I ran across this video courtesy of Fil from Wings of Pegasus. Commenting on the amount of sheer talent onstage at this 1987 concert he remarks that now (i.e. 2019) it would not be possible to put something similar onstage because the level of individual talent here is really not matched by current artists. I suspect he may be correct. He mentions things like songwriting ability, instrumental competence and so on. Here is his clip:
And here is the original concert for the Prince's Trust. Onstage are George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Elton John, Jools Holland, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, Mark King, Jeff Lynne and others.
You know, that is one terrific song, isn't it? And no autotune, no pitch-correction, no quantization...
The 4th Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich is mostly known for being the one that he withdrew from rehearsal on the occasion of his being denounced in Pravda in 1936. Instead he wrote the more-accessible Symphony No. 5 which was intended to get him back in Stalin's favor--it seems to have worked.
But the Symphony No. 4 is a very interesting work in itself and it has one of the most original (and apocalyptic) introductions ever. This clip with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony just popped up on YouTube, so have a listen. It's not showing in Blogger search yet, so just follow the link.
I just learned the most fascinating word: otium. Here is the Wikipedia definition:
Otium is a Latin abstract term which has a variety of meanings, including leisure time for "self-realization activities"[1] such as eating, playing, relaxing, contemplation, and academic endeavors. It sometimes relates to a time in a person's retirement after previous service to the public or private sector, as opposed to "active public life" (the negative negotium meaning "busy-ness"). Otium can be a temporary or sporadic time of leisure. It can have intellectual, virtuous, or immoral implications.
The concept originally expressed the idea of withdrawing from one's daily business or affairs to engage in activities that were considered to be artistically valuable or enlightening (i.e., speaking, writing, philosophy), and had particular meaning to businessmen, diplomats, philosophers, and poets.
This blog is a project of otium in that it is an activity of my leisure time. Hopefully it has virtuous rather than immoral implications! My goal is simply to notice things, in other words, to speak the truth. As it is a leisure activity and earns me no money and as I have no music-related earnings, I am able to ignore any and all commercial pressures. If I were to be pontificating in areas like politics or economics I would potentially fear censorship from some mega-corporation. But as Spotify or Universal Music doesn't have that kind of power, I think I can live free of fear. One hopes, at least.
Please be careful to distinguish otium from the similarly-sourced word otiose, meaning idle or indolent!
Some appropriate listening. This is Artur Schnabel, recorded in 1937, playing the Beethoven Bagatelles, op. 126. For many years Schnabel, the leading Beethoven interpreter of his day, refused to do recordings because, the story goes, he was afraid that someday, someone would listen to his Beethoven while eating a ham sandwich.
In Greek mythology, Procrustes was a bandit preying on travelers between Athens and Eleusis. He had an iron bed and compelled people to lie on it. No-one ever quite fit so for those who were too tall he amputated the extra and those who were too short he stretched to fit. Theseus, on his way to Athens, solved the problem by serving Procrustes with his own medicine. As commentators like Fil from Wings of Pegasus and Nick Beato have been pointing out, commercial pop music has become something of a Procrustean bed. Let's listen to Fil:
I think this is enough to get the idea. From different angles Fil is pointing out that much of what we see and hear in these kinds of videos is processed or, to be a little more blunt, fake. Rick Beato was making a similar point in the video I just put up yesterday. Here it is:
Now let me connect this to R. G. Collingwood, Professor of Philosophy at Oxford. His essay "Good Art and Bad Art" is found on page 536 in Art in Theory. Here are some quotes:
Art is community's medicine for that worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness.
...a work of art is an activity of a certain kind; the agent is trying to do something definite, and in that attempt he may succeed or he may fail. It is moreover, a conscious activity; the agent is not only trying to do something definite, he also knows what it is that he is trying to do; though knowing here does not necessarily imply being able to describe, since to describe is to generalize, and generalizing is the function of the intellect and consciousness does not, as such, involve intellect.
A work of art, therefore, may be either a good one or a bad one. And because the agent is necessarily a conscious agent, he necessarily knows which it is. Or rather, he necessarily knows this so far as his consciousness in respect of this work of art is uncorrupted; for we have seen that there is such a thing as untruthful or corrupt consciousness.
A bad work of art is an activity in which the agent tries to express a given emotion, but fails. This is the difference between bad art and art falsely so called. In art falsely so called there is no failure to express, because there is no attempt at expression; there is only an attempt (whether successful or not) to do something else.
To give some examples: if Paul McCartney were to sing "Hey Jude" very badly, out of tune and poorly phrased, that would be an example of bad art. If his performance of "Hey Jude" were to be pitch-corrected and rhythmically quantized, that would be "art falsely so called" because it would not be the truthful expression of emotion.
A bad work of art is the unsuccessful attempt to become conscious of a given emotion: it is what Spinoza calls an inadequate idea of an affection. Now, a consciousness which thus fails to grasp its own emotions is a corrupt or untruthful consciousness.
In my view, music that is pitch-corrected, autotuned or quantized is the product of a corrupt consciousness. A lot of what J Dilla did with his beats was an attempt to insert human expression into otherwise mechanized rhythms.
A person who is capable of producing bad art cannot, so far as he is capable of producing it, recognize it for what it is ... To mistake bad art for good art would imply having in one's mind an idea of what good art is, and one has such an idea only so far as one knows what it is to have an uncorrupt consciousness; but no one can know this except a person who possesses one. An insincere mind, so far as it is insincere, has no conception of sincerity.
Art is not a luxury, and bad art not a thing we can afford to tolerate.
I recommend reading the whole thing. I'm something of an Aristotelian myself and from the first sentence of the Collingwood I got the sense that he was one as well. So when you read him, do so slowly and carefully.
I suppose that we can thank the purveyors of rhythmic quantization and pitch-correction for showing us exactly what a corrupt consciousness in music consists in these days.
Just a footnote: every good singer I have worked with has intentionally bent the pitch of certain notes in one direction or the other for the sake of emotional expression. And phrasing, of course, is nothing but the pushing of rhythm in one direction or the other for the same reason. I learned these things from my first voice teacher.
It was the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen’s first concert in the hall since March, when he stunned the classical music world by announcing that he would step down as the orchestra’s music director amid a dispute with management over budget cuts. The evening’s program was just the sort of thing he had promised when he was hired with a mandate to rethink the concert experience: Ravel’s charming “Mother Goose” brought to life by dancers from Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet, and then Schoenberg’s nightmarish “Erwartung” staged by the director Peter Sellars.
His decision to leave once his contract is up next year has upset fans — “Who he is and what he brings can’t be replicated,” Mark Malaspina, an audience member, lamented as he entered the hall — and left some concerned about the future of the 113-year-old San Francisco Symphony.
“An orchestra that was in very good shape is now in crisis,” said Peter Pastreich, a longtime arts administrator who managed the San Francisco Symphony from 1978 to 1999. “It is heartbreaking to watch.”
Salonen, a powerful creative force both as a conductor and a composer, is exactly the person that an orchestra like San Francisco needs, which is undoubtedly why they hired him. His leadership of the Los Angeles Philharmonic was an indicator of what he could achieve. But yes, his plans were costly. On the other hand, they are the kind of innovative ideas that lead to wealthy donors with deep pockets coming up with the cash. And remember, this is San Francisco, home to a remarkable number of wealthy innovators. In a review of where the management was going, Salonen said, “I have decided not to continue as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, because I do not share the same goals for the future of the institution as the Board of Governors does.”
Taylor Swift is in London. Even the least culturally clued-in person could not have failed to notice. The city is full of people in “Eras” merch, and social media is awash in concert footage from the tour dates at Wembley Stadium: Travis Kelce donning a top hat and tails to make his own onstage debut, Prince William celebrating his 42nd birthday by shaking it off in his private box. We’ve got an election going on here at the moment, so candidates are busy doing things in public to appear maximally normal. Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition, posted a photo of himself on what he described as a “Swift campaign pitstop” at the “Eras” tour on Friday. Mayor Sadiq Khan posted a version of London’s underground map with all the stops replaced by Taylor Swift song titles and captioned it “London (Taylor’s Version).” For better or worse, this has indeed felt like her town, for a weekend.
Moving forward hasn’t exactly been a problem for Fratti, 32, who was born in Guatemala and is based in Mexico City. Since releasing her debut album, “Pies Sobre la Tierra,” in 2019, she has put out two more solo records, in addition to collaborations with her partner and producer, the Venezuelan musician Hector Tosta (known as I la Católica); the German electronic artist Gudrun Gut; and her improvisational quartet Amor Muere. In just five years, she has built a reputation as the most prominent member of Mexico City’s dynamic and rapidly evolving experimental music scene.
Driven by an influx of musicians to the metropolis and the establishment there of new institutions — sound galleries like 316 Centro in the city’s La Merced neighborhood, and labels such as Umor Rex — the Mexican capital’s avant-garde music community has flourished in recent years.
I began to devise the programme for my new recording during lockdown. Feeling oddly distanced from the classical and Romantic repertoire I usually love, one day I came across Byrd’s wonderful A minor Fantasia. It knocked me sideways. I immediately set about inhaling all the pieces in Parthenia, the first collection of keyboard music to be printed in England – in 1612-13, a joint endeavour by Byrd, John Bull and Orlando Gibbons. It was surprisingly moving to be exploring masterpieces written in a time of even more deadly plagues and at a time when, like today, people would have been contemplating a profoundly insecure and unpredictable future.
Few musicians explore this repertoire on the modern piano, but for me it felt entirely natural and instinctive to do so
There feels to me something fundamental about this music, almost as if many of the pieces set out to investigate the genetic codes of music itself. With this in mind, I could not resist including also one such piece by the extraordinary Dutch composer Jan Sweelinck, whose work bears testimony to the exchange of musical ideas and influences across Europe.
Machaut’s lasting fame resulted from a lucky conjunction of talent and power. Early on, he belonged to the court of John of Luxembourg, the King of Bohemia; in later years, he enjoyed connections to many members of the French royal family. He was thus in a position not only to write for high-ranking patrons but also to arrange for the preservation of his manuscripts. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France possesses an enormous volume, of more than five hundred folios, containing almost all of Machaut’s output. Like many composers over the centuries, Machaut did not lack confidence. In a prologue to that tome, he portrays himself in dialogue with Nature, who tells him, “Your works will find more renown than others, / For there will be nothing in them to fault, / And thus they will be loved by all.”
Yet the ubiquitous “I” in Machaut’s writing should be treated with caution. This is one message of Elizabeth Eva Leach’s 2011 book, “Guillaume de Machaut: Secretary, Poet, Musician,” a revelatory study of the music and the poetry in tandem. No less than future singer-songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, Machaut deploys a rotating array of ersatz selves. Although some of his scenarios have a happy vibe—“Rose, liz” shivers with gentle ecstasy—he is very often trapped in perpetual longing for a woman out of reach. What’s more, that pining is deemed essential to the creative act. Poetry and music, Leach writes, become “the ultimate surrogate for erotic desire and means of achieving a serene life.”
As always, finely written and researched, worth reading the whole thing.
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It feels like we talked about this a dozen times before, but Rick Beato does a good job of summing it up:
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Lots of envoi possibilities this week. First off, Enfrente from the new album by Mabe Fratti:
I have to say that to me, that sounds like pop music if it were interesting. Next, a ballade by Guillaume de Machaut:
Mishka Rushdie Momen playing William Byrd:
I don't know if this is indicative, but every clip of Elsa-Pekka Salonen on YouTube conducting the San Francisco Symphony is an advert! Nothing complete. So here is Daniel Patrick Stewart conducting the orchestral piece Nyx with the San Francisco Youth Orchestra.
Thinking about the aesthetic critiques of Dada and Surrealism, yes, they were justified as a reaction to the horrible calamity of the First World War (and the Second for that matter), but the solution, to turn over creativity to the unconscious and the irrational while refreshing and certainly A solution, was not a very good one. I will mention just one reason why: without the diligent use of reason and planning, only fairly small aesthetic objects are feasible. So certainly painting, drawing, small sculpture and poetry are ideal media. But architecture, large sculpture and extended musical works are not. If you want to jump in and cite minimalist music then, ok, that might be an exception or it might simply be the case that they are long works based on short structures. You might also mention some early Shostakovich absurd pieces such as The Nose opera or some ballets, but these are actually short works strung together to form suites.
What cannot be produced under the strictures of Dada and Surrealism are large works like the symphonies of Bruckner or Mahler (or Shostakovich), pieces that take years to write and orchestrate and a large, highly-trained orchestra to perform. Large works of poetry like the Four Quartets of T. S. Eliot and large novels like In Search of Lost Time by Proust or Ulysses by James Joyce, while certainly containing whimsy and disjointed episodes, considered as a whole have an intricate structure.
I think we are still hunting for ways of organizing societies that don't rely on either fascistic or communistic authoritarianism! And yes, of course, the aesthetic challenges of organizing large forms are still with us--and they are the same ones that always existed. Pop music avoids the problem by not having large forms. Or not needing them!
I await your comments while listening to Bruckner.
I have listened to five or six different performances of this and Celibidache is perhaps the best. The best one-word description of his conducting I can think of is "Jovian."
The archive gnomes have been at work because in the last week I have run into two guitar composers that I have never heard of before. This is Antoine de Lhoyer (1768 - 1852).
I honestly do not know what to think of this (found it via Ted Gioia) set by Will Smith's daughter Willow. I might like it. Not sure. Unlike Taylor Swift it actually has character.
"The fairy-tale of artistic creativity, this pitiful relic of the myth of divine creation, has remained the last delusion of Western culture."
--Max Ernst (1891-1976)
Written for an exhibition in 1934, this is one of the most succinct expressions of the attitude that underlies a lot of attacks on the fine arts. Ernst was a member of the Dada group and later a central figure in the surrealist movement.
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I know this is a bit far from the usual topics, but have a look anyway: Yesterday’s Men
One day in the autumn of 1980, during my first semester of graduate school, I was making my way to the English department when I came across a classmate. He was sitting on a bench, holding papers in his hand, and staring at nothing. When I asked him what was up, he told me that one of his professors had just returned a graded paper to him—the first paper he had written as a graduate student—and told him that he had inappropriately relied on the ideas of a literary critic named Northrop Frye. The professor had written that Frye was “yesterday’s man.” “Yesterday’s man,” my classmate repeated. “What does that even mean?”
Not so many years earlier, Frye had been the most important literary critic in the English-speaking world. But now he was increasingly being overshadowed by figures with strange names like Barthes and Derrida. A few weeks before my college graduation, a professor took me aside and whispered those names into my ear; feeling myself welcomed into some new freemasonry, I fetched an index card and wrote Bart, Derry Da. Only that initiation had prevented me from suffering a fate like that of my befuddled classmate. I tried to be sympathetic, not smug.
The whole thing is interesting if you have the time. Northrop Frye has stuck in my mind more than any other literary critic, especially folks like Barthes and Derrida. All this makes me recall again that there are definitely passing fashions in academia and also in the fine arts. That's why what endures and what doesn't is important.
Nobody laughed when an 11-year-old Mozart sat down at the keyboard to play what one critic described as “the longest and most difficult pieces with impressive precision.” Performing next, her younger brother, Wolfgang Amadeus, was not too shabby either.
As Susan Tomes, a Scottish concert pianist and author, reminds us in her delightfully provocative and consistently informative account “Women and the Piano: A History in 50 Lives,” it was Maria Anna Mozart who initially received top billing at the European courts where her father, Leopold, took his two child prodigies on tour.
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This clip talks about a topic that is pretty frequent around here:
I'm not sure I entirely agree with either position, but in answer to David Bruce, there are certainly 20th century pieces I love such as the Rite of Spring, Bartók String Quartet no. 4 and the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, string quartets and symphonies by Shostakovich, lots of stuff by Steve Reich, some by Philip Glass and a whack of other stuff if I took time to think. Prokofiev! In the 21st century, certainly some stuff by Gubaidulina, Caroline Shaw and likely some others. Honestly, would you rather listen to Taylor Swift?
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We constantly hear about grand plans to update and renew classical performance. We rarely hear when these plans go awry. But here is an example. Let's call it CBSO Reloaded:
Mention of the Vision rouses feelings that seasoned concertgoers should have felt something brewing even from the start of the current season, with the stark rebranding of each concert’s programme-book cover as “CBSO Remastered”, with perhaps a subliminal message of new brooms sweeping clean. The prospectus for the forthcoming 2024-25 season is equally unsettling. For the first time in decades the editorial blurb has not been written by an accredited writer on music, and speaks about toe-tapping to joyous works such as Bruckner Nine and Mahler Nine (music-lovers will understand that anomaly).
When management decides to update our concert experience, complainers are not welcome:
Another furore developed when one of the CBSO’s most loyal attendees, well-known to concert audiences throughout Birmingham, complained about the distractions of a photographer snapping away behind his seat. Eventually the CBSO management saw fit to issue a directive that people who continued to complain might be barred from attending concerts, or indeed any involvement with the orchestra. As recently revealed, the Arts Council of England has such a policy of threatening disgruntled clients.
Also:
There is a disturbing subtext to the entire situation, and that is the implication that the performances in the auditorium aren’t enough to attract audiences. What does this do to the morale of the players? Some anonymous contributions to Slipped Disc from within the ranks suggest that the players are disheartened and fearful, and that they feel the management should be thinking more about recouping financial shortfalls due to Birmingham City Council’s bankruptcy, and not wasting money on all the theatrical and lighting gimmicks.
Sometimes we associate the word “operatic” with big, extreme feelings. But I think mixed emotions — ambivalence — are what opera does best. [Opera] conveys the complexity of emotions that might be hard to hear in everyday speech. The book had a lot of that. I liked the realness of this story and how complicated the characters were. They felt very real to me in their charm and in their flaws.
Also, I wanted to write a tragic love story — not tragic in the sense of gay oppression, but tragic in the sense that [these characters are] not a great match. Tragic in the sense that their love doesn’t last.
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Our first envoi is the Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. It's just a great, great piece and I've loved it from the first time I heard it:
Here is a non-operatic piece by Gregory Spears:
Back in their glory days, here is the CBSO with Mahler Symphony No. 2. If you want people to know you are serious, just start with a double-bass solo.
Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything
marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.
--André Breton.
It's a weird world we live in: Eric Clapton’s ‘Wonderful Tonight’ Guitar to Sell Amid Robust Music Memorabilia Market. You might get blocked by the paywall so the story is that an old Martin acoustic guitar that Clapton supposedly wrote a song on in 1977 is headed to auction and is estimated to sell for around $380,000 or the price of a house in many markets. This isn't one of his famous guitars like the Gibson he used to play on with Cream, or one of the Fender Stratocasters he played on in later years. Nope, this is just an old guitar with cigarette burns:
Clapton wrote “Wonderful Tonight” for his then-girlfriend Pattie Boyd, whom he would be married to from 1979 to 1989. The guitar has a number of other Clapton-specific features, such as cigarette burns in the finish, for which he was known to have across his guitars.
Memorabilia tied to specific, significant music pieces like Clapton’s guitar are attracting a certain group of well-resourced auction buyers as they look to reconnect with some of their favorite artists and own a literal piece of music history.
"A literal piece of music history"! This seems pathetic, decadent and superficially materialistic all at the same time so hey, I guess it is the perfect reflection of our times with its strange obsession with celebrity.
Imagine if after Oppenheimer successfully detonated the first atomic bomb, the rest of the world had just shrugged its shoulders and carried on as normal.
Because that’s what seems to have just happened in the entire field of human culture known as “music.”
A few weeks ago, a company called Suno released a new version of its AI-generated music app to the public. It works much like ChatGPT: You type in a prompt describing the song you’d like… and it creates it.
The results are, in my view, absolutely astounding. So much so that I think it will be viewed by history as the end of one musical era and the start of the next one. Just as The Bomb reshaped all of warfare, we’ve reached the point where AI is going to reshape all of music.
That's the basic assumption. Notice that this is the kind of argument that has become typical in public discourse these days. Driven by the need for traffic, much of what we encounter on the internet, on YouTube and elsewhere is characterized by ludicrous and excessive claims and analogies. It started with entirely evidence and research-free claims about the "Ten Best" this and that. It moved on to claims that someone "destroyed" someone else with a quip. And now, every new generation of computer software changes humanity "forever." Take a moment to realize that every widespread event changes everything "forever." The Internet, the smart phone, the use of drones in warfare, in music, the invention of recording, the invention of streaming, sampling, the use of autotune and drum machines, hell, the invention of nylon strings for classical guitar to replace gut. All of these things had an incremental and continuing impact which means they changed things "forever."
Don't I wish that there were courses in school and university that taught things like proportionality and perspective in argument, that taught history, that just taught how to make an argument and avoid logical errors. Oh, wait, there was a time when they did, but all that had to be banned in order to leave room for more ideological indoctrination.
Ok end of rant. My answer to the above claim is simply that computer algorithms do not "create" anything, they just slap together some generic stuff lifted from people who did actually create something. Go ahead, listen to the examples. One thing we can deduce is that pop music has become itself so akin to a generic industrial product that even a computer can fake it plausibly. To be fair, the writer later on admits that:
I don’t think [AI] will make a huge difference at the “top” of the industry. Taylor Swift, Coldplay and, regrettably, U2, will continue to release albums and sell out stadiums. No one is going to stop you somehow enjoying Bono’s music.
But where I do think AI will make a difference are the billion other lower-grade circumstances where music is playing. If you need background music for your corporate health and safety training video, or you need a theme tune for your podcast, then it is a no-brainer to use AI instead of paying an expensive musician.
For better or worse then, AI will become the ubiquitous source of, essentially, “elevator music” for the entire world...
Yuja Wang’s latest recital at the Festival Hall was a dazzling, at times beguiling affair, carefully structured and executed with her customary flamboyance, glamour and elegance. Chopin’s four Ballades formed the second half of the programme, but before the interval came works from around 1950: Samuel Barber’s Piano Sonata in E Flat Minor, and a selection of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues.
Let's give deserving praise, her programming is far more creative than most pianists these days. She even had a piece by Pierre Boulez as an encore.
There is only one British contestant at this year’s Leeds piano competition, an event founded by piano teacher Fanny Waterman (pictured) to advance awareness of the instrument and its talented young performers.
Just one.
I looked through the list of current players in the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester’s concert this week in Granada. One in five players were Spanish. I struggled to find a single Brit.
Getting into these elite events requires training at the highest level.
Although no longer known for boldly progressive main stage productions — the likes of Achim Freyer’s Wagner “Ring” cycle (far and away the most imaginative of any American “Ring”) and a series of Robert Wilson stagings — L.A. Opera delivers a “Turandot” that does at least provide local color. Hockney designed his “Turandot” sets for San Francisco Opera and Chicago Lyric Opera, where they were first used in 1992. Still, he was at the time an Angeleno. His blues were the Pacific Ocean. His reds were Malibu sunsets.
The Hockney “Turandot” dazzles. He transformed objectionably quaint Chinoiserie of yore into a vibrant East-West artistic fusion. But of the seven operas Hockney designed (including a wondrous “Tristan und Isolde” for Music Center Opera in 1987), his “Turandot” is the most problematic and holds up least well.
When the French conductor François-Xavier Roth woke up the week before last in his apartment in Paris, his career was in excellent shape. He had just given two concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic. He had a tour to look forward to with Les Siècles, the period instrument ensemble he founded. He was the Music Director of the Gürzenich Orchestra, the general music director of the city of Cologne, the Principal Guest Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and Chief Conductor and Artist Director designate of the SWR Symphonieorchester in Stuttgart. His calendar was packed and the gigs kept getting better. Roth’s name stood for eclectic yet carefully curated programs, creative interpretations, and joyful experimentation beyond the well-trodden paths of the repertoire. He was equally capable of discovering unknown works and rediscovering well-known classics.
On May 22, suddenly nobody seemed to want anything to do with Roth. In the French satirical magazine Le Canard enchaîné, which is renowned for its investigative reporting, seven musicians accused Roth of harassment in the form of sexual text messages, including dick pics. (VAN was informed of Le Canard enchaîné’s upcoming article in advance, reporting exclusively on the story.) The evening the story was published, Roth was replaced by his assistant Adrien Perruchon for a concert with Les Siècles. The next day, Roth canceled all his upcoming engagements until further notice.
When we met in the lobby of a hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Uchida was in the middle of a particularly busy stretch of concerts. Almost immediately, our conversation took an unexpected turn, as she made it clear she was irked by my questions about her life and music.
A scholarly artist, Uchida was intent on testing my musical knowledge, stopping the interview several times to quiz me on the German Renaissance, the invention of musical copyright, Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” and the deaths of Schubert and Webern. Unimpressed, she at one point suggested I leave my job for a year to study music full time.
I think the problem there was that the New York Times hasn't quite realized that few artists have much respect for the journalism profession any more. Here is a delightful exchange:
When you take time to dream, do you have revelations about life or music?
I never have revelations in my life. Or if I do, I won’t tell you.
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Let's have something from Yuja Wang. It is hard to find something by her on YouTube that is neither a concerto, an interview, clips featuring her costuming or a biography. But here is a Rachmaninov prelude:
So since we have one prelude, let's have all preludes today. Here is Marcin Dylla with the Prelude No. 1 by Villa-Lobos:
Here is the Prelude no. 1 in C major from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Bk I by Bach on clavichord:
And finally, the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune by Debussy:
There is only one piece similar to this one that I can recall: the Seven Last Words for string quartet by Joseph Haydn. This is the String Quartet No. 15 by Shostakovich which consists of six movements, all adagio. Played by the Jerusalem Quartet:
Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very
serious person we are when we are not an artist.
--José Ortega y Gasset (1925)
Trying to return the Friday Miscellanea to light and chuckling:
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The New York Times reports on the Curtis Institute: At This School, the Students Live Entirely for Music. First, let's turn down the hype a bit: all good music schools are like this: small semi-monastic communities of devoted students and teachers. You can be a music student at a major university and barely know what else is happening on campus. You may not have even set foot in the main library. You spend all your time either in class or in practice rooms or rehearsal: this is the norm for music students.
[Curtis is] an extremely selective school whose roughly 150 students come from around the world to study with almost monastic focus. Even among conservatories, it is exceptional, with a wide age range — from preadolescence to post-baccalaureate adulthood — and a personalized approach, of schedules and repertoire, for musicians who live almost entirely for their art.
I went out with a Curtis graduate, a bassoonist. She said she learned a Vivaldi concerto every week and that if you attend Curtis, you have an in at every orchestra in North America because they are populated with Curtis graduates. The article follows the lives of five students and, while a bit hagiographic, is worth a read. I will try to give a report on what it is like at the Mozarteum when I am in Salzburg this summer.
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I'm trying to include as much comic, light-hearted and fun items as possible this week, but they are hard to find. This one is worth watching even though it is serious. Samuel Andreyev is a Candian composer who lives in France and he has a lot of interesting clips on everything from Webern to Captain Beefheart. Here he untangles a few misconceptions about the aesthetics of music. This is actually a Q&A clip, so the title is a bit misleading, but stick with it, he gives some interesting answers.
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Much of my education happened outside of university--though it was certainly attending university that set me on the right path. Still, nowadays universities seem less, well, enriching than they used to. Here is an interesting discussion: Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul.
I had students like this at Columbia and Yale. There were never a lot of them, and to judge from what’s been happening to humanities enrollments, there are fewer and fewer. (From 2013 to 2022, the number of people graduating with bachelors degrees in English fell by 36%. As a share of all degrees, it fell by 42%, to less than 1 in 60.) They would tell me—these pilgrims, these intellectuals in embryo, these kindled souls—how hard they were finding it to get the kind of education they had come to college for. Professors were often preoccupied, with little patience for mentorship, the open-ended office-hours exploration. Classes, even in fields like philosophy, felt lifeless, impersonal, like engineering but with words instead of numbers. Worst of all were their fellow undergraduates, those climbers and careerists. “It’s hard to build your soul,” as one of my students once put it to me, “when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.”
Symphony concerts aren’t supposed to be like this. This week, the audience for the world premiere of Huang Ruo’s City of Floating Sounds will download an app and stand at one of four designated starting points on the streets of Manchester. Then they will select and play out loud one of 11 synchronised prerecorded tracks to the symphony on their phones as they stroll towards the Factory International Warehouse, following routes suggested by the app. There are constraints: if you’re sipping cappuccino on Canal Street and are five minutes late pressing play, what you hear will be synchronised with others parts already in play on other phones. Hopefully audiences will all arrive at the concert at the same time for part two of the experience, a live performance of the whole symphony.
The rising Finn Tarmo Peltokoski, at 24 the youngest conductor ever signed by Deutsche Grammophon, talks to BR about his formative influences:
‘I don’t really come from a musical family, but Mozart’s music was always present in our home. We had a CD – something like “Classical Music for Dummies”. It had all the hits on it, including the first movements of the Symphony in G minor. But I can’t remember it specifically. But I do remember that I saw The Magic Flute for the first time when I was about eleven. Mozart was always there somehow.’
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Keeping it comic: our first envoi is Mozart's Musical Joke, K. 522:
The humor in the first movement is fairly subtle, but it gets rather coarse in the Minuet, especially at the expense of the horns. Next my favorite piece of grotesquerie the Danse Macabre, op. 40 of Saint-Saëns:
Shostakovich had a manic, sardonic side and it shows no more clearly than in this Polka from the ballet The Golden Age:
For everyone who couldn't stand yesterday's listening, here is the Vaughan Williams Piano Quintet. Like the Schubert Piano Quintet it is a bass-heavy ensemble with violin, viola, cello and double bass with the piano. A charmingly robust and rambunctious piece.
Marcin Dylla is one of the finest of the current generation of classical guitarists being both a strong technician and a fine musician. Lately he has joined with the Kupinski Guitar Duo to record some concerto performances. A while ago they released the Villa-Lobos Concerto and yesterday they released the Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez. While this is certainly well-played, it is not as successful as the Villa-Lobos because of the strong instrumental colors in the orchestra that are simply missing.
Recently Ana Vidovic released her version which consisted simply of playing the guitar solo part with no orchestral backing. The tragedy here is that fine artists like Dylla and Vidovic should be playing this concerto--and a bunch of other guitar concertos--with orchestras all over the place instead of being forced into these inadequate solutions. The Concierto de Aranjuez is a great piece, one of the finest 20th century concertos. When I was a solo concert artist I had a number of opportunities to play it with different orchestras and even got a chance to do the Villa-Lobos. But times have changed and it seems that guitarists are no longer sought after. The classical world has narrowed its horizons and there are vanishing few concerto performances that are not by piano, violin or cello. That's it.
I've been reading a large collection of theories of art which comprises a great number of artist's manifestoes. This has led me to wonder just what I might write that would constitute a manifesto: what it is that I am trying to do when I compose music. As I have no discernible public career as a composer--or a very, very tiny one--I believe I can speak with complete honesty. If anyone is in a similar boat, it might be of some use. So here goes.
I have to give a little background: I was born and lived my early life in the far north of Canada, an area sometimes described as "taiga." We lived in quite a number of very small towns and even in the wilderness itself. In the farthest north of these if you dug down ten or so feet at the end of the brief summer, late August, you would find the ground still frozen--permafrost. So while I was very aware of nature, it was not until we moved to Vancouver Island in my mid teens that I encountered something you might call "culture." The one exception to this was my mother, who was a country fiddler.
Living in the relatively well-populated west coast of Canada I encountered popular music first, then later classical music (in the form of old, scratchy LPs) and finally, Asian culture (in the local library) and Asian music (at the listening library of the university). I only mention things that had an impact or influence. So my initial model of a composer was derived from reading the biographies of people like Beethoven, Schoenberg and John Cage. Later I read a large number of biographies and listened to many hours of music by these and many other composers, but these were the ones I encountered first. Thinking back, I think the first composer I really loved was Claude Debussy.
While I was playing popular music I wrote a lot of songs, probably the main inspiration for these was Bob Dylan. Later, when I became a classical guitarist, my early attempts at composition were influenced by poetry as much as music. Later people like Ligeti and Steve Reich were important. Many years later, after I had retired as a performer, I again returned to poetry as an inspiration and my first serious attempt at composition was a series of songs. Here is one, setting a poem by John Donne:
And another, on a poem by Li Po:
As you can hear, the musical "language" is very different and in a relationship with the text.
Moving to instrumental music, the problem of style was very difficult for me. Here is something manifesto-like: what I want to do is create something with a real, individual character, because that is, for me, a crucial element for something to be an artwork. It doesn't have to be in the current popular style (whether that be serialism or ethnic-derived or ecologically correct), it doesn't have to be initially well liked, it doesn't have to express my inner suffering or whatever--it just has to have a real aesthetic character because that is what I hear when I listen to music I admire. Whether it is Bach, Berg or Steve Reich, what I hear is an artwork with a real, individual character. I would say a characteristic beauty, but as we all know, "beauty" is impossible to define, besides, aesthetic beauty usually contains elements of ugliness as contrast. Dissonance is essential for us to hear consonance.
So where I am now, is in the position of taking tiny hints from things I admire (and trying to conceal their origin!), trying to allow some influences to inspire other ideas and finally, trying to hew out something that has real character. Not many successes amid quite a few failures, but this piece for violin and guitar is not altogether bad (the reference there is to a comment Beethoven made about one of his finest pieces: he said it was "not altogether lacking in fantasy..."):
