son brought home a list of student rights and responsibilities. Had he already read the lesson on fact vs. opinion, he might have noted that the supposed rights of other students were based on no more than opinions. According to the school’s curriculum, it certainly wasn’t true that his classmates deserved to be treated a particular way — that would make it a fact. Similarly, it wasn’t really true that he had any responsibilities — that would be to make a value claim a truth.
Yes, it is perfectly obvious that for a lot of people their moral principles are facts but yours are just opinions! Once you realize this, it becomes easier to stand up for yourself. So let's dive in and take a critical look at famous philosophers:
Socrates is one of the most important inventors of the philosophical method often called the "Socratic method" which involves asking questions. This makes people uncomfortable so the people of Athens condemned him to death for corrupting the young.
Plato, his student, continued the work writing a bunch of dialogues of Socrates in conversation. I recommend the first one, the Euthyphro which poses the interesting dilemma, do the gods condemn murder because it is wrong or is it wrong because they condemn it?
Aristotle, student of Plato, was the teacher of Alexander the Great and basically laid the foundation of things like logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, psychology, ethics, botany, and a few other things. Plato is easy to read, but Aristotle is emphatically not--like many really great thinkers he is a very awkward writer. But the book to read is the Nicomachean Ethics a guide to moral conduct for many for centuries.
There is rather a large gap as the Romans were not big on philosophy, but things improved when Western Europe discovered the ancient Greeks. St. Thomas Aquinas created a synthesis of Aristotle with theology that still remains the foundation of Catholic theology. The most accessible text is the section on the five ways to prove the existence of God from the Summa Theologica.
I think I will stop there as philosophy gets more and more gnarly (not to mention lengthy) from here on so I will save that for future posts. But this should give you an intriguing start.
Those YouTube philosophers? One of the best is Jeffrey Kaplan; here is his take on Aristotle:
Here is a very interesting Reichian piece by Ligeti:
UPDATE: Egads, I think I saw a 17 in the time of 24-let! Or was it 24 in the time of 17? Ok, I went back and checked and it was even worse: 17 in the time of 16. How the heck you do that in a whole string section and how the listener can tell if they are right or not are things to ponder.
With those dismal words of Naomi Wolf still ringing in my ears.
There is a marked degradation in what can only be called aesthetics, and a great deal of erasure of what had been the presence of the treasures of Western culture.
If you are a child going to the Brooklyn Museum on a field trip, you will literally have no idea what the Western artistic heritage has been, but you will learn that it is bad.
Not so long ago the VCM’s Alix Goolden Performance Hall was a busy venue for a wide variety of musical performances. I believe it was regularly rented by local and out of town musical acts.
It can accommodate a large audience and has excellent acoustics and sightlines.
These days it mostly appears to host conservatory related recitals. I imagine that without the Pandora Avenue entrance the allowable seating capacity in the hall is greatly reduced.
This is, of course, due to the city’s continuing toleration of the antics on Pandora. The conservatory has become a kind of fortress. Folks are permitted to camp directly on the sidewalk in front of the hall’s main entrance. I have to wonder why that is even permitted.
There is a photo:
What you are looking at is the entrance to the concert hall of the Victoria Conservatory of Music. When it was inaugurated it was seen a wonderful venue for all the gifted performers that would emerge from the new premises of the conservatory. This is personal for me as my first job after university was as chair of the guitar department at the Victoria Conservatory of Music, a fine institution with high standards headed by the pianists Robin and Winifred Wood, both graduates of the Royal Academy in London. Outstanding performers like violinist Sydney Humphries and pianist Eva Solar-Kindermann also taught there. I felt honored to be invited to join the faculty. Nowadays it is a shadow of its former self with fewer and fewer classical students as they are edged out by more and more programs devoted to popular music. When I was there the classical guitar department had several teachers and dozens of students. Now there is a mere handful of students and most of the teachers have long since departed. The descent of the exterior of the concert hall into a dystopian hell is symbolic.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a bill into law on Thursday that aimed to protect artists including musicians from unauthorized use by artificial intelligence.
The Tennessee legislation updates Tennessee's personal rights protection law to include "protections for songwriters, performers, and music industry professionals' voice from the misuse of artificial intelligence," the governor's office said in a statement.
The good news is that this might help artists defend themselves against the simple theft of their image, sound, style and so forth by AI programs. If you look at YouTube you can see many clips that create fake imagery of famous people like Emma Watson--who most certainly did not pose for all those bikini shots. But on the other hand, this is just another example of government taking over our individual powers of decision and discrimination which is most certainly a bad thing. In a better world, we would simply refuse to look at and listen to obviously fake representations. The necessity to distinguish between truth and falsity, illusion, is one of the most basic human needs.
With a team of researchers and dedicated musicians, the conductor Kent Nagano is taking a historically informed performance approach to Wagner’s epic.
This is Wagner without constant vibrato, and sometimes without traditionally operatic singing. But mostly, the difference in sound comes from the instruments themselves, both originals from the 19th century and reproductions. Historical, often temperamental winds and brasses have a milder timbre, similar to the gut strings used throughout the orchestra, which here is tuned to 435 hertz — Wagner’s preference, slightly lower than the frequency of 440 Hz used by most players today.
Looks like it is time to review Taruskin's remarks about historic "authenticity." If we are doing "historically informed" performances of Wagner now, can John Cage be far behind? Where is that piano he "prepared" and do we have the original screws?
The culture of New York is now completely fragmented, and this happened through language.
It used to be that while there were a million different languages and accents here, everyone was trying to communicate as best he or she could — all the time. New Yorkers were famous for this! Any given day was thrilling, because random strangers, from whatever part of the world, would say something silly or funny or wise to you in passing, and everyone would manage to get the gist of each other, whatever anyone’s level of English. We were all present in the joy of being Americans — New Yorkers!— together.
That commonality is simply gone. Culturally, this city could now be anywhere in the world — any globalist, polyglot city. The culture that was New York has been smashed right through.
And here is the crux of it:
There is a marked degradation in what can only be called aesthetics, and a great deal of erasure of what had been the presence of the treasures of Western culture.
If you are a child going to the Brooklyn Museum on a field trip, you will literally have no idea what the Western artistic heritage has been, but you will learn that it is bad.
Read the whole thing, if you can stand the depression, for the details. I think a few moments reflection will reveal by whom and through what means this was accomplished.
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And here they are: In the name of anti-elitism, Arts Council England has declared war on opera and excellence. Of course they have. Recall my post a while ago: of the five priorities of government, the first three are to serve themselves, the fourth is the basic functions of government such as the administration of justice and dead last is things like infrastructure and cultural subsidies. Government fundamentally has no interest in culture which is the product of individuals working in concert, its only interests are power and control. So more fool you if you let government have control over culture.
Despite zero evidence that audiences are averse to revivals or more responsive to newly commissioned work, the authors, Tamsin Cox and Oliver Mantell, emphasise their point with one of several threats featuring in a document intended to help shape its future opera funding. “As a result of its limited engagement with the creation of new work, opera and music theatre may find it harder to make an argument for its continued evolution as a cultural practice.”
One hundred and fifty people, including students, faculty and alumni, signed a petition, and faculty wrote letters urging the College of Music to reconsider its decision not to renew the contract of its only lecturer of harpsichord.
In summer 2023, College of Music Dean John Richmond made the decision to let Lecturer of Harpsichord Bradley Bennight’s contract expire at the end of the spring 2024 semester. The petition says the loss of the harpsichord lecturer position and the changes that would follow, in combination with previous cuts and any future cuts, could “severely cripple, if not destroy” the college’s early music program.
The departing conductor has made some cryptic comments to Vesa Siren at the Helsingin Sanomat. Among other concerns, he is upset that budget cuts have eliminated next year’s Europe tour, requiring him to find a new orchestra to premiere his horn concerto at the Lucerne Festival.
He says: ‘The board has decided on big and dramatic cuts that affect the orchestra’s artistic profile so deeply that I don’t consider it possible to continue my contract.’
Additionally, ‘I’m not taking a new position as chief conductor, at least not soon. Possibly never again. After all, this has already been going on for a long time, 40 years.’
From an earlier Slipped Disc:
What really happened? Salonen, a sought-after conductor of progressive – meaning expensive – ideas ran into a headstrong board chair, Priscilla Geeslin, who demanded cuts. She called his departure ‘bittersweet’. That can be taken to mean that she is at least half pleased by the costly conductor’s departure. She got her way.
The third element is a weak CEO, Matthew Spivey, only 18 months in the job. When Geeslin pushed and Salonen shoved off, Spivey was squeezed until the pips squeaked. He piped up something about ‘significant financial pressures on the organization that have become impossible to ignore.’ What’s impossible to ignore is the ignominy of the situation.
There were three elements in the storm and one had to give way. It was, inevitably, the artist.
Music is a universal language… it’s an often repeated axiom, but what does that mean? Two newly published scientific studies add proof to the common impression.
One dismantles one of the pillars of Western theory, while the results of the other show that no matter where we come from, we have an innate response to the emotions that music conveys.
Music isn't even a language, let alone a universal one. Also, music does not convey ordinary emotions. Finally, these are scientific studies, of course, so one ought to be on guard from the outset about scientific studies that make claims in non-scientific areas.
The study looked at the responses of test subjects to the music arising from different traditions, using what are called body sensations maps or BSMs. What they found was quite simple: the same kinds of emotional and physical responses were produced across diverse cultures.
The emotional qualities in music produce physical responses and sensations, in patterns that were similar across the diverse groups;
The acoustic and structural features of the music were linked to the emotions and bodily sensations produced;
There were universal patterns in the responses they observed;
They did not observe any significant differences across divergent cultures.
A joyful piece of music will always be interpreted as a joyful piece of music, in other words, no matter where it is heard.
My skepticism meter just hit the red. Without all the details of who the test subjects were, how many they were and where they came from and the exact details of what music was used and how responses were measured, not to mention how to precisely define "joy" in music, I haven't the slightest idea what they are actually claiming, let alone how true it is. AGH! (If you follow the link in the article, you can get some more details, but...)
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I think we need some music composed by Salonen. Here is his cello concerto:
A little harpsichord music by Jacques Duphly:
That's rather "dark academic" isn't it? Now let's have a piece of music that would be received utterly differently by different listeners depending on their cultural background:
But of course, this is true of pretty much all music, isn't it? Metallica fans might not get much out of a Mozart serenade and vice versa:
Today is the 339th birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach, the composer who just gets more appreciated every year. Yes, ok, his actual birthday, after the Gregorian calendar reform, is actually March 31st, but I'm afraid if I wait I will forget to post anything. So let's lift a glass today. Apparently Bach liked to compose while drinking beer and brandy, according to a tavern bill, but raise the glass of your choice. Bach wrote a couple of secular cantatas alongside the religious ones. Here is a particularly jolly one, the "Coffee Cantata":
And while we are on joyous music, here is one of the most exuberant that Bach ever wrote, the Magnificat BWV 243:
One of my favorite pieces by Bach, the Canon per Augmentationem in Contrario Motu in which the answer to the theme is upside down, in double note values and down a fifth. Then, when all that is worked out, the voices simply switch, meaning that the whole thing was also in invertible counterpoint. I'm not sure we have a sufficiently robust expostulation for that! Shpadoinkle!
And finally, something really sublime, the Brandenburg Concerto no. 2, beloved by every listener and every trumpet player's nightmare:
As someone who has never had the slightest capacity to create one, I am fascinated with what I call "big bodies of work." That is, a substantial number of works all in the same genre or form where the composer confronts that same challenges over and over and solves them differently each time. It is rather like variation form taken to an entirely higher level.
Some examples:
the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart (Mozart around fifty and Haydn over one hundred--Beethoven with only nine really doesn't count)
an extreme example, the 555 harpsichord sonatas of Scarlatti
just making the grade on the low side, the fifteen symphonies and fifteen string quartets of Shostakovich
the thirty-two piano sonatas of Beethoven
a special example, the preludes and fugues of Bach: 48 in all
actually, we could keep citing examples from Bach: the cantatas, about three hundred of which survive; the keyboard suites (six English Suites, six French suites and six Partitas for a total of eighteen)
I'm forgetting one of the best, the roughly eighty string quartets of Haydn
Here's a fun project: buy a box of these (I recommend the Shostakovich string quartets by the Emerson Quartet) and listen to one or two every morning. Much better, not to mention cheaper, than psychotherapy.
Or, alternatively, the Beethoven piano sonatas. There is a new complete set by Igor Levit and an older one I like by Friedrich Gulda. Let's hear one of those. This is No. 32, op. 111:
Here is Yuja Wang with the Lindberg Piano Concerto No. 3. I really like the opening where the orchestra emerges out of the piano resonance like an image from smoke.
I wonder, though, how would it affect her career if she changed her concert garb?
I haven't been part of academia for decades now, but it was where I spent close to half my life. I liked to brag (more like "humble-brag") that I entered university in 1971 but they didn't let me out until 1998. That's because, shortly after graduating with two degrees from McGill, I was hired by a conservatory and later another university to teach.
Since I left academia in 1998 I have heard more and more about "woke" academia and the Congressional Hearings with the presidents of MIT, University of Pennsylvania and Harvard were a pretty good indicator of what has been going on. "Woke" academia, at least from my perspective, has been infected with all sorts of ideological strains such as "settler-colonialism," "systematic racism," and just plain old antisemitism. I'm not going to bother dissecting any of these as it has been done elsewhere, plus I haven't heard any arguments that are worth responding to.
Recently I have heard a new phrase, "dark academia" which is, as far as I can tell, just the old academia before it got drive-byed by the woke. Here is a little clip about which fountain pen inks are suitable for dark academia pursuits:
Mind you, I'm not sure he entirely understands what is going on with dark academia, but hey, let a hundred flowers bloom, I say. We also seem to have something called "Dark Classical Music"
Of course they are going to start with the Moonlight Sonata. Oh god, there is even a fashion aesthetic:
But things are really going off the deep end:
Re the music, Erik Satie and Beethoven are NOT 18th century! But the mere fact that something called, however loosely, "Dark Academia" is trending seems, uh, interesting at least. So let me hasten to provide some real 18th century music to do whatever it is you are doing to:
"quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio." ("What, then, is time? If nobody asks me, I know well enough what it is; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.") --Augustine, Confessions XI.14
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Dr. Johnson refuting Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy of subjective immaterialism by violently kicking a stone: “I refute it thus!”
You don't get many statues celebrating philosophical arguments, in fact this might the only one. Bishop Berkeley was an Anglo-Irish philosopher who put forth a theory that denied the existence of material substances, postulating instead that we don't have perceptions of anything, we just have perceptions. This is a surprisingly tricky position to refute and Dr. Johnson did so by simply kicking a stone.
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I think of McGill University in Montreal as being a sober and respectable academic institution and not just because it is my alma mater. Pieces like this are one reason why: Mozart’s Music Doesn’t Make Baby Geniuses
There is an alchemy to science. Sometimes, when the conditions are just right, the results of tiny, preliminary studies are transformed into truisms that spread the world over. For example, everyone knows that you’re either left-brained or right-brained… except that that is false. What is true is that some brain functions tend to involve one half of the brain more than the other, but the idea that scientists are left-brained while artists are right-brained is nonsense. Yet, the belief endures. When science goes public, it can become magic.
The Mozart effect is a scientific legend. It’s the idea that playing Mozart’s music to a baby will make them smart. We know it isn’t true. But it started with a nugget of science back in 1993. What happened next is a cautionary tale for how these legends spread. The media half-remembers the study and twists its findings, and the story starts morphing in the telling until it finds a shape the public views as desirable.
This is a story of scientists hounded by the media, trying to evade death threats. It is also about how scientific studies are portrayed as sacred rituals when they fail to replicate.
And then the article gets really interesting! Yes, you have to read the whole thing if only to find out how minimalist composer Philip Glass’ music was unfairly demonized in an attempt to prove a theory. (The term "minimalist" is from the article and no, I don't really agree.) This is a brilliant piece of intellectual history.
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Here is how one UK student amuses himself: transcribing performances that do not already have a notation, like this cadenza to a Mozart piano concerto:
While over at The Critic, Norman Lebrecht does a drive-by of the Chopin Competition: How to win at Chopin
Over three weeks, 40 contenders from around the world play Chopin all day and into the night for the benefit of a half-filled hall and large local television ratings. In the final, half a dozen survivors slug it out for the top slot, egged on by teachers, parents, bus drivers and their own damaged egos, trapped in a remorseless kind of Stockholm syndrome that makes them love their tormentors — the judges, and the contest itself.
One finalist, locked in a toilet with her teacher, is heard weeping hysterically and being ordered to stop if she wants to win. Another is watched over in sleep by his professor, herself a past contestant. A splendid Polish young man thinks he stands the best chance of winning if he has his hair done like Chopin’s; he winds up walking off stage in the middle of the second round, saying something like “I don’t want to do this any more.”
Three Italians maintain a modicum of sanity. One of them recommends, “I would say, whoever wins this competition should spend the €40,000 on a course of psychotherapy.”
My personal take on competitions: they are psychologically brutal and tend to produce generations of robotic virtuosos. Oh, and the best musician never wins.
McMaster University, a public research university in Hamilton, Ontario, has abolished its music degrees.
The degree course began in 1965. The university administration underfunded Music programmes for 40 years, closing its MA program in 2006, according to Paul Rapoport, who taught there from 1977 to 2005 and was Chairman of the Music Department in 1994–95. Now the bachelor degree has also been abolished.
Just between us, I barely knew that McMaster even had a music department...
New York City’s famed Metropolitan Opera added a website trigger warning for prospective ticket buyers to Giacomo Puccini’s “Turandot,” informing audiences that the 1926 masterpiece set in ancient China could be offensive.
“It is rife with contradictions, distortions, and racial stereotypes,” reads a program note promising “a discussion of the opera’s cultural insensitivities.”
“It shouldn’t be surprising . . . that many audience members of Chinese descent find it difficult to watch as their own heritage is co-opted, fetishized, or painted as savage, bloodthirsty, or backward,” the note continues.
Trigger warnings are themselves rife with contradictions, historical distortions and intellectual fetishes.
Arnold Schoenberg’s inventive approach to harmony left a lasting influence on the 20th century. Marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, the LA Phil explores the work of the Austrian-turned-Angeleno composer throughout the season highlighted by two performances of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder conducted by LA Phil Conductor Emeritus Zubin Mehta featuring soprano Christin Goerke (Tove), mezzo Violeta Urmana (Waldtaube), tenors Brandon Jovanovich (Waldemar) and Gerhard Siegel (Klaus-Narr), and speaker Dietrich Henschel (December 13 and 15).
I think it is safe to say that, despite the 150th anniversary of Schoenberg's birth, Los Angeles has not woken up very far. Gurrelieder is a lovely early work that resembles Wagner as much as anyone. Actually waking up to Schoenberg would probably involve programming some later works like the Piano and Violin Concertos, some string quartets, piano music and maybe his opera...
Of the thousands of German-speaking Jews who fled from Nazi-occupied Europe to the comparative paradise of Los Angeles, Arnold Schoenberg seemed especially unlikely to make himself at home. He was, after all, the most implacable modernist composer of the day—the progenitor of atonality, the codifier of twelve-tone music, a Viennese firebrand who relished polemics as a sport. He once wrote, “If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.” The prevailing attitude in the Hollywood film industry, the dominant cultural concern in Schoenberg’s adopted city, was the opposite: if it’s not for all, it’s worthless.
Yet there he was, the composer of “Transfigured Night” and “Pierrot Lunaire,” living in Brentwood, across the street from Shirley Temple. He took a liking to Jackie Robinson, the Marx Brothers, and the radio quiz show “Information Please.” He played tennis with George Gershwin, who idolized him. He delighted in the American habits of his children, who, to the alarm of other émigrés, ran all over the house. (Thomas Mann, after a visit, wrote in his diary, “Impertinent kids. Excellent Viennese coffee.”) He taught at U.S.C., at U.C.L.A., and at home, counting John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Oscar Levant among his students. Although he faced a degree of indifference and hostility from audiences, he had experienced worse in Austria and Germany. He made modest concessions to popular taste, writing a harmonically lush adaptation of the Kol Nidre for Rabbi Jacob Sonderling, of the Fairfax Temple. He died in Los Angeles in 1951, an eccentric but proud American.
Read the rest for more of Ross' charming and informative guide to Schoenberg and how his music is being celebrated this year.
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In honor of the refractory Austrian, let's have a whole set of envois dedicated to Schoenberg. First, the Piano Pieces op. 11 from that fertile transitional stage when he was experimenting with atonality but had not yet organized it in 12-tone serialism:
These days a lot of young guitarists frankly sound a bit robotic in their quest for technical perfection. After listening to them we like to go and listen to some Andrés Segovia as a palate cleanser, someone who was a great artist and a pretty good technician. But here, for your delectation, is a true virtuoso who has a spectacular technique but never sounds like a robot: Pepe Romero and the Etude No. 1 by Villa-Lobos.
Wolff, who turns 90 on Friday, is associated with a different pantheon. He is the last living representative of what’s known as the New York School of composition, a group that included John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and David Tudor. Their tight-knit circle shifted midcentury American music away from classic European models. And it radiated out, intersecting with other arts and artists who were making New York a leading center of modernism: the choreographer Merce Cunningham, the poet John Ashbery, the painters Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and many others.
After an early period involving intense reduction of musical materials, like the proto-minimalist “Duo for Violins” (1950), Wolff sought to create structures that cultivated chance, and also required performers to pay close attention to one another, listening for aural cues to proceed. Or, conversely, to play similar material independently, in tandem. Increasingly, his goal was to allow players of differing abilities to work together.
Over the years, Wolff explored a variety of strategies: graphic scores, text pieces, geometric configurations in which clusters of standard notation hung suspended in expanses of white space. The results could be agitated, evanescent or surprisingly direct and tuneful.
Over the years a perennial interest of mine has been notation and recently I have been combining that with an interest in Wittgenstein's "picture theory" in which thoughts and propositions are seen as pictures of reality. And, of course, graphic notation is a picture of a piece of music. I'm going to see if I can develop this idea.
“Algorithmic recommendations are addictive because they are always subtly confirming your own cultural, political, and social biases, warping your surroundings into a mirror image of yourself while doing the same for everyone else,” Chayka writes. “This had made me anxious, the possibility that my view of my own life — lived through the Internet — was a fiction formed by the feeds.” So he went on an algorithm cleanse and quit social media...
That's been my solution.
If taste — aesthetic judgment — is a human skill cultivated by a lifetime of gazing, reading, listening and selecting, recommendation algorithms are like the new robots powering up to take over the assembly line of our intentionality. These mathematical helpers reduce selection time and boost the efficiency of seeing pictures, watching TV shows and hearing songs: more and faster.
Yet if the LA Phil is the jewel in the crown, there is also a long-established, vibrant, but much less publicized contemporary music scene in Los Angeles led by the venerable Monday Evening Concerts series, which began in the late 1930s. Those roots have branched into a number of current organizations that grew from the same network of players.
At the height of the Great Depression, when America was reeling in despair, Hollywood thrived, attracting a remarkable community of artists, composers, musicians, writers, and dancer/choreographers from famous artistic scenes, from Vienna to Paris, London, and New York. There was work in the movies, and suddenly Los Angeles was a hub of artists with international recognition.
“It was a completely transplanted community, with the Hollywood film and recording industry as its nexus,” observes Ara Guzelimian, artistic and executive director of the Ojai Music Festival. “Together they kick-started the idea of cultural Los Angeles and at the same time fostered a new audience. It was a cultural jolt.”
In the 1930s Los Angeles was home to the two most important composers of the first half of the century: Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky.
Functional music is nothing new. From work songs to workout playlists, music is often used to influence listeners’ moods and behaviours. This is exemplified by the ubiquity of background music, which can be traced to the United States in the 1930s when the company Muzak first began piping easy-listening music into stores, workplaces, public transit, and other spaces. In the century since, recorded background music has spread throughout much of the world from Britain to Japan, designed to calm listeners, encourage customer spending, and increase worker efficiency. These effects reflect Anahid Kassabian’s concept of “ubiquitous listening,” which describes how even passive engagement with music can shape affect and subjectivity.
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Our first envoi is by Christian Wolff, Edges from 1968.
I recently re-watched one of my favorite movies, The Year of Living Dangerously by Peter Weir with Linda Hunt, Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver. In one scene we see Gibson's character simply listening to this song. I think Peter Weir uses music more skillfully than any other director I can think of.
The movie's title, by the way, comes from a speech by Indonesian President Sukarno. I'm thinking of naming this year The Year of Petulant Restraint.
Finally the Tombeau fait à Paris sur la mort de Monsieur Blancheroche by Johann Jakob Froberger
I see that the Dune, part 2 movie is out. I couldn't get through all of part 1 when it appeared on my streaming service last year. But I am tempted to have another go at the book which I read many decades ago. Like Benjamin Britten, who played through all the piano music of Brahms every year, just to remind himself how bad it was, I am tempted to re-read Dune for the same reason. However could such a loathsomely pretentious compendium of crap have become so popular? The earlier, extremely bad film of Dune was a quite accurate representation of how bad it is. Your milage may vary, of course...
Music has long helped us focus while doing simple tasks. Now, though, listening to podcasts or watching TikTok, YouTube or other videos while we do other things—from cooking to working—is a reflex. Last year, Americans streamed 21 million years’ worth of video, up 21% from the previous year, according to Nielsen.
These distractions in the form of a podcast or video clip can speed a task and stave off boredom, especially during more monotonous moments.
I guess I have to believe this is true, though it seems absurd on the face of it. Are the tasks most of us are engaged in so mindlessly repetitive that we can do them without actually thinking about them? That sounds like a huge problem in itself. I find I can't do any kind of mental work with background music of any kind, let alone video clips. Am I really in a minority? I find that my mind can wander off even without external distractions. I often have to read a sentence or paragraph over several times if it is conceptually difficult. I have always laughed at "speed-reading" courses. Good lord, the last thing on earth anyone needs is to read faster. But my hidden assumption there is, of course, that anything worth reading is worth reading slowly. Francis Bacon wrote in The Essays:
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.
And, sad to say, much of what is written these days really needs to be hurled against the wall with great force! (Yes, someone already said a version of that, but who exactly seems unclear.)
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Economics Explained is a useful series of YouTube clips by an Australian economist. Here is the latest:
This actually leads into something I have noticed recently involving a hobby of mine: fountain pens. Many years ago in Canada I had a fountain pen that I quite enjoyed writing with, but it never made it to Mexico. Here fountain pens are very rare. I rediscovered them a few years ago and bought a few Chinese pens because they were very cheap. Once I grew more aware of quality differences I gravitated towards German and Japanese pens (and one Italian pen). It almost seems as if the path towards becoming a great source of fine fountain pens was to lose World War II! The thing is that these fine pens from Germany and Japan, often cost between $150 and $200. But in the last couple of months I have noticed reviews of some new Chinese pens and after trying them, I am very impressed. They are as good as the good German and Japanese pens but cost between $25 and $30. My favorite is this one from Jinhao with a German steel nib (that is still something they excel at) and a handmade body of sandalwood (also available with tigerwood and ebony). Gorgeous pen.
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Since we were mean to Brahms earlier on, let's listen to his Symphony No. 2:
