Friday Miscellanea

Not so miscellaneous today: before going to Thanksgiving dinner yesterday with friends, I had a couple of free hours so I listened to most of the St. Matthew Passion by Bach. What an amazing work! This is the version I heard:

I grew up with the Klemperer recording, but this version is very much better. There are two small orchestras, two mixed choirs, two sets of four vocal soloists and six boy sopranos. The way Bach uses these forces is really remarkable. There are frequent montages where the choirs interject short, brisk phrases into a texture that might be one or both orchestras with obbligato solo parts, or a chorale like texture with the melody of the boy sopranos floating above, within a narrative carried by recitatives from a host of characters: Judas, Pontius Pilate, priests, bystanders and, of course, Jesus with his surrounding halo of strings. This is as close as Bach ever got to opera, but it is nothing like opera. Oddly enough, the montage sections remind me of Stravinsky's Petrouschka.

Speaking of the Netherlands Bach Society's project to record all of Bach, I have listened to many recordings so far and I have been impressed with nearly all of them. No big stars, but very accomplished and committed musicians. Listening to this it is hard to see classical music as a dying genre, no longer of any relevance as a recent series of YouTube clips would have us believe!

Here are a few recent recordings in the series:

Today's listening

One of those innumerable, terrific symphonies by Joseph Haydn:

And a photo I took yesterday. There are clusters of morning glory everywhere right now. November in Mexico.

Friday Miscellanea

Finally something interesting: two new pieces by J. S. Bach. No, not newly written of course, but newly discovered. Here is the New York Times:

In 1992 Peter Wollny, then a Harvard graduate student in musicology, was researching his dissertation at the Royal Library of Belgium when he came across two unsigned music manuscripts so strikingly original that he had copies made and set them aside. 

“This is actually how I work,” Wollny said Tuesday. “Whenever I find something that poses a scholarly problem to me, I keep it. Even if it takes three decades, I don’t put it aside.”

Wollny began to develop a hunch about who wrote these two anonymous, undated works for organ: Johann Sebastian Bach. But finding evidence required years of musical detective work, and it was not until this week, 33 years after the random discovery he made while doing research on one of Bach’s sons, that he officially announced the discovery.

And here they are:

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As is often the case, the subhead is a nice summary: Cultural products are more than ever a class of financialized assets, whose owners are even further removed from artmaking

THE HISTORY OF THE MUSIC industry is a history of conglomeration. For decades, the business has been ruled by a dwindling number of corporations, each controlling an enormous market share that grows larger with every new merger or acquisition. Today just three record companies—Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group—control more than 80 percent of all recorded music released through a recognized label. And they do so with a collective iron fist, jealously guarding access to their vast catalogs, whether through album sales, streaming platforms, radio airplay, or commercial licensing. The Big Three’s disproportionate market-making power, according to scholar and musician Aram Sinnreich, has all the trappings of an oligopolistic cartel. And in turn, streaming itself, once a domain of renegades and upstarts, has consolidated around its own Big Three: Together Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music account for 90 percent of all streaming subscriptions.

I guess my problem is that I have no interest in music as an industry--only as an artform. But this is where we are.

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The answer is "no". Granderson: AI can perform a song, but can it make art?

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Here is a particularly fine exemplar of human-created music. Jean Rondeau playing the Tombeau for M. Blancrocher from the new Louis Couperin collection:

A lovely recent performance of the Debussy Sonata for Cello and Piano:

And finally, the Piano Sonata no, 8 by Sergei Prokofiev: