What I'm currently reading

 "Truth and beauty are in this alike, that the strictest survey seats them

both off to advantage. While the false lustre of error and disguise

cannot endure being reviewed or too nearly inspected."

--George Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, p.43.

This was one of the readings, and a memorable one, from my first-year philosophy class. I just recently realized that the Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein can be understood as an answer to the problem posed by Berkeley. It is so hard to read because it is nowhere indicated that it is the answer to an unstated question.

Decades ago I read a novel by Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat, which has received considerable critical attention. All I can remember of it now is the phrase "the imperscrutable winds of autumn." I remember this because, at the time the word "imperscrutable" appeared only in the Oxford English Dictionary of which I had the compact edition, sadly no longer available. Now you can look it up on the internet: "imperscrutable, adjective. Not capable of being searched out; inscrutable."

One evening I walked past a second-hand bookstore in Montreal and noticed prominently displayed the three volumes of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary which I would have liked to replace my compact edition of the OED which I had foolishly lent to a recorder player and never got back. I stepped inside the bookshop and inquired of the owner, a very large fellow ensconced behind the counter, if he would sell me the dictionary for half price if I could name three words that were in the OED but not in the Shorter. I did actually have in mind two other words of which that was the case, but I don't recall them at present. He gave me a long, measuring glance and said, "no." I should have proposed that if I could not name the three words I would purchase the set for double the asking price. If he had said no to that, it would have been a real compliment!

The thing about Alexander Theroux, as true of the newer book, Fables, as of his earlier work, is that he has a truly stunning vocabulary. It seems he has read everything, starting with the OED. Fables is a collection of, yes, fables and I find words on nearly every page that I have to look up. And some are only in the OED. If searched, an entry will come up, indicating that the word is in the OED, but not supplying a definition. Some examples:

• snools
• frokin

Taken from just the first couple of fables. If a word is only in the OED, the likely reason is that it hasn't been used in a book since, oh, the 18th century. Some other words, obscure, but in other dictionaries:

• schinocephalic
• oarage
• umbles
• suckets
• prinking
• sneaping
• Lapiths
• figpeckers
• hekatoncheirs
• scowring

And so on. Those examples came from the first twenty-two pages. And it was a pain typing them out because spell-correct tried to intervene in nearly every case.

Alexander Theroux is the only author, by the way, who sends me to the dictionary on virtually every page. The only author! I have a pretty hellacious vocabulary myself. Apart from his vocabulary, he is well worth reading. Writers like Saul Bellow and Robertson Davies have praised him highly. I find his fables uniquely fascinating. He is the brother of the travel writer Paul Theroux.

Speaking of vocabulary, I am reminded of the most absurd political slogan ever: "Don't immanentize the eschaton" which William F. Buckley Jr. used when he ran for mayor of New York in 1965, finishing third.

I'm almost stumped for a suitable envoi. About the closest I can get is this piece: La Couperin by Forqueray because the favorite composer of the recorder player I mention above was François Couperin.

Pat-Ko in the New York Times

 I have raved about this extraordinary musician a number of times on this blog, and had the pleasure of seeing her perform at the Salzburg Festival, so it is nice to see a wholehearted recommendation from the New York Times:

Kopatchinskaja doesn’t always beat music black and blue. She can reduce her sound to a fragile whisper, or honey her tone into sweetness:

But she always strips away the fat, giving canonical works a breathing — indeed, panting — vitality. She grounds decorous masterpieces in the earthiness of Central European folk traditions.

She doesn’t do plush or placid. Pretty? Kopatchinskaja gives you biting wildness.

Here is the first movement of the Tchaikovsky:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbdy5Ldeo70

As long as there are artists like Kopatchinskaja around I don't fear for the continued existence of classical music.

Today's Listening: Gubaidulina

A fine performance by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra:

 

What I'm Reading Now

I just finished the William Hazlitt book, which was ok, but 19th century prose is a bit turgid. After that I read Catullus--he is one of the few ancient poets that almost reads like a contemporary. I just started this:

I'm just starting it, but it is a clear and concise discussion of how post-modernism came to be, tracing the intellectual history from Enlightenment figures like Bacon and Locke up to contemporary ones like Foucault and showing how each stage encountered problems that led to the next stage. For example, I had never read a really good discussion of the problems of empiricism. Anyway, so far, excellent book. I'm also halfway through the Iliad in this edition:

This is about the third or fourth time I have read it--the translation is thirty-five years old! But it reads really well. Amid all the blood and gore, Book 14, that I just read, is about the preparations Hera goes through to seduce Zeus so as to distract him from the battle between the Acheans and the Trojans. It's all about scented oils and what must be the Bronze Age answer to the pushup bra. Hera seeks Aphrodite's counsel:

Aphrodite, smiling her everlasting smile, replied,

"Impossible--worse, it's wrong to deny your warm request,

since you are the one who lies in the arms of mighty Zeus."

With that she loosed from her breasts the breastband,

pierced and alluring, with every kind of enchantment

woven through it . . . There is the heat of Love,

the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover's whisper,

irresistible--magic to make the sanest man go mad.

And thrusting it into Hera's outstretched hands

she breathed her name in a throbbing, rising voice:

"Here now, take this band, put it between your breasts--

ravishing openwork, and the world lies in its weaving!

[p. 260, op. cit.]

The Talented Mr. Beato

I've enjoyed Rick Beato's clips on YouTube quite a bit in recent years. He is obviously an experienced and talented musician who appreciates a wide range of music. As a popular musician and producer, you wouldn't expect him to do tribute videos on Bach and Martha Argerich among others. He has taste as well as talent.

He just put up a really interesting video about how he got into university:

Ignoring the usual over-heated title, the gist of it is that he was discouraged from even applying to university by his high school guidance counselor. His SATs were really bad: 880. He found out from some other students that to get into a music program you needed to audition so he asked his non-classical guitar teacher (rock, jazz? it's not clear) to teach him enough classical guitar to pass the audition: three pieces from three different style periods. Plus the Segovia scales. That's kind of weird, by the way--scales at an audition? Anyway, he failed the audition.

Rick's experience came roughly ten years after mine. I graduated high school in 1969 with a horrific C- average. In grade 11, I think it was, we all had to write aptitude tests to see what field we should go into. I wrote the test, but when it came time to meet with the guidance counselor, I didn't even bother going, so to this day I have no idea what the results were. I'm reminded of that episode on Buffy where Zander is slated to be in "corrections"! I ended up working in physical labour type jobs after high school as my rock/blues band failed to get anywhere. Then after a couple of years I applied to university as a mature student and, amazingly, was accepted. No SATs as I don't think we even had them in Canada. I applied to the school of music and yes, there was the dreaded audition. This was in the summer of 1971. I showed up at the school of music, but somehow I was unaware that I had to pass an audition. The conductor of the orchestra was passing through the office at that moment so they asked him to audition me. He took me into a practice room and, playing a note on the piano asked me to sing it back. Then a note in a different register. Then two notes. The two notes far apart. Then he asked me to identify a couple of chords. I had been playing and songwriting by ear for years so I passed quite readily.

I'm quite sure that if Rick had received a similar audition he would have also been accepted. The truth is that some people have real musical sensitivity, even without much training, but most people don't. You can find this out with the aid of a piano in about two minutes. Rick has a phenomenal ear and great musical gifts and these things can be discerned quite easily.

Of course now the music school I auditioned for is quite different. About ten years after I auditioned, I was appointed the first lecturer in a new guitar program at that same school and I was the one doing the auditions! We didn't have published "requirements" for guitar or any other instruments, by the way. You come to the audition and play some pieces on your instrument. We evaluated everything: demeanor, musicality, choice of repertoire and so on. I think that's the case at most schools. There are always a few who are really not classical guitarists, but try to fake it anyway. That really doesn't work.

Lots of questions sparked by the clip: why did he audition on classical guitar if he wanted to enter the jazz studies program? Wouldn't he audition on jazz guitar? If he was trained on the bass, why not audition on that?

By the way, after two years at the first university, who, it turned out, did not even have a guitar teacher at the time, I dropped out and went to Spain to study with José Tomás, a true master of the guitar. That was where I learned to play, certainly not at any Canadian university in the 70s.

Rick's story exemplifies that truth that yes, persistence is really important. But it is really odd that he fails to mention that it was really sheer musical talent that got him through the two degrees: undergraduate bass major and masters in jazz guitar. My problem, if you can call it that, was that I was too focussed on being a classical guitarist and failed to take advantage of the wider range of possibilities at university.

Rick makes good points about not letting educational administrators define him and about the support from his mother.

The real problem I think is that the whole system of public education was built on a foundation of training people to be functional factory workers--and I think this came from the Prussian system? Correct me if I am wrong.

None of the finest musicians I have known, by the way, ever attended a public university. The best French horn player I know auditioned for and won first chair in the Dallas Symphony when he was seventeen. The finest violinist I know was performing on the Austrian radio network when he was nine and he was at the time a student at the Vienna Conservatory--no public school. Similarly with pianists, cellists and guitarists. It even applies to composers, at least until recently.

I have long thought that a big problem with arts programs in university is that they are a very awkward fit in public education. One learns competence in the arts under a kind of apprenticeship such as I experienced in Spain and later in Salzburg. Essentially you go sit at someone's feet. The enormous sums that are channeled into public education do little more than distort the artistic disciplines because ultimately the processes, contents and values are determined by educational administrators who, to be brutally honest, don't have a f**king clue.

Gee, maybe I'm pissed too!

This is the first half of a program that I heard Grigory Sokolov play in Bologna in 2017.

Sokolov, by the way, won first prize in the Tchaikovsky competition at age sixteen, so nope, no university for him.

Hogarth: The Enraged Musician

We often hear stories of composers isolating themselves to compose: Stravinsky in a tiny room in a village in Switzerland, Mahler in a tiny shack on the shores of a lake in Austria, Elliott Carter in the Sonoran desert, Sibelius in a house in the country and so on. Why is that? William Hogarth provides the answer:

We can certainly pick up some of the reasons just by looking at the engraving. But for the full picture William Hazlitt has provided an exegesis. The engraving shows

every conceivable variety of disagreeable and discordant sound--the razor-grinder turning his wheel; the boy with his drum, and the girl with her rattle momentarily suspended; the pursuivant blowing his horn; the shrill milkman; the inexorable ballad.singer, with her squalling infant; the pewterer's shop close by; the fish-women; the chimney-sweepers at the top of a chimney, and the two cats in melodious concert on the ridge of the tiles; with the bells ringing in the distance as we see by the flags flying... [William Hazlitt, Selected Writings, p. 300]

Even after looking at the image carefully I missed both the chimney-sweepers and the cats.

Money and Art

As frequent readers know, I am a frequent attendee at the Salzburg Festival held, for the last one hundred plus years in Salzburg, Austria in July and August. For those six weeks, Salzburg is the center of the world's classical music. Over 250,000 tickets are sold and the concerts have an average attendance of around 94%. But even with this enthusiastic support the festival needs a lot of patronage. This comes from the Austrian government and corporate support. The main sponsor is Audi and one often sees Audi cars on the street proudly inscribed with "Main Sponsor of the Salzburg Festival." However, the festival also seeks private patrons and a couple of months ago, as a frequent attendee, I received a request for a donation. Here is what I think is happening.

Austria and Germany are very strong supporters of classical music as being a central element in their national cultures. Germany has around eighty opera houses compared to perhaps a dozen in all of North American including Canada, the US and Mexico. But the strength of the Germany economy in particular is now in question. Here is a recent headline: Audi to cut 7,500 jobs amid ‘challenging’ switch to EVs.

Carmakers are slashing jobs as the industry struggles with weak demand among customers for EVs but demands by lawmakers across the UK and EU to shift to electric.

Total EV sales across Europe, including the UK, fell by 1.3pc in 2024, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.

Audi has been hit hard by slowing EV demand. The carmaker’s deliveries of fully-electric vehicles slid 8pc year-on-year in 2024, to some 164,000. In February it closed a plant making EVs in Belgium that employed about 3,000 people.

Cuts at Audi are the latest in Germany’s auto industry, which has been hit hard by a slower-than-expected shift to electric cars, the loss of cheap Russian fuel and fierce competition from Chinese rivals. Audi’s parent company Volkswagen announced in December it would cut 35,000 jobs at its VW brand in Germany by 2030.

It's not just cars, of course, the really lunatic climate change policies being practiced in Germany are resulting in a slow but inevitable deindustrializing of the country.

A much poorer Germany means less support for things like the Salzburg Festival. I mention Germany in particular because the main patrons are all German companies. Austria, a much-smaller economy, provides much less funding.

The truth is that things like the Salzburg Festival are formidably expensive to put on. I have to research the budget sometime if I can get the numbers. But it would not surprise me if they needed between $100 and $150 million dollars annually. And that is just a wild guess.

Let's listen to some cheering music. From the 2005 Festival here is Valery Gergiev conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.

Granted...

Music and politics are uncomfortable bedfellows no matter what your political or aesthetic theories are. But here is one writer that takes the bull by the horns: Strings attached: How politics corrupts classical music. The author is Austrian composer Rina Furano. Here is an excerpt:

For most conventionally successful classical artists, ensembles and concert halls, scrambling for subsidies is a daily reality. But before any youngsters start dreaming about state-funded stipends, let it be said that there is a major pitfall to this practice, which everyone in the industry knows, but nobody likes to talk about in public: Musicians who rely on politics for their daily bread effectively sign up for serfdom to the politicians controlling the grants — both artistically and personally. After all, he who pays the piper calls the tune. 

In my native Vienna, classical music’s supposed capital, this is euphemistically known as Freunderlwirtschaft  — roughly: murky business with friends, or less charmingly: cronyism. To see local and national politicians invited to, and courted at, events and fairs for composers is the norm, not the exception. The director of Vienna’s largest music university, MDW, even went so far as to open the Austrian Composers Association’s annual meetup a few years ago with the words: “It is our first and foremost duty as creators of music to spread a political message.” I was struck with disbelief; truculently, I had always thought the first and foremost duty as a creator of music was — to create music. The director, meanwhile, proceeded to go into detail about what the current political message was supposed to be, much to the contentment of the politicians dappling the audience. Vienna is not an isolated case by any means; indeed one would struggle to find any territory in Central or Western Europe where things are different.

I have just been reading some essays by Richard Taruskin bemoaning the aesthetic pitfall that high art classical music fell into of the myth of aesthetic autonomy, so reading this is a bit jarring. It is as if everyone read Taruskin and decided, no, we are going to be very socially engaged and as a reward, we will get lots of government stipends. I don't think that this is what he intended.

Read the whole essay for the author's solution, basically, cultivate private donors and try to do something musically worthwhile. Ah, ok!

About the only thing I am comfortable with these days is music as an entirely private pursuit. At least there are no aesthetic, economic or ideological problems.

The Symphony no, 15 by Shostakovich would seem as good an envoi as any. Bernard Haitink conducting.

Those were the days, when the worst thing Shostakovich had to worry about was Stalin.

Haydn, Symphony no. 80

 This is one of the best performances I have ever heard of one of Haydn's best symphonies:

Lost and Found

I just started re-reading the Iliad by Homer. I don't re-read it as often as the Odyssey, but every few years. I have the translation by Robert Fagles which comes with a good introduction, pronunciation guide, maps and so on.

The Iliad is around 600 pages and it is amazing that it likely started out as an oral composition, only later written down when the Greeks adopted a version of the Phoenician alphabet. That means that originally the Iliad (and the Odyssey) were performed from memory. That would be a remarkable feat. Still, there are a few people around who have large chunks of Shakespeare from memory.

The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer and the Old Testament are the foundational documents of Western Civilization and they exist today because they were faithfully copied over and over by generation after generation of scribes for the last three thousand years. We are also pretty lucky in that a selection of Greek tragedy and comedy were also copied along with pretty well everything Plato wrote and a good selection of Aristotle. Individual works by Herodotus and Thucydides also survived. But, the sad truth is that it is estimated that ninety percent of classical literature is lost. For good, unless some of it turns up in the carbonized Herculaneum scrolls.

One particularly keenly felt loss is ninety percent of the poetry of Sappho. But we can be grateful for the survival of a very large chunk of the poetry of Catullus which I just started re-reading in this edition:

Catullus is the lyric poet of Roman sexuality and the closer you look at that mosaic the more troubling it becomes! But what I want to recount is just how fortuitous the survival of much if not most of his poetry was. He was born around 84 BC in Verona and died around 54 BC. He was a friend of Cicero and other leading figures and widely renowned as a poet. After his death he was admired by later Roman poets but then disappeared from history for a thousand years. All that we now have, enough to fill two hundred pages, comes from a manuscript that had lain in the Cathedral Library of Verona since at least the tenth century. It was discovered in the 14th century and the story goes that it had been used to wedge a barrel of wine which was responsible for frequent lacunae in the text. This manuscript went missing, but not before two manuscript copies were made. They are the only sources of Catullus' poetry except for a few quotes in other writers. Poem 18 is an illustration of both Catullus' humor and his bawdy:

18

I dedicate, I consecrate this grove to thee,

Priapus, whose home & woodlands are at Lampsacus;

there, among the coastal cities of the Hellespont,

they chiefly worship thee:

their shores are rich in oysters!

Here are three contemporary settings of Catullus sung in Latin:

A great composer passes: Sofia Gubaidulina

From the New York Times obituary:

The Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who died on Thursday at 93, was that rare creature: an artist both fully modern and sincerely spiritual. “I am convinced that religion is the kernel of all art,” she said in a 2021 interview.

That is hardly a universal worldview these days. The era of Palestrina and Bach, who aimed to glorify God with their work, is centuries past. Music that is adventurous, religious and great is unusual in our secular time, and some of the most significant was written by Gubaidulina.

I started a long series of posts on Gubaidulina, but I never completed them. I think this is the first one: Approaching Sofia Gubaidulina. And here is the part one of the long series.

Let's end with a quotation from Gubaidulina that appears at the very beginning of the Kurtz biography:

It is not my desire to express an idea, but to give

expression to the spiritual form of an emotion

steeped in life itself.

It does not matter to me whether or not I am modern.

What is important is the inner truth of my music.

I have no doubt that women think and feel differently

than men, but it is not very important whether I am a

woman or a man. What matters is that I am myself and develop

my own ideas strictly toward the truth.

--Sofia Gubaidulina

The New York Times piece, a pretty good survey, ends with this comment:

Gubaidulina made music that manages to be both uncompromising and accessible. Its strange colors are so alluring and changeable, its sense of drama and timing so sure, its desire to communicate — even if enigmatically — so evident that it’s irresistible. She kept on writing until a few years ago; her 90th birthday was celebrated with recordings and performances around the world.

Let's end with her lovely piece for guitar: the Serenade in an excellent performance by Marcin Dylla:

 

 

Today's Listening: Takemitsu, How Slow the Wind

 

Another terrific Haydn symphony: no. 24 in D major

 

Quotes from all sorts of places

Moon and the Pleiades go down.

Midnight and tryst pass by.

I, though, lie

Alone.

--Sappho (c. 630 - 570 BC)

Equality may be a right, but no power on earth

is capable of converting it into a fact.

 --Honoré de Balzac

'Animal spirits' are the spirits of the anima, the soul, within the human body.

They govern our higher actions.

--François Rabelais

...all great violinists, with the exception of Paganini, have always been Jews.

--Dictionary of the Khazars, Milorad Pavić

Perhaps not all. Here is the very fine violinist Shunske Sato playing the Violin Partita no. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004 by J. S. Bach:

The Virtues of Music

Here's an awkward question for you: what virtues do particular pieces of music celebrate? It's awkward for several reasons, of course. What do we mean by virtue, first of all? Then, since music, instrumental music at least, is famously abstract or vague as to what meaning it communicates, how can music celebrate virtue? I'm afraid I'm going to deal with those questions rather briefly.

The virtues and vices are characteristics exhibited by moral agents and include things like honesty, cruelty, tenderness, exuberance and so on. I'm being very selective here as I'm picking ones that we might be able to discern in music. Music, it has been argued doesn't really exhibit garden-variety emotions so much as the moods and atmospheres associated with them. Music can't communicate honesty, for example, but it certainly can communicate forthrightness. It can't be cruel, but it can be agonizingly dissonant. it can't be tender, but it certainly can communicate the mood of tenderness. For more on this see Peter Kivy on music and the emotions in various texts.

If we take an empirical approach it isn't very difficult to discern specific moods in pieces of music. A Haydn symphony, for example, will often have a dynamic and rhythmically complex texture with dramatic harmonic shifts in the first movement. The virtue exhibited here is that of dynamic conflict and movement towards a goal. The second movement might feature tender expression, the third dance-like vigour and the last sheer exuberance. Put it all together and we have a nice summary of European civilization at a particularly flourishing time. The music communicates the virtues of an outward looking society that has overcome some difficulties and looks forward to meeting other ones.

This is all a vast generalization, of course--a grotesque one to some people, I'm sure. But really, it is all there in the history books and the music. If we move one or two hundred years later we find an entirely different atmosphere of inwardness, doubt, despair and so on. And the history books offer some reasons as to why.

Comments, objections?

UPDATE: If one is looking for an example of the symphonic expression of doubt and despair, a good example would be a symphony by Allan Pettersson:

Happy 300th to Haydn

 In honor of the 300th anniversary of the birth of Joseph Haydn, Giovanni Antonini is recording all the symphonies with the Kammerorchester Basel and Il Giardino. Honestly, I think the only reason Haydn isn't always in the top ten of composers is that he just isn't gloomy enough.

Today's Listening: Haydn, Symphony No. 8 "Le Soir"

 From the early compositions of Mozart through to the last ones of Schubert was truly a magical moment in music history. It would be very hard to find a piece by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert that was less than delightful, beautiful, well-crafted, elegant and deeply expressive. An example from Haydn:

What I'm Reading

Still can't find any music articles to comment on, but I did run across an interesting quote:

Third comes the kind of madness that is possession by the Muses, which takes a tender virgin soul and awakens it to a Bacchic frenzy of songs and poetry that glorifies the achievements of the past and teaches them to future generations. If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses' madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.

[Plato, Phaedrus, 245a]

That's from a book I have been reading:

I've read all the Platonic dialogues before in the big hardcover edition, but this book is considerably handier. I'm also reading this:

Elizabeth Anscombe is one of the most challenging 20th century philosophers (and leading student of Wittgenstein).

For a 19th century writer, Balzac manages to get into some remarkably kinky territory. A bit reminiscent of Edgar Allen Poe.

William Hazlitt is an interesting political and cultural essayist and a great antidote to the hackneyed political commentary of today.

Finally, some listening. I just listened to this the other day. Franz Schubert's last composition:

A Cultural Rebirth?

 An anonymous reader appends a very incisive comment to my post yesterday on Decline and Rebirth:

Thank you for this post, Bryan. I have not much to add, only I am interested to know whence your enthusiasm for a cultural rebirth stems from, and what we can expect in the near future?

I am tempted to adopt Socrates' position and say that all that I really know is that I don't know! You can't go wrong there. But perhaps we can see just a few glimmers of possibility. One is tempted to quote Erasmus:

Immortal God! What a century do I see beginning! If only it were possible to be young again!

--Erasmus to Guillaume Budé (1517)

The remarkable span of Western culture from 1500 to 2000 was heralded by two different events. The last decade of the 15th century was not terribly promising: Europe was threatened on the East by Islam, all worlds had been conquered, science and learning had fallen into the topor of scholasticism. But then, in 1493, Christopher Columbus returned to Castile from having discovered the lands of the Western Hemisphere (not the first to do so, of course, but the most consequential). Then a few years later the unity of Christendom was torn apart by Martin Luther when he nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517. Suddenly all the foundations of the world were in doubt and everything again became possible.

Times of decadence and decline seem to need great upheaval to find new possibilities. All I really have to offer here is that I see this as a time of great upheaval when so many false idols are being cast down. I don't see a creative path for myself, but there will likely be one for the young. Remember, artists have for the last several decades been undergoing a kind of multiphase inquisition. They have been told that they are evil elitists, white supremacists, systemic racists, vile misogynists. And, if you were an artist in Canada, as I was, it was even worse as you were colonialist swine and largely ignored. UPDATE: If we just stopped treating our artists like abused children, that in itself would be a huge improvement.

If we could suffer enough upheaval to wipe away this encrusted viciousness towards creative activity, who knows what marvelous worlds we might discover. Let's have a listen to some music from the earlier phase of rebirth. Guillaume DuFay is a bit ahead of our time window, but creative people do often arrive before one thinks. This is his Lamentatio Sanctae Matris Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae:

Decline and Rebirth

My post of the last movement of the String Quartet No. 4 of Bartók the other day provoked a couple of enthusiastic comments. Yes, that music, plus other music by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Berg and others is powerfully expressive music of a kind that we don't seem able to produce these days. Mind you, the power of that music largely derives from the chaotic aftermath of the suicide attempt by Western Civilization that we label "World War I".

One reason I find little to write about these days is that there is little to write about. Taylor Swift being booed at the Super Bowl? Please. There is nothing interesting in pop music these days and the last creative musician that I enjoyed, Ye, has now descended into vile anti-semitism. In classical music we are either re-hashing the past or genuflecting to the gods of DEI and that is coming to a swift and ignominious end.

I recently re-read Jacques Barzun's magisterial volume From Dawn to Decadence which, though it fell into irrelevancy at the end, did a good job of charting the arc of Western Civilization from around 1500 to around 2000 when it was pretty much coming to an end. The really interesting thing is that what has happened since 2000 might herald some kind of rebirth.

I doubt that this rebirth will show itself for a couple of decades at least, so I likely won't be able to comment on it, but what I see is a rediscovery of the transcendentals: the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Yes, that Bartók movement, though fierce and dissonant is truly beautiful. Beauty can be terrible in its aspect. Marshmallow softness is not beautiful, only cloying.

I realize that a fundamental way I look at everything is moral: the values that are important are moral values (or, their near-relatives, aesthetic values). Sadly, what we are confronting is the truth that for many decades our intellectual and cultural elites have been morally bankrupt and are now suffering the consequences. This is not only inevitable, but inherently good.

A very good thing to do right now would be to re-read some Plato. Few authors write anything that is truly morally beautiful, but Plato is one of them. The Apology that he crafts recalling Socrates' speech to the jury of 501 Athenians at his trial in 399 BC is one of the fundamental touchstones of the civilization of the West. Sometimes I am approached by Christians asking me to accept Jesus Christ into my life. I appreciate anyone who is in pursuit of virtue, but I always have to tell them that of the two cities that lie at the base of Western culture, Jerusalem and Athens, I am a man of Athens.

The major turning point in my life came in September 1971 when I attended the University of Victoria as an undergraduate music student. I was enrolled in the university choir and the first piece we learned was the Requiem by Mozart. This was a profound revelation, not least due to the wisdom of the conductor, George Corwin. You only really get inside music by performing it.

Today's Listening: Bartók

 This is the Caspian String Quartet:

Today's Listening: Dylan and Bernard van Dieren

Two very different pieces of music. First, from Blonde on Blonde, "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands":

An early piece by Bernard van Dieren: Elegy for Cello and Orchestra (1908). Unusually, he was influenced equally by Delius and Schoenberg:

Quotes

 The flesh is sad and I have read all the books.

--Mallarmé

Scientism is the fallacy of believing that the method of science must be used on all forms of experience and, given time, will settle every issue.

--Jacques Barzun

No matter with what skill the great manage to seem other than they are, they cannot conceal their malignity.

--La Bruyère (1688)

Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.

--Horace Walpole

Pantagruel then asked, 'What people dwell in this fair bitch of an island?' 'They,' said Xenomanes, 'are all Hypocriticals, Dropsicals, Bead-tellers, purring Counterfeits, Sanctimonious, Black-beetles and Hermits: wretched folk, all of them, living on wayfarers' alms...'

--Rabelais

Today's Listening: Rodrigo

 I've often thought that the best description of the music of Joaquin Rodrigo would be "flamenco music if written by Igor Stravinsky!" Here is the very fine guitarist Koki Fujimoto with the last movement of the Sonata giocosa.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTJ03mLh1Wc

Today's Listening: Schoenberg for Chamber Orchestra

These three very brief pieces for chamber orchestra, no opus number, were written in 1910 and only came to light after Schoenberg's death. They are from that atonal transition period between his late romantic style and his later development of twelve-tone music. Quite interesting.

Miscellanea

I have stopped doing the Friday Miscellanea so there are a number of items worth mentioning the foremost of which is

Vast Trove of Arnold Schoenberg’s Music Is Destroyed in Fire

An estimated 100,000 scores and parts by the groundbreaking 20th-century composer Arnold Schoenberg were destroyed last week when the wildfires in Southern California burned down the music publishing company founded by his heirs. The company rents and sells the scores to ensembles around the world.

“It’s brutal,” said Larry Schoenberg, 83, a son of the composer, who ran the company, Belmont Music Publishers, from his home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles and kept the firm’s inventory in a 2,000-square-foot building behind his house. “We lost everything.”

No original scores were lost as they are all kept in an archive in Vienna. But performing parts and scores will be in short supply for a while. The fires in Los Angeles were a terrible disaster for everyone. Wishing a complete recovery to those who lost their homes and businesses.

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How Spotify is ruining music

From the perspective of a music fan, streaming is, unfortunately, a spectacular product: the universal jukebox! If some have a twinge of discomfort about the ethical compromises that enable its convenience — as when they use Amazon, or Uber — the uneasiness can be ambient and unspecific enough to keep them from changing their usage: Are the alternatives really any more righteous? For musicians, though, Spotify has been a more existential threat than the file-sharing revolution that spawned it, because it has the veneer of legitimacy. Meanwhile, says Liz Pelly, the company leaches profits from working musicians while preparing the ground to replace those musicians with AI-generated neo-Muzak. 

The broad strokes of the indictment — the neo-payola promotional schemes; the minuscule royalties paid to artists, not to mention the royalty-free “ghost artists”; the designation of huge swaths of artists as royalty-ineligible “hobbyists”; the investments in podcasts, military technology and aural wallpaper repackaged for wellness culture — may be familiar to those interested in the issues confronting musicians in the 21st century. But it’s invaluable to have the brief for the prosecution in one place, narrated in plain language with a sense of righteous outrage.

* * *

Selling Schoenberg?

It would be hard to come up with a more radically divisive major composer than Arnold Schoenberg, who was born in Vienna in 1874 and died in Los Angeles in 1951. It would be equally hard to come up with a more radically inclusive composer, who remade European music in his image and then came here and did the same for Hollywood. Or a more devotedly progressive — you could even say obsessively progressive — composer who honored the past yet paved the way for a kicking-and-screaming future.

We still don’t quite know how to sell Schoenberg. There is the scary modernist Schoenberg — inventor of the 12-tone system, replacing traditional harmony with the democratic notion that all notes are equal — who reputedly drives audiences away. But there is also the Schoenberg who carried on from the 19th century Romantic tradition in his lush early scores like the massive post-Wagnerian and post-Brahmsian “Gurrelieder.”

This next one sounds a lot like my post on Artisanal Music:

Analogue revival

From the dumb phone trend to a vinyl revival, analogue has been back on the rise in the cultural zeitgeist. This could shake up the digital ecosystem and unlock potential opportunities for entertainment –– but the 'why’ behind the trend needs to be better understood to action the opportunity to its full potential. This report explores the extent of the analogue revival, with insights from companies and organisations operating at the heart of it, dives into what is driving the trend, and what comes next –– looking at longevity, threats, and the next set of opportunities.

Tár finally appeared on Amazon Prime so I tried to watch it last night. Didn't make it to the fifteen minute mark. I usually have a problem with movies about music--with the exception of Amadeus and A Hard Day's Night--and this was very much not an exception. Watching the opening interview was painful as an unconvincing and embarrassing portrayal of a famous conductor. Nope.

* * *

‘Experiencing Sound’ Review: Hearing Is Believing

In “Experiencing Sound: The Sensation of Being,” Lawrence Kramer captures all sorts of heard moments, and in superb prose. He has assembled 66 brief chapters on music and sound, ranging from a couple of paragraphs to four or five pages. His aim, in part, is to make us intensely aware of the sounds that surround us and how they orient us. As he puts it: “Sound directs our passage through time. It shapes our orientation to the future moment and also to the moment when the future stops.”

What Adorno Can Still Teach Us

The normative ideal of happiness or human flourishing has its origins in classical philosophy—in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics such as Seneca. In Kant, it gained a central importance in the thought that in moral reasoning, we must postulate an ultimate convergence between our virtuous conduct and our just deserts. Kant thought of this convergence as the summum bonum, or the highest good. The implication is that the demands of morality and the natural expectation for happiness do not in principle conflict. Of course, Kant believed that to conceive of this convergence, we must presuppose an afterlife. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno draws upon Kant’s reasoning but sharply rejects the inference that the highest good would lie beyond mortal life. As he explains, the essence of Kant’s philosophy is the “unthinkability of despair,” but the demand for happiness can be retained without appealing to Kant’s postulate of eternity. On the contrary, Adorno says that we can affirm the postulate of happiness if and only if “metaphysics slips into materialism.” I find this conclusion fascinating. Adorno is sufficiently realistic in his social criticism to acknowledge that we do not possess any certain or perfect conception of what our happiness would consist in. His basic view is that in a damaged world, all of our ideals are likewise damaged; this reflects his Marxist reluctance to fill out any pictures of utopia. This is why all current intimations of happiness are (in his words) “precarious” and interlaced with despair.

 * * *

Let's have some music! First Alexandra Dovgan with the Partita No. 6 by Bach:

At age 17 she is just beginning her career. Grigory Sokolov is one of her fans. Next, Stravinsky, L'histoire du Soldat:

Finally, the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with Hilary Hahn:

Salzburg 2025

 

This is the cover of the 2025 Salzburg program, which, oddly, is the first program book I have ever seen as I usually go online. The reason I have it is that the Festival, without my asking, just mailed it to my office. Probably because I have attended three festivals in recent years. I'm in the process of planning and building a house for myself, so I was rather planning on not attending this year. BUT!

The program is a hefty 156 page book which heralds what seems to be a renewed approach to the festival programming. I have mentioned before some differences between current programming and what was done in the late 1980s when I was a student there. Back then they had two prominent living composers in attendance with their music: Karlheinz Stockhausen (whom I met) and Witold Lutosławski (his new violin concerto was being premiered). But in recent years, no living composers, instead they had a "focus" on a 20th century composer. Last summer it was Arnold Schoenberg. And most of the festival programming was core repertoire. But for the coming festival they have changed the approach considerably. For one thing, instead of seven opera productions, there are twelve and it looks as if five of them are by living composers. There are also some premieres of new dance projects. And instead of a focus on one 20th century composer, they honor two: Dmitri Shostakovich and Pierre Boulez. Finally the chance to hear concert performances of Boulez, rare in recent years. There are also performances of major works by Hans Werner Henze and Luigi Nono and of two major works by Igor Stravinsky: L'Histoire du Soldat and Oedipus Rex. From Shostakovich we have not only the Symphony No. 10 in the version for piano four hands and the orchestral version, but also a piano concerto and the whole of the 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano. Oh, and three string quartets and an evening of chamber music.

In a real tour-de-force, pianist Víkingur Ólafsson is playing the last three piano sonatas by Beethoven in the first half of his recital and the Art of Fugue by Bach in the second half. And don't despair, there will be a lot of Mozart--five concerts entirely devoted to his music.

I've just skimmed the surface as there are loads of other concerts devoted to a long list of composers. For example, there are five concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic under various conductors and ten guest orchestras including the Royal Concertgebouw and the Berlin Philharmonic. Also ten piano recitals including, of course, Grigory Sokolov.

I really can't afford to attend this year, but maybe I will find a way. We have until January 21 to apply for tickets at the festival site:

https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/en/tickets/programme?season=9

Artisanal Music

From Wikipedia:

An artisan (from French: artisan, Italian: artigiano) is a skilled craft worker who makes or creates material objects partly or entirely by hand. These objects may be functional or strictly decorative, for example furniture, decorative art, sculpture, clothing, food items, household items, and tools and mechanisms such as the handmade clockwork movement of a watchmaker. Artisans practice a craft and may through experience and aptitude reach the expressive levels of an artist. 

The adjective "artisanal" is often used in describing hand-processing in contrast to an industrial process, such as in the phrase artisanal mining. Thus, "artisanal" is sometimes used in marketing and advertising as a buzz word to describe or imply some relation with the crafting of handmade food products, such as bread, beverages, cheese or textiles. Many of these have traditionally been handmade, rural or pastoral goods but are also now commonly made on a larger scale with automated mechanization in factories and other industrial areas.

I've been away from the blog over the holidays, but I'm back and it feels like a new phase in culture so let's talk about it. I've made critical comments about a lot of the trends in popular music such as miming in concerts, industrial production, songwriting by committee and just generally a decline to repetitive mediocrity that we can see in rhythm, harmony, melody and lyrics.

In classical music the criticism clusters around accusations that it is elitist, obscure, outmoded and just generally irrelevant. And when artists like Yuja Wang try to make it more relevant by, frankly, dressing like a hooker, it becomes a caricature of itself.

So it feels like time to refresh and renovate both popular and classical musics. Before I start sounding like a caricature of Ted Gioia (who by the way did an interesting post recently on Anna Akhmatova) let me get to the specifics. The fine arts and the marketplace always have an awkward relationship. I genuinely believe that producing music for entirely commercial purposes is a mistake--at least I am quite certain that it holds no interest to me whatsoever. This is why my career as a concert guitarist was never entirely successful. Careerism, the single-minded focus on advancing one's career, never seemed to have anything to do with music as such.

Of course, musicians live in the world just like everyone else and they have to pay the bills. So one does need some financial security as an artist. In the past, patronage was common, but today, apart from the unreliable support of government, artists find they have to enter the marketplace or an educational institution. For many, it seems this results in a kind of endemic mediocrity.

What still attracts me to classical music over popular music is that so much of it is still artisanal. Aspiring musicians still have to, in nearly all cases, apprentice themselves to a maestro to learn the trade. Often these maestros are found in musical institutions though those are also inhabited by many careerists as well. Playing your instrument is a lifelong hands-on task as is being a scholar or historian. Composers may find themselves seduced by the myriad technologies of music production available today, but that feels to me very like the deal Mephistopheles offered Faust: infinite knowledge and magical powers at the cost of your soul.

A musical experience is for me is one where one hears a performer playing an instrument with no technological processing. This rules out nearly all current popular music, which is ok with me. The reason one wants to exclude technological processing is that it reduces (almost to nothing in some cases) the actual human agency of the artist. A music performance, in order to be aesthetically valuable, has to involve all the subtle shades and nuances that come directly from the artist. Popular music also used to be largely like this.

I feel that one of the strongest urges behind the growth of early music performance is precisely this: it puts the individual human artist at the center, playing instruments that are themselves handmade. The total opposite of this, of course, is the use of Artificial Intelligence to compose and perform music. For human listeners, let's have human performers and composers.

Speaking of Anna Akhmatova, years ago I set this poem of hers:

Music

There is a magic burning in it,

Cutting its facets diamond clear,

And it alone calms me in minutes

When others do not dare come near.

When my last friend cast down his eyes,

It was at my side at the grave,

It sang as thunder in spring skies

As if all flowers started raving.

Here is one of my favorite examples:

A Bach Film

I haven't been able to watch all of this film, but judging by the first part, it seems quite good.