Friday Miscellanea

I cannot hear the music of existence

I have not been given the power to imagine it

--André Frénaud (1907 - 1993)

Is this the End of Days or the Beginning of Days: Jerry Seinfeld is reading Marcus Aurelius.

"... he talks a lot about the fallacy of even thinking of leaving a legacy—thinking your life is important, thinking anything’s important. The ego and fallacy of it, the vanity of it. And his book, of course, disproves all of it, because he wrote this thing for himself, and it lived on centuries beyond his life, affecting other people. So he defeats his own argument in the quality of this book.... I really have adopted the Marcus Aurelius philosophy, which is that everything I’ve done means nothing. I don’t think for a second that it will ever mean anything to anyone ten days after I’m dead...."

I'll think that we really are turning around as a culture if I hear that Taylor Swift is reading Aristotle...

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Another one of those articles telling us what science tells us about music: What We Know — and Want to Know — About the Physicality of Music

The headline: “Music scientists find the connection between music and emotion: ‘Our neurons dance to the same rhythm.’” The subheading: “Three independent scientific studies analyze how the human brain transforms notes into feelings, a mystery that has intrigued psychologists and musicologists for decades.”

More and more, science is allowing us to understand our attraction to music and what it does for us — and consequently, what makes us human.

Aw, hell, I just remembered I have never learned anything interesting from any of these scientific studies of music. So, you know, I pretty much don't care what they have to say. But that term "music scientists" is actually really funny. Next up, "poetry scientists" who aim to discover what makes us, well, poetic.

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This is way more interesting: Like living beings: how instruments damaged by war and disaster found new life thanks to a luthier’s noblesse oblige

In 1996, after the war, the Sarajevo orchestra was in residence at the Farfa Giubileo Festival near Rome. Injeian went to Italy to restore its war-torn instruments. The work was done over a couple of weeks at a monastery nearby where he performed the ’surgeries.’ In Injeian’s words, ’Instruments should be treated as living beings. For the Sarajevo Philharmonic some instruments needed to be treated rather like field dressings for soldiers. Some needed more and received further restoration. Repairs were often grafts, just like skin grafts and prostheses made as are such optimal solutions for humans, according to their need.’ Injeian sees his work centered around the humanness of the instruments.

War-damaged cello

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A Fierce Soprano Arrives at the Met in ‘Madama Butterfly’

In the famous aria “Un bel dì,” or “One fine day,” every line seemed considered without being mannered, as if Grigorian’s Cio-Cio-San (the actual name of Butterfly) were thinking through her feelings in real time: joy, hope, defiance. She grabbed Suzuki by the shoulders, trying to shake sense into her, before shaking herself out of blissful reverie. You believed her screams, and feared the hand she raised in anger.

This revival of “Butterfly,” which will be simulcast in cinemas on May 11, has another notable debut in the conductor, Xian Zhang, the music director of New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. She led with brisk tempos, sensitive to Puccini’s shifts between Orientalist whole tones and love-drunk chromaticism, and reserving eruptive forces — including a pounding, death-driven drumbeat — for maximal effect.

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I'm going to offer this next item with absolutely no comment: John Cage Would Want You to Listen to Columbia’s Pro-Palestinian Protesters

John Cage, the influential composer and artist, is dead. So it’s technically impossible to know with absolute certainty how he would feel about the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University.

But the question emerges after New York Times columnist John McWhorter, a music humanities and linguistics professor at Columbia, wrote that he was forced to stop students from playing Cage’s 4’33”—a seminal work that’s effectively four minutes and 33 seconds of silence (though Cage-heads might disagree with that description)—because of the demonstrations. According to McWhorter, that silence, which would have made room for the chants outside, would have inflicted cruelty on his students, some of whom he identified as Israeli and Jewish American.

But I think it is safe to say that no-one has the ability to read John Cage's mind, especially since he is dead.

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What is Slavoj Zizek's favorite music? Schoenberg.

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Why am I not surprised? Establishment Corruption in Big Art

"Art is the only unregulated business that I know of in the world outside of the illicit drug business since the public had to be protected from criminal abuses in the stock and real estate markets over a hundred years ago," said Volpe.

Well, and big government itself, of course. 

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An excellent long read from the New York Times about a project by Kirill Gerstein: The Wartime Music of Debussy and Komitas, Still Resonating Today

Now comes Gerstein’s latest project, “Music in Time of War,” a recording that is expansive in its program and packaging: a 141-minute double album of works by Claude Debussy and the Armenian composer and ethnomusicologist Komitas Vardapet, accompanied by a 174-page book of conversations, essays and photographs that situate the music deep in its historical context. 

During the early days of the pandemic, as Gerstein thought more about Debussy’s final years, he also revisited a pile of scanned piano music by Komitas (1869-1935) that he had received from an enthusiastic member of the French-Armenian diaspora 20 years earlier. A pairing of late Debussy and late Komitas made for an intriguing fit: They were two composers who, for a brief time before World War I, existed in the same Parisian orbit and channel the darkened spirit of the age in their art.

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From the new Madame Butterfly at the Met:

Here is an etude by Debussy from the new Gerstein album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ugyb98fmBM

And piano music by Komitas:

And of course, Zizek's favorite Schoenberg: Gurrelieder: