Friday Miscellanea

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.”

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Here is the kind of wacky performance that we haven't seen since the 60s. In the key of 5G: the ‘dimensionalist’ who wrote a symphony for 1,000 phones

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.

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I GREW UP WITH CLASSICAL MUSIC FOR DUMMIES

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: