I recently saw a concert of cello and piano and it was a quite good and quite enjoyable concert. Apart from the Sonata for cello and piano by Debussy it lacked much musical substance, but that is par for the course these days. The ensemble was very good indeed and there was loads of musical expression. But in retrospect, there was one element perhaps worth commenting on. We are in difficult times for classical musicians where the market is limited but the number of young artists striving for recognition is all too abundant. So what do you do? Well, you become a technical master of your instrument, of course, but in addition to that you are counseled to "brand" yourself, to use commercial marketing techniques, to upgrade your stage presence--in Yuja Wang's case that may involve wearing performing costumes that are, well, risqué.
But there are other things you can do. And this is my topic for today. You need to be a virtuoso, of course, but equally importantly you need to signal to the audience that you are a virtuoso. I am reminded of the old story of Wanda Landowska, the early maestra of the harpsichord. One person who viewed her performing scores said that there were little notes here and there that said things like "look up," presumably to signal to the audience a transcendental moment. So this is certainly not new. But it has, until recently, been fairly uncommon in classical soloists. But the cellist in the concert I saw was an avid practitioner. He didn't just end a note, he "threw it away" with abandon. He "looked up" quite often to signal how moved he was by the music. Oh, and looked down and to the side as well as there were emotional highlights everywhere. We were witnesses to, not only a virtuoso performance but also the performance of virtuosity. Every gesture he made seemed to be exaggerated for emotional effect.
This is really not necessary for the virtuoso performance, but it is intended to charm the audience. As long as they think it is authentic and inadvertent. If we go back a few years and watch another cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich, playing the Shostakovich cello concerto we can watch someone playing far more difficult and profound music without any of the added spice of miming emotional expression.
The concert I saw on the weekend ended with the Sonata no. 1 for cello and piano by Felix Mendelssohn and as we were leaving the hall I'm afraid my evil twin took over and I commented to my friends: "Whenever someone feels the urge to play Mendelssohn I usually counsel them to repress that urge and play Shostakovich instead--we will all be better off."
Not so miscellaneous today: before going to Thanksgiving dinner yesterday with friends, I had a couple of free hours so I listened to most of the St. Matthew Passion by Bach. What an amazing work! This is the version I heard:
I grew up with the Klemperer recording, but this version is very much better. There are two small orchestras, two mixed choirs, two sets of four vocal soloists and six boy sopranos. The way Bach uses these forces is really remarkable. There are frequent montages where the choirs interject short, brisk phrases into a texture that might be one or both orchestras with obbligato solo parts, or a chorale like texture with the melody of the boy sopranos floating above, within a narrative carried by recitatives from a host of characters: Judas, Pontius Pilate, priests, bystanders and, of course, Jesus with his surrounding halo of strings. This is as close as Bach ever got to opera, but it is nothing like opera. Oddly enough, the montage sections remind me of Stravinsky's Petrouschka.
Speaking of the Netherlands Bach Society's project to record all of Bach, I have listened to many recordings so far and I have been impressed with nearly all of them. No big stars, but very accomplished and committed musicians. Listening to this it is hard to see classical music as a dying genre, no longer of any relevance as a recent series of YouTube clips would have us believe!
Finally something interesting: two new pieces by J. S. Bach. No, not newly written of course, but newly discovered. Here is the New York Times:
In 1992 Peter Wollny, then a Harvard graduate student in musicology, was researching his dissertation at the Royal Library of Belgium when he came across two unsigned music manuscripts so strikingly original that he had copies made and set them aside.
“This is actually how I work,” Wollny said Tuesday. “Whenever I find something that poses a scholarly problem to me, I keep it. Even if it takes three decades, I don’t put it aside.”
Wollny began to develop a hunch about who wrote these two anonymous, undated works for organ: Johann Sebastian Bach. But finding evidence required years of musical detective work, and it was not until this week, 33 years after the random discovery he made while doing research on one of Bach’s sons, that he officially announced the discovery.
And here they are:
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As is often the case, the subhead is a nice summary: Cultural products are more than ever a class of financialized assets, whose owners are even further removed from artmaking
THE HISTORY OF THE MUSIC industry is a history of conglomeration. For decades, the business has been ruled by a dwindling number of corporations, each controlling an enormous market share that grows larger with every new merger or acquisition. Today just three record companies—Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group—control more than 80 percent of all recorded music released through a recognized label. And they do so with a collective iron fist, jealously guarding access to their vast catalogs, whether through album sales, streaming platforms, radio airplay, or commercial licensing. The Big Three’s disproportionate market-making power, according to scholar and musician Aram Sinnreich, has all the trappings of an oligopolistic cartel. And in turn, streaming itself, once a domain of renegades and upstarts, has consolidated around its own Big Three: Together Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music account for 90 percent of all streaming subscriptions.
I guess my problem is that I have no interest in music as an industry--only as an artform. But this is where we are.
Here is a particularly fine exemplar of human-created music. Jean Rondeau playing the Tombeau for M. Blancrocher from the new Louis Couperin collection:
A lovely recent performance of the Debussy Sonata for Cello and Piano:
And finally, the Piano Sonata no, 8 by Sergei Prokofiev:
The lowbrow dominates culture and anyone who questions the status quo is dismissed as an elitist killjoy. But with bland algorithmic content on the rise, perhaps we consumers should start taking our art a bit more seriously
That subhead neatly summarizes the argument so we can probably skip reading the article. But yes, speaking as one who never left cultural snobbery, it is always a good time to take notice of cultural things that are not actually crap. Sure, they take a bit more time. Reading Don Quixote takes more time than watching Netflix, but perhaps not if you factor in the time spent trying to find something to watch on Netflix. Thanks to On an overgrown path for the delightful use of the word "enshittified." Yes, the enshittification of culture and, well, social institutions in general, is far advanced.
Of late, an increasing number of voices, some new and some thoroughly familiar, have converged on Substack. Such erstwhile blogging heavyweights as Steve Smith, Tim Rutherford-Johnson, and Joshua Kosman are in residence. The great Paul Griffiths, who has been observing new music longer than most of us have been alive, has launched what music!
The rise of headphone listening has changed us profoundly—and maybe not for the better.
No, no, no, they have it all wrong. If anything, music is too popular, or, more accurately, there is too much popular music. About the only ray of sunshine is the widespread use of headphones which has saved so many of us the torture of listening to other people's music. If only we could make the use of headphones mandatory in all public spaces.
Now for some listening. One cannot be too familiar with the symphonies of the always inventive Joseph Haydn. Here is his Symphony No. 31, nicknamed "Hornsignal" and yes, there are lots of horns.
You also cannot be too familiar with the symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich. Here is the 8th with Alain Altinoglu conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. This clip just appeared on YouTube six days ago.
For our last envoi, not a symphony but a serenade by Mozart. Even when writing music for diversion or background to a banquet, Mozart was simply incapable of writing anything less than superbly beautiful.
I said in my Friday Miscellanea post that I didn't see much worth commenting on. But just now, I did. More and more I find Rick Beato to be worth following because he often surprises. When it comes to popular music I'm usually a curmudgeon because the mass-produced industrial music we hear in just about every public space drives me right up the wall. But of course, there is a lot, well, some, really good "popular" music being created. Probably not really popular, but really interesting. And Rick Beato has just found some for us:
Yep, everything he says there is true. This really doesn't sound like anything you have heard before and yes, it really is beautiful. But deep in the harmonic structure, it reminds me very much of Debussy if he were alive today, living in London and working with a drummer named "II".
“Sinfonia” remains one of Berio’s most popular and indelible pieces. It appeals to lay listeners yet continues to fascinate experts. Throughout its five movements, the piece shows an inventive, clearly audible approach to form, an unsentimental melodiousness and extraordinarily skill in orchestration. Its most radical section is the third movement, which feels presciently overstimulating.
The piece “reflects a world marked by crises and conflicts — themes that remain profoundly relevant today,” De Benedictis said. “Wars, the destructive effects of capitalism (even more evident now than in 1968), the disintegration of the fundamental principles of coexistence, the frenzy of a fragmented and disjointed existence.”
At the opening of the third movement, a loud chord is followed by at least three distinct musical quotations in the space of seven measures: a climbing brass motive from the fourth movement of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra; the coldly biting flutes, sleigh bells and inviting violin phrase from the opening of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony; and cresting music from the second movement of Debussy’s “La Mer.”
What makes the article particularly useful is that it offers a host of music clips as examples.
Every night, ten-year-old J.S. Bach reached his little fingers through a locked bookshelf with a latticed front, rolled up a book of sheet music inside, drew it out, and copied it by moonlight, for he was not allowed a candle. It took six months for him to finish this difficult endeavor, only for the copied manuscript to be found by his older brother and taken away.
This was a child who had music pouring into and out of his ears since before he could talk. As little as we know about his life story, this fact is undeniable. Something was going on inside his head, strongly, forever. So does it make sense to look at his life in terms of events, or something more, something equally internal?
Allemande
Even if you hate classical music, you’ve heard Bach’s six cello suites. At least, the prelude of the first suite, in movies and on television. Like in Master and Commander and Family Guy and The Hangover Part II. And in this American Express commercial showcasing household objects making frowny faces and smiley faces. In fact, it’s often heard in commercials advertising financial services. “In the case of recent television commercials, Bach has more or less taken on a single function: reassurance,” said musicologist Peter Kupfer. “It is no coincidence that most companies that use Bach in their commercials offer financial or insurance services (including American Express, MetLife, and Allstate), thus requiring a message of trust.”
There is a paragraph or two for each of the six movements of the Cello Suite No. 1, so you should read the whole thing.
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Frankly, looking in the usual places, I don't see anything else over the last week worth comment. Your mileage may vary, of course. But let's just move on to the envois. First up, of course, the Berio Sinfonia:
And the Bach Cello Suite No. 1:
Here is the Charpentier Te Deum, the drum-friendly interpretation:
And finally, in my travels in Oaxaca the last couple of weeks I stumbled across the 1969 film of The Battle of Britain. An all-star cast for a film that I have never known before. The main casting problem was that the average age of the pilots that flew in the Royal Air Force in 1940 was twenty! They simply couldn't find many actors that young. The best lines were from Laurence Olivier as Air Chief Marshal. When they finally turned the tide and were shooting down a lot more German planes than the Germans were shooting down British planes, he was asked to comment on a statement from the German ambassador in a press conference that the British numbers were simply wrong. Olivier said "I have no interest in propaganda. If we are right, they will give up. If they are right, they will be here in a week."
I'm not at home, but traveling in Oaxaca state, Mexico. Yesterday I flew from Puerto Escondido to Oaxaca in this plane:
This is a De Havilland Twin Otter, I think. Manufactured by De Havilland Canada
It seats fifteen, not counting the pilot, but for the first leg I was the only passenger. Now on to our regularly-scheduled program.
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In the Gramophone classical music awards:
Rising star María Dueñas, 22, was named young artist of the year. The Spanish violinist, who won first prize at the Menuhin competition in 2021 and records for Deutsche Grammophon, also took the instrumental category for her album of Paganini’s 24 Caprices.
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Also:
The recording of the year was awarded to the French conductor Raphaël Pichon and his choir and period-instrument orchestra Pygmalion for their recording of JS Bach’s Mass in B Minor on the Harmonia Mundi label. Gramophone hailed the performance as one “that gleams at the cellular level, radiating outwards with devotional warmth; in short, it is alive”.
A team led by Dr. Shinichi Furuya at the NeuroPiano Institute and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. has provided the first scientific evidence showing how pianists’ touch on the keys can actually change a piano’s timbre—the tonal character of its sound.
Artistic creativity in music, painting, and other forms of expression depends on the ability to shape how an audience perceives what they experience. Yet, until now, scientists did not know whether musicians could truly alter a piano’s timbre while performing, or what kinds of physical movements would make that possible.
The headline oversells the article, as always. No, no secret tricks are revealed. And every single sensitive listener has heard how pianists (and harpsichordists) can shape timbre. So this isn't actually news, just confirmation. It has a lot to do with the velocity of attack.
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Over at Slipped Disc, Norman Lebrecht is complaining about a new box of ten CDs of the harpsichord music of Louis Couperin.
Now not many things make me happier than an hour or so of solo harpsichord. Even two hours, at a push.
But ten hours of it, and by a composer who’s mostly known by the piano suite Ravel wrote at his tomb.
Can anyone sing a single tune by Louis?
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Wow, I thought Mexico was mostly free from this sort of thing: CONDUCTOR IS SACKED ‘FOR GENDER PARITY’
Members of the Mexico City Tipica Orchestra (OTCM) yesterday condemned the dismissal of their artistic director, Alberto Torres Xolocotzi, after authorities from the Mexico City Ministry of Culture, headed by Ana Francis López Bayghen, summoned the musician to inform him of the decision, citing “gender parity.”
“Yesterday, June 24, in a meeting with the Orquesta Típica and Mariana Gómez Godoy, director of Artistic and Cultural Heritage of the SC, I informed the members of the group that the artistic director’s contract was terminated,” meaning that “a female director will be appointed in her place, without holding a competitive examination as has been the case since 2017,” the musicians detailed in a document shared with Excélsior.
The musicians lamented this decision and expressed their dissatisfaction: “We express our condemnation of policies that discriminate against gender, that promote gender intolerance, and that violate the human and labor rights of our members.”
In the second paragraph, the quote should read “a female director will be appointed in his place" probably a translation error.
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Which brings us to our envois for the day. Let's start with Spanish violinist Maria Dueñas playing the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso by Saint-Saëns:
Here is Raphaël Pichon conducting the Sanctus from the Bach B minor mass:
The most remarkable color change I have ever heard on piano was achieved by Arthur Rubinstein in a concert in Spain in 1974. When he got to the major section of the Bach Chaconne, I swear the entire color of the piano changed--as striking as if it were blue then green.
Now I think we need some Louis Couperin. This is a prelude played by Jean Rondeau. Sorry, Blogger won't embed:
Arvo Pärt, the pre-eminent religious composer of our time, was born in 1935 in Estonia, before its Soviet occupation. His music suggests the contemplative devotion and purity of Gregorian plainchant and Renaissance church chorale, though it could only have been written today, being at once archaic and abstract-modern. With its sense of stasis and light, the music reflects the immensity of the Baltic landscape and Estonia’s own forested plains. Under communism, Pärt fell foul of the Soviet censors as his music defied official atheism. His work is shaped by his Eastern Orthodox faith; it is a form of prayer.
One cannot miss the parallels with the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, whose music is also a form of prayer.
Pärt emerged from his silence with the exquisite piano composition Für Alina. Often used in films today to conjure a mood of sadness, Für Alina was music distilled to its purest essence and the first piece in Pärt’s new musical style of tintinnabuli. The compositions now began to pour out of him. Tabula Rasa, a landmark in 20th-century music, premiered at Tallinn’s Polytechnic Institute in September 1977 and reportedly left the audience speechless. The clanging of the prepared piano (achieved by inserting screws between its strings) showed the anti-classical influence of John Cage.
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If, like me, you have cast a critical eye on the whole rush to artificial intelligence, here is a Dutch philosopher to put it in perspective. He explains, very clearly, what it is and what it isn't:
Composers throughout the ages have used ‘models’, have paid homage to their imperishable predecessors in ways that are more often than not loving tributes: think Josquin’s Déploration sur la mort de Jean Ockeghem, Mozart’s very early piano concertos that are unabashed ‘arrangements’ of Johann Christian Bach, or Alban Berg’s Violinkonzert ‘Dem Andenken eines Engels’. Much of what is being written today is, however, merely derivative; betraying a lack of courage or of vision, straining our faith in music as an art-form with any future at all. Much contemporary art qualifies, indeed, barely as ‘entertainment’ any more, for it has been hijacked by the ‘addiction-directed’ processes of the internet, whose attention span is measured not even in minutes, but in seconds.
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It is hard to envy the life of a contemporary concert soloist: A VIOLINIST’S LIFE IN THE AIR
This has been quite the past 30 hours! My crazy travel day started with an incident on my United flight from Indianapolis to Houston, when some poor guy had a mental break and ran up to the front of the plane just as we were about to land and pulled open the emergency door (luckily he was subdued before he could throw himself out, so he is, as far as I know, OK).
We sat on the tarmac surrounded by police and firefighters for a couple of hours, I managed to get to my connecting flight to Buenos Aires ♂️but they told me it was closed. I begged, they relented, but of course they had given away my lovely business class seat so I spent the next 9.5 hours in 43D. 1 hour of sleep on the flight, 1 hour spent at Buenos Aires airport filing a claim for my lost suitcase, arrive at hotel 11AM, sleep until 1:30PM, find a clothing store, purchase an entire concert outfit in 30 minutes (that’s my kind of shopping), quick lunch, rehearsal at 4:30PM, Beethoven Concerto at 8PM with Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie and Riccardo Minasi at the incomparable Teatro Colón, post concert dinner at the most beautiful home of our wonderful presenters @mozarteumargentino_ , back to hotel 1AM. Pickup tomorrow at 7AM to head to Montevideo!
But that was what I worked hard to try to achieve in my career!
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Now for some envois. It seems forever since we have had something from Gustav Holst. Here is Mars from The Planets:
Here is the Symphony No. 9 by Valentin Silvestrov:
And finally, some not well-known Handel, an Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne, 1713:
It's odd, but sometimes I find an article in the Wall Street Journal on music to be more interesting than anything in the New York Times, which tends to puff pieces on musical personalities. Here is an article on a fascinating piece: ‘11,000 Strings’ Review: Georg Friedrich Haas’s Meditation.
“11,000 Strings” is precisely 66 minutes long and was performed in a gigantic oval of instruments and instrumentalists that surrounded an audience of 1,300 people. The music was played by 50 upright pianos, each of them with ever-so-slightly different tuning, amid a scattered chamber orchestra, the Klangforum Wien, of 25 other instruments. Each pianist had a tablet computer sending out individual musical instructions. No attendee heard exactly the same piece as a neighbor in any other part of the hall. (For the record, I was sitting between the harpist and a bassoonist, who were busily exploring the outer limits of their instruments.) But the circle of pianos provided a sort of unified backdrop that held it all together.
And here is a YouTube clip:
I have often thought that in this current phase of musical exploration a particularly fertile approach would be to consolidate the wildly experimental musics that appeared in the 1950s to 1980s of the last century. People like John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Olivier Messiaen opened many doors and windows on landscapes that have scarcely been traveled. This piece is an excellent example.
Despite Franz Schubert's remark to a fan, perhaps not. After all we have sardonic music, joyful music, comedic music, triumphal music and so on. But so often when I pick a piece of music for myself or for someone else to listen to it is what you might call 'sad' even though it is probably not the garden-variety emotion we think of as sad. Really great music is instead transcendent, out-lifting, making us stand outside ourselves--the original meaing of "ecstasy". Let's have some examples:
Even listeners who pay little attention to liner-note credits are likely familiar with Martin and Shellback’s handiwork. Martin’s career as a hook wizard took off in the late 1990s, when he helped write and produce such evergreen earworms as Robyn’s “Show Me Love” and Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way.” In the years that followed, Martin established a reputation for songs that combined precise instrumentation with expansive, inescapable choruses, like Kelly Clarkson’s 2004 smash “Since U Been Gone.”
“He writes songs. He’s not an artist,” Robyn said in a 2008 interview with Pitchfork. “He doesn’t have the need for expressing his personal thoughts in a song. For him, it’s about the melody. It’s about cracking a code, being as efficient as possible.”
Martin, who is press shy (“I’d rather not do this,” he told Joe Coscarelli during a 2022 New York Times interview), was a onetime rock frontman who was mentored by the Swedish pop mastermind Denniz Pop, who was known for wedding irresistible beats to sweeping choruses. “Not growing up here,” he said, referring to the United States, “you hear music differently. There was a big part of my life where I didn’t even understand what they were saying, so phonetics are super important to me — how things sound.”
This does, sort of, explain why popular music is more and more the product of an abstract process, like cheese slices, even while it masquerades as heartfelt individual expression.
In March 2025, an anonymous buyer purchased the 1715 “Baron Knoop” Stradivarius for $23 million (U.S.), making it the most expensive violin ever sold. (The seller, the American stringed-instrument collector David L. Fulton, had purchased it for a more modest $2.75 million in 1992.) Previous record setters have included the 1721 “Lady Blunt,” which fetched $15.9 million in 2011, and the “Joachim‑Ma,” which went for $11.25 million in February 2025.
All three of these models were made by Antonio Stradivari, a Cremonese luthier whose output in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is said to epitomize perfection in violin manufacturing. Depending on your point of view, they may indeed be examples of flawless human handiwork. Or they might be, as the fiction writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce once put it, objects that “tickle human ears by friction of a horse’s tail on the entrails of a cat.”
Compare this to what high-value guitars are selling for:
The guitar may exist on a similarly high level of symbolism, but the appraisal of an individual six-string turns more on its provenance and on any alterations by famous owners than on the maker. As two examples, an acoustic Gibson owned by John Lennon sold for $2.4 million in 2015, while the 1959 Martin D‑18E that Kurt Cobain used on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York album went for just over $6 million in 2020 (he had picked it up for just $5,000). Pricey, but not near the numbers a Stradivarius commands.
Read the whole thing for a lot of interesting observations.
he death of music criticism, long foretold, came a whole lot closer this summer. One day in mid-July, the New York Times sacked both of its chief music critics, pop and classical, along with chief theatre critic Jesse Green and Margaret Lyons, who covered TV.
The reason given for their “reassignment” was more alarming than the bloodbath itself. A memo from the culture editor, Sia Michel, warned that “new generations of artists and audiences are bypassing traditional institutions” — the New York Times — whilst “smartphones have Balkanised fandoms”. What readers crave, Michel feels, are “trusted guides to help them make sense of this complicated landscape”.
In plain English, what the Times is looking for is music critics who are as different as possible from the expert, well-dressed, wisecracking reviewers who delivered first-night juice (wisecrack intended*) daily at breakfast. Those dodos have had their daybreak.
What are we missing?
Why does this matter? Because a hostile New York Times review is worth more than a rave in ten other papers. Readers trust it, and artists use it to test their blood pressure. It has been over half a century since the Times last had a firebrand music critic in Harold Schonberg, who famously wrote: “Last night at Carnegie Hall, Jack Benny played Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn lost.” Schonberg earned the undying enmity of Leonard Bernstein, but New York devoured his every word.
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Sorry, no time for more this morning, so let's have some music. I haven't put up a late Beethoven string quartet for years and years. Here is the C# minor with the Danish String Quartet. I doubt there is any more profound music.
No, that's not what I've been reading! My usual assumption is that photos never really capture clouds, but that image yesterday was so dramatic I thought I would give it a try. Not bad. Ok, now to the books.
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis is one of the funniest books I have ever read, though perhaps you would have to have spent some time on a college campus to fully appreciate it.
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius are on the list of books that "everyone should read" but my feeling is that while the private thoughts of one of the great Roman Emperors are certainly of historic interest and also interesting to people studying Stoicism, this is not a really important book. Much of it is just mundane stream of consciousness.
The Laurence Sterne however, while not to everyone's taste, is certainly one of the great comic novels. I have to admit, I enjoy a great comic novel more than one of those Russian tragic doorstops. Mind you, you will encounter footnotes in classical Greek, the author's preface on page 172, innumerable digressions along with a chapter that attempts to map out the digressions, an entire exorcism in Latin, chapters on whiskers and noses that are really not about whiskers and noses and a lot of discussion of hobby-horses.
Let's attempt to find a suitable envoi. One of the funniest pieces of Baroque music is "The Kidney Stone Operation" by Marin Marais. Here is a performance with narration:
For all those folks who have been missing it! Let's have a quote from Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Bk 3:
Vermin were the death of Democritus, and vermin of another sort killed Socrates.
The editor tells us that Marcus Aurelius was likely thinking of Pherecydes of Syros instead of Democritus of Abdera. The "vermin" who killed Socrates were a jury of 501 fine and upstanding Athenian citizens.
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The New York Times did a big piece on what an amazing genius Taylor Swift is, but they seem to have memory-holed it already. Oh well. However there is another piece from the New York Times worth reading: Celebrating a Buffalo-Born Titan of the French Baroque Revival. William Christie is a nearly legendary figure who was hugely important in reviving the performing traditions of the French Baroque. The article delivers a well-earned tribute:
It was late August in Thiré, the tiny town in the Vendée region of western France where Christie has spent decades restoring an abandoned 17th-century manor house and planting a spectacular baroque garden. Now he was preparing to host his annual weeklong music festival there, Dans les Jardins de William Christie, which this year was the culmination of a season-long celebration of his 80th birthday and the improbable musical empire he has built. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Christie is venerated in France, where he played a key role in the revival of French baroque music and the reputations of composers like Lully, Charpentier, Couperin and Rameau. His inventive, vital performances showed that early music could be exciting and chic, and have sold out venues from the opera house at Versailles to the Brooklyn Academy of Music...
The Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů, the focus of this summer’s Bard Music Festival, at Bard College, had one of those voices which reveal themselves in a matter of seconds. Take the opening of his Second Symphony, from 1943, which the Orchestra Now performed on the festival’s first weekend, under the direction of Leon Botstein, Bard’s president and chief musical curator. The first violins unfurl a lilting, lightly bopping tune in D minor. Ascending patterns elsewhere in the strings blur the outlines of that governing idea. The real Martinů giveaway is an underlying buzz of activity in the piano and the harp—D-minor triads mixed with C-sharp-minor, B-flat-major, and E-flat-major ones, suggesting a rickety machinery behind the lyrical action. These and a few other basic elements recur throughout Martinů’s œuvre: curt themes, darting rhythms, tangy harmonies, glittering textures.
This is just the sort of thing that Ross does very well.
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One of the reasons I have reduced my postings is that I don't find much I want to comment on these days. Looking in all the usual places I find mostly the usual things: who died, who was appointed and who committed what sexual transgression. The news oriented sites like Slipped Disc are all about mundane events, the more scholarly sites are still beating the race/gender/colonization drums with the added spice of AI. And listeners seem to be tending towards the more soporific music. So let's listen to some non-soporific music:
Of course we have to have some Martinů. Here is his Symphony No. 2:
And just for fun, since we have never had any Martinů here before, here is the Symphony No. 4:
Oddly, Blogger simply refuses to embed that clip. Usually heard on violin and sometimes on guitar this is Bach's gussied up orchestral version of the prelude to the E major violin partita:
And finally, for the hard-core among you, Sviatoslav Richter playing an all-Schumann recital in Moscow in 1985.
St. John's College, founded in 1696 in the Maryland colony, has a great reading list. Divided up into four lists for each year from freshman to senior, it not only contains reading, but also listening with Bach, Mozart, Monteverdi, Haydn and others. I recall reading someone's opinion that a truly educated person should be as familiar with the Haydn string quartets as with Dante's Divine Comedy. Well, yes, of course!
Wow, I haven't done one of these for a long time. First up, this is what I am currently reading:
This is something I have wanted to read for a long, long time. Marcus Aurelius was the fifth of the "Five Good Emperors" of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty of the Roman Empire. The shocking thing one finds, even after reading just the first book, is that the Roman Empire during this period, 96 to 192 AD, was far better run than our contemporary democracies. As Winston Churchill averred, democracy is the worst of all systems, except for all the others. Nice quip, but, as we can see from this era of the Roman Empire, not actually true. As a philosopher manqué I have always had my misgivings about democracy. After all, it was 501 good Athenian citizens that voted to condemn Socrates to death in 399 BC, causing Aristotle to depart Athens so it would not "commit a second crime against philosophy."
Why was this era of the Roman Empire so well run? Let's let Marcus Aurelius explain with his list of things he is grateful for:
From Severus: love of family, love of truth, love of justice; ... to have conceived the idea of a balanced constitution, a commonwealth based on equality and freedom of speech, and of a monarchy which values above all the liberty of the subject...
If only we had governments that adhered to those virtues! Instead, the incentives that drive our politicians are all bad: they are constantly pressured to lie, to curry favor with financial contributors, to form partisan tribes for mutual support--and all in order to win elections. Policies are not chosen for their economic virtues, but so as to buy the votes of the citizens. There are a thousand ways this drives us towards the kind of dysfunctional politics we have today. The interesting thing about this succession of emperors is that they typically did not follow the usual rules of succession: the eldest male heir inherits the throne, but instead adopted as heir the person they felt would make the best ruler. This ended with Commodus, the natural son of Marcus Aurelius, who was a horrible ruler.
Singers of all backgrounds come here every year: fresh out of the conservatory or with five-figure fees per performance, mainly from the world of opera, but also from pop and jazz. “Our three basic principles are spontaneity, beauty, and freedom,” Paglin sums up. “These days, the voice is highly planned; natural singing isn’t cultivated, and there’s an unhealthy obsession with power and volume that generates great muscular tension.” For Brilla, the key lies in breathing: “You only need a thimbleful of air, but it must be well managed, as babies do intuitively. That was baritone Gino Bechi’s best-kept secret…”
The two sopranos behind this school made a thorough study of vocal production:
Almost simultaneously, they decided to put their singing careers on hold to retrain their voices. “We studied historical recordings, consulted specialists like Maria Carbone, and read treatises by the great masters in search of our own method,” continues Brilla, who, after consulting 27 teachers, applied for a Fulbright scholarship that allowed her to research the roots of bel canto in their place of origin, Italy. “We lived in Rome, Florence, Milan…” adds Paglin. “But it was in Osimo that we set up our own studio.” Almost three decades later, the locals of this historic hill overlooking the Adriatic Sea describe the former palazzo the pair acquired at the time as a “sanctuary of voices.”
Voice is probably the most difficult "instrument" to teach as it is part of your body and invisible to the eye.
In the Great Festival Hall was a concert by Utopia, the orchestra founded in 2022 by Teodor Currentzis. Utopia is composed of players from some thirty countries. Currentzis is a Greek Russian conductor, wizardly and individualistic (and not to everyone’s taste). He was duly on the podium for this concert. The first item on the program was a Shostakovich piano concerto—No. 2, in F.
This is less popular, or less frequently programmed, than the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1. Why, I don’t know. A great recording of No. 2 was made by Yefim Bronfman, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen. Bronfman once told me that orchestras seldom request the second concerto. If they want Shostakovich, they want the first.
The soloist with Utopia and Currentzis was Alexander Melnikov, a Soviet-born pianist who studied in Moscow with a legendary teacher: Lev Naumov. Shostakovich’s second concerto ought to have a number of characteristics, including military precision, melting lyricism, and electricity. Melnikov was never less than competent—but I could have used more of what makes this concerto lovable.
He played an encore, a piece introduced to many of us by Vladimir Horowitz: Scriabin’s Poème, Op. 32, No. 1. Melnikov rendered it expertly.
After intermission, Maestro Currentzis conducted the Utopians in a Mahler symphony: No. 4 in G, sometimes known as Mahler’s “Mozart symphony,” for it has an air of the Classical. Under the baton of Currentzis—or rather, under his hands, because he goes without a baton—every part was clear. All parts were in balance. Moreover, Currentzis communed with Mahler, reflecting his spirit. (Mahler was “wizardly and individualistic” himself—also “not to everyone’s taste.”) Currentzis is a shape-shifter, conforming his body to the music, able to represent it physically, somehow. His orchestras respond.
Members of his orchestras stand while playing—excepting cellists and a few others. Does this make a difference? Well, here’s a difference, possibly: I think I hear the woodwind solos better. These players sing or pipe more directly to you.
I heard Currentzis and his orchestra in an all-Rameau program a couple of years ago and it was magical. The only time I have seen the Salzburg audience actually give a standing ovation.
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Let's end with the suitable envoi of the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 2. This is Anna Tsybuleva with Risto Joost conducting the Wuppertal Symphony.
Yesterday, Sept. 11, was Arvo Pärt's 90th birthday and the New York Times has a fine article on him, except for the headline.
THERE IS ALWAYS an element of mystery to fame, but Pärt seems to have tapped into a kind of ur-expression in music that has a profound effect on people regardless of how much they know about it. (The effect of that has been double-edged; his works have been embraced by a New Age audience, then criticized by some cynical specialists as New Age or “holy Minimalist.”) Its spirituality is broad, recalling elements of multiple religions. Its harmonic language would be as at home in the 15th century as the 21st. This is a sound, Michael Pärt said, “without boundaries.”
The music isn’t cloyingly populist, either. If anything it is personal, devotional, a product of composing, what he called his way of “breathing in and out.” He has also been guided by the belief that “art should concern itself with the eternal and not just the current,” perhaps another source of his mass appeal.
For all its accessibility, though, Pärt’s music is difficult to perform. He has said that “it is enough when a single note is beautifully played,” but in works so stripped down and fragile, that can be a challenge to sustain, whether over a few minutes or an hour.
Interpreters have described it requiring a kind of selflessness. His works, in their clean construction and economy, resist over-expression. “We don’t want to hear the performer perform,” Hillier said. “Just doing the music is enough.”
Describing someone like Arvo Pärt as having a kind of pop star status is a typical aberration of our current culture. No, he has nothing like pop star status though a few well-known popular musicians love his music. Taylor Swift sells millions of tickets and makes billions of dollars. Arvo Pärt has a centre in Estonia devoted to him and there is a focus on his music at Carnegie Hall this season. See the difference?
Things are looking pretty bad. Just listen to Rick Beato:
Well, yes, it sounds pretty bad, but just don't listen to that AI crap. Instead I play Bach every morning. I'm just memorizing the Siciliano from the First Violin Sonata. Gorgeous!
And then there is the Wall Street Journal which I used to rely on. But these days they are just predicting doom like everyone else. Some headlines today: Lumber Prices Are Flashing a Warning Sign for the U.S. Economy, Is the U.K. a Canary in the Coal Mine for a Heavily Indebted World?, Trump’s Risky Game With the Fed. Gosh, you would hardly suspect that the markets are hitting new all-time highs.
Cassandra, by the way, was a princess of Troy, daughter to King Priam and sister to Hector. She made a deal with Apollo to gain the ability to predict the future, promising him her favors. When she went back on the promise he cursed her by ensuring that no-one would believe her prophecies. Ouch!
I just want to point out that while Rick Beato hits the nail on the head, most of what we see and hear every day is crafted to make us fearful, anxious in order to sell us newspapers, magazines, jeans and makeup. We can simply ignore all of it. And no, the oceans aren't rising.
So, really, there is no need to feel anxious or fearful or just glum. Hell, we have the antidote in Vivaldi:
On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Philharmonic announced that Salonen would be its first creative director, starting in fall 2026. Simultaneously, the Philharmonie de Paris announced that he would hold its inaugural creativity and innovation chair starting in 2027, while also taking on the role of principal conductor of the Orchestre de Paris.
“One morning, I realized that I had been a music director or something to that effect for 40 years,” Salonen said in an interview. “And I thought, maybe that’s not the only option.”
Now there's a serious commute: Paris to LA every few weeks. Mind you, less grueling in First Class.
When pop groups and rock bands practice or perform, they rely on their guitars, keyboards and drumsticks to make music. Oliver McCann, a British AI music creator who goes by the stage name imoliver, fires up his chatbot.
McCann’s songs span a range of genres, from indie-pop to electro-soul to country-rap. There’s just one crucial difference between McCann and traditional musicians.
“I have no musical talent at all,” he said. “I can’t sing, I can’t play instruments, and I have no musical background at all.”
McCann, 37, who has a background as a visual designer, started experimenting with AI to see if it could boost his creativity and “bring some of my lyrics to life.” Last month, he signed with independent record label Hallwood Media after one of his tracks racked up 3 million streams, in what’s billed as the first time a music label has inked a contract with an AI music creator.
For those who think that this is the future of music, all I want to say is, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha and refer you to the Saint-Exupéry quote.
There is something a bit funny, at any rate, about pop-music criticism, which purports to offer serious analysis of a form that is often considered (by other people, who are also, in a sense, critics) rather silly. In 1969, Robert Christgau, the self-proclaimed Dean of American Rock Critics, began writing a Village Voice column called “Consumer Guide,” in which he assigned letter grades to new albums. He took pleasure in irritating the kinds of rock-loving hipsters who “considered consumption counterrevolutionary and didn’t like grades either.” He described the music of Donny Hathaway as “supper-club melodrama and homogenized jazz” (self-titled album, 1971: D-), and referred to George Harrison as a “hoarse dork” (“Dark Horse,” 1974: C-). In 1970, in Rolling Stone, Greil Marcus, another pioneering rock critic, began his review of Bob Dylan’s “Self Portrait” by asking, “What is this shit?”
Music criticism lost its way in my view, when it became no longer possible to offer reasons why something was good, bad or simply ridiculous and when the idea of aesthetics was lost.
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How about some music? I mean, the real stuff, not artificially generated and autotuned. Here is some Archangelo Corelli.
Like most composers and composers manqué, I am very sensitive to sound. Reading this New York Times article was like a vision of hell.
Block parties are how many New Yorkers escape the drudgery of the city in the summer. On a Saturday in August, music and the scent of barbecue lured people out of their brownstones onto a street in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, where kids pranced in the path of a bubble machine. Behind them, a dancers circle opened in a thicket of jubilant adults.
Ping-ponging around the makeshift dance floor was a bearded man in flamingo pink joggers carrying a laptop. Karl Scholz, 41, was using the computer to tune the sounds coming out of each of the six hulking stacks of speakers along the street, each painted the same bold pink as his pants.
Watching what is going on in Europe, particularly the UK, and Australia, I reflect on my own personal history. My family were from Nottingham, England. In the 1740s one branch was caught poaching the King's deer and transported to Canada, an alternative destination for convicts other than Australia. We lived in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta (where I was born), and British Columbia for some fourteen generations until I moved to Mexico.
Mexico, certainly in comparison to Canada, Australia and the UK, is quite a patriotic country. Every September the whole country is festooned with the Mexican flag:
Something Mexico has in common with the US is the use of an eagle as a national symbol. The American eagle on the national seal is depicted clutching, in one taloned fist, an olive branch, symbolizing peace and in the other, thirteen arrows, symbolizing war. The eagle on the Mexican flag is perched on a cactus clutching a rattlesnake. Come September the flag is seen everywhere, even flying from every taxi.
In Canada the rather insipid national flag is rarely seen except on government buildings. Patriotism is very much suppressed in Canada.
But in England and to a lesser extent in Australia, there has been a recent upwelling of displays of St. George's Cross, the national flag of England:
So as I sit, musing on the history of my family, I munch on the food of my people, English Breakfast Tea and an English muffin with marmalade, and observe with interest the upwelling of patriotism in England called "Operation Raise the Colours":
I suppose the underlying truth here is that who you are and where you are from flows as a subtext underneath the surface of your life, no matter where you are now.
The two best courses I took at McGill were a graduate seminar on the symphonies of Shostakovich and the gnomically titled: "Fugue."
Pretty much everyone who has an interest in classical music knows about the symphonic form, and likely many know something about fugue, but what a fugue is and how it works are fairly obscure topics to even classical music lovers, though they certainly know what they sound like.
When I returned to McGill as a doctoral candidate in musicology they required that I make up for not having taken an honours undergraduate degree by taking two graduate-level courses in music theory. The course called "Fugue" is offered to both graduate and undergraduate students and never has a very numerous enrollment.
Here is the first extraordinary thing to know about fugue. It is a type of musical composition that dates back to the Renaissance with roots in even older music and appears under various names like fantasia, ricercare, and in later years, fugue. One also finds fugal sections in many other forms such as the mass, oratorio, requiem and so on. So, one would expect that a course called "Fugue" would take a broadly historical approach. Not so. The first thing the professor said was "while many composers have written fugues over the last four hundred or so years, we are only going to look at pieces by J. S. Bach."
With the possible exception of Chopin and the mazurka, nothing like that could be said about any other music genre. Bach dominates the fugue like no other composer dominates any other form. Imagine a course in opera that only covered operas by Verdi.
So what I would like to do is a few posts on fugue that will take you inside the kinds of things that happen in fugues. Fugue isn't a form or genre or style--it has often been described as a texture, but you could also think of it as a process or collection of related techniques.
My main reference will be an excellent book by Joseph Kerman published in 2005 entitled The Art of Fugue.
The book comes with a CD of many of the pieces discussed. I'm going to follow Dr. Kerman in his choice of the first fugue in the Well-Tempered Clavier to begin with. The reason that fugue is not a form, genre or style is that each fugue differs in fundamental ways. There is no common rhythmic structure, phrase structure or even contrapuntal structure even though the fugue is typically referred to as a contrapuntal composition. Let's look at how the C major fugue from Book I of the WTC exemplifies these characteristics.
One of the techniques associated with fugue is the stretto. To explain what that is I have to back up a bit. A fugue, particularly a fugue by Bach, has a subject or theme which may consist of anything from four whole notes to a whole bunch of sixteenth notes. Because of their role, subjects often have a distinctive rhythmic character that enables them to stand out in the texture. Of course, Bach sometimes conceals this by just stating a fragment of the subject, known as a "false entry" to fool the listener. The subject is answered by another version of itself, usually at the fifth. When this answer begins, the subject often continues with contrasting material called the "counter-subject" which may serve an important thematic function--or not! Stretto is the technique of coming in with another statement of the subject before the first is finished, a piling on effect which often results in an increased intensity.
This fugue is a stretto fugue par excellence because in its twenty-seven bars, the fairly extended subject appears no fewer than two dozen times. This fugue consists of almost nothing but strettos. Compare this with the next fugue, in C minor, that has absolutely no strettos! One begins to see why I say that fugue is not a form or genre or style, but rather a family of musical techniques and processes. Let's have a listen before we dig into the details.
As this is the first fugue in the WTC, Bach took the occasion to sign his name: B (2), A (1), C (3), H (8) = 14. The subject, ending on the E on the third beat of the second measure, has fourteen notes. We know this is not just a coincidence because Bach used number symbolism in a number of places in his music.
The fugue begins in methodical fashion by stating the subject four times, once in each voice. Here is an annotated score. I show each entry with a blue bracket. Each stretto, i.e. overlapping entry, I show with a red bracket. As you can see the strettos come spaced one beat later, two beats later and three beats later at a variety of intervals.
I hope you can see my blue and red brackets. Just click to enlarge.
UPDATE: The color wasn't coming through, so I redid the scans.
For those who don't know, Grigory Sokolov only performs on the European continent. And his own piano travels with him to every concert in a big, black Steinway Concert Services van. He also travels with a piano technician and tuner. Here is some footage of them getting ready for a concert which involves virtually dismantling the piano and adjusting every key. A perfect pianist needs a perfect piano.
Later scenes show the Herbert von Karajanplatz and the exterior of the Großes Festspielhaus. Later, during the concert, we see that this is the famous evening where there was a heavy rainstorm and the roof of the Festspielhaus began leaking. After the leak was stopped, the concert resumed and Sokolov commemorated it by playing Chopin's "Raindrop" prelude as one of his encores.
These days all Sokolov does is play solo recitals--pretty much in any hall in Europe. He does not do studio recordings so Deutsche Grammophon has begun releasing live concert recordings.
There are so many reasons why Bach is such an enormous presence in music. This morning I watched a little Rick Beato clip and despite the title it turned out to be just a "listen to this piece by Bach" clip. Well, sure!
But I want to play something else by Bach. The Well-Tempered Clavier, a set of preludes and fugues in every key, is one of the most monumental keyboard pieces ever written. And to show it wasn't a fluke, twenty or so years later, Bach did it all over again. There have been a few attempts in the last 300 years to match this achievement, but the only successful one was by Shostakovich.
Here is the transcendental pianist Grigory Sokolov playing book one in a concert in Munich in 1990.
UPDATE: Something I didn't realize until I had finished listening to the whole clip: this only goes up to the D# minor fugue, so only half of Book I.
I think there is a place in one of my compositions where I inserted the simple instruction: poetically. I knew what I wanted, for the player to take more time, to give a bit more expression, to play, well, beautifully. I think most performers would respond in this way. But it makes me realize that these days, asking someone to do something poetically is almost absurd. We don't live in very beautiful times. Here is a clip that talks about how this manifests:
If I were to peel back the layers of the onion, I could mention that the repoeticization of my own life started a few years ago. Realizing that I had spent the last thirty years composing and writing on the computer I decided to make a radical change. Instead of composing with music software I went back to a pencil and eraser. I started writing a journal including poetry. And I did that with fountain pens in a paper journal. I started sketching. Apart from the sketching, I have kept all this up with great enjoyment. Historically, we can go deeper and look at some of the things that are emblematic of a "war on beauty".
Just a note on pronunciation: "Guernica" is not pronounced "gooernica" but "gernica." The "u" is just there to make the "g" hard instead of soft. Julia attributes the profound changes in aesthetics to the world wars, but it is very interesting to note that the change in aesthetics actually began before World War I. Artists have a sort of vague procognition as to where the culture is going. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset was the first to write about the mechanization and flattening of aesthetics in works written between the two wars, but we can hear the disquiet, the feeling of an approaching cultural thunderstorm well before World War I in pieces like Verklärte Nacht and Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg as well as symphonies by Mahler and Petrushka by Stravinsky. All of these works show the signs of dislocation and dissonance that are characteristic of modernism. And, as I said, all were written before WWI.
But, as Julia points out, we are starting to become fed up with the sterile, grey world that has come to be. No reason we have to put up with it. We can just change things. And that, indeed, seems to be what is happening. And, in fifty or a hundred years or so, we will see how it turned out.
For some reason this makes me think of the last movement of the Symphony No. 4 by Shostakovich, which takes us on a very strange journey.
