Science Fiction on Television

I admit to being a fan of science fiction both in written form and in filmed narrative--since childhood. Today I just want to talk about science fiction series on television. The original Star Trek was the first one I really enjoyed and I still do today, though it is no longer my favorite. It has been the genre model for many successors such as Voyager, Deep Space Nine, The Next Generation and a host of recent ones like Discovery and Picard that I have hardly bothered to watch. Of this whole group the best are likely the original show, The Next Generation and Voyager though Enterprise and Deep Space Nine certainly had their moments. Culturally and sociologically they share a set of common values that seem to assume that all future economies will be socialist (except the Ferengi), that fashions will be weird versions of the 60s and that future crews will be exclusively American and alien.

Then there are a whole bunch of individual series with their own virtues and faults. Among these are Battlestar Galactica, the revival. I never saw the original because I was in Spain studying guitar. The new version which came out in 2003 was a breath of fresh air. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attack it featured a suit of military virtues and a battle for survival. The first few seasons were very enjoyable but to my mind it descended into incoherence towards the end which I never bothered to watch. This seems a chronic failing of many shows who tend to "jump the shark" as creativity fades. Game of Thrones is a classic example.

One rather eccentric series is Farscape, an Australian-American co-production which ran from 1999 to 2003. The brilliant innovation here was replacing Star Trek-style facial prosthetics with Jim Henson puppets to create plausible aliens. It often worked quite well. The tradition of featuring alluring female aliens was also an element.

A slightly older and much loved series was Babylon 5 which premiered in 1994 and ran for five seasons. Entirely the brainchild of J. Michael Straczynski who wrote and directed every episode, it was a rather different take on the future, much more politically aware and featuring a lot of power politics and some really evil aliens.

The most abbreviated series of all was Firefly, the creation of Joss Whedon, also known for Buffy and Angel. The sad irony here is that of all the show runners in this genre, he is the one most capable of coming up with excellent series finales as witnessed by both Buffy and Angel. The irony is that Firefly was cancelled halfway through season one though that was followed by an excellent movie that did allow some development. But we are all robbed of what would likely have been some remarkable character developments.

In contrast to Firefly, Stargate SG-1 had a huge run: ten seasons of the original series which was a development of the original film which came out in 1994. This was a brilliantly original concept which blended aesthetic motifs from ancient Egypt with science fiction futurity and primitive cultures to yield a rich visual texture. Then there was the Atlantis spinoff which ran for five seasons and the Stargate: Universe series which ran for two, plus two movies.

After Firefly, which is likely the finest science fiction to be filmed, I would rank Stargate SG-1 and spinoffs as my favorite. Its rich visual texture is an improvement over the stark, sterile sets of most tv science fiction. Mind you, the fact that they were all shot in Vancouver leads to a certain sameness of alien planets which all look like the heavily-treed landscape of coastal British Columbia, a fact often commented on by the characters. Incidentally, Battlestar Galactica and Andromeda were also shot in Vancouver as well as The X Files.

Stargate SG-1 is classic hard science fiction with no mystical elements and a fairly conservative set of values. Oddly, the pilot featured some full-frontal nudity that was never repeated. The series feature strong male and female characters with, apart from the pilot, a minimum of alluring aliens. The frequent comedy is well handled and a major element.

That's about as far as my critical skills will take me so I look forward to your disparaging comments!

A Few Good Men

After living in Mexico for twenty-seven years, sometimes the thought runs through my mind that Canada has little history and even less culture. But despite that, with the perspective of time and distance a few individuals stand out as being strong contributors to culture. In music there are four: jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, composer Claude Vivier, poet and song-writer Leonard Cohen, and pianist Glenn Gould. Interesting that three of the four are from Montreal. Outside of music my knowledge is limited, but we could certainly add to the list writer Mordecai Richler, literary critic Northrop Frye and possibly Jordan Peterson, but we have to see how he wears over time. Richler is another Montrealer and Frye was also born in Quebec, but not in Montreal. Peterson was born in Alberta but attended McGill University in Montreal.

Yes, of course there are many others, but less-known to me. There are quite a few artists that I only have a vague knowledge of, Jack Shadbolt for one, born in England but lived in Vancouver, the Group of Seven and likely others, but I don't have the experience to name names.

I'm spurred to write this because I am re-reading, as I said the other day, a marvelous work of literary criticism by Northrop Frye. As Oscar Peterson is one of the best jazz pianists ever, so we should count Frye as one of the best literary critics ever, certainly that I have ever read and my reading in this area runs from Aristotle through Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Bakhtin and Harold Bloom. If it were not for Northrop Frye, few of us would know what Menippean satire was!

For an envoi there is likely nothing better than a little Oscar Peterson:

Now what I am reading

There was enough interest in my last "what I'm reading" post to encourage me to offer another. First, a set of books I am re-reading that I first read over fifty years ago:

This nine-volume history of philosophy, in my opinion the clearest, fairest and most balanced, was written in the 1950s and reprinted ever since. I started reading it as an undergraduate after taking my first philosophy course, but only got as far as the volume on Kant. I just hit a wall! Now I am re-reading this volume with the British empiricists because I am rethinking the problems of the relationship between consciousness and the material world.

I just read John Ciardi's excellent translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. I enjoyed the Inferno, but the Purgatorio less and less and stopped before the Paradiso. I am following it with possibly the most striking and unique book of poetry I have ever encountered:

Knit Ink contains two books of poetry, Slate Petals and Stray Arts and two shorter "chapbook epilogues." The first thing to note about those odd titles is that they are all palindromes! We know of palindromes from phrases like "Able was I ere I saw Elba" something Napoleon never said. A palindrome reads the same forward and backward. Bach did some in music. I even did a song as a palindrome. But palindromes in literature are much harder than in music where the cancrizans or "crab" canons are quite common. Anthony Etherin in this compendium takes the palindrome to heights never before seen. The very simplest example is a haiku in palindrome form. I have been trying for days to write one, but, good lord, it is nearly impossible. Here is an example from the book:

Slam ice, dynamic.

A bad loch: Cold abaci.

Many decimals....

Try it! I first read a few of the opening poems and failed to notice any of these structural constraints. Then I discovered that after each book the author explains how each poem is structured. But he does more than just construct nearly impossible palindromes. Here is the description of the poem Colourscape:

An ottava rima (ABABABCC) in iambic pentameter, intersected by a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic monometer--such that the third metrical foot of each line of the ottava rima belongs also to the sonnet. It is preceded by an anagram-poem.

AGH! Since I suspect you don't believe this was possible, here it is:

There are a hundred other structural innovations including experiments with triolets, ottava rima, villanelles and a host of things there are no names for. This is poetry as pure structure and the miracle is that they are also aesthetically fascinating even though meaning is sacrificed.

And I just started this book today, though I first read it thirty-some years ago:

Certainly the best work of literary criticism I know of though disperaged by current English departments.

Today's Listening: Leo Brouwer in Moscow, 1981

One of the great tragedies of the guitar since WWII was the curtailed performing career of Leo Brouwer due to an injury to a right hand finger. Mind you, it probably resulted in a lot more compositions.

 

Musical Rooms

I ran across an interesting clip on YouTube I want to share with you. Initially it was because it was the very unusual case of a classical guitarist playing a transcription of a piece by Olivier Messiaen. But while watching and listening I realized first, that I didn't really think the transcription worked that well--replacing a singing cello line with a guitar tremolo doesn't quite work--and what I really found interesting was the room where the recording took place.

Realize for a moment the profound differences between a visual artist's studio and a musician's studio. Here is a typical artist's studio:

There is a profusion of materials and workspaces and tools. Compare that with the lovely space where guitarist Edith Pageaud is recording;

(Even though I don't think this transcription quite works, her other recordings are very fine. Have a listen to her Scarlatti, for example.)

I'm reminded of the cover of a Gustav Leonhardt album from years ago. He is seated at a harpsichord in an austere white room containing only bookshelves. An ideal musician's studio is a lot like a monk's cell but with a musical instrument and possibly a chair.

Doesn't this tell us something about the nature of the musical art form versus painting and sculpture? Music is essentially ethereal, evanescent while the visual arts are material. Yes, of course, musical instruments and concert halls, not to mention musicians themselves, are material, but the music itself is nothing more than pressure waves in the air. Invisible and instantly evaporating.

Music, the soundtrack of our lives

There are things about living in Canada I miss, like hiking in the Victoria, BC area. There are a wealth of beautiful places to see, from the ocean-side to the mountains and all the forests in between. There are video clips on YouTube where you can get a bit of a sense of it. Here is a good one:

Yes, beautiful natural surroundings, but after a while I had to turn it off. Can you guess why? Yep, the soundtrack. My recollection of the pleasures of these kinds of experiences always include the silence of the forest, broken by birdcalls and the soughing of the wind in the trees. The freshness of the air, the colors, smells and textures of the woods. But here, we have this damnable, repetitive, pounding soundtrack that seems to be ubiquitous in every video like this. Why? For me, it ruins the experience entirely. Nowadays you can't venture in any public space without suffering this kind of soundtrack. It varies to classic rock sometimes, or smooth jazz, or easy listening melodies. More and more, though, it seems to default to this kind of moronic, motoric thumping.

There are certainly other music choices one could make that would be less aesthetically dissonant, but they are rarely made. Here is one without the intrusive soundtrack, but instead with have an intrusive narration--useful if you are about to embark on one of these hikes. But what's wrong with silence, or the ambient sounds?

Anyway, that's my rant for the day! You're welcome.

Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated

Not my death! No, that's classical music talking. I just read a fascinating essay by "Ben" on substack. It's hard to excerpt, so here is a big chunk:

In addition to doing more focused listening than in the past, I often listen to classical radio in the car and try to guess what composer or era they’re playing, with uneven success. It’s a nice way to apply my knowledge that I learned from Greenberg’s course.

As with almost all music, seeing it live is better. Like I said above, I traveled for the Spoleto (mostly) classical music festival in Charleston and saw some great stuff: Haydn’s The Creation, Beethoven’s 3rd, Mahler’s 5th, plus some well-curated chamber works. Our local symphony director has a soft spot for Romantic music and he’s helped turn me around on some of it.

I do need to get better at re-listening to classical albums to let them sink in via osmosis in the way that I often do with popular music, rather than focusing and giving them one thorough listen and then moving on to the next. I realize I’m often expecting them to fully land or not in that one listen. But many of my favorite popular music albums didn’t click on the first or second listen and I need to make room for the same experience with this music.

I am, though, starting to see the benefits of giving that kind of focused attention to a canonical corpus and returning to it periodically. I’m developing a decent knowledge of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. On classical radio, I heard a spellbinding recording of the third piano sonata, second movement by Lang Lang (below). It’s my favorite movement of Beethoven’s early piano sonatas, in the era when he still mostly sounds neat and Mozart-y. But this movement is a sort of foreshadowing of the deeper emotional territory he would mine later in his career.

I think that classical music is a small, though aesthetically powerful, niche that some as in this essayist, only discover later in life. It is fascinating to me that so many who do explore classical music keep coming to the same very short list of composers: Beethoven, Bach, Haydn, Shostakovich. True, you can broaden out in a host of directions--in my case I have been exploring Bruckner--and I was pleased to see a real tribute to Léonin and Pérotin in this essay. But Beethoven, Bach, Haydn and, somewhat surprisingly, Shostakovich, are the bread, butter, meat and potatoes.

Classical music's fortunes, based on sales statistics, go up and down over the decades but it seems that there is a 3% core audience that is always there. At the moment, however, they are not much interested in avant-garde, post-modern or other progressive musics. Some 20th century composers such as Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Bartók seem to have inched their way into the core canon and three cheers for that. Ten years ago I was saying to pianists, why don't you play the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues? It seems this is slowly coming to pass.

 

Non-Friday Miscellanea

 

Church in historic Puebla

I just got back from spending Easter weekend in Puebla, a city of 3.3 million people midway between the port of Veracruz and Mexico City. Very important historically and a center of pre-Columbian religion. Here is a very popular image of the church of Los Remedios with the volcano Popocatépetl in the background. Of course, when you are actually there it doesn't look like this due to a prevailing haze:

But it's there. And that church was built on top of a very ancient pyramid so large it covers a couple of hectares. The name of that pyramid? Tlachihualtepetl! Indeed, in contrast to where I live, all the names in the region, apart from Puebla itself, are Nahuatl.

* * *

Here is an interesting post where economist Tyler Cowan recounts his history with philosophy:

I was drawn to the Great Books series, most of all the philosophy in there.  I figured I should read all of them.  So of course I started with the Dialogues of Plato, which occupied my attention for a long time to come.  Aristotle was boring to me, though at the time (and still) I felt he was more correct than Plato.

I also, from the beginning, never bought the argument that Socrates was the mouthpiece of Plato.  In my early view (and still), Plato was the real genius, and he upgraded the second-rate Socrates to a smarter figure, mostly to make the dialogues better.  The dialogic nature of Plato shows is true genius, because any single point of view you might find in there is quite untenable.

My favorite dialogues were the classic ones, such as Crito, Apology, Phaedo, and Symposium.

* * *

 I've been engaged in a philosophical quest myself over the last year or so. I am re-tracing the history of philosophy to see exactly how we got to wherever we are now. Here is an interesting contribution: Are We Really Living in a Materialist Age?

When we look back on history, we find in almost every culture some belief or other that commanded near-universal respect—that even acquired a kind of intellectual invulnerability—despite now seeming to us absurd. When future historians look back at our age, I think they will count reductive materialism among such beliefs.

Reductive materialism is the view that all of reality can be explained by, and ultimately reduced to, the purely physical. Whatever cannot be accounted for in this way—consciousness, morality, free will, feelings—must be illusory. As the biologist Francis Crick likes to point out, this includes even you: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Yes, indeed. I find the traditional gods to be implausible and I'm afraid that includes the Jewish and Christian one as well. But I also find the idea that all reality is, is the whirl of atoms in the void to be equally implausible. Reading Bishop Berkeley, he makes a plausible argument that not only cannot everything be reduced to the merely physical, in actuality, all there is, is spirit, consciousness! The problem of consciousness is not only not about to be "solved" as scientists claim, it is more monumental than ever. JMHO.

* * *

Here's a thumbsucker from the Atlantic: Do You Actually Know What Classical Music Is? Does Anyone?

I’m a composer and conductor in the field that’s broadly known as Western classical music, a term that’s routinely applied to radically different idioms across more than 1,000 years of musical history. Within this huge array, you’ll find the engulfing sonorities of William Byrd’s choral music; the intimate revelations, too private for words, in chamber works by Franz Schubert and Anton Webern; the majestic topography of Jean Sibelius’s orchestral landscapes; and, more recently, a multitude of works by composers as different from one another as Chaya Czernowin, Tyshawn Sorey, and Thomas Adès.

The unruly and elusive entity known as classical music does not sound like any one thing, and the sheer abundance of the tradition might invite the conclusion that trying to define it at all is a hopeless exercise. But that would be a mistake, especially at this moment.

It would be more interesting if it didn't start out the way a thousand other essays on the "problem" of classical music have.

* * *

This is one of the most positive news items I have seen recently: Wigmore Hall says it no longer requires public funding

The classical music venue in London has raised £10m to become financially self-sufficient and will voluntarily withdraw from Arts Council England’s portfolio.

Celebrated classical music venue the Wigmore Hall has succeeded in its aim to raise £10m and will no longer require Arts Council funding, its director John Gilhooly said.

In April 2026, the London venue, which will be celebrating its 125th anniversary, will voluntarily take itself out of the Arts Council England (ACE) portfolio. It currently receives £344,206 a year.

Last year, Gilhooly launched a fund which aimed to make the Wigmore Hall financially self-sustaining in “an uncertain public environment for classical music in the UK”.

Given the unreliability of all government these days, this might be a good policy for private citizens as well.

* * *

Now for some music. All from Wigmore Hall. Here's one definition of classical music: what they play at Wigmore Hall.

 

 

 

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.

* * *

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