Friday Miscellanea

I'm just not keeping up with The Guardian, which is why I missed this article: In an era of AI slop and mid TV, is it time for cultural snobbery to make a comeback? (hat tip to On an overgrown path).

The lowbrow dominates culture and anyone who questions the status quo is dismissed as an elitist killjoy. But with bland algorithmic content on the rise, perhaps we consumers should start taking our art a bit more seriously

That subhead neatly summarizes the argument so we can probably skip reading the article. But yes, speaking as one who never left cultural snobbery, it is always a good time to take notice of cultural things that are not actually crap. Sure, they take a bit more time. Reading Don Quixote takes more time than watching Netflix, but perhaps not if you factor in the time spent trying to find something to watch on Netflix. Thanks to On an overgrown path for the delightful use of the word "enshittified." Yes, the enshittification of culture and, well, social institutions in general, is far advanced.

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 Alex Ross posts a tribute to substack:

Of late, an increasing number of voices, some new and some thoroughly familiar, have converged on Substack. Such erstwhile blogging heavyweights as Steve Smith, Tim Rutherford-Johnson, and Joshua Kosman are in residence. The great Paul Griffiths, who has been observing new music longer than most of us have been alive, has launched what music!

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The Atlantic avers: How to Make Music Popular Again. And follows that clanger with an even more mistaken subhead:

The rise of headphone listening has changed us profoundly—and maybe not for the better.

No, no, no, they have it all wrong. If anything, music is too popular, or, more accurately, there is too much popular music. About the only ray of sunshine is the widespread use of headphones which has saved so many of us the torture of listening to other people's music. If only we could make the use of headphones mandatory in all public spaces.

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YouTube paid out $8B to the music industry in 12 months. I guess that's good news. Mind you, I would love to see a breakdown of who got what. If Taylor Swift got seven of the eight billion, well...

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Now for some listening. One cannot be too familiar with the symphonies of the always inventive Joseph Haydn. Here is his Symphony No. 31, nicknamed "Hornsignal" and yes, there are lots of horns.

You also cannot be too familiar with the symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich. Here is the 8th with Alain Altinoglu conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. This clip just appeared on YouTube six days ago.

For our last envoi, not a symphony but a serenade by Mozart. Even when writing music for diversion or background to a banquet, Mozart was simply incapable of writing anything less than superbly beautiful.

Rick Beato on Sleep Token

I said in my Friday Miscellanea post that I didn't see much worth commenting on. But just now, I did. More and more I find Rick Beato to be worth following because he often surprises. When it comes to popular music I'm usually a curmudgeon because the mass-produced industrial music we hear in just about every public space drives me right up the wall. But of course, there is a lot, well, some, really good "popular" music being created. Probably not really popular, but really interesting. And Rick Beato has just found some for us:

Yep, everything he says there is true. This really doesn't sound like anything you have heard before and yes, it really is beautiful. But deep in the harmonic structure, it reminds me very much of Debussy if he were alive today, living in London and working with a drummer named "II".

Friday Miscellanea

 A very good article on Luciano Berlo's Sinfonia this week in the New York Times: His Music Saw Our Age of Information Overload Coming

“Sinfonia” remains one of Berio’s most popular and indelible pieces. It appeals to lay listeners yet continues to fascinate experts. Throughout its five movements, the piece shows an inventive, clearly audible approach to form, an unsentimental melodiousness and extraordinarily skill in orchestration. Its most radical section is the third movement, which feels presciently overstimulating.

The piece “reflects a world marked by crises and conflicts — themes that remain profoundly relevant today,” De Benedictis said. “Wars, the destructive effects of capitalism (even more evident now than in 1968), the disintegration of the fundamental principles of coexistence, the frenzy of a fragmented and disjointed existence.”

At the opening of the third movement, a loud chord is followed by at least three distinct musical quotations in the space of seven measures: a climbing brass motive from the fourth movement of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra; the coldly biting flutes, sleigh bells and inviting violin phrase from the opening of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony; and cresting music from the second movement of Debussy’s “La Mer.”

What makes the article particularly useful is that it offers a host of music clips as examples.

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This kind of reminds me of the Hofstadter book of years ago Gödel, Escher, Bach: Bach is a Strange Loop

Prelude

Every night, ten-year-old J.S. Bach reached his little fingers through a locked bookshelf with a latticed front, rolled up a book of sheet music inside, drew it out, and copied it by moonlight, for he was not allowed a candle. It took six months for him to finish this difficult endeavor, only for the copied manuscript to be found by his older brother and taken away.

This was a child who had music pouring into and out of his ears since before he could talk. As little as we know about his life story, this fact is undeniable. Something was going on inside his head, strongly, forever. So does it make sense to look at his life in terms of events, or something more, something equally internal?

Allemande

Even if you hate classical music, you’ve heard Bach’s six cello suites. At least, the prelude of the first suite, in movies and on television. Like in Master and Commander and Family Guy and The Hangover Part II. And in this American Express commercial showcasing household objects making frowny faces and smiley faces. In fact, it’s often heard in commercials advertising financial services. “In the case of recent television commercials, Bach has more or less taken on a single function: reassurance,” said musicologist Peter Kupfer. “It is no coincidence that most companies that use Bach in their commercials offer financial or insurance services (including American Express, MetLife, and Allstate), thus requiring a message of trust.”

There is a paragraph or two for each of the six movements of the Cello Suite No. 1, so you should read the whole thing.

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Frankly, looking in the usual places, I don't see anything else over the last week worth comment. Your mileage may vary, of course. But let's just move on to the envois. First up, of course, the Berio Sinfonia:

And the Bach Cello Suite No. 1:

Here is the Charpentier Te Deum, the drum-friendly interpretation:

And finally, in my travels in Oaxaca the last couple of weeks I stumbled across the 1969 film of The Battle of Britain. An all-star cast for a film that I have never known before. The main casting problem was that the average age of the pilots that flew in the Royal Air Force in 1940 was twenty! They simply couldn't find many actors that young. The best lines were from Laurence Olivier as Air Chief Marshal. When they finally turned the tide and were shooting down a lot more German planes than the Germans were shooting down British planes, he was asked to comment on a statement from the German ambassador in a press conference that the British numbers were simply wrong. Olivier said "I have no interest in propaganda. If we are right, they will give up. If they are right, they will be here in a week." 

Friday in Oaxaca

 I'm not at home, but traveling in Oaxaca state, Mexico. Yesterday I flew from Puerto Escondido to Oaxaca in this plane:

This is a De Havilland Twin Otter, I think. Manufactured by De Havilland Canada

It seats fifteen, not counting the pilot, but for the first leg I was the only passenger. Now on to our regularly-scheduled program.

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In the Gramophone classical music awards:

Rising star María Dueñas, 22, was named young artist of the year. The Spanish violinist, who won first prize at the Menuhin competition in 2021 and records for Deutsche Grammophon, also took the instrumental category for her album of Paganini’s 24 Caprices.

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Also:

 The recording of the year was awarded to the French conductor Raphaël Pichon and his choir and period-instrument orchestra Pygmalion for their recording of JS Bach’s Mass in B Minor on the Harmonia Mundi label. Gramophone hailed the performance as one “that gleams at the cellular level, radiating outwards with devotional warmth; in short, it is alive”.

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High-Tech Sensors Expose the Secret Tricks of Piano Masters

A team led by Dr. Shinichi Furuya at the NeuroPiano Institute and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. has provided the first scientific evidence showing how pianists’ touch on the keys can actually change a piano’s timbre—the tonal character of its sound.

Artistic creativity in music, painting, and other forms of expression depends on the ability to shape how an audience perceives what they experience. Yet, until now, scientists did not know whether musicians could truly alter a piano’s timbre while performing, or what kinds of physical movements would make that possible.

The headline oversells the article, as always. No, no secret tricks are revealed. And every single sensitive listener has heard how pianists (and harpsichordists) can shape timbre. So this isn't actually news, just confirmation. It has a lot to do with the velocity of attack.

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Over at Slipped Disc, Norman Lebrecht is complaining about a new box of ten CDs of the harpsichord music of Louis Couperin.

Now not many things make me happier than an hour or so of solo harpsichord. Even two hours, at a push.

But ten hours of it, and by a composer who’s mostly known by the piano suite Ravel wrote at his tomb.

Can anyone sing a single tune by Louis?

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Wow, I thought Mexico was mostly free from this sort of thing: CONDUCTOR IS SACKED ‘FOR GENDER PARITY’

Members of the Mexico City Tipica Orchestra (OTCM) yesterday condemned the dismissal of their artistic director, Alberto Torres Xolocotzi, after authorities from the Mexico City Ministry of Culture, headed by Ana Francis López Bayghen, summoned the musician to inform him of the decision, citing “gender parity.”

“Yesterday, June 24, in a meeting with the Orquesta Típica and Mariana Gómez Godoy, director of Artistic and Cultural Heritage of the SC, I informed the members of the group that the artistic director’s contract was terminated,” meaning that “a female director will be appointed in her place, without holding a competitive examination as has been the case since 2017,” the musicians detailed in a document shared with Excélsior.

The musicians lamented this decision and expressed their dissatisfaction: “We express our condemnation of policies that discriminate against gender, that promote gender intolerance, and that violate the human and labor rights of our members.”

In the second paragraph, the quote should read “a female director will be appointed in his place" probably a translation error.

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Which brings us to our envois for the day. Let's start with Spanish violinist Maria Dueñas playing the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso by Saint-Saëns:

Here is Raphaël Pichon conducting the Sanctus from the Bach B minor mass:

The most remarkable color change I have ever heard on piano was achieved by Arthur Rubinstein in a concert in Spain in 1974. When he got to the major section of the Bach Chaconne, I swear the entire color of the piano changed--as striking as if it were blue then green.

Now I think we need some Louis Couperin. This is a prelude played by Jean Rondeau. Sorry, Blogger won't embed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1D9QcI8rkA

Enjoy and have a great weekend!

Friday Miscellanea

 

Arvo Pärt

Another article on Arvo Pärt on the occasion of his 90th birthday, this one rather better than the one in the NYT a couple of weeks ago: Arvo Pärt: the holy minimalist who defied the Soviets

Arvo Pärt, the pre-eminent religious composer of our time, was born in 1935 in Estonia, before its Soviet occupation. His music suggests the contemplative devotion and purity of Gregorian plainchant and Renaissance church chorale, though it could only have been written today, being at once archaic and abstract-modern. With its sense of stasis and light, the music reflects the immensity of the Baltic landscape and Estonia’s own forested plains. Under communism, Pärt fell foul of the Soviet censors as his music defied official atheism. His work is shaped by his Eastern Orthodox faith; it is a form of prayer.

One cannot miss the parallels with the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, whose music is also a form of prayer.

Pärt emerged from his silence with the exquisite piano composition Für Alina. Often used in films today to conjure a mood of sadness, Für Alina was music distilled to its purest essence and the first piece in Pärt’s new musical style of tintinnabuli. The compositions now began to pour out of him. Tabula Rasa, a landmark in 20th-century music, premiered at Tallinn’s Polytechnic Institute in September 1977 and reportedly left the audience speechless. The clanging of the prepared piano (achieved by inserting screws between its strings) showed the anti-classical influence of John Cage.

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If, like me, you have cast a critical eye on the whole rush to artificial intelligence, here is a Dutch philosopher to put it in perspective. He explains, very clearly, what it is and what it isn't:

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Here is a post about a composer I had no knowledge of: Art has been hijacked by the addiction-directed internet

Composers throughout the ages have used ‘models’, have paid homage to their imperishable predecessors in ways that are more often than not loving tributes: think Josquin’s Déploration sur la mort de Jean Ockeghem, Mozart’s very early piano concertos that are unabashed ‘arrangements’ of Johann Christian Bach, or Alban Berg’s Violinkonzert ‘Dem Andenken eines Engels’. Much of what is being written today is, however, merely derivative; betraying a lack of courage or of vision, straining our faith in music as an art-form with any future at all. Much contemporary art qualifies, indeed, barely as ‘entertainment’ any more, for it has been hijacked by the ‘addiction-directed’ processes of the internet, whose attention span is measured not even in minutes, but in seconds.

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It is hard to envy the life of a contemporary concert soloist: A VIOLINIST’S LIFE IN THE AIR

This has been quite the past 30 hours! My crazy travel day started with an incident on my United flight from Indianapolis to Houston, when some poor guy had a mental break and ran up to the front of the plane just as we were about to land and pulled open the emergency door (luckily he was subdued before he could throw himself out, so he is, as far as I know, OK).

We sat on the tarmac surrounded by police and firefighters for a couple of hours, I managed to get to my connecting flight to Buenos Aires ‍♂️but they told me it was closed. I begged, they relented, but of course they had given away my lovely business class seat so I spent the next 9.5 hours in 43D. 1 hour of sleep on the flight, 1 hour spent at Buenos Aires airport filing a claim for my lost suitcase, arrive at hotel 11AM, sleep until 1:30PM, find a clothing store, purchase an entire concert outfit in 30 minutes (that’s my kind of shopping), quick lunch, rehearsal at 4:30PM, Beethoven Concerto at 8PM with Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie and Riccardo Minasi at the incomparable Teatro Colón, post concert dinner at the most beautiful home of our wonderful presenters @mozarteumargentino_ , back to hotel 1AM. Pickup tomorrow at 7AM to head to Montevideo!

But that was what I worked hard to try to achieve in my career!

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Now for some envois. It seems forever since we have had something from Gustav Holst. Here is Mars from The Planets:

Here is the Symphony No. 9 by Valentin Silvestrov:

And finally, some not well-known Handel, an Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne, 1713:

Georg Friedrich Haas: 11.000 Saiten (2020)

 

It's odd, but sometimes I find an article in the Wall Street Journal on music to be more interesting than anything in the New York Times, which tends to puff pieces on musical personalities. Here is an article on a fascinating piece: ‘11,000 Strings’ Review: Georg Friedrich Haas’s Meditation.

“11,000 Strings” is precisely 66 minutes long and was performed in a gigantic oval of instruments and instrumentalists that surrounded an audience of 1,300 people. The music was played by 50 upright pianos, each of them with ever-so-slightly different tuning, amid a scattered chamber orchestra, the Klangforum Wien, of 25 other instruments. Each pianist had a tablet computer sending out individual musical instructions. No attendee heard exactly the same piece as a neighbor in any other part of the hall. (For the record, I was sitting between the harpist and a bassoonist, who were busily exploring the outer limits of their instruments.) But the circle of pianos provided a sort of unified backdrop that held it all together.

And here is a YouTube clip:

 I have often thought that in this current phase of musical exploration a particularly fertile approach would be to consolidate the wildly experimental musics that appeared in the 1950s to 1980s of the last century. People like John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Olivier Messiaen opened many doors and windows on landscapes that have scarcely been traveled. This piece is an excellent example.

Is All Music Sad?

Madame, all music is sad.

--Franz Schubert

Despite Franz Schubert's remark to a fan, perhaps not. After all we have sardonic music, joyful music, comedic music, triumphal music and so on. But so often when I pick a piece of music for myself or for someone else to listen to it is what you might call 'sad' even though it is probably not the garden-variety emotion we think of as sad. Really great music is instead transcendent, out-lifting, making us stand outside ourselves--the original meaing of "ecstasy". Let's have some examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUCR2xiHiHQ

Ok, maybe it's not sadness, perhaps superhuman calm or simply spirituality?

Friday Miscellanea

I've been saying for years that much of popular music these days is produced by a committee of Swedes led by a guy named Max: When Taylor Swift Met Pop’s Supreme Hitmaker, Max Martin

Even listeners who pay little attention to liner-note credits are likely familiar with Martin and Shellback’s handiwork. Martin’s career as a hook wizard took off in the late 1990s, when he helped write and produce such evergreen earworms as Robyn’s “Show Me Love” and Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way.” In the years that followed, Martin established a reputation for songs that combined precise instrumentation with expansive, inescapable choruses, like Kelly Clarkson’s 2004 smash “Since U Been Gone.” 

“He writes songs. He’s not an artist,” Robyn said in a 2008 interview with Pitchfork. “He doesn’t have the need for expressing his personal thoughts in a song. For him, it’s about the melody. It’s about cracking a code, being as efficient as possible.”

Martin, who is press shy (“I’d rather not do this,” he told Joe Coscarelli during a 2022 New York Times interview), was a onetime rock frontman who was mentored by the Swedish pop mastermind Denniz Pop, who was known for wedding irresistible beats to sweeping choruses. “Not growing up here,” he said, referring to the United States, “you hear music differently. There was a big part of my life where I didn’t even understand what they were saying, so phonetics are super important to me — how things sound.”

This does, sort of, explain why popular music is more and more the product of an abstract process, like cheese slices, even while it masquerades as heartfelt individual expression.

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This is a look at the price-history of concert violins: With Strings Attached

In March 2025, an anonymous buyer purchased the 1715 “Baron Knoop” Stradivarius for $23 million (U.S.), making it the most expensive violin ever sold. (The seller, the American stringed-instrument collector David L. Fulton, had purchased it for a more modest $2.75 million in 1992.) Previous record setters have included the 1721 “Lady Blunt,” which fetched $15.9 million in 2011, and the “Joachim‑Ma,” which went for $11.25 million in February 2025.

All three of these models were made by Antonio Stradivari, a Cremonese luthier whose output in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is said to epitomize perfection in violin manufacturing. Depending on your point of view, they may indeed be examples of flawless human handiwork. Or they might be, as the fiction writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce once put it, objects that “tickle human ears by friction of a horse’s tail on the entrails of a cat.”

Compare this to what high-value guitars are selling for:

The guitar may exist on a similarly high level of symbolism, but the appraisal of an individual six-string turns more on its provenance and on any alterations by famous owners than on the maker. As two examples, an acoustic Gibson owned by John Lennon sold for $2.4 million in 2015, while the 1959 Martin D‑18E that Kurt Cobain used on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York album went for just over $6 million in 2020 (he had picked it up for just $5,000). Pricey, but not near the numbers a Stradivarius commands.

Read the whole thing for a lot of interesting observations.

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Norman Lebrecht weighs in on a crisis in music criticism: Wanted: classical music influencers

he death of music criticism, long foretold, came a whole lot closer this summer. One day in mid-July, the New York Times sacked both of its chief music critics, pop and classical, along with chief theatre critic Jesse Green and Margaret Lyons, who covered TV.

The reason given for their “reassignment” was more alarming than the bloodbath itself. A memo from the culture editor, Sia Michel, warned that “new generations of artists and audiences are bypassing traditional institutions” — the New York Times — whilst “smartphones have Balkanised fandoms”. What readers crave, Michel feels, are “trusted guides to help them make sense of this complicated landscape”.

In plain English, what the Times is looking for is music critics who are as different as possible from the expert, well-dressed, wisecracking reviewers who delivered first-night juice (wisecrack intended*) daily at breakfast. Those dodos have had their daybreak.

What are we missing?

Why does this matter? Because a hostile New York Times review is worth more than a rave in ten other papers. Readers trust it, and artists use it to test their blood pressure. It has been over half a century since the Times last had a firebrand music critic in Harold Schonberg, who famously wrote: “Last night at Carnegie Hall, Jack Benny played Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn lost.” Schonberg earned the undying enmity of Leonard Bernstein, but New York devoured his every word.

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Sorry, no time for more this morning, so let's have some music. I haven't put up a late Beethoven string quartet for years and years. Here is the C# minor with the Danish String Quartet. I doubt there is any more profound music.