Friday Miscellanea

The New York Times has a think piece on Discord at the Symphony: Losing a Star, San Francisco Weighs Its Future

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.”

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It's Taylor Swift's world, we just live in it: The Taylor Swift Economy Has Overtaken London. I Went to Its Epicenter.

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.

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Also in the NYT an article about an experimental Mexican musician: Mabe Fratti, a Spark in Mexico City’s Experimental Music Scene

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.

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One of the recurring pleasures of the classical music world (and the pop one as well) is the discovery or re-discovery of music of the past: ‘Dazzling, beautiful and vital’ – Mishka Rushdie Momen on Tudor keyboard masterpieces

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.

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Alex Ross goes all medieval: Guillaume de Machaut’s Medieval Love Songs

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.