Friday Miscellanea

Under the spell of a great tradition full achievement is possible

even to a minor artist, because the living art brings him

in touch with his task and the task with him.

--Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

I guess this was inevitable. Alex Ross weighs in: The Fashionista Modernism of Yuja Wang

Given this gaudy lineage, it is curious that any controversy should attend the thirty-seven-year-old pianist Yuja Wang, who seldom speaks during performances, presents programs of wide-ranging seriousness, and plays with flawless technique. The debate, such as it is, is confined to her taste in clothes. She favors spangly, skintight ensembles from high-end designers, such as Hervé Leger and Akris, and clomps across the stage in Christian Louboutin stilettos. The late Janet Malcolm, in a 2016 Profile of Wang for this magazine, devoted considerable space to the pianist’s couture, arguing that it is less a contradiction than an accentuation of her athletic performance style: “The sense of a body set in urgent motion by musical imperatives requires that the body not be distractingly clothed.”

All the same, a number of people find themselves distracted. “She’d fit much better in a night club” is one of the politer complaints to be found on Wang’s Facebook page. Ironically, such concern trolling is symptomatic of the very superficiality that it purports to condemn. If you hold music to be a pure, transcendent, anti-physical medium, your attention shouldn’t be meandering to a player’s physique.

Still, one does have the feeling that part of the intense competition between Yuja Wang and, say, Khatia Buniatishvili might come down to who has the sexier presentation. I'm just saying.

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For tragic/comic relief we have this item: DISASTER: CONDUCTOR’S BATON KNOCKS VIOLIN OUT OF SOLOIST’S HANDS

The Czech violinist Pavel Šporcl was playing the Mendelssohn concerto with the Mlada Boleslav Chamber Orchestra when a sideswipe from the conductor’s baton knocked his precious blue violin out of his hands.

Only a swift leg movement by the soloist stopped the instrument smashing onto the floor. Pavel picked up the violin and carried on playing, to the conductor’s evident relief.

Some conductors are more dangerous than others! 

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I don't read On An Overgrown Path nearly as often as I should. Here are two recent, interesting posts: A tale of two new audiences

According to his PR spin, Norman Lebrecht’s blog Slipped Disc is the world’s #1 cultural news site, drawing 2 million readers every month. Central to Norman's strategy for building an audience is the use of  controversial techniques alien to the predominantly conservative classical music world. These include salacious headlines, innuendo, gossip, and deliberate provocation. 

Meanwhile the new CEO of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Emma Stenning has embarked on a strategy for building an audience using controversial techniques alien to the predominantly conservative classical music world. These include multi-media concerts, photography during concerts, and drinks in the auditorium.

Slipped Disc's use of  alien audience-building techniques draws not a whisper of disapproval. But Ms Stenning's use of  alien audience-building techniques prompts howls of disapproval from the same predominantly conservative classical music world. Moreover the howls of disapproval are gleefully expressed on Slipped Disc, thereby reaching the impressively large readership created by alien audience building techniques.

And the other: For young classical audiences the sound is the message

In David Hepworth's recommended history of EMI's Abbey Road studios he makes an observation that may just hold the key to unlocking the new younger audience that classical music has sought for so long in vain. Writing about the increasing importance of pop music in late 1950s Hepworth explains that "whereas the people working in classical music wanted to record music, the people in pop increasingly wanted to record sounds". The ultimate example of studio-created sound taking priority over music culminated in the seminal “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band" which took five-and-a-half months of sound-shaping at Abbey Road for the album's13 tracks to be completed. 

Classical dogma dictates that the music takes priority - note perfect interpretations, historically informed performances, pedigree of the musician, concert hall etiquette etc. In the classical world sound is the servant of music, as in the never-ending search for the acoustically perfect concert hall. By contrast popular non-classical music is improvised, has no original score for the performance to be judged against, and the character of the performance is heavily influenced by electronic sound-shaping. Recent scientific research has started to identify the important role played by infrasound vibrations in the 35 to 75 Hz range - gamma rhythms - in human consciousness and perception. The preponderance of these frequencies in popular music compared with classical may well explain why the classical genre struggles to engage with younger audiences.

 Read the whole thing for some very cogent observations.

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On the occasion of an important premiere, the New York Times reviews the growth of interest in Native American composers: Amid Orchestral Waves, the Sound of Cultures Conversing

Native American composers and performers are slowly gaining more visibility after having long been largely ignored by institutions associated with the Western classical tradition. Raven Chacon, a Diné composer and visual artist, won the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2022. In March, the New York Philharmonic premiered an orchestral version of the Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s “Pisachi.”

And yet Native music, kaleidoscopically varied across the country and its many tribes and heritages, remains only rarely heard, and so only vaguely understood and appreciated, by non-Natives. This is hardly surprising, given the country’s more general neglect of a full, sustained reckoning with its history with — and its often stunningly cruel treatment of — Native Americans.

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Getting any reviews at all these days is difficult. But assuming you do, this offers some good advice: Handling Bad Reviews

Can you identify the composers who were the subject of the following reviews:

“His second symphony is a crass monster, a hideously written wounded dragon, that refuses to expire and thoroughly bleeding in the Finale, furiously beats about with its tail erect.”

“The Finale [of his fifth symphony] is riotous beyond endurance. Instead of applying local color with a brush, [the composer] emptied the paint pot with a jerk.”

“His music which professes to dismiss all elements of melody, appears strangely futile, vacuous, and non-existent.”

The whole piece is worth reading. And at the end it names the composers who were the subject of the above reviews.

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Let's have pieces by the composers criticized above. The first was Beethoven and here is his hideously written Symphony no. 2:

Here is Tchaikovsky's riotous Symphony no. 5:

Because of the missing audience and the socially-distanced orchestra we know this was recorded during the pandemic madness.

Finally, the pieces reviewed in the last quote are not named, but the composer is Debussy. Here are the vacuous Nocturnes for orchestra:

One of the pieces mentioned in the New York Times article is Pisachi by Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate.