Friday Miscellanea

Outside of Salzburg, the world still goes on and the New York Times has an interesting piece on an up and coming composer: Hannah Kendall Writes Music With a Vocabulary of Her Own.

Kendall’s own journey began in Wembley, a suburb in northwest London, where she was born. Her grandfather was a jazz musician; the household was filled with music, dance and drama, and at the behest of her mother, a first-generation Guyanese immigrant, she took up the violin at 4, the piano at 7 and voice lessons at 14.

Kendall majored in voice and composition at the University of Exeter, and then earned a master’s degree in composition at the Royal College of Music, while also studying arts management at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. (“As a composer it’s incredibly helpful for me to understand press and marketing and fund-raising, as I’m likely to have to do it for myself,” she told The Guardian in 2018.) For much of the past six years, she has been in New York, where she completed her doctorate at Columbia University in March.

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I've been looking for pieces on the Salzburg Festival in the mainstream media, but nothing yet. But there is this item: La Jolla Music Society SummerFest Review: Broadening Horizons

But it was a performance of Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale,” cogently conducted by the English composer and musical polymath Thomas Adès, that stole the show. Written for septet and narrator (in this case, the Broadway actor Danny Burstein, affecting a Paul Giamatti-ish demeanor), the piece is frequently augmented by additional artistry, which on this occasion fell to a small outfit called the Paper Cinema, whose work, all executed live opposite the musicians, was projected onto a large screen at the rear of the stage. Had Messrs. Adès and Burstein and the band proved any less compelling, most people’s attention would have been focused entirely on the paper puppets and the pen-and-ink drawing of Nicholas Rawling, the outfit’s co-founder and artistic director.

The whole event sounds really interesting, so read the whole thing. Guitarist Sean Shibe is scheduled to appear later in the festival.

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 Obituary from the New York Times: Wolfgang Rihm, Prolific Contemporary Classical Music Composer, Dies at 72

Mr. Rihm was considered one of the most original and prolific musical voices in Europe and the most performed German composer of contemporary classical music. Among his prominent commissions was “Reminiszenz,” an “arresting, broody orchestral song cycle,” as Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim described it in The New York Times. The work, for a tenor and large orchestra, premiered at the 2017 opening of the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg.

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For those of you interested in Wittgenstein, the London Review of Books has an exhaustive review of three new translations of the Tractatus: A Tove on the Table

It consists of 525 sections, or ‘propositions’, ranging in length from four words to about a page and a half of text and diagrams. Each is given a decimal number, with the numbers indicating subordination and interconnection. Thus propositions 2.21 and 2.22 are comments on proposition 2.2, which is itself a comment on proposition 2, which is one of the seven top-level propositions. The propositions have an aphoristic quality. They are written with great compression, hardly any examples, and little explicit argument. They are for the most part general and abstract. Wittgenstein makes few concessions to his reader. But there is something undeniably awe-inspiring about their cumulative effect and about the concision with which they encapsulate his elaborate system of thought.

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Slipped Disc uncovers an interesting phenomenon: WHY A COMPOSER IS LOVED OVER THERE, AND NOT OVER HERE

I find it rather uplifting that, in a global market, a great composer can be revered in one section of the world and totally ignored in the rest.

It is entirely to the credit of Wolfgang Rihm, who died this weekend, that he remains virtually unknown in the English-speaking world.

In his native Germany, and in neighbouring Austria and Switzerland, Rihm ranked as the most performed living composer and the most prolific. He was resident composer at the Berlin Philharmonic, the Salzburg and Lucerne festivals and other summits of classical activity.

In Britain and the US, he had name recognition in the diminishing puddle of contemporary music, and nothing beyond. The BBC put on a weekend of his music at the Barbican some 15 years ago but the uptake was so poor the experiment was never repeated.

Read the whole thing, which has a number of insights.

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Some observations on what goes on behind the scenes in pop music: The music industry is engineering artist popularity – listeners are right to be angry

Pop has always presented listeners with the illusion of choice – no matter whether you listen to Roan, Eilish or Carpenter, your $0.003 lines the coffers of Universal Music Group – but it’s certainly got worse in recent years, as artists and their teams have worked out new ways of gaming charts and algorithms. Taylor Swift has maintained a chokehold on the charts not just because of widespread listenership of her album The Tortured Poets Department, but because she has savvily released geolocked alternate versions of the record when a competitor, such as Charli xcx, comes within spitting distance of the No 1 spot.

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It took me a while, but I did finally appreciate how great a contribution Ringo Starr made to The Beatles.

The man cruelly mocked as “not even the best drummer in The Beatles” must be the most underrated musician of all time

So vast is the chasm between the way Starr is perceived and his actual talents that it would not be going too far to say he is the most underrated musician of all time. While his talent is not of the same stripe as hyperactive geniuses such as Ginger Baker, Keith Moon or Mitch Mitchell, it actually involves greater variety and imagination. He serves songs rather than swamps them, at the same time providing character. His nuanced skill frequently lifts recordings from the merely great to the classic. Witness “She Loves You” (1963). The Beatles’ second number one, it summed up their singular life-affirming charm and ensured they became less a chart act, more a social phenomenon. 

Starr’s contribution is pitch perfect. To a recipe containing an unforgettable vocal hook, an anthemic chorus and trilling harmonies, he adds a dramatic opening roll, breathless pace, sizzling hi-hat and gleeful cymbal-splashes, the perfect final ingredients to a dish of exhilaration.

It is “Rain” that confirms Starr’s greatness beyond dispute. The B-side of the 1966 single “Paperback Writer” occupies a unique status in the Fabs’ corpus in being the only Beatles track where every band member contributes as an equal. In a pounding piece of proto-psychedelia, Lennon provides a quavering melody and scathing lyric, McCartney a belligerent, brawny bass and Harrison shimmering guitar shapes, while Starr goes gloriously haywire.

After kicking off with a dive-bombing tattoo, he weaves spell-bindingly blistering patterns. His unremitting display — heedlessly maintaining hectic playing on downbeats — sees him running the risk of distracting from Lennon’s anti-orthodoxy philosophising, but the shameless showboating never offends simply because its elevated quality justifies him being a joyous law unto himself. 

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This is what I've been saying: CDs sales are growing. How I wish I hadn’t given my beloved collection away

Compact discs provided the soundtrack to his life. Then came streaming and he couldn’t get rid of them fast enough. As CDs enjoy a mini-renaissance, our writer looks back at what he lost and, below, musicians share their memories

Actually, I'm still regretting getting rid of my vinyl, decades ago.

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First up, a chamber piece by Hannah Kendall: Network Bed.

I'm sorry to admit that this is probably the first time I have put up a piece by Wolfgang Rihm. This is Concerto en Sol for cello and orchestra.

Finally, The Soldier's Tale by Stravinsky: